First Love

Though nutured like the sailing moon
In beauty’s murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.

But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.

She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.

(from ‘A Man Young and Old’, The Tower 1928)

 Come on Ireland, just say NO! Presidential candidate Sean Gallagher is a man who

a) in 2009 gave himself an illegal tax-evading interest-free loan of €82, 829 from his public speaking company to his personal account. His accountants noticed and informed him he was breaking the law. He now claims this was an accidental clerical error. This is either corrupt or a matter of the most enormous incompetence (the loan was worth 70% of the company).

b) claimed that he with his cable expertise company, subcontractors of big property developers, to have created 100 jobs. He admitted yesterday that in the downturn he had to get rid of 80 people. That’s 20 jobs then Sean. Hardly Microsoft. And having been sacked twice yourself you’ll know tough it is. Let’s bring this entrepreneurial spirit to the Aras.

c) boasted in January 2009 of ‘a long record of involvement and commitment to Fianna Fail over the past 30 years’. Nothing wrong with this, except then to serve on the National Executive of Fianna Fail for two years, resigning in January 2011, and then to run as an ‘independent’ presidential candidate 5 months later following the March election meltdown is hardly credible. The same January 2009 letter remembers ‘I first served on the National Executive with Charlie Haughey in 1985-1987′, and notes his work as Political Secretary to Rory O’Hanlon as Fianna Fail Minister for Health and Minister for the Environment, and as a ‘full time’ fundraiser for the party ‘in Fianna Fail headquarters’. These are not the actions of a ‘grass-roots’ member, which he claims to be.

d) lied yesterday on live television.  He claimed he did not organise and personally collect donations for a 2008 Fianna Fail fundraiser. He did. Under closer questioning he then panicked, and eventually backtracked. He was forced to admit driving to a house to drop off photographs of the event. He still denied accepting there a €5000 donation. Under further pressure he admitted he might have taken a brown envelope. Ye Gods. It seems the businessman involved was also a convicted criminal.

It doesn’t matter who people vote for but surely, surely no voting  preferences should go to this man. From his own testimony he is a liar, a crook, and an ‘independent’ candidate who is fact an influential executive and fundraiser for a corrupt political party whose decisions condemned Ireland to economic armageddon.

Here are reputable printed sources for a) the illegal loan

c) the Fianna Fail connection

d) the €5000 donation

For b) visit here

and for all of these stories here’s a link to the RTE Frontline Presidential debate

Remember Zammo, Ireland. Just say no. Don’t listen don’t listen to anyone else. All you gotta do is be yourself.

to Katherine Tynan [13 Aug 1887]

Rosses Point, Sligo

You will see by the top of this letter that I am down at Sligo. I reached here Thursday morning about 2 oc having come by Liverpool but will return by Dublin perhaps.

Have been making a search for people to tell me fairy stories and found one or two. [...] It is a wonderfully beautiful day the air is full of trembling light. The very feel of the familiar Sligo earth puts me in good spirits. I should like to live here always not out of liking for the people so much as for the earth and the sky here, though I like the people too. I went to see yesterday a certain cobler of my acquaintance and he discoursed over his cat as though he had walked out of one of Kickhams novels “Cats are not to be depinded upon” he said and told me how a neighbours cat had gone up the evening before to the top of a tree where a blackbird used to sing every night “and pulled him down” and then he finished sadly with “cats are not to be depinded upon”. [ here follows some found verses and other stories…]

Your Friend

W B Yeats

PS [...] How does your article go on? I wish it were an Irish article, though at the comencement one I supose cannot chose ones own subjects always; but remember by being as Irish as you can you will be the more origonal and true to your self and in the long run more interesting even to English readers.

I am going now to a farm house where they have promised me fairy tales so I can write no more.

See the ECHO website for more details, or contact adrianpaterson@yahoo.com , or thomas.walker@ell.ox.ac.uk

Sixty years old, this – well, the only word is masterful – book on psychology and power relations has still to be bettered. It looks and smells all of its sixty years, the atmosphere and trappings seeming to savour of ambered wines and musty times past, the Cambridge college in which it is set cocooned in the opening’s deadening snow – and my paperback copy has long loosened its hold on itself – but its taste is crisp, clear, contemporary. In fact it describes a time of change, new money beginning to shift the college on its axis and anticipating future developments by remembering its past evolution. More than this, it describes so well things that do not change, the thoughts of men, their pride, ambitions, their subtleties, manoeuvrings, and self-deceptions, and in its swift sentences layering tension and suspicion contains more hard clear gems of human insight than barrowloads of contemporary psychological fiction. I say men – the focus is on men, the dying Master of a college, and his thirteen colleagues who must gather to elect a new leader. If this sounds dull, nothing could be less so. They are observed absorbed in action, in feeling and testing and using their influence, in trying their power, their strength, their allegiances, facing their own vanities and humiliations, in defeat, death, and annihilation. Women are actors too, it must be said, although as wives and loves far from alone centre stage, and they like all the people here are glimpsed in movement or helpless stasis as the clock ticks towards the election’s resolution. In short, this is politics writ naked, but instrumentally, cunningly, beautifully dissected. C.P.Snow himself was a molecular physicist, but had a good war: he became involved in the Civil Service selecting of scientific personnel, and his judgements of personality were tested in white heat. His narrator thus exacts an expert scrutiny on men judging and being judged, and finds unpredictability in the dullest, predictability in the most imaginative. The book should not therefore only be read by disillusioned university lecturers, though it describes better than almost anywhere I’ve seen the thirst for knowledge and the drying of its streams, and better than anywhere the politics of university living, the mutual suspicion of the arts and sciences, the pressure of both under dwindling resources. Its level dryness can make brief quotation from it seem, summary, spare, even unconvincing; yet in so squarely building its effects one detail or sentence can drop us with sickening suddenness through a hole in the human heart. The compassion, grief, and vulnerabilities glimpsed beneath the surface means the novel by no means lacks an emotional centre. It opens to view all the things, in other words, that matter to people in the world. Within its small canvas it is one of the wisest and most moving novels imaginable, and like the best realist fiction a living, dying world in miniature.

Tonight I’ve watched

The moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone

Sappho (trans. Mary Barnard)

(Apparently several editors have denied this is by Sappho but then they fail to say who else might have written it..)

Prayer before birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Louis MacNeice

 Hymn to Diana

Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep:
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.

Earth, let not they envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia’s shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wishéd sight,
Goddess excellently bright.

Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe, how short soever:
Thou that mak’st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright!