The Irish

I'm currently enjoying a hot port which is possibly my favourite Irish cultural touchstone of all.

I've never understood Hopkins. Wished they'd put chattier gays on the LC

rip

how was hopkins not chatty, he exploded sonnets to 500 words for god's sake

Hopkins was not good

burton reading leaden/golden echo is maybe the best thing humans have done

No, I was wrong. My chosen four were Yeats/Plath/Heaney/Mahon. I think of Heaney a lot and bought several books of his, but Mahon I still know by heart <redacted> years later.

mahon cailin indeed

Gyac I suspect we did the leaving the same year

Wouldn’t be surprised. What was your core text?

I want to say Macbeth

A fine vintage

same but id imagine from an earlier cycle

Hopkins was not good

ftfy

well it's a given that one cannot simply agree with another's opinion, this is the irish thread

Speaking of vintages, I think pom and I are the same age. Jurd “Manly” Hopkins was not good.

The sprung rhythms and talk of inscape and instress are all classic imo but I'm fond of poetry that aspires towards the condition of music (short of actual sound poetry, which lacks all the desirable qualities of language and music both).

I think we are the same age, yes. I'm a 1985-er.

A fine year.

That’s interesting. I may look at him again now that you’ve said that. I never had quite that association between the sounds and rhythms of poetry as I did with music in English - but I can still remember some of the Irish poems I learned because of their musicality.

I'm younger but I was quite young when I did the leaving

Hopkins drew on Anglo-Saxon cadences so he was definitely working within a wholly different tradition (apologies for mentioning it itt).

xp

It’a fine! What else is this thread for?!

In the absence of a The Anglo-Saxons thread...

Anglo-Saxons is a kinda nonsense category tbf

It is kind of telling that the canonical Anglo-Saxon epic begins with a reference to the 'Spear-Danes'.

We've got our own Saxons, incidentally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvanian_Saxons

Same!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxons#Netherlands

The local language, although strongly influenced by standard Dutch, is still officially recognised as Dutch Low Saxon.

Damn continental immigrants.

Anglo-Saxons is a kinda nonsense category tbf

― éminence rose et jaune (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 3 December 2019 12:17 (fifty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

and don't ye behave like it

happy to take my share of the blame but i've got enough self-loathing for one or two more if needed

its valuable work and we surely appreciate it

I did Hamlet and if nothing else it's almost certainly provided me with more University Challenge answers than any other subject

"leaving cert" is one of the fascinating concepts I've been introduced to by my favorite thriller writer Tana French, along with the staggeringly good idiom "fair play to you"

fair play to here

her, ffs

Both work.

https://youtu.be/Z1vYs5LBC3c

silby what was it about the leaving cert that so intrigued

It does have a ring of the YA about it - Percy Jackson and the Leaving Certificate.

its the piece of paper that allows you to emigrate to 'mericawwww

silby what was it about the leaving cert that so intrigued

― deems of internment (darraghmac), Tuesday, December 3, 2019 9:23 AM (thirty-four minutes ago)

the mystery! What happens if you don't pass? Can you leave whenever you want? Where do you leave to? No way of knowing.

Well you can chuck it in anytime you like, but you can never leave

p much

Did anyone else watch the film How to Cheat in the Leaving Cert? Amazing that Willie O’Dea was so het up about it, lol.

its the piece of paper that allows you to emigrate to 'mericawwww

I am reliably assured that this is a classic of the LC Irish curriculum by people younger than me:

https://youtu.be/SW-tdaO2s9o

We never had anything so memorable, remember the children of Lir story and one about a drug addict. No films.

Lol u mean "gafa"

What a pile of nonsense! Did it actually end with a chainsaw decapitation?

I don’t remember that at all if so. Apparently it was still on the curriculum recently?

re: Heaney, did anyone catch the 'Seamus Heaney and the Music of What Happens' documentary on the bbc last week? I recorded it.

well I don't recall ever reading it all the way through, there were extracts in whatever textbook we used. But we did all have to go the see it at the Taidhbhearc and yes it definitely included that ending.