ireland – Donal Kelly

Lough Corrib Ireland flooded island in winter

Here it comes, there it goes. The Christmas break, with its long buildup and heavily marketed stature, has already left the building before it seemed to even arrive.

The rains barely paused for breath, though the good winds provided enough breath for all. Under the twinklings of dangling lights blowing in the breezing rain, ’tis the season’ bells barely tinkled before being bundled back into boxes until the next rendition.

We had the lights barely untangled. Plans to untangle the spent year in my brain and my brain to untangle for the year to come fogged up like a stubborn windscreen. Through that foggy glass things seemed no clearer than before. Clarity maybe comes from commitment to some version of events or other.

2015 might be the year of obsessive notification-checking, or the year of film photography, or a year of solidifying yesterness, or less or more of all these things if considering.

The water levels have broken records, with the shoreline exploring new curves along many a distant acre of field and shrub.

Indoors, in the bubble of days with names, family, television, turkey, and people in every room, time just whips away the last week of the year.

On the only calm clear day I was free, I took a borrowed Kayak to the high waters of the Corrib, with nary another floating human in sight, and rowed two blisters worth from Baurisheen to the head of the Owenriff and up past the boathouse and under the bridge at Eighterard and eventually all the way home in the darkening.

It is a world of
birds disturbed,
hulls upturned,
limbs of leafless tress sketched into the face of the river

To get under the bridge I had to fling myself forward then let my back fall flat onto the kayak hull, and still the bottom of the bridge concrete almost touched my nose. I failed the first time and wondered how safe the idea was with such a rush of water and nobody around and three grand of water-speckled camera gear between my knees, but I tried again.

It is a world of
current and flow,
never the same when you come back,
even if you never go.

In any case, not far after I got tired of battling the strengthening current that tore down in the narrower sections, and I flipped the little plastic boat around. Now it tears back down on the swell.

photos oughterard lough corrib owenriff river kayaking donal kelly

W.B. Yeats visited a public school in Waterford in 1926, and there, as an ageing man among the young children, his mind wanders, first to Maud Gonne, to youth, and in an unexpected way, to something universal and beautiful: Among School Children

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

The poem is an incredible journey from the bustling school room to pithy metaphors of being. The words need to be read and heard, as they flow with such energy and ability.

My effort does little justice, but it is a poem that should be heard.

The poem comes from the Tower, published in 1928, and named after Thoor Ballylee, in Gort, Co. Galway, which Yeats owned from 1916/17 to 1929.

Audio

thoor balylee galway yeats — W.B. Yeats bought it for £35 in 1916 or 1917

Words

I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way — the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy —
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age —
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage —
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV
Her present image floats into the mind —
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once — enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts — O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise —
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Tag: ireland

Lough Corrib and the Owenriff River by Kayak in Winter

A Reading of W.B. Yeats’s Among School Children