Sound Out

I’m prone to living in my own head. Not good sometimes. This week I took a trip down literary memory lane. The catalyst was Soundings and those of an age will remember the Leaving Cert poetry book with the squiggly green cover. It’s back on the shelves by popular demand, as the fella says. A gift for Christmas, it livens the elegiac connections in the grey matter. My school copy is buried in the depths of the attic at home no doubt, covered in notes, doodles and love hearts. I also gave a copy to a dearest friend who celebrated a birthday last week. I wished I was there to reminisce with her as we both loved that textbook. Much of our enthusiasm is down to some great teachers who taught in the old alma mater,  The Mercy, Newtownsmyth. We all had our favourites, some of the stanzas, couldn’t make head nor tail of them. It had all the hits. The inspirational odes of the Romantic Brat Pack;  Shelley,  Keats and Wordsworth.  There was Kavanagh’s insightful ‘dance in Billy Brennan’s barn’.  I was blown away by Clarke and his lyrical ‘The Planter’s Daughter’  as ‘men who had seen her/Drank deep and were silent’. And, of course, the emblematic  ‘September 1913’ where Yeats’ poetic voice rings true today as the bankers and politicians who ruined the country ‘fumble in the greasy till/And add the halfpence to the pence’. 

The Small Man in our house likes to look at our copies of US, a book of photos taken in Ireland by ordinary people doing all sorts of things, on the same day in October 2005 and again in 2010. He can be quite contemplative, gets that from his aul lad. He says it reminds him of home.  They’re great books, uniquely Irish. But this thing of Irish identity is hard to pin down. I tell him he will always be Irish no matter where he lives. Moving away inevitably leads to questions of identity as you try to assimilate into your new surroundings, wherever that may be. But all the while you try to retain your uniqueness, stay the person you are, especially when you have children.  In Soundings, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ got me thinking. His symbolic masterpiece deals with the self-doubts of modern man, ya know, urbanisation, isolation, lack of spirituality, social crisis, all those light-hearted knitting-of-the- brow themes.  So, for me, ‘There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’  reminds me of those who have left home and landed in pastures new, cities strange with fresh faces, by choice or without choice. Don’t change too much. It’s hard work meeting new people. Sure, when in Rome and all of that but be true to yourself. Don’t misplace your essence. And pick up a copy of Soundings..not to analyse, compare or contrast. Just immerse yourself in some of the greats.  Plug in, tune out.