Your weekly dose of Irish ☘️🕺
Sep 17, 2021 3:01 pm
Hi there,
Here's your weekly dose of Irish for Friday, September 16th 2021...
- Last week you went crazy for the Olympic skater, but this week it was Michael Flatley's turn. This short 3-minute video of his greatest moments in Irish dancing was viewed over 40'000 times! Wow.
- Have you ever heard of Irish road bowling? It is probably one of Ireland's most unique sports after Hurling and GAA. It is essentially a game of golf on Irish country roads, and the aim is to roll the metal ball around the course in the lowest amount of throws. You can read my post about it here.
- As a result of all of the visitors last week, I have a whole lot of new subscribers, so welcome everyone! I hope you enjoy your first weekly dose of Irish.
This week's posts:
☘️ What Is Irish Road Bowling And The History Behind It(Video)
Irish road bowling is a unique sport played mainly in Cork and Armagh.
Although nowadays it is played in a lot more counties in Ireland.
In a way, it is …
The post What Is Irish Road Bowling And The History Behind It(Video) appeared first on Irish Around The World.
☘️ Watch Michael Flatley’s Greatest Moments In Irish Dance
If there ever were a man who brought Irish dancing more mainstream, you would have to say it was Michael Flatley.
I enjoyed some casual watching on YouTube when I …
The post Watch Michael Flatley’s Greatest Moments In Irish Dance appeared first on Irish Around The World.
☘️Irish Poem: “The Workmans Friend” – By Flann O’Brien(A Pint Of Plain)
A pint of plain is a beer, and if there was ever a poem that poetically put a beer as essential, it would be this one.
This poem comes in …
The post-Irish Poem: “The Workmans Friend” – By Flann O’Brien(A Pint Of Plain) appeared first on Irish Around The World.
☘️ 10 Facts About Cork, Ireland That You Might Not Know
Sure, since I am from Cork, I felt I had to share these 10 facts about Cork you might not know.
Where exactly is Co.
Cork in Ireland?
County Cork …
The post 10 Facts About Cork, Ireland That You Might Not Know appeared first on Irish Around The World.
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So what is this week's top Irish poem?
The Circus Animals’ Desertion, by W. B. Yeats
This week it is number 51 on my top 100 Irish poems list. Yet again, Yeats makes an appearance. This poem, however, is unique in that it was the last collection of works published by Yeats before he died in 1939.
But what is ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ about?
Don’t worry if you are like me; the poem is quite confusing on a first read. It seems all over the place with different rhythms and going back and forth. But the main theme in the poem is about Yeat’s life poetry work.
The poem finds him looking back over his poetic career, reinterpreting his past work and his motivations for writing it. In the beginning, he talks about how he struggles with inspiration to write new poems. Keep in mind that Yeats was nearly 70 writing this poem. So it is no wonder that he lacks inspiration after writing hundreds of poems throughout his life.
You might also be asking what does he mean by Circus animals? In the poem, the poet uses the desertion of circus animals as an analogy to describe his failure to find inspiration for
poetic creation as he seeks new inspiration.
It certainly is one of his more in-depth poems compared to a simpler poem like the fisherman’s poem.
Some terms in this poem and their explanations:
“Oisin” Oisin (also called Ossian) is a legendary Celtic warrior-poet about whom Yeats wrote one of his Celtic Revival poems.
“Cuchulain” pronounced” “Kuh-CHOO-lin”; another legendary Celtic hero, leader of the Knights of the Red Branch, also called The Hound of Ulster. In the 1892 poem “The Death of Cuchulain”, Yeats wrote of him and re-wrote the poem in 1925 “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.”
“The Countess Cathleen” is The name of one of Yeats’s Noh-style (meaning they were inspired by classical Japanese Noh drama) plays and its heroine. Set during the famine, the play tells how agents of the devil come to Ireland offering to buy the starving peasants’ souls for gold.
Rag and bone shop — a junk shop, quite common in England and Ireland at that time, where you could buy and sell rags and other used items. Source Mason.edu
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
I
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
II
What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.
And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
`The Countess Cathleen’ was the name I gave it,
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this poem; while it is complicated, you still can learn a lot about how he must have been feeling after a life dedicated to poetry.
This week's joke: An elderly woman in the bank of Ireland:
This is a great one; I have posted it before, so I do apologize if you have already read it. Enjoy!
An elderly woman walked into the Bank of Ireland one morning with a purse full of money. She wanted to open a savings account and insisted on talking to the president of the Bank because, she said, she had a lot of money.
After many lengthy discussions (after all, the client is always right), an employee took the elderly woman to the president’s office.
The president of the Bank asked her how much she wanted to deposit. She placed her purse on his desk and replied, ‘$165,000’.
The president was curious and asked her how she had been able to save so much money. The elderly woman replied that she made bets.
The president was surprised and asked, ‘What kind of bets?’
The elderly woman replied, ‘Well, I bet you $10,000 that your testicles are square.’
The president started to laugh and told the woman that it was impossible to win a bet like that.
The woman never batted an eye. She just looked at the president and said, ‘Would you like to take my bet?’
‘Certainly’, replied the president. ‘I bet you $10,000 that my testicles are not square.’
‘Done’, the elderly woman answered. ‘But given the amount of money involved, if you don’t mind, I would like to come back at 10 ‘ clock tomorrow morning with my lawyer as a witness.’
‘No problem’, said the president of the Bank confidently.
That night, the president became very nervous about the bet and spent a long time in front of the mirror examining his testicles, turning them this way and that, checking them over again and again until he was positive that no one could consider his testicles as square and reassuring himself that there was no way he could lose the bet.
The next morning at exactly 10 o’clock, the elderly woman arrived at the president’s office with her lawyer and acknowledged the $10,000 bet made the day before that the president’s testicles were square
.
The president confirmed that the bet was the same as the one made the day before. Then the elderly woman asked him to drop his pants etc., so that she and her lawyer could see clearly.
The president was happy to oblige.
The elderly woman came closer so she could see better and asked the president if she could touch them. ‘Of course, said the president. ‘Given the amount of money involved, you should be 100% sure.’
The elderly woman did so with a little smile. Suddenly the president noticed that the lawyer was banging his head against the wall. He asked the elderly woman why he was doing that, and she replied, ‘Oh, it’s probably because I bet him $100,000 that around 10 o’clock this morning I would be holding the balls of the President of the Bank of Ireland’
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