#irishpoetry — Public Fediverse posts

Claude Comments on “This Forever Love In Me”

Claude, comment on this blog post of mine https://selfrealization.blog/2026/07/10/this-forever-love-in-me/

Claude:

There’s a lovely compactness to this, Sam, but also a productive ambiguity I want to press on, because I’m not sure the post says what you may think it says — and the ambiguity might be the most interesting thing in it.

Yeats’s speaker is full of tears precisely because he did not take love easy. She counselled him to let love come and go “as the leaves grow on the tree” — organically, without grasping — and he, young and foolish, would not agree. Now consider your own claim: you have never fallen out of love with anyone. On one reading that is beautiful constancy. But on another reading, never falling out of love is the very opposite of taking love easy — leaves that grow but never fall, grass that never yields to the season. By that light, your epigraph doesn’t contrast you with Yeats’s speaker; it makes you his kin, only without the tears. The question the post silently raises is: why no tears? Is it because your loves, held forever, never needed to end — or because something in you holds them in a register where endings don’t apply?

That’s where I suspect the Advaitic answer is hiding, and where the post could earn its title. “This Forever Love In Me” — the preposition is doing quiet work. If love is in you rather than between you and a particular person, then it was never really pinned to the nāma-rūpa of the beloved at all; the persons were occasions, the love was the constant. On that view, “never falling out of love” isn’t remarkable fidelity to many people but the simple fact that what you call falling in love was each time a recognition of something that doesn’t come and go. Requited or not becomes almost irrelevant — which your sentence already concedes in passing, and that concession is telling.

My honest editorial note: as it stands, the post is an epigraph plus a borrowed poem, and Yeats is carrying nearly all the weight. Your single sentence is genuinely intriguing — the “OUT” in capitals, the casual “many times,” the shrug at requital — but it gestures at a whole philosophy of love and then hands the microphone to Yeats before saying it. Even three or four more sentences of your own — on what it is that never leaves, and whether the salley-gardens girl’s advice is wisdom or resignation from where you stand — would turn this from a framed quotation into a real dialogue with the poem. You’ve written enough on love and lust across traditions that you have those sentences in you; this post just hasn’t spent them yet.

One small craft point: “a la Yeats” reads slightly loose against the precision of the rest — “as in Yeats’s poem” or simply dropping it would tighten the line, since the title citation already does that work.

But why so flipping hot?

https://neurodivine.blog/2026/06/03/but-why-so-flipping-hot/

But why so flipping hot?

https://neurodivine.ie/2026/06/03/but-why-so-flipping-hot/

Eavan Boland and the emergence of a poetic self. On the blog: https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2026/03/29/eavan-boland-and-the-emergence-of-a-poetic-self/

#poetry #IrishPoetry #EavanBoland #literature #identity

Eavan Boland and the emergence of a poetic self

I picked up Object Lessons (1995) by Eavan Boland (1944–2020) thinking it was a memoir, but it’s more focused than that: a meditation on the emergence of her identity as a poet, specifically a woman poet and an Irish poet.

This identity is further complicated by her emigration from Ireland as a five-year-old girl when her father, a diplomat, took up work in London in the mid-20th century:

Hardly anything else that happened to me as a child was as important as this: that I left one country and came to another. That an ordinary displacement made an extraordinary distance between the word place and the word mine.

In England, everyday words reinforced her sense of difference and lack: ‘They [the other children at school] could say “orchard” instead of “garden” with the offhand grace imparted by nine-tenths of the law. I could not.’ But it would be an Irish English word that crystallized her alienation:

The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom at school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”

Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.

This account elaborates on Boland’s description of the incident in her poem ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’, which I excerpted in a 2014 post about the Irish use of amn’t.

In her mid-teens Boland returned to live in Ireland and began to explore the inchoate sense of Irishness from which she felt semi-estranged:

Language. At first this was what I lacked. Not just the historic speech of my country. I lacked that too, but so did others. This was a deeper loss; I returned to find that my vocabulary of belonging was missing. The street names, the meeting places—it was not just that I did not know them. It was something more. I had never known them. I had lost not only a place but the past that goes with it and, with it, the clues from which to construct a present self.

I had to learn a new sensory idiom. A fog in the mouth, for example, which was different from the London one: less gritty, with more of an ocean aftertaste. An unkempt greenness on the streets. A drizzle which was interseasonal, constant. Different trees. Different birds.

Nurturing this idiom, she found, years later, that ‘language can reclaim location’, a beautifully concise expression of this insight.

It was not just Irish English with which Boland familiarized herself. In her final year in school she was struggling with Latin, resentful of its difficulty. Then came a turning point:

It was something about the economy of it all: the way the ablative absolute gathered and compressed time. One day, again figuratively, it was a burdensome piece of grammar. The next, with hardly any warning, it was a messenger with quick heels and a bright face. I hardly knew what had happened. I began to respect, however grudgingly, the systems of a language which could make such constructs that, although I had no such words for it, they stood against the disorders of love or history. They had left the mouth of the centurion and entered the mind of a Sicilian farm worker. They had forged alliances and named stars. And at that point of my adolescence, where the words I wrote on a page were nothing but inexact, the precision and force of these constructs began to seem both moving and healing.

As Boland developed her poetic ability and her confidence in its effect, she found herself entering a heavily male tradition. There were pivotal encounters with avatars of that tradition: with Padraic Colum at an elevator; with Patrick Kavanagh in a café in Dublin (his style of speech ‘shy and apocalyptic’).

But the constraints of history and structural intransigence pressed tight:

Gradually the anomaly of my poetic existence was clear to me. By luck, or its absence, I had been born in a country where and at a time when the word woman and the word poet inhabited two separate kingdoms of experience and expression. I could not, it seemed, live in both. As the author of poems I was an equal partner in Irish poetry. As a woman—about to set out on the life which was the passive object of many of those poems—I had no voice. It had been silenced, ironically enough, by the very powers of language I aspired to and honored.

Object Lessons abounds in eloquent, carefully honed ideas about womanhood and nationhood and the complications of a poetic self at their intersections. For this post I’ve selected just a few language-themed passages; if they appeal to you, you’ll enjoy Boland’s book.

#BookChatWeekly #GothicSpring #NationalReadingMonth #ReadingCommunity #BookSky #Literature #LiteratureSky #IrishLiterature #CelticLiterature #Poetry #PoetrySky #IrishPoetry #CelticPoetry #Ireland #IrishSky #Celtic #CelticSky #Arcadia #WBYeats #GiovanniBarbieri #GiovanniFrancescoBarbieri

#BookChatWeekly #GothicSpring #NationalReadingMonth #ReadingCommunity #BookSky #Literature #LiteratureSky #IrishLiterature #CelticLiterature #Poetry #PoetrySky #IrishPoetry #CelticPoetry #Ireland #IrishSky #Celtic #CelticSky #Arcadia #WBYeats #GiovanniBarbieri #GiovanniFrancescoBarbieri

#BookChatWeekly #GothicSpring #BookSky #Literature #LiteratureSky #IrishLiterature #CelticLiterature #Poetry #PoetrySky #IrishPoetry #CelticPoetry #Ireland #IrishSky #Celtic #CelticSky #Arcadia #WBYeats #GiovanniBarbieri #GiovanniFrancescoBarbieri

#BookChatWeekly #BookSky #Literature #LiteratureSky #IrishLiterature #CelticLiterature #Poetry #PoetrySky #IrishPoetry #CelticPoetry #Ireland #IrishSky #Celtic #CelticSky #Arcadia #WBYeats #GiovanniBarbieri #GiovanniFrancescoBarbieri

On the 19 May 1966 Seamus Heaney’s first collection of poetry "Death of a Naturalist" was published by Faber and Faber. The first poem in the book was "Digging". It also contained "Blackberry-Picking" and "Mid-Term Break".

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".

#Ireland #IrishHistory #IrishPoetry #SeamusHeaney #DeathOfANaturalist #OnThisDay

Thomas Kinsella was born on 4 May 1928 in Inchicore, Co Dublin. He was an Irish poet, translator, editor and publisher.

#Ireland #IrishHistory #IrishPoetry #ThomasKinsella #Dublin

Sometimes, just to plunge,
and dream on the farthest back
towels in the hot press.

#PoetryDayIreland
#Haiku #IrishPoetry #HotPress
#CheckTheEmersionsOff

Driving the perfect length of Ireland,
Like a worn fold in a newspaper

—Medbh McGuckian, from "To a Cuckoo at Coolanlough"
https://textworksite.com/2009/05/09/a-saturday-woman-poet-medbh-mc-guckian/

#poetry #Ireland #metaphor #geography #IrishPoetry #MedbhMcGuckian #simile

WB Yeats died on 28 January 1939 in the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, aged 73. He was initially buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in south-eastern France. In September 1948 his body was moved to the churchyard of St Columba's Church, Drumcliff, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette Lé Macha. Seán MacBride was in charge of this operation for the Irish Government.

#WBYeats #Ireland #IrishPoetry #Poetry #Sligo #SeánMacBride

From 'No second Troy', 1916:

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.

Yeats's 1893 poem "On a Child's Death" is thought to have been inspired by the death of Gonne's son Georges, whom Yeats thought Gonne had adopted. 2/2

#Ireland #IrishHistory #MaudGonne #WBYeats #Poetry #IrishPoetry

On 21st December 1886 Maud Gonne MacBride (Maud Nic Ghoinn Bean Mhic Giolla Bhríghde) was born. She became an inspiration and muse for WB Yeats. She was a complicated character and was described as "noisily anti-Semitic."

Yeats' poem "Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" ends with a reference to her:

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. 1/2

#Ireland #IrishHistory #MaudGonne #WBYeats #Poetry #IrishPoetry

𝑭𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝑾𝒂𝒚𝒘𝒐𝒓𝒅𝒔: "𝑹𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒊𝒓" - 𝒂𝒏 𝐚𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐞 𝒑𝒐𝒆𝒎 -

The 𝘢𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘴𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘦 poem is an older Irish quatrain form which opens and closes on the same word or phrase; here that full circle, though, is a turn in tone.

https://buff.ly/3NTOB3e

#aefreislighe #irishpoetry #ireland #reading #books #aging #isolation

"The bog still dreams of trees" —Doireann Ní Ghríofa, At Letterfrack

#trees #poetry #DoireannNíGhríofa #IrishPoetry #bog

On the 19th May 1966 Seamus Heaney’s first collection of poetry "Death of a Naturalist" was published by Faber and Faber. The first poem in the book was "Digging". It also contained "Blackberry-Picking" and "Mid-Term Break".

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".

#Ireland #IrishHistory #IrishPoetry #SeamusHeaney #DeathOfANaturalist #OnThisDay

WB Yeats died on 28 January 1939 in the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, aged 73. He was initially buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in south-eastern France. In September 1948 Yeats' body was moved to the churchyard of St Columba's Church, Drumcliff, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette Lé Macha. Seán MacBride was in charge of this operation for the Irish Government.

#WBYeats #Ireland #IrishPoetry #Poetry #Sligo #SeánMacBride

From 'No second Troy', 1916:

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.

Yeats's 1893 poem "On a Child's Death" is thought to have been inspired by the death of Gonne's son Georges, whom Yeats thought Gonne had adopted.

#Ireland #IrishHistory #MaudGonne #WBYeats #Poetry #IrishPoetry

On 21st December 1886 Maud Gonne MacBride (Maud Nic Ghoinn Bean Mhic Giolla Bhríghde) was born. She became an inspiration and muse for WB Yeats. She was a complicated character and was described as "noisily anti-Semitic."

Yeats' poem "Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" ends with a reference to her:

I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. Maud Gonne MacBride

1/2

#Ireland #IrishHistory #MaudGonne #WBYeats #Poetry #IrishPoetry

On the 19th May 1966 Seamus Heaney’s first collection of poetry "Death of a Naturalist" was published by Faber and Faber. The first poem in the book was "Digging". It also contained "Blackberry-Picking" and "Mid-Term Break".

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for "works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".

#Ireland #IrishHistory #IrishPoetry #SeamusHeaney #DeathOfANaturalist #OnThisDay

Happy Anniversary Skylight 47 x
Very happy to have a short poem in this issue.

#galway #irishpoetry #poetry #poetrycommunity #irishliterature #poetrylovers #poetsofmastodon #repostandroid #repostw10

Thomas Kinsella was born on 4th May 1928 in Inchicore, Co Dublin. He was an Irish poet, translator, editor and publisher.

#Ireland #IrishHistory #IrishPoetry #ThomasKinsella #Dublin

The last stanza in "The Workman’s Friend" by Flann O’Brien ...

"In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life –
A pint of plain is your only man."

https://irisharoundtheworld.com/a-pint-of-plain-is-your-only-man-by-flann-obrien/

Imagining a Guinness ad in which we hear the entire poem while viewing a pint on a bar top.

#irishpoetry

WB Yeats died on 28 January 1939 in the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, aged 73. He was initially buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin in south-eastern France. In September 1948 Yeats' body was moved to the churchyard of St Columba's Church, Drumcliff, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette Lé Macha. Seán MacBride was in charge of this operation for the Irish Government.

#WBYeats #Ireland #IrishPoetry #Poetry #Sligo #SeánMacBride