432 A.D.:
St. Patrick arrives in Ireland, bringing Christianity. (The Protestant faith did not yet exist.)
1541:
Britain's King Henry VIII is declared King of Ireland by Englishmen living in Ireland. He opposes the Catholic religion.
1608:
Britain's King James I sends thousands of Protestant English farmers to Ireland to take over land owned by Catholic farmers, mostly in the north.
1692:
New laws forbid Catholics to vote, own land or practice their religion. Such laws remain in effect until 1829.
1845-1849:
A potato blight kills Ireland's staple food crop. About a million people die from starvation and fever during the Great Potato Famine.
1916:
The Easter Rebellion. Armed Irish patriots rebel against British troops in Dublin, Ireland, on the Monday after Easter. The British execute rebel leaders.
1919-1921:
The Anglo-Irish War between the British and the Irish Republican Army. In a treaty, Britain finally gives up control of most of Ireland but tightens its grip on the six counties of Ulster (Northern Ireland).
1921-1923:
Irish Civil War between those who accept the treaty with the English and the Irish Republican Army, which wants all of Ireland to be free of British rule. The Republicans lose.
1949:
Britain declares Ulster a permanent part of the British Empire. The lower 26 counties of Ireland declare themselves the Irish Republic, totally free of British control.
1972:
During anti-British protests in the Ulster town of Londonderry on January 30, 13 unarmed marchers are killed by British troops, an event now known as Bloody Sunday. Britain imposes direct rule on Ulster. A more intense era of bloodshed begins. The Irish call this violence the Troubles.
(http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/teachers/aw/wr/article/0,28138,1720975,00.html)
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Mid-Term Break by Seamus Heaney.
I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
_____________________________________________________
Mid-Term Break is a very personal poem, written when Heaney's four year old brother passed away. This poem may make Heaney sound emotionless the way he calls his brother a "corpse" and never revealing his emotions towards this tragedy, however this is how Heany has dealt with this whole ordeal and has added onto the powerful effect this poem has on the reader.
The death of his brother is shown to change Heaney's childhood completely, this event in his life is where he becomes aware of the true brutal reality of the world. We can sense a disturbing undertone to the poem, most clearly seen at the poem's start. Here he still does not know of his brother's death, he is still at school "counting bells knelling classes." The world "knelling" has a direct link to funerals. Heaney is "embarrassed" when men stand up to shake his hand like a man. The last line is very isolated from the rest of the poem,"A four foot box, a foot for every year." This line highlights how young his brother was taken from them, and how unfair life has been on their family.The dramatic shift from innocent school scene to standing next to his dead brother represents the drastic change Heaney went through at the time, from innocent school boy to understanding the harsh realities of life.
Counting bells knelling classes to a close.
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.
In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.
The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand
In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.
Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four foot box, a foot for every year.
_____________________________________________________
Mid-Term Break is a very personal poem, written when Heaney's four year old brother passed away. This poem may make Heaney sound emotionless the way he calls his brother a "corpse" and never revealing his emotions towards this tragedy, however this is how Heany has dealt with this whole ordeal and has added onto the powerful effect this poem has on the reader.
The death of his brother is shown to change Heaney's childhood completely, this event in his life is where he becomes aware of the true brutal reality of the world. We can sense a disturbing undertone to the poem, most clearly seen at the poem's start. Here he still does not know of his brother's death, he is still at school "counting bells knelling classes." The world "knelling" has a direct link to funerals. Heaney is "embarrassed" when men stand up to shake his hand like a man. The last line is very isolated from the rest of the poem,"A four foot box, a foot for every year." This line highlights how young his brother was taken from them, and how unfair life has been on their family.The dramatic shift from innocent school scene to standing next to his dead brother represents the drastic change Heaney went through at the time, from innocent school boy to understanding the harsh realities of life.
Seamus Heany
Heaney's poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s when he was active as one of a group of poets who were subsequently recognized as constituting something of a "Northern School" within Irish writing. Although Heaney is stylistically and temperamentally different from such writers as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (his contemporaries), and Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson (members of a younger Northern Irish generation), he does share with all of them the fate of having be en born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust. This had the effect not only of darkening the mood of Heaney's work in the 1970s, but also of giving him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen. The essays in Heaney's three main prose collections, but especially those in The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995), bear witness to the seriousness which this question assumed for him as he was coming into his own as a writer.
Heaney's beginnings as a poet coincided with his meeting the woman whom he was to marry and who was to be the mother of his three children. Marie Devlin, like her husband, came from a large family, several of whom are themselves writers and artists, including the poet's wife who has recently published an important collection of retellings of the classic Irish myths and legends (Over Nine Waves, 1994). Marie Heaney has been central to the poet's life, both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly and indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his oeuvre right down to the most recent, and making it possible for him to travel annually to Harvard by staying on in Dublin as custodian of the growing family and the family home.
The Heaneys had spent a very liberating year abroad in 1970/71 when Seamus was a visiting lecturer at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It was the sense of self-challenge and new scope which he experienced in the American context that encouraged him to resign his lectureship at Queen's University (1966-72) not long after he returned to Ireland, and to move to a cottage in County Wicklow in order to work full time as a poet and free-lance writer. A few years later, the family moved to Dublin and Seamus worked as a lecturer in Carysfort College, a teacher training college, where he functioned as Head of the English Department until 1982, when his present arrangement with Harvard University came into existence. This allows the poet to spend eight months at home without teaching in exchange for one semester's work at Harvard. In 1984, Heaney was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, one of the university's most prestigious offices. In 1989, he was elected for a five-year period to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a post which requires the incumbent to deliver three public lectures every year but which does not require him to reside in Oxford.
In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has always contributed to the promotion of artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. While a young lecturer at Queen's University, he was active in the publication of pamphlets of poetry by the rising generation and took over the running of an influential poetry workshop which had been established there by the English poet, Philip Hobsbaum, when Hobsbaum left Belfast in 1966. He also served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland (1973-1978) and over the years has acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry competitions and literary conferences, establishing a special relationship with the annual W.B. Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. In recent years, he has been the recipient of several honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996, subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
(http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html)
Heaney's beginnings as a poet coincided with his meeting the woman whom he was to marry and who was to be the mother of his three children. Marie Devlin, like her husband, came from a large family, several of whom are themselves writers and artists, including the poet's wife who has recently published an important collection of retellings of the classic Irish myths and legends (Over Nine Waves, 1994). Marie Heaney has been central to the poet's life, both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly and indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his oeuvre right down to the most recent, and making it possible for him to travel annually to Harvard by staying on in Dublin as custodian of the growing family and the family home.
The Heaneys had spent a very liberating year abroad in 1970/71 when Seamus was a visiting lecturer at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It was the sense of self-challenge and new scope which he experienced in the American context that encouraged him to resign his lectureship at Queen's University (1966-72) not long after he returned to Ireland, and to move to a cottage in County Wicklow in order to work full time as a poet and free-lance writer. A few years later, the family moved to Dublin and Seamus worked as a lecturer in Carysfort College, a teacher training college, where he functioned as Head of the English Department until 1982, when his present arrangement with Harvard University came into existence. This allows the poet to spend eight months at home without teaching in exchange for one semester's work at Harvard. In 1984, Heaney was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, one of the university's most prestigious offices. In 1989, he was elected for a five-year period to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a post which requires the incumbent to deliver three public lectures every year but which does not require him to reside in Oxford.
In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has always contributed to the promotion of artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. While a young lecturer at Queen's University, he was active in the publication of pamphlets of poetry by the rising generation and took over the running of an influential poetry workshop which had been established there by the English poet, Philip Hobsbaum, when Hobsbaum left Belfast in 1966. He also served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland (1973-1978) and over the years has acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry competitions and literary conferences, establishing a special relationship with the annual W.B. Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. In recent years, he has been the recipient of several honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996, subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
(http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1995/heaney-bio.html)
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