The Irish Poetry and Postcolonialism

Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish” tells the story of a sixty-eight-year-old Chinese immigrant and her struggle to accept other cultures different from her own. The protagonist has been living in the United States for a while but she is still critical of other cultures and ethnicities, such as her son-in-law’s Irish family and the American values in which her daughter insists on applying while raising the protagonist’s granddaughter. The main character finds it very hard to accept the American way of disciplining and decides to implement her own measures when babysitting her granddaughter Sophie. When the main character’s daughter finds out that she has been spanking Sophie she asks her mother to move out of the house and breaks any further contact

1. The Scotch-Irish were staunch libertarians, and acted upon their feelings. Sex ways and dress ways had close ties to each other in the backcountry. To talk about sex and sexual behavior was also acceptable in this culture. The dress women and men wore was meant to arouse the opposite sex. Anglican missionary Charles Woodmason wrote, “They draw their shift as tight as possible round their Breasts, and slender waists (for they are generally very finely shaped) and draw their Petticoat close t their Hips to show the fineness of their limbs– … –indeed nakedness is not censurable without ceremony.” Woodmason was appalled at how these women carried themselves, but to the women, they were sexy. Men even dressed in ways to show off

Something I've not yet mentioned is imagery. This poem is so laden with imagery that if it were to be placed in a swamp it might sink. Nearly every line has imagery of some sort in it. Things like the words "with the fat greasy mires," or "the nugget of dense sap, branching vines, the dark burred faintly belching bogs," bear so much imagery in them that they practically take me right to the swamp to which this poem is written about.

In the 16th century, Henry VIII turned England into a Protestant country, but most of the Irish people remained Catholic. Being that no one listened to the king, he sent in soldiers to push them to change religions. The land owners fled their land when the soldiers came in. New protestant colonists came in to settle on the island. The Catholics rebelled and tried to get their country back, but were not successful and were left without power and land. While Great Britain gained full control of the whole island in the 19th century, Ireland has joined Wales, England, and Scotland to become the United Kingdom.

While the poem speaks of death, the tone is very subtle and joyful because of the multiple imageries of nature through diction such as “bird,” “garden,” and “water.”

The mood and tone of the poem is encouraging and persuasive, but the words he uses in the poem are not always encouraging and persuasive. He uses words like “grave”, “grieved”, and “dying” to compare to death, in which he is encouraging his father to fight.

Identity is pivotal to the story and holds its own innate power, but what is even more pivotal is that the Irish do not necessarily all share the same views. The Irish find their history very important because it is the foundation of the language. Hugh says, “It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language” (88). It is evident then that Hugh finds the historical meanings of

Both poems have been written about death dying and the loss of loved ones, in a once thriving Welsh mining community. The first poem by Mike Jenkins is a reflection and remembrance by a Father who tragically and suddenly lost his son in a horrific and unfortunate disaster that happened in Aberfan in 1966, where many young lives were lost.

This poignant dichotomy is seen explicitly in two poems in Seamus Heaney’s Field Work. One poem, “The Strand at Lough Beg” is written for “Heaney’s cousin Colum McCartney (ambushed and shot in a sectarian killing)” and is rich with pastoral scenery, dark tones, and religious imagery (Vendler 60). Another poem, “A Postcard from North Antrim” is about “his friend the social worker Sean Armstrong (shot by a ‘pointblank teatime bullet’)” (Vendler 60). These two elegies, both with a strong presence of Heaney’s personal voice, are imbued with a sort of ambiguity as Heaney struggles with the death of two people who were both very close to him. In both poems, Heaney “tries to converse with and question the dead” in an attempt to rationalize, or at least display his sentiments on the untimely deaths (Parker 159). It is interesting to watch Heaney oscillate in imagery, tone and diction as he progresses through both poems. This wavering can be seen as a result of Heaney’s background.

Young Yeats spent much of his childhood in Sligo, Ireland. It was in Sligo where his earliest visions began to form. Through the Pollexfen’s, William was able to experience life on the water, as his grandfather owned a fleet of ships and the Sligo Steam Navigation Company. As the grandson of this sea merchant, the sailors onboard the fleets, as well as the servants back at home, would all treat young William like royalty. The Pollexfen’s world was complete with yachts and summer homes. Despite separation from his father for much of his youth, William was without want. He was free to wander about to discover the beauties, and explore the myths and legends of this enchanted place. William would miss Sligo immensely when this family would move

is the idea of the bone as stone, with the mind as a catapult. This

In the poems you have studied a recurring theme is that of ‘loss’. This can take many forms: death; identity; hope or loss of innocence

Yeats’ sonnet, ‘Leda and the Swan’, adds to his conflicting perspectives regarding the development of independence acting as an analogical piece, exposing the Irish-British relationship. This is explored through the contrast of language between the god Zeus, and the decrepit Leda. The violent imagery of the swan’s “dark webs”, in contrast to Leda’s “staggering”, can be interpreted as the internal conflict within Yeats, which resulted in his mixed frustrations about the state of Ireland. The critic Declan Kiberd states that the poem is “an allegory of Yeats’ complicated feelings about England’s relation to Ireland”. Thus, ‘Leda and the Swan’ acts as a metaphor for the destruction of Ireland. This is supported by the symbolic use of “her loosening thighs”, which can be seen as a representation of Ireland giving herself up to the ‘almighty’

the theme of death. The speaker of the poems talks about the loss of a

Still after the official Irish Independence in 1922, the Irish people needed to find an identity free of the English influence but also of the Catholic morality and the values celebrated by the Revival, an identity which could be in step with the times and truly represent them. It was a particularly difficult task for intellectuals and writers. They found themselves almost shut up by Irish censorship and rejected by the bigotry that mostly characterized the middle-class society for decades after the Independence.