Close reading: Irish poets i
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
Irish Poets: Course I (repeated by popular demand)
Sunday 23 June and Sunday 30 June 2024.
We study some great poetry through close reading.
from ‘Digging’ (1966)
Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
[…]
Read the whole poem and hear it read aloud on the Poetry Foundation website.
Course description
Few territories can claim to have produced so many excellent poets and poems as the island of Ireland. Join poet and lecturer Dr Mariah Whelan as we explore a selection of poems by:
• W. B. Yeats
• Louis MacNeice
• Michael Longley
• Seamus Heaney
• Medbh McGuckian
In these two two-hour sessions, we will use close reading techniques to study a selection of poems from five excellent Irish writers. Together we will observe, analyse and discuss them as individual pieces and we will also explore how they might be read as being ‘in dialogue’ with each other.
This is the perfect course for anyone wanting to enhance their skills of analysis and discussion in a warm and collegiate atmosphere. No prior experience of close reading is necessary to take part.
Mariah will provide a selection of poems for participants. This course is live online via Zoom.
Please note that, because these sessions are mainly group discussion, we don’t record them.
Sunday 23 June and Sunday 30 June 2024
2.00 to 4.00 pm British Time
3.00 to 5.00 pm Central European Time
Course fees
£84.00 full price (2 sessions)
£78.00 students and CAMcard holders (2 sessions)
Prices include 20% VAT
Links and further information
Poetry Foundation on W. B. Yeats
Poetry Foundation on Louis MacNeice
Poetry Foundation on Michael Longley
Poetry Foundation on Seamus Heaney
Poetry Foundation on Medbh McGuckian
The Gallery Press: poetry books by Medbh McGuckian
Optional further reading
Senia Paseta, Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2003)
Radio programme on the history of Ireland, BBC Radio Ulster (might not be available outside the UK)
We hope to run several sessions on Irish poetry over the next two or three years. A second course, Irish Poets II, on Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon, takes place on Sunday 28 April and Sunday 5 May 2024.
The Second Coming (1920)
W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W. B. Yeats in 1911. Photo by G. C. Beresford. Wikimedia Commons
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
*
Hear recordings of Yeats’ poems read aloud on Poetry Archive website.
from ‘The Good Wife Taught Her Daughter’
Medbh McGuckian
Lordship is the same activity
Whether performed by lord or lady.
Or a lord who happens to be a lady,
All the source and all the faults.
A woman steadfast in looking is a callot,
And any woman in the wrong place
Or outside of her proper location
Is, by definition, a foolish woman.
[…]
- Read the full poem on the Poetry Foundation website.
*
Medbh McGuckian’s poem, ‘The Flitting’ is on the Poetry Society webpage. This won the 1979 National Poetry Competition prize.
Medbh McGuckian b. 1950
Medbh McGuckian on writing:
‘Why do I write? Out of the helplessness of the human condition – the only kind of control I can muster over the incoherence and apparent senselessness of it. Also to communicate and diagnose and express what cannot otherwise be expressed; to be a voice or give a voice to things that have been oppressed and repressed in my peculiar culture; to find an emotional valve for the deepest joys and sorrows.’
From the British Council webpage on Medbh McGuckian
Zoom link
We will send you a Zoom link by email at least 24 hours before the first lecture. If the link does not arrive, please let us know by email in good time, at least an hour before the session begins, so we can re-send.
If you cannot attend a course you have booked
Please note that, because places are limited, we cannot usually give refunds if you cannot attend a course. But if you contact us in advance, we might be able to transfer your booking to a different course.
Recordings
Because these classes are guided group discussions (not lectures), they are not recorded.
This course first runs in November 2023 (sold out). This page is for the repeated course in June 2024.
Comment from a previous Close Reading participant
‘Thank you so much for this course. Working on Browning and Keats with Mariah has been wonderful and I feel so enthused after every class. Really looking forward to the next one!’ - Saffron, London, 2023