A chara – Some of the building materials used in the constuction of the Tower of Babel, referred to by John Thompson (August 13th), were deemed, by the early Irish grammarians who composed Auraicept na nÉces (The Poets' Primer), to be made of the parts of speech of the Irish language.
Approximately 6,500 living languages co-exist in the post-Babel world of today, decreasing at a faster rate than the polar ice caps or the Amazonian jungle. Mr Thompson appears to want the word to revert to its pre-Babel stage, to speak of itself with one tongue rather than via many tongues, presuming, one might suspect, that his tongue will be the last tongue standing, which could be a grave presumption.
Mr Doyle (August 13th), on the other hand, is rather selective about what I wrote, omitting the fact that I mentioned compulsory English (the language of the new monolingual frontier envisaged by Mr Thompson). He maintains that I misunderstood his “fumbling in a greasy till” reference, and urges me to “read further in the referenced poem” , in which the refrain “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave” appears. Submitting to your readers’ own interpretation of what Mr Yeats actually said in the first verse of “September 1913”, I give it here in full: “What need you, being come to sense, / But fumble in a greasy till / And add the halfpence to the pence / And prayer to shivering prayer, until / You have dried the marrow from the bone? / For men were born to pray and save; / Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”
As I’m sure Mr Doyle knows well, when interpreting poetry seeming is believing. And indeed it seems to me that what Yeats said above is as true now as it ever was. – Is mise le meas,
PÁDRAIG Ó CÍOBHÁIN,
An Cimín Mór,
Bóthar na Ceapaí,
Bearna