By Patrick O’Sullivan

My first year at secondary school in the Intermediate School, Killorglin; the Carnegie as it was popularly known, was spent in the old Wesleyan Church nearby. In many ways it was a big enough change from my time in Callinafercy National School, when we played in the grove at lunch time, the tall pine trees racing skyward, their scraggly crowns touching the blue.

We hardly thought of it then but looking back, the church had a wonderfully old-world atmosphere, the sense of history everywhere around. The first poem that I studied in the church was, ‘The Listeners’, by Walter de la Mare, who was born in Kent in the 1870s and was of Scottish and French Huguenot descent. His fascination with the supernatural led him to write many brilliant ghost stories as well as poems in a similar vein.

In ‘The Listeners’, a traveller comes on horseback to a secluded old country house but receives no answer to his knocking; ‘But only a host of phantom listeners/That dwelt in the lone house then/Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight/To that voice from the world of men’.

The traveller senses the presence of the listeners and, as he clearly has some connection with the occupants of the house, he addressed the listeners directly saying, ‘Tell them I came, and no-one answered/That I kept my word’, he said. In his poem, ‘Farewell’, the poet urges the reader not to take the beauty of life for granted but to relish and embrace it and pay it, ‘the utmost blessing’.

If ‘The Listeners’ conjures up a sense of mystery with its image of the listeners thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, then ‘The Owl’, which we studied for the Inter Cert, is a much darker, more disturbing poem, ‘What if to the edge of dream/When the spirit is come/Shriek the hunting owl/And summon it home’.

I had already come across Edward Lear’s much lighter, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, in national school in which the pair go to sea in a beautiful pea green boat; ‘They took some honey, and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note’. Most school children of the time also knew the rhyme about the wise old owl who lived in an oak, ‘The more he saw, the less he spoke/The less he spoke, the more he heard/Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?’

I did Latin at the Carnegie, and one of the goddesses that featured in the books of the time was Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, and counterpart of the Greek Athena. The olive was her favourite tree, the owl her favourite bird. The German philosopher, Hegel, wrote, ‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk’.

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