The Vandalism Inherent in the Leaving Cert

First published in the Western People on Tuesday.

A creature, made of clay

The Leaving Cert results are due this week. This will almost certainly result in the children of the rich and privileged disgracing themselves out foreign on holidays, and the publication of po-faced reports of same in a fortnight’s time that will not neglect any sordid detail.

Happily, no Mayo boy or girl would do such the thing – who could leave the country while the footballers are once more on the cusp of glory? Greece, how are ye.

What is a more interesting topic than boys being boys is the actual exam itself, and how the Leaving Cert, like Irish society itself, has changed with the times and not always for the better.

The impossible triangle of the Maths paper made headlines back in June, but that was a once-off blunder, and one that is unlikely to recur. What is of greater worry is the state of the syllabuses themselves, and the dumbing down that is getting more and more apparent as he years go by.

For instance, Project Maths is the great fashion now, rather than the old method of students swallowing their theorems and formulae whole, like so many boa constrictors.

The theory behind Project Maths, that of awakening the mathematician within, is fine but every maths teacher who has spoken to your correspondent about Project Maths does not think it’ll work. On the bright side, they are looking forward to a bull market in grinds for as long as it exists, and the grinds will be conducted in the old fashioned way. Open wide, scholars.

Irish is a tricky one. People involved in the promotion of Irish are generally very reluctant to confess any bad news about the language, and this prevents honest discussion of what’s actually happening.

The press looks no deeper than whether or not Peig Sayers is still on the syllabus, and take her exclusion as a sign of progress, without ever wondering what will replace her. Suffice it to say that the ancient language remains in mortal danger in our schools, Gaelscoileanna notwithstanding.

And then there is the sorry state of the English syllabus. The teaching of English, like so many other things, underwent no small upheaval during the 1960s. Prior to that unhappy decade, there was a Great Tradition of Literature, with every age adding its Great Writers to that Tradition.

The sixties, being the time of revolution it was, had no time for anything as unhip as tradition or standards, but did manage to generate a righteous fury that the so-called tradition was actually a power-structure that supported Dead White Males.

Fifty years on, nobody is really sure what a “great book” is anymore, and that level of insecurity is evident in the current Leaving Cert syllabus. As a matter of fact, the syllabus is so insecure about what a great book is that some of the books aren’t books at all. By the clever use of the word “text,” you can now go to the movies and call it school.

There are six films listed as prescribed texts for the Leaving Cert, ranging from Citizen Kane to Blade Runner, and they have no business there at all. The fact that each film lists its director as its author shows that not only does the Department not know that a film isn’t a text, the Department is equally unaware that film is the ultimate collaborative art form. Who signed off on this?

Bad and all as that is, a look at the poetry section is even worse. Geoffrey Chaucer is the man who wrote the Canterbury Tales, the poem that established English above Latin as a language worthy of literature. There is no sign of him on the latest syllabus, due for 2015.

The gallant and courtly Andrew Marvell – no sign. John Milton, second only to Shakespeare as a writer of blank verse and the only man to successfully write an epic poem in English, Paradise Lost, doesn’t make the grade.

Alexander Pope, “little Alexander the women laugh at,” the greatest of the Enlightenment poets? We don’t want his kind around here. George Gordon, the sixth Lord Byron, a man whose celebrity in his time echoes the madness of our own? Not good enough for the Leaving Cert.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron’s great contemporary and the man whose Ozymandias gives the culture its great lesson the importance of worldly power? His poems are no good here. John Keats, the last of the great Romantic Poets to be the born and the first to die? Nope, sorry.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the twelfth British poet laureate and the man whose poem “Ulysses” Judi Dench’s M quotes in the blockbuster James Bond movie Skyfall, goes right over the heads of children we now consider educated.

Patrick Kavanagh, second only to WB Yeats as the greatest Irish poet of the 20th Century and the authentic and eloquent voice of rural Ireland? A mystery to those who will sit their Leaving Cert in 2015.

And who’s there instead? Greg Delanty, Kerry Hardie, Liz Lochhead, Richard Murphy and William Wall are all on the syllabus for 2015 and there isn’t one of them whom your correspondent could pick out of a lineup.

This is an appalling state of affairs. Verse is the highest expression of language, any language. English has tradition of poetry that is over a thousand years old, predating even Chaucer, and that thousand-year tradition is being sidelined, and ignored, by the current Leaving Cert syllabus.

The great works are touchstones of what we consider important in life, once the dinner is eaten and the mortgage paid and we sit back and wonder what it is to be human. These poems have travelled down the generations and given wonder and consolation to countless people where-ever English is spoken.

Irish children are now being denied that heritage for reasons that are impossible to understand. This isn’t education. This is cultural vandalism and it’s time someone called a halt to it.

Have Ye No Pomes to Go To? The Return of Soundings

The republishing of Soundings, the Leaving Cert poetry anthology that was discontinued at the end of the last century, tells us many things about our current culture. Not all of them are good, but there is a definite light of hope.

The general welcome that the re-publication has received has been fuelled more than somewhat by nostalgia. The already-doodled cover is redolent of schoolroom ennui, and the new introduction by Joe O’Connor assures us that it’s socially acceptable to be seen with the book. The O’Connor imprimatur means there is no need to sandwich your copy shamefully between volumes of Pynchion and Vargos Llosa when approaching the till in Hodges Figgis.

However. The fact remains that Soundings is a schoolbook, and bears all the fell taint of that. Every poem is accompanied by questions to increase understanding of the work, but reading those questions again is too redolent of wet winter evenings, copybooks, pencil cases, Barry Lang’s Hotline on 2FM and general misery.

“Would you agree that the poem has some striking combinations of sound, vision and sense?” Yes, yes, yes, I’ll sign anything you want – just get me away from this damned desk and somewhere within a hundred mile radius of Belinda Carlisle.

The fact that Gill and Macmillan saw fit to mail freebie copies of the book to many media outlets and left out everybody’s favourite Irish blogger does little to endear it also. Bastards.

Those cavils aside, the republishing of Soundings, the initial demand that made its republishing worthwhile in the first place, and the general warmth with which a secondary school textbook has been welcomed tells us something that’s been lost in recent years. That there is such a thing as a poetry, and there is such a thing as the Western Canon. And if there wasn’t, there ought to be.

People like pomes. They don’t always know what they are, because the goalposts shift from day to day. People are told Séamus Heaney is a great poet, but are at a loss to recite any of his poems. You could recite a line, certainly, but you could recite a line from the Simpsons too and that doesn’t make Homer ... er, never mind.

Soundings means certainty. Soundings was written before the Marxist critiques of the Western Canon and the general scorn of a Dead While Male establishment had taken hold. The Canon is based on the idea that, as Gus Martin puts it in his original introduction, there are such things as great poems written by great poets.

That a baton has been passed down the ages from Chaucer to Shakespeare and Johnson, Donne and Marvell, Pope and Dryden, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson and Hopkins, Eliot, Yeats and Dylan Thomas. That there is a shared culture that allows one generation to connect to the generation that preceded it and to pass something on to the generation that follows.

Because it’s so very difficult to define what poetry is, perhaps An Spailpín can suggest taking a leaf out of the American academic and critic and say that poetry is that which is fun to recite out loud? When he wrote How to Read and Why, Bloom remarked in passing that he had to declaim verse in private, on deserted beaches or in empty fields, lest the PC police that roamed US university campuses at that time caught him and send him to the gulag.

But those days are old now and poetry declaimers may safely return to the light, holding their pints close to their hearts as they tell of country pleasures, travellers from antique lands, the ten years’ war in Troy, the Sunday in every week, and all those other dead loves that were born for me.

Soundings is not a complete collection, of course, but no collection can ever be. A thousand year tradition is lot to cram into one book. But as a statement of value and worth and a jumping off point for lifetime's delight, Soundings is sheer solid gold. Hurrah for its return.

Lines by St John Gogarty, Appropriate to This Morning's Current Affairs Radio

Enough! Why should a man bemoan
A Fate that leads the natural way?
Or think himself a worthier one
Than those who braved it in their day?
If only gladiators died,
Or heroes, Death would be his pride;
But have not little maidens gone,
And Lesbia's sparrow - all alone?






Technorati Tags: Ireland, culture, radio, journalism, poetry, Oliver St John Gogarty, Per Iter Tenebricosum

John Milton - Skip the Biography, Read the Poetry

Anyone who doubts just how dormant poetry currently is as an art-form need only read Andrew Motion’s enthusiastic review in this weekend's Guardian of Anna Beer’s new biography of John Milton – Milton's 400th anniversary is this year – to have their worst fears confirmed. Motion is the current British poet laureate, but from reading this one begins to wonder just what sort of poems he writes himself. And then one discovers Motion's poem celebrating the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, and all hope is forever lost.

Milton’s reputation ebbs and flows with the times – Robert Graves despised him, TS Eliot thought he was great – but An Spailpín Fánach is inclined to take his judgement from George Bernard Shaw. “English,” Shaw has Professor Higgins declaim in Pygmalion, “is the language of Milton, Shakespeare and the Bible.” Good enough for GBS, good enough for An Spailpín Fánach.

Motion seems less convinced. The first thing Motion does is make sure there’s some clear blue water between himself and Milton. Motion holds his nose while telling us that Milton was “a man whose views on the role of women seem to contaminate much that is central to his work and existence.”

Milton was also a enthusiastic supporter of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, as enthusiastic a supporter of genocide as has visited these shores, and the Green Isle of Erin has been visited by a few of them. Should we hold this against him, as well as his views on women? Should a man living three hundred years before women were granted suffrage presage his age? It’s a lot to ask, isn’t it?

Motion remarks that it’s difficult for Ms Beer to make “Milton at home likeable, or even vivid.” Is she writing a biography, or an episode of the Waltons? One of the countless evils of the culture wars is that political correctness insists that poets must be acceptable guests at a dinner party in Sandymount if they were alive today, thus wiping out more or less the entire canon of Western literature. Of course Milton was a tricky customer – how could he not be? But he also wrote what is possibly the most heart-breaking poem of loss in the language, Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint, so he can’t have been all bad.

And he wrote Paradise Lost, the towering poetic achievement of the English language, the only epic in the language, the poem by which all others measure themselves and are found wanting. Motion tips the cap to this idea – “its peerless combinations of imaginative reach and political analysis, its profoundly subtle enquiries into the nature of our relationship with the divine, its marvellous organ-blast hymn to (and the plea for vigilant support of) liberty” – but one gets the sense his heart isn’t quite in it. Diane Purkiss, in her review in the Telegraph, gets it so much better: “it's not a difficult poem; it's easier than most of Shakespeare. Its sonorous organ tones and phalanxes of angels are the brilliant backdrop to intense moral debates between charismatic tempter and naive humanity.”

The reason for the distance between Milton and his twenty-first century readership is best summed up by John Carey, in his review of the Beer biography in the Sunday Times at the weekend: “Milton’s art is rooted in Greek and Latin literature and in Christian theology, and the vast majority of the British people are ignorant of all three.”

Professor Carey hated Ms Beer’s book, and stomps all over it in his review. It is the stomping of a love spurned, as it’s very clear that Professor Carey dearly loves the poem, and hates to see it not recognised for the supreme achievement that it is. Professor Carey’s hypothesis, about the role that Milton’s subconscious played in the writing of the poem, is especially fascinating to those who are captivated by the poem’s great contradiction – why it is that a poem whose avowed purpose is to “justify the ways of God to man” paints Satan in such an heroic light?

An Spailpín’s advice is to ignore Ms Beer’s advice entirely, and head straight for Paradise Lost itself. Don’t attempt to consume it neat, because you won’t get it. The references will be too arcane. But if you can get a good annotated edition, you are in for treat that will stay with you for the rest of your life. And remember also that this is an epic poem – things happen on the grand scale. But do make the effort – it’s the New Year, and you owe yourself a treat.






Technorati Tags: culture, books, poetry, John Milton, Paradise Lost