Tag Archives: St. Patrick’s Day

Music

The Irish Sing “Remember, Lord, Our Mortal State”

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“547 Granville” from The Tenth Ireland Sacred Harp Convention in 2020

For St. Patrick’s Day, give a listen to this Sacred Harp convention in Cork, Ireland, singing an Isaac Watts text listed as 547 Granville. Sacred Harp music began in London but flourish in America. It found a path to Ireland in 2009 via University College Cork.

The singers above begin by singing the shapes to get the music down before singing the lyric.

Remember, Lord, our mortal state;
How frail our lives! how short the date!
Where is the man that draws his breath,
Safe from disease, secure from death?

Lord, while we see whole nations die,
Our flesh and sense repine and cry;
Must death forever rage and reign?
Or hast Thou made mankind in vain?

Music

Sunday Singing: “Be Thou My Vision”

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“Be Thou My Vision” performed by Celtic Worship

This may be my favorite hymn for as long as I can remember. The original Irish words are attributed to the monk Dallan Forgaill in the poem, “Rop tú mo Baile.” They have been used in Christian services in Ireland for several hundred years. The folk tune, “Slane,” may go back to the 4th century. Both the words and tune are said to have been inspired by St. Patrick’s protest of King Logaire of Tara’s order forbidding any fires until after he lit the sacred fire of the spring equinox. Patrick ignited a fire for Easter on Slane Hill as a way of saying Christ is the king of heaven and earth.

I appreciate the group Celtic Worship for including the oft-skipped third verse in this hymn.

Be Thou my battle Shield, Sword for the fight
Be Thou my Dignity, Thou my Delight
Thou my soul’s Shelter, Thou my high Tower
Raise Thou me heavenward, O Power of my power

Music

Is St. Patrick’s Day Irish or Scottish? What’s the difference?

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The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,
For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air

W. B. Yeats, “Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland”

We have storms in our region today. It’s been raining somewhat since Monday, gushing rain now. It will be flooding somewhere nearby. I’m thankful to have always lived on a hill.

I learned today that St. Patrick’s Day is not the unique in American holidays. We also have National Tartan’s Day on April 6. Maybe folks who attend Highland games knew that. I’ve only thought about attending those games, when I occasionally hear of them, so I didn’t know about Tartan’s Day.

I think most Americans couldn’t tell the difference between Irish and Scottish or Celtic and Gaelic cultural things unless clearly marked. As a trivial example, here’s my favorite Scottish reel, “The J.B. Reel,” arranged with a jig called “The Shepherdess.”

Note the stark contrast of this piece with the first of the Irish reels performed in this recording of Brendan P. Lynch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W_feaIdTEA

That’s how you tell the difference, friends. Happy St. McPaddy’s Day.

Music

The Dream I Knew

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While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye

W.B. Yeats wrote fondly of his native Ireland and the pagan faerie roots he supposed it has. These lines from his poem, “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” published in 1893. Composer Thomas LaVoy arranged the last stanza into this choral piece, performed by The Same Stream.

I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them.

Poetry

Longing of Two Kinds

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I’ve let other things crowd out St. Patrick’s Day for me. My days have plodded steadily this year. I haven’t given much thought to future plans, but remained within the day.

Still, out of respect for the day, here are two poems with kinds of longing.

Patrick Pearse, “On the Strand of Howth” : (Entire poem)

Speaking in the night;
Of the voice of the birds
In Glenasmole

Happily, with melody,
Chanting music.

Seamus Heaney, “Mid-Term Break”

I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand
And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest
Read more through the links.
Religion

When Guinness Heard Wesley

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Guinness lived at a time when no one understood micro-organisms and how disease is spread. They routinely drank from the same waters in which they dumped their garbage and their sewage. Unknowingly, they polluted the rivers and lakes around their cities. People died as a result, and this made nearly everyone in Guinness’ day avoid water entirely. Instead, they drank alcoholic beverages.

Their drinking led to public drunkenness and crime, so some businessmen began brewing beer, which had less alcohol and was far healthier than homemade whiskey.

So as Arthur Guinness sat in church on the day we are imagining, he was a successful brewer in Dublin, selling a drink throughout the city that made people healthier and helped them avoid the excesses of the hard liquor that had done so much damage for so many decades.

Stephen Mansfield goes on to describe what happened when Arthur Guinness heard the great John Wesley in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Blogs, Socials, Music

This is what you're getting for St. Patrick's Day, and you'll take it and like it!

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Under protest, it goes without saying, because I’m afraid of the power of the Irish Lobby, I offer the following clip of the redoubtable Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. It’s a song I’m particularly fond of — the kind that might not impress you on first acquaintance, but sticks in your mind after a couple repeats. I particularly like the line, “Castles are sacked in war, chieftains are scattered far — truth is a fix-ed star….”

Now an Anthony Sacramone update: He sneaked back into his blog last week, tiptoeing with his shoes off, and did a post. Then he did another yesterday. So we’ve got that. He also links to the web page of the Intercollegiate Review, where he’s got a very amusing cover story right now:

Empire builders and revolutionaries, reformers and moral scolds, civil libertarians and uncivil prohibitionists—all believe History is on their side. Beware anyone who imputes to History an inevitable, self-directed, Forward march, as if it were as fixed as a bar code, as predetermined as male-pattern baldness, as sovereign as any voluntaristic deity. Most risible are atheists, old or new, who act as if the expanding energies of a supposedly random and causeless Big Bang could even possess an ultimate purpose….