When the technocrats finally take over education, one thing they’ll surely do away with is poetry. Along with history and Irish, which are literally antiquated, poetry serves no market function, and is therefore difficult to justify in this age of economic utility. Try quoting Emily Dickinson in a job interview and see where that gets you. End of. Such dark thoughts were going through my head recently when someone sent me the gift of a book of poems by one of my former teachers.
Frank Kelly, an affable Dungannon man who taught English, economics and Latin at St Michael's College, Dublin for over 30 years, had – it turned out – a secret intellectual life. Since the early days of his marriage, and before his five children were born, he used to write poetry, on a near-daily basis. And he continued to write – hundreds of poems, sometimes several in one sitting – at a desk facing a window to his back garden at his home in Dundrum, south Dublin until long after his retirement. The collection of his life's work, Et Ego in Arcadia, addressed themes far removed from his professional life: among them, the joy of song; silence and solitude; and connecting with nature. The latter is represented in Walking the Land where he recalls how his brother used to take him on a seasonal survey of his farm in Co Roscommon: "And with one accurate glance could tell/A cow or a sheep was missing or hidden".
On reading the book, I detected certain influences from the curriculum. One poem titled Strange Progress, a not-so-subtle attack on the education system, had a Yeatsian vibe, with the lines: "Boys and girls memorise forever/And add millions to a million." But then who was I to say?
To my shame, I've read very little poetry since leaving school; the only works I've bought have been some Seamus Heaney and Dennis O'Driscoll. More importantly, I've lost the tools for analysing what makes a good poem. My old copy of Soundings is covered with margin notes about "assonance", "sibilance", "lyricism" and "rhyming couplets" but these terms are now alien to me. Why is that? Perhaps the sheer authority of Soundings had a part to play. Although designed as subtitled as an "interim anthology", it was perceived as The Gospel of poetry in an Irish context. So much so that it was hard to imagine the art form outside of it. This sort of Soundings snobbery kicked in for me recently when I learnt September 1913 was originally published in a newspaper (hold your nose!), and, worse, lashed off in response to a parochial artistic controversy involving Dublin Corporation.
Okay, it was this newspaper but, as James Harpur reminded us on the anniversary of the poem's publication, all that stuff about "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone" was probably wrapping someone's fish and chips 100 years ago. Was I the only one to feel the poem had suddenly been devalued by this disclosure?
Earlier this month, and just weeks after his poems had finally been printed, Frank Kelly died. At his funeral, it was recalled how he developed a reputation for concocting sayings and aphorisms in class. Once he tried to silence an unruly gang of Leaving Certers with the gnostic words: “Life’s not a bowl of cherries, it’s not just rock n’ roll”.
A few weeks after the outburst, when exams were over, graffiti suddenly appeared on the wall of the school. In large lettering, it read: “It’s only rock n’ roll.”
It’s not clear whether Mr Kelly wrote his poems for himself, or for someone else to read some day, but he took them seriously enough to some years ago burn a batch of them that weren’t deemed up to scratch.
One of his former colleagues was Dermot Morgan, who taught at the school before taking up acting and would later go on to work with another Frank Kelly on Father Ted. Had Mr Kelly ever dreamed of such paths? One of the last poems in his book is called It Happens to Some, and deals with the nature of fame, and the competing tugs of adventure and security in every creative being. Its last lines read like an exhortation: ". . . be prince," he writes: "Of every possible opportune moment. Such/Can be fame enough to set the flame of life/Aright waiting patiently for that serendipitous/Light to come alive if just for old time's sake."
Et Ego in Arcadia by Francis J Kelly is published by Original Writing