GO DIRECTLY TO GAOL . . .

Well, that's exactly how we started our day: we headed off mid-morning to the legendary and notorious Kilmainham Gaol [i.e., Jail] via the LUAS street-level train . . . and we kept on going all day long. . . . 

The Kilmainham part of the day was a powerful experience--very moving. The gaol is over two-hundred years old. Its last prisoner--Irish rebel (and later Prime Minister and then President) Eamon de Valera was released in 1924. The gaol then sat empty and in disrepair for decades before being restored as a commemorative site mostly for nationalist heroes, though as our fine guide pointed out, they represented only about 15% of the total population through the gaol's history. But what an impressive 15%! Robert Emmet and Charles Stewart Parnell pretty much bookend the 19th century.

And in the 20th century, many of the leaders of the Easter Rising of 1916 were imprisoned there . . . and were executed there by firing squad. In our class a few week ago, we read Yeats's poem "Easter 1916": "I write it out in verse-- / MacDonagh and McBride / And Connolly and Pearse / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born." I think that every member of our entourage was touched by the spirit of place at Kilmainham--the sense of history and humanity that still inhabits the cells there. And to stand in the very courtyard where the rebel leaders were shot by firing squad--that is an especially moving experience. . . .

Perhaps it's just as well that we altered our schedule for the rest of the day. Originally we had planned to go straight from Kilmainham to Glasnevin Cemetery in an entirely different part of Dublin. But we decided to defer that visit to Tuesday; instead we went to the National Museum, which is less than a 10-minute walk from our digs at Trinity. I have been to the Museum a number of times, so I was surprised to discover that some of the displays I expected to see--and that I had advertised to our students--were not in fact there! It seems that the collection has now been spread over 4 different sites. Most of the Irish-related displays related to early and medieval Ireland--interesting and eye-opening . . . but not quite the complete picture we had expected. Well, no harm in leaving something for another time and another place. . . .

After the Museum we all still had some mileage left in our legs, so we headed south . . . toward the Grand Canal to visit a site commemorating the important mid-20th-century poet Patrick Kavanagh. "O commemorate me where there is water," Kavanagh wrote in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin,” continuing: “Canal water, preferably, so stilly / Greeny at the heart of summer.”

After his death in 1967, his friends erected a bench in his memory with that poem inscribed on it. In 1991 Kavanagh was further commemorated by a life-size statue sitting on another bench along the canal. . . .

Going to and coming from the Grand Canal, we passed through St. Stephen's Green, the wonderful park in the heart of southside Dublin. On our way back down Grafton Street toward Trinity College Dublin we made note of several drinking establishments with literary associations--McDaid's, a pub frequented by Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien, J. P. Donleavy, Michael Hartnett and other denizens of "Bohemian Dublin" of the 1950s and '60s, and Davy Byrne's on Duke Street, where Leopold Bloom of Joyce's Ulysses ducks in for a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy. Sounds good to me!