Dunluce Castle, Ireland
Happy Lá Fhéile Pádraig! That’s Irish for St. Patrick’s Day.
Rumor has it that one St. Patrick’s Day in the early 1900s a man in a pub, after too many pints, leaped atop a table and sang a poem. The pub owners, not knowing who he was, booted him out. They later learned it was James Joyce. The poem was penned by William Butler Yeats.
Down by the Salley Gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the Salley Gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
Published in Yeat’s The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems in 1889.
Let’s consider a few more Irish literary greats: Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize in Literature 1995). An honorable mention goes to Frank McCourt, whose nonfiction memoir, Angela’s Ashes, won a Pulitzer Prize. For celebrities, there’s Bono the singer and actors Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell, and Michael Fassbender.
Cheers to all the fine Irish men and women! I’ll be drinking a pint of Guinness tonight. Here are two links to lots of Saint Patrick’s Day festivities in Las Vegas:
Places to Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Las Vegas
