Happy St. Patrick's Day to All!!

[Zochitl]

Today is St. Patrick's Day, a day to celebrate all things Irish. If you are in the mood, you can sing some classic Irish folk songs.

There's "Cockles and Mussels," about a beautiful fishmonger who dies of a fever, but whose ghost continues to wheel seafood through the streets of Dublin. The song begins: "In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone As she wheeled her wheel-barrow
Through streets broad and narrow Crying cockles and mussels, alive, alive-O!"

There is "Down By the Sally Gardens," which takes its lyrics from a poem by W.B. Yeats: "It was down by the Sally Gardens, my love and I did meet.
She crossed the Sally Gardens with little snow-white feet. She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree, But I was young and foolish, and with her did not agree."

And there is the very popular "Irish Lullaby": "Over in Killarney Many years ago, Me Mither sang a song to me In tones so sweet and low. Just a simple little ditty, In her good ould Irish way, And I'd give the world if she could sing That song to me this day. Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li, Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don't you cry! Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li, Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that's an Irish lullaby."

One of the most enduring stereotypes of early theater was a character called "Stage Irish." This man was usually a badly dressed country bumpkin, drunk on homemade liquor, who couldn't hold down a job but was full of down-home Irish wisdom. No one is sure which English playwright first capitalized on this stereotype of the Irish, but it might have been Shakespeare with his Captain Macmorris in Henry V. Shakespeare decided to make the three captains of Henry's troops an Irishman, a Welshman, and a Scot, as a reference to the unification of Britain — which happened not during Henry's time but during Shakespeare's. On the one hand, he was eager to include all of them, countries symbolically fighting a common enemy. On the other hand, they are all made out to be foolish, with exaggerated accents, particularly Macmorris. Shakespeare gives Macmorris lines like:

"It is no time to discourse, so Chrish save me: the day is hot, and the weather, and the wars, and the king, and the dukes: it is no time to discourse. The town is beseeched, and the trumpet call us to the breach; and we talk, and, be Chrish, do nothing: 'tis shame for us all: so God sa' me, 'tis shame to stand still; it is shame, by my hand: and there is
throats to be cut, and works to be done; and there ish nothing done, so Chrish sa' me, la!"

[RavenDelcor]

Cool stuff this! The song of songs, not Danny Boy, but the Wearin o the Green, bespeaks the trials of being Irish and oppressed by English "unification" that turned to indentured slavery and neglect. Where the Irish spirit rises, it rises with the green shoots, knowing well that as Mother Earth refuses to obey the King, so must we be proud in the wearin of the green!