WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day Special

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

The 2025 Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day Special commemorates the story of St. Patrick and celebrates the culture of Ireland, the island he called home. Hear from Hillsdale College Chaplain Rev. Adam Rick, Hillsdale Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Fredericks, and Cairn University Professor of History Steele Brand. Plus Irish songs played by Hillsdale College students and Irish poetry read by Hillsdale's Tower Players.Hosted by Gavin Listro, with contributions from Gwen Thompson, Lauren Smyth, and Lilly Faye Kraemer. The Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day Special was made possible in part through the generous support of John and Karen Harrington and Brooke Harrington, Hillsdale College Class of 1994.

The following program is made possible in part through the generous support of John and Karen Harrington and Brooke Harrington, Hillsdale College Class of 1994. Hello and welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day Special. I'm your host, Gavin Leastrow. Join us as we commemorate the story of St. Patrick and celebrate the culture of Ireland, the island that he called home. We're joined first by Hillsdale College chaplain Reverend Adam Rick to hear the history and his thoughts on St. Patrick's Day. St. Patrick enters into the local calendar of Saints in Ireland by the 11th century or so. He enters into the Roman calendar for the whole Western Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century. And I think the reason why his day becomes so popular in the United States is because, of Irish immigrants to this country trying to claim some aspect of their national heritage while

they're here. Of course, many of the Irish Catholics that immigrated in the United States were a persecuted minority when they first arrived. And so celebrating their own national origins is a way for them to sort of shore up their own identity as immigrants. And so it's for that reason that St. Patrick's Day's associations with parades and all that stuff are actually more prominent here in the history of the United States and they are even in Ireland. It didn't become a formal holiday in Ireland until like 1903. So a lot of the many parades and traditions associated with St. Patrick's Day are actually older here in this country than they are in the country of origin in Ireland. And so that's how the party gets started, right, is as sort of

Irish immigrants in the United States trying to reclaim their national heritage in a new country. And the drinking associated with St. Patrick's Day has to do with the fact that his day usually comes during Lent. And so there would be disembate. from the Catholic hierarchy for the Lenton fast for his day, and that inevitably led to excess. And now it's just a sort of cultural excuse to party. I mean, I feel like this is what's become, especially in cities with historically large Irish populations like Boston or Chicago. It's now just such a civil holiday that everybody just kind of gets sort of wrapped up in, quite apart from being Irish or even being Christian, for that matter. And it's just an excuse to

take it easy, drink a little too much, and otherwise have a good time. So that's what tends to happen with Christian holidays when they get taken over by the culture. The whole idea of celebrating a saint is to celebrate a reminder, a tangible reminder in the life of a living person, a person who did live, of God's faithfulness to his promise and of God's ability to transform sinners into saints. And so when we celebrate someone like St. Patrick, like any other saint we might celebrate, that's primarily what we're celebrating is God's faithfulness in the lives of his people. And we also try to remember particular attributes about that saint as occasions to make us ponder our own Christian lives. So in Patrick's case, he's got a fabulous story of reconciliation and forgiveness of his own enemies,

and that's something to cause us to ponder in our own lives. You know, where do I need to show forgiveness in my life? for, do I need to let bygones be bygones? St. Patrick was a missionary, right? So he was not from Ireland, ironically enough. He's associated with Ireland, but he wasn't even Irish, though he evangelized the Irish people. And that's a call for us to remember that the mission of the gospel continues in the present day. And not unlike Patrick, we live in an increasingly hostile culture to the Christian faith. And it's good for us to be inspired by his life, to be bold and courageous. And to think about ways to evangelize our neighbors and to share the good news of the gospel.

with them. And the last thing I would say about St. Patrick is that like any saint, he is a model of somebody who consecrated their entire lives to Jesus. And so that causes us to ponder. What would it look like for me to truly surrender my life to Christ and to make myself available to him to do whatever he wants me to do? And of course, Patrick going back to evangelize his captors as a real model of courageous faith. So, of course, on Saints Day as we celebrate, it's okay to party with our Christian friends. We should remember, of course, his St. Patrick was a monk. And so perhaps getting drunk is not the best idea, but there's certainly nothing sinful about alcohol in and of itself if it's used to the glory of God, right? So there's no reason not to have a good time in gratitude. Because saints' days are celebrations.

They're feasts, right? We celebrate God's faithfulness. So there's no reason not to celebrate, but let them be an occasions for prayer, pious imagination, and self-examination in light of that saint's life and how they're calling us to live lives more full. are dedicated to the good news. That was Reverend Adam Rick, chaplain of Hillsdale College, on our Radio Free Hillsdale's St. Patrick's Day special. Next up, some music,

performed by our own Hillsdale College students. The first song we have for you is the Keshe Jig. The Keshe Jig dates from at least the 19th century, the early days of Jigs in Ireland, and is considered a staple piece in any Irish musician's repertoire. Named for a village in Northern Ireland, it also has been published or recorded as the Ramble. jigg. It was one of the first pieces, or perhaps the first piece, of traditional Irish music

to be recorded and sold on phonograph in the United States. It sold out almost immediately. This recording is by Radio Free Hillsdale's own Lily Fay Kramer and David Ballet and Lucy Jansen. The Keshe jig on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. You're still listening to the Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day special, and that was the Kesheg, performed by Lily Fay Kramer, David Ballet, and Lucy Jansen. Joining us now is Kevin Pines, a member of the Tower Players at Hillsdale College, to read a bit of Irish poetry. The Lake Isle of Innisfrey by William Butler Yates.

I will arise and go now and go to Innes Free, in a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made. Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, and live alone in the Be-Loud Glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils, of the morning to where the cricket sings. There midnight's all the glimmer, and noon a purple glow, and evening full of the linnet swings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day. I hear

lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore, while I stand on the roadway or on the pavement's gray. I hear it in the deep heart's core. The Lake Isle of Innesbury, read by Kevin Pines of the Tower players. On Radio Free Hillsdale, St. Patrick's Day special. Now, some analysis from Associate Professor of English, Dr. Elizabeth Fredericks. The Lake Isle of Innisfrey is one of W.B. Yates's most famous early poems, and Yates himself is probably Ireland's most famous poet, not to mention their first noble laureate for literature. And here he captures a theme we often see in Irish poetry, especially poetry of the revival era, a longing for rural Ireland in all of its unspoiled beauty and peace.

Yates himself recalled that the genesis of this poem was actually when he was living in London and walking along Fleet Street feeling quite homesick when he heard a little fountain in a shop window that reminded him of the lapping of lake water and this little nostalgic ittle resulted.

It's a beautiful dream of escape from a drab, urban world in which the speaker lives, but notably it's a dream and a dream alone from start to finish. The speaker begins by saying, I will arise, positioning the action permanently in some elusive future that may or may not come. Also, the phrasing here is striking.

I will arise and go is the wording used by the prodigal son in the King James version of the Bible when he decides to go back to his father. Thus positioning the speaker himself as another prodigal, in this case a son of Ireland who is far from home and dreaming of return. There's also a beautiful rhythm to this poem. In each stanza, we have these three long lines with six stressed beats, each one with a pause in the middle of the line, which helps create that dreamlike feel. The medial pause is also reminiscent of older literature, like Old English poetry or the biblical Psalms, creating the timeless feeling of the poem. But then each stanza concludes with a shorter line, which disrupts the reverie just a little, reminding us that this is a dream and not a reality, and pulling not. us back away from Inis Free. The speaker conjures for us this world that's all full of soft light at all times of day,

dawn, midnight, and noon, and the sense of peace that comes with it. Yates' use of repetition and alliteration throughout the poem helped create this dreamy, hypnotic sense in the second stanza, especially, of peace and dropping words he repeats, not to mention the many S and L consonants that run throughout. By the end, it seems that the same. speaker has almost talked himself into it. Even when he is standing on the roadway or on the pavement's gray, he hears that sound of lake water, lapping against the shore, and it calls to him, a sound that the long lines with their internal pauses imitate, and yet he hasn't gone by the end.

And we might ask, what is it that keeps this prodigal from doing what it is he wants to do, and going back to island and to In is free, a small island in the middle of a little of Locke Gill in Sligo. One theory is that the notion of peaceful retreat that he conjures here is in fact at odds with itself. Certainly other writers picked up on that, notably some decades after this poem's first publication, the novelist Flan O'Brien, writing under his journalistic pseudonym Miles Nagopoulin, wrote a column satirically picking apart the poem, noting, for instance, that Ennis Free is the most rocky and least hospitable island on Lock Gill, and that the speaker could not possibly husband honeybees in its dense foliage or grow sufficient beans to

sustain himself, suggesting it's all the ill-informed fancy of an urban man who knows nothing of sustaining himself in the countryside. Notably, Yates himself said that Thoreau was an inspiration for this poem, and there has also been much poking fun at Thoreau, whose retreat at Walden did involve his mother doing his laundry. But on a more serious level, the speaker's dream of idyllic peace is perhaps at odds with the island itself, where all the animals in the poem are in constant movement, perhaps even hard at work. The be-loud glade is filled with the sound of the industrious insects, and the sound of the Linnet's wings might be the hard work of the birds feeding their young, flitting between the trees and the ground. As much as the speaker yearns

for Innisfrey, the poem contains the possibility that it might not be the perfect, peaceful retreat from urban, dreary, modern life that he's hoping for. Nonetheless, the poem is a beautiful one, and an integral part of the Irish revival. It's an early reminder of how the Irish imagination does begin to turn towards the countryside and to the rural areas of Ireland, finding in them a prospect of enchantment

that might revivify a culture that many felt had gotten a bit lost at this point in time. And it offers imaginative resources that can revive that culture without leaning so heavily upon the British sources that it becomes so common. Ireland thus offers itself up to its poets as a site of restoration and beauty, and W.B. Yates and the Irish Revival would make great use of that in the decades to come. Dr. Frederick's, Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College,

with a bit of insight into the poetry of Yates. As we continue the Radio Free Hillsdale's St. Patrick's Day Special, we turn our attention back to the figure of St. Patrick. Hearder tell us about his life is Dr. Steele Brand, professor of history at Kern University. When he becomes a slave in Ireland, there's all these horrible tales that he's told as a little boy, who's probably horrified as he's on the boat with the pirates going over to Ireland. He's probably thinking, oh my gosh, they're going to eat me alive because these are the kinds of stories they tell. Like these people, like, they waylay, like people that herds them out in the mountains,

and then they kill them and they eat them or sometimes just eat them while they're still alive. So he's probably horrified. They're going, oh, my gosh, this is what's going to happen to me. But instead, what ends up happening is he, whoever buys him, later tradition says the guy's name is Miliuk. He goes and he sends them out into, like, in the far west coast of Ireland, a beautiful part of the countryside. And he's a shepherd of sheep. One gets the sense that Patrick is a bit of an extrovert in the writing. You just kind of, you detect that.

If he was on the Myers-Bregs, I'd say he was an E, not an I, if I'm just going to guess. But so I think this was actually like a really, really, a horrifying experience for him in a way that he did not expect. first of all he doesn't have all the nice things that he's used to but he also is totally alone with a bunch of sheep but unlike the really silly story of i think it was it called castaway or whatever with like tom hanks and he starts talking to a volleyball Patrick does what's actually natural and not like stupidly fictitious he engages with his creator he engages with god and he questions god like what's happened to me and he discovers god there so the shepherd bottle for patrick is actually the means of his salvation and when he's there with the sheep taking

care of the sheep. He says he prays a hundred times every day. He prays as he is sleeping at night. And this is where he is saved, alone with the sheep in the wilderness. And to the extent that at the end of this period of slavery, he's such a Christian that the Irish are all calling him the holy boy, the holy boy. And that's what he is known as in Ireland as a slave before he makes this really riveting escape. So he has a dream. And in the dream, there's a figure that appears, and he names him later, a guy by the name of Victoricus comes to him. At the very least, he has a dream. And in the dream it says, see your ship is ready. It's time for you to go. And so he escapes. He breaks the law. And he becomes a runaway slave. And he doesn't, he's smart. He doesn't go

back to the east coast of Ireland where they're going to be hunting for him. And they're like people may know who he is. Instead, he strikes out south. He has to, has a 200-mile journey. He doesn't tell us much about this. It had to be a harrowing journey for this escape tale. But the biographers want to tell us, he probably goes home, and we know that he goes home, but the biographers want to tell us that at some point he gets an education, he goes to all the best places. Like, he goes to the Oxford, the Harvard, the Princeton, the Hillsdale of his day. And he goes to all the finest schools and studies under all the finest people. The problem is that almost certainly didn't happen because Patrick never mentions that,

and Patrick's Latin is really lousy, and Patrick is very aware that his Latin is very lousy. He tells us that over and over again. He's probably educated at home, and he's missed that critical stage of his training in rhetoric. And so now he's a grown man, and all the aristocrats like him have a great education. He never really gets that kind of a good education.

But when he's there, Victor Rikas comes back to him, probably when he's getting an education. He's training to become a deacon and then a priest. Victoricus comes to him with an armload of letters, and says this is the voice of the Irish, they're summoning you to come back. And this is probably the coolest part of the Patrick's story is he has to wrestle with this fact,

do I go back to Ireland, and how do I go back? And he says, my family, of course, they insist, don't do this. Everyone thinks you're crazy if you go back, but he decides, no, I have to go back because I'm being summoned. But he also goes back knowing, I'm not going to go back in power.

And this is where the biographers get wrong. They want him to come back and have a showdown with a slaveholder. And it's, you know, like the guy burns himself in his hut like Denethor, you know, does and Lord of the Rings. That doesn't happen. He actually comes back and he consciously, he mentions this like six or seven times his letters, I'm a slave to the Irish, but now he's a different kind of slave. He's like a voluntary slave. And he sees him going back and being a missionary to convert the Irish as like his new kind of slavery. God is his

master, but the Irish are his mission. And so that's where he serves. And this is where he spends the rest of his life. And he never leaves. We don't know. if he's the first bishop, there's another guy named Palladius. One gets the sense that Palladius was appointed by the Pope, so he's one of these fancy guys very unlike Patrick. Paladius might have taken Patrick with him as a deacon or as a priest, but Patrick is not the first bishop to Ireland. Inside of Ireland, everyone remembers Patrick. And Patrick at some point, probably in his 40s or 50s, probably sometime around the 430s, 40s or 50s, he becomes a bishop. And this is where he spends the last decades of his life as a bishop, like doing really hard work, working with these tyrants that

had formerly enslaved him, working with their princes, consecrating nuns and monks, building churches. Some of them are friendly to him. Some of them are not. He gets enslaved 12 more times, and his life has put at risk, and he keeps escaping, and he keeps never leaving. And so, and this is, we hear about this in the letter, the confession, and he explains that everything for him is about this mission, and he doesn't even know if it's going to be a successful mission. We know it's a successful mission, but he has no idea, and he's writing the confession at the very end of his life. He has no idea if this is going to be successful at all.

It's tragic reading the confession, but he has this confidence that what he's doing, it's worthwhile, even if it's not successful, because he knows it's the mission that he's been given. We'll hear more later from Dr. St.iel Brand on St. Patrick's Life and Ministry. But before we do, here's more music. Another jig from Lily Fay Kramer, David Ballet, and Lucy Jansen. Morrison's jig is a lively and energetic tune often played at Irish sessions and dances.

Jigs like Morrison's jig are typically in six-eight time, giving them a bouncy, rhythmic feel that's perfect for dancing. This tune has roots in traditional Irish folk music, but its precise origins are unknown. I'm your host Gavin Listro on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM, and this is the Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day special. Here's Morrison's jig. That was Lily Faye Kramer, David Ballett, and Lucy Jansen, performing the traditional Irish song Morrison's Jig. We still have one more piece from them to play for you, and more poetry and history on the life of St. Patrick, all in the second half of our St. Patrick's Day special. You're on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.

I'm your host, Gavin Listro, and we'll be right back after this. Welcome back to the second half of the Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day special. I'm your host Gavin Lestrow. Join us as we continue to commemorate the story of St. Patrick and celebrate the culture of Ireland, the island he called home. We start off with some more Irish poetry, this time read by Fiona Molli for the Tower Players. Where nothing was, then something.

Six months ago, most of this was sludge, and a gangrenous slipway dipping its ruined foot in the sea, a single, rusted gantry, marking the spot where a small town's population of Protestant men build a ship the size of the Empire State Building. Smashed cars and wreckers' yards flourished in between. A skin-stripping wind. This morning I walk on concrete, smooth as a runway

with a full-scale outline laid in light of the uppermost deck. Railings as over a stern. Grass. Seating. The Memorial for the Dead Ghost's names I can't pronounce. Hustadt, Tausig, Backstom, in immaculate glass. Once, I count a surname seven times. Signatures by Schneid Morrissey.

Read by Fiona Moli of the Tower Players. Now, some analysis from Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College, Dr. Elizabeth Fredericks. Signatures is a very different poem for the others, and it's also by a very different poet. Cheneid Morrissey is a professor of poetry at the Seamus Heaney Center at Queen's University Belfast, and she herself was born and raised in Belfast, the city that stars in this poem.

And these are some of the things that make it different. This takes place in the city, the names that do appear, sound Nordic, and so on. But this poem is also part of Irishness and Irish poetry, too. Belfast was a major industrial city in the north for years. and was famous in particular for its shipyards. Perhaps most memorably, the Titanic was built there, and that's the shadow that looms over this entire poem.

However, the Belfast's shipbuilding industry has contracted significantly since its glory days in the first half of the 20th century. Seneid Morrissey, as a Belfast native, writes often about Belfast's industrial past, particularly because her father and grandfather were labor leaders in the city. In the first half of this poem, Morrissey reflects on the building of the Titanic Museum on the site of the old shipyards. This museum opened in 2012 the centenary year of the Titanic sinking, and it is on the site of the old Harland and Wolf shipyards where the Titanic and her sister ships, the Olympic and the Britannic, were also built. This is an area that, as the poem suggests, had fallen into decay in the years since, using words such as gangreness and rustic.

and referring to the wreckers' yards and the smashed cars. The massiveness of the former enterprise is hard to imagine from its decayed remnants, the slipway in the gantry, the scaffold that would have held the ships as they were constructed, would have been massive, and she has to invoke the idea of a small town's population and the empire state building to communicate the scale of what this place once was. All Morrissey's work here in this very compressed first stanza points to the glorious but also complicated history of Belfast, particularly this post-industrial space. The Titanic and other incredible works of maritime engineering were constructed here,

but also the shipyards were a segregated work site. Only Protestants were hired for these steady, highly paid jobs, with Belfast Catholic minority often relegated to casual day labor. The Catholics of Belfast aren't even mentioned here, in a ratio that is often common in histories of the city at this time. And it also suggests another root of the sectarian violence that would come. The troubles arrived as many Protestants found themselves no longer enjoying those secure jobs that, while working class, came with a kind of prestige. And there is a resentment and rage that can come along with the economic depression that hit Belfast. It's a history that points to hidden tensions and tragedies of all kinds, not just sectarian violence, but the loss of jobs and

identity and an uncertainty about what will come. In the second stanza, the speaker is now on the site of the completed museum. This museum is, in fact, beautiful. The reconstructed site is beautiful and clean in comparison to the decay of the first stanza. Smooth concrete, light that traces the outline of the ship, grass, places for tourists from around the world to sit. On the surface, it's much more pleasant. But Morrissey is always attuned to the way every place has its ghosts, and the memorial area of the site does indeed invoke those ghosts.

If you go visit, the memorial does sketch out a concrete area at the size of the original Titanic's upper deck, outlined in light, and there are clear glass walls etched with the names of all of the victims. This is a place where the ghosts of the past live, something that's easy to forget now that it's a glossy, revived tourist site. Notably, the names she includes in this second stanza are not Irish, but Nordic, a reminder that Belfast, and thus this island as a whole, are part of a global network of trade, travel, and tragedy. Belfast, and what has happened here over time, is connected both to the local and the global, always personal, but always expressive of the world more broadly. The surname she counts seven times, for instance, is likely that of the Anderson family of Sweden. two parents and five children, immigrating to Canada, all of whom died.

Heaney's poem reminded us that love and tenderness are both intimate and local, as well as connected to the network of eternal life. Morrissey reminds us in turn that tragedy is the same. These foreign strangers who perished at sea on a Belfast-made ship that they boarded in England remind us how our lives are enmeshed, and how when we mourn, we mourn for all, whether they are victims of the Titanic or victims of the troubles. Once again, that was Dr. Frederick's associate professor of English at Hillsdale College

with a bit of insight into the poem Signatures by Shnade Morrissey. As we continue the Radio Free Hillsdale's St. Patrick's Day special, we're joined again by Dr. Steele Brand of Karen University. Listen as he talks about the myth surrounding St. Patrick. Sometimes in history, it's really hard to draw a line. and okay, where's the tradition and where's what's historical? With Patrick, it's actually really clear. So we have two letters written by Patrick.

Most scholars say, yeah, these are two letters that are written by Patrick, and most see a high degree of historicity in those two letters, written by Patrick's hand or maybe his secretary's hand. And one letter's called the confession, so they're kind of hearkening back to a contemporary, who has the famous confession, Augustine. And there are elements of that because it's his statement of faith, but it's also highly autobiographical.

And then the second letter is this fiery letter that he writes to probably a British king, but a British king that has done a horrible thing in Ireland. And this is where we really see how he impacts politics, both in Britannia and in Ireland, right? So we have both of these, and they're in pretty good shape. Then we have like 200 years of silence. We have a few things that we know about that people attribute to Patrick, but most of them are dubious. A few sayings, there's like a breastplate hymn. Most people, there's some canons.

they're like kind of attributed to him, but there's no consensus that they're from him. And then we have a couple of biographies, and that's when the tradition really gets going, but that's 200 years after the letters. That's 200 years after he has died. But by this point in time, everyone knows Patrick,

so we don't know how we get there, but it's probably because these biographies really tell this great story about Patrick. And the both of the biographies start very similarly to the confession and that they tell his early life, and they're really close to what his confession says, sometimes quoting verbatim what he says.

But then they go on these crazy elaborate of details. They make these, it's called hagiography. They have these stories where he's fighting druids of like the high king of Ireland and it's like Voldemort

versus Dumbledore, you know, Captain America versus Iron Man. Of course we want Captain America to win and so we want Patrick to win as well. And he defeats the druids. And it's these fantastic tales that are like, they almost feel like myth

and they're almost certainly not true and they certainly are not verified by what we know. And so that's the Patrick that begins to grow into the legendary figure of Ireland that we know today. But someone comes along with the idea that, okay, there are no snakes in Ireland, and why was that the case? Well, it's because Patrick did it. And that's one of these myths that just gets picked up later. But you see it everywhere.

It's all over the statues. It drives me crazy that we always have this. Patrick doesn't look like anything like the historical Patrick. He's got a bishop's mitre. He's got a crozier. He's got nice robes. He looks like a modern bishop or a great high medieval bishop. that's nothing like the real Patrick. And the snakes at the bottom, what they always have him

stepping on, that's nothing like the real Patrick. And the only miracle, the only miracle that he says that exists is he prayed for food one day and a herd of pigs came along. That's it. That's as miraculous as Patrick talks about. He talks about dreams a lot, but I mean, we all have dreams that can be interpreted and have meaning. So that's not as big of a deal. Okay, so that's the snake myth. It comes up later. But let's give that myth its due diligence. What if we interpret this snake legend as actually a symbol of Patrick coming to Ireland and banishing injustice and tyranny and illiteracy. Because when you bring Christianity to an area, what happens in those pagan areas is people write because Christianity is fundamentally, it's a religion of the book,

and you have to have literacy, and you have to have people write, and then you read to the people and the people learn the text. And so Christianity always brings in literacy, and it kind of takes people out of the dark age in the sense that we know about those people because we have literacy. So if the snakes can represent like injustice and illiteracy and a lack of like culture and art and beauty and knowledge of where we came from, then that's a great symbol and I'm okay with him banishing the snakes if they're symbolic in that way. That was Dr. Steele Brand of Karen University here on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Before we hear a little bit more from him about St. Patrick, we have one last song from Lily Fay, David Ballet, and Lerner. Lucy Jansen. This last tune is called St. Anne's Reel. Reels are the most popular dance tunes in Ireland, to which they are indigenous. In the first dance, Irish step dancers usually learn. The musical

difference between a reel and a jig can be hard to discern, but here's a little trick to help. If you can say carrots and cabbage, carrots and cabbage, to the time of the music, it's a jig. If you can more easily say, this is how a reel goes, rhythmically to the music, you've guessed it. It's a real. The tune probably originated in French Canada, but was quickly incorporated into the Irish repertoire. It already bore many hallmarks of Irish folk music, probably because Irish fiddlers are admired the world around. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day special, and here's Real. Lily Faye Kramer, David Ballette, and Lucy Jansen, with their final contribution to the Radio Free Hillsdale, St. Patrick's Day special, St. Anne's Real. And now we turn to our final

offering of Irish poetry, read by French major and poetry enthusiast, Jack Walker. I'm your host Gavin Listro, and this is Radio Free Hillsdale, 101.7 FM. St. Kevin and the Blackbird by Seamus Heaney. And then there was St. Kevin and the Blackbird. The saint is kneeling, arm stretched out, inside his cell. But the cell is narrow. So one turned-up palm is out the window, stiff as a crossbe. When a blackbird lands and lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked neat head and claw. and finding himself linked into the network of eternal life is moved to pity. Now he must hold his hand like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks until the young are hatched and fledged and flown. And since the whole things imagined anyhow, imagine being Kevin, which is he? Self-forgetful or in agony all the time. From the neck gone out, down through his hurting forearms, are his fingers sleeping?

Does he still feel his knees? has the shut-eyed blank of under earth crept up through him. Is there distance in his head? Alone and mirrored, clear and love's deep river, to labor and not to seek reward, he prays. A prayer his body makes entirely, for he has forgotten self, forgotten bird, and on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

That was Jack Walker, reading St. Kevin and the Blackbird by Seamus Heaney. And of course we turn now to Dr. Fredericks, for a brief analysis. Perhaps surprisingly, St. Patrick doesn't come up in a lot of Irish poetry. A variety of other saints and religious figures do, however, such as St. Kevin in this Seamus Heaney poem. Heaney, of course, is another one of Ireland's greatest poets, a Nobel laureate like W.B. Yates. In this poem, he retells a famous story about St. Kevin, which was first told in Gerald of Wales' history of Ireland.

Gerald describes St. Kevin of Glendalach fleeing the company of other people during Lent, and in his little cottage by the river, he lifts a hand to heaven, as was his habit in prayer, when a blackbird settled in and laid her eggs there. This poem is typical of Heaney, for its interest in Ireland's medieval past, a space to which Heaney often returns in his poetry. W.B. Yates rarely touch this part of Ireland's history, perhaps because he was not a Catholic himself, but for Heaney it's easier to explore, and also for Heaney, this past is compelling for a variety of reasons. There's a connection here in particular to the natural world that is unmediated and undisrupted.

St. Kevin is here at prayer, and a figure so still and so calm that a blackbird decides it's safe to nest in the palm of his hand. This connection to the natural world is also a connection to the divine. As Heaney writes, he finds himself linked into the network of eternal. life and thus finds himself moved to hold still and let this bird hatch her young in the palm of his hand. Now he acknowledges that this story might be just that. A story, saints' hagiographies, are famously difficult to fact-check. But rather than discard the story and walk away from it, he invites us to imagine more deeply. What must it feel like to be the saint in this act of piety and tenderness? What must his body feel like? Has he forgotten himself? Has he forgotten himself?

in some prayerful, beatified trance, or does he consciously feel the pain of every single moment that passes holding out his hand for this bird and unable to let her drop? Heaney seems to lean on the ladder, maybe, but he also seems to suggest that for St. Kevin, it doesn't matter.

This act is one of deep, profound love, a love for the life of this small, beautiful bird in his hand. In Heaney's 1996 Nobel lecture, he retold this same story. and called Kevin's action, quote, true to life, if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and glimpsed ideal, at one in the same time, a signpost and a reminder. And what's beautiful here is how prayer and love are not just things that happen in St. Kevin's head,

but rather, as Heaney points out, something happening in his body. The pain he feels, as he holds this position for so long, is so intense that words and conscious thought are both. gone, and it is his body that is doing the praying through the act of holding this bird. Kevin's total surrender of ego here is astonishing, as Heaney's poem points out, and it's a reminder of what can come when we love a place, not just as an abstraction, but as an embodiment of the network of life in which we too are enmeshed with the totality of our being. Kevin is moved by pity and faith, large, often abstract concepts, but in the particularity of

this bird in his hand at this moment. He lives out this love and his prayer in a deeply embodied way. And Kevin's forgetting of self does seem like a kind of connosis and emptying out like that of Christ on the cross, and one which draws together both that religious ideal and the natural world in which Kevin is situated as he prays. This is how God loves creation, and Kevin's love is both intimate and impersonal by the end. Forgetting himself, the bird, the name of the river, and yet also continuing to hold the bird and her eggs until they hatch. Again, as Heaney notes in his Nobel lecture, this is all imagined. As he points out, the story was actually written down by a Welsh Norman priest in the employ of an English king, not by

anyone Irish. And yet all the same, it offers the reader re-enchantment, a sense of the natural world as something in which they too are deeply and intimately involved. This understanding of nature and its connection to one's life runs through a great deal of Irish poetry, including fellow Catholic poets like John F. Dean, or more modern writers like Mary O'Malley. That wraps up the lovely analysis from Dr. Frederick's associate professor of English here at Hillsdale College. Now we return once more to Dr. Steele Brand for some parting advice. In one sense, it's nice that we commemorate a saint who people kind of vaguely know, he was a good guy. Okay, he had something to do with Ireland.

So that's fine. But what if we want to correct what we do on St. Patrick's Day? I would say the best thing to do is to return it to the sense of what a holiday should be, literally a holy day. And then it is a time to reflect on who Patrick worshipped, what he thought about God, and that should orient our minds toward the kingdom of God. And he was very mindful of that, even though he's working among the kingdoms of the earthly tyrants in Ireland. And I think the best way that you could do is that there was one thing I would ask that people do. on St. Patrick's Day. It would be to sit down and read Patrick's confession

because it is so moving. You also hear, when you're reading the letter, Patrick wrestling with, have I been successful at like, what's gonna happen to the people when I die? I wanna stay here forever, but I can't live here forever. And he also is very aware, no one may remember me. And he's writing, I think it's okay that no one remembers me

because I'd rather be known by the people that I know now than remember by people that I want. never know. And he puts his hope in that and that he will go to God and be at peace. It's like the third to last paragraph. He says, I don't even know if my body will be preserved. Maybe it's going to be eaten by carrion birds and beasts and dogs. And that's exactly what happens. There's a grave for Patrick. We don't know if it even has his bones in it. So we don't know what anything that Patrick touched was. We have copies of the two letters and that's it. We don't know anything else for certain. But what do we know? We know his mission. We know the

work that he did and how he treated people. So that, I think, is what would be a good thing to remember. Sit down and read the confession and wrestle through the same things that a spoiled kid who was enslaved wrestled through when he decided, I'm going to go back and I'm going to serve the people who wronged me. And I'm going to make that a better place. This concludes the Radio Free Hillsdale St. Patrick's Day Special. I'm your host, Gavin Lee Stroh. Thank you for listening. And thank you to all those who contributed their time and talent. Happy St. Patrick's Day and God bless you. The preceding program was made possible in part through the generous support of John and Karen Harrington and Brooke Harrington, Hillsdale College Class of 1994.