the bliss of the Irish

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive 
But to be young was very heaven"

Not a film star on a yacht in Monte Carlo. A hotel receptionist on a pier outside a modest little Irish town. But oh so happy. The quote could represent her whole existence right then.

(The quote is from William Wordsworth: "The French Revolution". I learned it not in studying English poetry, which I was never very good at anyway, but because it was splashed in bold print across the front page of a major Irish newspaper one day. The reason for the Irish press waxing lyrical? Ireland had made it to some semi-final in some football world cup, or something like it - unprecedented in that particular sport. Only the Irish would celebrate such a (to me) mundane thing by quoting poetry in the headlines of the day. It is so true what T.E. Kalem said about the Irish people and the English language:

"They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter. They hurl it at the sky like a paint pot full of rainbows, and then make it chant a dirge for man's fate and man's follies that is as mournful as misty spring rain crying over the fallow earth.")