With Christmas coming up in a few weeks I felt the poem Oíche Nollag na mBan, by Seán Ó Ríordáin would be a great choice! This week I have selected poem number 95 from the top 100 Irish poems list. A short poem that was originally written in Irish and translated into English. I have put my notes on the poem below, with a link to where you can read it in Irish and English.
What is the poem Oíche Nollag na mBan By Seán Ó Ríordáin all about?
In this early 1947 poem, Seán Ó Ríordáin, listening in the solitude of his sick room, almost seems to delight in the wildness of the storm. His hope to be caught up in a comparable storm while returning fatigued from the dance of life would not be granted. When he died thirty years later, it was a considerably more drawn-out event of which he was acutely aware.
What is Women’s Christmas or Little Women’s Christmas?
Some of you may not have heard the phrase before, but it falls on the twelfth and final day of Christmas; women’s Christmas or Little Christmas was traditionally a day off from all housework for women as a reward for their hard work over the season. Of course, in modern days, this wonderful event has now developed into a day celebrating women, and where many women gather to share and celebrate each other.
Bhí fuinneamh sa stoirm a éalaigh aréir,
Oíche Nollag na mBan was written in early 1947. Seán Ó Ríordáin, ill with tuberculosis, lies awake on the night of Women’s Christmas listening to a wild storm. The wind shrieks across the sky like something escaped from a madhouse and batters everything around the house.
In the second half the poem turns from the weather to his own death. He wishes for the same wild weather when his own time comes, so that its noise would spare him from hearing death arrive in silence. It is a brave and strange wish, to go out in fury rather than in quiet.
The poem appeared in Eireaball Spideoige (1952), Ó Ríordáin’s first collection and a landmark in modern Irish-language poetry. He lived with illness for thirty more years and died in 1977.
Read the full poem: Oíche Nollaig na mBan by Seán Ó Ríordáin at The Irish Times, in Irish with an English translation by Theo Dorgan. You will also find it in Eireaball Spideoige (Sáirséal agus Dill) and in his Selected Poems, edited by Frank Sewell (Yale University Press and Cló Iar-Chonnacht).
Did you enjoy finding out about this wonderful poem? It was written in early 1947 and published in his first collection, Eireaball Spideoige, in 1952. Be sure to share Oíche Nollag na mBan By Seán Ó Ríordáin.