Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

It was St. Patrick’s Day, and although the weather was very rough at times, with heavy showers of sleet and hail racing in across the sea on massive black clouds from the frozen north, there were at least some moments when the sky cleared and the sun decided to shine.

Wating for one of these sunny intervals, Algy managed to settle himself down for a few minutes in the most sheltered spot he could find, with his back pressed firmly against the mossy trunk of an old elder bush. Opening one of his many books of poetry he read the entry for 17th March:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone! Algy hopes you will follow his example, and dye your hair bright green, as he does every year on this day ☘️

[Algy is reading the poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by the late 19th/early 20th centurey Irish poet William Butler Yeats.]

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Each year on 17th March, Algy dyes his hair green in honour of St. Patrick’s Day, as many of his friends are at least partly Irish 🙂

As he dozed happily on top of the dunes, watching the Quiet Burn down below winding its way slowly across its sandy bed to the sea, Algy noticed that all the winter-brown grasses had turned bright green too. He dreamed that he had flown across the sea to the Emerald Isle, which was not so very far away, and was reclining on the green grass there, watching the Irish skylarks dancing reels in the sky as they sang their lovely songs in Gaeilge…

Algy wishes all his Irish and part-Irish friends around the world a very Happy St. Patrick’s Day today xo

On St. Patrick’s Day, Algy always dyes his hair green, and this year was no exception. But as he stretched himself out on a warm, flat rock beside the blue burn, to dry his hair in the sun, he noticed something strange. It seemed that the burn had undergone a transformation… Had he done that, or was it just the effect of St. Patrick’s Day?

Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone 🙂 xoxo

On St. Patrick’s Day, Algy dyed his hair green, found a spot where he could look out across the ocean towards the Emerald Isle, and practised his personal version of the Irish fluffy bird jig…

A very Happy St. Patrick’s Day to lovers of Ireland everywhere :-))

St. Patrick’s Day 2013

Algy was sitting quietly by the burn on St. Patrick’s Day, when he experienced a strange phenomenon …

          What motion of the sun or stream
          Or eyelid shot the gleam
          That pierced my body through?
          What made me live like these that seem
          Self-born, born anew?

[Algy is quoting from W. B. Yeats’ poem Stream and Sun at Glendalough, with apologies to the great Irish poet for taking his words out of their proper context.]

Upon St. Patrick’s Day

Algy dyed his hair green, and recited one of his favourite poems:

          I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
          And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
          Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
          And live alone in the bee-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 a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
          And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

          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 pavements grey,
          I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

[Listen to The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats read by the poet himself, in an archive recording published as part of the BBC Poetry Season.]