With no St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Thurles this year, we bring you a reminder of the parade in 2019, and wish all our readers “Lá fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh! “, (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!).
Keeping two dates in mind; International Women’s Day, which we celebrated on March 8th last, and today, St. Patrick’s Day; we have chosen an extract from a poem by that great poetess Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose work back in Victorian England, focused on promoting women’s rights. Married twice, Charlotte, who died of cancer, resided for a time in Co. Kilkenny and Co. Westmeath, before undertaking charity work in the Irish ghetto in London.
St. Patrick’s Day: With an Irish Shamrock.
By Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna [1790 – 1846].
From the region of zephyrs,* the Emerald isle,
The land of thy birth, in my freshness I come,
To waken this long-cherished morn with a smile,
And breathe o’er thy spirit the whispers of home.
O welcome the stranger from Erin’s green sod;
I sprang where the bones of thy fathers repose,
I grew where thy free step in infancy trod,
Ere the world threw around thee its wiles and its woes.
But sprightlier themes
Enliven the dreams,
My dew-dropping leaflets unfold to impart:
To loftiest emotion
Of patriot devotion,
I wake the full chord of an Irishman’s heart……
[* In European tradition, a zephyr is a light wind or a west wind, named after the Greek god Zephyrus, latter a representation of the west wind in human form.]
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