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Poblacht na h ireann - "August destiny"

  • 13-10-2010 8:04pm
    #1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,184 ✭✭✭


    I was just looking at Poblacht na hÈireann today, I've seen and read it many times before but this line caught my eye today, "prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called".

    Just wondering what the "august destiny" is, or what it means.
    I asked my history teacher but he didn't seem to know either.

    Thanks.


Comments

  • Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 6,488 ✭✭✭Denerick


    Its flowery rhetoric. It wouldn't be a revolutionary document if it didn't have generally meaningless lines like that. Sometimes when I get lost in the rhetoric and hyperbole - on the internet, not in front of the GPO - I'd use phrases like that myself, can't beat a good old fashioned rhetorical flourish :D

    On a seperate note, I walked past the GPO twice a day for most of last year. Hardly a day went by when I wouldn't look at the bullet marks or imagine old Sackville Street on that extraordinary morning.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,184 ✭✭✭storm2811


    Denerick wrote: »
    Its flowery rhetoric. It wouldn't be a revolutionary document if it didn't have generally meaningless lines like that. Sometimes when I get lost in the rhetoric and hyperbole - on the internet, not in front of the GPO - I'd use phrases like that myself, can't beat a good old fashioned rhetorical flourish :D

    On a seperate note, I walked past the GPO twice a day for most of last year. Hardly a day went by when I wouldn't look at the bullet marks or imagine old Sackville Street on that extraordinary morning.

    Ah, thank you.
    So it's not of much significance then?

    Yeah, I look at them too every time I'm in Dublin, ever since my brother told that there were bullet marks still there I was fascinated.


  • Registered Users Posts: 5,301 ✭✭✭Snickers Man


    Well to be fair, you can grab a dictionary and look up the meaning of the word august (without the capital A) and it will tell you, if your dictionary of choice is the Concise OED, that it means "majestic, noble, impressive or venerable".

    So what the statement is saying (and it comes from the proclamation of the Republic, by the way, not Poblacht na h-Eireann) is that the achievement of an independent, democratic republic is a noble/impressive/venerable or majestic goal which the Irish nation should set itself the task of achieving.

    Now, the one that always gets me is the slobbery gibberish written by Thomas Kettle about the "secret scripture of the poor". What the flock does that mean?

    'Know that we fools now with the foolish dead
    Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
    But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed,
    And for the secret scripture of the poor.’

    A load of pious old innuendo trying to make Catholicism, nationalism and serving the cause of the British Empire synonymous with helping the "poor".

    Maybe I'm doing him a disservice. Maybe, had he lived, his eyes would have been "opened by experience", as Dickens put it.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,731 ✭✭✭MarchDub


    Seeing as how it is placed at the end of the Proclamation I always took it to be the ultimate goal of the coming Rising i.e. that Ireland's destiny -hereby declared to be an 'august' cause - was to be an independent Ireland.


  • Registered Users Posts: 5,301 ✭✭✭Snickers Man


    Yup. Reading right through the entire publication and consulting a dictionary for words of uncertain meaning leads one to that inescapable conclusion.

    Now, any chance you can help me out with what this "Secret scripture of the poor" palaver is all about?

    Cause it makes no sense to me at all.


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  • Closed Accounts Posts: 2,184 ✭✭✭storm2811


    Yup. Reading right through the entire publication and consulting a dictionary for words of uncertain meaning leads one to that inescapable conclusion.

    Now, any chance you can help me out with what this "Secret scripture of the poor" palaver is all about?

    Cause it makes no sense to me at all.

    No idea!:confused:


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 588 ✭✭✭R.Dub.Fusilier


    Now, the one that always gets me is the slobbery gibberish written by Thomas Kettle about the "secret scripture of the poor". What the flock does that mean?

    'Know that we fools now with the foolish dead
    Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
    But for a dream born in a herdsman’s shed,
    And for the secret scripture of the poor.’

    A load of pious old innuendo trying to make Catholicism, nationalism and serving the cause of the British Empire synonymous with helping the "poor".

    Maybe I'm doing him a disservice. Maybe, had he lived, his eyes would have been "opened by experience", as Dickens put it.

    i think you are doing him a disservice. Tom Kettle was a member of the Irish Volunteers and was in Belguim trying to by guns for the IV at the start of WW1 and later joined the british army and died in the war.

    the slobbery gibberish as you put it is taken from a poem he wrote to his daughter shortly before he was killed. so i think a man in his position , thinking about never seeing his daughter again ,can be excused for what he wrote at the time.


  • Registered Users Posts: 5,301 ✭✭✭Snickers Man


    i think you are doing him a disservice. Tom Kettle was a member of the Irish Volunteers and was in Belguim trying to by guns for the IV at the start of WW1 and later joined the british army and died in the war.

    the slobbery gibberish as you put it is taken from a poem he wrote to his daughter shortly before he was killed. so i think a man in his position , thinking about never seeing his daughter again ,can be excused for what he wrote at the time.

    I am well aware of who Tom Kettle was and I am also very familiar with the poem. The last line is widely quoted but I can't for the life of me think why. I know too that it was for his daughter, but either it was a private message not for wider public consumption or it was an open letter in verse intended to convey his deeper feelings to a general audience.

    In which case, I can ask, and given the popularity of the poem should be able to expect an answer for, the question: what the hell does it mean?

    Secret? Scripture? Poor?

    What's secret? What scriptural references act as his motivation? What is the obvious link between a middle-class university professor like Kettle and "the poor"?

    And as for the bit about the "dream born in a herdsman's shed", a clear reference to the birth of Christ.

    Did he think that being a small part of this titanic struggle was his Christian duty? In which case were not soldiers in every army in the conflict inspired by a similar motivation? With the obvious exception of the Ottomans who had their own divine intercessor to pray to.

    The whole thing is a mystery to me. And the fact that nobody has ever been able to give me a plausible interpretation of those words while many are content to quote them as if they were especially deep and meaningful leads me to the same conclusion as the children in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes.

    Slobbery gibberish.

    But I'm still open to being convinced otherwise.


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,731 ✭✭✭MarchDub


    I am well aware of who Tom Kettle was and I am also very familiar with the poem. The last line is widely quoted but I can't for the life of me think why. I know too that it was for his daughter, but either it was a private message not for wider public consumption or it was an open letter in verse intended to convey his deeper feelings to a general audience.

    In which case, I can ask, and given the popularity of the poem should be able to expect an answer for, the question: what the hell does it mean?

    Secret? Scripture? Poor?

    What's secret? What scriptural references act as his motivation? What is the obvious link between a middle-class university professor like Kettle and "the poor"?

    And as for the bit about the "dream born in a herdsman's shed", a clear reference to the birth of Christ.

    Did he think that being a small part of this titanic struggle was his Christian duty? In which case were not soldiers in every army in the conflict inspired by a similar motivation? With the obvious exception of the Ottomans who had their own divine intercessor to pray to.

    The whole thing is a mystery to me. And the fact that nobody has ever been able to give me a plausible interpretation of those words while many are content to quote them as if they were especially deep and meaningful leads me to the same conclusion as the children in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes.

    Slobbery gibberish.

    But I'm still open to being convinced otherwise.

    This may not be the answer you expect but poetry is art - there is no one and only interpretation , plausible or not. It can mean many different things depending on the individual interpretation, and all of them correct and plausible to someone. It's not a science. If it makes no sense to you - then that's your answer.

    Robert Browning was once asked about a line in one of his poems and he said "when I wrote it only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant - now only God knows".

    Oscar Wilde advises that "the first step in aesthetic criticism is to realise one's own impressions".


  • Closed Accounts Posts: 1,731 ✭✭✭MarchDub


    Just to add my own take - when I first read the lines I saw the word 'secret' as 'hidden' as in the poor have no voice. Here they all are just fodder in the fields of war without any real power over their own destiny - but, significantly, they are not mindless either. They do have a script, a story, lives, opinions - but all that doesn't get out there. It's a big wig world run by big money.

    My critique anyway.


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