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By
Mary Ruth Yoe
Paintings
by Mark McMahon
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Wearing an Irish-knit vest and carrying a cup of breakfast tea,
U of C English professor James K. Chandler, AM’72, PhD’78,
walks into a Georgian-style drawing room in the Muckross Park Hotel.
This Monday morning in mid-August, the drawing room is a classroom,
and 30-some students—Chicago alumni (along with spouses and
friends)—await.
Freshly arrived in Killarney, County Kerry, the previous afternoon,
they’ve signed up for the weeklong “Town and Country in
Ireland” tour offered by the U of C Alumni Association. The
travelers, who include graduates of the College and almost all the
divisions and professional schools, range in age from fortysomething
to eightysomething. They are social workers, CEOs, psychiatrists,
chaplains, professors, retirees, returning and first-time visitors
to Ireland. Although dressed alike—comfortable shoes, slacks,
sweaters, and maroon nametags—the individual travelers are
both friendly and wary of the people with whom their week’s
lot has been cast. It’s up to Chandler to help create a class.
 He
places his teacup beside a portable CD player, dons his reading
glasses, and intones the not-so-forgotten words of Thomas Moore,
an often-forgotten 19th-century Irish poet: “Believe me if
all those endearing young charms….”
The poem’s rhythmic “one, two, THREE; one, two, THREE”
is echoed outside the hotel by the rattle and hum of passing cars,
lorries, and horse-drawn jaunting cars. “Anapests are hard
to take in large doses,” Chandler begins. “That’s
one of the reasons why Moore is seldom read today.” Still,
his Irish Melodies, published in ten volumes between 1808
and 1834, were translated into nearly every European language by
the 19th century’s close. (The sheet music for “Tis the
Last Rose of Summer” sold 1.5 million copies in the U.S. alone.)
So when Chandler bends over the CD player, fast-forwards to the
desired track, and pushes the play button, the haunting melody is
immediately familiar.
 He
quickly connects the elegiac lyrics (written for Moore’s wife,
Bess, who suffered from palsy) to one of four texts sent to the
class members before leaving home: Thomas Flanagan’s 1979 novel,
The Year of the French. The year was 1798, marked by an unsuccessful
revolt against British rule. The rebellion, he says, was a “weird
yoking of peasant hatreds with the very high-minded ideals of the
French revolution.”
The story begins as Irish schoolmaster, drunkard, and poet Owen
McCarthy is enlisted by militant peasants in County Mayo to write
threatening letters to the local English landlords. Though he knows
English (and French and Latin), McCarthy writes his poetry in Irish,
in forms and on themes as ancient as the Celtic bards. “In
a moment when Ireland is striving for modernity,” Chandler
notes, “all the things its poets are celebrating are in ruins.”
Continued...
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