Celbridge Tutorials

29/05/2025

What is revealed in the poetry of Sylvia Plath is the vivid portrait of a tormented and anguished person

Sylvia Plath suffers for her sanity like other sensitive artists who feared that they would in time be betrayed by what they loved. John Keats feared that he would die “before his pen had gleaned his teaming brain”; Sylvia Plath feared that her muse would fail her while she lived. Thus she refers to “total neutrality”, and this means an absence of inspiration to write. This produces a terrible anxiety as she awaits the next “miracle” and seeks “back talk from the sky”. Yet, as long as a black rook can inspire her on a rainy day, because of how the light is playing spasmodic tricks of radiance upon its feathers, the miracle is always about; though she may not have grasped this assurance. Her season of fatigue and her long wait are part of her own innate fear of ultimate failure: ironically, this might well have produced an earlier fatal sequel ─ were it not for the help of her fickle muse.
Within the “Bee Box” there is something suppressed; an awareness caused to become angry; something scary that nevertheless draws her towards it incessantly like a great magnet; some dark power that may be released with potential dreadful consequences. The subject matter is perhaps metaphorical: the torrent is within the confines of her own head as much as it is within the bee cage; the great magnet is her Muse and the darkness is what she has camouflaged until now ─ for the gentle hearted might not like it. So she can nurture these things for future release or let them decay. If she releases the power of her caged awareness it may cause unforeseen hurt. “I am no source of honey”, she says: so neither bees nor people may expect too much flower-like sweetness from her; thus neither can feel cheated by a new revelation. So then, she has power: the power to grant freedom to both the bees and to her own art-crazed thoughts ─ thus she is like God, where being sweet equals delivering some fulfilment. Tomorrow, she promises, she will deliver!
Perhaps Plath should be best seen as having been married to her muse to whom she bears a family of poems ─ which alone fulfil her intuition. In morning Song we see her innate fear of and alienation to human motherhood: her baby is “a fat golden watch”, and later its mouth is like that of a cat. Then, at best, it is the sound of the sea in its breathing: but the sea has as much potential to be dangerous as beautiful ─ for it may drown those that engage with it! She herself is a milch cow and the light of day swallows the dull stars. She and her baby will become as alien to one another as the passing cloud that condenses a pool of water and then loses its former shape. As a mother, Plath is full of insecurity so that her baby’s nakedness only bares her own inefficiencies for her new role.
The terrible truth within the theme of the poem “Child” is that, whereas the innocence and imagination of the child should be a source of emotional inspiration to the mother, it only reflects all the more on her emptiness and inability to relate to joy. Thus the little child ponders on the beauty of “The zoo of the new” Even words as well as shapes and colours bear it magic. In contrast its mother sees only “this dark Ceiling without a star”
The poem “Poppies” presents even a more gruesome affair; for the poet can not experience any emotion at all ─ not even pain. This presents a fearsome prospect that she would gladly suffer physical trauma rather than live within her current state of inertia: “If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!” The flickering of the poppies in the breeze only serves to exhaust her; but she is somewhat excited by the imagery of violence which she beholds in their colour:
“A mouth just blooded.
Little bloody skirts!”
She is close to breakdown now and simply wants to get out, she thinks: “If I could bleed or sleep”

The “Mirror” is no sweet god: but the woman who visits it daily wants it to produce miracles. However, it unapologetically tells the truth and does not requite her supplications when she comes to it for comfort: thus it is insensitive and mean, but faithful to fact. And that fact is that the lady grows steadily older and is not a “Snow white”. Then the mirror undergoes a terrible metamorphoses becoming a lake into which the woman has gone as a young girl, only to emerge as a self-scaring and terrible fish. Thus Plath illustrates the importunate nature of her gender: needing and not getting reassurance, losing beauty with inevitable age and ultimately frightened by a future of helpless decline. Such is also of course common to the male of our species: but Plath writes here only for her own.
Plath is an endearing poet, full of the wonder of nature’s mysteries, full of human fears of failure and decline, but lulling us with poetic beauty to enjoy her sorrow. She is the rare sensitive pheasant on the elm hill trailing its tail in the winter snow; she is the mad bee box full of energetic trouble; she is the black rook in rainy weather waiting for the random descent of light upon its dullness that will radiate its hidden beauty; she is the paradoxical morning song for her baby that is so much a mourning song for freedom; she is the “zoo of the new” in which her child can meditate wonder and so become wise ─ but she does not know it; she is the lady at the mirror of art drowning in her own dreams and discovering a nightmare; and she is unfortunately ann ultimately the bloody poppy that will produce its own dulling opiates to forever still her fear and pain and her irreplaceable poetry.

05/11/2024

A typical piece of Munster Bu****it: is this where Ireland's Art's Council puts our tax money?
Brian Burú was a usurper and came from a little known sept; most of his history was written long after his death.
Thus, he did not drive the Danes out of Ireland in 1014.
The story of Fionn is mythological and full of magic, poetry and great drama; it was used during the late 19th. and early 20th Century in schoolrooms in order to cultivate nationalism among children during the Gaelic literary revival

I like the story of Fionn: but do not call it history.
As for the O Briens of Munster, they were primarily concerned with self advancement, indeed, Brian's successors became myrmidons of the Anglo-Norman conquest and the Reformation .
Indeed one such sychophant entreated William The Conqerer to invade Ireland and set him up as his vassal.
The prominent Gaelic Analysts of the mid 11th. Century describe the Battle of Clontarf as having been a conflict between O Brien and the King of Leinster, with the Danish King of Dublin supporting the latter. When it was over, Brian, his son and grandson were dead and the Dane was still King of Dublin; as regards the battle having been fought on Good Friday, there is no certain evidence-- but, of course it would have been good propaganda to have the life of Brian coincide with that of Christ.

Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna is a beloved collection of tales from our rich mythology and folklore. In th...

09/10/2024

■For Leaving Certificate English:

GOOD AND EVIL IN THE TRAGEDY OF KING LEAR {Mick Beirne}

It was a time of social upheaval: people were being driven out on to the heath and the wilderness by the greed and enterprise of the “enclosure movement It was a time when preachers arose among the common people to presage the wrath of God upon the English nation as it turned towards a new materialistic agenda.

Good is represented by loyalty to the traditional bonds of family and state, coupled with a concern for the welfare of society. Evil is associated with an extreme pre-occupation with self advancement and an outright rejection of the bonds of kinship; coupled with a perverse indulgence in savage cruelty. Cordelia, Kent and Edgar epitomise goodness; Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Oswald and Edmond are set to represent the opposite: though, if I were a judge in a court of trial, I would be reluctant to so condemn the latter.

Cornwall is by nature an evil coward. He is only brave when he is backed up by Regan and Goneril. In blinding Gloucester, he performs the cruellest deed in the entire affair, and he appears to enjoy cruelty; thus he is adamant that Lear should be sent out into the storm and on to the heath.
Yet Regan and Goneril are more evil still.: they repudiate the natural bonds of fidelity between daughter and father and are bereft of any vestige of feminine kindness. They swear false love to their father and then diminish that to the number of knights that he may keep in his attendance. They operate rationality and not by ethics or morality when dealing with their kindred; yet ironically it is through passion for Edmond that they both ultimately perish. Both display inveterate cruelty when dealing with Gloucester; indeed Goneril is the worst woman that Shakespeare ever set on stage -- for there is no end to how far in villainy she will go to fulfil her desires. She is also stronger in resolution and deeper in vileness than Regan: thus she knows that blinding is a lasting torment to the victim, while hanging only hurts horribly for a short while. She also considers a rat’s death as being a fitting farewell to her once comrade sister.

Despite his perverse exploitation of people for self-advantage, it is simplistic to define Edmond as evil. He has been banished abroad merely because he is illegitimate. Gloucester tells Kent: “He hath been out nine years, and away he shall again.” Later Edmond prays: “Now gods, stand up for bastards” His problem is that bitter life has taught him selfishness as a means for survival His tragedy is that he takes it too far before he can learn through grief.

Love itself is fundamental to goodness. It is not merely an emotional feeling: it inspires the performance of duties of care, bo***ge and obligation to kindred and state. Thus Cordelia tells her father: “I love your Majesty according to my bond.”
it involves unquestioned loyalty and self-sacrifice. Thus, when Albany enquires from Edgar as to how he has known his father’s miseries, he replies: “By nursing them, My Lord”. love is a virtue that enlightens all who possess it to operate a loyal service to those to whom they are attached. Thus Kent tells Lear: “I am the very man that from your first of difference and decay has followed your sad steps”.

Lear is a tragic hero who has potential for goodness: however this better aspect of his being has been eclipsed by the corruptions of power -- so that he no longer knows love. Therefore, he must suffer in order to purge himself of his flaws of selfishness and unkindness: in this way the fate of the King represents a Christian hope that the suffering and sacrifices of the innocent ─ like Cordelia ─ can redeem us from the dangers of innate human ugliness.

This drama does not give us the happy ending that we desire -- for the nightmare of Cordelia's cruel murder is too close to reality; yet we may learn from identifying such horrors that our society is still in need of repair
This is likely to have been Shakespeare’s covert message to his own monarch -- during an age when being too explicit could land a playwright at the gallows.

08/10/2024

Our Grinds classes are re-commencing shortly for Leaving and Junior Cert. Students.

Contact by phone, by WhatsApp or by text: 087 2632059; or Email
[email protected]

24/10/2023

“The Forge, by Seamus Heaney, is mainly metaphorical, and less about a smithy than an allegory of his own art: poetry.” Consider!

All I know is a door into the dark.
Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;
Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,
The unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned as a unicorn, at one end and square,
Set there immoveable: an altar

24/10/2023

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30/09/2021

CELBRIDGE TUTORIAL COLLEGE
is again providing grinds in Irish, English, Biology, Geography and History for Leaving Certificate students;
Also, help in Irish for Third Level students.

Contact us at:
0872632059
And/or
[email protected]

25/08/2021

We haven't gone away you know!
Contact us: 0872632059

05/03/2021

Help for Third Level students of Irish: this includes grammar and composition — including advice on assignments. The latter may be of particular interest to those in First Year at University or Teacher Training College: these students may not have obtained sufficient practice in writing skills due to the Covid lock down during preparation for last year's Leaving Certificate examination.Contact:
celbridgetutorialcollege.ie
Mobile: 0872632059

20/02/2021

John Keats died two hundred years ago - he was only 25 years old; yet any one who has not read his work can't say that he or she really knows poetry.

John Keats loved nature deeply and by this love he was inspired to works of poetic beauty that have not been surpassed. He became aware of his great potential sometime during his mid-teenage years and knew that he could envisage wonderful imagery of beauty through the gifts of a vivid imagination and a sensuous sensitivity to an ephemeral inspiration ─ the latter of which he called “the magic hand of chance” His only fear was that death would take him from this world before the fulfilment of his art. Early death was indeed a real and tangible threat, for both his mother and his younger brother had died of tuberculosis, while his father had died in a tragic accident at work. Thus he ponders upon the awful terrors of death:

“When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;”

Yet there are some great paradoxes in his writing ; one is that he sometimes appears to crave death as an ultimate escape from the cruel realities that have taunted his youth. This is not an artistic inconsistency: for poets often deal in paradox as mood changes seek expression. Thus, in Ode to a Nightingale, his desire is to escape during a moment of ecstatic bliss:

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy! “

Ultimately however the human wishes to survive, and so it occurs to Keats that the nightingale’s song is an anthem for life and not a requiem for the dead who cannot hear its music under the earth:

“Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. “

So he turns his thoughts to immortality as represented by the bird’s song:

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown: “

This quest for immortality became fuelled by a desire to leave some great artistic legacy in his name in praise of the glories of nature and sensuous love. In the following lines he wishes for the permanence of the star; but not its eternal lonely vigil; instead he wishes for everlasting love:

“Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,”
……………………………………….
“No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest “

Keats dreamed of an “unreflecting love: one that did not ask for anything in return other than that the object of his love would remain constant and true. Again however, the paradox arises; for love may only briefly remain noble once it has been requited: moreover, not only is human love mortal, but it is fickle by nature and thus may not even last more than a day. This is dramatically depicted n the poem La Belle Dame sans Merci. Here the lovers’ meeting is a dream, but the ending is a nightmare:

"I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said—
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!"

Through coming to appreciate the fickleness of love and the fearsome transience of life itself John Keats come to the conclusion that only in art is there permanence. His ecstatic image of perpetual unrequited love, with the never-ending prospect of a future fulfilment, is a glorious one that remains unsurpassed in romantic English poetry:

"Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! "

This utopian image occurs in his Ode To a Grecian Urn, which concludes with a famous cryptic moral. The great T.S. Elliot could not comprehend the concept involved. However, we must look to what Keats himself thought: “I am certain of nothing but the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination ─ what the imagination seizes on as beauty must be truth!” So! since the heart can imagine beauty on earth, that beauty exists as much as do the truths of reality. Therefore we need to know imagined beauty to mitigate the wounds of reality ─ thus the value of art! Here is the entire stanza in which this thought occurs:

“O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden w**d;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Keats is the master of metaphor and imagery! The nightingale is a “light-winged Dryad of the trees “ and a “Darkling”. The Grecian Urn is a “still unravish'd bride of quietness,” and a “foster-child of silence and slow time,” He addresses Autumn as,“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.” And what about this sustained metaphor on the Goddess of harvest-time:

“Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies,”

And the following images of the decay of beauty, assaults of ague and the ravishes of old age:

“Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.”

And this is his bleak image of loneliness and despair:

“then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.”

Thus Keats whose main concern is with writing memorable romantic verse for love and nature becomes an accomplished and skilled tradesman in the techniques of poetry. Here below he gives us poetic gems of assonance and alliteration:

“O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: “

And here is his famous sample of onamataipé: “The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

The idealistic quest for unselfish human love despite its obvious fickleness, the desire to create beautiful art before the dreaded doom and the innate desire to avoid the wounds of reality had all caused him to be restless in mind and paradoxical in writing throughout his earlier works ─ though these were nevertheless both brilliant and beautiful. However, in his ode, “To Autumn” he has at last achieved a peaceful reconciliation with the cycle of life. Here there are flowers and bees; there is fruit and honey and wine; there is the Goddess of the harvest; there are stubble fields and the swallows preparing to depart; there is the gentle dirge of the robin for the passing year; and there is a choir of gnats singing their own requiem as they are borne by the rising currents of autumnal air towards the heavens:

“Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

This is an anthem of fulfillment: not just on behalf of nature, but also on behalf of the poet himself ─ for he is now aware that he has beaten the fatal bell, that he has gleaned his teaming brain and has gifted to others the full ripened grain. No one can say that he or she knows poetry if that person has not read John Keats.

31/01/2021

Established in September1987, Celbridge Tutorials is now over thirty three years in operation as a "Grinds" centre of repute; we have been out of operation due to the COVID 19 PANDEMIC since April 2020. Mick Beiirne is now back! He can offer significant HELP TO LEAVING CERT. STUDENTS IN IRISH and ENGLISH.

During the next week, the Website predictions and subject information will be redeveloped:
See the essay below on King Lear

Also help for Third Level Students of Irish: this includes grammar and composition — including advice on assignments.