Day 11

Day 11 Monday:  Dublin!  After lunch in the heart of Dublin, we headed to Epic, a fantastic museum combining Irish history and the immigrant story. It was a lovely way to tie together all of the events we have been studying. One more final connection for the program occurred when we stopped at the Dublin Teachers Union building.  We walked into this beautiful Georgian style building, and had a poetry reading with Paula Meehan, Ireland's former poet laureate.  I had included her in our LIT 206 curriculum, and now students had the opportunity to ask her questions about the poems we had read and discussed!  Here we were in a country that values the arts, especially writers and poets—the land of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett, and W.B. Yeats, of James Joyce and Seamus Heaney and now Paula Meehan.  And, incredibly, the actual room hosting us was where Joyce, author of Ulysses and The Dubliners, took his piano lessons as a child.

Everyone was then let loose into the city after goodbye hugs and tears with Niahm and John.  A small group of us headed to Trinity College, where we viewed the Book of Kells.  This is one of the oldest surviving Biblical manuscripts, but its ornate, intricate illustrations, often with Gaelic patterns, are what are especially stunning.  In disbelief, we viewed pages from the book dating from 800 A.D.  It’s one thing to see burial chambers or stone castles this old, but a book that has been safeguarded all this time?  It was awe-inspiring.  Afterward, a student and I hurried to Christchurch Cathedral, Dublin's oldest, and then on to Saint Patrick's Cathedral where Jonathan Swift was the dean.  There he wrote “A Modest Proposal” and Gulliver’s Travels; he is also buried at the Cathedral.