(39) 'Róiseanna toirní. An chistin'

Publication Instance Details #211

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	Yes	No	No	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	Genocide
War / Genocide Referenced	Genocide: Holocaust
Irish Context	WW II (Ireland) Other
Languages	Irish
Genre	Part Of Lyric Sequence
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	This poem is part of the lyric sequence, 'Seabhac ag Guairdeall', in which the poet describes aspects of his childhood, viewed through the lens of Irish neutrality during World War II. In this poem, the thirty-ninth part of the sequence, the speaker describes his mother's fear at a thunderstorm. She herds the children under the stairs with her to hide from the storm. There, the speaker describes his gloomy surroundings in the damp, and his joy at being let out into the light again. This is sharply contrasted with the experience of Anne Frank, who the speaker notes as contemporaneously hiding in Amsterdam. Despite the speaker's freedom from the under-stair hideaway, he acknowledges how she cannot escape her hiding place: the devil himself approaches her, over the 'rocks of destiny'.