Vibrations of light

The books of Canon Sheehan do not rest on Irish bookshelves in the same way as, say, those of Thomas Hardy or Charles Dickens do on English (or indeed Irish) shelves. That’s a pity. Sheehan was a writer who sold in huge numbers during his day and it seems a bit strange that someone who made such a great contribution to English-language literature in Ireland should be so forgotten. Is television the key? His works are not adapted for the small screen by RTÉ in the same way as Hardy or Dickens are by the BBC. Is it impossible to give, say, The Graves at Kilmorna, Lisheen or The Blindness of Doctor Gray the tv treatment? Irish producers seem to have no difficulty in plundering written literature for material, yet Sheehan remains immune to this trend. A case of cultural cringe, perhaps?

Anyway, as well as being a novelist, Sheehan wrote a wonderful book called Under the Cedars and the Stars. I have it in the form of four short books that Mercier published in the early 1970s: The Beauty of Summer; The Sadness of Autumn and The Loneliness of Winter. They are beautifully written contemplations on life and death and bear comparison with, say, the sensibility and style of Thomas Merton.

Here is a lovely abstract from The Magic of Spring, a very acute observation of returning swallows and one which still holds true. The single lonely swallow I noticed a few weeks ago while cycling around Lough Neagh has been joined by hundreds of companions. Fáilte don Éan:

“The first swallows have come. I had been watching for them these last few warm days in early April, and I scanned the sky every morning and evening for the white breast and black wings that cut the air like a knife … Then, one evening, the 16th of April of this year, I looked up suddenly from my book; and no? – yes, indeed, they were my pretty favourites, tumbling, tossing, gliding flapping, through the air, as in last September, when bade them farewell and without sign or warning they were gone!...

“And here are they again careless of time and human vicissitudes and vexation; here to roll and toss and plough the air like the vibrations of light, so swift and sudden and silent are their movements; caring only for the day and the hour of existence, and only studying alternations of weather, as to whether they shall seek their living food high up in the summer air, or poised above the darkened river, when the heavy clouds bend down weighed with rain, and the flies are languid from the pressure. But here they are, harbingers of spring, and its most swift and elastic messengers…”