From misty meadows

I’d not come across Thomas Caulfield Irwin before, but I’ve found some sonnets by him, sonnets, my favourite verse form at the moment! Irwin was born in Warrenpoint in County Down, Ireland, the son of a doctor, in 1823; his family were very wealthy and it seems as if he was one of those young gentlemen who completed his education by travelling on the continent with a private tutor, and even went as far as Africa. However, his family fell on hard times when he was in his twenties and he became a writer, translator and poet to support himself. He was very much affected by English poets such as Keats and Tennyson; one poem I’ve come across, although have not read is ‘The Wanderings and Lamentations of Queen Gormflaith’, an Irish Queen of Tara who lived probably about 870 to the middle of the tenth century.

Irwin seems to have had mental health problems, and has been described as ‘eccentric’; he apparently thought a neighbour was spying on him through the brick walls of his house and threatened to shoot him! He died in 1892 and is buried in Dublin.

Irwin wrote some very beautiful poetry, and here is one of his sonnets:

The rough green wealth of wheaten fields that sway
In the low wind of midsummer all day;
The morning valley’s warm perfumed breeze
Floating from southern sycamore shadowed rills,
The singing forest on the dawn-topped hills,
The living depth of azure spacing seas:
Still, brooding shadows upon mossy walls,
Aerial vapours crumbling down the heights,
Silence of woods amid green mellow lights,
And sighs of distant drizzling waterfalls:
The sweet faint breath of the short moonlit nights
From misty meadows where the quaint crake calls;
Rare pageants in the western day withdrawn,
And fleets of rich light-laden clouds at dawn.