Now that the clocks have gone back the winter film-on-a-sofa season is officially open. I rummaged around and realise that I have far too many DVDs.
I will do some weeding and present the dross to Oxfam. Meanwhile I picked Educating Rita, adapted from Willy Russell’s play and released in 1983. I hadn’t seen it for so long that I conflated it with Shirley Valentine, also by Willy Russell and with a similar theme.
Rita is made on location around Dublin with Trinity College featuring prominently alongside Michael Caine and Julie Walters, although it is set in an unnamed northern university town (Newcastle?). Caine plays Professor Frank Bryant and early on in the film slips up. He is asked what “assonance” means and gives as an example the repetition of “swans” and “stones” in The Wild Swans at Coole (WB Yeats). Later in the film his students say that he doesn’t even know what assonance means – he gave an example of consonance.
However, I thought Prof Bryant made a bigger bish: he pronounced Coole “cool”. Brought up looking across Dundalk Bay to the Coole Peninsular and the Mourne Mountains I knew it is pronounced “coolie”. It is a fact that sometimes I file away totally inaccurate data labelled as facts. Until recently I thought the highest mountain in Ireland was Slieve Donard (2,790 ft) in the Mournes whereas it is Carrauntoohil (3406 ft) in the Macgillycuddy’s Reeks. Slieve Donard isn’t even in the top ten although it is the highest in Northern Ireland.
In the same vein I now know that the Cooley Peninsular is spelt and pronounced quite differently to Yeat’s lake at Coole Park but it is an excuse to revisit this autumnal poem, first published in 1917.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
https://youtu.be/udI91Um_Z-8
Aside from the ‘Cooley/Coole/Coolie discussion, perhaps the author could illustrate the variance between ‘peninsular’ and ‘peninsula’. In the case in question in Co. Louth I always refer to it as ‘peninsula’?
I got it wrong and you have further educated me. I’d not spotted the different spellings or their different meanings:
Peninsular. Use the adjective peninsular to describe a near-island that is connected to the mainland. … A peninsula is a piece of land that juts out into the water, nearly an island. Something that’s peninsular looks like a peninsula or is a geographical area with a lot of peninsulas.