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culture’s separation from the mainstream. It could
also be used as a tool to convert speakers from
Ebonics to standard English more effectively. As
is the case with Irish opponents of Gaelic, a con-
siderable number of African Americans are cau-
tious of Ebonics because they can see that giving
the minority their own language without teaching
competence in standard English would exclude
them from the overall economic competition—the
word we use for political separation like this is that
it “ghettoizes” them.

In Hartnett’s poem, the Irish language is lib-
erating, a chance for the speaker to return to his
true nature. The Irish words that he recalls hearing
in a bar stir an excitement that “was not new,” but
that he felt compelled by emotion to express in
words, finding English inadequate to the task. The
language he needed was definitely not language of
business, and in fact the few Gaelic words that he
recognized broke down the smooth functioning of
commercial discourse, “clogging the intricate ma-
chine.” English had been the language of Ireland
since the 1690s, when British landowners passed
laws requiring its use. Gaelic remained common in
the country, where it was not necessary to conduct
formal business transactions. The famous potato
famine of 1847 though, severely depleted the rural
population of Ireland. The population went from 10
million people in 1841 to 6.5 million just a decade
later, and dwindled yet another million in the fol-
lowing twenty years. The number of Irish people
speaking Gaelic cut in half during the famine, from
four million to two million. Millions died, and a
million others emigrated to other countries, specif-
ically Australia and the United States, which were
both English-speaking countries. Those who re-
mained in Ireland, no longer able to feed them-
selves with what they grew in their fields, shifted
further and further into the English-speaking econ-
omy. Today, English is the language of interna-
tional business, required for transactions through-
out Europe, Africa and Asia.

It is understandable that victims of the potato
famine, struggling to make ends meet, would aban-
don Gaelic and take up English if it would give
them an economic advantage. It is also under-
standable that Hartnett would, in the 1970s, take
up Gaelic. First, there are aesthetic reasons, which
are clearly identified in “A Farewell to English.”
Some emotions that Hartnett felt just could not be
captured by the logic of English, and needed the
sweet flow of music that Old Irish offered. The
poem hints at some sort of genetic code that is tick-
led by the sound-combinations of the mother

tongue, an assumption that seems less and less

plausible the more you think about it, but then, the

point of getting away from English is precisely to

leave over-analysis behind.

Another reason his decision is a sound one is

that it reminds us that economic dominance is no

reason to forget one’s own culture. As already men-

tioned above, someone has to fight against the con-

cept that the winners of any fight are the ones who

get to leave their mark on history. The 1970s were

a time of struggle for dependence in Northern Ire-

land (where, by the way, Hartnett did not live nor

work: most of his life was spent in County Limer-

ick and Dublin, in the south). The fight for free-

dom from Great Britain reached was at the height

of its violence, and Hartnett sought the preserva-

tion of the Irish culture by pumping life back into

a language that was nearly dead.

At least he was doing what he could to counter

the forces that would have caused his tradition to

disappear. Throughout the twentieth century, the

world became aware of the systematic removal of

any sign of a defeated culture. The example of the

A Farewell to English

What

Do I Read

Next?

• Hartnett’s last volume of poetry, The Killing of
  Dreams,was published after his death, in 2000,
  by The Gallery Press.


• The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia-Lorca,
  available from New Dimensions, provides a
  good sampling of the work of the Spanish poet
  who was a major influence on Hartnett.


• The Irish poet best known in America today is
  Seamus Heaney, the 1995 winner of the Nobel
  Prize in Literature. His works are available in
  many anthologies, and his career is on display
  in Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996.


• Thomas Kinsella, one of Ireland’s most re-
  spected poets and a contemporary of Hartnett,
  edited The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse,
  which includes poems from the sixth century to
  today. From Oxford University Press, 1986.