In John Montague’s poem “A Lost Tradition,” he refers to the Irish landscape as a text: “The whole landscape a manuscript” (line 34). After reading this poem in class, I started to think of the different mediums and methods in which I experienced the Irish landscape and culture. My “reading” of the Irish landscape today began with a verbal presentation and discussion on theories of place and how these concepts relate to Irish literature
and history. Roaming through the James Joyce Library, I viewed a small selection of Yeats’ manuscripts and letters in glass case on display at the library’s lobby. In between the library and the Newman building, I stumbled upon a passageway with a timeline of Irish history, which provided me with a visual representation of Irish history and the fight for an independent landscape.

On the cliffs of Howth, I “read” the Irish landscape with each step up to the Summit. The dense, rolling fog over the awe-inspiring cliffs made me think of Rhoda Coghill’s 1903 poem “Runaway” where she writes, “Somebody must tell me something real / and that very quickly. / Someone must show me a thing / that will not disappear when I touch it / or fade into a cloud to walk through” (lines 1-5). Coghill’s poem and the foggy cliffs that I experienced in Howth (specifically the fog’s clearing to reveal Ireland’s Eye) seems connected to the ambiguity and uncertainty of the Easter Rising and the Irish Rebellion: the outcome unclear like Island’s Eye in the dense fog.