April 4th, 2025

4/4/2025

Manx Reflections 19 is open for submissions. Please email them to Hazel before the end of April
Membership Subs are open for renewal they remain at £20 this year. Please send a cheque, payable to the Isle of Man Poetry Society,
or pay by bank transfer

The 25th anniversary of the IOM Poetry Society is taking place on Friday the 2nd of May at the Douglas Bay Yacht Club. It it's £15 per person, which includes a buffet and some entertainments.
We really need to know numbers ASAP so if you know you are coming, please let me know.

1 Comment

John Boyle

16/6/2025 16:28:50

A small, personal, tongue-in-cheek contribution to the celebrating of Mayday for all the other poets of the Manx Poetry Society.

“… let us roll all our strength and all/Our sweetness up into one ball/And tear our pleasures with rough strife/Through the iron gates of Life...”

Andrew Marvell, to his 'Coy Mistress.' Composed – it’s so blisteringly pat – on May Day. The tax bill’s (finally) paid. Winter's back’s broken. Spring’s seducing us to “... tear our pleasures with rough strife...” How much more of a come on do we need? And, it’s not as if we'd be setting a cultural or historical precedent.

The Manx Celts (like all Celts) split their year into two distinct periods. Dark and Light. A bewitching Celtic solution to time's complexities – Stephen Hawking notwithstanding. May Day was blast-off for the Light Period and when the Celts amorous shenanigans quickened. With all that May-Day light about they could see who they wanted to shenanigans with.

The Romans (never set foot on the Isle of Man because the historian Tacitus told them there was no women there) were, understandably, miffed by these Celtic May-Day shenanigans.

May Day for them was all 'Bona Dea', the Goddess of chastity, and ‘Lemuralia’, a festival for the souls of the departed. No May-Day shenanigans for them then.

Bona Dea’ or 'Fauna’ was the daughter of the Roman God Faunas who, in a fit of pique, started slapping her around with a myrtle stick. Not really a lot there by way of celebration.

As for 'Lemuralia'? Those Romans who observed it did so by being silent, washing their hands, and stomping around bare-footed all day.

When they weren't washing their hands, being silent and stomping around barefooted, they were showering those behind them with hard black beans to ward off the dead.

This’s why the Celts never clicked with the Romans, who were stomping around, un-shenaniganed, sour-faced, barefooted with May thorns (hawthorns) spearing the soles of their big hairy feet.

The Celts on the other hand were whooping and shenanigan-it up good style. It was around this time that the Romans shanghaied May Day as a distress signal.

The Anglo Saxons freighted May Day with the name, 'Thrimilce', or, the month of three milkings. In the May-Day light they could now be certain what they had their hands around at milking time.

Built on this cultural and historical precedent - of milking their cows three times a day - is based the issuing of milk three times a day to modern schoolchildren. And, in maternity wards throughout the land, babies are breastfed three times a day as well.

The English, as is their wont, ignored these Celtic amorous May-Day shenanigans, and, characteristically, kept themselves to themselves. However, they did play with their bows and arrows a lot. That's why today they're such good dart players.

“It’s a case of ‘January’ and ‘May'. This ancient adage signifies the marriage of a young woman to a much older man. In Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales', a beautiful young woman called May is about to marry a sixty-year old Baron called January.

This all takes place in May. A sixty-year-old man today is nowhere as near the knacker’s yard as his counterpart in Chaucer's time.

To reignite Marvell poem to where he hears “…time’s winged chariot drawing near… “or, as Raymond Chandler, put it (more succinctly) ‘The Big Sleep.’ Now, the “winged chariot” has pulled up alongside the sixty-year old January.

We twig January’s reluctance to shuffle on board before his imminent marriage to the beautiful young May. May-Day God bless them both.

And, we pray that Andrew Marvell’s, “times winged chariot” will idle whilst January and May, “roll all their sweetness up into one ball... and tear their pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life” - before January’s shuffled off to the knacker’s yard.

April 4th, 2025

Leave a Reply.