The Gaelic Athletic Association, Joyce, and the Primitive Body

Abstract

William Wordsworth’s familiar poem “The World Is Too Much with Us” expresses, as most traditional sonnets do, the sting of unrequited love. Published during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, the poem critiques the harmful effects of progress, and identifies the intellectual, spiritual, and natural consequences of Britain’s fast-paced industrialization, and her maddeningly efficient exploitation of environmental resources. Fed up, Wordsworth longs to return to a pre-Christian “golden age,” an age distinguished not only by its natural piety but by its veneration for natural gods. “I’d rather be a Pagan,” he cries, and imagines himself sighting Proteus and Triton at work from his grassy vantage point in Britain. Like the modern Irish primitivists discussed in this book, the Romantic Wordsworth contemptualized the corruption and self-centeredness of the industrialized age, and feared that his country would devolve into a society unmoved by natural beauty and worse, subverted by its insolicitous attention to rural nature. Irish revivalists shared this same sense of panic and longed to rekindle modern Ireland’s relationship with its precolonial golden age.

“—Great God! I’d rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.”

—William Wordsworth