Sean O’Faolain

My Dearest Love, When will we meet again? It is only a few hours since I left you and I am full of melancholy thoughts. Why did I think to-night of Con Hourigan, and that soft, wet night when the lights of Cork down in the valley were weeping throu [...]

On the platform at Dieppe, at a corner so near the sea and the boat as to be part of the quay, there stood a small nun, flanked by three shapeless bags of that old-fashioned kind known as portmanteaux. Lovely as a black wallflower, large-eyed by natu [...]

The village kids said they fell out with Inch Moran because she had "leveled" Padna Calla with a stone. That was true, as far as it went. But it was not the reason; for, as the world knows, or should know, there is every difference between [...]

Men who go into competition with the world are broken into fragments by the world, and it is such men we love to analyze. But men who do not go into competition with the world remain intact, and these men we cannot analyze. They are always contented [...]

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This winter, being all by myself in the country, I find I have read more novels than for many years past—and a strange collection they make. There is Mauriac's "Un Nceud de Viperes," Roger Martin du Gard's "Les Thibaults," Norah Hoult's "Apartments [...]

We are too often so arrogant as to think that language is a christening at which man is present as priest, father, godfather, and sponsor while all the helpless phenomena of life wait patiently for the label whereby we shall know them when we speak o [...]

When I look at the large book which constitutes Yeats's effort to explain the nature of life and thought, "A Vision," I want to think back into a certain corner of the latter half of the nineteenth century. That particular aspect of ninetee [...]

Forty years ago, verse in Ireland clustered about a nucleus; so did the drama. Anybody of Irish origin who could write gravitated like the atom towards this nucleus, and the result was a well defined little school of poetry. Today Irish verse and dra [...]