New(?) Sculpture Arrives In Douglas In Time For Halloween

[Virginia P]

Mind you, he would have benefitted from a Spellchecker, what?

[Mr. Sausages]

I've seen that hat before. Has he been wearing it for months, or does he only put it on for special occasions?

[John Wright]

The dialect reads well and is beautiful when read aloud with the correct accent, intonation etc

 

Never forget the Islnad has three languages, manx, dialect and english

 

there is a resurgence in manx but dialect is oft over looked

 

I think there is a reviewing of his position. Yes there has been a reverence of TE for years he had his own rom in the Museum. They are removing it now.

 

Better than Mcgonagle not as good as Burns

[Freggyragh]

T.E Brown is probably the most famous Manx Poet in English. Personally I prefer Mona Douglas, Willy Teare, Juan Noa, Cushag, and Paul Lebedinsky. The best Manx poetry is (in my opinion) that of William Kennish, or the unknown poets of the ballads, such as "Ec ny Fiddleryn". Unfortunately people will tell you, (as indeed did T.E. Brown) that there isn't a cannon of Manx poetry. This is of course nonsense. Kennish was writing "Aislin" style poetry, full of assonance and complex rythym, with literary nods to Classical Gaelic - not bad for a man mostly known for inventing the exploding shell and the theodolyte. The hundreds of religious "Carvals", the many, many ballads, the verse from the Bardic (Bardagh) tradition collected from here over four hundred years ago (recorded in The Book of the Dean of Lismore) and up to the modern work of Adrian Pilgrim and Bob Carswell - a huge body of work. T.E. Brown deserves his place, as does Seamus Heaney, for giving the English speaker a glimpse of what is available in Gaelic, as Graves does for giving the English speaker a taste of what lies in Latin.

[VinnieK]

T.E. Brown deserves his place, as does Seamus Heaney, for giving the English speaker a glimpse of what is available in Gaelic, as Graves does for giving the English speaker a taste of what lies in Latin.

 

I tend not to think of T.E. Brown in such a way at all. I think that it's important when regarding Brown's poetry to keep in mind that he was a man who was educated according to the high Victorian principles of educaton that were a feature of England at the time, and who spent the greater part of his adult life in Oxford or Bristol. His poetry exhibits little of the celtic culture that undoubtably so charmed him and for which he obviously had a genuine affection, and I believe is more representative of the then current trend for celebrating the noble savage and the honest rural worker that was so fashionable amongst educated Victorians at the time. For all that is made of his use of "dialect", T.E. Brown's Manxman is virtually indistinguishable from any other author's humble Cornish fisherman, hardy Yorkshire farmhand, wiley Irish peasant, or what have you. Indeed, his use of metre and form is designed to convey not an authentic "voice" of which he is a part, but to create an impression of simplicity and directness he wishes to celebrate, regardless of the culture to which he attributes it, and indeed the way he achieves this (simple verse structures and rhyming schemes, etc) was already a cliché by the time of Brown's writing.

 

This trend for educated, cosmopolitan individuals to ostentatiously celebrate the rural worker or primitive foreigner goes back to at least the time of Tacitus, and is usually at best a veiled criticism of what the author regarded as modernity (at worst a total flight from it). T.E. Brown wrote not as a Manxman, but as a Victorian scholar and observer of his own (British) society, and he wrote truly less about the Manx than he did a generic ideal of idyllic rural simplicity that legions of Victorian authors were busy superimposing upon various cultural groups the world over.

 

Consider for a moment Brown's conclusion to How to Spend Seven Days on the Isle of Man

 

"Remember, the race is mainly Celtic; and you will readily, but (I think) only to your disgust, elicit a coarse echo of your own fun. Talk to them quite simply and kindly, and you will like them very much."

 

This is not the voice of a Manxman who loves his country out of patriotic and cultural pride. It is rather the voice of an educated Victorian who loves the Island and its inhabitants because they, in their coarse, uneducated simplicity, seem to represent to him something more honest and palatable than the intrigues and sophistry to be found in the high social circles of the big metropolitan centres elsewhere.

[StuartT]

I think Brown to me resembles something of a Manx Robert Burns (with a lot more morals & better circumstance) - in that he has become regarded as "the nations poet", and his use of the Manx English Dialect.

[Frances]

Brown's 7 days (written for his friend J A Brown of the Times) is, if I might use the phrase, a 'p*ss take' - read more of his verse and if possible read aloud - much is online on www.manxnotebook.com (as is a fair amount of Cushag + Wm Kinnish) - he was being as condesending to the 'Cotton ballers' as they were to the Manx. He was however quite deliberate in his development of Anglo Manx.