A who's who of favourite poems

David Byrne - European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection

David Byrne - European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Protection

In the course of settling into my position in Brussels, my new surroundings triggered memories of an unforgettable moment some years ago, when James Joyce's touching poem Ecce Puer came to life in a most unexpected way. Ecce Puer was written by a 50-year-old Joyce, whose despair at the recent death of his father was finally alleviated by the arrival of his grandson Stephen: "Of the dark past/a child is born/With joy and grief/My heart is torn".

Joyce's tenderness in addressing the child of the future contrasts sharply with his contrite plea for forgiveness to his recently dead father which closes the poem, "O father forsaken/Forgive your son!"

Much of Joyce's life and work was about overcoming what he called "the nightmare of history". At the level of his own personal history, he had singularly failed to strike the right balance in his relations with his father. In a sense history had defeated him. Unable to make it up to his dead father, and faced with the arrival of his grandson, Joyce tries to overcome the burden of history through the writing of a simple poem. It is a small moment in which imagination transforms history.

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The power of this transformation was brought home to me some years ago, when I was privileged enough to be present when the poem's subject, Stephen Joyce, brought the poem to incarnate life during a reading in one of Joyce's old haunts, Fouquet's in Paris. There for a brief moment, the beauty and tenderness of Joyce's imagination revealed its power to reach across time to heal, restore and renew. Ecce Puer is a gentle reminder from Joyce that we are not prisoners of our own history.It is an encouraging thought.

Councillor Mary Freehill - Lord Mayor of Dublin

One of my favourite poems is September 1913 by W.B. Yeats. I was attracted to this poem which I discovered during my school days. I liked the way that Yeats expressed his disgust at the manner in which his opponents William Martin Murphy et al opposed the idea of an art gallery to house the Lane paintings and how they used religion to justify greed and meanness - "For men were born to pray and save". When I became a member of the Art Advisory of Dublin Corporation's Municipal Gallery, which houses the Lane paintings, the poem had an even deeper resonance.

Bertie Ahern - An Taoiseach

My favourite poem is The Mother by Padraig Pearse, which I love because I can remember reciting it at school.

Brendan O Donoghue - Director, National Library of Ireland

At boarding school in Dungarvan in the late 1950s, our English teacher had no regard for the curriculum or for the prescribed texts. English classes consisted of readings of some of his favourite poetry and prose, with instructions that we should all "write it down". In later years, some of the pieces I first encountered in this way became favourites of my own, including the following:

Growing Old from "Songs of the Fields" by Francis Ledwidge.

"Across a bed of bells the river flows,

And roses dawn, but not for us; we want

The new thing ever as the old thing grows

Spectral and weary on the hills we haunt.

And that is why we feast, and that is why

We're growing odd and old, my heart and I."

Uaneen FitzSimons - RTE presenter

The poem I've picked is Seamus Heaney's Death of a Naturalist. It's the very visuality of the words that appeal to me - as I read it I can almost smell and see every aspect of the countryside he writes of.