Brendan Kennelly remembers the teacher who helped him make the connections in life

AS I grow older I find myself thinking more and more about Agnes Jane McKenna whose teaching has influenced me enormously throughout my life.

She was a UCD arts graduate, from the Glin area of Co Limerick, who came to North Kerry in the early 1940s to set up a co-educational school. It was here in a large yellow house outside Tarbert village that I received my second-level education.

Agnes Jane McKenna was a short stocky woman with a stern and dignified bearing through which her kindness shone. I think she was influenced by the educational ideas of Padraig Pearse. Behind the house there was a big field, where we played football and hurling.

She was a great lover of languages and she taught us Irish, English and Latin. She insisted on grammar, on roots and on memory - the very things that are so unfashionable today. But a good Latin word can illuminate a whole field. If you have a good grounding in Latin you can identify the relationships between words and can understand the behaviour of language, which is closely connected to the rhythms of poetry.

It's unfashionable to emphasise the pragmatic values of literature, but if it doesn't help people to live, what good is it? I firmly believe that if you've learned Shakespeare as a 12-year-old, later in life you will be able to relate that learning to difficulties you may be experiencing and benefit from it.

In my life I have made a choice to connect - I got that from Agnes. Under her influence, I learned to appreciate simplicity, which I see as the triumph of intelligence over confusion. She taught me that a real teacher is a real learner and to see the promise in people whatever their age.

She educated your perception and perception is to do with an appreciation of promise. Through her, I learned that as a teacher you have to give students your best and avoid destroying them. It was because of Agnes that I won a scholarship to Trinity College - the Reid Sizarship - which is still available to students from Co Kerry.

At the school there was no electricity and we worked by lamplight beside a turf fire. My home was in Ballylongford and when I was studying for the Leaving Certificate I lived in digs in Tarbert and studied at school between 5.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m. each evening.

When she died I wrote four lines for her tombstone:

"In the house on hill she sits Always teaching always learning With the fire blazing in the grate And the two lamps burning."