Today being what is known in Gaelic as isru shikres, or the extension of St. Patrick’s day for a further twenty-four hours, we’ll continue our Hibernian theme with a quotation from W.B.Yeats about those denizens of what Jack Spicer called “the English Department of the spirit” who can’t for the life of them understand why St. Patrick’s is a two day holiday everywhere that isn’t Ireland. “The Seven Sages” isn’t one of his best-known poems, but is unequalled in its anatomy of the square:
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.
Louis Jordan has now been cited on this blog more often than anybody else. Here’s his answer to the question of what to do when Purim runs into St. Patrick’s Day:
