Séamas O'Reilly: Pondering the practicalities of the 'may the road rise to meet you' poem

"May the road rise to meet you - a charming message, hailing back to the days when Irish peoples’ lives were more in communion with the elements"

Seamas O'Reilly. Picture: Orfhlaith Whelan

On return trips to Ireland, I sometimes find myself a tourist in my own country. 

Everyone does, I suppose, since the first things you encounter in Irish airports are those baubles aimed at new visitors; baby onesies imploring nearby adults to “kiss me, I’m Irish”; non-standard Irish sports jerseys, designed with a lawyer present so as to avoid potential licensing infringements; and the various fridge magnets, tea towels, and wall hangings that blare all those phrases we use every day, like “it’s a great day to be Irish” or that one prayerful poem that begins “may the road rise to meet you”. 

I’ve always been fascinated by that latter work, and found myself examining it quite closely on our arrival in Dublin this week, while waiting for my wife to gather the Newgrange snowglobes and miniature Irish flags we were making for dinner that night.

“May the road rise to meet you” it goes, “may the wind be always at your back, may the sun shine warm upon on your face, and the rain fall soft upon your fields”. 

It’s a charming message, hailing back to the days when Irish peoples’ lives were more in communion with the elements. 

There are an additional two lines, which evoke a desire that God hold you in his hand but, looking around the airport, I find they are often omitted, perhaps to encompass the preferences of visitors of all faiths and none. 

The line about rain on fields remains, despite the fact that its predictions about the agrarian holdings of a visitor from Seoul or Mexico City might be considered presumptuous.

It’s not a piece of literature I’ve thought much about — which is strange since, like all Irish people, I recite it in full to every person I meet — but the gap between landing at, and exiting, Dublin Airport lasts about a fortnight so I have time to consider it now. 

THE PHYSICS OF RISING ROADS

The opening line puzzles me the most. Its tone implies convenience; namely that the road, in rising to meet you, will save you the effort of walking in some way we’re expected to find straightforwardly helpful. 

How this works in practical terms is unexplained. In what way, exactly, will the road rise, and to what benefit? 

A rising road could, after all, more easily describe a nightmarish death trek along an ever-inclining horizon. 

Perhaps, in “rising to meet you”, they mean that any vertiginous downhill stretch of road will magically lift, rendering itself passably flat, although this seems to imply that downhill walking is more onerous than its uphill equivalent, which I do not accept. 

If you take the time to really puzzle it out — and, as previously stated, I was still some days away from leaving the terminal — the only other hypothesis is equally disturbing; that their most ardent prayer for any dear friend is that the road will rise up, and down in concert with their every step, saving some fraction of the hassle of lifting and lowering their legs as they walk. 

Even a cursory examination of this presents questions. 

Surely your legs would suffer horribly having their every step immediately intercepted by the ground, as if walking on a sea of artificially intelligent sand. 

Maybe it would be like those travelators in that very airport, which balance perambulatory convenience with the horror of reading a grisly pictorial washing line of T-shirts blaring Irish phrases and barely-comprehensible jokes. 

Aphorisms like “I’m Irish, what’s your superpower?” and “life is too short for matching socks”, that turn your days-long commute to the baggage area into an eternal, baffling conveyor belt of deeply inscrutable cringe.

But it is the second part of that poem that’s occupied my thoughts this week in which the sun shone very much upon my face, and I enjoyed it a bit too much. 

I am, frankly, a pale man. I break out in freckles if I switch on a Kindle in a darkened room, so I am not a sun worshipper by nature. 

To be honest, I regard our nearest star with the frosty ambivalence of a colleague who shares Jordan Peterson videos in the work Whatsapp group. 

It shows up on time and does its job, sure, but we are not friends.

A BURNED MAN

I don’t trust the sun. 

Consider the weirdness of an object that is 93 million miles away, responsible for all life on Earth, and visible in the sky for a large part of every day, but must not be looked at. 

Consider, moreover, how strange it is that we don’t constantly talk about how strange that is. 

We are informed, just once in childhood, that we must not look at the blinding, malevolent death orb that hovers just outside our field of vision our entire lives and, barring the odd eclipse, this is never spoken of again.

Which makes it all the more embarrassing that I forgot this well-earned distrust. 

I speak to you now as a burned man. 

Thankfully, my face, neck, arms and legs were plastered with a thin milkshake of Factor 500, applied with sufficient thickness to choke a horse. 

But then, in some fit of jubilation, I forgot the lessons of 37 years and took off my shirt exposing my back, my poor unprotected, marble-white back, to our distant antagonist for a little under 25 minutes.

Perhaps I was seized by airport poetry, perhaps I felt every inch the tourist my absence from Ireland has made me these past 10 years but, whatever the case, I have been paying for it ever since. 

As I write these words days later, my shoulders and spine are consumed with pain, an itching, spiking, soon-to-be-peeling agony. 

I only ask that my dear friends turn to their nearest tea towel or novelty plate, and pray with those words we all know so well, for a cool, refreshing wind, that may be always at my back.