Search

In any educational system there are broadly speaking, five clearly defined components. They are: (1) students, their needs and expectations; (2) teachers, their competencies and commitment; (3) infrastructure which includes buildings, libraries, laboratories and classrooms; and (4) syllabi of courses, their framing and execution; and (5) most importantly a clearly conceived and unambiguously stated objective. Detailed discussions on the theoretical aspects of these components can go on ad infinitum. In order to make our discussions meaningful and relevant, it will, of course, be desirable to read our analysis of the related issues in the context of our own situation in the country. It will not be an exaggeration to assert that the area which attracted the least serious attention of those responsible for the governance of our educational system during the post-independence period is education. We may gloat over the unbridled proliferation of educational institutions and explosion of student-population flocking to these institutions. But the big question remains and that is whether our educational system as a whole is founded on any definite objective which alone can provide a sustainable direction. Flexibility in objectives is understandable but a radical deviation from the age-old purpose of liberal education meant for shaping humans into a worthwhile creation of God can only prove disastrous. Education should aim at primarily developing students' personality and chiselling those inherent traits in him with which he is born in God's own image. This assertion may sound too holistic to utilitarian ears. But it has stood the test of time since humanity came into existence

W.B. Yeats is a poet of great artistic honesty and integrity. In his critical statements he has candidly stated his artistic intentions and preoccupations. For such students of Yeats as have been puzzled by the artistic intentions of the poet in regard to the subject matter of his poetry, he has clarified his stance in his cryptic remark, “I remake myself” in my poetic compositions. Yeats, as every scholar knows it, is paradoxically a very complex and a simple poet. His complexity lies in his reader’s bewilderment at the contradictory artistic issues and his simplicity lies in its being a key to the unlocking of some of the ambiguities lurking in some of his poems. In his poetry, sometime he raises an issue which develops logically but the conclusion seems to stultify his explicit poetic statement, because the conclusion of the poem is deliberately made meaningfully ambiguous. His “Sailing to Byzantium” is a poem of this type of complex simplicity.

Sean O'Casey came in the limelight with his Dublin Trilogy of which the first play, named, The shadow of a gunman, was premiered at the Abbey in 1923. But he had earlier written three plays- The Frost in the Flower (1917), The Harvest Festival (1918) and The Crimson in the Tricolor (1920)- which were rejected by the Abbey directorate. Of these the first and the last named above are still untraceable and it is "unlikely that either will ever be recovered now."1 However, Luckily the manuscript of The Harvest Festival was acquired by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in 1969 and was not available to scholars until 1978. Robert Patrick Murphy has said, "I have not been able to examine. The Harvest Festival. Lola L. Szladits, Curator of the Berg collection of the New York Public Library, considers the holograph a 'museum piece' and maintains an official policy of discouraging access by students."2 it was first published in America in 1978 and in Ireland and Britain in 19809. It is logical, therefore, that no study on the play could be made until this time, though references to it do occur in a number of book- length studies on O'Casey's plays. But even these stray remarks on the play are made on the basis of what O'Casey himself has to say about it in his Innisfallen Fare thee Well,3 and not on that on any close reading of the text. It is pertinent to notice that even seventeen years after its publication the play is yet to be performed. During his life time O'Casey himself showed no interest in the play in his writings and correspondence; his venture to revise the play remained incomplete; only the first Act is partly revised John O'Riordan has regretted: "The dramatist himself in his meridian years never strove to promote it."4 Even the O'Casey Annual and Sean O'Casey's Review, two major journals aiming at promoting fresh studies and researches on the unexplored areas of O'Casey's writings, have shown singular neglect of this play. Perhaps, drawing a clue from the dramatist himself, some of the major O'Casey scholars in their studies have disparaged the play.