Their Names Do Live

 Their names do live as Irish literary greats

Joyce and Beckett and Heaney and Yeats

In the literary World they remain leading lights

But reading them will not have you laughing all night

Surely great writers in case you get me wrong

And among the World's best they surely belong

But lacking in the humor of Ireland's wronged literary child

The brilliant and sharp witted one known as Wilde

And as for Mangan the author of Dark Rosaleen

Far tougher days than most in life he had seen

In post famine days of malnutrition and consumption he died

A great Irish poet who is not recognized Worldwide

Some of James Stephens poems in you will raise a smile

To read some of his writing may be worth one's while

To him he did have quite a humorous side

Yet his writing never inspires in Irish literary critics a sense of pride

Kavanagh and Gogarty two who come to mind

One could not say of them that they were of a kind

That they did not like each other only true to say

But politics in this did have some part to play

Of more Irish writers one could talk about

But in a short rhyme some names have to be left out

Mine is just one opinion which to little amount

And i am not one whose literary criticisms are taken into account.