Lamb time!

I was visiting the Dingle Peninsula and Dingle Town recently, two places I had heard about from my Irish Literature professor, because of his love for the town and everything it offers. While visiting the town I saw many things, we started with lambs. As you can see from the picture above I held the baby lamb. It was a life-changing experience. I have always thought that lambs were cute, because well they just are, but holding it and hearing it bleet was a whole different experience. He was scared when I first picked him up, but after a second, he calmed down. It was incredible to see him go from scared to comfortable in my arms. Now I had no idea how I was going to walk away from this lamb, but I managed. I was considering taking him and bringing him back to Dungarvan and the States with me. 

When researching more about lambs in Ireland, I found a poem written by W.B. Yeats, one of the authors we are talking about in my Irish literature class. Shepherd and Goatherd This poem by Yeats is very long, but I have linked it. The poem actually represents grief through images of a pasture, which was not the emotion I was feeling while with the lambs. This poem is arguably incredibly sad, which is a great juxtaposition compared to the sheer joy that I felt with the lamb. 

Throughout my time reading Yeats' poems, I have realized that many of them are fairly sad or negative. He does not use happy emotions often, which could be due to the time and place of when he was writing the poems. During that time in Ireland, tensions were high and there was general unrest with people. I however, am finding Ireland to be an incredibly happy place for myself. I love how rich the country's history is and how much I can learn, just by walking around and looking at everything. I certainly loved the lamb that I held and everything that I saw in Dingle town and around the Dingle Peninsula.