Millet, The Angelus, Musee D’Orsay

The Mullingar Literary Festival 2026 was launched by Inklings Writing Group and Friends in Caffrey’s pub on Culture Night. The theme was famous paintings and the 26 participants delivered original pieces on the paintings. Jimmy O’Connell’s selection was the painting of ‘The Angelus’, a famous work from 1857-1859 by French artist Jean-François Millet, depicting two peasants in a field praying at the sound of a distant church bell. This is Jimmy’s poem inspired by it.

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Watching it now among Millet’s other

Barbizon paintings, as the quiet, almost

reverend, appreciators process through

the gallery behind me, it demands its

singular truth. I recall the six o’clock

Angelus bell on the radio boom in its

regular three lots of three and then the

long nine chimed intonations, calling us

to that ritualised silence, and recall how

my mother in the kitchen, pausing whatever

domestics then engaged, began:

‘The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,’

and how we antiphonated the responses.

Did Millet sentimentalise a French rural reality

and its Peasantry, as some critics accused,

or is he the chronicler of truth? Do I merely

sentimentalise memory – this religious litany

that bonded us, as it measured time as an

anticipation of eternity, and this prayer as an

act of uncritical hope, but hope nonetheless?

There are the mundane shibboleths of culture

and domesticity still: family Sunday visits,

club colours, each fulfilling its own necessities,

the needs of the soul and the invocation of

imagination as its tool transforming our routines

into memories for poets, painters and prophets.

Jimmy O’Connell is a member of Inklings Writing Group, who meet on Tuesdays at 11am and on Wednesdays at 7.30pm in the Annebrook House Hotel, Mullingar. Aspiring and fun writers welcome.