Irish poet’s son spots her own poem on exam paper

A Galway schoolboy opened his higher-level Junior Cycle English paper to find a poem written by his mother, Emily Cullen, sitting in section D. The poem, Envoi in Chalk, had been inspired seven years earlier by a message Lee wrote on a pavement: “The world is great.”

For Cullen, a poet in residence at the University of Limerick, the moment turned a private family scene into part of Ireland’s State exams. Lee, now 15, sat the paper at Coláiste Éinde in Salthill, Co Galway, while more than 146,553 candidates across the Leaving Certificate, Leaving Certificate Applied and Junior Cycle exams were sitting tests nationwide.

Cullen said she could not believe it when her son told her what had appeared on the paper. The poem had been written when Lee was eight, after she spotted his chalk note and turned it into verse, a tiny exchange that later found its way into the exam system and onto the page of a teenager who knew exactly where the lines had come from.

The coincidence carried extra weight because Envoi in Chalk was already part of the literary circuit long before it reached the classroom. The poem was selected as The Irish Times Poem of the Week in December 2019, giving it a wider readership before it was chosen for the higher-level Junior Cycle English exam.

That journey, from pavement to publication to exam hall, highlights how contemporary poetry enters the canon in real time. A living poet’s work can move quickly from personal experience into school syllabuses and standardized assessment, where it is stripped of biography for most students but not for Lee, who encountered his mother’s poem as exam text.

The episode also underscored the unusual overlap between family life and Ireland’s formal education machinery. In a year when tens of thousands of students were being assessed nationally, one paper in Co Galway placed a son inside his mother’s poem and his mother inside his exam, a rare reminder that the texts used to measure students are also the works that shape what a generation is taught to read.