The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Read online

  The two most idiosyncratic poems in this section come from the appendix to Richard Stanihurst’s translation of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid (1582): his elegy for his student Garret FitzGerald and FitzGerald’s own death-bed lyric of repentance both appear in their original eccentric orthography. Logician, aesthetician, philologist, historian, biographer, theologian, alchemist, pioneering pharmacist and diplomat, Stanihurst was even by the standards of the Renaissance an extraordinary polymath. He began life as a typically loyal member of an Old English family from the Pale, and his extravagantly written accounts of the Irish past in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) are remarkable, inter alia, for their aspersions on Gaelic culture. Reformation politics created strange alliances, however, and the turn of the century found the poet representing Hugh O’Neill in the negotiations that led to the Spanish intervention at Kinsale. After the defeat of the Ulster chiefs, Stanihurst lived in the Spanish Netherlands, where he became a Jesuit. He had strong views on metrics as well as spelling, and his elegy on FitzGerald is as striking for its irregular syllable count as for its eschewal of rhyme, which he detested.

  The Irish epigraph to section III sardonically comments on the ‘turn for the better’ involved in the supersession of strict-metre verse by the ‘softer’ art of the accentual poets, and on the yielding of the old Gaelic clan system to the English aristocratic order (whereby the O’Donnell become Earl of Tyrconnell, the O’Neill Earl of Tyrone, the O’Maguire Earl of Fermanagh, etc.). The signature poem is by the epigraph’s author, Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa, bard to the O’Maguires of Fermanagh, whose chief’s exploits in the long campaign that culminated in disaster at Kinsale in 1601 it celebrates. If the tonalities of James Clarence Mangan’s rendering of ‘Ode to the Maguire’ are wild and vehement when compared to the austere classicism of the original, their apocalyptic fervour is appropriate to the catastrophe that overcame the Gaelic world in the new century. Poetry in Irish for a time retained and even increased its vigour, rather as the colours of the day reserve their finest display for sunset, and both the early seventeenth-century verse that marked the end of the bardic tradition and the accentual lyric poetry of the following hundred years or so are of con summate technical virtuosity. The dominant temper of both modes is querulous, indignant and – climactically in the work of Ó Rathaille – desolate.

  As early as the twelfth-century chronicles of Ireland by Gerald of Wales, the colonizing classes attempted to justify their activities in terms of a mission to extend civilization to the barbarous Irish, while throughout the six hundred years that separated the arrival of the Normans from the death of the Ulster poet Peadar Ó Doirnín the Gaels in their turn felt little reason to doubt the antiquity and quality of their own civilization. After the Reformation the discourses of civilization and barbarism took on a murderous edge, as in the English poet Edmund Spenser’s posthumously published A View of the Present State of Ireland (1633), where the dialectical presentation of the argument only partly mitigates a colonial enthusiasm for genocide.

  Among the writers in section III, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille believed that the English held a monopoly on barbarism in Ireland, while many in Jonathan Swift’s circle (if not Swift himself) took it equally for granted that they (or their Anglo-Irish offshoot – the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a distinct Irish Protestant identity) held a monopoly on civilization. The Latin poems from the Confederation of Kilkenny, like the erudite Gaelic ‘Dirge’ of the poet-priest Pádraigín Haicéad and the scholarly prose achievement of Séathrún Céitinn (who is represented here by three pieces from his small but stylish and various corpus of poetry in Irish) remind us that, in some respects at least, Gaelic vs Anglo-Saxon antipathies are to be understood as local expressions of an overarching European conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism. (Donnchadh Rua Mac Con Mara’s poised Latin epitaph for Tadgh Gaedhealach Ó Súilleabháin, composed in 1795, speaks for the long temporal reach of Counter-Reformation learning in Ireland – Mac Con Mara was educated in a hedge-school.)

  Swift’s little known and uncharacteristically ornate ‘Verses Occasioned by the Sudden Drying Up of St Patrick’s Well near Trinity College, Dublin’ takes the form of a monologue by St Patrick. The poem provides an early example of what later would become a stock claim for the Patrician lineage of the Church of Ireland, but Swift develops his theme in a way unusual for an Anglican clergyman, not only asserting the seniority of Irish to English civilization but arguing that the larger island was rescued from barbarism by missionary clerics from the smaller one. He also contrasts the benign Irish attitude to the country’s British colony – Scotland – with the malign treatment of Ireland by Britain. Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, who died the year Swift wrote his poem, might have agreed; he would certainly have sympathized with the sense of Ireland’s terminal decline that leads Patrick to relinquish his national patronage in the closing lines. However, Ó Rathaille would have found incomprehensible Swift’s depiction of Catholicism as slavery, and his assumption that Gaelic high culture existed only in the distant past.

  If some of the divisions of language, politics and culture in Ireland softened in the post-Reformation period it was only because a more fundamental difference – that between Catholicism and Protestantism – was growing ever more definitive. The extent to which long-standing affiliations could dissolve under the pressure of this dominant religious conflict is suggested by the disparity in circumstance and motivation separating the first two of the three Richard Nugents who are in turn referred to, heard and addressed in the opening part of section III. All belonged to the same extended family, a prominent Old English dynasty associated with Meath and Westmeath. The first – subject of Giolla Brighde Ó hEodhasa’s tender bardic poem of consolation to the young man’s bereaved mother – grew up Irish-speaking and fought alongside the Ulster chiefs before his early death; while the second – author of a witty English sonnet-epistle to the third – was content to present himself as a typical Renaissance fop, confessing to his namesake cousin that he left Ireland for the appropriately Petrarchan reason of the continued residence there of his ‘sweete foe’.

  The bards themselves had rather more pressing reasons for emigrating, as their patrons fled to the continent, where they struggled to maintain their aristocratic way of life at courts friendly to the recusant cause. In 1609 Giolla Brighde Ó hEodhasa, a kinsman of Eochaidh, renounced his poetic calling in favour of a religious one, taking the name Bonaventura on his ordination as a Franciscan priest at the College of St Anthony of Padua in Louvain. (In this new role he wrote important works on theology and Irish grammar to accompany an earlier treatise on bardic prosody.) Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird tried to continue in his original profession, but died destitute in Louvain – his ‘Letter of Complaint’ is addressed to Father Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire, the founder of St Anthony’s College. Eoghan Rua, from the same poetic family (their surname means ‘Son of the Bard’), fared somewhat better, travelling to Flanders with the O’Donnells of Tyrone during the Flight of the Earls in 1607 and later becoming an important member of the coterie of Hugh O’Neill in Rome, where he was granted a pension by Philip III of Spain. The child Aodh Ó Domhnaill whom Mac an Bhaird hailed in his brief poem of 1613 grew up not (as the poet later hoped) to lead a Catholic invasion of Ireland, but rather to pursue a career as a senior officer in one of the Irish brigades of the Spanish army.

  Many of the miscellaneous lyrics in section III are shadowed not only by political antagonism but by violence. ‘Love’ is one of the shorter pieces in Faithfull Teate’s Ter Tria (1658), a forceful if at times eccentric Irish contribution to the tradition of book-length arrangements of devotional poetry inaugurated by George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) in England and extended by Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1650) in Wales. Teate, the father of Nahum Tate (who became England’s poet laureate and whose work is represented here and in section IV), was a Church of Ireland clergyman who moved to England after three of his chil
dren died as a result of an attack on his property in County Cavan during the Catholic uprising of 1641. From the opposite side of Ulster’s religious and linguistic divide, Peadar Ó Doirnín vividly conveys the horror of sectarian child-murder a century later in ‘The Mother’s Lament for Her Child’. The poem that closes section III is said to have been written by Robert Emmet in invisible ink in 1799, four years before he was hanged, drawn and quartered for leading a rebellion in pursuance of the aims of the United Irishmen he laments in ‘Arbour Hill’.

  Encounters between dominant and subaltern political formations were not always bitter in character, and one historical moment of great pathos is recorded here: Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin is represented both by translations of his glitteringly musical poems and by the original of the rough-hewn ballad in English which he formally offered to Admiral George Rodney after the Battle of Les Saintes in the Caribbean in 1782, when this last of the great lyric poets in Irish was a common sailor in the British navy. Thomas Dermody’s eccentric ‘Odaic Epistle’ in Scots to Robert Burns similarly crosses identity boundaries. Dermody was not a Presbyterian radical from Ulster, as his poem’s language and sentiment might suggest, but a schoolmaster’s son from Ennis in County Clare in Munster. He ran away to Dublin at the age of ten, published his first collection of poems four years later, won fame with his second at seventeen and spent most of the rest of his short life in alcoholic dissipation.

  Two long works on agrarian themes dominate the closing pages of section III. The Deserted Village (1770) achieved wide popularity in Ireland. Though the poem explicitly mentions ‘England’s’ rather than Ireland’s ‘griefs’ (and contains a description of a decisively English rural tavern), many readers have been eager to agree with Goldsmith’s sister Mrs Hodson, who identified Lissoy in County Westmeath, where the poet spent his childhood, as the model for the village of the title. Some of the details, certainly, seem to relate to the author’s homeland. The ‘wretched matron’ who serves as ‘sad historian of the pensive plain’ has much in common with the cailleach figure of Gaelic poetry and mythology (the sovereignty goddess in her more melancholy aspect) and there are strong Irish resonances to the emigration scene of the closing verse paragraph. If the speaker’s desire ‘Here to return – and die at home at last’ is read in terms of Goldsmith’s biography, then ‘home’ becomes a reference to the Irish midlands. (Critics generally assume that the farewell to poetry which follows the emigration scene features Goldsmith writing in propria persona.) It might be objected that the characteristic Augustan universalizing tendency informing The Deserted Village robs arguments about the poem’s setting of much of their relevance and renders redundant speculations about its possible citations of particular English and Irish instances of rural degeneration, clearance and ‘improvement’. A counter-objection might say that Goldsmith uses the universalizing mode as a cloak that allows him to smuggle Irish concerns into an acceptably metropolitan and ‘English’ literary performance.

  As noted above, The Deserted Village influenced the other long work in section III. The Midnight Court’s ambiguous relationship to Gaelic literary precedent has generated much comment, but one question has baffled critics. The huge expansion in population that would eventually set the scene for the Great Famine of the 1840s was already developing apace in Munster in the 1770s, not least in Brian Merriman’s native county of Clare. Why then does The Midnight Court, composed in 1780, complain of rural depopulation? We know that the poet won prizes for his flax at the Royal Dublin Society in 1797 and that he made his living in his later years as a teacher of mathematics in Limerick: clearly he moved with competence between the two main linguistic cultures of the south of Ireland; it is inconceivable that such a bilingual intellectual was ignorant of the most popular English-language poem in Ireland at the time, so the simple answer to this question is probably ‘because The Deserted Village does so’.

  Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,

  Where wealth accumulates and men decay

  wrote Goldsmith. Merriman’s townland (rather than village) is deserted because wealth accumulates and women decay, their charms unappreciated and their reproductive faculties ignored by men interested only in economic advancement.

  Stylistically, The Midnight Court marks a vernacular departure in Gaelic poetry that might have served as the foundation of an entirely new literature had not political and economic circumstances conspired to bring Irish near to extinction in the nineteenth century. The plenitude, slanginess and gargantuan inventiveness of Merriman’s vocabulary constitute his most signal contribution to Gaelic poetic method, and it is extremely difficult to communicate in English this aspect of his achievement. Four separate translations have been drawn upon for the full text presented here, each highlighting a different facet of the immensely rich source. Ciaran Carson catches the exuberance and outrageousness of Merriman’s mode of address, while Seamus Heaney honours the poem’s thumping assonantal drive and rootedness in living speech. The matter-of-fact approach of The Midnight Court to love and marriage is most effectively conveyed by Thomas Kinsella’s version. Frank O’Connor taps more traditionally English and canonical lexical resources to emphasize the Augustan qualities of a poem that to a degree (particularly in the aisling parody of the opening) shares a mock mode with Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and such later British poems as ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, and displays an unusual Gaelic partiality for rhyming couplets.

  Manuscript references to vernacular songs occur throughout the bardic period, but as these works belonged to oral rather than literary culture they have perished, along with many popular poems and verses by women that also receive mention. If Columbanus wrote the Latin hymn to the Trinity preserved in the Antiphonary of Bangor during his time at that monastery, then this formally daring and theologically subtle work may be the oldest text not only in section IV but in this anthology. (The saint left Bangor c.589 for his mission to the continent; ‘Rowing Song’ seems to have been composed just over two decades later, as he made his way with his companions up the Rhine from Coblenz to Mainz on their journey towards the territory of the Alamannians.) The ‘Hymn’ was probably designed for use in the Easter liturgy – at any rate it is notable for the thoroughness with which it interstitches an imagery of darkness overpowered by light into its account of the chronology and meaning of the life of Christ.

  The oldest vernacular piece in section IV is the only slightly later and still widely sung ‘Be Thou My Vision’, attributed to Dallán Forgaill, the reputedly study-blinded author of section I’s lament for Colum Cille. The earliest secular song in the book, ‘Donal Óg’, is at least a thousand years younger, going back no further than the seventeenth century. Many of the Gaelic folksongs have a melancholy aspect, characteristically reinforced by the slow airs to which they are sung. ‘From the Cold Sod that’s o’er You’ is unusual among them in its connection to international balladry (it can be seen as a variant of Child Ballad No. 78, ‘The Unquiet Grave’).

  Otherwise, popular song in Irish developed in a somewhat insulated environment where theme is concerned. There is much comment, direct and indirect, on the calamitous politics of the period: the forest clearances that followed the triumph of William of Orange (1650–1702) are defiantly mourned in ‘Shaun O’Dwyer of the Glen’, while the Jacobite defeat of 1691 and its dispiriting aftermath are observed from ground level in ‘Patrick Sarsfield, Lord Lucan’. Tomás Ó Flannghaile’s seventeenth-century ‘The County of Mayo’ (exquisitely rendered in George Fox’s 1834 translation) provides an early, unsurpassed treatment of the pains of emigration that would form a dominant motif in the experience of the Irish masses for three hundred years after Ó Flannghaile’s time. The tender benediction ‘Shule Aroon’ – listed under the ‘English’ heading and given in a macaronic version that reveals a song in transition from the older language to the younger – is voiced by a girl on the brink of becoming camp follower of a recruit to the French military (Irishmen were allowed
by the British authorities to join the armies of the European Catholic powers throughout most of the first half of the eighteenth century).

  While the Gaelic love songs in general are characterized by a combination of emotional frankness with a stark dignity of utterance, they can also be playful: gently so in the exchange between Seán Ó Neachtain and Úna Ní Bhroin; more rambunctiously in Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin’s rakish dialogue ‘The Volatile Kerryman’. (The celebrated composer Seán Ó Riada’s translation puns on the adjective in the Irish title ‘An Ciarraíoch Mallaithe’ by rendering it homophonically as ‘volatile’ rather than literally as ‘accursed’ or, in this context, ‘incorrigible’.) Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna’s address to a bittern dead of thirst beside a frozen lake is playful in another way, blending pathos with slyness by deploying sympathy for the unfortunate bird in defence of the drinking that earned the poet both his complexion and his nickname (‘bu í’ is Irish for ‘yellow’). The two harp songs by Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin, whose legendary skills as a composer and competence as an instrumentalist made him welcome in many of the ‘big’ houses of the Anglo-Irish, show Gaelic song in its more formal aspect.

  The authored texts presented at the head of the English group are literary in character, perhaps to the point of politeness, although Nahum Tate’s ‘While Shepherds Watched’ enjoys continuing currency as a Christmas carol. Most of the anonymous songs, like folksongs everywhere, give the point of view of the powerless. The oldest among them, ‘The Boyne Water’, is something of an exception in its raucous triumphalism. ‘My Love is Like the Sun’, doctored and de-Hibernicized by Burns (who removed the reference to the Curragh in County Kildare), has the distinction of being one of a tiny handful of traditional pieces disimproved by the great Scottish poet. (‘My Love is Like the Sun’ comes from a later point in the eighteenth century than ‘Shule Aroon’: the young woman’s lover joins the British army.) The Jacobite ‘The Blackbird’ has obvious affinities with the aisling, while ‘The Irish Phœnix’ can be seen as a degraded, depoliticized exercise in the latter form, albeit one redeemed by the extravagant vigour of its language. The comic fatalism and lively Dublin street slang of ‘The Night before Larry was Stretched’ expresses the outlook of the urban poor – a class rarely represented in Irish poetry. (The expert versification of the piece may suggest genteel authorship, however.) ‘Willy Reilly’ – a tale of love triumphing over class and sectarian obstacles at their most extreme – draws on actual events and was widely popular in the northern counties of Ireland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.