The
Context and Development of Irish Literature:
History, Poetry, Landscape
Chapter
Three: Revolution, Emancipation, Starvation, page 3
During this time Irish poetry shifts from a largely oral to
a largely written tradition--a poetic transformation that is
inextricable from the political and social changes we have
just examined. Two of the greatest Irish poems come from
the mid-18th century: Eibhlin Ni Chonaill’s
"Lament for Art O’Leary" and Brian Merriman’s
"The Midnight Court"(Irish Verse
pp.218-247). One scholar has said of the
"Lament" that "there is no greater love poem in
Irish." The subject, Art O’Leary, was from the
southwest of Ireland, the countryside, and was a dashing,
heroic figure who had served in the Hungarian military. O’Leary
defeated the High Sheriff of Cork in a horse race, and the
Sheriff then offered O’Leary 5 pounds for his horse--for
under the Penal Laws, a Catholic could not own a horse of
greater value than 5 pounds. O’Leary refused and went
on the run, and eventually was shot down.
According to legend, O’Leary’s horse, drenched in his
blood, galloped back to his wife; she rode it back to her
husband’s body, where she drank of his blood and began her lament.
The lament is one of the great elements in Irish literature,
usually taking the form of the caoineadh, the keen:
a song for the dead, usually sung by women, usually at the
wake. Here the keen takes 3 parts: the salutation
(the keener calls upon the deceased with affection), the keen
(the singer praises the deceased in several verses), and the cry
(the entire company joins in a wordless cry of grief). This
tradition survives from the funeral rites of the pagan heroic
tradition, a largely oral tradition, generally frowned upon by
the Church (and here we see again the continued tension
between the orthodox and the pagan).
Note in this poem the language--even in the English
translation, we can see that the language is clear, direct,
plain, with none of the high formality of the English
tradition in the 16th & 17th
centuries. We see here the crucial lack of the
influence of the Renaissance in Irish poetry. This
pan-European phenomenon was largely unfelt in native Irish
culture, a fact of great importance. This is therefore
not a courtly poetry derived from the models of Petrarch,
Spenser, and Sidney; it is a "people’s poetry,"
concerned with life and death, love and children, the land,
and justice. We can also think of this as poetry as "heroic
history," a kind of mythography or myth-writing, offering
an alternative history to the official history being written
by the British conquerors. This actually goes back to
the original tradition of the Irish bards, who were as much
historians as they were poets--or rather, they saw no
difference between the making of history and the making of
poetry.
"The Midnight Court" is a very different kind of
poem, an outrageously comic poem, complaining of the
frustrations of the Irish women and their inability to find a
worthy man in the Ireland of the late 1700's. Though the
political critique of "Art O’Leary" is not as
plain here, nevertheless the idea that the colonial situation
has stripped Ireland of its manhood and harmed the fertility
of the land and its people is a powerful complaint against the
injustice of the British. We see in these two poems both
the tragic and the comic responses to British rule. The
Irish modernists would take up both strains in their work.
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