Famous Poets Hung in Killarney

 

Piaras Feiritear was a nobleman and Irish poet about whom folktales were still told in the early 20th century on the Dingle peninsula, He took an active part in the wars against the English in the 1640s-1650s (Cromwellian War), and is believed to have hidden in a cave on the Great Blasket Island for a time. He was eventually taken prisoner and hung in Killarney. Luckily there were no tourists there at the time.

Many of his poems survive, and though there is no recent edition (that I know of), a collection was published in 1903--Danta Phiarais Fheiriteir, edited by Dineen. It's available as a pdf file through Internet Archive. (The Archive has lots of older Irish and Gaelic books--more Gaelic than Irish, thanks to the National Library of Scotland.)

Leig Diot t’Airm

 

Put down your weapons, lovely woman, 

Unless you mean to wound all men; 

Unless you put those weapons down, 

I will have to bring the law against you.

If you mean to give up your weapons,

hide from now on your twisting hair

Do not show your white throat

 from which no man at all escapes. 

 If you yourself think, oh woman

 that you’ve slain no one, south or north, 

 your quiet eyes’ glance has slain every man, 

though you’ve no knife or axe. 

 Though you think your knee is blunt 

 and though you think your hand is soft,

 they have wounded all who’ve seen them; 

 you’ve no need of shield and spear. 

 Hide your chest white as lime from me, 

 do not allow your bright side be seen;

 for the love of Christ, let no one see

 your bright breast like the flower of the grove. 

 Hide from me your piercing eyes,

 if you want to escape, despite all they’ve killed; 

 for the love of your soul, close your mouth, 

 let no one see your bright teeth. 

 If you are content with all you’ve wounded, 

 woman who has so overthrown me now,

 put down those arms of yours;

 before I myself am put under the ground.

-Piaras Feiritear, (?-1653)

Below is a picture of what remains of his castle. It's quite a bit larger when you're close to it.

Below is a recording of a bit of Una Bhan (Fair-haired Una), a well-known love song from the same era. The author and his love lived in County Roscommon, though the O Coisdealbha (Costello) family were traditionally associated with neighboring east Mayo.  If I remember correctly, the author, Tomas Laidir O Coisdealbha, member of a displaced noble family, also fought against the English.

A poem to a harp, performed as these poems might have been then. The text is in Irish Bardic poetry (Bergin) with translation. It is a great poem,

"You that lures the bird from the flock; that cools the heart; brown, sweet-speaking speckled one, fervent, wondrous, passionate...You favorite of the learned, restless smooth one, sweetly musical; red star over elfmounds, breast-jewel of the High Kings...."

Another poem of the same type as Feriter's poem. The original is also in Danta Gradha, edited by Tomas O Rathaile.

Don’t be tormenting me now, woman;

let us place our wishes together; 

you to be my wife in Clár na bhFionn;  (ie. Ireland)

let us put our arms around one another. 

 Put your mouth, the color of strawberries, 

to my mouth, oh skin like foam;

stretch out your curving white limbs around me, 

over all our quarrels. 

Do not any longer, fair slender one,

be distant or untrue to me. 

Admit me to your bed, soft slender one;

let us stretch out next to one another. 

 Just as I have abandoned, oh smooth side, 

 every other woman in Ireland for your sake, 

 so should you abandon every other man,

 if this is something you are able to do. 

Just as I have given to your white teeth love 

that cannot be measured, 

just so is it proper to give to me
your affection in the same measure.

The cover.

Unfortunately, there was never any Cuid II. O Rathaile produced some great anthologies (Burduin Bheaga; Dainfhocail; Measgra Danta; one of proverbs from an O Longain manuscript), but it sounds like he was a very 'difficult' man.

Children of the Great Blasket Island, probably 1910 -1925.

There are still not many videos of medieval Irish or Gaelic songs or poetry, though I complained of the fact all of two months ago. Here is a modern recording of a song Fraoch a Ronaigh (Heather from Ronay) that is basically a list of places on the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. It's  a love song, but to a place.

The group Mouth Music produced a brilliant first recording combining Scottish Gaelic songs and electronic dance music years ago, and there is little has ever come close to it.

And by the way, yes, this is a frivolous stop-gap of a blog post, awaiting time to produce another more ponderous, weighty and incoherent. 

I intend to change the blog to Irish language soon. The thing was originally meant to stimulate the interest in the terrible beauty of the Irish language tradition, the interest of those on little Irish. I suppose, however, there are only so many times one can essentially say the same thing, without becoming repetitive. 

What Happened?

The writer Brendan Behan  said somewhere that an Irishman would crawl across a room of naked women to reach a pint of beer, and the Irish are often considered the least sensual people in Europe, at least. There was a little book available a few years ago; "Great Irish Erotic Literature." When you opened it, the pages were blank. Someone described sexual foreplay in Ireland as 'drinking.'

Things are changing of course, though whether the contemporary commodification and consumption of  sex and sensuality marks a real change is up for debate. So is it the genes? The climate?

In fact, Irish puritanism only goes back to the 19th century.

Richard Stanyhurst was a 16th-century colonial Englishman resident in Dublin. He described the Irish then as "Religious, frank, amorous...many sorcerers...The lewder (ie. common) sorts, both clerks and laymen, are sensual and over-loose in living."
Father William Good, an English Jesuit sent to Ireland in the 1560s, wrote; "And to speak in general of them all...this nation is strong in body and passing (ie. quite) nimble...for wit, quick...given to fleshly lust; kind and courteous to strangers; constant in love; in enmity implacable, and...in all affections most vehement and passionate."

Foreign observers right through the 19th century in the West commented on people's easy affectionate physicality. Mostly the observers were men, so they were talking about women. The problem, as far as a lot of the observers were concerned, was that the women would embrace and kiss unselfconsciously--which the observers weren't used to in their own society--and joke sexually, but they would not sleep with them, which was perplexing.

Love poems and songs in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and to a lesser extent, Breton, are distinguished by, among other things, a tender clear-eyed passion that is in love forever with the colors, sounds, textures and creatures of this world; with all the invincible fugitive compounds of nature doomed to one day fade and disappear. 'This is our life, our world,' the poems say; 'This flowering tree, this clump of rushes, this dear face. If we bring to these things the love and attention which they silently ask of us always, ten they'll reveal to us their hearts, which are, in themselves, the heart of being.'

The songs offer a clear attentive appreciation of the beauty of man and woman. There are no startling revelations of the absolute; no abstractions; no hysteric choirs of angels bowing before "Love". There are nothing but some very real flowers growing beside the road, caught for a moment by passing light. Nothing except some very real men and women, pausing for a moment in the dance of love to turn to speak to us. I challenge anyone to read the poems I've translated and then say that the Irish were frigid anti-body puritans.

So was the accusation a baseless slander put out by the evil Saxon conqueror? A gag the Irish played on the rest of the world?

Unfortunately not; in the late 18th and 19th centuries, physical survival meant access to a farm to be rented from a (usually English) landlord whose main concern was maximizing profit. All other concerns Irish country people might have had were sublimated to the attainment and maintenance of respectability, wealth, status...and food. Men often had to wait to marry until their father was ready to give up the farm, which meant late marriage. Marriage was itself often a cold-eyed business arrangement between heads of households whose main goal was to maintain or increase their family standing and wealth. Anyone screwing around would simply not get a husband (or wife.). Anyone who  did not succeed in the deadly competition for access to rented land did not leave long-lived descendents or any descendents. The main unifying social organization was the Catholic Church which was going through a long long phase of rigid Jansenism and puritanism that considered the world--and women, in particular, except as suffering mothers--as dirty and evil.

In the meantime, please consider the poems made available in this blog as evidence that things were not always that way.

There's 'sensuality' and there's 'sensuality.' though. You'll find an easy acceptance of sex and of the body in traditional Irish (Gaelic) literature, but no "Fifty Shades of Gray". But then there are no Irish (Gaelic) works entirely focused on the pleasures of eating, say, or jogging either.

And Irish dancing wasn't actually like that either, until the late 19th century. Old style (Sean-nos) dancing only survived in out of the way places until the 1990s, but now it's back and that's an excuse for this video of a group from Abbeyknockmoy parish, my mother's mother's parish, in an All-Ireland talent contest. The dancing starts at about 2:00 minutes, and ends at about 4:30. Never mind the rest after that--fools talking away.

My wife says they look like dancing monkeys, but being from Kerry, she would, wouldn't she?

Tá Buige is Gile

Your body: soft, shining, fair and cool.
Your eyes; passionate, hesitant, joyful, flashing .
Your hair; heavy, twisting, thick-layered, waving.
You’ve bereft me, you’ve thrown me, you’ve left me without sleep tonight.

Original

Tà buige a's gile a's finne a's fuaire i'd chorp;
Mìre a's moille a's gluaise gan ghruaim i'd rosg;
Truime a's cuime a's cuise a's cuan i'd fholt

Do chuiris, do mhilleas, do bhuinis de'm shuan mè anocht.

(Synthetic "Munster" verb endings--- 'Chuiris' - 'You put,' etc. It's amhran, so look out for the for those vowel patterns.)

(Original text is in: Burduin Bheaga, ed. byThomas F. o"Rahilly, Browne and Nolan, Dublin, 1925.


The author of the Middle Irish poem below playfully protests his innocence in the matter of Gormfhlaith in such a way as to leave little doubt that she and he are in fact very well acquainted.

I translate from the original in Three Middle Irish Poems, ed. by Brian O Cuiv, Eigse, vol. 16(??).

Cinaed, Cá Cin Ro buí Dúinn?

Cinaed, what crime have I been charged with
that I should be banished from the land of Niall?

For I’d never do with anything with a beautiful woman
that I wouldn’t do with my own wife....

 A gray-haired man accused me and his wife--
may God not reward him!
Indeed, I’m not likely to climb under the covers,
until a cat would drink new milk;

Until a deer would leap over a tall fence,
until a salmon would leap up in the stream,
until a woman would engage in magic practices,
until ale would be drunk out of a silver cup.

Even if she were to allow me,
I wouldn’t do it, despite her husband,
until a herd would follow the boar,
until a bear (?) would take a drink of honey.

It's a miserly cause for which I’ve been accused
of lying down with generous Gormfhlaith of Ath da Rinn,
if it's only because of the movement of her two thighs,
while I lay with my right hand under her head.

Or because we were seen together
on the green-surfaced grassy earth:
because her lips were seen on my lips,

that’s a miserly reason for making talk.

It wasn’t proper for gentle Cinaed,
just because she and I shared a drink--even though it was mead--
to accuse me, who’s free of wrong and of crime,
of lying with the king’s daughter of the fringed clothing.

           Another short poem:

 Duibhe id Mhailghibh

Your eyebrows are black, your cheeks are embers,
your eyes are blue, your hair is so smooth,
the wind is caressing your flowing hair;
all the women at the fair are noticing you.

A wife who would never admit to watching you,
is in front of you there, plaiting her hair;
her fingers make a space through the wave of her hair

of a woman who’s watching and looking at you.

Translated from Nua-Dhuanaire, Cuid I.



And lest you think I'm advocating sex, remember:

Is iongna an toisg a's an cor ina bhfuilim i bpein;
Mo thuiscint o'm thoil, 's mo thoil ag druidim o'm cheill;
Ni thuigtear do'm thoil gach locht do'm thuisgint is leir.
s ma thuigtear, ni toil lei ach toil a tuisgeana fein.


It's a wonder, the reason and situation in which I am in pain;
My understanding galloping away from my desire, and my desire from my intelligence;
My desire does not see each fault that to my understanding is clear,
but if it sees, it desires nothing but the desire of its own understanding.

I know, but it makes more sense in Irish....My 'translation' tries to be fairly literal in order to guide you in your own translation

(For 500 extra points, identify the vowel pattern in this amhran stanza. A hint, the first vowel is the 'i' of iongna, tuiscint, tuigtear and tuigtear, and the last is the 'ei' of pein (dative of pian), ceill (dative of ciall), leir and fein.)

Woodland Nationalism

 

 George Campbell Hay’s poetry which was discussed in the last post -- Stories, and a Few Bottles of Wine -- is characterized by the terse lyric precision of bardic poetry. He is not a difficult poet to appreciate, but it is difficult for us today, who are not of that culture, to appreciate bardic poetry.

 

Partly that is a function of what happened to be written down of it, and thus preserved. The poetry was oral, and unless someone had a strong reason to write it down, they didn’t. That means that the family poembooks that preserve formal praise poems to lordly families like the Maguires, Magaurans, O’Haras, etc., are our most important source…Along, of course, with the early 17^th century Book of O’Conor Donn, and the O’Gara manuscript that preserve a similar body of work. There is a wider variety of poems in these last two, and the compilers’ and poets’ focus, in that time of shipwreck and apocalypse, is somewhat different. It's all still very different from what we are used to today as “poetry”, though.

 It’s only in the very incompletely-documented less formal poetry that the virtues of bardic poetry are obvious: in what are now defined as “Na Dànta Grà” , and in the more individual poetry of the early 17^th century, like O Bruadair, Haicèad, Ceitinn, etc – people who had received some traditional bardic learning, but who were not “bards.” Great stuff! ( Filìocht Phàidraigìn Haicèad, edited by Nì Cheallachàin, An Chlòchomhar, 1962, is a good representative introduction to that.)

 

The love poems are very approachable, but the poetry of O Bruadair and the rest is seriously under-appreciated, probably because it is challenging today. It requires a serious knowledge of the language, and a willingness to appreciate a more formal approach to poetic expression than that which we are generally used to. It was composed by members of a society that was fighting for its life, so it is serious and intense – similar, for example, to the best poetry of representatives of modern European “liberal” literary society who were thrown personally into the maelstrom of WWII: Miklos Radnoti, and so on, and so it is often angry.

 That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though.

 

Áine Ní Fhoghludha (1880 – 1932) was a writer, musician and painter from An Rinn, near Dungarvan in county Waterford, active in the Irish cultural movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. She died relatively young, possibly due to the long-term effect on her health of many long bicycle journeys in the cold and rain as a messenger for the then underground Sinn Fèin.

 

Her one book of poems, Idir Na Fleadhanna, (1922, 1930), like George Campbell Hay, combines a sure sense of the older Late Medieval/early 17th Century bardic poetry, with modern influences, though she also uses amhràn metre, and her poems are short lyrics, for the most part, generally slighter than Hay’s work. They do have the same “bardic” direct perception and expression that O Fiannachta pointed out also characterizes Tomàs O Criomhthàin’s prose. He compared that prose to early Irish “nature” poetry, in its starkly-perceptive lyricism, and while it would be a stretch to see that in these poems, they have a similar sort of virtue.

 

Tiobraid Arann, mòr a chlù:

Comhla dùin ghil Eireann gle.

Tobar fìorghlan gaile is gnìomh,

Tearc a lìon, cè mòr a bheadh.

 

Faith na fèile, suainlios niadh,

Clàr an bhidh don laoch ar fàn,

Gleannta meala meas is cnò,

Dìdean cròdha rug craobh ò chàc!

 

(She was in Tipperary during the war of independence (Cashel, Fethard), while her husband was in prison for political activities.)

 Some of the cultural activists of the turn of the 20^th century made careers for themselves in the new Irish government and the cultural apparatus that it fostered, but even many of those that did seemed a bit lost in the new world that was actually mostly a return to the big farmer/shopkeeper society of pre-Revival Ireland, now running a national government. Nì Fhoghludha never quite found a secure place in the new world, though her husband became a policeman.(You can read more in the online entry on Aimn.ie.)

 

Rinn O Gcuanach àrus sìth,

Dùthaigh aoibhinn Gaedheal gan càim,

Riamh thug cùl le siosma an tsaoighil,

‘S tug a chluais le ceolta tràgha,

 

Ucht na mara adhairt a cinn,

Sonasach a luighe annsùd—

Scàil na slèibhte ar a beinn,

‘S cèad-ghà grèine ar a cùl.

 

(Two of five verses)

 

O Bruadair speaks to us from a perspective and a world that are now almost inconceivable to most of us, and so does Nì Fhoghludha. She grew up in a time when life and love were going to remake Ireland, and Irish was then the key to this bright new world, instead of the pointless irrelevancy it is considered today…and is, really.

The Revival (1885? – 1920?) had came about because some people noticed that a whole rich fascinating world existed in Ireland; one that the mainstream culture of money, respectability and Empire did not recognize. This other world spoke of the reality of Ireland, and reality of life altogether, in ways that the mainstream did not. It offered insights, pleasures and meanings that the mainstream culture did not.

 The Revival was an attempt to learn a new world; to make a new world.

 People learned Irish then in order  to explore that other world, and in order to become better and more intensely alive people. Each issue of the Gaelic Journal, each new book of folktales or of ancient texts, carried a cargo of treasures—jewels possessing the power to help these explorers in a journey of social, cultural and self-discovery. It was a quiet revolution, and it must have been an exciting time, for some, to be alive.

 Nationalists?

There are several kinds of nationalism. Gaelic League/Revival nationalism was, at heart, a love of the specifics of Ireland: literature, song, land, and people. Not “people” like some eternal “Irish people” who were better than others and had a special destiny, but “people” like a collection of individual persons. Like the Slavic “matica” scholarship of the late 19^th century, it was an attempt to reconnect to the reality of place, and the “folk” tradition.

 That is very different from flag-waving nationalism “We-are-the-best-and screw-the -rest-of-you:” of “gloire” and the armies of the nation sweeping across Europe; of “You-are-not-me-and-you-are-therefore-vermin-and-I-will-kill-you.”

Yes, the Revival failed, and the faded pamphlets are today embarrassing or merely quaint. The new Anglo-Irish mercantile society was too firmly entrenched in most communities, and it had no time for starry-eyed romanticism, and certainly not for Hyde and the others’ clear-eyed analysis of what would come if Irish society would admit no values but those of the bank ledger and the Sunday pulpit. Pearse and some others judged that without a bolt of lightening to split the heavy pall and gloom of “normality.” the Revival was doomed. We can’t know if he was right or wrong – we were not there – but it is easier to shoot a gun than to think, and the Easter Rising eventually led to war with Britain, and the whole thing turned into a violent struggle for power. People who have a dream of a better world rarely come out on top, in that sort of thing, and the merchants and county councilors were the final victors.

Dà dTiocfá liom Cois Coille (If You’ll Come with Me to the Wood)

 

            If you’ll come with me, love, to the wood,

            if you’ll come with me when the dew is falling,

            I’ll set out for you, in sweet exposition,

            tunes of music that you never have heard before,

                                    if you’ll come with me to the wood.

 

            If you’ll come with me to the borders of the wood,

            when the world’s asleep and the sky is tremulous,

            when there’s no sound anywhere to be heard,

            I’ll tell you my secret, lad,

                                    while we are in the midst of the wood.

                                                                                               

 Irish woodlands did not generally fare any better than light and love in the new Ireland.

 If you are interested, accurate information on Irish woods, ancient and modern, can be found most usefully in Kenneth Nichol's paper Woodland Cover in Pre-Modern Ireland, published in the book Gaelic Ireland c1250-c 1650; Land, Lordship and Settlement, edited by Patrick J. Duffy, David Edwards and Elizabeth FitzPatrick, Four Courts Press, Dublin. Nichols knows 16th and 17th century documents better than anyone alive.

 The Potential Natural Vegetation of Ireland (J.R. Cross), Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (Biology and Environment); Vol 106B, No 2 , 65-116, 2006 is also very informative, and is on-line.

(Garryland, Gort)

 The Irish government sponsored a series of field surveys of old woods that were partly published on-line. This, the National Survey of Native Woodlands 2003-2008, was exhaustive, and ranks individual woods as regards their importance, based on richness of the flora, presence of species indicating an ancient wood, size, etc. Important woods do not include Killarney, which is not particularly rich in species, and also stripped pretty bare these days by red deer and sheep.

 IWM46-ALEW.pdf (botanicalenvironmental.com)

 Woods with very high scores include Dromore in Clare (ash/hazel); Glengarrif, Cork (oak), and the Gearagh, Cork (wet woods); Garryland, Gortnacarnaun and Derryclare, Galway (between Coole and Slieve Aughty);  St. John's Wood in Roscommon; Charleville Wood, Tullamore, Offaly (now partially felled for a road); Ardnamona, Donegal; Ballyseedy near Tralee in Kerry; Curraghchase in Limerick (near Askeaton and being slowly poisoned by industrial pollution); Lismore Woods, Waterford; Aughnaglanny valley in Tipperary (Slievefelim mountains); and Brackloon in Mayo.

(Charleville, Tullamore)

Here is to life and to love; to Aine Ni Fhoghludha and Torna and Garryland and the rest!