I mentioned last week that an Irish/Scots Gaelic king or lord had serious obligations to his people and was expected to be absolutely just and therefore to maintain the harmony of the human with the natural and supernatural worlds.
Power and glory are always a temptation, though, and particularly in periods when the structure of existence seemed shaky (the Norse invasions and aftermath that – like in England – destroyed some kingdoms and thus encouraged the expansion of others: then the rebound from the Anglo-Norman invasions), some men decided to just go for it, to hell with tradition.
Most of the time, though, the structures of daily life and of society made it easier to do the right thing. And, of course, some poet might always appear to tell you that you were screwing up. It wasn’t just the poet: behind him was the whole power of the forces of nature and “supernature”, and his satire would not only make people snicker at you, but it would also symbolically withdraw the mandate of heaven, and all kinds of bad things would happen to you and your people.
It’s easier to be good when “good” is normal and expected.
The Tudor and Stuart dynasty English who conquered and colonized Ireland in the late 16th and 17th centuries didn’t care about any of that. Their society assumed you could be a rapacious bastard all your life, and as long as you were of the right religion and paid dues to the authorities, you’d be fine. You could always repent on your death bed, but it sure looked like might made right: the guys who killed and plundered got very rich.
Anyway, Ireland was there for Englishman to get rich. The people were barbarians and followed the wrong religion and didn’t matter, so you could do things there you couldn’t get away with in England, then go home one day and enjoy life. Or you could grab lands and live like a lord in Ireland while the Teigs did all the work.
The Irish didn’t see it that way.
They saw big armies with cannon and big horses. They saw men who did not observe the rules and thought it was fine to destroy crops and starve people, slaughter prisoners and women and children, lie, go back on an oath, swindle, assassinate…that kind of thing. They saw those guys win again and again and take your lands. No harm done, though: if you were harmless and inoffensive and lucky, they would allow you to use some land at a high rent.
The Irish saw the end of the world.
The same thing has happened often in other times and places, and no one knows, but the Irish could write,
Aogán O Raithile from east of Killarney was rediscovered in the Irish Revival of the 1890s etc. and he is worth rediscovering. He was born about 1670 and, except for an O Dálaigh family that stayed pretty quiet in the backcountry nearby, the bardic schools were gone, so he did not possess the kind of learning that slightly earlier poets like O Bruadair, O Donncha an Ghleanna, etc. did. This makes him more accessible to us, in a way, because he speaks plainly, not in a traditional idiom.
He was more or less a refugee for most of his life, taking shelter wherever he could find a surviving Irish noble family that still had land. (Mostly they were Mac Carthaigh or de Brún of the old lords of his area.) His poems are those of a man pushed to the edge and dealing with ruin and evil, and they do not mince words.
There was hope, to begin, that the Stuart kings would return to England and right what had been done in Ireland, and his vision poems see the Otherworld Queens returning to the land with good tidings:
Maidean sul smaoin Titan a chosa do luaill
Ar mhullach cnoic aoird aoibhinn do lodamar suas,
Tarraster linn scaoth bhruinneasll soilbhir suairc-
Gasra bhí i Sídh Seanaibh solas-bhrugh thuaidh.
Fearastar scím driaíochta nár doracha snua
Ó Ghaillimh na líog-gheal go Corcaigh na gcuan;
Barra gach crainn síor-chuireas toradh agus cnuas,
Meas daire ar gach coill, fír-mhil ar clochaibh go buan…
Oner morning before the Sun even thought to stir his feet,
To the summit of a fine high hill I climbed (literally “we”).
There came to me a band of joyous happy maidens:
A band from the resplendent (Fairy) palace north there, Shee (Shanid?).
A druid cloud spread over all, of no dark appearance,
From Galway of shining stones to Cork with its bays:
The top of every tree put forth fruit and nuts,
A crop of acorns in each oak wood, true honey on every stone,,,
But by was clear by 1729 that darkness was not to lift.
From a lament for a last Irish lord:
Cabhair ní ghairfead go gcuirthear mé i gcruinn-chomhraiinn,
Dar an leabhar, dá ngairfinn, níor ghaire-de an ní dhomh-sa:
Ár gceodhnasch uile, glac-chumasdach shíl Eoghainn,
Is tóllta a chuisle ‘gus d’imigh a bhrí ar feochaidh…
Mo ghlam is minic, is sílimse síordheora,
Is trom mo thubaist ‘s is duine mé ar míchothrom,
Fonn ní thigeann im ghaire ‘s mé ag caoi ar bhóithre
Ach foghar na Muice nach gontar le saigheadóireacht.
Stadfadsa feasta – is gar dom éag gan mhoill
Ó treascaradh dragain Leamhain, Léin is Laoi:
Rachasd ‘na bhfasc le searc na laoch do chill,
Na flatha fá raibh mu shean roimh éag do Chríost.
I will not cry out for help until I’m put in a narrow coffin,
And by the Book, though I called, it would be no nearer to me.
Our whole support, a skilled hand of the seed of Eoghain,
His veins holed now, and all his might decaying.
It’s often I cry out in pain and tears come always,
Heavy disaster I carry always, a man on uncertain ground,
No music I hear anywhere near as I go down the road lamenting
But only the squeal of the Pig that is not slain by arrows (i.e. death)
I will stop now and forever, for death draws soon near
Since the dragons of (river) Laune, Killarney and Lee are thrown down.
I will go to them in the graveyard, with love for those heroes:
The lords under whom my own ancestors served (as poets) since before Christ died.
Mist and Pigs
Coxie
Aoghán O Raithile expressed his rage at the invaders openly in the poem translated here last week, and his despair.
Another poet, either Aodh Buidhe Mac Cruitín of Clare or Cormac O Luinín of Fermanagh or maybe someone else, took a different road.
A Courtly Poem For Sir R. Cox (O Luinín) was published in Eigse (vol iv, p.284-6), followed in a later issue by the article Sgiathluithreach an Choxaigh by Briain O Cuív (A shield-prayer for Cox). O Cuív pointed out that the poem was not the fawning, adulatory exercise that O’Sullivan described, but instead an slightly-camouflaged series of insults. it’s actually hard to see how O’Sullivan missed that fact, but that he seems to have been a contrary and argumentative person.
Cox (1650 – 1730) himself was a prominent English landlord, soldier and administrator who as Lord Administrator in 1703 passed “the most penal of the penal laws” and wrote a book, Hibernica Anglicana, telling how the brave, clean-living English defeated hordes of savage barbarian Irish and took control of the place in the interests of good administration. He imprisoned Mac Cruitín in Dublin for daring to publish a book in English dissenting from that view.
Do you get the impression he didn’t like the Irish?
He also had power, and anybody who wanted to criticize him could not do it openly.
The poem in question survives in two manuscripts as far as I know: one by historian of noble Irish family)_ Charles O’Connor (Roscommon), and an earlier one by Mac Cruitín now at Maynooth. The text is very similar in both.
The poem starts out more or less normally enough:
A Risteard mhuirnidh na gcreach,
Go maire tú fá oineach:
Nár théidh tú go hifrionn na gceall,
‘s go raibh tú beo again tamull.
A little clumsy in Irish, and, come to think of it, poems of praise don’t usually start by hoping the subject will not go to Hell. The next three quatrains continue to talk about Cox not ending up going to Hell. Yes, a bit odd, but Cox, hearing a translation of them, might just think, “Well, those Irish aren’t much as writers either…”
The poem gets weirder:
May you never be felled in an alehouse brawl
by a four-sided cudgel wielded by a wanderer.
May no unsteady tree ever fall on you:
May your enemies never destroy your coach.
May you never sit on the white mare
A big sore ready to burst on your buttocks.
If ever it happens you have to go out,
May Christ protect you from the diarrhea.
May you never have to box a big burly soldier
And you with an anguished scab on your neck.
May your britches never fall down in battle
And you without button or button-hole to keep them up
when panicked hasty retreat is called.
May you never have a big open sore on your shoulder
From having to carry heavy bundles each and every day.
May you never be observed sweeping the streets,
Oh miserable excuse for a mother’s son.
May you and a hag with a hat, on a winter’s day
Never have to stand all day long at the market cross
Crook mouthed from ear to ear
Shivering while you bawl out ballads for sale.
May you never be a penniless wanderer
Traveling all Ireland, cursed and unlucky forever.
With no food, wit hno clothes, with no possessions,
Begging hopelessly forever for pennies to live.
May no Church minister ever discover you out in the field
Just as you finish screwing your mother.
May you never have to stand before the congregation,
A sinner’s white sheet all around you.
May you never have to fight for your life
And you on the back of a cursed misshapen horse,
Without saddle, without reins, without spurs,
Tortured and bothered with the rain and snow in your face.
while the wind blasts out of the north
Always into your face, never ceasing even for a second,
And you having a tall English hat perched on your head,
Gripping it with desperate fingers lest it fly away.
And then your horse stops all of a sudden, no warning,
Right in the middle of the river ford,
And you in a panic kicking her ribs with your heels
But it’s no good: you have to jump off right there.
It goes on like that for five more verses, four of which are insulting, th last of which could be interpreted as something like praise if you weren’t reading carefully.
The poet never says anything like “You’re a vicious tyrant.” He never criticizes Cox at all, and if called out, he could say (like Good Soldier Schweik) “What? I was just saying I hoped bad things don’t happen to you? What did I do wrong?”
Whoever heard the poem in Irish , though, would always think of Cox in these degrading situations and
might not fear him quite as much. Even if they did, they might smile behind their hands when they saw him ride by.
James Scott wrote a big book Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, Yale, 1985) about his fieldwork in a Malaysian village where he focused on the strategies poor peasants used to deal with big farmers and landlords when any open disagreement or opposition is not tolerated. His point was that silence and apparent agreement do not always imply consent, and poor obsequious peasants are often smarter and more determined than their betters think.
Praise poems are not always about praise, especially when the big people with power know that you are just an Irish fool trying to ingratiate himself with you
Irish? Who Cares?
Irish? Who Cares?
Irish literature is uniquely interesting, the oldest surviving European literature after Greek and Latin, but it is very different from them\. It is a voice from ancient Europe, a voice from beyond the town walls, and a vessel of at least 2500 years of human experience in the island of Ireland, and also in the Highlands of Scotland, because the Highlanders were really just Irish with boats.
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish society underwent a traumatic, extended, violent break with all that had gone before. The social structure that resulted in many areas was an unbalanced, neurotic one; communities of survivors and of people who had watched their neighbors go under. Yes, that was long ago, but the world view and social structures that “long ago: engendered are still with us in a mutated form. In the silence when the power is switched off, ghosts still walk. People learn Irish to reconnect to the main line of the development of Irish culture.
The land in many places still speaks Irish, and I don’t mean place names. Irish land and its “energy” (for lack of a better term) and Irish language have shaped one another, and to know anything really about the place in all its dimensions, one must know Irish and know Irish well. Some people want to reconnect to ‘Eire’ and so learn Irish for that reason.
Because no state or corporation has ever used it, it is unlike most modern standard languages. It is not streamlined, slick and facile, and does not facilitate easy assumptions or consumption. Ads in Irish still seem odd and uncomfortable. It is not a language that has been formed more by face-to-face interactions than by the media.. It has not, until very recently cared much about what went on in offices or in boardrooms.
Some people just like languages, and Irish is a fairly unique one. It developed on the margins and possesses a long written record. It demonstrates fascinating developments in morphology, syntax and phonology, and it’s got palatalized consonants, all those prepositional forms and the weird VSO sentence structure. Some people learn Irish because it’s fascinating.
Traditional spoken Irish is a complex, apparently unnecessary language whose logic is not always superficially visible. It’s a language in which there are deep groves of silent trees still, places into which explorers from Google and Apple Corp may never come. It is a language formed by seasons and weather, by the human mind in face-to-face community, and by the necessities of physical existence. It and other languages like it are part of the Wild, and though Irish cannot offer physical refuge to modern people in our headlong rush to wherever it is we're going, it can offer intellectual, emotional and psychic refuge for a while longer.
But does any of this matter? I mean, is it worth getting all worked up about?
Maybe not. Nothing is permanent. So many people and cultures have already gone without a memory.
On the other hand…Some of us, cursed or blessed, cannot simply turn away, and let Irish and those other things pass away.
Not for its sake, but for our own.
Tá Mé ’mo Shuídhe
I am awake since the moon rose last night,
here kindling the fire restlessly, feeding it desperately.
The folk of the house are all stretched out and I am alone;
the cocks are crowing and all the world’s asleep, but for me.
Tá mé imo shuídhe ó d'éirigh an ghealach aréir,
ag cur teineadh sios, faraor, a's ag fadadh go géar.
Tá bunadh an toighe ina luíghe, a's tá mise liom fhéin,
tá na coiligh ag glaoch a's tá an tír ina gcodladh, ach mé.
Your mouth, your face are my soul’s desire,
your shining blue eyes for which I abandoned pleasure and rest.
In sorrow after you, I can’t see to walk the road,
and, oh, friend of my heart, the mountains stand between you and I.
Learned folk say that love is a mortal sickness:
I didn’t believe them, until it tore my own heart inside.
A desperate disease, it's my sorrow that I didn’t escape it:
it sends a sharp arrow, a hundred arrows through the center of my heart.
I met an elvish woman down at the hollow by the ford:
I asked her was there anything that would loose the fetters of love.
She said quietly, in a gentle fair voice,
“When once it goes into the heart, never, never will it loose its grasp.”
Mist and Pigs
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