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