Sedulia's Quotations

Owen Roe O'Sullivan: Even the Sassenachs might die

The world laid low, and the wind blew-- like a dust--
Alexander, Caesar, and all their followers.
Tara is grass; and look how it stands with Troy.
And even the English—maybe they might die.

       —Owen Roe O'Sullivan/ Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1748-1784). tr. Thomas Kinsella, with Seán Ó Tuama, from An Duanáire: Poems of the Dispossessed.

From Sedulia: Owen Roe lived at the worst time in history for an Irish poet, when the Penal Laws were killing the ancient way of life and when Catholics had no legal way to make a professional living. He was a brilliant, red-haired, hard-living brawler, called "Owen of the Sweet Mouth" (Eoghan an Bhéil Bhinn) and in Munster I have myself still met Irish speakers who passed down the folk memory of his great charm.

Do threascair an saol is shéid an ghaoth mar smál
Alastrann, Caesar, 's an méid sin a bhí 'na bpáirt;
tá an Teamhair 'na féar, is féach an Traoi mar tá,
is na Sasanaigh féin do b'fhéidir go bhfaighidís bás!

Kerry, Ireland, 1751: "Many of the common people speak Latin"

The gentlemen and inhabitants of this country are all of them remarkable for their hospitality to strangers, generosity and courteous carriage, which characters, should I refuse them, must be attributed to the highest ingratitude ; and lastly, there are few among them but whose breeding and parts, and I might say learning also, are eminently more conspicuous than in many other places in this kingdom; notwithstanding, Ireland may vie in this respect with most of the civilized countries of Europe. It is well known that classical reading extends itself even to a fault among the lower and poorer kind in this country, many of whom, to the taking them off from more useful works, have greater knowledge in this way than some of the better sort.

The common people are extremely hospitable and courteous to strangers. Many of them speak Latin fluently, and I accidentally arrived at a little hut in a very obscure part of this country where I saw some poor lads reading Homer, their master having been a mendicant scholar at an English grammar school at Tralee.

    --Dr. Charles Smith (1715–1762), traveling in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1751. Cited in The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade: Count O'Connell and the Old Irish Life at Home and Abroad, 1745-1833, by Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell, 1892.

Kevin Whelan: I'm bruised inside from the punches I've pulled

                                 Dublin, 3 October 2005

Getting it off my chest

I'm bruised inside
from the
punches I've pulled.

          --Kevin Whelan

From an excerpt of Alan Bennett's diaries published in the London Review of Books, 1 January 2009. Bennett writes, "24th May [2008]. Cleaning out some shelves, I find a note from Kevin Whelan dated Dublin 3 October '05. It's a poem.... I'd have liked to have written that, though I've no idea who Kevin Whelan is."

Possibly this Kevin Whelan? Please let me know.

UPDATE: The correct answer is below! Thanks.

A.E. on the British: If they were only alive they would be the best people in the world

It is really a dead country, but there are very nice people among the dead, and if they were only alive they would be the best people in the world.

   --A.E. [pen name of George William Russell, Anglo-Irish writer] (1867-1935), in a letter to his friend Frank O'Connor from London, quoted by O'Connor in My Father's Son, his autobiography

Frank O'Connor on the two sexes

 
...the two sexes, for ever scouting about one another's encampments and bringing back horrible tales of what went on in them.

    --Irish writer Frank O'Connor [pen name of Michael O'Donovan] (1903-1966) in his autobiography My Father's Son

"McGee, that's a French name."

McGee, that's a French name. I don't know anyone named McGee who doesn't speak French.

       --Cajun musician Dennis McGee (1893-1989), quoted in The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (pub. ) by Shane Bernard.
          I have relatives named McGee (the children in this photo) and it's true-- they are all Cajuns  and speak French.

Love's Old Sweet Song

Once in the dear, dead days beyond recall,
When on the world the mists began to fall
Out of the dreams that rose in happy throng,
Low to our hearts love sang an old sweet song,
And in the dusk where fell the firelight gleam,
Softly it wove itself into our dream...

Just a song at twilight,
When the lights are low;
And the flick'ring shadows,
Softly come and go,
Tho' the heart be weary,
Sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight,
Comes love's old song, Comes love's old sweet song.

Even today we hear love's song of yore,
Deep in our hearts it dwells forevermore,
Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,
Still we can hear it at the close of day.
So 'til the end when life's dim shadows fall,
Love will be found the sweetest song of all....

        --Words by Clifton Bingham (1859-1913); music by James Lynam Molloy (1837-1909). This 1884 song was wildly popular in the late 1800s. Among other places, it features in the Shirley Temple/Lionel Barrymore movie The Little Colonel.

Just B Cuz at flickr found this old photo. "This has the names Flora and Sikes on the back written in pencil. I do not know who took it but it is one of my all time favorite photos, I got it at a flea market. There are so many details of this picture that I love. On the back is written also "Love's Old Sweet Song" . Perfect!"
.

       

Archbishop MacEvilly and the fairies

Wasn't it MacEvilly, the archbishop of Tuam, who wouldn't allow the parish priest of Ballintubber to continue roofing the abbey church for fear of the fairies?

  --Frank O'Connor in Irish Miles (1947), Macmillan, London.

This archbishop, John MacEvilly, was a real person, a brilliant, active, political, and learned man.

The abbey at Ballintubber was founded by King Cathal O'Connor in 1216 and was burned in 1653 by Cromwell's troops. It was finally restored in 1966. Actor Pierce Brosnan was married there.

H.V. Morton: The history of the Anglo-Irish, summarized: the "ghostly other owner"

Great burned Anglo-Irish houses dot the landscape of Ireland. This explains why.

I would go day after day to read among the ruins of the big house beside the road. It was quiet and mysterious. The weeds had made a riot of the garden, but roses still flowered. All I knew about the big house was that at some time during the  "Trouble" the owners were turned out and the place fired by the Irregulars. There was not far from the house, in a shrubbery, the remains of an ancient wall and tower, all that was left of a fortress. The place had evidently been occupied for centuries.

The dead house began to fascinate me. I would prowl about in the ruins looking at the blackened walls and the faded wall-paper, the places where pictures had hung, the staring windows, doors which led nowhere, stairs that ended in mid-air; and I would wonder what kind of people lived there and what they had done to deserve this.

I asked questions about it and bit by bit pieced together its history; and in the story of that piece of land was also the history of Ireland.

When in the year A.D. 1171 Henry II became Ireland's first absentee landlord, he left behind him a Norman baron (Welsh on his mother's side, like so many of the original  invaders) in possession of his estate. The six-foot thick boundary wall in the shrubbery is all that remains of the castle built by this settler.

This Norman family settled down and developed along that line of least resistance which had it not violently conflicted with the ideas of England's rulers might have solved the "Irish Question" centuries ago. In the course of a few generations this family became, to all appearances, Irish. It spoke Irish, intermarried with Irish families, observed the Brehon law, adopted the Irish system of fosterage, and changed its name to-- say-- MacFerris. Such union between the English and the Irish was hateful to Westminster. Such families were known as the "degenerate English." The Statute of Kilkenny was launched against them in 1367, forbidding them on pain of high treason to intermarry with the Irish, speak Irish, or adopt the speech or dress or customs of the Irish. The MacFerris family, however, managed to weather the storms of three centuries, until a bright light of burning in the sky announced the arrival of Cromwell on his war of extermination. Then the MacFerris family was driven into the hills. That was in the year A.D. 1653.

English and Irish versions of what Cromwell did at Drogheda

The new owner of the estate was one of Cromwell's Puritan followers, a soldier named-- say-- Buckley. He took the MacFerris demesne, built himself a suitable house, and established himself on the land. He weathered the Stuart storms as successfully as his predecessor had weathered those of Plantagenet times.

The Georgian age found these Buckleys no longer humble ex-service men of Cromwell's but distinguished country gentlemen with Gainsboroughs and Romneys on their walls, good wine in the cellar, and a stable full of noble horses. The house of their ancestors had made way for an austere square mansion with a portico upheld by Corinthian columns. They were, by comparison with others, good landlords and well liked.

They disappeared for long periods into England, where their rents were sent to them. Here the process of Irishing which had penalized the Plantagenet settlers was a kind of social charm. The Buckleys when in England were considered to be delightfully Irish. They were expected to do and say funny things and to be generally a bit mad. But they could not speak Gaelic and they were staunch Protestants. (When they returned to Ireland their tenants thought of them as English.)

They sent sons into the Army and the Church. A Buckley distinguished himself in the Crimea. Another became an English bishop. In Victoria's reign-- so glorious and well-fed for England, so miserable and starved for Ireland-- the Buckleys heard the first faint rumble of rebellion, but they rode to hounds right through it. They served in the South African War, and a Buckley commanded an English yeomanry regiment during the war with Germany.

 
Anglo-Irish and Irish under the British

This was the Colonel Buckley who had come over to see his agent in 1922. He discovered that the warning rumble of Fenianism through which his great-grandfather and his father had hunted now swept with the force of a gale throughout Ireland The young men of his estate seemed to belong to a secret society. He saw strange slogans chalked up on the walls. His tenants had the appearance of spies. One night, he was sitting at dinner in the big Georgian room, congratulating himself perhaps, that the good deeds of his ancestors had preserved his Irish fortunes, when there was a tramp of feet as a band of Irregulars walked in, tough young men with caps pulled over their eyes. He had time to notice among them the sons of one or two of his tenants.

"You've got your rosary?" one began from force of habit; then, remembering that the Colonel was a Protestant he smiled grimly and said: "Come now to the top of the hill."

The Buckleys, like most of the unfortunate Anglo-Irish, may at times have been stupid but they were never cowardly. The Colonel, knowing at once that he was to be murdered, and knowing too that argument was pointless, asked to be allowed to find a hat. They marched him to the top of his own hill in the dark. Here a  huge young man stood over him.

"Who does that demesne belong to, Colonel Buckley?" he asked.

"It belongs to me," said the Colonel.

"Oh; it does?" replied the young man with deep irony. "Well, now, take a good look at me while you can! that demesne belonged to me before you came over with Cromwell. My name's MacFerris! Now down with ye on your knees...."

The ruins of Puxley Manor. For its story, which is much like the one in this description, read Hungry Hill by Daphne DuMaurier.

But the Colonel was not shot. At the last moment the men, becoming alarmed by a scouting-party of Free State troops, fled, leaving the middle-aged Anglo-Irishman kneeling on the grass without the slightest idea that Cromwellian had met Plantagenet. As the Colonel rose he looked down and saw that his house was on fire. He then and there swore never to set foot on Irish soil; and he kept his vow. He retired to an English cathedral city.

So I go day after day to read among the ruins of the house beside the road. There is something as inevitable as Greek tragedy in the thought of a MacFerris, probably a farm-labourer, swooping down with the indignation of centuries behind him to snatch a brief vengeance at the pistol's point. If this long memory is not nationalism what is it?

There is not a great estate in Ireland owned by one of Cromwell's settlers which had not always had a ghostly other owner in the memory of the common people.

             --H.V. Morton (1892-1979), In Search of Ireland (1930). Methuen & Co. London.

This story is still going on. Here is one old Irish estate which was repurchased by descendants of the original family.

Seumas Macmanus: The Irish language saves seven men from the guillotine

A certain Irish Capuchin, Father Donovan of Cork, was a chaplain of a noble French family in Paris when the Revolution broke out. His friends fled, and he, as having been concerned with aristocrats, was thrown into prison. One morning, after he had spent the night preparing a number of his fellow-prisoners for death, he was suddenly called out with a batch of condemned and trundeled off to the guillotine. Just as he was about to get his foot on the ladder, an officer of the French guard called out in Irish: "Are there any Gaels among you?" "Seven," answered Father Donovan, in the same language. "Then let there not be any fear on you," shouted the officer, and the seven were saved.

           --Seumas MacManus (1869-1960), The Story of the Irish Race, p. 476. New York: Devin Adair Co. 1921.

This story is not as farfetched as it might seem. Many Irishmen went to the Continent to be educated during the 1700s, a time when the British had imposed draconian Penal Laws in Ireland that subjugated the native population. Many Irish soldiers served and lived in Spain, Austria and France during these years.

Heinrich Heine on the British: They are the gods of boredom

Yes, if you meet Englishmen in a foreign country, you see their defects quite glaringly through the contrast. They are the gods of boredom, who hunt through all countries post-haste in shiny black carriages, and leave a gray dustcloud of gloom behind them everywhere they go. And then you have their disinterested curiosity, their well-washed dowdiness, their impertinent stupidity, their awkward selfishness, and their dreary joy in all melancholy subjects. For the past three weeks, you can see an Englishman every day here in the Pizza di Gran Duca [in Florence, Italy]. For hours at a time he watches a charlatan there who sits on a horse and pulls out people's teeth. Perhaps the noble son of Albion takes advantage of this show because he misses the executions in his dear homeland....For, next to boxing and cockfighting, there is for a Briton no finer view than the agony of some poor devil who has stolen a sheep or counterfeited a signature and is shown to the public for an hour in front of the façade of Old Bailey, with a rope around his neck, before they spin him off into eternity. It is no exaggeration when I say that stealing a sheep and counterfeiting are punished the same as the most abhorrent crimes, like parricide or incest, in that savage land. I myself, passing by through a sad coincidence, saw a man hanged because he stole a sheep, and since then I have lost all my pleasure in roast mutton; the fat always reminds me now of the white cap of the poor sinner. Next to him they executed an Irishman who had imitated the handwriting of a rich banker; I still see the naive fear of death of the poor Paddy, who at his trial could not grasp that he would be punished so harshly for an imitated handwriting-- he, who would let anyone who wanted imitate his own! And this people constantly talks of Christianity, and misses no Sunday in church, and floods the whole world with Bibles.

      --Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), Florentine Nights

Ja, wenn man den Engländern in einem fremden Lande begegnet, kann man, durch den Kontrast, ihre Mängel erst recht  grell hervortreten sehen. Es sind die Götter der Langeweile, die, in blanklackierten Wagen, mit Extrapost durch alle Länder jagen und überall eine graue Staubwolke von Traurigkeit hinter sich lassen. Dazu kommt ihre Neugier ohne Interesse, ihre geputzte Plumpheit, ihre freche Blödigkeit, ihr eckiger Egoismus und ihre öde Freude an allen melancholischen Gegenständen. Schon seit drei Wochen sieht man hier auf der Piazza di Gran Duca alle Tage einen Engländer, welcher stundenlang mit offenem Maule jenem Scharlatane zuschaut, der dort, zu Pferde sitzend, den Leuten die Zähne ausreißt. Dieses Schauspiel soll den edlen Sohn Albions vielleicht schadlos halten für die Exekutionen, die er in seinem teuern Vaterlande versäumt... Denn nächst Boxen und Hahnenkampf gibt es für einen Briten keinen köstlicheren Anblick als die Agonie eines armen Teufels, der ein Schaf gestohlen oder eine Handschrift nachgeahmt hat und vor der Fassade von Old Bailey eine Stunde lang, mit einem Strick um den Hals, ausgestellt wird, ehe man ihn in die Ewigkeit schleudert. Es ist keine Übertreibung, wenn ich sage, daß Schafdiebstahl und Fälschung in jenem häßlich grausamen Lande gleich den abscheulichsten Verbrechen, gleich Vatermord und Blutschande, bestraft werden. Ich selber, den ein trister Zufall vorbeiführte, ich sah in London einen Menschen hängen, weil er ein Schaf gestohlen, und seitdem verlor ich alle Freude an Hammelbraten; das Fett erinnert mich immer an die weiße Mütze des armen Sünders. Neben ihm ward ein Irländer gehenkt, der die Handschrift eines reichen Bankiers nachgeahmt; noch immer sehe ich die naive Todesangst des armen Paddy, welcher vor den Assisen nicht begreifen konnte, daß man ihn einer nachgeahmten Handschrift wegen so hart bestrafe, ihn, der doch jedem Menschenkind erlaube, seine eigne Handschrift nachzuahmen! Und dieses Volk spricht beständig von Christentum und versäumt des Sonntags keine Kirche und überschwemmt die ganze Welt mit Bibeln.