THE IRISH TIMES Tuesday, June 21st, 2005 A SPECIAL REPORT UCD150 7

Donagh had his share of disagreements with church authority. He married a Protestant, Muriel Gifford, with the co-operation of a “mod- ernist” priest who did not insist that she promise to convert, but who enjoined the couple to abso- lute secrecy. Found in translation . . . Thereafter, MacDonagh was only a sporadic churchgoer, although it seems that he received the last sacraments before his execution, at which the British officer-in-command observed that “they all died nobly, but MacDonagh died like a prince”. After his death, MacDonagh’s influence grew rapidly. Literature in Ireland was published in the genius of MacDonagh Dublin later in 1916, establishing his reputation as a scholar-critic. So worried were the British authorities by the way in which the “poets’ rebel- lion” was capturing the international imagination that they commissioned special essays from HG Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett denouncing the cult in American magazines and newspapers. But the tide could not be turned. Even within the British Army itself, a young poet from County Meath, Francis Ledwidge, recreated those internal rhymes and assonance favoured by the filí in his haunting lament for the man who had done so much to introduce the Irish mode into English:

He shall not hear the bittern cry In the wild sky, where he is lain, Nor voices of the sweeter birds Above the wailing of the rain. Nor shall he know when loud March blows Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill, What might a UCD aesthetic be and Blowing to flame the golden cup Of many an upset daffodil. where might it be found? But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor, And pastures pure with greedy weeds, Declan Kiberd, professor of Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn Lifting her horn in pleasant meads. Anglo-Irish literature and drama at (Lament for Thomas MacDonagh)

UCD, explores the question through In December 1917 The Irish Times (no friend of the Easter rebels) nevertheless published a poem the life of Thomas MacDonagh, by AE/George Russell lamenting two fallen Tho- mases, MacDonagh dead in the Rising and Kettle teacher, poet and, finally, a leader of in the trenches of the Great War, both of them the Easter Rising UCD lecturers: I listened to high talk from you, Thomas MacDonagh, and it seemed The words were idle, but they grew To nobleness by death redeemed. Life cannot utter words more great THOMAS MacDONAGH Than life may meet by sacrifice, High words were equalled by high fate, (1878-1916) You paid the price: You paid the price. You who have fought on fields afar, That other Ireland did you wrong Who said you shadowed Ireland's star, NIVERSITIES have always been rapidly came to disconnect the words “Catholic” From one who yearns to do thee homage meet. once given a mask he told a deeply personal MONTAGE Nor gave you laurel wreath nor song. founded on a dubious assumption: that and “modernist” (ably abetted in that act of dis- Yeats went one better and told MacDonagh to truth. Irish Times You proved by death as true as they, learning and piety are somehow condu- connection by most of the authorities of the Cath- “translate a great deal from the Irish – to translate It was out of triumphs like this that Thomas Imaging In mightier conflicts played your part, Ucive to one another. You need only olic church). literally, preserving as much of the idioms as pos- MacDonagh produced his major critical study, Equal your sacrifice may weigh study the more ribald lyrics penned by medieval The theorists of intellectual freedom in The sible. It will help you get rid of the convention- Literature in Ireland, arguably the most influen- Dear Kettle of the generous heart. scholastics to see just how baseless such an equa- Bell and other liberal journals were quite unable ality of language from which we all suffer today”. tial work of literary analysis to come out of UCD. (To the Memory of Some I Knew who are Dead tion is. to admit the technical conservatism of their own MacDonagh was on the road to literary mod- In it he produced brilliant versions in English of and who Loved Ireland) When John Henry Newman founded his col- favoured art forms (mostly social realist) or to ernism. By 1907 his style had taken full measure Gaelic poetry and song, as rendered by Ferguson, lege in the Dublin of 1854, he did so with the idea recognise the astonishing formal experimenta- of the sprung rhythms and compound words of Mangan, Callanan, Walsh and, of course, himself. EWMAN could hardly have foreseen of creating a Catholic intelligentsia which might tion of such avowedly Catholic writers as Coffey, both Whitman and his disciple Hopkins: He identified an Irish mode, rooted in the Gaelic all this, least of all a UCD involvement not only consolidate the social benefits of Eman- Devlin or, indeed, Flann O’Brien. Back in the substratum and characterised by the wavering, in the Easter rebellion. But perhaps in cipation in Ireland but also add weight and mass 1920s the critic IA Richards had announced the Heart-felt, brain-syllabled, and lip-let-loose – delayed rhythms pioneered in English by Tom Nsome oblique fashion, his underlying to the crusade for Romanism in the wider British severance of “poetry” from “belief”. Sweet-sung to-day, to-morrow harsh and Moore and perfected by WB Yeats. intentions were carried out. After all, he had scheme of things. The “radical” intellects of independent Ireland hissed. MacDonagh’s lectures on this topic were deliv- always proclaimed himself a defender of threat- Yet, little more than half a century later, Uni- in subsequent decades were so busy seeking a ered to an MA class and constituted the raw mate- ened traditions and on that basis had declared versity College Dublin would produce graduates separation of church and state that they were in However, the major and happiest influence rial for his book. They deeply inspired one stu- that, if he had been born an Irishman, he would with a somewhat different set of agendas. New- no mood to sponsor a reconnection of religion was the poetry of the man who had given the dent, Austin Clarke, who would refine the ideas most certainly have been a rebel. man’s classic conversion-narrative, Apologia Pro and art. Newman had produced his Catholic intel- good advice: further in his own poetic theory and practice. Perhaps it was the spirit of Cardinal Newman Vita Sua, would be rewritten by James Joyce as A ligentsia, all right, but its effects were strangely On a visit to his teacher’s house at Oakley which guided the college authorities to appoint Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, lodging an “underground”. None would the service ask Road, Clarke discovered at first hand just how Austin Clarke to the lectureship which his charis- even more pressing claim for the vocation of art Today, with that censorship a distant memory, That she from love requires, seriously MacDonagh took his idea of a bilingual matic teacher had left vacant. His own versions over that of religion. it is possible to marvel at the number of writers Making it not a task Ireland. While he stood out on the kerb dis- of Irish poetry would scale even greater heights, Far from integrating a rationalised, Victorian produced by UCD who not only evolved a lay But a high sacrament coursing on Tudor lyrics, his toddler son, providing in turn the inspiration on which a later form of Catholicism into British life, a group of mysticism but also integrated an “Irish Mode” Of all love’s dear desires Donagh, cried out as a horse-and-cart flew past: translator such as Thomas Kinsella could build. writers emerged whose mystical understanding (based largely on Gaelic syntax and prosody) And all life’s grave intent. “Look, daddy, at the capall.” of that religion was invoked to further a claim to into the languages of modern English. Here, a line (After a Year) It was, however, for its definition and descrip- ● PRIMARY REFERENCES: full national independence. would pass from Clarke and Flann O’Brien tion of the evolution of Anglo-Irish literature that The Poetical Works of Thomas MacDonagh edited All universities must sponsor a comprehensive through Kinsella and McGahern down to Éilís Ní That was, however, as good as MacDonagh’s MacDonagh’s book would be remembered. The by James Stephens (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1916) syllabus delivered with some semblance of objec- Dhuibhne. poetry got. More often it remained a proof of the subtitle was Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish and the tivity. But those which evolve a distinctive “aes- All of these traditions seem to come to a point Wildean contention that all bad poetry springs essays asserted the essential continuity of the Thomas MacDonagh – Literature in Ireland thetic” often do so by giving shape to the energies of convergence in the writings of Thomas Mac- from genuine feeling, being brooding, subjective two, seemingly opposed, Irish traditions. (Dublin: Talbot Press 1916) of gifted individuals at a concentrated phase of Donagh, who was born and often indecipherable. MacDonagh contended that, by the time of the their development. If the Oxford of the later 19th in Cloughjordan, Co Tip- Part of McDonagh’s Penal Laws, Gaelic literature had become deca- Francis Ledwidge – Lament for Thomas century became an outpost of lost causes, Zuleika perary, in 1878 and exe- THIS IS ONE OF 28 ESSAYS IN problem was technical: dent, but for more than a century afterwards Eng- MacDonagh, in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Dobsons and dreaming spires, the Sorbonne of cuted as a British pris- how to find an objective lish “was not yet able to carry on the tradition or Volume 2, edited by Seamus Deane (Derry: Field the 1960s was a place in which intellectuals oner-of-war in 1916. His language for the mystic’s to syllable anew for itself here”. (This was a view Day Publications, 1991): 774 sought to seize power and remake the world. If parents were teachers, THE UCD states of consciousness. to be reiterated for a later generation by Thomas Vanderbilt University in Tennessee became the father a cheerful His close collaboration Kinsella.) home to the Agrarian poets of the defeated post- drunkard, the mother a AESTHETIC: with Joseph Plunkett was MacDonagh suggested that it was only with Civil War American south, Sao Paolo in Brazil devout convert from based on a shared desire the emergence of a writer such as Synge that one could be cited as the meeting point in the Protestantism. Celebrating 150 to express the unknown had an art “at once sufficiently Gaelic to express mid-20th century for the ideas of European Mod- MacDonagh was edu- in terms of the known. the feeling of the central Irish tradition, and suffi- ernism and those of an insurgent Latin America. cated by the Holy Ghost Years of UCD Writers In an article for The ciently master of English style to use it as one And, of course, in the writings of Trinity Col- Fathers at Rockwell and Irish Review MacDonagh uses the air one breathes”. lege, Dublin, graduates from Jonathan Swift to returned for some years spoke of the challenge Samuel Beckett may be found a blend of bleak wit there as a clerical stu- – compiled and edited facing “the mystic who EJECTING Patrick Pearse’s doctrine and cool comedy that characterises an Anglo- dent. has to express in terms of that a national literature could be cre- Irish caste always willing to view man as some Undergoing a sudden by Dr Anthony Roche, sound and wit the things ated only in the Irish language, Mac- kind of anthropological witness of himself. crisis of faith, he pro- senior lecturer in the of God that are made RDonagh went on to declare that modern What might a UCD aesthetic be and wherein duced large quantities known to him in no lan- Irish suffered from the very same defects which might it be found? One answer could be to locate of death-obsessed School of English at UCD guage”. affected modern English: journalese, cliché, it in the attempts of a Catholic intelligentsia to poetry. His early tastes and published as part JM Synge had con- fatigued imprecision (all those elements which evolve a lay version of that religion, at once mys- were antique and, like of the UCD150 fronted the same chal- would in due time feed the surreal imagination of tical and modernist, and often executed in a spirit the young Joyce, he lenge in the 1890s and Flann O’Brien). The ideal solution to this of high playfulness. This is a strain which links made a special study of celebrations had solved it by the expe- dilemma had been found in the Hiberno-English writers as disparate as Hopkins, Joyce, Clarke, Elizabethan love songs. dient recommended by dialect of Synge which “at its best is more vig- Flann O’Brien, Coffey or Devlin. When WB Yeats was Yeats: word-for-word orous, fresh and simple than either of the two lan- It has definite roots in Newman, who was shown some of his poems in 1903, he told Mac- translation from another language, which if done guages between which it stands”. often accused by his enemies of insincere pun- Donagh not to publish, “but to read the great old with integrity would locate the frustrated mystic MacDonagh conceded that “all of us find in ning, tricksy rhetoric and sheer play-acting. masters of English, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Sir on a needle-point between official languages. Irish rather than in English a satisfactory under- James Pribek has gone so far as to cite the “trick- Thomas Browne, perhaps Chaucer, until you There is reason to believe that Synge shared standing of certain ways of ours and the best ster” figure as the major link between Newman have got feebler modern English out of your his ideas with MacDonagh who met him regu- expression of certain of our emotions – so we are and Joyce: and there is every reason to believe head”. How badly this advice was needed can be larly in 1908. MacDonagh recalled that Synge expressing ourselves in translating from Irish”. that this is correct. judged from a poem called Róisín: “read me some of his translations from Petrarch However, he was quick to point out that such Why has this not been more obvious? Why did into that wonderful rich language of the Irish translations were just a temporary expedient it take an American Jesuit such as Pribek to make Deep in my Irish heart I grieve that I peasant”. during the transition to English: “At present a the connection? A determinedly secular criticism Know not to sing my lays in Irish tongue; Whenever MacDonagh wrote subjectively he large amount of translation is natural. Later, has for decades turned Joyce into a carbon copy That here no Gaelic heart before my feet wrote badly and without the distinction of a per- when we have expressed again in English all the of itself; and an Irish intelligentsia, smarting I place with trusting gladness; – such vain sigh sonal style. His poems are often a roomful of old emotions and experiences expressed already in under the censorship of the independent state, In hope of change, its offering has wrung echoes. But when he translated from the Irish, he Irish, this literature will go forward, free from conveyed the urgency of a man speaking with full translation.” force: Legend has it that MacDonagh was working on the proofs of Literature in Ireland during lulls in Congratulations to UCD on their 150th The yellow bittern that never broke out the firing at Jacobs’ Factory through Easter week In a drinking bout, might as well have drunk; 1916. A further legend holds that he improvised a Anniversary from the Directors and Staff of His bones were thrown on a naked stone game of cricket, using a battered tennis ball, Where he lived alone like a hermit monk. while holed up in the building. Pierse Group - providers and managers of O yellow bittern! I pity your lot, Some commentators find it hard to understand Student Accommodation Centres in Dublin. Though they say that a sot like myself is curst – how a man who stood so steadfastly for the con- I was sober a while, but I’ll drink and be wise fluence of two traditions could have become the For I fear I should die in the end of thirst. leader of an insurrection. But MacDonagh saw no John McMahon (The Yellow Bittern) contradiction. In his final class at UCD, he simply closed his copy of Pride and Prejudice and sighed: Property/Residence Manager MacDonagh, in discovering such Gaelic folk “Ah, lads, there’s nobody like Jane!” Pierse Group authors – the Irish equivalent of the Elizabethan His rebel comrades also revered English songsters – liberated also the frustrated author poetry, Pearse sharing his lifelong admiration for Birmayne House, Mulhuddart, Dublin 15 and artist within himself. He was, like Synge, an Wordsworth, Plunkett his love for Francis Tel. 087-2395016 example of an artist whose genius was for trans- Thompson. They were liberal, educated men lating the effects of Gaelic syntax into English, a who simply wanted their country back from a E-mail: [email protected] language often held to be incapable of conveying usurping power, much as they had also sought, in Web: www.pierse.ie such effects. their earlier work as a lay intelligentsia, to seize MacDonagh really was a case of the translator back from the priests of Cullenite Catholicism as a character in search of an author, one who those godly things which are not narratable in might free him into pure utterance. He was least any obvious language. PIERSE - SHAPING OUR WORLD of all himself when he wrote “sincere” lyrics, but Like many lay Catholic intellectuals, Mac-