THE POET AS PROFESSIONAL.

EARNA, the quarterly published by the Celtic
Faculty of University College, Cork, has
recently contained portion of a brilliant
and provocative study of the work of David O’Bruadair,
by Sean 0’Faolain, M.A. It is fully time that we should
have such a study, and there are many students, myself
among them, who will look forward to seeing his essay
in a more permanent form.

For, in truth, the character of O’Bruadair, as
revealed in his poetry, is a riddle! Mr. Stephens,
his only serious translator, would give us to understand
that he was a bawler, and, if I remember rightly, speaks
of “his terrific Muse”; Mr. Corkery would place him
somewhere as a predecessor of Brian Merriman;
Mr. O’Faolain roundly claims him as a great poet writing
in a great tradition. Perhaps of the three his
judgment comes nearest the truth.

O’Bruadair was a great poet—with qualifications;
and in the qualifications lies the tragedy. He was a
professional poet and knew it. In his work, his intellect,
his wit, his consummate mastery of the technique of
verse, are always dominant. It is only at certain
moments that the crust is broken, that we see behind
the intellectual personality the personality of emotion,
the passionate lyric power which makes Mr. 0’Faolain
cry: _Il maestro do dhein!_ The Master made this!

Here is the poet that tradition remembers. It is an
extract from a letter ascribed to O’Bruadair, and we
are to understand that it accompanied a poem of his
on the Popish Plot of 1682.

  “The author of the Inclosed Poem is a man not concerned
  at all in the Weighty affairs of this World, yet
  see’th and can smile or frown on things as well as
  any other fool. He is a great Lover and admirer of
  honest men and as great a hater of the adverse party.
  He holdeth his abode in the proximity of a quiet company,
  the Dead, being banished the society of the living,
  for want of means to rent as much as a house
  and Garden amongst them. He lives like a sexton
  without salary in the Corner of a Churchyard in a Cottage
  (thanks be to God) as well contented with his
  stock, which is only a little Dog, a Cat and a Cock, as
  the Prince of Parma with all his Principalities.”

Again (I translate from the poem which accompanied this letter):

  “Of the cause of this (the Plot) I make no wonder,
  since it is a story which practice has proved sure that
  poison without some beauty making it beautiful is rare,
  and yet, that every shadow is but a child of the sun.

  “There is no heresy, new or old, which has sprung
  up since the time of the Son of God for which some
  priest or puck of a day has not found a crook in the
  Scriptures of Christ.”

Reading such a poem through one imagines a mind
made harsh by its own strength, taking pleasure merely
in its own vitality, and yet, how wrong one may be
in such a judgment! Who reading Mr. Stephens’
famous translation of the curse on a servant girl who
refused him drink, would believe that the author was
also a great lyric poet? Or who would believe it reading
a poem like the following (limping and halting in
my translation, to be sure)?

  MAIRG NA FUIL ’N-A DHUBHTHUATA.

  My grief that I am not a boor,
  Without good sense or feeling!
  As such I might be even
  With all this boorish people.

  Or that I were a stutterer,
  My worthy friends, among you!
  Since such a one might suffer all
  Your coarseness and presumption.

  Or would that I could meet a man
  Who’d take my wit and breeding!
  I’d put a penny’s price between
  Him and his dour demeanour.

  But since good clothes win more respect
  Than learning and attainments,
  Oh! would that all I spent on art
  Were round me now in raiment!

Boors, indeed! Mr. Yeats never wrote anything
with a more lofty air. And then his nonsense verse!
I know of no other poet who put in his verse so much
cynical aloofness, so much contempt for ordinary
intelligence, so much mischievous arrogant craft. Joyce,
one may say, has done something like it in prose; in
poetry it is unique. And so O’Bruadair will spin out
verse after verse of nonsense, rhymed, measured, perfectly
balanced, bawdy; and end all with a single sweep
of the hand: Well, my friends, this is the sort of
poetry that appeals to you! He has an amazing
faculty for producing archaic and slang words side by
side until one’s brain reels with them:

  “’Tis a rascal
  takes a baton,
  gives a clatter
  to his lassie
  on the forehead;
  when pronocum
  and potatoes
  made salutas
  fit to greet her
  ere they married.”

And again one smiles, thinking what form the
Expressionists, Joyce and the rest have produced, more
modern, more ecstatically ridiculous than the forms
used by this cynical tatterdemalion of the seventeenth
century.

And yet the old rascal was also a great poet! Mr.
0’Faolain has set out to prove it by showing the
development in O’Bruadair’s powers during ten years
of growth. He has done his work well. From the
poet’s work he has selected passages which show us a
lyrical personality greater even than the intellectual
personality we know. It is a hard task, but one
which well repays the seeker. Here, for instance, is
a quotation from one of O’Bruadair’s longer poems:

  “Though ruinous it be to tell it, this will be the
  crowd that will dwell in our bright-moated mansions—
  Judy Hook and Moother Hammer, Robin Saul and
  Fawther Psalm, the breeched fellow who sells salt,
  Gammer Ruth and Goodman Cabbage, Russell Rake and
  Mawster Gaffer!

  “There (Il Maestro!) where Deirdre the winsome,
  lovely maiden lived and Emer of the Ringlets and her
  grey steed, Aoibheall of the Hillside and the gentle
  Danaan women-folk: there where flying darts cast
  cloud-like shadows, where the hunting feasts of nobles
  took place in full-voiced clamour, where naked,
  tortured limbs were strained in wrestling bouts and
  archers readied themselves for advancing foes!”

Passages like this are not rare in his work, for
genius, no matter how disgruntled, how embittered, is
always tending towards the one thing: the creation of
new beauty. And how characteristic of O’Bruadair it
is that beside a nonsense description of Cork—“Cork
has many planks and tierces, bones and dresses”—we
should find lines like this:

  “Many an orchard, fruited, stately,
  Cold, delighting,
  Many a hill that leans to hear the
  Seabirds’ shouting.”

Irish Statesman, Saturday, October 03, 1925