Irish Bard symbolised emotive nationalism in its pitiful glory
Poet and songwriter Thomas Moore’s neglect is due to an amalgam of circumstances, writes Allan Gregory
IWAS amused recently to find that in the entry for Thomas Moore in the Oxford Companion to English Literature ,he is referred to as “the son of a grocer”, while in the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature he is “the son of a Catholic retail merchant”. At least we must be thankful he gets his just recognition in both of these publications.
That Moore has been neglected is an understatement. It is now hard to believe that during the mid-decades of the 19th century he was revered as ‘The Bard of Erin’. Yet, in Declan Kiberd’s best-selling work Inventing Ireland ,he doesn’t merit a mention.
His neglect is due to an amalgam of circumstances, the primary one being that, by today’s standards, he was not a great poet. Moore’s kind of poetry (and it includes Byron’s songs) has not been amenable to new criticism and its heirs. The traditional model of lyric as in Shakespeare’s songs or Rochester’s songs (or Moore and Byron) was displaced by the new Romantic lyric as in Ode to a Nightingale. The new model of middle-class writers like Wordsworth and Keats was earnest, not social, nor sexual. In this new Romantic tradition poems called songs are not usually meant to be sung; they invoke an idea of song but are not songs themselves. Also, Schubert’s dramatic professional performance song replaced the whole tradition of poetic song, making it seem almost archaic and inferior. It is just as true of Burns, who is read in Scotland but hardly ever in England and then only his satires, never his songs, because we don’t know how to read them. They seem too simple.
Another reason is that Moore is not aristocratic or, like Burns, bawdy enough. There is a whiff of 19th century drawing-room taste about him, with which it is very difficult for modern academic-led taste to come to terms. Twenty-first century criticism is only interested in analysable meanings and pays no attention to cadence, lilt and song properties which culminate in the marriage of words to music.
Following his death in 1852, Irish novelist Lady Morgan and poet Sir Samuel Ferguson, among others, decided to form a committee to seek funds for the erection of a statue to Moore. This committee crawled from crisis to crisis finding very little national enthusiasm or money for the project. Following reams of negative publicity, the statue was eventually unveiled by the Lord Lieutenant Lord Carlisle in October 1857. It was immediately apparent that someone had committed a serious faux pas. This was how a correspondent put it in The Dublin Builder:
“Botched at first in pedestal and base, Botched again to fit him in his place.”
Lady Morgan decided the statue was “grotesque” and might be anyone but little Moore. As if to complete the humiliation of the National Bard, Dublin Corporation saw fit to let him preside over the largest public gents’ lavatory in the city, a fact that did not escape the wily James Joyce. In Ulysses, Bloom passes “under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger.
They did right putting him up over a urinal; meeting of the waters (and all that). [There] ought to be places for women [though]. Running into cake shops”.
The saga of the statue led to endless caricatures of Moore.
Terence de Vere White in his biography, calls the statue “a libel in metal, holding Moore up to posterity’s ridicule and contempt”.
Dublin City Council has since removed the public lavatories and thankfully reinstated a cleaned-up Moore to his rightful position adjacent to Trinity College, on the 160th anniversary of its erection.
However, the truth of his neglect in Ireland lies more in the fact that Moore’s Melodies came to represent sentimental nationalism, in all its pitiful glory, extolled in poetry and song by armchair republicans. With the founding of Conradh na Gaeilge, the Irish language revival movement, towards the end of the 19th century, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Celtic Revival of WB Yeats, John Millington Synge and Lady Gregory, and the birth of “a terrible beauty” following the 1916 Rising, Moore’s work was all but forgotten. However, there are occasions, in Ireland, when Moore makes a brief comeback. In 1995, Hyperion Records issued an album called Invocation — Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies with new and interesting arrangements directed by Timothy Roberts, and in 1998, the 200th anniversary of the 1798 Rebellion, a further CD of his melodies came out under the title Romancing Rebellion by the prominent Irish soprano, Kathleen Tynan. The 150th anniversary of his death in 2004 was celebrated with numerous concerts and biographical programmes on Irish television and radio, bringing his name once again to millions of people.
In the academic world, the 2001 book by Jeffery Vail entitled The Literary Relationship of Lord Byron and Thomas Moore demonstrating the influence both poets had on each other’s life and work, is an excellent basis for further study in this area. Two further biographies of Moore have appeared since then. Lucinda Kelly’s Ireland’s Minstrel was published in 2006 followed by her namesake, Ronan Kelly with Bard of Erin, quite a comprehensive study, in 2008.
In conclusion, let us remember Byron’s words:
“Moore has a peculiarity of talent, or rather talents — poetry, music, voice, all his own; and an expression in each, which never was, nor will be, possessed by another.”
‘Moore has a peculiarity of talent’