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Brave Lord Cox

Aoghán O Raithile expressed his rage at the invaders openly, and later, 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). It was followed later by an article Sgiathluithreach an Choxaigh by Briain O Cuív (A shield-prayer for Cox) pointing out that the poem was not a fawning, adulatory exercise, but instead an slightly-camouflaged series of insults. In fact, it’s hard to see how O’Sullivan missed that fact, but that he seems to have been a contrary and argumentative person.

Coxh(1650 – 1730) himself was a prominent anti-Irish soldier administrator who passed “the most penal of the penal laws” and wrote a book, Hibernica Anglicana, detailing how the brave, clean-living English defeated the 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.

Anybody who wanted to criticize Cox could not do it openly.ú

This poem exists inn two manuscripts as fare as I know: one by historian of noble Irish family)_ Charles O’Connor (Roscommon), and an earlier copy by Mac Cruitín now at Maynooth. The text is very similar in both.

The poem starts out 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.

Although, come to think of it, poems of praise usually don’t focus on hopes the subject will not ho to Hell, and the next three quatrains continue to talk about Cox not ending up going to Hell. A bit odd, but Cox, hearing a translation of them, might just think, “Well, those Irish aren’t much as writers…”

It then gets weirder:

May you never be felled in an alehouse brawl

by a four-sided cudgel wielded by a >>

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 happened you have to go out,

May Christ protect you from the diarrhea.

May you never have to box a big burly soldier

When you have an anguished scab on your neck.

May your britches bever 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 ?/ son of your mother.

May you and a hag wearing a hat

Never have to stand a winter;s day 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.

Without food, without clothing, without any possessions at all.

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,

With no saddle, with no reins, with no spurs,

Tortured and bothered with rain and snow inb your face.

And the wind is blasting out of the north

Always in your face and never ceasing even for a second,

And you with a tall English hat perched on your head,

Gripping 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,

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 for five more verses, four of which are insulting, then ends with a quatrain that could be interpreted as something like praise if you’re not 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 would probably always think of Cox in these degrading situations, though, and might not fear him quite as much. Even if they did, they might smile behind their hands when they saw him ride by, and that is something.

James C. Scott wrote a big book about his fieldwork in a ? village, focusing on the strategies poor peasants used to deal with big farmers and landlords when any open disagreement or opposition was not tolerated. His point was that silence does not always imply consent, and poor obsequious peasants are often smarter and more determined than their betters think. And praise poems are not always about praise, especially when the big people know you are an inferior fool.

Email : tighsagainne@fastmail.com (all lower case)