Expressing the Nineteenth Century in Irish: The Poetry of Aodh Mac Domhnaill (1802–67)

Abstract

The famine years have been characterized as a time of profound silence when there was "no singing, nor the desire to make song"(níl ceol in aon áit ná suim ina dhéanamh), as one of the few contemporary Irish songs has it. 3 It is with this in mind that one should judge the significance of Aodh Mac Domhnaill's poem "Ceol na mBacach" ("The Song of the Beggars"), in which he strives to give voice to a people who were being occluded from the record of history at a time before even the official recording of deaths had been initiated. The proposition that the famine years left a legacy of unexpressed trauma of the famine years has, in our own time, inspired many critical engagements with that period. 4 It seems, however, that an awareness of the power of unresolved trauma is much less recent. As though anticipating the psychiatric tropes of postcolonialist writing, as early as 1963 Máirtín Ó Cadhain described in nowfamiliar terms the phenomenon of unexpressed trauma: "That sodden pulp of Famine fields, those nights of reeking coffin ships are bone of our bone, we carry them about with us still as rancorous complexes in our breasts." 5