Dark and evil days
Dark and evil days
In Brief
In Wandering Rocks Tom Kernan thinks of the Rebellion
of 1798 led by United Irishmen like Lord Edward Fitzgerald: "They
rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that is: Ingram. They
were gentlemen." Kernan quotes a line from The
Memory of the Dead, a poem written in 1843 by Irish
mathematician, economist, and poet John Kells Ingram, whose
Protestant background, shared with many of the United
Irishmen, appeals to him.
Two years later the patriotic poem was set to music and became
a popular republican anthem. Echoes of the poem and the song
sound through three successive chapters.
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Gifford notes that Kernan's "They were gentlemen" (following his image of Fitzgerald as a "Fine dashing young nobleman. Good stock, of course") is "A typical 'west Briton' phrase used to exonerate Anglo-Irish Protestant revolutionaries (such as Fitzgerald, Wolfe Tone, Emmet—and even Parnell) from the sort of blame due the croppies." The United Irishmen movement of the late 18th century was truly ecumenical, supported by patriots both Catholic and Protestant, though the latter were mostly Presbyterians and Methodists, not members of the Ascendancy class's official Church of Ireland.Ingram was born in 1823 to an Ulster Scots family living in the southeastern corner of County Donegal, near Lower Lough Erne. Although he considered Ireland unready for independence he abhorred tyranny and The Memory of the Dead celebrates the sacrifices of the men killed in '98. He wrote the poem in March 1843 while a student at Trinity College, Dublin and published it anonymously on 1 April 1843 in The Nation, a newspaper dedicated to repealing the Act of Union. In 1845 John Edward Pigot set it to music for voice and piano. Despite Ingram's distrust of militant nationalism the ballad entered the pantheon of republican songs, and its tune has often been piped at the funerals of fighters. Douglas Hyde translated the text into Irish. Ulysses quotes the English lines highlighted here in boldface:
Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight?
Who blushes at the name?
When cowards mock the patriots' fate,
Who hangs his head for shame?
He’s all a knave or half a slave
Who slights his country thus;
But a true man, like you, man,
Will fill your glass with us.
We drink the memory of the brave,
The faithful and the few:
Some lie far off beyond the wave
Some sleep in Ireland, too;
All, all are gone—but still lives on
The fame of those who died:
All true men, like you, men,
Remember them with pride.
Some on the shores of distant lands
Their weary hearts have laid,
And by the stranger's heedless hands
Their lonely graves were made;
But, though their clay be far away
Beyond the Atlantic foam,
In true men, like you, men,
Their spirit's still at home.
The dust of some is Irish earth;
Among their own they rest;
And the same land that gave them birth
Has caught them to her breast;
And we will pray that from their clay
Full many a race may start
Of true men, like you, men,
To act as brave a part.
They rose in dark and evil days
To right their native land:
They kindled here a living blaze
That nothing shall withstand.
Alas, that Might can vanquish Right!
They fell, and pass'd away;
But true men, like you, men,
Are plenty here today.
Then here's their memory—may it be
For us a guiding light,
To cheer our strife for liberty
And teach us to unite!
Through good and ill, be Ireland's still,
Though sad as theirs your fate;
And true men be you, men,
Like those of Ninety-Eight.
Tom Kernan confuses the musical version of Ingram's poem
with The Croppy Boy:
"Ben Dollard does sing that ballad touchingly. Masterly
rendition. / At the siege of Ross did my father fall."
Although the croppy boy is Catholic and the rebels of Ingram's
Memory were Protestant, Kernan's slip is understandable
because both ballads tell stories of patriots who lost their
lives in the Rebellion of '98. And, as Ruth Wüst points out in
a personal communication, both were published in the same
paper. The Croppy Boy appeared in The Nation
in 1845, two years after the publication of Ingram's poem and
the same year in which the poem was set to music.
The two compositions remain linked in Sirens. As
Bloom listens to Ben Dollard singing The Croppy Boy he
doubly misremembers a line of The Memory of the Dead:
"Who fears to speak of nineteen four?" (It seems
possible that Joyce here is using his protagonist's proclivity
for getting details wrong to make a joking reference to the
date of his own novel's action, 1904.) At the end of the
chapter, the men who have been listening to Dollard's
performance drink a toast to one another inspired by the
refrain at the end of the song's first stanza:
— True men like you men.
— Ay, ay, Ben.
— Will lift your glass with us.
They lifted.
Tschink. Tschunk.
Echoes are still lingering in Cyclops: "So of course
the citizen was only waiting for the wink of the word and he
starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old
guard and the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of
ninetyeight and Joe with him about all the fellows that
were hanged, drawn and transported for the cause by drumhead
courtmartial and a new Ireland and new this, that and the
other." The Citizen uses the poem's title both as a toast and
as an aggressive challenge to the uncomprehending Bloom: "—The
memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his
pintglass and glaring at Bloom."
