Caoc O'Leary
Caoc O'Leary
In Brief
Bloom's list of literary travelers who, like Odysseus, come
home after decades away (Ben Bolt, Enoch
Arden, Rip van Winkle) concludes
with one Irish example: "does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc
O'Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation piece." The
work he refers to is Caoch O'Leary, often called Caoch
the Piper. A simple and tenderhearted tale by County
Laois poet John Keegan, it was assigned reading in primary
schools for years, and is often recited even today. Judging by
his description of it as "most trying," Bloom seems to have
been forced to memorize at least some of it in his youth.
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First published in May 1846 in The Irish National
Magazine, Keegan's ballad tells the story of a blind
piper (caoch means "blind" or "one-eyed") who wanders
to the door of a boy's house in the countryside with his dog
Pinch. Seeking shelter for the night, he finds a warm welcome,
plays his pipes for the family the next morning, bonds with
the boy, and departs. Twenty years later, the grown-up speaker
of the poem has lost the "happy times" of his childhood and
all of his loved ones. Sitting at his door thinking "Of twenty
sad things," he sees a little dog wearily leading a decrepit
figure up the lane. The old man asks, "Does anybody
hereabouts / Remember Caoch the piper?" The two lonely
men embrace tearily and the piper asks to spends one more
night in the house, saying "I'll go home tomorrow": "My peace
is made, I'll calmly leave / This world so cold and dreary; /
And you shall keep my pipes and dog, / And pray for Caoch
O'Leary." In the morning neighbors help the speaker dig a
grave "near Eily, Kate, and Mary," and now the old piper
"sleeps his last sweet sleep."
Joyce ingeniously spotted the structural affinities between
this simple ballad and Homer's Odyssey: a 20-year
absence (amazingly, he found the same Homeric span in Ben Bolt
and Rip van Winkle), a homecoming, a joyful father-son
reunion, an old faithful dog.
Also worth admiring is the way Bloom seems to be asking his
companions in the cabman's shelter a question (Do any of you
remember that old chestnut we had to memorize in school?),
when in fact he is silently quoting from the poem. The phrase
"Does anybody hereabouts remember" encapsulates the pathos of
the old exile forgotten by the world, which is Bloom's focus
in all four stories. Later in Eumaeus he will pull
Charles Stewart Parnell into the same orbit.
John Keegan too has been largely forgotten. He lived a
peasant's life, educated in his youth by tutors who wandered
the countryside like the piper, and he died of cholera in 1849
in his thirties, having suffered through the famine years with few resources.
During his short years he achieved a sizeable body of
journalistic and poetic work. Caoch the Piper, his
best known poem, is much more widely recognized than he is. In
fact Bloom is made to participate in the erasure of the poet:
he supposes that the work was written by "poor John Casey."
In recent years, though, efforts have been made to
resuscitate Keegan's reputation. An 11 March 1999 article in
the Irish Times notes that Tony Delaney, who was born
in the same Midlands parish, edited and published his Selected
Works (Galmoy Press, 1997), located his unmarked grave
in the Glasnevin cemetery, and headed up efforts to have a "monumental sculptor" erect a
Celtic cross over it.
