Gaelic Literature Of 18th Century

Above : Kinnity Church, Colga, One Of Muster Poets, Plied His Trade here

Above : Hedge School

The desolating peace of the Penal times was a more sinister peril to Irish literature than had been any of the devastating wars of invasion or spoliation that had plagued the country. Legislation which struck directly at mind and character was more deadly than the sword. With education denied to an entire people, and teaching made a criminal offence, there seemed to be little hope of literary activity. The great mass of the people belonged to the proscribed faith, and they were also Gaelic speakers so that their language was penalised equally with their religion. Some of the well-to-do Catholics were able to send their sons to Douai and St. Omer and other centres on the Continent in defiance of the laws. But most of the people had to depend upon the learning they could obtain in the ” hedge-schools.” These seats of study, conducted—also in defiance of the law—by teachers with a price upon their heads, were the surviving representatives of the great scholastic establishments of earlier times. There were maintained to some extent the traditions of classical learning, and there also, and there alone, were cultivated the language and literature, the history and legends of the Gaelic race. In these illegal academies the peasantry got all that was left of native culture, while their more prosperous and leisured neighbours came back from their foreign schools with a foreign education.

Above : Medusa, Irish Literature Still Got Influence From Greek Mythology

Many of the eighteenth century poets were schoolmasters teaching in the hedge-schools ; most of them wandered from place to place; and the lives of some were not very edifying. Their themes are often political, deploring the downfall of the Gael, and hoping for the return of the Stuarts and the exiled chiefs. Ireland is frequently personified under poetic names—” Roisin Dubh,” ” Caitlin Ni Uallachain,” etc.—and frequently the beauteous maiden who appears to the poet in an “aisling” or vision, reveals herself as “the maid Eire”. The Saxon churls and ” bodachs ” who have taken the places of the courteous and liberal Irish gentry are bitterly satirised. Ardent love-songs and praises of the tavern are varied with humorous verses and with pieces descriptive of local scenes and local events. All these subjects are dealt with in the new verse forms which were brought by the poets of this period to the highest perfection of melody.