Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin

Owen Roe O'Sullivan is the English name of the Irish poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin (1748-1784). O'Sullivan is known as one of the greatest of later Gaelic poets. Daniel Corkery devoted a chapter of his groundbreaking book The Hidden Ireland (1924) to Owen Roe, who had been relatively unknown to English speakers until then, although beloved among Irish speakers. Corkery writes, "Eoghan Rua's life was ... tragic, but then he was a wastrel with a loud laugh." O'Sullivan is most famous for his aisling [pron. "ashling"] poems, in which the vision of a beautiful woman comes to the poet in his sleep-- the woman also often symbolizing the tragic Ireland of his time. Most of the following information comes from Corkery's work. Corkery in his turn depended on a book in the Irish language, Amhráin Eoghain Ruaidh Uí Shúilleabháin, or Songs of Owen Roe O'Sullivan, written by the priest Athair Pádraig Ua Duinnín (Father Patrick S. Dinneen).

Owen Roe was born in 1748 in Sliabh Luachra, a mountainous part of County Kerry, in southwestern Ireland. He was from a once-prominent sept that like so many others gradually lost its land and its leaders in the successive British conquests of Ireland. By the time of his birth, most of the native Irish in the southwest been reduced to landless poverty in a "houseless and unpeopled," mountainous region. But the landlord was MacCarthy Mór, one of the few native Irish Chiefs of the Name to have retained some power, and a distant relative of the O'Sullivans; and in Sliabh Luachra there was at the time one of the last "classical schools" of Irish poetry, descended from the ancient, rigorous schools that had trained bards and poets in the days of Irish domination. In these last few remnants of the bardic schools, Irish poets competed for attention and rewards, and learned music, English, Latin and Greek.

Eoghan Rua (the Rua refers to his red hair) was witty and charming, but had the misfortune to live at a time when an Irish Catholic had no professional future in his own country because of the anti-Catholic Penal Laws. He also had a reckless character and threw away the few opportunities he was given. At eighteen, he opened his own school, and "all his life through, whenever his fortunes were hopeless, on this empty trade Eoghan was to fall back." But "an incident occurred, nothing to his credit, which led to the break-up of his establishment."

Eoghan Rua then became a spalpeen [Irish spailpín], or itinerant farm worker, until he was 31 years old. He then was forced to join the army under interesting circumstances. Corkery writes, "I have had it told to myself that one day in their farmyard [O'Sullivan was then working for the Nagle family, a wealthy Anglo-Irish, but Catholic and Irish-speaking, family in Fermoy, County Cork] he heard a woman, another farm-hand, complain that she had need to write a letter to the master of the house, and had failed to find anyone able to do so. "I can do that for you," Eoghan said, and though misdoubting, she consented that he should. Pen and paper were brought him, and he sat down and wrote the letter in four languages-- in Greek, in Latin, in English, in Irish. "Who wrote this letter?" the master asked the woman in astonishment; and the red-headed young labourer was brought before him; questioned, and thereupon set to teach the children of the house....Owing to his bad behavior he had to fly the house, the master pursuing him with a gun." Legend says he was forced to flee when he got a woman pregnant-- some say it was Mrs. Nagle. (Interestingly, the mother of British politician Edmund Burke was a relative of these Nagles .)

O'Sullivan escaped to the British military barracks in Fermoy. The British Empire was then in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, using impressment to fill its dire need for sailors. O'Sullivan soon found himself aboard a British ship in the West Indies, "one of those thousands of barbarously mistreated seamen." He sailed under Admiral Sir George Rodney and took part in the famous 1782 sea Battle of the Saintes, against the French admiral Comte de Grasse. The British won. To ingratiate himself with the Admiral, O'Sullivan wrote an English-language poem called "Rodney's Glory" about the battle and presented it to the Admiral, who offered to promote him. O'Sullivan asked to be set free from service, but "an officer named MacCarthy, a Kerryman...interposed and said:'Anything but that; we would not part from you for love or money.' Eoghan turned away, saying, Imireaochaimíd beart eigin eile oraibh ('I will play some other trick upon you'). MacCarthy, who understood his remark, replied: 'I'll take good care, Sullivan, you will not.'"

Corkery writes of the odd contrast between the English view of Owen Roe, who must have seemed an awkward, rascally fellow to the Admiral, and the Irish author of "perfect lyrics, with the intuitional poet in every line of them!"

Much of Owen Roe's life is still unknown. He returned after the wars to Kerry and opened a school again. Soon afterwards, he died at 35 from fever that set in after being struck by a pair of tongs in an alehouse quarrel. He was buried in midsummer, 1784, near or possibly in Muckross Abbey.

In spite of his luckless life, Owen Roe was well-beloved and legendary in his own time, and his songs and poems have passed down in the Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking regions, of Munster, by word of mouth right up until the present day. John Millington Synge mentions Owen Roe in his famous play The Playboy of the Western World: the heroine Pegeen compares the Playboy, Christy, to him:

"If you weren't destroyed travelling, you'd have as much talk and streeleen, I'm thinking, as Owen Roe O'Sullivan or the poets of the Dingle Bay, and I've heard all times it's the poets are your like, fine fiery fellows with great rages when their temper's roused."

Synge had traveled in West Kerry and spoke Irish, so he had certainly heard the legends of Owen Roe; Christy's character resembles that of Owen Roe in many points.

Thanks in part to Corkery's book, O'Sullivan has become more widely known in English over the years. The Irish musician Seán Ó Riada (John Reidy) wrote a play based on the life of Owen Roe, called A Spailpín a Rún (My Darling Spalpeen). The song of the same name is part of the "Lament" in the music of the Titanic (1997 film). There is a memorial to him at Knocknagree, Country Cork.

According to the Irish writer Frank O'Connor, Owen Roe's songs are as popular among Irish-speakers as those of Robert Burns are in Scotland. One of the most famous is still commonly heard today:

"Owen Roe lived at the worst time in history for an Irish poet, when the Penal Laws were killing the ancient way of life and when Catholics had no legal way to make a professional living. He was a brilliant, red-haired, hard-living brawler, called "Owen of the Sweet Mouth" [Eoghan an Bhéil Bhinn], and in Munster I have myself still met Irish speakers who passed down the folk memory of his great charm.

Sources

• George Petrie, Ancient Music of Ireland. Finished with notes, 1855, published by C.V. Stanford 1903. Reprint edited by David Cooper. Cork: Cork University Press. 2002
• Father Patrick S. Dinneen, Amhráin Eoghain Ruaidh Uí Shúilleabháin (Songs of Owen Roe O'Sullivan) Gaelic League Irish Texts Series. Dublin: 1901.
• Corkery, Daniel. The Hidden Ireland. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. 1924.
• O'Connor, Frank, Kings, Lords, and Commons: Irish Poems From the Seventh Century to the Nineteenth. London: Macmillan & Co. 1961.
• Montague, John, ed. Faber's Book of Irish Verse. London: Faber and Faber. 1974.
• Ó Tuama, Seán, ed. with translations by Thomas Kinsella. . An Duanaire: An Irish Anthology 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1981.
• Kiberd, Declan, Irish Classics. London: Granta Books. 2000.

External links

• Quotation from one of O'Sullivan's most famous poems
• Discussion and translation of a drinking song written by O'Sullivan and still popular today
• One of O'Sullivan's songs
• Some crests of the O'Sullivan sept
• Short biography of O'Sullivan, Electronic Irish Records Dataset, Princess Grace Library, Monaco
• A book of O'Sullivan's aisling poems
• Article from Limerick, Ireland, newspaper, 1950, referring to a well-known story about O'Sullivan
• Link to information on one of O'Sullivan's songs
• Dedication of the Sky Woman statue in Killarney, County Kerry, dedicated to County Kerry poets Piaras Feiritéar (Pierce Ferriter), Seafradh Ó Donnchadha (Geoffrey O'Donohue), Aogán Ó Rathaille (Egan O'Rahilly) and Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin
• from Poetry Ireland, history of the Sky Woman statue dedicated to O'Sullivan and three other Kerry poets
• Photo of Sky Woman statue
• Photo of O'Sullivan's memorial stone
• Details of play about O'Sullivan, "The Red-Haired Man," by Geraldine Kalka Cash.
• Text of "The Playboy of the Western World"