Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche

Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche (The Midnight Court), a long poem by Brian Merriman written about 1780 in Feakle, Co. Clare, using accentual metre [see Irish metrics]. A monstrous female envoy from the fairies appears to the unmarried poet in a dream, summoning him to the court of Queen Aoibheall to answer charges of wasting his manhood when women are dying for love. He listens to complaints on subjects such as the celibacy of the clergy and marriages between old and young for purely economic reasons. At last Aoibheall pronounces judgment on the poet, who awakens as he is being severely chastised by the women of the court. Cúirt an Mheán-Oíche draws on the European courtly love tradition and its bawdier offshoots. These elements are subsumed into the framework of the native aisling genre. The first translation was made by Denis Woulfe (Donnchadh Ulf) in the 1820s, and there have been more than half-a-dozen others, the best-known being Frank O'Connor's (1945).