Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire

Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire or the Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire is an Irish keen, or dirge written by his wife Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. It has been described as the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.^[1]

The late eighteenth-century epic poem is one of the greatest laments ever written, and one of the greatest love poems of the Irish Language. Eibhlín composed it capturing the life and death of her husband Art on May 4, 1773.

It details the murder at Carraig an Ime, County Cork, of Art, at the hands of British official Abraham Morris, and the aftermath. It is one of the key texts in the Irish oral literature corpus. The poem was composed ex tempore and follows the rhythmic and societal conventions associated with keening and the traditional Irish wake (ceremony) respectively. The caoineadh is divided into five parts composed in the main over the dead body of her husband at the time of the wake and later when Art was re-interred in Kilcrea.

Parts of the caoineadh take the form of a verbal duel between Eibhlín and Art's sister. The acrimonious dialogue between the two women shows the disharmony between the two prominent families concerned.

Literary References to the Caoineadh

• Peadar Ó Riada (son of the famous Seán Ó Riada) has arranged Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire to be sung, most famously by the Cor Ban Chuil Aodha.

• Professor Patricia Rubio notes the similarities between Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire and Seamus Heaney's "The Burial at Thebes".^[2]

• Playwright Tom McIntyre dramatised the events, and his play won the Stewart Parker Prize in 1999.^[3]

• Hunter S. Thompson used an excerpt from the anglicized version of this poem as an epigraph to The Rum Diary:

"My rider of the bright eyes,
What happened to you yesterday?
I thought you in my heart,
When I bought your fine clothes,
A man the world could not slay."

Also, a fictional San Juan street mentioned frequently in the novel is "Calle O'Leary", possibly another reference to the poem (Art Ó Laoghaire's name is anglicized as Art O'Leary).

• Breandan O'Madagain has argued that the lament would have been originally sung, and very likely to have been sung to a melody that is still in existence. He demonstrates this in his work "Keening and other Old Irish Musics" (Clo Iar-Chonnachta, 2006), which includes a recording of the keen to a likely traditional melody.

References

External links

• [http://web.newsguy.com/a-little-bit-of-Irish-culture/gael/caoineadh.html#trans Online text in Irish and English