The Flesh Made Word and the Word Made Place: Thomas McGreevy's ‘Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill’

Abstract

The Flesh Made Word and the Word Made Place: Thomas McGreevy’s ‘Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill’ Thomas O’Grady ‘Then Mount Jerome for the protestants’, James Joyce has Leopold Bloom muse in the ‘Hades’ episode of Ulysses: ‘Funerals all over the world everywhereeveryminute.Shovellingthemunderbythecartloaddoublequick. Thousands every hour’.1 Bloom is not in Mount Jerome but in the National Cemetery in Glasnevin, the ultimate setting for ‘Hades’ and the final resting place of his recently deceased friend, the fictional Paddy Dignam. It is also the final resting place for another of Joyce’s fictional creations, May Goulding Dedalus, wife of Simon (who has a cameo role in the episode) and mother of Bloom’s co-protagonist for the novel in its entirety, Stephen Dedalus (whom Bloom catches a glimpse of through the window of the funeral carriage as it passes along Sandymount Road). In 1904 Glasnevin was also the final place of rest for the real-life Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, among many other Irish luminaries; eventually it would hold a pantheon of Irish literary, historical and cultural figures ranging from Michael Collins, Maud Gonne and Éamon de Valera to Brendan Behan and balladeer Luke Kelly of The Dubliners. It would also hold both of Joyce’s parents (the models for Simon and May Dedalus) and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Even Seumas O’Kelly, the author of the classic short story ‘The Weaver’s Grave’, set in the unnamed but still recognisable old cemetery in his native Loughrea, Co. Galway, is buried in Glasnevin, ironically (for anyone acquainted with that story) in a nondescript grave shared with a relative. Located on the other side of Dublin in the southside village of Harold’s Cross, Mount Jerome Cemetery was indeed, in 1904, a principal burial ground for Protestants, including such notable literary and cultural figures as Thomas Davis, John Kells Ingram, William Carleton, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu; musicologist Edward Bunting, painter Walter Osborne and William Studies • volume 109 • number 434 191 Wilde, father of Oscar. Over time they would be joined by the mortal remains of John Millington Synge, George Russell (A E), and Jack B Yeats. In 1920, the gates of Mount Jerome were opened to Catholics, and eventually the pantheon there, too, expanded to become richly constellated, including even celebrated Irish-language authors Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Máirtín Ó Direáin. Another of those Catholics, interred upon his death in 1967, is Thomas McGreevy.2 A man of many parts – literary critic, art critic and historian, Director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963, best man at the wedding of James Joyce’s son Giorgio in 1930, executor of the will of Joyce himself in 1941, close friend of Samuel Beckett as well as of George Yeats (W B’s wife), even closer friend of Jack B Yeats (on whom he wrote a monograph), executor of J B’s will in 1957 – McGreevy was also a noteworthy poet. Indeed, his slight output notwithstanding – one thin volume, titled simply Poems, published in 1934, and a few strays afterwards – he is always included among the small number of Irish writers directly associated with poetic modernism: Niall Montgomery, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin. ‘Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill’ While that single volume yields a number of enduring poems, arguably the most enduring of all is ‘Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill’. In fact, by the evidence of a letter to McGreevy from George Yeats, the poem not only met with her approval but also received the imprimatur of W B himself. ‘My dear Tom’, George wrote on 26 March 1926, ‘You never yet did anything as good or better than “Aodh Ruadh O Domhnaill”’: ‘I’ve read it again and again and there isnt [sic] a word to spare or a misplaced word and I take my hat off to you. Willy has been away yesterday and today so he hasnt [sic] seen it but I’ll be very surprised if he doesnt [sic] get it at least as much as I’ve got it. I’ll show it to him tomorrow and write to you again! I felt quite grateful to you for it . . . ’ Two pages later, she...