Drunken Thady And The Bishop's Lady: A Legend of Thomond Bridge

By Criostoir OFloinn

Michael Hogan, the self-styled Bard of Thomond’s best-known epic poem, running to 445 lines, is ‘The Drunken Thady and the Bishop’s Lady,’ which tells the tale of the vengeful wife of the Bishop of Limerick and the night she met the drunk known as Thady.

The ‘Bishop’s Lady’ led a life of vice and while alive she roamed the city streets picking fights. After her death, she continued her malicious ways.

The ‘Drunken Thady’ was a ne’er-do-well from Thomondgate who would drink himself into a stupor while evading the police.

One night, while Thady was on his way home, he met the bishop’s wife who intended to take him to hell. She managed to toss him over the Thomond Bridge and he landed in the river. Thady repented and begged God’s forgiveness, vowing to live peacefully if his life was spared. His life was spared – Thady was no longer the Drunken Thady.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Limerick Writers Centre
• Release date: Sep 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005712112

Criostoir OFloinn

Críostóir Ó Floinn (O'Flynn) from Limerick, Ireland, began to write poems, plays and stories at the age of ten, not realising then that he was afflicted for life with the incurable compulsion of creativity. He qualified as a teacher with teaching posts in Roscommon, Ennis, and in the Limerick area. In 1952, he married Rita Beegan and they moved unwillingly to Dublin where he had been offered a permanent teaching post. Apart from an abortive attempt in 1962 to return to Limerick – that exile has been permanent, and they now live near Killiney Hill in County Dublin. In 1960, hoping that a job concerned with writing would be more congenial than teaching, Críostóir took up a post with Bord Fáilte as a writer on cultural affairs, but found that it was case of “out of the frying pan...” and returned to teaching after a year. He has been a full-time writer since retiring from teaching and being elected a member of Aosdána, the State-sponsored body of writers, artists and composers who are considered to have made a significant contribution to the arts in Ireland. Críostóir also worked freelance in journalism and broadcasting.Críostóir has also written many plays for which he has won many awards and accolades including Na Cimí. Mise Raifteiri an File, Romance of an Idiot (later retitled Land of the Living) The Order of Melchizedek, Cóta Bán Chríost, and Oileán Tearmainn.Many of his short stories have been published in magazines and anthologies in Ireland, Britain, the US, Germany and France. Three collections, two in English, one in Irish, are part of his published work.Críostóir has published twelve collections of poetry including Ó Fhás go hAois and Centenary. A translation of the three initial cantos of Dante’s Divina Commedia won the Oireachtas award for translation and was launched at the Italian Institute in Dublin.Críostóir has published an autobiographical trilogy in English, There is an Isle, Consplawkus, A Writer’s Life. Recent publications are Lóchrann Dóchais, a trilogy on the three French saints, Thérèse of Lisieux, Bernadette of Lourdes, Joan of Arc (Columba Books); Old Church Street, a Limerick memoir, and Meeting Mrs Zebedee: A Personal Guide to Faith. His next publication will be Remember Limerick: Four Essays (Was there a Pogrom in Limerick?; Angela’s Ashes Analysed; The Origins of the Limerick; The Treaty Stone of Limerick).

Book preview

Drunken Thady

and

The Bishop’s Lady

A Legend of Thomond Bridge

by

Michael Hogan, the Bard of Thomond

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

CRÍOSTÓIR Ó FLOINN

A REVIVAL POETRY BOOK

Revival Press

Limerick - Ireland

Copyright (c) Croistoir O’Flynn 2014

First edition published in 1977

This edition published by Revival Press 2014

Revival Press is the poetry imprint of

The Limerick Writers’ Centre

12 Barrington Street, Limerick, Ireland

www.limerickwriterscentre.com

www.facebook.com/limerickwriterscentre

www.facebook.com/michaelhogan

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover illustration from an engraving for Maurice Lenihan’s History of Limerick (1866) showing the old Thomond Bridge King John’s Castle and St Mary’s Cathedral..

Inspired Illustrations by Ronan Deevy from the edition from 1977

Cover design: Dania Fernández Fernández

Book design: Dania Fernández Fernández

E-book Formatting: Máire Baragry

Managing Editor Revival Press: Dominic Taylor

A CIP catalogue number for this publication is available from The British Library

We acknowledge the support of The Limerick Writers’ Centre Community Publishing Project

Introduction

Michael Hogan, the self-styled Bard of Thomond, was born in Limerick City in 1832, fifteen years before the Great Famine during which Ireland’s population of eight million was reduced by a quarter, one million people dying of hunger or disease, another million emigrating to Britain or America. He was self-educated, his formal schooling having been cut short, he says, because he composed lampoons on some of his teachers and fellow-pupils. He worked as a labourer in the mills and as an employee of the Corporation, while that early indication of natural poetic talent blossomed into a prolific output of verse which culminated in the publication of his collected poems, Lays and Legends of Thomond, in 1867.

The Bard himself divided the 165 poems in that volume into four sections which he entitled:

(i) Legendary Poems and Romances.

(ii) War-Poems and Chivalrous Romances.

(iii) Poem-Pictures and Songs of the Affections.

(iv) Requiems and Wreaths for the Dead.

The section titles themselves are evidence that fashions in poetry, as in art, clothes, music, furniture, etc. change with the generations – even Shakespeare was thus downgraded for a time – and many of the very long historical and other poems which the Bard himself, and indeed his enthusiastic reviewers in some journals of the day, considered his finest achievement, would now be considered tedious because of the ornate diction and strictly structured verse which was the approved form of poetry in previous centuries. A comic poem like Drunken Thady would probably have been regarded as an inferior piece which might amuse the common public but was not of much merit as poetry. Both the Bard himself and his contemporary admirers would be puzzled by the fact that this rollicking re-telling of a local legend is now the only poem by which he is known, if at all, even in his native Limerick.

That he should be thus remembered as the author of only one poem is no detrimental verdict on Michael Hogan’s status as a poet. The question arises, if their poems were not prescribed on exam courses, how many of the poems of W.B.Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, T.S.Eliot, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and other poets to whom the academic literati append the label famous would be known today? Yeats is generallly known only as the author of The Lake Isle of Innisfree, and Padraic Colum regretted having written the lovely poem, An Old Woman of the Roads because it was the only poem of his to be found in schoolbooks or anthologies. How many graduates in English literature can recite a single sonnet of Shakespeare or quote one of the great soliloquies from his plays?

The mass emigration during and subsequent to the disastrous 1847 Famine (there were other famines in that century) added economic pressure to the decline of the Irish language resulting from the establishment of the all-English national schools in 1831. While he expresses a patriotic regret at the loss of the national language, and even used phonetic versions of Irish words and phrases in some of his poems, Hogan’s literary models were inevitably those English poets of his own and former ages whose works were available to him in magazines and books, as well as contemporary Irish poets writing in English in the pages of The Nation and other journals.

Although his work was appreciated by other poets, including Lady Wilde, mother of the ill-fated Oscar, and favourably reviewed in some journals in Dublin and London, and in spite of an impractical effort to make a living as a publican, the Bard was never far from penury. He must often have been cold and hungry as he pored over old books and made his copious notes for his many long poems on ancient battles and legends. There were no Arts Councils or state grants, nor was there even a weekly dole, to help him survive, although the dedication of some of his poems to people like Lord Inchiquin, and of his collected Lays and Legends of Thomond to the most noble Caroline, Marchioness of Queensberry, in gratitude for her large-hearted and practical sympathy with Ireland’s national cause may be an indication that he had some occasional patronage from such sources.

His penchant for satirical prose and verse directed at officialdom did not enhance his prospects of support. In 1886, hoping to find peace and a more generous recognition in the New World, he emigrated to New York and found neither. He returned to his native city in 1889, in ill-health and with failing eyesight due to the long years he had spent in reading and writing by the light of candle or oil lamp. He was given a sinecure office by the Corporation, at a salary of one