Ich am of Irlaunde

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"Ich am of Irlaunde", sometimes known as "The Irish Dancer",[1] is a short anonymous Middle English dance-song, possibly fragmentary, dating from the early 14th century, in which an Irish woman issues an invitation to come and daunce wit me in Irlaunde. The original music for this song is now lost. It is historically important as being the earliest documented reference to Irish dance.[2] [3] "Ich am of Irlaunde" is well-known as the source of W. B. Yeats's poem "I Am of Ireland", and it was itself included in The Oxford Book of English Verse,[4] The Norton Anthology of English Literature[5] and The Longman Anthology of British Literature.[6]

Text[edit]

Ich am of Irlaunde,
And of the holy londe
Of Irlande.
Gode sire, pray ich thee,
For of sainte charite,
Come and daunce wit me
In Irlaunde.

Transmission[edit]

The poem survives in only one manuscript, Bodleian Library Rawlinson D.913,[7] which was bequeathed to the library in 1755 by the antiquarian bibliophile Richard Rawlinson.[8] Bound into this manuscript is a strip of vellum, eleven inches by four inches, on which are written about a dozen poems including "Ich am of Irlaunde", "Hay! Robyne, Malkin", and the well-known lyric "Maiden in the mor lay".[9]

"Ich am of Irlaunde" was first published by the German academic Wilhelm Heuser in 1907 in the academic journal Anglia,[10] but came to wider attention when Kenneth Sisam included it in his 1921 anthology Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose,[11] and still more when it was adapted by W. B. Yeats (see below).

Composition[edit]

The name of the poet is unknown,[12] but the poem dates from the early 14th century.[7] Opinions differ as to the dialect of the poem, and hence the place where it might be presumed to have been written. It has been identified as an Irish English poem,[2][13] or again as the work of a poet in England writing in southern English dialect.[14][15][16]

Criticism[edit]

"Ich am of Irlaunde" has been described as "problematic",[17] "mysterious",[18] "enigmatic",[19] and as having a "a magic that tantalizes".[20] In part, the mystery may stem from the fact that the surviving lines are by some scholars considered to be no more than a fragment of a poem now otherwise lost.[21][20][19] Critics are generally agreed that they form the lyric of a dance-song,[22] or perhaps some kind of dramatic performance.[21] Dance-songs, or carols, were divided into the refrain (the first three lines of this poem), which were sung by the dancers as they danced in a ring, and the verse (the remaining four lines) sung by a soloist.[23] "Ireland", it has been proposed, may have been simply a name for the centre of the dance-floor where the soloist stood.[18] Some critics have suggested that the phrase holy londe might imply a Celtic Otherworld,[19][24] and that the song was used in a May or Midsummer dance deriving ultimately from the rites of a pre-Christian Nature religion.[25] Such dances were, perhaps, "the ritual which unites male and female, and in so doing unites the everyday, secular space of here and now with the sacred elsewhere".[26] On the other hand the holy londe of Irlande could be a reminder that Ireland is famous for its "saints and scholars", while phrases like sainte charite, and even come and daunce wit me, are perhaps interpretable in terms of Christian allegory.[17] As an expression of Christian love the dancer's overt invitation to dance with her could represent a covert one to marry her.[27]

Influence[edit]

W. B. Yeats's poem "I Am of Ireland", written in August 1929 and collected in his Words for Music, Perhaps, and Other Poems (1932), is based on the Middle English poem, which had been read aloud to him by Frank O'Connor, possibly from St John Seymour's Anglo-Irish Literature 1200–1582.[14][28] Yeats expands on the original poem, giving it a contemporary political theme of appeal to idealism.[17]

The Canadian-born American poet John Malcolm Brinnin's "Ich Am of Irlaunde" was published in The New Yorker in 1956.[29] The poem begins:

Where sea gulls, holy-ghosting rainbows, ran
With the weather on the piebald landfall lea,
I came to Ireland, an Irishman,
To dress a grave for saynte charité...[30]

The Fijian-Australian poet Sudesh Mishra included, in his poem-sequence "Feejee", an adaptation of "Ich am of Irlaunde" presenting the racial tensions between native Fijian and Indo-Fijian in the aftermath of the 1987 coups:

I am of Feejee,
the bitter land of Feejee,
and hate is all we know, cried she.
Leap down that mango tree
and dance with me
in this bitter land of Feejee.[31]

Settings[edit]

Though it is believed that "Ich am of Irlaunde" was originally sung, the music that it was sung to has not survived.[32] The Irish choral group Anúna performed their own setting of this poem on their album Invocation.[33]

Footnotes[edit]

  1. ^ Goldstein, R. James (2017). The English Lyric Tradition: Reading Poetic Masterpieces of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. p. 9. ISBN 9781476664750. Retrieved 5 July 2022.
  2. ^ a b Jackson 1935, p. 160.
  3. ^ McCarthy, Kay (2019). "'...a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun...': A brief non-academic reflection on Riverdance, a seemingly never-ending success story of diasporic cultural cross-fertilisation". Studi irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies. 9 (2019): 309. doi:10.13128/SIJIS-2239-3978-25518.
  4. ^ Quiller-Couch, Arthur, ed. (1940). "The Irish Dancer" . The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1918 . Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 1 – via Wikisource. [scan Wikisource link]
  5. ^ David, Alfred; Abrams, M. H.; Greenblatt, Stephen, eds. (2000). The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Volume 1A: The Middle Ages (7th ed.). New York: W. W. Norton. p. 349. ISBN 0393975657.
  6. ^ Baswell, Christopher; Schotter, Anne Howland, eds. (2006). The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Volume 1A: The Middle Ages (3rd ed.). New York: Pearson Longman. p. 598. ISBN 0321333977. Retrieved 5 July 2022.
  7. ^ a b Silverstein 1971, p. 82.
  8. ^ "MS. Rawl. D. 913". Medieval Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries. Retrieved 30 June 2022.
  9. ^ Butterfield, Ardis (2016). "Poems without form? Maiden in the mor lay revisited" (PDF). In Cervone, Cristina Maria; Smith, D. Vance (eds.). Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. pp. 171, 174. ISBN 9781843844464. Retrieved 30 June 2022.
  10. ^ Burrow, J. A. (1984). Essays on Medieval Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0198111878. Retrieved 30 June 2022.
  11. ^ Hickey, Raymond (2002). A Source Book for Irish English. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series V. Library & Information Sources in Linguistics, 27. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. p. 117. ISBN 9786613861405. Retrieved 30 June 2022.
  12. ^ Phelan 2014, p. 12.
  13. ^ Todd, Loreto (1989). The Language of Irish Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan. p. 96. ISBN 9780312028428. Retrieved 30 June 2022.
  14. ^ a b Alspach 1960, p. 23.
  15. ^ McHugh, Roger; Harmon, Maurice (1982). Short History of Anglo-Irish Literature from Its Origins to the Present Day. Dublin: Wolfhound Press. p. 46. ISBN 9780905473529. Retrieved 30 June 2022.
  16. ^ Brennan, Helen (2001). The Story of Irish Dance. Lanham, MD: Roberts Rinehart. p. 15. ISBN 9781589790032. Retrieved 2 July 2022.
  17. ^ a b c Scattergood 2005, p. 48.
  18. ^ a b Burrow 2008, p. 71.
  19. ^ a b c Klinck 2019, p. 145.
  20. ^ a b Davies 1964, p. 320.
  21. ^ a b Speirs 1957, pp. 59–60.
  22. ^ Moore, Sarah Kathryn (2015). Beste of Bon and Blod: Embodiment in Middle English Lyric (PDF) (PhD). University of Washington. p. 80. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  23. ^ Turville-Petre, Thorlac; Burrow, J. A. (2021). A Book of Middle English (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. p. 267. ISBN 9781119619277. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  24. ^ Phelan 2014, p. 13.
  25. ^ Speirs 1957, pp. 59–61.
  26. ^ Boklund-Lagopoulou, Karin (2002). I Have a Yong Suster: Popular Song and the Middle English Lyric. Dublin: Four Courts Press. p. 38. ISBN 1851826270. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  27. ^ Greentree, Rosemary (2001). The Middle English Lyric and Short Poem. Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature, 7. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. p. 161. ISBN 0859916219. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  28. ^ Jeffares, A. Norman (1968). A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan. p. 385. ISBN 9780333022665. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  29. ^ Brinnin, John Malcolm (17 August 1956). ""Ich Am of Irlaunde"". The New Yorker. Retrieved 4 July 2022.
  30. ^ Brinnin, John Malcolm (1963). The Selected Poems. Boston: Little, Brown. p. 176. Retrieved 4 July 2022.
  31. ^ Arvidson, Ken (2004). "Testing our limits: regionalism, nationalism, and selfhood in the Anglophone literature/s of Oceania". In Marsden, Peter H.; Davis, Gordon V. (eds.). Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Human Rights in a 'Post'-Colonial World. ASNEL Papers, 8. Amsterdam: Rodopi. pp. 192–193. ISBN 9042017635. Retrieved 3 July 2022.
  32. ^ Speirs 1957, p. 60.
  33. ^ "Anuna - Ich Am of Irlaund Lyrics". SongLyrics. Retrieved 5 July 2022.

References[edit]

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