The Lass of Aughrim

Publication Instance Details #1734

Publication Overview

Translation	Is Multilingual	Explicit Irish Context?	Ekphrasis	Has Paratext?	Reference to News, Media or Technology
No	No	Yes	Yes	No	No

Details

Human Rights Issues	HR & Colonisation/Colonial Legacies Other
Irish Context	Irish Language/Culture
Languages	English
Genre	Short Lyric
Medium	Print Collection
Notes	First published in Meeting the British (1987), this poem is a broken-up sonnet. Fittingly, it displays and problematises how initially foreign materials are domesticated in the colonial process. The speaker is aboard a boat on a stream that feeds into the Amazon river when he spots 'an Indian boy' who starts playing a flute (a non-native instrument). The speaker experiences 'delight' at recognising the tune of 'The Lass of Aughrim', a song associated with Joyce's short story 'The Dead' and the triumph of the foreign over the native (the young man and woman in the song both die, as did Joyce's Gretta Conroy's first love, Michael Furey). Another voice cuts into the scene, as 'Jesus explains' that the native boy is trying to attract fish with an instrument made from 'the tibia / of a priest', whose former mission has long been abandoned. The poem thus lays bare Ireland's role in the colonial project, specifically regarding Christian imperialism. But the reader is also put to the test here and made complicit in the aftermath of colonial projects: for how exactly will they pronounce 'Jesus'?