Denis Florence MacCarthy (1817-82)
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Life
| [occas. var. Dennis] b. 26 May, 1817, the son of a merchant, at the family home at 24 Sackville St. [now O’Connell St.], Dublin - the site later occupied by the Imperial Hotel, and later again by Clery’s; ed. St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, where he learned Spanish from a Catholic priest returned from Spain; contrib. “My Wishes” to Dublin Satirist (12 April 1834) [aetat. 17]; contrib. “Proclamation Songs” (No. 1) to the Nation (14 Oct. 1843); studied law at King’s Inns, and called to the Irish bar, 1846, but did not practice; established himself as a man of letters and contrib. to The Nation [signed “Desmond”, “Vig.”, “Trifolium”, “D F McC”, “D-”, and “Antonio’, and other papers, incl. Duffy’s Catholic Magazine for 1847, as “S.E.Y”; |
| edited and intro., The Poets and Dramatists of Ireland (1846), the first and only volume of Duffy’s ‘Library of Ireland’, prefaced by an essay on early history and religion of Ireland; ed. The Book of Irish Ballads (1846), with an introductory essay; contrib. “The Bell-Founder” and “The Foray of Con O’Donnell” to Dublin University Magazine (April, 1847) and later “Waiting for the May,” “The Bridal of the Year,” and “The Voyage of Saint Brendan,” (January & May, 1848); issued Ballads, Poems and Lyrics (1850), including original and translated work; appt. first Professor of English at the Catholic University, under Newman; gave a series of Lecures on Poetry, 1855, and a later series on Spanish poets and 16th c. drama; |
| he lived mainly at Killiney Hill but moved to the continent on prolonged visits by reason of health after 1864, and later settled in London; inspired by by Shelley’s praise of Calderón de Barca in an essay, he publish six translations of the plays of the ‘Spanish Shakespeare’ [Calderón] under the pseudonym “J. H.” (1853), these including Calderón’s St. Patrick’s Purgatory, with further instalments in 1861, 1867, 1870, and 1873; published Shelley’s Early Life (1872) in London, a work which includes an account of the English poet’s visit to Ireland in 1812; his poetry collected as Poems (1882) by his son John McCarthy - of Blackrock - containing a previously unpublished longer poem, “Ferdia[h]”, being an energetic versification of Cuchulain’s fight at the ford of Ardree; |
| contrib. to The Irish Monthly, ed. Fr. Russell, extensively from 1874, incl. posthumous publications such as “The Paschal Fire of St. Patrick” [ ‘On Tara’s Hill the daylight dies ...’] (Irish Monthly, March 1895); wrote committee-commissioned centenary poems for Thomas Moore and Daniel O’Connell (e.g., “The Dead Tribune”); other celebrated poems incl. “The Bridal of the Year”, “Summer Longings” [otherwise “Waiting for the May” - set to music by Stephen Collins Foster in 1849], and “The Voyage of St. Brendan”, a long narrative poem which contains a paraphrase of “Ave Maria Stella” rendered as the evening song of the sailors; completed his version of Calderón’s Al Aurora en Capacabana/Daybreak in Capacabana [unpub.] a few months before his death; returned to Dublin; d. 7 April [Good Friday] 1882, at Blackrock; he was married to Ethna, with whiom 9 children; a son, John, edited his poems (1882); a dg. became a nun as Sr. Stanislaus, and wrote poetry; |
| his Spanish translations were highly esteemed by contemporary scholars such as George Ticknor (History of Spanish Literature, num. vols. 1847, 1863, &c.); there is a bust by Thomas Farrell in the City Hall (Dublin); his papers are in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library of the University of Kansas and at the Library of the University of N. Carolina; Rosa Mulholland’s Life of Sir John Gilbert (1905) contains many references to him; Ethna MacCarthy, associated with Con Leventhal and Samual Beckett, was a grand-daughter. CAB ODNB PI DBIV RAF DIW DIL GBI MKA JMC FDA OCIL DIL |
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Works
| Trans. from Spanish |
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| Original poetry |
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| Collected Poems |
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| Edited anthologies |
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| Biography |
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| Bibliographical works |
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| Addenda |
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MS papers of D. F. MacCarthy are held at the Univ. of N. Carolina Library [link] and the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas [link] as well as at the National Library of Ireland [as attached].
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Bibliographical details
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Criticism
Freeman’s Journal (10 April 1882); Nation (15 April 1882); Obituary of Denis Florence MacCarthy, in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Science (Appendix 2), Ser. 2, Vol. III (1877-83), p.220;J. S. Crone, ‘A Centenary Sketch’, Irish Book Lover, 8 (1917); Matthew Russell, Irish Monthly 10 (1882), also Irish Monthly, 31 (1903; rep. from Donahoe’s Magazine [Russell defends his literary reputation, quoting correspondence]; Ellen M. Clarke, in Dublin Review, 3rd ser. XL (1883), pp.260-93. See also Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Historical and Literary Representations of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork UP 1996), p.5; pp.110-11; p.137; 140; 143-45; 163; 177.
See also Sale Catalogue of the Collection of Denis Florence Mac-carthy, [auction held by] Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge on Tuesday (20 June 1865), 19pp., 8o.; copy held by Register of Preservation Surrogates [COPAC].
[See National Library of Ireland Catalogue: sel. journal references, as infra.]
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Commentary
Mary Cusack, Life of the Liberator (1872 edn), cites McCarthy’s eulogistic poem on the incarceration of O’Connell, “Cease to Do Evil – Learn to Do Well” (being the inscription on Richmond Penitentiary [Gaol], s. Circular Rd., Dublin], pp.727-29; the title-line is used as an ironic refrain to stanzas listing the virtues of the political hero, whom English law has styled a ‘dangerous criminal’, proclaiming his ‘honesty a crime’; an elegy, ‘The Dead Tribune’, commencing with an epigraph from Byron [‘… the forum’s champion and the people’s chief’], is printed at the close (pp.772-74.)
The Irish Book Lover: A writer in the Irish Book Lover describes Denis Florence McCarthy’s library on Sackville St., calls it more sterile than Thomas Davis’s. (See Irish Book Lover, Vol. 27 [q.d.].) |
H. Hovelaque, Anthologie de la Littérature irlandaise des Origines au XXe siècle (Paris Libraire Delagrave 1924), calls MacCarthy a ‘poète de valeur qui a publi e sur la jeunesse de Shelley une œuvre très attachante; il fut également undees meilleurs rédacteurs de la Nation’ (p.364). Hovalque was ‘professeur’ at the Lycée Saint-Louis.
D. J. O’Donoghue, Life of Carleton [1896] (Belfast: White Row Press 1996), writes in a footnote to Carleton’s account of his pilgrimage to Lough Derg: ‘Calderon, the Spanish dramatist, wrote a play on the legends of this place, entitled El Purgatorio de San Patricio, whic has been admirably translated by Denis Florence McCarthy [sic]. The traditions concerning Lough Derge were known all over Europe in medieval times.’ (p.88, n.)
Chris Morash, The Hungry Voice (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1989): b. Dublin, 26 May 1817; d. Blackrock, Co. Dublin, April 7 1882; respected as trans. of Calderón; contrib. to The Nation under name of ‘Desmond’ or ‘DFMC’; ‘A Mystery’ much anthologised, from MacCarthy, Poems (Dublin MH Gill & Son 1882); appeared in The Nation vol. 5, No. 245 (19 June 1847): ‘Is it right, is it fair, / That we perish of despair / In this land, on this soil / Where our destiny is set, / Which we cultured with our toil, / And watered with our sweat? // We have ploughed, we have sown, / But the crop was not our own / We have reaped, but harpy hands, / Swept the harvest from our lands ... reap it for strangers, and turn aside to die.’ (Morash, p.190-92.)
David Lloyd, Anomalous State: Irish Writing and the Post Colonial Moment (Duke UP 1993), quotes Book of Irish Ballads [see infra] and remarks: ‘Beneath this affirmation of MacCarthy’s text persists the disturbance in which it originates, an apprehension of the real state of Ireland, its identifications split between the “real” and the “nursing” mother’ - though the word ‘real’ does not in fact appear. Further quotes: ‘Upon the subject of our Anglo-Irish ballads, there is nothing to add to what Mr Duffy has so ably and so truly written in his Introduction to the Ballad Poetry of Ireland.’ (Lloyd, op. cit., p.25.)
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Book of Irish Ballads [new edn., rev. & corr., with add poems & a preface.; dedicated to S[amuel] Ferguson (Dublin: James Duffy 1846), incls. poems of Mangan, Duffy, MacCarthy, Banim, Callanan, Moore, Ferguson, &c., published in 1846 as a companion to Duffy’s Ballad Poetry of Ireland (1846). Preface, ‘[W]e can be thoroughly Irish in our writings without ceasing to be English, faithful to the land of our birth without being ungrateful to that literature which has been “the nursing mother of our minds”; that we can develop the intellectual resources of our country, and establish for ourselves a distinct and separate existnence in the world of letters wihtout depriving ourselves of the advantages of the widely-diffused and genius -consecrated language of England, are facts that I conceive cannot be too widely disseminated.’ (p.14; quoted in David Lloyd, 1992, as supra.) [See also Table of Contents - attached.]
Further: ‘It has been said, by a well-known authority, that the Ballads of a people are more influential than their laws, and perhaps he might have added, more valuable than their annals ]...] A people of passionate impulses, of throbbing affections, of dauntless heroism, will invariably not only have done things worthy of being recorded, but will also have recorded them. Myriads of human beings cannot be moved about noiselessly, like an army of shadows. The sullen sound of their advancing will be heard afar off; and those who see them not, will listen to the shrill music of their fifes and the merry echoes of their bugles. The great heavings of a people’s heart, and, from time to time, the necessary purifying of the social atmosphere will make themselves felt and heard and seen, to that all men may take cognizance thereof - as the mighty waves of the roused ocean dash against each other with a war-cry, or as the electric spirit proclaimeth its salutary mission in a voice of thunder. / In almost all countries the Ballad has been the instrument by which the triumphs, the joys, or the sorrows of a people have been proclaimed.’ (MacCarthy, ed., Book of Irish Ballads, NY: Felix E. O’Rourke, 9 Barclay St. 1873, pp.11-12 [introduction]; quoted in Jennifer Cooper, ‘Irish Ballads in English Language Teaching’, in Bloomsday: Ensaois 2014, ed. Ann Graça Canan & Marcelo Amorim, Natal, Brasil: UFRN 2015, p.51.)
‘Written after Reading Gilbert’s History of Dublin” (Printed at head of IUP reprint text of Gilbert’s History, 1854-59; 2nd edn. 1861): ‘Long have I loved the beauty of thy streets, / Fair Dublin; long, with unavailing vows, / Sign’d to all guardian deities who rouse / The spirits of dea nations to new heats / Of life and triumph ... / Look! look, what life is in these quaint old shops - / The loneliest lanes are rattling with the roar / Of coach and chair, fans, deathers, flambeaux, fobs / Flutter and flicker through yon open door, / Where Handel’s hand moves the great organ stops.’ [Note that Rosa Mulholland’s Life of Sir John Gilbert, 1905, contains many references to him.]
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| A Selection from Poems of Denis Florence MacCarthy (1882) | |
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The pillar towers of Ireland, how wondrously they stand Beside these gray old pillars, how perishing and weak The column, with its capital, is level with the dust, But the grass grows again when in majesty and mirth, Two favourites hath Time—the pyramids of Nile, The names of their founders have vanished in the gloom, |
Around these walls have wandered the Briton and the Dane— How many different rites have these gray old temples known! Here blazed the sacred fire, and, when the sun was gone, Here was placed the holy chalice that held the sacred wine, Where blazed the sacred fire, rung out the vesper bell, There may it stand for ever, while that symbol doth impart |
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“Summer longings”: ‘Ah! my heart is weary waiting, / Waiting for the May: / Waiting for the pleasant rambles / Where the fragrant hawthorn brambles, / Where the woodbine alternating, / Scent the dewy way; / Ah! my heart is weary, waiting, / Waiting for the May.’ (For full text - attached.)
Note: Richard D’Alton Williams quotes ‘Ah! my heart is weary waiting, / Waiting for the May!’, [by] D. F. MacCarthy, as an epigraph to his own poem “Longing”, in Poems (1894), p.332pp. Beginning: ‘I wish I was in Ireland / For Summer will soon be there, / And the fields of my darling sire-land / To my heart will be fresh and fair" (p.332) - and ending: ‘For, in spite of the Saxon’s scowlings, / The land to my heart is dear, / And to be but one day in Ireland / Were worth a whole lifetime here.’ (p.334)
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“Goodbye to the Fairies”: ‘Ah! the pleasant time hath vanished ere our wretched doubtings banished / All the graceful people, children of the ear and sea / Who in days now dim and olden, when the world was fresh and golden, / Every mortal could behold in haunted rath and tower and tree - / They have vanished, they are banished. Ah! How sad the loss for thee. ’ (Quoted in Michael MacMahon, Intro. to Maurice O’Keeffe, Irish Life and Lore CD Archive [online].
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| See full text - attached. |
| "A Shamrock from the Irish Shore" (On receiving a shamrock in a letter from Ireland, March 17th, 1865) | |
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[...] Struggling, and yet for strife unmeet, And shall I not return thy love? |
| See full text in Gill’s Irish Reciter: A Selection of Gems from Ireland’s Modern Literature, ed. J. J. O’Kelly [Seán Ó Ceallaigh] (Dublin: M. H. Gill 1905), pp.236-38 [available at Internet Archive - online]. | |
[See other poems by MacCarthy at Read Online - as attached]
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References
Charles Read, ed., A Cabinet of Irish Literature (3 vols., 1876-78) asserts that his Poets and Dramatists of Ireland (1846) claims many writers as Irish for the first time.
The DNB entry on Denis Florence MacCarthy was written by for Stephens by James Ramsay MacDonald - later. British Prime Minister. James Maher of Mullinahone, Co. Tipperary, writing in a letter to the Catholic Herald for 26 April 1957, remarks his surprise and narrates that "[w]hen Mr. MacDonald was addressed in Gaelic in Nova Scotia he thought the language was lriquois". (See online.)
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Project Gutenberg holds digitised versions of The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria, and trans. Life Is a Dream, Poems, The Purgatory of St. Patrick, A Drama of Early Christian Rome, The Wonder-Working Magician - e.g., Poems [online]. |
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“Summer Longings” is held at World of Quotes [online]and Giga USA [online], with the associated PD Music - which includes an audio-version of the music in .mid file format [online]. |
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The Denis Florence MacCarthy web page created by by Dennis McCarthy provides a biographical article from the Catholic Encyclopaedia along with bibliography and digitised texts [online]. |
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Alfred M. Williams, ed., Poets and Poetry of Ireland (1881); biog. notice on Denis Florence McCarthy: ‘distinguished in general literature as well as an Irish national poet’; ‘His father was a tradesman, but of ancient family, and his descent has been traced to the MacCauras, or MacCarthaighs, kings of Desmond or Southwestern Munster’. Further, ‘Mr McCarthy’s national poetry is rather didactic than historical or dialectic, with a few exceptions, such as the very spirited balled “The Foray of Con O’Donnell”, in which the portrait of the ancient Irish wolf-dog is very admirable; and he has also some graphic descriptions of national scenery.’ [403].
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (1919) notes that MacCarthy contributed the the Dublin University Magazine from 1847, generally anonymously.
Dictionary of National Biography, calls him a descendant of Irish sept of Maccauras; espoused repeal, contrib. to Nation; admirable trans. of Calderón [and works].
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America 1904), gives ‘Cease to Do Evil, Learn to Do Well’, and other pieces.
D. J. O’Donoghue, Poets of Ireland (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1912) notes that his numerous and most of his national pieces were omitted from his collected poems by his son.
John Cooke, The Dublin Book of Irish Verse (Dublin: Hodges Figgis 1909), selects ‘The Dead Tribune’ and other poems, and notes, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, trans. Denis Florence McCarthy 1853).
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Patrick Rafroidi, Irish Literature in English: The Romantic Period, 1789-1850 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1980), Vol. 1:‘D. F. MacCarthy trans. Vigny’, in Dublin University Magazine, XXXII, 192 (Dec. 1848), in ‘sounds and Echoes’, pp.648-58. [46, n.] See also Rafroidi, op. cit., Vol. 2 (1980): Bio-Bibl., Poets and Dramatists of Ireland (Duffy 1846); The Spirit of the Nation; Scenes and Stories from the Spanish Stage, 3 vols. (1848), and other works.
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Robert Hogan, Dictionary of Irish Literature, NJ: Greenwood; Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1979): McCarthy calls Luis Ennius, Calderón’s equivalent of Knight Owen in Henry de Saltrey’s Tractatus de Purg. S. Patricii, a ‘heinous hero-villain-convert’ (Poems, Dublin 1884), Preface, p.x. Hogan quotes from the translation: ‘An accountable assemblage / All recumbent in fire: / Through their bodies and their members / Burning spikes and nails were driven’.
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Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 selects from Ballads, Poems and Lyrics, Original and Translated, ‘The Pillar Towers of Ireland’ [‘The pillar towers of Ireland, how wondrously they stand / By the lakes and rushing rivers through the valleys of our land; / In mystic file, through the isle, they lift their heads sublime, / These gray old pillars temples, these conquerors of time!’, and ending, ‘Bright prophets of the future, as preachers of the past!’ 59-60]; cited with translators and collectors Hardiman, Petrie, John O’Daly, Edward Walsh and Douglas Hyde [Seamus Deane, ed.], 5, 113 [Biog.]
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National Library of Ireland [Catalogue search results for <Denis Florence MacCarthy> = 46 items.]
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See complete listing - as attached. |
| Further on MacCarthy by Rev. Matthew Russell: |
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See complete listing - as attached. |
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Ulster University Library (Morris Collection) holds The Book of Irish Ballads (Duffy 1869) and Poems (1884), 287pp. Belfast Public Library holds Shelley’s Early Life (?1920); Ode on the Death of the Earl of Belfast (1855); Poems (1882, 1887); Underglimpses (1857); Book of Irish Ballads ([1846] 1869, 1881).
Hyland Books (1995 Cat.) lists Poems, 1st edn. (Dublin 1882), xxii+287pp.
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Notes
Underglimpses (1) - James Joyce: Denis Florence MacCarthy’s collection Underglimpses is the probable allusion in the phrase referring to ‘Denis Florence MacCarthy’ combies’ [i.e., underclothes] in Finnegans Wake, [200.34-35]. (See Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Night, 1989, p.350; and see further notes on the Joyce connection, infra.)
James Joyce (1) taught at Clifton School, Dalkey, established ‘at Summerfield Lodge, once the residence of minor poet Denis Florence McCarthy [sic] whose name keeps coming up in Finnegans Wake.’ (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, [1959], 1965 Edn., p.158.
James Joyce (2): Leopold Bloom’s library in Eccles St. contains Denis Florence MacCarthy’s Poetical Works, with ‘copper beechleaf bookmark at p.5.’ (see Ulysses, Bodley Head Edn., p.832.)
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Underglimpses (2) - Rose Kavanagh: ‘What a wonderful stillness there is among the hills in September! After all, September is a lovely month, too. I wish it had a poet as devoted as Denis Florence MacCarthy was to May. Perhaps you will tell me the meaning of the title “Underglimpses” in Mr. MacCarthy’s book. Does it mean glimpses under the surface of life, or nature, or what? But it must be nature, I think. I like his “Irish Emigrant’s Mother” greatly - it always brought the tears into my mother’s eyes. “The Foray of Con O’Donnell” always rises in my mind as the Foray of Dan O’Connell. Dublin ought to be pretty hot now [...]’ (Quoted, without date, in Rose Kavanagh and Her Verses, [ed.,] Rev. Matthew Russell, S.J., M. H. Gill 1909, pp.7; for for longer extract, see under Kavanagh, q.v., supra.)
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Abbey playwright: The Abbey Theatre considered a production of Calderón’s Purgatory in 1910 (see A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, A New Biography, London: Macmillan 1988, p.339).
Edward M. Fitzgerald: Fitzgerald translated six plays of Calderón in the same year as Denis Florence MacCarthy.
Davis Coakley, in The Importance of Being Irish (1994), establishes a link between Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” and a poem by D. F. McCarthy [q.p.].
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