Thomas MacDonagh: Commentary

D. J. O’Donoghue, writing of When the Dawn Comes (1908) in his contemporary Irish Booklover notice of the play, remarked that it was ‘simply incomprehensible’, yet thought there was ‘something’ in it all the same.

Joseph Holloway, diary-review of When the Dawn is Come (17 October 1915 [3rd night]), chiefly deals with the company he met and the story of Hyde that Yeats gave him there, viz.: ‘W. B. Yeats had a word with O’Donoghue and me as we came out. He told us of Douglas Hyde abusing the play right and left when it was being acted, and then loudly calling for the “author” at the end, and getting the house to join in the applause; and when Yeats asked him why he called for the author, he said, “Because I had never seen him and wanted to see what he was like.” O’Donoghue said Douglas Hyde was such a kindly soul that he would not offend anyone. […] Guinan told me that MacDonagh’s play was the first produced at the Abbey that was not approved by Yeats. Pressure was brought to bear on him to have it presented, and he gave way.’ (See Robert Hogan and James Kilroy, The Abbey Theatre, The Years of Synge, 1905-109 [The Modern Irish Drama, a documentary history III, Dublin: Dolmen Press 1978, p.229.)

Seamus O’Sullivan [James Starkey]: ‘[...] Thomas MacDonagh’s laughing mouth / And eyes of a happy child [...]’ (See longer extract under O’Sullivan, supra.)

W. B. Yeats: ‘Met MacDonagh yesterday - a man with some literary faculty which will probably come to nothing through lack of culture and encouragement. He has just written an article for The Leader, and spoke much as I do myself about the destructiveness of journalism here in Ireland, and was apologetic about his article. He is managing a school on Irish and Gaelic League principles but says he is losing faith in the League. Its writers are infecting Irish not only with the English idiom but with the habits of thought of current Irish journalism, a most un-Celtic thing. “The League”, he said, “is killing Celtic civilization.” I told him that Synge about ten years ago foretold this in an article in the Academy. He thought the National Movement practically dead that the language would be revived but without all that he loved it for. In England this man would have been remarkable in some way, here he is crushed by the mechanical logic and commonplace eloquence which give power to the most empty mind, because, being “something other than human life”, they have no use for distinguished feeling or individual thought. I mean that within his own mind this mechanical thought is crushing as with an iron roller all that is organic.’ (‘Estrangement’, XLIV; in Autobiographies, 1955, p.488; note the ensuing item, XLV: ‘The soul of Irelnd has become a vapour and her body a stone’ - idem.)

W. B. Yeats (2): ‘MacDonagh called today. Very sad about Ireland. Says that he finds a barrier between himself and the Irish-speaking peasantry, who are “cold, dark and reticent” and “too polite”. He watches Irish-speaking boys at his school, and when nobody is looking, or when they are alone with the Irish-speaking gardener, they are merry, clever and talkative. When they meet an English speaker or one who has learned Gaelic, they are stupid ... Presently he spoke of his nine years in a monastery and I asked what it was like. “O”, he said, “everybody is very simple and happy enough. There is a little jealousy sometimes. If one brother goes into town with a Superior, another brother is jealous.” He then told me that the Bishop of Raphoe had forbidden anybody in his See to contribute to the Gaelic League because its Secretary “has blasphemed against the holy Adamnan.” The Secretary had said, “The Bishop is an enemy, like the founder of his See, Saint Adamnan, who tried to injure the Gaelic language by writing in Latin.” ... [Bishop of Raphoe, Cardinal Logue, &c.]’ (“Death of Synge”, XI; in Autobiographies, London: Macmillan 1955, pp.505-06.)

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James Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin (Dublin: Maunsel & Co. 1916) - on the 1916 leaders: ‘But in my definition they were good men - men, that is, who willed no evil, and whose movements of body or brain were unselfish and healthy. No person living is the worse off for having known Thomas MacDonagh, and I, at least, have never heard MacDonagh speak unkindly or even harshly of anything that lived. It has been said of him that his lyrics were epical; in a measure it is true, and it is true in the same measure that his death was epical. He was the first of the leaders who was tried and shot. It was not easy for him to die leaving behind two young children and a young wife, and the thought that his last moment must have been tormented [89] by their memory is very painful. We are all fatalists when we strike against power, and I hope he put care from him as the soldiers marched him out.’ (pp.89-90.)

G. C. Duggan, The Stage Irishman: A History of the Irish Play and Stage Characters from the Earliest Times (Dublin: Talbot Press 1937; NY: Benjamin Blom; London: Longmans 1937): ‘Speaking of the Anglo-Irish writers [in Literature in Ireland, 1916], MacDonagh says, “Occasionally they introduced to their readers English-speaking Irishmen, but they were either caricatures, or were obviously only half-articulate in their new speech”.’ (p.292.) Note that Duggan retorts: ‘A generalisation of this kind can hardly be sustained on a fair examination of the plays’ (Idem.)

Padraic Colum, ed., Anthology of Irish Verse (1922): Introduction: ‘[...] One of the characteristics of Irish poetry according to Thomas MacDonagh is a certain naiveté. “An Irish poet”, he says, “if he be individual, if he be original, if he be national, speaks, almost stammers, in one of the two fresh languages of this country; in Irish (modern Irish, newly schooled by Europe), or in Anglo-Irish, English as we speak it in Ireland. ... Such an Irish poet can still express himself in the simplest terms of life and of the common furniture of life” (Literature in Ireland). / Thomas MacDonagh is speaking here of the poetry that is being written to-day, of the poetry that comes out of a community that is still mainly agricultural, that is still close to the soil, that has but few possessions. And yet, with this naiveté there must go a great deal of subtility. “Like the Japanese”, says Kuno Meyer, “the Celts were always quick to take an artistic hint; they avoid the obvious and the commonplace; the half-said thing to them is dearest.” [Ancient Irish Literature] This is said of the poetry written in Ireland many centuries ago, but the subtility that the critic credits the Celts with is still a racial heritage.’ (See full text version in RICORSO Library, “Critical Classics” > Anglo-Irish [infra].)

Padraic Colum, ‘Thomas MacDonagh and His Poetry’, in Dublin Magazine (Spring 1966), pp.39-45: ‘a quality of reconciliation that is haunting in his poetry’; Records their acquaintance and his indebtedness for the title of Wild Earth. ‘I met him at a time - it is more easy for me to define it by movement than by chronology - when the Gaelic movement was at its most hopeful and its most uplifting. The generous-minded of the young men and women who were not of the West British persuasion, belonged to the Gaelic League, and were continually finding ways of expressing their ardour. Literary and musical festivals were igniting the minds that were from all parts of the country and outside it. The young men and women who were to make a drastic change in Irish history were ‘feeling the forces’. Yeats and AE were holding youthful poets to their vocation. Young men wearing kilts were to be met in the streets and in Dublin drawing-rooms. Further: Colum met MacDonagh at the Hill of Uisneach, sometime around 1906. Note that D. J. O’Donoghue, M. H. Gill are the publishers of MacDonagh’s The Gold Joy (1906), his third booklet. Miss Gavan Duffy ran St Ita’s adjacent to Pearse’s St. Enda’s. (p.41.) The Irish Review was named at Colum’s suggestion. Stephens contributed The Charwoman’s Daughter. The review ‘brought him [MacDonagh] out of a scholastic environment. […] He made the poems for […] Songs of Myself’ […] the poems in which MacDonagh discovers himself.’ [Cont.]

Padraic Colum (‘Thomas MacDonagh and His Poetry’, 1966) - cont.: ‘About the hero of his play When the Dawn is Come he was very serious - he has a poem whose title is in a very high style - “Of the Man of my First Play”. (p.42) The people of Cloughjordan indignant at their portraiture in “The Upright Man” (‘The only thing straight in the place was the people’). On “The Stars up in the Air”: a translation, but a translation that embodies a mood. The mood is a loneliness that is deeply felt. Ferguson translated this poem but there is no personal mood in his translation. […] Here MacDonagh has achieved that “Irishness” in English verse which he advocated in Literature in Ireland. (p.44) ‘The Yellow Bittern’ is also in the Irish mode, and perhaps we could regard it as the poet’s admonition to himself as hermit and seminarian.’ Note that elsewhere in the article Colum refers to him as ‘hermit and seminarian’, but also as a wit and raconteur - when jogged into it (p.43, 45).

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Seamus Heaney, ‘Mossbawn’, in Preoccupations (London: Faber & Faber 1980) [on McDonagh]: ‘Recently at a poetry reading in Cork a student remarked, half reproachfully, that my poetry didn’t sound very Celtic. The verb was probably more precise than he intended. His observation was informed by an idea of Irish poetry in English, formulated most coherently by Thomas McDonagh [sic], a professor of English at University College, Dublin, who was shot for his part in the Easter Rising of 1916. In his view the distinctive note in Irish poetry is struck when the rhythms and assonances of Gaelic verse insinuate themselves into the texture of English verse. And indeed many poets in this century, notably Austin Clarke, have applied Gaelic techniques in the making of their music and metres. I am sympathetic to the effects gained but I find the whole enterprise a bit programmatic.’ (p.36.) Cf. remarks in ‘The Redress of Poetry’: ‘[…] In any movement towards liberation, it will be necessary to deny the normative authority of the dominant language or literary tradition. At a special moment in the Irish Literary Revival, this was precisely the course adopted by Thomas MacDonagh, Professor of English at the Royal University in Dublin, whose book on Literature in Ireland was published in 1916, the very year he was executed as one of the leaders of the Easter Rising. (The Redress of Poetry, 1995, p.7; for longer extract, see under Heaney, supra.)

Richard Kearney, ‘Myth and Terror’, in The Crane Bag, 2, 1 & 2 (1978), pp.273-87: ’In his Literature in Ireland, [MacDonagh] described the revival of the national spirit as a ‘supreme song of victory on the dying lips of martyrs’ and elsewhere declared his own death to be but a ‘little phases of an Eternal Song’; MacDonagh defended the Proclamation, ‘You think it a dead and buried letter, but it lives, it lives, from minds alight with Ireland’s vivid intellect it sprang; in hearts aflame with Ireland’s mighty love it was conceived. Such documents do not die.’ Note that Kearney quotes Conor C. O’Brien, ‘and in Padraig Pearse’s mind and those of some other notable Irish patriots, the sufferings of the Irish (Catholic) people were in a particular sense one, the sacrifice of the patriots was analogous.’ (Idem; O’Brien, States of Ireland, p.287.)

Declan Kiberd, ‘Writers in Quarantine?: The Case for Irish Studies’, in Crane Bag, III, 1 (1979), pp.9-21 rep. in Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1982); pp.341-42: Discusses MacDonagh’s Literature in Ireland in the light of its subtitle, ‘Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish’, and quotes MacDonagh, ‘all of us find in Irish rather than in English a satisfying understanding of certain ways of ours and the best expression of certain of our emotions - so we are expressing ourselves in translating from Irish’; ‘At present a large amount of translation is natural. Later, when we have expressed again in English all the emotions and experiences expressed already in Irish, this literature will go forward, free from translation.’ (p.348.); ascribes influence to MacDonagh in inculcating growing pluralism in Pearse: [Had MacDonagh lived longer] ‘he would certainly have worked for a rapprochement between both literary traditions, a rapprochement which Pearse himself began to favour in the closing years of his life […] under the influence of his friend’ (p.348).

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape 1996), quoting MacDonagh on Hiberno-English dialect, ‘at its best is more vigorous, fresh and simple than either of the two languages between which it stands’ (Literature in Ireland, Dublin 1916, pp.47-8; Kiberd, p.163); quotes MacDonagh on ‘the mystic who has to express in terms of sense and with the things of God that are made known to him in no language’ (‘Language and Literature in Ireland’, Irish Review, IV, March-April 1914, pp.176-82; Kiberd p.200.)

Note: Kiberd makes this the linchpin of his argument to the effect that the poet revolutionaries of 1916 were intent on bringing into being some entirely new thing, not already encapsulated in conventional language and therefore genuinely revolutionary. ALSO, ‘The Little Black Rose Shall be Red at Last’: ‘... Praise God, if this my blood fulfil the doom/When you, dark rose, shall redden into bloom’ (Poems, 1916, pp.59-60 Kiberd, p.201).

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F. S. L. Lyons, review of Johann A Norstedt, Thomas MacDonagh: A Critical Biography (Virginia UP [?rep 1980]), in Times Literary Supplement (16 May 1980): ‘MacDonagh was a minor poet and not a very good one, though some of his translations from the Irish (‘The Yellow Bittern’ is the most frequently anthologised) suggest that he had some capacity for growth. While his conception of the poet’s role was based on a hazy late-Victorian romanticism, he also had at least the rudiments of a critical sense, and his Literature in Ireland, despite its faults of organization and its frequent confusion, was and remains one of the few serious attempts by an imaginative writer to define and explain that notoriously difficult concept, Anglo-Irish literature. Finally, MacDonagh belonged to the generation that was brought up in the new nationalism, compounded of Gaelic revival and the republican rebirth. This led him into the politics of violence, into becoming a signatory of the proclamation of the Easter Rising itself and eventually to execution and to posthumous glorification. ... He wrote one play, When the Dawn is Come, which Yeats, though describing it as ‘so sentimental I can hardly see how we can stage it’, did admit briefly onto the stage of the Abbey Theatre. MacDonagh repaid him by writing another play a few years later, Metempsychosis, in which he satirised the theory of transmigration of souls by holding up to ridicule his central character who unmistakably resembled Yeats. This play was succinctly described by the Dublin theatre-playgoer Joseph Holloway as ‘unactable ... rot’. Yet a third play, Pagans, was performed by a rival company to the Abbey Theatre, but this seems to have been more a vehicle for MacDonagh’s by then militant nationalist than a serious contribution to the drama.’ [Cont.]

F. S. L. Lyons (review, Times Literary Supplement, 1980) - cont.:‘There may indeed be doubt about MacDonagh’s commitment to [the idea of blood-sacrifice] - though is poem ‘Barbara’ points strongly towards it - but it is surely difficult to deny that Pearse was deeply imbued with the idea [&c.]’. On the biography itself, Lyons says it marks a further stage in the ‘swing from hagiography to history ... submits [MacDonagh to a solemn and disintegrating analysis ... impressive apparatus ... cracking what in the end seems an embarrassingly small nut ... All of these effusions are soberly and effectively damned by Norstedt. / Even MacDonagh’s political career is markedly diminished by this biography ... Norstedt may be on shakier ground ... underestimate[s] his part in the intellectual pre-history of the rebellion &c.’. Note an alternative view: Norstedt’s MacDonagh confirms that MacDonagh deserves a biography (see Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society, 1989, p.37n.)

David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland, colonialism, nationalism and culture (Manchester UP 1988), MacDonagh’s Pagans, Irish Theatre (April 1915), one-act drama of ideas; John Fitzmaurice has resisted the temptation of two women, leaving his wife and fleeing the possibility of an affair in favour of a Christ-like period of exile from Dublin; on his return he articulates his mental conclusions, “Frances, I shall do better than write. A man who is a mere author is nothing. If there is anything good in anything I have written, it is the potentiality of adventure in me - the power to so something better than write. My writings have only been the prelude to my other work ... I am going to live the things that I have imagined.” In Literature in Ireland (1916) he argued that an Anglo-Irish literature worthy of special designation ‘could only come when English had become the language of the Irish people, mainly from Gaelic stock, and when the literature was from, by, of, to and for the Irish people’ (p.viii; cited also in Anthony Cronin, Heritage Now, 1982, p.12.); The Irish race was now mostly Irish speaking, but the life and ways of thought it expressed were ‘still individually Gaelic, spiritually, morally, socially’ (p.23); the ‘true’ Anglo-Irish literature could only be produced by ‘the new English speakers of the country whose fathers or grandfathers spoke only Irish’ (p.24); for the Irish were ‘an agricultural people, fresh from the natural home of man’ (p.23); ‘the patriotism of the Pale [was] very different from the national feeling of the real Irish people’ (p.27).

[Cairns & Richards, Writing Ireland [.... &c.] (1988) - cont:] MacDonagh’s play Metempsychosis (1912) ridiculed the notion of reincarnation taken up by Yeats and AE, and in Literature in Ireland [1916] he suggested that Anglo-Irish authors use Irish material ‘as WS Gilbert and such writers for comic purposes used to treat French’ (p.49). Cairns & Richards remark that MacDonagh, as distinct from Yeats, grounds his paganism in Catholic orthodoxy. [104-06]. Cairns & Richards characterise MacDonagh’s When the Dawn is Come, staged at the Abbey in Oct. 1908, as one of the plays produced within the people-nation of the revolutionaries; it is set ‘Fifty years hence, in Ireland in time of insurrection’ (p.6); while the sub-Shakespearean plot and diction contradict the implied modernity, the play also ends in triumph for the forces of Ireland; it was praised as ‘the first Sinn Féin drama’ and the editor of the St Enda’s school diary noted that ‘We were present in a body at Mr MacDonagh’s When The Dawn Is Come, at the Abbey theatre. Our youngest boys came home yearning for rifles’ (quoted in Parks & Parks, Thomas MacDonagh &c., 1967, p.102-04). Holloway expressed bafflement [see supra’, observing that the enthusiastic reception was the work of young Gaelic Leaguers. The leader of the insurrection is a Catholic intellectual and ‘like one seeking death’. MacDonagh’s title derives from a poem, ‘Of a Poet Patriot’, originally titled ‘To William Rooney’, and containing reference to actions which ‘have echoes still\When the dawn is come.’ (pp.108-09.)

Gerald Dawe, Introduction, Literature in Ireland: Studies in Irish and Anglo-Irish [rep. edn.] (Nenagh: Relay Books 1996): ‘MacDonagh sought to establish the linguistic and quasi-cultural factors (what he called ‘the Irish Mode’) which will both establish and vindicate the separate identity of Irish literature. That there could be an Irish literature (‘a separate thing’, as MacDonagh states) was as potent an issue as the legitimacy and validation of the Irish state.’; (Dawe; rep. in Causeway, Autumn 1996, pp.59-60; p.60; see also under Dawe, supra.[ top ]

Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998), 262pp.: ‘As an abstract linguistic tendency rather than an innate racial capacity, the “Irish note” should be fully available to the Anglo-Irish in MacDonagh’s model of cultural production. The subtlety of this position is unrecognisable as the vulgar fundamentalist nationalism attacked by revisionist discourse.’ (p.83; [Earlier quotes MacDonagh on the shift from Irish to English language; see Quotations, infra.]

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Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translations, Languages, Cultures (Cork UP 1996): ‘In his Literature in Ireland (1916), Thomas MacDonagh saw translation as a sketch of possibility, the ante-chamber of change: “This is an age of beginnings rather than of achievements; for a hundred years now writers in this land have been translating, adapting, experimenting,working as the writers of the sixteenth century worked in many countries. The translations which have survived are those most in consonance with the genius of the country. “An age of beginnings: what the next age or the ripeness of this may bring, one can only guess at.” (Op. cit., 1920 edn., p.13) A signatory to the 1916 Proclamation and subsequently executed for his part in the Easter Rising, MacDonagh did not hold with the view that translation was, at best, a compromise and, at worst, a form of betrayal. On the contrary, he argued ante Derrida that the test of excellence in a literature was its degree of translatability. Quoting John Dryden, “A thing well said will be wit in all languages” MacDonagh stresses the importance of the Uberleben or afterlife in translation [quote:] “The high things of the Scriptures, the words of Our Lord about considering the lilies of the field, are still poetry in all languages. When the language of their first expression is dead and the day of its most gracious felicities is over, they still live. If Shakespeare’s phrases refuse to translate beautifully into some tongues, it is that their beauty consists rather in felicity of words than in high poetry. All that is great in his dramatic power, in his creation of character, in his philosophy, will be great in other languages, only indeed less great for that want of Shakespearean diction.” (Ibid., p.122) / Translations can, in fact, surpass the original. He cites the examples of Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s translations of Sully Prudhomme and Douglas Hyde’s translations from the Irish. For MacDonagh, a dead image in one language can come alive in the new context of translation. This metaphorical resurrection energises the poetic idiom of Hyde. MacDonagh’s generous belief in the possibilities of translation is shared by many commentators on contemporary Irish culture, but it is a belief [167] that is not without dissenters. [… &c.]’ (pp.167-68.)

Dara Redmond, ‘The MacDonagh File: Rising Executions’, in The Irish Times (5th May 2001), writes that Gen. Blackadder, President of Court Martial, charged: MacDonagh that he ‘did an act to wit: did take part in an armed rebellion and in the waging of war against His Majesty the King, such an act being of such a nature as to be calculated to be prejudicial to the Defence of the Realm and being done with the intention and for the purpose of assisting the enemy’; plea of not guilty; MacDonagh called no witness in his defence but simply asserted: ‘I did everything I could to assist the officers in the matter of the surrender, telling them where the arms and ammunition were after the surrender was decided upon.’ MacDonagh surrendered to Gen. Lowe at 3.15 pm on 30th April; accompanied in surrender negotiations by Fr. Augustine, OFM (Capuchin); MacDonagh wrote a letter in Kilmainham occasioned by his impression that his account in court of the surrender ‘might seem like an appeal’ and asserting that ‘it was not such. I made no appeal, no recantation, no apology for my acts. In what I said I merely claimed that I had acted honourably and thoroughly in all that I had set myself to do. [… &c.]’; on hearing Asquith’s announcement in that the first three leaders had been executed, Carson told Parliament on 3rd May: ‘It will be a matter requiring the greatest wisdom and the greatness coolness, may I say, in dealing with these men, and all I can say to the Executive is, whatever is done, let it be done not in a moment of temporary excitement but with due deliberation in regard both to the past and to the future.’

Aaron Kelly, Twentieth-Century Literature in Ireland: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2008): ‘[...] MacDonagh writes: “We have now so well mastered this language of our adoption that we use it with a freshness and power that the English of these days rarely have” (Literature in Ireland: Studies in Irish and Anglo-Irish Literature, Talbot 1916, p.169). Most importantly, MacDonagh, like Joyce, sought to resist racial definitions and delimitations of Irish literature: “I have little sympathy with the criticism that marks off subtle qualities in literature as altogether racial, that refuses to admit natural exceptions in such a naturally exceptional thing as high literature, attributing only the central body to the national genius, the marginal positions to this alien strain or that.” (Ibid., p.57.) / Thus, MacDonagh refuses to enthrone one nominally pure Irish form of writing above all others. His rejection of a notional Irish essence overturns the terminology of Yeats, and by extension Arnold’s Celticism, as well as resisting the strictures of Moran’s Irish Ireland. Instead MacDonagh proposes to replace the idea of the Celtic Note (based on essential, racial demarcations) with what he terms the Irish Mode (a much more culturally and critically acquired discourse). The Irish Mode proposed a form of Irish writing in English that preserved Irish cadences and patterns, and which took possession of English and shaped it to the needs of Irish experience and culture. MacDonagh argues that he advances his Irish Mode in order to avoid the vague racial longings of the term Celtic and “to fix certain standards, to define certain terms. I trust that [30] is a result the Irish Mode will be better understood and appreciated than the Celtic Note for which I substitute it” (Ibid., p.vii). MacDonagh helps us to understand that the 1916 Rising and the Revival period itself contained many divergent constituencies. While willing to fight and ultimately die for Ireland, MacDonagh’s conception of Irish literature was distinctively and generously open-ended since his Irish Mode proposed not an exclusive[,] racially and linguistically pure Irish canon in the manner of Irish Ireland. Rather, it was a critical invitation for many forms of Irish writing in English to be considered in all the tension, precariousness and possibility of their dual linguistic and cultural inheritance.’ (pp.29-30.)

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