In Eumaeus Bloom mistakenly attributes the poem Caoch O'Leary to
"poor John Casey." He has confused the author, John Keegan,
with John Keegan Casey, the "Poet of the Fenians" who wrote The
Rising of the Moon, the well-known song about the
Rebellion of 1798. Both men died young, but Casey especially
deserves to be called "poor": incarceration after the Fenian
Rising in 1867 destroyed his health, and he died at age 23.
The son of a school teacher, Casey was born near Mullingar in
County Westmeath in August 1846, at the height of the great famine. He lived through years
of overwhelming anguish: mass starvation and disease, mass
evictions of peasants from their cottages, mass emigration in
the "coffin ships," criminal government neglect, more radical and militant forms
of nationalism, harsh crackdowns by the state
authorities. As a teenager he began writing nationalistic
ballads like The Patriot's Love, The Reaper of Glenree,
The Forging of the Pikes, Máire My Girl, and The
Rising of the Moon. Many were sung at political
gatherings, and their popularity led Casey to move to Dublin,
where he joined the Fenian movement and wrote articles for The
Nation under the pen-name "Leo." His collected poems,
published as A Wreath of Shamrocks in 1866, brought
him still more fame, and he spoke at mass rallies in Dublin,
Liverpool, and London.
After the suppression of the Fenian rebellion, Casey was
imprisoned without charges in Mountjoy Prison for eight
months. Released because of poor health on condition that he
self-transport to Australia, he stayed in Dublin in disguise,
married, and had a child, but the baby died in October 1869
and Casey himself did a few months later, on St. Patrick's
Day, 1870. Newspapers estimated that more than 50,000 people
followed his casket to the Glasnevin cemetery on foot, and
another 50,000 to 100,000 lined the streets to see it pass by.
Fifteen years later, a monumental
Celtic cross was erected over his grave.
Almost anyone might be forgiven for mixing up Keegan and
Casey, two relatively obscure 19th century poets from the
Irish Midlands who had similar names and both died young. But
is Bloom the culprit, or Joyce? If it's Bloom, the error is
entirely consistent with all his other close-but-not-quite
stabs at remembering obscure information, including his
confusion of Thomas Gray and
Thomas Campbell in Hades, when he tries to
recall who wrote Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Rather
than scorn Bloom for his defective mnemotechnic, a kindhearted
reader might admire this largely self-educated man for the
range of what he does know, and sympathize with his inability
to get everything right.
