The Midnight Court

Brian Merriman, Frank O'Connor, Brian Bourke

• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781847176639
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia

Award-winning edition of this outstanding translation of Brian Merriman's eighteenth-century erotic masterpiece.

Translated by Frank O'Connor

Illustrations by Brian Bourke.

THE MIDNIGHT COURT

‘Twas my pleasure to walk in the river meadows

In the thick of the dew and the morning shadows,

At the edge of the woods in a deep defile,

At peace with myself in the first sunshine.

When I looked at Lough Graney my heart grew bright,

Ploughed lands and green in the morning light,

Mountains in ranks with crimson borders

Peering above their neighbours’ shoulders.

The heart that never had known relief

In a lonesome old man distraught with grief

Without money or home or friends or ease

Would quicken to glimpse beyond the trees

The ducks sail by on a mistless bay

And a swan before them leading the way,

And a speckled trout that in their track

Splashed in the air with arching back,

The grey of the lake and the waves around

That foamed at its edge with a hollow sound.

Birds in the trees sang merry and loud,

A fawn flashed out of the shadowy wood,

Lowing horn and huntsman’s cry,

Belling hounds and fox slipped by.

A longing for sleep bore down my head,

And in the grass I scooped a bed

Yesterday morning the sky was clear,

The sun fell hot on river and mere,

Her horses fresh and with gamesome eye

Harnessed again to assail the sky;

The leaves were thick upon every bough

And ferns and grass as thick below,

Sheltering bowers of herbs and flowers

That would comfort a man in his dreariest hours.

A longing for sleep bore down my head,

And in the grass I scooped a bed

With a hollow behind to house my back,

A place for my head and my legs stretched slack.

What more could I ask? I covered my face

To keep off the flies as I slept for a space

But my mind in dream was filled with grief

And I tossed and groaned as I sought relief.

And her grinning jaws with the fangs stuck out

Would be cause sufficient to start a rout

I had only dozed when I felt a shock

And all the landscape seemed to rock,

A north wind made my senses tingle

And thunder crackled along the shingle,

And as I looked up, as I thought, awake

I seemed to see at the edge of the lake

As ugly a brute as a man could see

In the shape of a woman approaching me,

For if I calculated right

She must have been twenty feet in height

With several yards of a hairy cloak

Trailing behind her in the muck.

I never beheld such a freak of nature;

She hadn’t a single presentable feature,

And her grinning jaws with the fangs stuck out

Would be cause sufficient to start a rout,

And in a hand like a weaver’s beam

She raised a staff that it might be seen

She was coming to me on a legal errand

For pinned to the staff was a bailiff’s warrant.

And she cried in a voice with a brassy ring

‘Get up out of this, you lazy thing!

That a man of your age can think ‘tis fitting

To sleep in a ditch while the court is sitting!

An honester court than ever you knew

And far too good for the likes of you;

Justice and Mercy, hand in hand,

Sit in the courts of Fairyland.

Let Ireland think, when her troubles are ended

Of those by whom she was befriended.

In Moy Graney palace twelve days and nights

They’ve sat, discussing your wrongs and rights,

And it saddened the heart of the fairy king

And his lords and influential men

When they studied the cause of each disaster

That happened your people, man and master;

Old stock uprooted on every hand,

Without claim to their rent or laws or land;

The country waste and nothing behind

Where the flowers were plucked but the weeds and wild;

The best of your breed in foreign places,

And upstart rogues with impudent faces

Planning with all their guile and spleen

To pick the bones of the Irish clean.

But the worst of all these bad reports

Was that truth was darkened in their courts,

And nothing to back a poor man’s case

But whispers, intrigue and the lust for place;

The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• PREFACE
• THE MIDNIGHT COURT
• THE AUTHOR
• THE TRANSLATOR
• THE ILLUSTRATOR
• Copyright