On Rereading Thomas Moore

...Paradise and the Peri is the only poem of any length given...

...Thereafter for a period of six months the central board may make assessments...

...Occasionally we find a district attorney with the courage to try and convict those finally responsible for the present evils...

...Such a volume in sheets were a volume of charms, Or if bound, it should only be bound in our arms...

...It is authentic, too: a garden, a fawn, and a child speaking of them, and we are made to feel the touch of the child's hand...

...The ward chairman sends a check for the number of authorizations or names he has to the collector of delinquent taxes...

...The ward chairman if he so desires becomes an alderman, or if he prefers a quiet life is guaranteed a wider immunity for bootlegging or gambling...

...It broadens from city to county, from county to state and inevitably from state to nation...

...Succinctly put, that means that your ballot or mine had exactly one-third the effect which the framers of the constitution intended it should have...

...Take his five lines on Castlereagh-they do not brand as Shelley's or Byron's lines brand the man-they are aimed at accomplishment, or a lack of accomplishment, rather than at character...

...Or perhaps he is given the automobile repair work for a district...

...Let me note here that Eugene O'Curry was of the opinion that the tunes played by the harpers, the tunes to which Moore set his words, recorded the structure of ancient verse...

...The latter issues a batch of receipts, which are delivered in turn by the various heelers and district deputies...

...The "O" which is so evocative of the open sea has its full sound in these words...

...there is nothing like it among the rhythms of English poetry...

...The peri and the angel, the man and the child, are there so that the scene around each may be described...

...By DONALD C. ANDERSON Literature has been comparatively free of late from reference to the old-time "boss...

...Moore knew nothing about Gaelic verse forms, but the music that he wrote to made, as it were, a mold: in filling the mold he reproduced a Gaelic form...

...When through the Piazzetta Night breathes her cool air, Then, dearest Ninetta, I'll come to thee there...

...An effort must be made, however, to dissociate words and tunes, for, on the pages of a book, these pieces exist, not as songs, but as organizations of words embodying distinct moods, having rhythms which are part of the mood projected...

...To go back a step further the acts of assembly also provide the methods whereby the taxes so to be paid are to be assessed...

...Nor do the extracts from the journal of Biddy Fudge satirize that lightheaded young lady nor the world she lives in-the writer is not absorbed enough in it all...

...The character or the passion that makes a narrative poem is not in Paradise and the Peri...

...The Minstrel Boy has nothing of the nobility that is in The Harp That Once through Tara's Halls...

...They are again treated to the magnanimity of the organization as the heeler remarks, "Oh, forget that," or "See me after the election and pay me...

...But I miss in it three pieces which I think should have been included-Come Rest on This Bosom...

...Now then, for a brief financial recapitulation before discussing the uses to which these invalid tax receipts have been put...

...Are we developing a different species of the same character...

...In the last general election there were 40,000 of these receipts issued in one county at an approximate expense of $41,600...

...They are witty and entertaining, however...

...So far so good...

...Sigerson once told me that he considered this poem the most successful example of a Gaelic verse form in English...

...There is The Kiss, a piece which has not the overtone that would make it poetry, nor the wit that would make it an epigram...

...This winning faction will in the next four years control, in its relatively small zone, the expenditure of $500,000,000...

...The process has been easy and painless...

...In isolated instances it may become necessary to substitute names for voters who have been forgotten or whose allegiance is more definitely established...

...Then we have Has Sorrow Thy Young Days Shaded, which leaves us with the conviction that the poet is more interested in drawing out similes than in opening his heart to a sorrow which he thinks he has divined...

...we should read it as we look at tapestry-but tapestry in which all the figures are brightly colored...

...When the results of a gubernatorial election are not known for five days during which time constant conferences take place between the two opposing political camps for the purpose of "trading" is the voice of the people being heard...

...The selection I have been commenting upon is the best that has appeared...

...Briefly they provide for the appointment of district assessors and a central board of assessors...

...Love Thee, Dearest...

...Fair gardens, shining streams, with ranks Of golden melons on their banks, More golden where the sunlight falls...

...That is his payment...

...And I cannot believe that a piece which, with its insistence upon faithlessness and long-faded glories is distinctly defeatist, can really correspond with a heroic and truly national air...

...I do not want to write of The Harp That Once through Tara's Halls as a song, but one cannot refrain from noting how magnificently it is made for articulation, how every salient word-pride, glory, praise, pulse, ruin, freedom, throbs, breaks, lives-is unerringly placed...

...The strange and memorable rhythm of At the Mid-hour of Night came to the poet from the music of the harpers...

...It must be one of the world's great songs...

...It is nothing but description...

...The Last Rose of Summer has two charming lines: Since the lovely are sleeping, Go, sleep thou with them...

...The structure of Moore's verse has more artistry than can be found in the Gaelic song: the end line of each verse has a rhyme that is a faint echo...

...Oft in the Stilly Night, which we remember for the striking image of the banquet hall deserted, again carries contradiction between the thing that is being said and the measure it is being said in: it is in the tone of a man talking to companions, not in the tone of a man who realizes that he has become lonely...

...and When He Who Adores Thee...

...The full results of this system, if they were known, would unquestionably cause us to throw the entire system overboard...

...Some are not vital, and an editor would be justified in reducing the poem...

...The extraction of political power from the hands of independent voters has been very similar to the operation which takes place in the dentist's chair...

...Dublin: The Cuala Press...

...The political battle was three-cornered and the winning party's plurality was only 20,000 over its nearest competitor...

...If I were asked to put another of Moore's beside The Harp That Once through Tara's Halls I should think of How Oft the Banshee Cried...

...In the past two decades, however, a system has been evolved and developed which evades this provision of our laws...

...A rhetorical question is in point...

...Our sands are bare, but down their slope The silv'ry-footed antelope As gracefully and gaily springs As o'er the marble courts of kings...

...And did you see the maiden with the step firm and free...

...This is accomplished with an eraser and pencil...

...Now the charm of Fly to the Desert, Fly with Me is in its flowing descriptiveness...

...The higher leaders secure widespread concessions in one form or another, perhaps in the award of large construction contracts or in some cases in the appointment to important city or county boards...

...But as an organization of words it is remarkable, and it definitely projects the mood...

...WITHIN the next two decades it is possible that we may see the entire submergence of the American constitution...

...Faintly answering still the notes that once were so dear...

...The trend of government in the United States while professedly toward benevolent paternalism is in reality toward the greater restriction of personal rights...

...Ireland owes Moore a debt of gratitude for having written a poem that so well matches a heroic tune and that so movingly renders her sense of the kingly past...

...Still, something comes to us through the old-fashioned parlance of To Nea: The little bay, where turning in From ocean's rude and angry din, As lovers steal to bliss, The billows kiss the shore, and then Flow back into the deep again As though they did not kiss...

...It is Moore's real tribute to Irish music: no other words written by an Irish poet express as this poem expresses the spirit of our proud and sorrowful traditional music...

...Now for its causes and working scheme...

...The thing is porcelain, if you like, but it is well wrought and there is a place for it...

...The voters cast their ballots with a sense of civic self-righteousness and read the morning papers with pride when they see recorded in a controlled sheet the victorious result of a controlled vote...

...it admirably illustrates Moore's compass...

...Dear Harp of My Country has appropriate organization: it is a fine dedicatory poem...

...Let me trace the rewards for services rendered...

...Even at such times as this the salve of national expediency has been applied to assuage the burn and to justify tactics and policies which would hardly have been permitted or countenanced in the days of the Medici...

...But the instances are rare...

...Lir's lonely daughter...

...would any sane business man refuse to expend $41,000 to secure the right to disburse $500,000,000...

...What dignity it has-the dignity of a hero's last speech...

...Whereupon the county commissioners, having before them the list of taxables and their assessments and the county treasurer's budget, fix the tax rate and authorize the county treasurer to collect the taxes due...

...In some instances prospective voters with a smattering of civic pride offer to pay for these receipts...

...the rest is only these lines diluted...

...Then there are familiar pieces which are difficult to dissociate from the tunes which are their accompaniments...

...The district chairman, likely a personable young man of uncertain morals and still more uncertain occupation, at the behest of a ward chairman undertakes the shepherding of the organization vote in his district...

...In this poem which is really heroic the mood of mourning and exultation are admirably conveyed by the structure of the verse...

...When the Balaika Is heard o'er the sea, I'll dance the Romaika By moonlight with thee...

...This obviously "dates"-we do not express ourselves in such terms nowadays...

...Sail on, sail on, thou fearless bark" is merely a Byronic echo...

...they hold up to scorn Castlereagh the public speaker, not Castlereagh the cold-hearted, capable servant of the vested interests of the day...

...The taxes so assessed become delinquent if unpaid on September 1 of each year and uncollected taxes are transmitted to a delinquent tax collector for collection...

...This is the song that ends Lalla Rookh...

...Net result-the organization secures an absolutely sure vote at a net expenditure of $1.24...

...There is, too, alliteration-"murmuring mournfully...

...Needless to say the winning faction was the incumbent one...

...The point to which your attention is directed, however, is that with the certification of the tax books to the county commissioners for the establishment of the tax rate by specific provision of and natural inference from the acts of assembly, expires the last opportunity for a prospective voter to be legally assessed...

...Long may the fair and brave Sigh o'er the hero's grave...

...This argument, of course, should backfire as it is the duty of the appointed assessors, controlled by the party in power, to see that all assessments are properly made...

...The Song of Fionnuala has this much against it-it is not self-contained: one has to know the story of the Children of Lir before one can follow it, and this takes from it as a poem...

...In Let Erin Remember neither of the stanzas has real power...

...in a great majority of instances on a prosperity issue and an ever-present will-o'-the-wisp promise of municipal improvements...

...On election day the district heeler gets his votes out by using his own car or a borrowed automobile to canvass his district and jolly or cajole the controlled vote to the polls...

...This latter official thereupon, after the first day of September, contrary to law, and in obvious disregard of the rights of legally qualified voters, proceeds to perform the functions delegated by acts of assembly to the county treasurer, and the county commissioners, and with the assistance and compliant silence of the board of assessors enters the names of taxables in these extra tax books, collects from them delinquent taxes which were never delinquent in the interpretation of the statutes and issues tax receipts therefor...

...So much for the actual result of the system in one instance...

...Anderson's belief that generations now living may see the American constitution submerged, the evidence for "controlled voting" he offers is impressive enough...

...When finally the presidential candidate of a major party, whose nomination is tantamount to election, is chosen by seven men in a hotel room thick with smoke and the fumes of liquor, is it not about time that we questioned the adequacy of our present form of elective democracy...

...Silent, oh Moyle, be the roar of thy water, Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose, While, murmuring mournfully, Lir's lonely daughter Tells to the night-star her tale of woes...

...The district heeler reports to the ward chairman and files his lists...

...From a multitude of like instances, stage-managed sometimes in adroit fashion are built up in our large cities the so-called "controlled vote...

...In the fullest sense of the word it is controlled and the percentage of error is less than y2 of 1 percent...

...We think it will arouse interest, if not concern, since the conditions described, though localized in Pennsylvania, are true in many other states.-The Editors...

...Coincidentally the county treasurer submits to the county commissioners his estimated budget for the taxable year...

...In the second poem in the selection a young man tells a girl that they must not walk toward a certain place any more-"such walks may be our ruin...

...Gay lizards glitt'ring on the walls Of ruin'd shrines, busy and bright As they were all alive with light...

...Remember, o'er its circling flood In what a dangerous dream we stood, The silent sea before us, Around us all the gloom of grove That ever lent its shade to love, No eye but heaven's o'er us...

...The circle is unending...

...Witness, the Volstead disaster, witness as well divers and sundry congressional and senatorial investigations with their ever-present and resultant prosecutions for...

...this is broken by too drastic a cut, and in four stanzas the gracefulness of the poem is impaired...

...It reproduces the rhythm of a Gaelic song that has been translated by several poets, but translated with most approximation to the sound by Douglas Hyde in O were you on the mountain, and did you see my love ? And did you see my fair one, my queen, and my dove...

...He is even given police assistance in stamping out rival business...

...The ground plan is set up in the smallest unit of our political system, the precinct or voting district...

...In a recent city election in my own city the controlled vote out-numbered the independent vote more than two to one...

...Their books are then closed and the list of taxables is certified to the county treasurer and the county commissioners...

...To the Pretty little Mrs.- is not a satire-it is an epigram, and perhaps among the best epigrams in English...

...In the first place it has a defect that is present in another famous song-Ben Jonson's Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes: the first and second stanzas are related only through the fact that they are invariably found together, but they are really two different poems...

...Fundamentally dishonest and undemocratic it has unquestionably sapped our entire political plan until at the present time it is difficult to conceive how far the tentacles extend...

...Moore had not enough malice to make him a real satirist...

...If the answer is affirmative he congratulates them, calls them good citizens and solicits their support for his organization...

...If I remember aright, it contains eleven stanzas...

...We read: When first I met thee warm and young There shone such truth about thee, And on thy lip such promise hung I did not dare to doubt thee, and we know that this jig-time rhythm has no correspondence with a real mood of abandonment and reproach...

...And, yet more splendid, numerous flocks Of pigeons, settling on the rocks, With their rich, restless wings, that gleam Variously in the crimson beam...

...But not all in this selection are as authentic as are, to my mind, the poems I have already noted...

...Paradise and the Peri is as empty of character and passion as an improvisation might be- indeed, with its indeliberate structure and its surface presentation it might be an improvisation...

...At times, as in the 1928 presidential campaign, it has been necessary to resort to some small violence in-order to rescue the drowning non-conformists from watery political death...

...How many of Moore's familiar songs can exist for us on these terms...

...The district heeler for his services is tacitly guaranteed immunity from police interference with the bootlegging or disorderly house business in his particular zone...

...With the expiration of this opportunity there should also expire his right to vote...

...After the transmission of the tax books containing delinquents to the delinquent tax collector by the county treasurer, there has grown up a custom, fostered, encouraged and controlled by the party in power, of preparing a new and additional series of tax books for such taxables as have not been assessed up to that time...

...How oft has the Banshee cried, How oft has death untied Bright links that glory wove, Sweet words entwined by love...

...In Pennsylvania, for instance, the acts of assembly governing the right to register as a voter provide primarily that a citizen otherwise qualified may register if he produces at the time of registration a receipt for state or county taxes paid within the period of two years immediately preceding the general election...

...I come to Child's Song: from a Masque...

...In other words new books which have never been in the hands of the county treasurer, the board of assessors or the county commissioners are prepared and placed in the hands of the collector of delinquent taxes...

...ON REREADING THOMAS MOORE By PADRAIC COLUM I HAVE given myself the task of commenting on nearly every poem in a volume that is before me- a collection of less than thirty pieces-because I think the time has come to determine how much of this work can have a place in literature...

...And this is difficult, for the poet is the writer of The Harp That Once through Tara's Halls, and Let Erin Remember, and The Minstrel Boy...

...Now go one step further...

...A controlled press, however, does not permit the true results to become known...

...Let Erin Remember the Days of Old also fails when compared with The Harp That Once through Tara's Halls...

...If they do not have tax receipts he remarks on the terrific amount of trouble incident to securing them and the tedious hours necessary to be properly assessed...

...A lady writer is compared to a dainty volume-a duodecimo...

...Reduced to its lowest terms it places a value of $1.24 on a man's vote and $.83 on a woman's, wholesale rates in any election...

...We have even had upright public officials in the full sense of the word...

...Now all of this procedure is intricate and has been in years past accompanied by unavoidable delays and breakdowns in the machinery of collection...

...And, say, was she pining in sorrow like me...

...But it is difficult to judge, for every word in the piece has become hackneyed...

...The chairman commanding a congressional district is given the right to make numerous appointments with their consequent revenue and return...

...Those Evening Bells, too, have a hollow sound-we think we hear them, but that is only because we are being told about their ringing...

...Then come-thy Arab maid will be The lov'd and lone acacia tree, The antelope, whose feet shall bless With their light sound thy loneliness...

...While not everyone will agree with Mr...

...The only possible inference is, since these additional receipts are issued for occupational taxes only, so-called poll taxes, that they are secured solely for voting purposes...

...And you may touch his sleeping eyes, And feel his little silv'ry feet...

...O'Curry quotes an eight-line poem by Cormac MacCuilennain who died in the year 903, which sings to an old air popularly known by the title For Ireland I'd Not Tell Who She Is, and adds, . . . Many such instances could be adduced to ancient lyric music still in existence in minutely exact agreement with forms of lyric poetry peculiar to the most ancient periods of our native literature...

...It has lovely verses filled with beautiful and varied overtones-indeed it is a triumph of picture-making: Our rocks are rough, but smiling there The acacia waves her yellow hair, Lonely and sweet, nor lov'd the less For flow'ring in a wilderness...

...The present editor, I think, has cut too many stanzas-he has reduced the poem to four...

...He makes a house-to-house canvass of the residents of his district, asking prospective voters if they possess tax receipts...

...at the very first sign of pain on the part of the victim, gas has been applied in lethal doses, where anaesthetic doles were insufficient...

...Whatever is in the verses is in these two lines...

...The business I am undertaking is to try to find out how authentic as poems these pieces are...

...A Canadian Boat Song has in it neither the flow of the river nor the pull of the oars-we should not know we were with men afloat if Moore did not keep on telling us that we were...

...Peace to each manly soul that sleepeth, Rest to each faithful eye that weepeth...

...He is also a writer whose expression and sentiment, in a great number of instances, have become old-fashioned...

...One year prior to the date of the general election the books of the district assessors are closed and their reports made to the central board...

...Democracy as practised has been undermined until it now possesses only 33 1-3 percent of its purposed power...

...The volume is Lyrics and Satires from Thomas Moore, edited by Sean O'Faolain...

...There are two pieces given whose rhythms are as cheap as if they had been made to fit a tune that anticipated a popular gramophone record...

...The paper is based upon the results of an investigation in which the author took an important part...

...it gives the effect of a hushed and trembling return of something disembodied...

...If we are unable to determine today whether or not the mayor of the fifth city in this nation holds his office as the result of a legal election, will we be able in ten years to satisfy ourselves that the President of these United States and its high administrative officers are the choices of the people ? When the senator-elect of one of the sovereign commonwealths of the union is openly faced with the accusation that "his election was partly bought and partly stolen" and can make no adequate defense to that charge are we prepared to defend our present elective system...

...it is facile in its rhythm and is rhetorical in its feeling...

...Granting for the purpose of argument that the voters are evenly divided between the sexes, the average cost per tax receipt is $1.04...

...Now you will find these acts extremely involved...

...A like descriptiveness is marked in Fly to the Desert, Fly with Me...

...Then in the second stanza there is a repetition of thin vowels which carries a sense of wistfulness-Erin, springing, weeping, heaven...

...in this selection it has been condensed by the editor...

...In judging his poems for what they are here and now I have to guard against many encirclements of opinion and prepossession...

...Finally, with great magnanimity, he offers to secure receipts for them subject to the tacit or outspoken provisions that the recipients shall register and support his candidates...