Thomas Moore is a poet of great versatility, producing satires, epistles, romances, and many other forms, but it is as a major exponent of the Romantic song or lyric that his significance chiefly resides. Famous in his day, a popular poet of Irish descent and concerns, a friend and mostly amiable rival of Byron, taken up by the Whig party and its fashionable coteries, Moore has often been dismissed as a purveyor of largely nostalgic and sentimental poems about ‘Erin’ (Ireland), a mawkish entertainer pandering to the hypocritical sympathies of an imperialist ruling class. ‘Mr. Moore’, writes Hazlitt with some savagery in The Spirit of the Age, ‘converts the wild harp of Erin into a musical snuff‐box!’1 In fact, that ‘musical snuff‐box’ contained heady poetic substances. Moore cannot simply be dismissed as an elegant weathervane, reflecting changes in contemporary poetic taste. Seamus Deane comes closer to the truth when, acknowledging Moore’s cultural importance and invention of ‘Irish nationalism’, he argues that the Irish poet ‘was a minor poet but a major phenomenon’.2
We need to allow for the way in which the tag ‘minor poet’ can get in the way of close inspection of what a poet manages to do. Moore wrote lyrics in an idiom that has been called ‘Anacreontic’, after the ancient Greek poet Anacreon, who wrote lyrics in praise of love and wine. In her illuminating essay on Moore’s early Odes of Anacreon, Jane Moore notes that ‘The structural economy of Anacreontic verse is one of imitation, rather than innovation’.3 Yet as she herself remarks, Moore’s mode of imitation is often one that ‘modifies’ the ‘Anacreontic ethos’ and this blend of respect for tradition and capacity subtly to make it new pervades Moore’s lyrics.
His Irish Melodies (ten numbers between 1808 and 1834) are among the major products of the period’s interest in poetic nationalism, in the idea that ballads and songs derive from the ancient sources of a culture, often one deserted, abandoned or subjected to tyrannical rule. The political subtext of Moore’s poems, with their hints of protest against current English government policy, is no less strong for being shrouded in lyrical veils, as in his lament for his friend Robert Emmet, hanged and beheaded after the failed 1803 Irish uprising:
Oh! breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade,
Where cold and unhonour’d his relics are laid;
Sad, silent, and dark be the tears that we shed,
As the night‐dew that falls on the grass o’er his head.
But the night‐dew that falls, though in silence it weeps,
Shall brighten with verdure the grave where it sleeps;
And the tear that we shed, though in secret it rolls,
Shall long keep his memory green in our souls.4
The kind of poem that led Byron to refer to Moore ‘as the Burns of Ireland’,5 these lines make an eloquent lyricism out of what cannot be spoken, the name of the fallen freedom‐fighter; they ‘breathe’ the name in the act of letting it ‘sleep in the shade’. The lines appear to allude to Emmet’s own supposed speech in the dock in which in one version he asked for the ‘charity of silence’ until his country had taken ‘her place among the nations of the earth’.6 Moore’s lyricism, with its alliteration, vowel music, and anapaestic lilt, may lull, but the poetry’s velvety form conceals a steely content apparent in the way in which ‘grass’ sets going a train of associations which culminate in the patriotic ‘green’ of the last lines, or in the turn effected from ‘night‐dew’ as merely symbolic of forlorn lament to its use as a symbol of renewal.7 There may be an element of the ‘unfulfilled proposition’, in Jane Moore’s words, about the final image, but Moore’s swaying, rounding on itself lyricism is not inhospitable to the kind of far gaze into futurity found in other Romantic works such as Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: these gazes can be dismissed over‐hastily as idealistic to a fault or, more sympathetically, they can be seen as courageously sustaining the reader’s vision. Deane is right to single out Moore’s commitment to ‘the fidelity of the tender heart’ in the face of ‘The treachery of time’,8 but one needs to add that his pledge to steadfast commitment has toughness in it as well as tenderness. Certainly there’s an honesty and a cunning in the writing: a deep latent anger coexists with a refusal to commit itself to any political position other than reverential respect and grief.
Moore did not wholly disclaim political motives: he mockingly takes the fight to those prejudiced against his native country in his ‘Prefatory Letter on Music’, added to the third number of the Irish Melodies (1810): ‘it was not to be expected that those touches of political feeling, those tones of national complaint, in which the poetry sometimes sympathizes with the music, would be suffered to pass without censure or alarm’ (p. 194). But Moore deftly parts company with ‘those who identify nationality with treason, and who see in every effort for Ireland a system of hostility towards England’ (p. 195), and his shrewdly balanced position is evident in a poem such as ‘Oh! blame not the bard’ which continues:
if he fly to the bowers
Where Pleasure lies, carelessly smiling at Fame,
He was born for much more, and in happier hours
His soul might have burn’d with a holier flame (p. 208)
In his preface Moore wrote that ‘as [the Melodies] are intended rather to be sung than read, I can answer for their sound with somewhat more confidence than their sense; yet it would be affectation to deny that I have given more attention to the task, and that it is not through want of zeal or industry if I unfortunately disgrace the sweet airs of my country by poetry altogether unworthy of their taste, their energy, and their tenderness’ (pp. 193–4). In the above poem ‘sound’ and ‘sense’ cooperate and interact: the run of long i sounds suggests the pleasure theme before the ‘born for much more’ series of echoing vowels backs up the sense of promise wasted, the various feelings mingling in the wistfulness of ‘might’, recalling but offsetting the depiction of ‘Pleasure’.
Through its attention to sound, indeed, Moore’s poem is alert to the political difficulties facing an Irish poet at a time when, as Kelly puts it, ‘all hopes of Irish independence had been destroyed’.9 The smoothly tripping metre is dexterously supportive of and at odds with the matter: the attitude includes an oblique mixture of self‐reproach and self‐justification on Moore’s part, even as the poem offers itself a part of a volume of traditional ‘melodies’ and a note ironically portrays the bard as ‘one of those wandering bards whom Spenser so severely, and perhaps truly, describes in his State of Ireland’ (p. 208n). The bard may appear to be blameworthily hedonistic in reaction to political disappointment. But the poem finally offers something close to a reaffirmation of the poet’s role in difficult times, as the maintainer of the flame of Irish memory:
But though glory be gone, and though hope fade away,
Thy name, lovèd Erin, shall live in his songs;
Not even in the hour, when his heart is most gay,
Will he lose the remembrance of thee and thy wrongs. (p. 209)
A poet’s ‘remembrance’ is not merely personal; it serves here to name a cultural function, the poet as storer and recorder of Ireland’s ‘wrongs’.10 Loving, living on, and not losing link alliteratively. In such work, Moore evolves a mode and style that allowed him to fly below the censorious radar of Regency England and to ensure that ‘Erin’ and her ‘wrongs’ were in the ‘remembrance’ of the culture at large, as is shown by Shelley’s reference to him in Adonais as sent to by ‘Ierne’ (Ireland) as ‘The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrongs’ (269, 270).
Arguably, the very fame of Irish Melodies has led to their critical under‐estimation. Often they take the note of lament found in much late eighteenth‐century poetry, such as Hugh Macpherson’s Ossian, and lift it to a pitch of near‐incantatory, memorable speech, bearing witness to the way in which memory keeps intruding into consciousness, both the source of pain and a sign that an ideal still seeks baffled expression. Thus, ‘The Harp that Once through Tara’s Halls’ sustains its tightly worked iambic tetrameters and trimeters into its concluding second stanza in the following way:
No more to chiefs and ladies bright
The harp of Tara swells:
The chord alone, that breaks at night,
Its tale of ruin tells.
Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes,
The only throb she gives
Is when some heart indignant breaks
To show that still she lives (p. 197).
This passage suggests that in the past the bard’s role was traditional, to sing to an aristocratic elite of ‘chiefs and ladies bright’, but that now it is played by an individual who speaks of a ‘tale of ruin’. If it is normally now ‘mute’, it is also the witness to a residual impulse to protest. Poetry’s role, the lines suggest, has changed for the poet – and not necessarily in the way, the concluding glossing lines intimate, for the worse. It may be Freedom is a broken heart whose ‘only throb’ is the moment that it ‘breaks’, but that breaking speaks of indignation and of the fact that ‘still she lives’, where ‘still’ means ‘always’ as well as ‘even now’. The poem’s melody is mournful but also surprisingly defiant. The fact that all but one rhyme in the stanza involves a verb speaks of conflict, latent struggle, the remaining if desperate hope that Freedom ‘lives’.
Other lyrics espouse an artful credo of complementary feeling, as in ‘Erin! The Tear and the Smile in Thine Eyes’, in which the mingled affect typical of lyrics by Shelley and Byron is itself the subject of the song. The tear and the smile are worked up into a conceit of the rainbow uniting various lights that may smack of contrivance but reveals a light yet yearning strain of political hope.11 In ‘Erin, O Erin!’ (pp. 207–8) he anticipates the political force attaching to the central metaphor of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, that winter will give way to spring: ‘Thus Erin, O Erin!’, the poem concludes, ‘thy winter is past / And the hope that lived through it shall blossom at last’. The versification is again attuned to the matter at hand, the last line moving with a more regular march and beat than its predecessor. Moore’s lyricism inspired responses from Berlioz12 and Emily Brontë, who derives the first line of her complexly inflected ‘Remembrance’ from Moore’s ‘When Cold in the Earth’.13 He is able continually in Irish Melodies to move between and fuse feelings with an art that veils but finally points up a rare and influential poise and depth of engagement.