William Allingham

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John William Byers addressing the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society on Allingham (1 Dec. 1903), declared: ‘No writer had a greater sympathy with, and appreciation of, the fairy world of fancy and myth than the Ulster poet Allingham.’ (Q. sources; Cited in Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989, p.172.)

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W. B. Yeats , Irish Literature (CUA Washington 1904), Vol. III, ppvii-xiii: ‘Allingham had trained an ear, too delicate to catch the tune of but a single master, upon [x] the lyric poetry of many lands. Allingham was the best artist, but Ferguson had the more ample imagination, the more epic aim. He had not the subtlety of feeling, the variety of cadence of a great lyric poet, but he has touched, here and there, an epic vastness and naivete, as in the description in Congal of the mire-stiffened mantle of the giant specter Alananan mac Lir, striking against his calves with as loud a noise as the mainsail of a ship makes, “when with the coil of all its ropes it beat the sounding mast.” He is frequently dull, for he often lacked the ‘minutely appropriate words’ necessary to embody those fine changes of feeling which enthral the attention; but his sense of weight and size, of action and tumult, has set him apart and solitary, an epic figure in a lyric age. [...] Allingham, whose pleasant destiny has made him the poet of his native town, and put “The Winding Banks of Erne” into the mouths of the ballad singers of Ballyshannon, is, on the other hand, a master of “minutely appropriate words,” and can wring from the luxurious sadness of the lover, from the austere sadness of old age, the last golden drop of beauty; but amid action and tumult he can but fold his hands. He is the poet of the melancholy peasantry of the West, and, as years go on, and voluminous histories and copious romances drop under the horizon, will take his place among those minor immortals who have put their souls into little songs to humble the proud.’ (pp.x-xi.) Further, ‘In Allingham, I find the entire emotion for the place one grew up on which I felt as a child. Davis, on the other hand, was concerned with ideas on conscious. His Ireland was artificial, an idea built up in a couple of generations by a few commonplace men. This artificial idea has done me as much harm as the other has helped me.’ (Autobiographies, p.471-72.)

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W. B. Yeats (2): ‘Perhaps ... to fully understand these poems one needs to have been born and bred in one of those western Irish towns; to remember how it was the centre of your world, how the mountains and the river and the roads became a portion of your life forever; to have loved with a sense of possession even the roadside bushes where the roadside cottagers hung out their clothes to dry.’ (George Bornstein & Hugh Witemeyer, eds., W. B. Yeats: Letters to the New Island, London 1989, p.72; quoted in G. J. Watson, ed., The Short Fiction of W. B. Yeats, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1995, p.xx.)

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W. B. Yeats (3) - letter to Katherine Tynan on completion of John Sherman (1891): ‘When you review it, you might ... say that John Sherman is an Irish type. I have an ambition to be taken as an Irish novelist not as an English or cosmepolitan one choosing Ireland as a background. I studied my characters in Ireland & described a typical Irish feeling in Sherman’s devotion to Ballah. A West of Ireland feeling I might almost say for like that of Allingham for Ballyshannon it is local rather than national. Sherman belonged like Allingham to the small gentry who in the West at any rate love their native places without perhaps loving Ireland. They do not travell & are shut off from England by the whole breadth of Ireland with the result that they are forced to make their native town their world. I remember when we were children how intense our devotion was to all things in Sligo & still see in my mother the old feeling.’ (Letters, 1, 1986, pp.274-45; quoted in Watson, op. cit., p.xxi.)

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A. P. Graves, ‘William Allingham,’ Irish Literary & Musical Studies (London: Nelson 1913), pp.70-101: ‘Of Carlyle he saw much more than most of that great man’s friends, for during some years scarcely a week went by in which they did not walk together. […] Allingham used to recount how Carlyle would sometimes begin by flatly contradicting him, and end by tacitly adopting what he said. A stroller, he tramped through Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland as “Patricius Walker” […]’. Graves here mentions letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham. Further, ‘Allingham raises a very interesting literary question. He states that he did not find it easy in ballad writing to employ a diction that might hope to come home to the English-speaking Irish peasant using his customary phraseology, and also keep within the laws of poetic taste and the rules of grammar.’ Here Graves quotes Allingham: “for that phraseology, being as regards its structural peculiarities but an imperfect and distorted expression, not an ancient dialect like that of Scotland, is generally too corrupt, though often forcible, to bear translation into poetry. [...] From these conditions [i.e., the use of words such as distress in special senses as meaning ‘bodily want’] it comes that the choice of words for poetry in Irish-English is narrowly limited, instead of there being both that variety and racinesss which is sometimes in the gift of a genuine peculiar dialect.” Graves continues: ‘But after 15 years’ experience, Allingham qualifies the strong term “imperfect or distorted expression” as applied to the structural peculiarities of the Irish peasants’ phraseology, to mean unusual forms, some of them old-fashioned English, some translated or adapted from Gaelic forms.’ Further [Graves], ‘This is a very important modification of view, and surely such forms, derived as they are from Shakespearean English and classical Gaelic, are as ancient and respectable in their historic and literary associations as the idioms of the mod. Scotch dialect. // Allingham’s final concession that some not unimportant poetical results might flow from a judicious treatment of Irish dialect has been more than justified by the event. [Graves here cites Irish literary practitioners including Moira O’Neill, Fahy, Armstrong, Stephenson, Synge, Gregory, Boyle, Yeats, et al.] Allingham has, however, very justly pointed out that during his time Irish-English has never been properly examined [here Graves cites P. W. Joyce]’ (p.77).

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Thomas MacDonagh identified Allingham with the patriotic poets ‘many of whom have no subjects than national ones, and yet who have not in our ears, for all their Gaelic words, the Irish accent of Ferguson’ (Literature in Ireland, 1915; quoted in Seamus Deane, ‘Poetry and Song, 1800-1890’, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991, p.990.)

Thomas Kinsella, ‘The Divided Mind’: ‘One pauses a little longer over William Allingham, for a kind of passive wisdom-though it rarely comes to live in his verse, except in flashes of sudden concern, sudden power and economy, as in the eviction scene in Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland. But then all sinks again into mood-setting and description-description in the service of nothing.’ (Printed in Seán Lucy, ed., Irish Poets in English, Mercier 1973, p.213.)

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Hugh Shields, ‘William Allingham and Folk Song’, Hermathena, CXVII (Summer 1974), pp.23-36 [“The Poet and Music”; “Poet and People”; “Songs and Ballads, Old and New”]: Shields cites various views on ballads expressed by Allingham, who earlier admired the form more than latterly, when he identified it with it ‘a kind of barbarous loose freedom’ pointing to the shortcomings of the Anglo-Irish dialect in comparison with Burn’s Scots dialectic. He also offers a glimpse of Allingham as observer, sitting outside the fair-day throng; eavesdropping on signing girls in cottages, and once, intensely conscious of his otherness, accompanying pilgrims to Lough Derg [n.cit.]; quotes lines on ballad singing in Laurence Bloomfield: “Murder, and love, and treason, chanted strong / By voices hardened with perpetual song / Draws each its group; and ere the rustic buys, / With open mouth to catch the strain he tries, / Then pushing in a rudely bashful fist, / Crumbles the ill-spelt paper [...].”’ (Laurence Bloomfield, 1864, p.186.)

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Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 1, calls Allingham an exemplary figure and, with George Darley, one of the ‘loners’ [Deane, ed.; p.2]; introduced to Tennyson by Coventry Patmore ... his achievement and importance greater than recognised although in the last 20 years John Hewitt has helped to establish [his] position more securely [7]; ‘It is Allingham’s awareness of the political divisions of Ireland, combined with his love for the ancient Irish world and its culture [...] that gives his best work it particular force and importance’ [p.8; Laurence Bloomfield is] ‘one of the best narrative poems of the time .. the only poem of sustained quality to treat this central theme [i.e., the battle for the land] of nineteenth-century Irish life’ [8];[Allingham] ‘blended what we may call the political and the picturesque elements prevailing in Irish poetry at this time’ [8]; remarks upon the impersonal quality of the broadsheet poem [compared with Thomas Davis, Deane, ed., p. 723]; also includes quotations from Allingham’s Diary (1907) and from Thomas MacDonagh’s remarks on Allingham.

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Seamus MacAnnaidh, ‘Shpayke’, The Spark [Fermanagh/WEA] (Spring 1992), [q.p.]; ‘[...] William Allingham, who has frequent references to the Irish language in his diaries and likes to give the impression that he knew Irish. Indeed, there is a copy of O’Reilly’s Irish-English dictionary in Enniskillen library with his signature on it.’ [Narrates how, on meeting Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan, Allingham tells him the apocryphal tale of the King who pulls out one eye to give to a female guest who has asked for it, rendering the Irish súil amhain and súil aon.] He further quotes Allingham’s diary, “I avoid writing brogue and leave it to the speaker or singer.” In 1885, he says that Tennyson ‘has lately done an Irish piece and honoured me by much consultation about his “brogue”. But the truth is I don’t much like his “brogue” pieces and have myself tried to manage Irish subjects with a minimum of that flavouring. A “brogue” is not a dialect. I suppose the word has been transferred to express a rustic and clumsy gait in speech, from its original meaning, a rough shoe.’ Later on that year, he tells Tennyson, ‘I told him that the Irish brogue has many nuances, especially in sound, it differs in different parts of the island; and there are vulgar and unvulgar brogues, and the possessor of a vulgar brogue is the subject of frequent imitation and ridicule among his own countrymen. A mild brogue in the mouth of an educated person, and especially of a pretty woman, is very different from the way an ignorant Connaught or Munster peasant would shpayke. I could not bring myself to use the vulgar brogue in verse, unless it were for a broadly comic purpose’; includes quotation from Allingham’s “Adieu to Ballyshanny”.

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‘Justice for Ireland! O ye priests / Both Protestant and Roman;/Let each observe his fasts and feasts, / But try to anger no man. / Religion’s rind is little worth, / The milk is in the kernel; / All love is of celestial birth, / All hatred of infernal.’ (Poems, 1850, p.17.)

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Holy Ireland: ‘Not men and women in an Irish street / But Catholics and Protestants you meet’ (Blackberries, 1884; quoted in Anthony Bradley, ‘Literature & Culture in Northern Ireland’ Michael Kenneally, ed., Cultural Contexts & Literary Idioms, Colin Smythe 1988, p.38.)

Scenes & feelings: ‘By a certain River, with its harbours and bay, lies the native region of most of these poems. They possess a reality for the writer of which little, alas! can be conveyed to the readers. For him the cold words carry life and youth in their veins; they recall real scenes and feelings.’ (Irish Songs and Poems, 1887 edn., p.1; cited in Terence Brown, Northern Voices, Gill & Macmillan 1975, p.53.)

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Lord Tennyson: ‘After dinner, a discussion on Ireland. A.T., as usual, while granting and liking the lyrical and humorous qualities of the Kelts [sic] and their pleasant manners, calls it “that horrible island”, and will not allow that it has any history of its own worth the least notice, knowing in fact not a whit more of its history than does the average Englishman - who knows, as nearly as possible, nothing. To him, as to A.T., the very name of “Brian Boru” is a joke. // I try to made Brian be seen as a real and important historic personage, and win an audience from the Americans, and perhaps some attention, but A.T. plays his part of the deaf adder, and we all have to wind up with a laugh.’ (Diary of William Allingham, 1907, p.62; cited in Alan Warner, Dublin Magazine, Summer 1967, p.25.)

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Contemporary Ireland: ‘I came early to the consciousness that I was living in a discontented and disloyal country; it seemed the natural state of things that the humbler class-which was almost synonymous with Roman Catholic, should hate those above them in the world, and lie in wait for a chance of despoiling them’ (Diary of William Allingham, 1907, [n.cit.]; quoted in Seamus Deane, ‘Poetry and Song, 1800-1890’, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991, Vol. 2, pp.7-8.)

Harmonies: ‘Through harmony of words may murmur the harmony of things, whispers of human life and the world our scene, pensive memories and high hopes musically mingling. These, at fit moments, may soothe, cheer, strengthen.’ (Music Master, 1855, p.10.)

Poetic style: ‘I avoid writing brogue and leave it to the speaker or singer.’ (Music Master, 1855, p.336; cited in Seamus MacAnnaidh, ‘Shpayke’, The Spark, Fermanagh/WEA Spring 1992, [q.p.]).

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References
Chris Morash, The Hungry Voice (Dublin: IAP 1989), selects “The Poor Little Maiden” and “The Young Street Singer”, remarking that Allingham shows a keen sympathy with the plight of the Irish peasantry in the years following the Famine, particularly in Lawrence Bloomfield (1864).

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 2, selects Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland [pp.61-62]; Songs, Ballads and Stories, “The Girl’s Lamentation” [61-62], “The Ruined Chapel” [p.63], “The Fairies” [p.64], “The Winding Banks of Erne” [pp.64-65]. Includes remark, ‘Tennyson was his idol and he cultivated the laureate’s friendship with relentless assiduity [...] widened his acquaintances when he became editor of Fraser’s Magazine in 1872 nine years after he had settled in England.’ [p.113]. (See also remarks, supra.)

Daniel Karlin, ed., The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (London: Penguin 1997), incls. William Allingham - with 8 other Irish poets: Jane Barlow, Edward Dowden, William Larminie, James Clarence Mangan, George William Russell [AE], John Todhunter, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats ... amidst tens of English poets.

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Notes
“Patricius Walker” was the pseud. of William Allingham in his walking tours of Scotland, England, and France. See Alan Warner, ‘Patricius Walker, Victorian Irishman on Foot,’ in Éire-Ireland, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1973), pp.70-80.

John Bowen, reviewing Jim Cooke, Charles Dickens’s Ireland: An Anthology including an Account of His Visits to Ireland (Inchicore: Woodfield Press), notes that William Allingham’s ’the Irish “Stationers” is included but not his more important article on Irish ballad singers.

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Portrait: ‘Helen Allingham, wife of the Donegal poet William Allingham, paints her husband in almost mystically serene mood in a russet-coloured dressing gown.’ (See Terry Eagleton, review of “Conquering England: Ireland in Victorian London” [exhibition], in Times Literary Supplement, 1 April 2005 , q.p.)

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Namesakes: 1] William Allingham, author of Fistula, haemorrhoids, painful ulcer, stricture, prolapsus, and other diseases of the rectum; their diagnosis and treatment. (1871, 1873, 1882), and part reps. as Inguinal colotomy (1935), &c. 2] Allingham, William, F.R.C.S]. 1873. William Allingham, Prizeman (1850-1919), author of The Duties and Officers and Seamen in the British Mercantile Marine: Shipmasters' Society - Course of Papers, No. 21 (London 1892); Board of Trade Examination: Shipmasters' Society - Course of Papers, No. 67 (London 1900); Fast Passages and Best Routes [...] No. 41 (1895); A Manual of Marine Meteorology [...] (1927); Mercantile Marine Education (1893); S. T. C. Lecky, Wrinkles in Practical Navigation, 13th edn., enlarged by William Allingham (1917).

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