Curses: An Irish Poetic Tradition

• Anonymous -- 19th century

  • Translated by Douglas Hyde. Obscure in details, but powerfully Old Testament in tone!

• Patrick O'Kelly

  • A vigorous example by a little-known early 19th century author (1754-1835?), who paid to have it printed in 1812.

• James Stephens

  • Stephens won world reputation as author of The Pot of Gold, a charming novel about leprachauns. Here he is in a different tone.

• John Millington Synge

  • Synge, Yeats's friend and collaborator in the Irish Literary Revival, is best known for The Playboy of the Western World

For a brief discussion of the tradition, see Hugh Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983), 80-81. Kenner remarks,

Now if a curse is efficacious, like a gunshot, it is also aspective, like a gargoyle. On Paris churches sinners turned to stone must discharge waste water from church roofs through their open mouths for ever, and likewise as long as there are people to read or hear a fine elaborate curse it holds the victim contorted in its torments.

May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair,
And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

-- As he does, he still does.

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