The Midnight Court

Brian Merriman owes his fame and celebrity to one poem - The Midnight Court. Little else of his literary work is recorded. Few biographical details of his life survive.

It is known that he was born in Ennistymon, Co. Clare, around the middle of the eighteenth century. His family subsequently removed to Feakle.

It was there that Merriman spent most of his life. He lived for a brief period in Limerick where he died in July of 1805. The General Advertiser and Limerick Gazette published his death notice in a brief announcement. He is buried in the family grave in the local churchyard in Feakle.

Brian Merriman was contemporaneously a small farmer, a weaver, a school master. He was most enduringly a poet and scholar who composed one of the great poems of Ireland.

The Midnight Court met with almost instant acclaim. It was readily acquired, popularly memorised and extended upon liberally. The poem conferred on his native Clare the mark of intellectual stronghold. In the folk memory of its people, The Midnight Court was kept, forever. It is held in manuscripts at the Royal Irish Academy.

The Midnight Court is arranged in four parts. It addresses a number of major themes which were part of a wider critical discourse across Europe since medieval times and before. The regeneration of the population, priestly celibacy, free love and male and female sexual angst are stays, around which the poem weaves its colourful tapestry.

The literary lineage of The Midnight Court will find many precedents. A direct pathway to an antecedent is more difficult to establish.

As school master and poet, Brian Merriman was assuming a role as instructor and counsellor. He was taking up a position in a public place. He proposed to define the liberty to speak. He sought to act as guardian of poetic authority. He engaged to stem the tide of crusading moralists. In this, he was participating in the dialogue of the literary cultures of Europe.

For his lesson he calculated that humour and satire would bring him a wider and a more lasting audience. The leashing rhyming couplets, the richly textured language, the internal chording, vibrate with an almost frenzied intensity. The inrushing overlay of vowel and consonant crosses the threshold of the hearing in full flood.

The Midnight Court is most acclaimed for its humour and jocularity. Each part, each scene, are witness to playful mischief with serious intent. Measured exaggeration is tantalizingly held on the threshold, to brink, but never to break. The absurd and the ridiculous are always earthed to the reality of the case being made.

The narrative is easily told. In a dream, the poet is ordered to attend at The Midnight Court where the case of lustless men is being contested. The court is presided over by Aoibheall, the shee queen of Craglee. The exchanges are laced with dramatic emotion in a highly charged rhetorical joust. The woman attacks and the man defends in equal measure. Insults are traded. Cutting innuendo is scored. At the close Aoibheall finds for the women. The men are sentenced to a whipping to bestir them from their lustless lethargy.

Brian Merriman, in awakening from this nightmare dream, escapes to close The Midnight Court.

The Midnight Court has been translated, mainly to English, by many scholars. Each translation brings its own degree of creativity and fidelity to that complex task. Yet, every language will only bear its own, to fall short of the original.

Pauline Bewick's visual translation, in eleven pieces, carries the mastery and the genius of The Midnight Court readily. Clearly, as an artist she is a disciple of Merriman and dogma holds no fear for her. She conveys the plots and the themes of the poem with all of the persuasiveness and conviction for which her art is known. Merriman, with his unique idiom, his mixture of mischief and mirth, naturally attracted her. Like Merriman, she has the ability to startle and to surprise, reflecting shade and emphasis to encompass the poetic emotional experience of fear, sensuality, fantasy and the impish gaiety of life.

The geography of the poem, its inhabitants, their customs, charms and dwellings, the plants and animals are all to be found meshed with the double ironies characteristic of the Merriman genre. The wit of her line, the colour and abandon of her interpretation match Merriman's play on words in that uniquely harlequin way.

Her visual translation of The Midnight Court shows Pauline Bewick in her most glorious form, eloquent and expansive.

It will recall to The Midnight Court a new jury and an even more extensive audience.

Prof. Kieran R. Byrne
Director
Waterford Institute of Technology