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Behind the Book: The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe
An Irishwoman, who died more than two hundred years ago, can help us understand the self-destructive effect of Islamophobia now sweeping the western world and casting its dark shadow over the American presidential election. Mary Tighe (1772-1810) was the author of “Bryan Byrne,” a harrowing ballad that takes as its subject the sectarian violence between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. But the dynamic she describes could just as easily apply to current-day tensions between Christians and Muslims.
wedded to our Ellen’s love,
One house was ours, one hope, one soul;
. . .
Tho’ we were sprung from British race,
And his was Erin’s early pride,
Yet, match’d in every loveliest grace,
No priest could ere their hearts divide. (77-78; 81-84)
Their marriage is one of equality before God, for the pair seems beyond the religious sectarianism that ravages the land. In fact, the poem explains, Bryan Byrne looked on the conflict with “sad dismay” (75). Bryan and Ellen represent the happy coexistence and love possible between Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant.
But external political events shatter their domestic harmony. Ellen’s English father explains the cycle of violence, consciously portraying his family as representative of Ireland’s suffering:
“’Twas ours,” the sorrowing father cried,
“’Twas ours to mourn the crimes of all
Each night some loyal brother died,
Each morn beheld some victim fall. (121-24)
Murder begot murder: when an English loyalist was killed, a native Irishman was killed in response. Sometimes the response took the form of a massacre. In The Annals of Ballitore, the Quaker writer Mary Leadbeater records one such incident in 1798: “The insurgents had fled on the first alarm, the peaceable inhabitants remained. The trumpet was sounded, and the peaceable inhabitants were delivered up for two hours to the unbridled license of a furious soldiery” (229-30). Similarly, in Tighe’s poem, the politically neutral Irishman, Bryan Byrne, who is essentially an innocent bystander, is slaughtered by those avenging sectarian murder.
The harm goes beyond the initial violence, for Bryan and Ellen have a child whose life is forever altered by these events. His grandfather explains:
That boy had seen his father’s blood,
Had heard his murder’d father’s groan,
And never more in playful mood
With smiles his infant beauty shone. (57-60)
The profound “horror and rage” that now flush the child with a “manly beauty strange” (11-12) help to give the poem its sense of grim foreboding. Although the child, himself, is not evil, the trauma of his father’s murder might, indeed, make him dangerous, for his “quick blood strong passions told” (14). The old man’s tale takes on a mythic quality, and he becomes a bardic figure, telling the story of treachery that cannot be adequately avenged. Tighe ends her poem with a warning:
And chief, if civil broils return,
Tho’ vengeance urge to waste, destroy,
Ah! pause: think then on Bryan Byrne!
Poor Ellen and her orphan boy! (253-56)
Sadly, Tighe’s contemporaries failed to heed her warning; Catholic and Protestant blood continued to be spilled in Ireland for generations.
But it is not too late for us to take heed of that same warning, to reject the self-destructive impulse in our own society that is Islamophobia. All that can come of marginalizing Islam and subjecting its law-abiding followers to injustice is justifiable rage. As Tighe reminds us, we are perfectly capable of creating the monster we fear most.
Paula R. Feldman holds the C. Wallace Martin Chair in English and the Louise Fry Scudder Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. She is the editor of British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology and the coeditor of The Journals of Mary Shelley, and the coeditor of The Collected Poetry of Mary Tighe .
Additional Resources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/omar-alnatour/muslims-are-not-terrorist_b_8718000.html
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