A Grey Eye Weeping With the breaking of the Treaty of Limerick by the English in 1691 the Irish Catholics descended into a slavery worse than anything experienced by Negroes in the Southern States. (When the Irish came to America, the Negroescalled them “White Niggers.”) This period is best represented in the few authentic poems of Egan O’Rahilly, a Kerry poet who lived between 1670 and 1726. In this fine poem he approaches, not one of the masters he would have approached fifty years before—the MacCarthys—but Lord Kenmare, one of the new Anglo-Irish gentry. Hence the bitter repetition of the fellow’s name. O’Rahilly himself would have considered “Valentine” a ridiculous name for anyone calling himself a gentleman, and as for “Brown,” he would as soon have addressed a “]ones” or a “Robinson.” O’Rahilly is a snob, but one of the great snobs of literature. That my old bitter heart was pierced in this black doom, That foreign devils have made our land a tomb, That the sun that was Munster’s glory has gone down Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown. That royal Cashel is bare of house and guest, That Brian’s turreted home is the otter’s nest, That the kings of the land have neither land nor crown Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown. Garnish away in the west with its master banned, Hamburg the refuge of him who has lost his land, An old grey eye, weeping for lost renown, Have made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown. Egan O’Rahilly Source: O'Connor, Frank (tr); Kings, Lords, & Commons: An Anthology from the Irish; 1962; London; Macmillan & Co; p.102