THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD--BOBBY SANDS'' FAVORITE

I woke up ten mornings ago with these lyrics  repeating in my head and I thought--that wreck must have happened in NOVEMBER  and it did.

NOVEMBER 10, 1975

Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald

Music and lyrics ©1976 by Gordon Lightfoot

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down 
of the big lake they called "Gitche Gumee."
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
when the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,
that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
when the "Gales of November" came early. 

The ship was the pride of the American side
coming back from some mill in Wisconsin.
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
with a crew and good captain well seasoned,
concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
when they left fully loaded for Cleveland.
And later that night when the ship's bell rang,
could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
and a wave broke over the railing.
And ev'ry man knew, as the captain did too
'twas the witch of November come stealin'.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
when the Gales of November came slashin'.
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
in the face of a hurricane west wind.

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck

Sayin' "Fellas, it's too rough t'feed ya."
At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in; he said,

(**2010 lyric change: At 7 p.m., it grew dark, it was then he said,)

"Fellas, it's bin good t'know ya!"
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
and the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when 'is lights went outta sight
came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Does any one know where the love of God goes
when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
if they'd put fifteen more miles behind 'er.
They might have split up or they might have capsized;
they may have broke deep and took water.
And all that remains is the faces and the names
of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
in the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;
the islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
with the Gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
in the "Maritime Sailors' Cathedral."
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they call "Gitche Gumee."
"Superior," they said, "never gives up her dead
when the gales of November come early!"

PROBABLY ONE OF THE GREATEST NARRATIVE SONGS WRITTEN in the 20TH CENTURY, THIS BALLAD DELIGHTED AND INSPIRED BOBBY SANDS
PLAY IT ON  YOU TUBE BY GORDON LIGHTFOOT.  It will stay in your head for days.

SO now I am reminded by the great  biography of Bobby Sands JUST AN UNFINISHED SONG  by O'Hearn which relates how Bobby loved this ballad and thought that it was the greatest song that told a story.  He sang it aloud during the prison protest and he taught it to the other men who were  imprisoned with  him.

  He confided to "The Dark", his comrade Hughes, that he wanted to write a  song about the Irish struggle to the same tune as the Edmund Fitzgerald.  He did that as O'Hearn relates that one night when they were having a sing song to keep up morale one of the other prisoners asked Bobby to sing The Wreck. 
Bobby said that he had been putting new words to it.
Then he sang THE VOYAGE a song about United Irish  prisoners who were being transported to Tasmania on a ship called The Gull.

Here are some of the lyrics that Bobby sets to the tune of The Wreck:
It was 1803 when we sailed out to sea
And away from the sweet town of Derry
For Australia bound and if we didn't drown
The mark of the  fetter we'd carry.

Here is another verse that ties together the United Irishmen and the Blanketmen:

In our own smelling slime we were lost for a time
Hoping God in his mercy would claim us
But our spirits shone high like the stars in the sky
We were rebels and no man would tame us.

Try singing these words to the tune of the Wreck and you will  see how well they fit.

Bobby was able to pass from life through suffering  to death with so much grace because he had the certainty of a martyr.
He knew that his cause, the cause of Irish Freedom,  was just and the British Imperial  claim was unjust and would be judged so by History and by God.

REMEMBERING OUR WOMEN POETS --Ethna Carberry and BOBBY SANDS

BOBBY SANDS WANTED TO WRITE LIKE ETHNA CARBERRY

One of the sad-funny things I learned when I read more recent accounts of Bobby Sands Hunger Strike  was that he loved the poetry of Ethna Carberry.  He was inspired by her poem that was  a patriotic song "Roddy McCorley" and in his last  days he asked his jail neighbor Brendan Hughes whom he called the Dark if he  could give him a letter to mail to Ethna. He added that he did not have her address. The Dark answered  "I hope you have a ouija board in there because she  does not have an address. She died in 1902"

.

Here's how one reference work described the popular song:

RODDY McCORLEY. Irish, Air or March (cut time). D Major (Miller & Perron): G Major (Carlin). Standard tuning (fiddle). One part (Miller & Perron): AABB (Carlin). There were two songs named "Roddy McCorley" (spellings vary). One is older, and may have been written soon after the Irish rebellion of 1798. The other was written in 1898 for the centenary of the rebellion, and while the tune is traditional (also used for the song "Sean South of Garryowen") the words are the product of County Antrim-born Ethna Carberry . Her poetry was published by her husband after her death in The Four Winds of Eirinn (1902), and proved a popular volume that contained, among many other pieces, her "Rody M'Corley" (pp. 82-83).

The words in her version commemorate a martyr of the 1798 rebellion. They begin:

O see the fleet-foot host of men, who march with faces drawn,
From farmstead and from fishers' cot, along the banks of Ban;
They come with vengeance in their eyes. Too late! Too late are they,
For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today.

Oh Ireland, Mother Ireland, you love them still the best
The fearless brave who fighting fall upon your hapless breast,
But never a one of all your dead more bravely fell in fray,
Than he who marches to his fate on the bridge of Toome today.

The truth of Roddy McCorley is more complicated and confused than Carberry's portrayal. Despite some assumptions he was Catholic, the best information is that he was a County Antrim Presbyterian. He also seems to have come late to the cause of the United Irishmen, and while he may have fought in Antrim, it was for his participation in an organized patriotic gang (The Archer Gang) afterwards that seems to have been the reason for his death sentence. The song was recorded and popularized by the Clancy Brothers, the Kingston Trio and others. It is a frequently heard in march medley’s played by Irish musicians and is considered a ‘grand old chestnut’ of a tune. 

Here is a verse from the lyric written by Bobby Sands:

Oh! I am Rodai of Duneane 

And those of no property bear my name. 

Those kingly freemen who sweat and toil 

And yet who never gain nor reign. 

I love these wretched gentle souls 

They! condemned to death from birth, 

I stand by Tone and I stand by truth 

And the wretched of this earth!

From the poem Rodaí MacCorlaí written by Bobby Sands,

Bobby has transformed it into a  marching song for world socialism, Wasn't he a great one!

Roddy McCorley

Here is the version made popular by  The Clancy Brothers

O see the fleet-foot host of men, 
Who march with faces drawn,
From farmstead and from fishers' cot, 
Along the banks of Ban;
They come with vengeance in their eyes. 
Too late! Too late are they,
For young Roddy McCorley goes to die 
On the bridge of Toome today.

Up the narrow street he stepped, 
So smiling, proud and young.
About the hemp-rope on his neck, 
The golden ringlets clung;
There's ne'er a tear in his blue eyes, 
Fearless and brave are they,
As young Roddy McCorley goes to die 
On the bridge of Toome today.

When last this narrow street he trod, 
His shining pike in hand
Behind him marched, in grim array, 
A earnest stalwart band.
To Antrim town! To Antrim town, 
He led them to the fray,
But young Roddy McCorley goes to die 
On the bridge of Toome today.

There's never a one of all your dead 
More bravely died in fray
Than he who marches to his fate 
In Toomebridge town today; ray
True to the last! True to the last, 
He treads the upwards way,
And young Roddy McCorley goes to die 
On the bridge of Toome today.

Songwriters: J Baird / Pd Tra

YES,  Bobby Sands was so taken with Ethna;s work that he wrote his own ballad version of Roddy Mc Corley. He recognized a fellow patriot in the woman from Antrim.

Ethna Carberry was the pen name used by a 19^th century Irish poet and journalist whose short life was ended by illness at the age of 35. She collaborated on the production of two Irish Nationalist magazines with another Irish poet, her friend Alice Milligan.

Born Anna Johnston on the 3^rd December 1866 in Ballymena, County Antrim. Her father was a timber merchant by trade but also a prominent Irish Republican in the Fenian movement. She was writing verse from a very young age and had her first piece published at the age of fifteen. She went on to have a number of other pieces of work published in periodicals such as the Nation, Catholic Fireside and United Ireland.

The Irish Nationalist cause was very close to her heart and she lectured up and down the country on the subject, along with Alice Milligan and Maud Gonne, the latter being the leader of a revolutionary women’s organisation called Inghinidhe na hÉireann, which translates as “Daughters of Ireland”. With Milligan’s help, she wrote plays to promote the organisation’s cultural activities. The pair were also responsible for The Northern Patriot and The Shan Van Vocht, both well-read nationalist publications. The latter title has been acknowledged as a major contributory factor to the “Irish Revival” in cultural activities.

Alice only started using the pen name Ethna Carberry in 1901 when she married fellow writer and folklorist Séamus MacManus. She explained that she did not wish to write using her now married name as she wanted to avoid being confused with him. Tragically the marriage only lasted a year as Alice fell ill with gastritis and died. Séamus lived for a further 58 years and never re-married. The impact on his life of his wife was so great, and he wrote a memoir in her honour. He published the work of Ethna Carbery in The Four Winds of Erin after her death and this collection was extremely popular.

She was, without doubt, loved throughout her native land and much further afield. 
The fame of Ethna Carbery spread across the Atlantic.
 As well as being a prominent and fervent supporter of and writer about Irish Republicanism, she wrote poetry as if her mind was:
 

One of her most poignant poems is reproduced here. My Dearest appears to show Ethna searching deep into her own soul for inspiration:

 

Ethna Carberry was a deeply patriotic individual whose love for all those who had contributed to, and died for, her country was an almost all-consuming passion and this fervour was to be found in much of her work. She wrote fluently, easily and with infectious enthusiasm. Her body of work would, no doubt have been greatly enhanced had she lived a longer life.

Ethna Carberry died on the 21^st April 1902 at the tragically young age of 35.

BOBBY SANDS DIED ON MAY 6 1981 AT THE TRAGICALLY YOUNG AGE OF 27.

Two kindred spirits  her work reached across a century and soothed the tortured body and soul of  a fellow REPUBLICAN PATRIOT.  

SHE SPURRED HIM INTO SONG.

The latest Irish Bard: BOBBY SANDS

66 DAYS ON HUNGER STRIKE
1 March 1981 to 5 May 1981

66 long days -- And during those days I could think of nothing but his suffering.
It preyed on my mind and pushed me to become active in the Northern AID movement in that  year of 1981. 

I HAVE NOT SPOKEN  HIS NAME ALOUD  FOR AWHILE, AND  SURELY  I HAVE NOT PRAISED  HIM FOR MANY YEARS IN PUBLIC.

But surely the time has come at last to praise--  
THE  LAST IRISH BARD --- BOBBY SANDS, MP.

And the driving force against oppression, as Bobby concludes, is the moral superiority of the oppressed.

Bobby found and embodied that moral superiority that shines in every line he wrote in such  an extraordinary crucible of pain, suffering and daily humiliation.  What a writing workshop he dared to  hold and to produce lines  that we see now are  monuments to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit when it is harnessed to the engine of human freedom.

* * *

"It has been said that were Bobby alive to see these poems today he would have rewritten or changed some of the simpler rhyming words. But that is to miss the point. These poems were written by a young man under the most depressing of conditions. More importantly his poetry is the raw literature of the H-Block prison protest which hundreds of naked men stood up against their cell doors (in the late of night when the Screws left the wings) to listen to and to applaud.

It was their only entertainment, it was a beautifully rendered articulation of their own plight. Out of cruelty and suffering Bobby Sands harnessed real poetry, the poetry of a feeling people struggling to be free..."

— Danny Morrison, October 1981.

Danny Morrison told it straight at the time. IT has taken me almost  40 years to read and  know the truth of his assessment.

---

MODERN TIMES

It is said we live in modern times,
In the civilised year of ‘seventy nine,
But when I look around, all I see,
Is modern torture, pain, and hypocrisy.

In modern times little children die,
They starve to death, but who dares ask why?
And little girls without attire,
Run screaming, napalmed, through the night afire.

And while fat dictators sit upon their thrones,
Young children bury their parents’ bones,
And secret police in the dead of night,
Electrocute the naked woman out of sight.

In the gutter lies the black man, dead,
And where the oil flows blackest, the street runs red,
And there was He who was born and came to be,
But lived and died without liberty.

As the bureaucrats, speculators and presidents alike,
Pin on their dirty, stinking, happy smiles tonight,
The lonely prisoner will cry out from within his tomb,
And tomorrow’s wretch will leave its mother’s womb!


We can see  from this poem that Bobby Sands was not a person with a narrow Nationalist vision; he had a dream of international solidarity.  He was seeking to forge a United Front with  all the oppressed of the world,

In her essay " Embodying Resistance: the Poetry of Bobby Sands", Fiona Mc Cann provides a detailed  analysis of Sands' work  and connects his  long poems of prison life to Oscar Wilde's  work--another  Irishman whose life was shortened by 5 years in an English  prison.

McCann writes:

 I propose to read Sands’ “Trilogy” as evidence of, as Lloyd puts it, “a re-vernacularisation of a literary ballad”, [Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”], forged under the conditions of distraint and distress out of which the collective re-emerges against cellular isolation”. I will firstly investigate the tension between the individual and the collective group before analysing the representation of torture, particularly in the final part of the poem, subtitled “3 The Torture Mill – H Block”. This will lead me to a final discussion on Sands’ perspective on the interplay between art and politics.

9The structure of the whole poem, made up of 226 stanzas, is similar to that of Wilde’s famous ballad: each stanza of the second and third parts of the poem is six lines long (those of the first part eight lines long) and all adhere to the alternate rhythm of iambic tetrameter/iambic trimeter. The choice of ballad form not only establishes a link with an oral communal tradition perpetuated inside the H Blocks by the prisoners and, specifically, with Wilde’s prison experience, it also, through its very rigidity, mirrors the prison space in all its rigidity. It is significant that Sands opens the first part of the poem, “The Crime of Castlereagh”, with an assertion of his individuality:

• 29 Sands, op. cit., p. 104.

I scratched my name and not for fame
Upon the whitened wall;
“Bobby Sands was here,” I wrote with fear
In awful shaky scrawl.
I wrote it low where eyes don’t go
Twas but to testify,
That I was sane and not to blame
Should here I come to die

 LOVER OF BIRDS
I learn from  doing the reading of Bobby's now published prison diary that that Bobby Sands and I share something--we both love  birds.  Of course the Sky lark is  central to his poems but also the curlew and the  crows  play their part in relieving his sense of isolation  in his cell  as he is slowly dying over 66 days,

Here from a diary he  kept for the first 17 days of his Hunger strike:

"The birds were singing today. One of the boys threw bread out of the window. At least somebody was eating!
I was lonely for a while this evening, listening to the crows caw as they returned home. Should I hear the beautiful lark, she would rent my heart. Now, as I write, the odd curlew mournfully calls as they fly over. I like the birds.
Well, I must leave off, for if I write more about the birds my tears will fall and my thoughts return to the days of my youth.
They were the days, and gone forever now. But I enjoyed them. They are in my heart -- good night, now."
This from a man who was  just 27 years old when he died and had spent the last 9 years in brutal imprisonment. His love of the natural world and of the small free creatures  shines here.

Bobby Sands also  skewered the role of the renowned Irish poets who did not join their voices to his but who hid behind the aesthetic
masks :

The Men of Art have lost their heart,
They dream within their dreams.
Their magic sold for price of gold
Amidst a people’s screams.
They sketch the moon and capture bloom
With genius, so they say.
But ne’er they sketch the quaking wretch
Who lies in Castlereagh.

• 64 Ibid., p. 111.

The poet’s word is sweet as bird,
Romantic tale and prose.
Of stars above and gentle love
And fragrant breeze that blows.
But write they not a single jot
Of beauty tortured sore.
Don’t wonder why such men can lie,
For poets are no more.64

21Those two stanzas encapsulate a scathing criticism of what Sands perceives as a reprehensible lack of interest in the prison protest by writers in the North. Once again, there is a clear sense that the pastoral mode which Sands evidently uses as a sort of umbrella for poetry and art more generally, is not only inadequate to the task of representing the prison protest but also works to eradicate it from sight. 

As much as he loved birds and nature he would not use  them to distract himself or his readers from the  terrors that man's inhumanity to man  has wreaked on the world and all its inhabitants.

 In putting these entries together on poets who changed the world, I have omitted many.  I decided to think about  the American experience later.  I also did not  go to the revolutionary poets from Russia like Mayakovsky and Akmatova and Yevtuschenko  who inspired so many later poets like Faiz and Hikmet and Neruda and Brecht.

Somehow,  I was not letting myself think of BOBBY.  But when I completed the Padraic Pearse entry, I could not stop there: I could not leave it as if no poet bard had died for Ireland since Pearse.  That would be a lie.

YES, there was one other giant-- BOBBY SANDS.

Even now I know that there are many whose teeth are set on edge at the very thought of him. 

This blog is not for them.

But there are others who have come to see that he was a great leader and martyr and poet.

THIS BLOG ENTRY IS FOR YOU  AND YOUR SACRED MEMORY---MISE EIRE--  BOBBY SANDS.