An Irishman’s Diary on John Keegan, the ‘Peasant Poet’

This year marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of the Nation circle of poets and writers, John Keegan (1816-1849), of Killeaney near Shanahoe in Co Laois.

That his grave in Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin was unmarked for 150 years after his death at the age of 33 epitomises how Keegan and many other poets and writers of the 19th century are all but forgotten.

Yet Keegan left an important literary legacy that lives on, although he himself is seldom spoken of.

It was in The Irish National Magazine that his most famous work, Caoch the Piper, recounting the heart-warming story of the blind piper Caoch O'Leary and his dog Pinch was first published. It was copied in many of the prominent literary publications of the second half of the 19th century and became a national school favourite in the first half of the last century, particularly in the readers of the Christian Brothers.

New life was breathed into Caoch the Piper in more recent decades with its recorded recitation by the remarkable northern voice of the late Benedict Kiely for RTÉ's Mo Cheol Thú on which it was frequently broadcast and captured the imagination of many a Sunday morning listener.

Though his was a short life, Keegan lived through a dramatic period dominated by the campaign for Catholic emancipation, hedge schools, peasant secret societies, the repeal movement, the Great Famine, the establishment of Young Ireland and the 1848 rising – all of which he captured in his literary works.

With Ireland already on its knees, further disaster struck with the spread of the cholera epidemic from Europe, to which Keegan fell victim on June 30th, 1849.

The Irishman newspaper broke the news of his death with its editor Joseph Brenan announcing: "Another son of genius is gone. Death is becoming an epicure and selects the choicest victims. It is not many weeks since we closed the grave over James Clarence Mangan; his friend and fellow poet, John Keegan, did not tarry long behind him . . . There were no legends, familiar to the peasantry, with which he was not acquainted. His poems were thoroughly idiomatic, and racy of the soil. They were the Irish heart translated and set to music. They touched us more than the polished lines of drawing-room bards, because they did not consecrate affectation, but showed us ourselves."

Keegan's writings began to appear from the age of 21 in the Leinster Express and over the following 12 years he produced a literary corpus of over 20 stories and more than 50 poems.

His extensive Tales of the Rockites gave a first-hand account of the peasant secret societies of the 1830s, whose main purpose was to protect the tenant against the landlord and to combat the landlord's power of eviction. The main weapon of these societies was terror, enforced by assassination. Keegan wrote graphic accounts in his Tales of the Rockites of these agrarian activities, including his own eyewitness account of public hangings in Maryborough (in the main street of Portlaoise outside of what is now the courthouse).

After his death, the Leinster Express recalled Keegan's Tales of the Rockites and informed its readers that "the violators of the law were startled by the picture drawn of themselves by the hand of a master. They recoiled from the hideousness and infamy with which the pen of the poet was branding their brows; and the misguided peasantry of the locality were brought to a sense of the enormity of their nocturnal movements, more by the fervid preaching of one who sprung up amongst themselves, than by all the cumbrous machinery of law courts".

Keegan was known as a "peasant poet" – resulting from his self-introduction to the Dublin University Magazine: "I am an Irish peasant – born and reared in an Irish cabin and educated in an Irish hedgeschool. I have spent my years amongst the lower classes of the despised Irish peasantry. On Sundays I have knelt with them before the same rude altar; on weekdays I have wrought with them in the same fields and in the same employment; on the summer evenings I have joined them in the gaieties of the rustic dance on the well-trodden village green."

Keegan’s literary works captured the everyday lives of the peasantry of the first half of the 19th century. His wonderfully crafted words succeed in illuminating that period in Irish history for us and in bringing it to life in a very vivid and often startling way.

The Celtic cross which now stands on his grave bears an inspiring epitaph taken from his poem To-morrow, published in January 1849 in support of the Young Ireland leaders who were awaiting deportation following the failed rising of 1848: "It little matters why we fell/If we arise To-morrow!"