The fame of William Allingham (1824-1889), who was born 201 years ago on March 19th, 1824, has long been eclipsed by that of Ballyshannon’s other favourite son, Rory Gallagher.
The latter has a statue in the town, complete with his trademark electric guitar. The former has to make do with a plaque. But whereas Gallagher’s relationship with Ballyshannon was fleeting, Allingham spent most of his life there and wrote about it obsessively.
This was despite, or maybe because of, being what we would now call Anglo-Irish. WB Yeats, who was greatly influenced by him and spent childhood holidays a few miles down the coast in Sligo, thought Allingham’s loyalties were to his Donegal locality rather than any nation.
“He sang Ballyshannon and not Ireland,” Yeats wrote. “[There] he grew up, filling his mind with all the quaint legends and fancies that linger still in such odd corners of the world, and with that devotion to the place where he was born, felt by few people so intensely as by the Irish . . .
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“To feel the entire fascination of his poetry, it is perhaps necessary to have spent one’s childhood, like the present writer, in one of those seaboard Connaught (sic) towns.”
And yet Allingham’s most ambitious work, the epic poem Laurence Bloomfield, was a portrait of the much troubled Ireland as a whole, circa 1864. Describing an idealistic young landlord’s return home after foreign travels, it includes the lines:
“This Irish county bears an evil name,/And Bloomfield’s district stands the worst in fame,/For agitations, discord, threats, waylayings,/Fears and suspicions, plottings and betrayings;/Beasts kill’d and maim’d, infernal fires at night,/Red murder stalking free in full daylight.”
Whatever about Yeats, the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev was impressed at the poem’s engagement with the national and land questions. After reading it, he declared: “I never understood Ireland before.”
Allingham did tear himself away from Ballyshannon and Ireland eventually, retiring from his day job as a customs officer in 1870 and moving to London to become an editor on Fraser’s Magazine.
He immersed himself there in the literary life of the city, knowing everyone who was anyone and keeping a diary about it, published posthumously.
In time, most of his poetry was forgotten. But the diary’s pithy observations of Lord Tennyson, Thomas Carlyle, and others, lived on to become Allingham’s most famous work.
Here it is, describing a “dinner, pleasant and lively talk” with Tennyson in 1880, where the subject of Ireland comes up and sets his guest off on a rant:
“T. – `Couldn’t they blow up that horrible island with dynamite and carry it off in pieces – a long way off?’
[Allingham] – ‘Why did the English go there?’
T.— ‘Why did the Normans come to England? The Normans came over here and seized the country, and in a hundred years the English had forgotten about it, and they were all living together on good terms.’
(I demurred: T. went on, raising his voice.) ‘The same Normans went to Ireland, and the Irish with their damned unreasonableness are raging and foaming to this hour.’
At that point, Allingham reminds Tennyson of the penal laws and the “deliberate destruction of [Irish] industry by the English Government”. Which forces his guest into a retreat, albeit temporary:
“T. ‘That was brutal! Our ancestors were horrible brutes! And the Kelts (sic) are very charming and sweet and poetic. I love their Ossians and their Finns and so forth – but they are most damnably unreasonable.’”
Although steeped in the same traditions, Allingham was reluctant to write in the Hiberno-English dialect later popularised by Yeats, Synge, and others. That and his publicly apolitical stance may explain why most of his work fell out of fashion in 20th-century Ireland.
“He was the last of the scattered, isolated, Irish poets, who essayed to cultivate something of the national tradition, while unable to join the politico-literary groups of their time,” wrote Ernest Boyd (1887-1946), the journalist and literary critic:
“In spite of a typically West Briton fear that an Irish Parliament would make Ireland not so ‘homely as Devonshire’, Allingham was attached to his country. Whenever he was inspired by the love of his native home, Ballyshannon, his verse revealed the temperament and spirit of his race. Neither his political and religious alienation, nor his English milieu could obliterate these. It is by such songs that he is remembered . . . "
By way of proving Boyd’s point, Laurence Bloomfield is little known today.
By contrast, the opening lines of a less important but vastly more popular Allingham poem, The Fairies, have achieved immortality: “Up the airy mountain,/Down the rushy glen,/We daren’t go a-hunting/For fear of little men.”
Although set in Donegal, that was quoted in the movie Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), alluding to the Oompa Loompas. It also featured in the 1973 horror film Don’t Look in the Basement, aka The Forgotten. And at the start of this century, for a time, it supplied the working title of what became Terry Pratchett’s comic fantasy novel, The Wee Free Men (2003).
