The Rhyme Rats Hear Before They Die

 

Yeats was a great believer in the power of "poet speech" to change minds and circumstances, and of course he was a master. Opening his Collected Poems at random, I found myself rereading “Parnell’s Funeral", in which he draws from a dream of an Artemis-like goddess on horseback shooting an arrow at a star. He moves on to characterize politicians and phases of Irish history. In a commentary, he said he was versifying things he had spoken in lectures in a recent tour of the United States. I came to the lines

All that was said in Ireland is a lie
Bred out of the contagion of the throng
Saving the rhyme rats hear before they die. [1]

In a previous reading, in the old Macmillan edition I was given as a prize for writing verse in school, I had assumed the reference to “rats” was another example of Yeats’s haughty patrician dismissal of critics and group think he disliked. This time I was using volume one of the Collected Works, which is enriched by the copious scholarly notes of Richard J, Finneran. Thanks to Finneran, I made this fascinating discovery about the reputed power of poetic “rhymes” even on rats.

In “The Proceedings of the Great Bardic Institution” ed. & trans. Professor [Owen] Connellan, Transactions of the Ossianic Society, 5 (1860), the poet Seanchan causes ten mice to die by his satire. In a long note (pp. 76-77), Connellan refers to a paper presented to the Royal Irish Academy in 1853 by James H. Todd “on the subject of the power once believed to be possessed by the Irish Bards of rhyming rats to death or causing them to migrate by the power of rhyme.” [2]

Shakespeare knew something of these things.  In Act III Scene 2 of As You Like It, Rosalind says, “I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras time that I was an Irish rat, which J can hardly remember “. In German folk tradition - which gave us "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" - the rat catcher uses a flute. It seems his Irish counterpart needed no instrument other than his voice box. 

The Irish rhymers often had larger targets than rats and mice. I followed Finneran's lead and read about several instances of Irish bards rhyming to death even Lords Lieutenants of Ireland.

The following is an instance given by the Four Masters at the year 1414 in which an unpopular Lord Lieutenant was rhymed to death by the Irish bards: "John Stanley, Deputy of the King of England, arrived in Ireland, a man who gave neither mercy nor protection to clergy, laity, nor men of science, but subjected as many of them as he came upon to cold, hardship, and famine." Then, after mentioning some particular instances, especially his having plundered Niall, son of Hugh O'Higgin, the annalists proceed to say : "The O'Higgins, with Niall, then satirized John Stanley, who lived after this satire but five weeks, for he died from the virulence of their lampoons." [3]

References

[1] "Parnell's Funeral" in Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume 1 The Poems ed. Richard J. Finneran Second Edtion (New York: Scribner, 1997) p.285

[2] CW vol 1, Explanatory Notes p. 677. n.304.I.28.

[3] Transactions of the Ossianic society, for the year[s] 1853-1858 vol. 5 (Dublin, 1860) p.80.