Arthur Cleary was first Airt Uí Laoghaire,¹ a captain in the Austrian army who was shot upon returning home and finding himself bereft of property rights. As would befit a well-regarded soldier, aristocrat and husband and father, his epitaph reads "Lo! Arthur Leary, generous, handsome, brave, / Slain in his bloom, lies in this humble grave" (Levi 19). Uí Laoghaire's wife's ritual keen, a heroic and narrative lament, first sung in 1773, has since been recovered "in several different versions from illiterate countrymen and fishermen in the south of Ireland" (18) and remains one of the cornerstones of Irish poetic tradition.

Dermot Bolger's work, meanwhile, is generally exemplary of a bleakness of tone which typified much Irish literature of the 1980s; in that period during which "young Ireland went into a ferocious reaction against the older pieties, it seemed that no aspects of national tradition would be left unscathed" (Kiberd 609). Bolger wrote prose tirades against patriots (The Journey Home, 1989) and novelistic epics on the disillusion of the youth of Ireland who had given up on their country (The Woman's Daughter, 1991). Bolger's introduction to the anthology Invisible Cities, The New Dubliners begins

[f]rom the offices of a forgotten newspaper, later set ablaze by glue sniffers, down a ramshackle laneway in the dead centre of the old city of Dublin, each day, in the year of 1983, I set out in a battered blue van to bring books to the invisible cities of a new Dublin. (7)

Everything is "rotting," "apathetic," "derelict," "invisible, " "displaced" (7). According to some critics, however, Bolger was merely representative of

a movement which fancied itself the voice of a persecuted modernity while in fact being fully established and empowered. Moreover, the writing of Bolger and his colleagues was considerably less subversive than it took itself to be. . . . Although it prided itself on its realistic engagement with the sordid aspects of Dublin life, it may have unintentionally ratified the old pastoral notion of rural Ireland as real Ireland. (Kiberd 609)²

The Lament for Arthur Cleary, however, is only secondarily a play about an out-of-work, recently returned, world-weary Irish man who finds solace in his motorcycle and his much younger girlfriend; its dreary urban landscape, with its hopelessness, its heroin and its slumlords fades into the background. Although it touches on all of these social concerns, The Lament for Arthur Cleary transcends them; despite Bolger's claim that the tenements and projects of Dublin "possessed no place in the school books and poems we learnt at our wooden desks" (Invisible Cities 7), Bolger fashions an Arthur Cleary who takes his place with his poetic predecessor of 1773. It is first and foremost a play about an individual voice in a universal context, referring at once to a particular man and, more broadly, to the shared human experience of grief and loss. Perhaps because he existed first in another language, another era and another generic tradition, Bolger's Arthur Cleary is Irish in the present moment without violently or insolently refuting his country's past; the distance of his earlier incarnation in the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire and the mythologised status of that incarnation elevate the character above the superficial and reductive bitterness which tainted many of his similarly socially unsettled peers. As Declan Kiberd summarises,

[w]hen he accepted the Irish past as a basis on which to know the Irish present, Bolger impressed as a writer: but when he went to war against the past, he was left dependent on his own resources, which could never be equal to the challenge. (610)

While Kiberd perhaps does Bolger an injustice in implying that the writer could not create a polyphonic, multi-representational work of quality without explicit reference and direct inspiration from Ireland's literary past, the complex strata of sources and allusions evoked by the work broaden the individual complaint of Bolger's 1980 Dublin Arthur Cleary to span genre, history and personal circumstance. There exists a rich tradition of lament in Irish orality and literature. This most recent lamenting Irish man is elevated to that mytho-literary level, not only by Bolger's use of the eighteenth century Eibhlín Dhubh ní Chonaill poem, but also by the transformation of the narrative in his own hands, first through a long poem in an early poetry collection, Internal Exiles (1986), and then into a stage play.

The Irish tradition of poetic patronage disappeared after the English conquests and settlements of the seventeenth century (Ó Tuama and Kinsella xix), which triggered a shift to personal poetic pursuits, away from the established great hereditary bardic families. The purely personal voice was most often heard in folk expression, "a kind of poetry that demands a listening rather than a reading audience" (Ó Tuama and Kinsella xxv); the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire is one of the masterpieces of such occasional oral poems. The lament was composed by Eibhlín Dhubh ní Chonaill (Eileen O'Connell-Black Eileen or Dark Eileen), Airt Ó Laoghaire's twenty-year-old widow, after her husband's death on May 4, 1773. The Caoineadh expresses the sorrow, anger and wistfulness of the recent widow while tracing the social and personal circumstances of the murder, death, wake, Airt's burial in unconsecrated ground, subsequent exhumation, second wake and second, Christian burial.

Although the specific images which Dhubh ní Chonaill uses in her lament would seem archaic if transplanted into contemporary verse, Bolger creates a parallel sense of environmental detail as a larger-than-life backdrop to the life and death of Arthur Cleary. Dhubh ní Chonaill thus depicts her Arcadian surroundings:

Where berries grow freely
And gold nuts on branches
And great floods of apples all in their seasons.
(Dhubh ní Chonaill, Dillon trans. 30)

Bolger's poem, meanwhile, calls to mind an urban scape of a sublime decayed beauty:

Confettied light combed our faces
From spinning globes of speckled mirrors
When we walked towards the exit
Through those swirling ranks of dancers.
(Bolger, "Arthur Cleary" 20)

As well as the "impressionistic nature imagery, or metaphors from daily life" and "evidence of a strong sense of lyric or dramatic structure" (Ó Tuama and Kinsella xxxi) which characterise Irish folk poems, the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, and laments in general, were meant to be performed as part of the oral, female-centred keening rituals, socio-poetic conventions which echo throughout Bolger's twentieth-century adaptations. Far more than the devalued "Celtic melancholy" described by Matthew Arnold (qtd. in Yeats xix), the Irish lament was a plain way to commemorate, to right wrongs, to say what wasn't said in life and to express hope for the future: "[t]he lamentation . . . belongs in its pure form to simpler and more coherent societies than ours" (Levi 8). Dhubh ní Chonaill's impressionistic natural realm evolves into Dublin's putrefying metropolis, but Bolger's language still harkens back to rural themes, as in the verses "Past the crumpled stalks of drunks / falling between the dispersed sheaves" (Bolger, "Arthur Cleary" 20) or in the way the poet juxtaposes "the windscreens of stolen cars" (22), for example, against "the first blue notes of dawn" (21) to recreate the bittersweet fertility of Dhubh ní Chonaill's setting.

I drifted into sleep
To see a horse come riderless,
Over fields trailing
A bridle smeared with blood,

Towards a white house
Where a woman stood screaming.
As I shuddered awake
I realised her voice was mine. (65)

Kathy's words echo Eibhlín's lament, over two hundred years earlier:

I knew nothing of your murder
Till your horse came to the stable
With the reins beneath her trailing,
And your heart's blood on her shoulders
Staining the tooled saddle
Where you used to sit and stand.
(Dhubh ní Chonaill, Dillon trans. 25)

Bolger's insinuation is clear: Ireland is still dreaming about its past, but needs an oneirical or surreal vehicle to iterate that vision. Perhaps, by extension, the theatrical retelling of the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire acts as a similar agent of historical reflection; the distance of time and genre broadens the experiential frame while permitting the explicit presence of Airt Uí Laoghaire, horse and all, and allowing the restoration of the lament form.

Through a transplantation of voice, Airt Uí Laoghaire, mourned and remembered by his widow, becomes re-remembered and recontextualised in twentieth-century city slums and economic slumps. The story is similar: a man dies an unjust death. Both men are wanderers: Uí Laoghaire is a soldier in a continental army and Arthur Cleary has recently returned to Dublin after many years abroad as a migrant worker. However, while Airt Uí Laoghaire is definitely at home amidst his family and extended community in County Cork (he is eventually buried in the monastery at Kilcrea), his twentieth-century counterpart is a wanderer even in the city which once was home. Bolger emphasises Arthur Cleary's homelessness through his reminiscences about long-ago clubs and bands-"I was only fourteen, but I was there. I saw Rory Gallagher with the Impact and Skid Row . . ." (Bolger, Arthur Cleary 20). Even in his boyhood neighbourhood, Arthur Cleary is foreign: "Eh, what are you at then?" the Frontier Guard asks in the guise of a "whinging moneylender" (36). Arthur replies,

I live here.
Frontier Guard: Since when? Old Mrs Cleary used to live there.
Arthur: I was born here.
Frontier Guard: Tell me another. (37)

Even Kathy tells Arthur, "you don't talk like real people" (28), highlighting his strangeness as a returned exile and simultaneously as a vestigial character from another time, another literary tradition, another poem. Arthur Cleary's continued temporal and social dissociation from the Dublin to which he has returned is underscored by the surreal frontier sequences-

Frontier Guard: Ah Irish. Irish. Boom-boom! eh!
Arthur: Yeah. Boom-bleeding-boom. . . . Where am I now? Which side of the border am I on?"

-which suggest not only a realistic cultural prejudice and a sense of geographical and national displacement, but also imply the metaphysical border between life and death. The reader or audience is constantly reminded that Arthur Cleary exists only in a literal liminal space. The play opens with a moment that mitigates the creation of suspense in the play with Kathy's flashforward overture "[m]y lament for you Arthur Cleary" (Bolger 3); Arthur Cleary is always "a posthumous man" (Merriman 179), as the Frontier Guard tells him in an earlier version of the play. Because The Lament for Arthur Cleary is an appropriated narrative, however, that liminal space is dramatised also into the in-betweens of national history, literary tradition and the universally human experience of death.

Arthur Cleary is such a universal human figure, a mythologised everyman who represents both the human experience of loss and his expressly Irish predecessor. Bolger's Arthur Cleary is "the real McCoy" (Bolger, Arthur Cleary 44) first and foremost by appellation: not only is his name obviously reminiscent of Airt Uí Laoghaire's, but Arthur Cleary is frequently referred to in the play by his full name. "Mornings I'd climb down the steps from these flats and people would shout 'Arthur Cleary! Arthur Cleary! Come in! Come in!'" (31), Arthur remembers; "You're a sap, Arthur Cleary" (41), Kathy admonishes him; "The real McCoy, Arthur Cleary" (59). The repetition of his full name gives him an epic dimension which echoes the eulogy and memorial of the snippets of poem Kathy speaks in the play: "My lament for you Arthur Cleary" (3) and "Within sight of my father's house / Is where I first loved Arthur Cleary" (24).

As well as his depiction as a binomially stated, epic character, the dramatic focus on the male object of the lament shifts the focus and weight from what was traditionally the domain of women, and in particular Irish women. While laments commemorated the dead, the recitation of laments by women also gave voice to the female social and interpersonal realm. For example, Eibhlín's response to her sister-in-law's insinuations about her husband's way with "[m]any a modest, mannerly maiden" (Dhubh ní Chonaill Dillon trans. 32) is as much a comical and impudent portrayal of the subtle competition for influence between two women as it is a tender reiteration of Airt Uí Laoghaire's spousal qualities-

The wives of the merchants
All bowed down to you
For they knew in their hearts
What a fine man in bed you were,
And what a fine horseman
And father for children. (33)

Whereas the literary traditions of other Western countries comprise a predominantly male repository of courtly love ballads, the plaint of the abandoned girl is typical of the seventeenth-century Irish lament. Because Eibhlín, and to a lesser extent Airt's sister, who speaks several verses of the lament, are the survivors, they hold the remaining personal evidence not only of the man whose love they mourn-"my soul's darling" (Dhubh ní Chonaill, Dillon trans. 24)-but also of his social status, his

Right hand steady-
Threatening aspect-
Trembling terror
On treacherous enemy- (23)

Airt Uí Laoghaire's affluence, authority and vigour are nonetheless not praised explicitly as they would be in a male-spoken literary elegy or heroic epic, but related anecdotally:

My friend and my love!
Of the country's best blood
That kept eighteen wet-nurses at work,
And each received her pay. (30)

By emphasising Airt Uí Laoghaire's virile ability to drain eighteen wet-nurses and mentioning his nurses' remuneration rather than recounting his military exploits, heroic deeds or physical power, Dhubh ní Chonaill shifts the elegiac poem into the feminine domain of the lament. While in Bolger's poem, Arthur Cleary is something of a romantic antihero, "Unable to glance at a girl / Unless with drink or stoned" (Bolger, "Arthur Cleary" 20), in the original and conventionally female-centred lament, both Eibhlín and Airt's sister have sufficient agency to express their willingness to have died in Airt's stead.

When the bullet came towards you,
My right side would have taken it
Or a fold of my tunic, (27)

moans Eibhlín. Airt's sister repeats:

When the gun-powder blazed at you,
My right side would have taken it,
Or a fold of my gown. (27)

Dhubh ní Chonaill's lament thus reflects female realities while eulogising Airt Uí Laoghaire. By making Arthur's lover, Kathy, the speaker of the poem, Bolger straddles the traditionally female mourning voice and renders it as the specific story of a twentieth-century woman who survives the Dublin suburbs. "Kathy" was merely labelled "Girl" in initial versions of the play (Merriman 169, 173). While still steeped in its historical identity, the female lament nevertheless becomes more strongly individuated as Kathy takes on her name. The more definite identity which Bolger adds to his play's ban caointhe (leading keener) also reflects more closely the circumstances of the 1773 Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, which was unusual insofar as it was created spontaneously out of personal grief, whereas keeners were most often professional mourning and wailing women, who travelled from wake to wake and were paid in whiskey, tobacco or a few shillings (Ó Coileán 107).

While women are the instruments of the keen and therefore the holders and keepers of memory, Airt Uí Laoghaire is nevertheless the subject of the lament. As is the Caoineadh, The Lament for Arthur Cleary is the tale of one man whose eighteenth-century doppelgänger makes him an everyman. In Bolger's poem, however, and even more so in his play, the lamentee is given a voice; Arthur Cleary voices his own particular plight which represents in a more general way that of a returned working class emigrant. While Dhubh ní Chonaill's poem presents Airt entirely in the third person, the Arthur Cleary in Bolger's poem is able to speak for himself, albeit only in the context of his girlfriend's narrative: "My love I have finally come home" (26). Although Kathy, who speaks the formal lament, is to an extent Arthur Cleary's young redeemer, the lament as an act of theatre is even more so; Arthur Cleary muses that he had "[n]ever thought I'd . . . feel new again, like now. . ." (28), and therein is Airt Uí Laoghaire also reborn. The dramatic version of The Lament for Arthur Cleary gives Arthur Cleary the title role and allows him the power of speech. Interestingly, the play, due in part to the nature of theatre, effects a return to the orality privileged in the original lament form. Although "[t]he true performance of lament was seldom repeated [and] [i]t was considered terribly bad luck to sing the true lamentation of the dead outside its proper occasion" (Levi 17-18), Bolger breaches the formal rule in order to bring Airt Uí Laoghaire into a contemporary idiom. However, because the play is still historicised and contextualised in the lament genre, which refers back to the female expressive tradition and the Caoineadh specifically, The Lament for Arthur Cleary is not merely the navel-gazing self-pity of some drugged-up cradle-robbing motorcycle-riding welfare case, but the universally human and timelessly Irish lament for identity and national memory.

The shift in language from the Gaelic of the original lament to the English of Bolger's poem and play can also be taken as a inclusion rather than as a loss. Although the idealistic Yeats foresaw "Ireland . . . communicating with herself in Gaelic more and more, but speaking to foreign countries in English" (Yeats xxxi), the expression in English of the Dublin- and Ireland-specific plight of Arthur Cleary underlines Bolger's concurrent European concerns, notably embodied by works such as In High Germany (1990) and The Valparaiso Voyage (2001), which place Irish characters in a more broadly Europe context.

Bolger also avoids the linguistic question of the desirability of preserving Gaelic. The Lament for Arthur Cleary is a play generally about loss: the addition of a linguistic loss to Arthur's already tenuous sense of home would be excessive. However, it is perhaps no accident that the Gaelic poem that Bolger attempted to reshape into a twentieth-century English-language revision eventually found its way into a dramatic form. As Peter Levi points out, "[p]opular, proverbial rhetoric underlies the rhetoric of poetry, and in a dead language, they are hard to distinguish" (10). In other words, the elegiac idiom of the original, Gaelic lament faltered in the more metaphorically-rich, less vernacular poem The Lament for Arthur Cleary, but regained firmer footing in the theatrical version, without the middleman of contemporary poetic allegory. Bolger's poem accurately captures the hopelessness and last-ditch fervour of the Dublin tenements. However, his language demands associative leaps not required by a listener of Eibhlín Dhubh ní Chonaill's eighteenth-century oration; phrases such as "the slipstream of your world" (Bolger "Arthur Cleary" 22), "[t]he bolted flats sweat[ing] / Under the reign of shotguns" (22), "[t]he rage . . . a whirlwind / Imploding through my skull" (23) are more disparately associative than the repetitive simple imagery of the "white-handed rider" (Dhubh ní Chonaill, Dillon trans. 24) and "white-breasted Art" (31), and the stark descriptions of Airt Uí Laoghaire's "heart's blood still flowing; / I did not stay to wipe it / But filled my hands and drank it" (25); his children "will call out to their father; / And he won't be there to answer" (24). Much more an eloquent mourning for a husband, father, brother and son, Dhubh ní Chonaill's lament becomes via Bolger's pen a symbolic dirge for an entire displaced, dislocated generation and the "oily cobbles" (Bolger, "Arthur Cleary" 20), "rust-eaten ghosts of lorries" (21) and "honky-tonk cafés" (21) which are their world. Bolger himself views the lament, and specifically the reinvention of a formally and nationally ancestral poetic articulation of mourning that is the Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire as a positive transformation, a reappropriation of the act of lamentation to counter the rosy (or, rather, emerald green) depictions of de Valeran Ireland and the equally counterfeit economically progressive Ireland of the mid- and late twentieth century:

This folksy nostalgia has created the illusion that somehow the real Dublin is dead, the real Dubliners scattered and some alien city is rising in its place. . . . Rather than being dead it is alive and vibrant with new people, with new blood, new streets, new placenames. (Invisible Cities 9)

Declan Kiberd accuses Bolger's early works of a monophonic short-sightedness: "In his texts, he found it difficult to register a variety of voices, and this was symptomatic of a generation which, in its anxiety to redefine the Irish condition, sometimes seemed unwilling to allow any voices other than its own to be heard. In that respect, also, they were all too like the older gang which they were reacting so strongly against" (610). In Bolger's preface to the 1993 Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, he asserts that the new generation of Irish writers are "drawing on deep reserves to drive literature into a state of renewal" so that "the centre is shifting in Irish writing" (qtd. in Stewart). Those "deep reserves," which Bolger taps in The Lament for Arthur Cleary, are the willingness to allow a work to take on generic and literary fluidity and, most importantly, the subtle acknowledgement of the past which not only gives the lost Arthur Cleary an ancestry, but also lightly and unassumingly gives new breath to an old poetic form. Just as Dhubh ní Chonaill's lament was "not only for Art himself, but for the nobility of his caste" (Merriman 167), Bolger's play is a lament for an exile in his own country, but also, more broadly, for a 1980s Dublin in a state of urban decay. It is certainly a vituperative and cynical commentary on a city, a country and a culture which cannot take back its own, but it is also a comforting contextualisation: Arthur Cleary's sorrows are not new or solitary; as he says, there is a "feeling like this has happened before" (Bolger, Arthur Cleary 27). His lament is deeply rooted in a recorded history of personal grief and in the Irish literary tradition, and his too shall pass.

Endnotes

1. Academics, critics and writers variously spell the eighteenth-century lamentee's name as "Airt" or "Art," often using both within the same discussion, a disparity seemingly based on whether they are concerned with the character in a Gaelic-language poem or in an English translation. I will use "Airt" when discussing the Caoineadh's character, regardless of language. Citations from secondary sources, however, have not been changed.
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2. Interestingly, the work of Bolger and his ideological and national contemporaries seems to have been very much admired in England, where they heralded "a new cutting-edge realism in Irish writing" (Kiberd 609-610).
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Works Cited

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---. The Journey Home. London: Viking, 1989.

---. ed. Invisible Cities, the new Dubliners: a journey through unofficial Dublin. Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1988.

---. The Lament for Arthur Cleary. Plays: 1. London: Methuen Drama, 2000.

---. "The Lament for Arthur Cleary." Excerpt. Irish Poetry Now. Ed. Gabriel Fitzmaurice. Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1993. 19-27.

---. The Woman's Daughter. London:Viking /Penguin, 1991.

Dhubh ní Chonaill, Eibhlín. "The Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire." Excerpt. Trans. Thomas Kinsella. The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. Oxford: OUP, 1986. 218-21.

---. "The Lament for Art Ó Laoghaire." Trans. Eilís Dillon. The Lamentation of the Dead. Ed. Peter Levi. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1984. 22-35.

---. "Dirge on the Death of Art O'Leary." Trans. Eleanor Hull. Anthology of Irish Verse. The Poetry of Ireland from Mythological Times to the Present. Ed. Padraic Colum. New York: Liveright Publishing, 1948. 225-32.

Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1996.

Levi, Peter. The Lamentation of the Dead. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1984.

Merriman, Vic. "Centring the Wanderer: Europe as Active Imaginary in Contemporary Irish Theatre." Irish University Review. 27 (1) 1997: 166-81.

Ó Coileán, Seán. "The Irish Lament: An Oral Genre." Studia Hibernica. 24 (1984-88): 97-117.

O'Toole, Fintan. "Introduction." Plays: 1. By Dermot Bolger. London: Methuen Drama, 2000. ix-xiv.

Ó Tuama, Seán and Thomas Kinsella, ed. An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed. Mountrath, Ireland: The Dolmen Press, 1985.

Stewart, Bruce, ed. "Tom Murphy." EIRData. Princess Grace Electronic Library (Monaco). http://www.pgil-eirdata.org.

Yeats, William Butler. A Book of Irish Verse. London: Methuen and Co., 1900.