Life
?1794-1846 [pseud. “Zozimus”]; born in Faddle Alley, off Black
Pitts, Liberties of Dublin, not ten years later as in memoir by Guliemus,
which sets his age at forty-three at death; blind from birth; recited
‘Life of St Mary of Egypt’ in verse version by Bishop Anthony
Coyle; performed at Essex Bridge, Wood Quay, Church St., Dame St., Capel
St., Sackville St., Grafton St., Henry St., and Conciliation Hall; began
each oration with the verse, ‘Ye sons and daughters of Erin,/Gather
round poor Zozimus, yer friend;/Listen boys, until yez hear/My charming
song so dear’; named after him were the magazine Zozimus,
1870-72; also Zoz, or the Irish Charivari, 1876-79; and New York
collection of stories, The Zozimus Papers (1889); he was twice
married, one son; d. 15 Patrick St., his lodging, 3 April 1846. DIB
DIH OCIL
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Criticism
See Georges Denis Zimmerman, Songs of Irish Rebellion: Irish Political
Street Ballads and Rebel Songs, 1780-1900 (Dublin: Fourt Courts Press
2002), 352pp. [rep. edn.; ultimately based in thesis first publ. as Do.,
Geneve: Imprimerie La Sirene, 1966].
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Notes
W. B. Yeats, ‘Zozimus, Michael Moran, the
Last of the Gleemen’, in Yeats’s Celtic Twilight [printed
prev. as ‘The Last Gleeman’, from The National Observer,
1893). Michael Moran was born about 1794 in Faddle Abbey, off Black Pitts,
in the Liberties of Dublin. A fortnight after birth he went stone blind
from illness and became thereby a blessing to his parents, who were soon
able to send him to rhyme and beg at street corners and at the bridges
over the Liffey ... his mind became a perfect echoing chamber where every
movement of the day and every change of public passion whispered itself
into rhyme or quaint saying ... He was not much to look at [80] ... he
would have been a woeful shock to the gleeman MacConglinne could that
friend of kings have beheld him in prophetic vision from the pillar stone
at Cork. And yet ... he was a true gleeman, being alike poet, jester and
newsman of the people. [His wife would read him the paper at breakfast]
That’ll do. I have me meditations’. / He had not, however, MacConglinne’s
hatred of the Church and clergy ... ‘Boys, Am I standin’ in
a puddle, am I standin’ in wet?’ ... The best known of his religious
tales was ‘St Mary’, a long poem of exceeding solemnity, condensed
from a much longer work of a certain Bishop Coyle [An immoral woman is
converted in the Holy Land and attended by Bishop Zozimus.] The poem has
the intolerable cadence of the eighteenth century, but was so popular
an so often called for that Moran was soon nicknamed Zozimus. He had also
a poem of his own called ‘Moses’ ... Once an officious peeler
arrested him as a vagabond, but was triumphantly routed amid the laughter
of the court, when Moran reminded his worship of the precedent set by
Homer, who was also he declared a poet and a blind man and a beggar-[82]
man. [82] Various imitators started up on all sides [Tale of a 40 shilling
wager to impersonate Moran.] ... In April 1846 word was sent to the priest
that Michael Moran was dying, He found him at 15 (now 14 and a half) Patrick
Street on a straw bed in a room full of ragged ballad singers come to
cheer his last moments ... a fine wake ... merriment ... rann, tale, old
saw, or quaint rhyme. [Tale of drunken funeral procession] Moran must
have felt strange and out of place in that other kingdom he was entering
perhaps, while his friends were drinking in his honour. Let us hope some
middle region was found for him where he can call dishevelled angels about
him with some new and more rhythmical form of his old [84] / Gather round
me boys (&c) / and fling outrageous quips and cranks at cherubim and
seraphim. Perhaps he may have found and gathered, ragamuffin though he
be, the Lily of High Truth, the Rose of Far-sight Beauty, for whose lack
so many of the writers of Ireland, whether famous or forgotten, have been
futile as the blown froth upon the shore.’ [85] (Writings on Irish
Folklore, Legend and Myth, ed. Robert Welch, Harmondsworth: Penguin
1993). See also George Moore, Vale (1915 ed.) p.174: ‘one
of the tales, "The Last of the Gleemen", put it into Yeats’s
mind the idea that he has followed ever since, that the Irish people write
very well when they are not trying to write that worn-out and defaced
idiom which educated people speak and write, and which is known as English.’
Colm Ó Lochlainn, Anglo-Irish Song Writers. Quotes ‘Pharoah’s Daughter’, ‘In Agypt’s land contaygious to the Nile,/Old Pharaoh’s daughter went to bathe in style,/She tuk her dip and came unto the land,/And for to dry her royal pelt she ran along the strand: //A bull-rush tripped her, whereupon she saw/A smiling babby in a wad of straw,/She took it up and said in accents mild,/’Tare-an-ages, girls, which o’yees own the child?’ His ‘Song of Moses’ also in Frank Harte, ed, Songs of Dublin (1978).
DNB: Hugh Shields, ‘Zozimus’, in Dictionary
of National Biography: Missing Persons (1993); see also Irish
Book Lover, Vol. 3, p.26.
W. B. Yeats employs an engraving of ‘Zozimus’
by Jack B. Yeats as front. port. for The Celtic Twilight (1893)
in which ‘The Last of the Gleemen’ concerns Moran [supra].
H. Halliday Sparling, Irish Minstrelsy (London: Walter Scott 1888), makes deprecatory comments about Zozimus: ‘lest anyone should weep too much for the loss of his line, I give an extract from one of the few specimens of his power that are extant, ‘In Egypt’s land [...// ...] which av yes owns the child?’ (p.514); note also the poem ‘Pharaoh’s Daughter’ by Nuala Ni Dhomhaill giving a new currency to the theme.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)