Life
1800-1870? [‘Fermanagh True Blue’]; b. Fintona, Co. Tyrone; nailor by
trade; wrote sectarian poetry in the Orange cause; The Orange Minstrel
or Ulster Melodist (Derry 1832), and anthology of his own and other
writers’ work including Rev. John Graham (‘by permission’) and a copy
of the pop. song "The Boyne Water" which provides the title
for the novel of John Banim and a line in a poem of W. B.Yeats; also Poetical
Works (Derry 1863); received government pension. PI
RAF
Works
The Orange Minstrel or Ulster Melodist (Derry 1832); The Poetical
Works of Robert Young of Londonderry comprising agricultural and Miscellaneous
Poems and Songs with copious notes. Dedicated by permission to the Rt.
Hon. the Earl of Enniskillen (Derry Standard Office 1863); The
Ulster Harmonist, Original and Collected Poems, with Historical and Biographical
Notes (1840).
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Notes
Chris Morash, The Hungry Voice (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan
1989), reminds us that D. J. O’Donoghue [Poets of Ireland, 1912]
wrote archly of Young, ‘in the 1860s he was awarded £50 a year by the
Govt., ostensibly for literary ability, but as he had none, it must have
been for political services; Poetical Works (Derry Standard Office
1863). Morash selects "Stanzas on the Death of Daniel O’Connell,
Esq. M.P." [as infra.]
Belfast Central Library holds a copy of John Keegan Casey’s Rising of the Moon in which there is an undated cutting from the London Review comparing Casey’s acceptible nationalism with Robert
Young’s ‘rabid, stupid, nonsensical’ Orange verses’.
The Ulster Melodist (1832) contains inter alia, "The
Boyne Water", a traditional Orange song, not attributable to the
author: ‘King James he pitched his tents/The lines for to retire;/But
King William threw his bomb balls in,/And set them all afire’ [copy in
Belfast Central Library; q.p.]. W. B. Yeats includes a line clearly echoing
this in "Lapis Lazuli" (viz., ‘Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls
in/Until the town lie beaten flat.’). In his Autobiographies (Macmillan
1955), he recalls that his father read to him in boyhood Macauley’s Lays
of Ancient Rome which Yeats calls ‘the first poetry to move me after
the stable-boy’s Orange rhymes’ (quoted in W. B. Stanford, Ireland
and the Classical Tradition, IAP 1984, p.95; citing p.56 [?edn.].)
Of this event, A. N. Jeffares writes: ‘there was a stable-boy, Johnny
Healey, who read Orange ballads to him in the stable loft, and when there
were rumours of a Fenian rising Willie though he would like to die fighting
the Fenians’ (Jeffares, W. B. Yeats: A New Biography, Macmillan
1988, p.6; see Autobiographies, p.14). The same sentence is quoted
as an epigraph to Seamus Heaney’s collection Field Work: ‘He (the
stable-boy) had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we read them
together in the hayloft gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time.
Later on I can remember being told, when there was a rumour of a Fenian
rising, that rifles were being handed out to the Orangeman; and presently,
when I began to dream of my future life, I though I would like to die
fighting the Fenians’ (cited in Tony Curtis, ‘A More Social Voice: Field
Work’, Curtis, ed., The Art of Seamus Heaney, rev. edn. 1994, p.102).
Jeffares further cites H. H. Sparling’s anthology of Irish Minstrelsy
(1888) as source for the lines in question, remarking that Yeats introduced ‘pitched his tents’ and ‘bomb-balls’ into the original as having ‘the
vehemence he required’ (Jeffares, p.364.) Daniel Albright (ed., Yeats, Poems, 1992, p.744) cites Jeffares’s identification and adds the
variant lines of "Lapis Lazuli" from the Variorum Edn., but
adds also the whole of the relevant stanza from the Orange song, viz.,
"The Boyne Water": ‘July the First, in Oldbridge Town,’There
was a grievous battle,/Where many a man lay on the ground,/By the cannons
that did rattle./King James he pitched his tent between/The lines for
to retire;/But King William threw his bomb-balls in/And set them all on
fire.’ [Albright, ed., Yeats, Poems, 1992, Notes, p.744; quoted
by Russell K. Alspach, Irish Poetry from the English Invasion to 1798,
Phil: Pennsylvania. UP 1959, p.44, taken from Historical Songs of Ireland,
Percy Society Publications, Vol. 1.)
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Comrades in arms: poems by the Rev. John Graham (ed.) are included by consent of the author (i.e., Young) in Ulster Melodist [1832].
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)