Moore and Me (i)

I'm guessing our President, who loves to quote his beloved Irish poems and even hum an Irish tune, has kept a sacred place in his repertoire for a line or two from Thomas Moore, a famous old Irish poet who lived a pretty wholesome life on the success his Irish Melodies won him, a bittersweet batch of songs set to music that includes a selection titled "The Last Rose of Summer."

If you don't know "The Last Rose," you probably think you do--and you may. The title alone conveys its mood and sense and is mysteriously familiar perhaps because we all know the feeling of summer's end. 

I'm not a bit Irish, but I can't help believing that the songs of Thomas Moore pray on people like Biden, who by hook and crook believe they still own something in their DNA of old Ireland. Who can't hum "Danny Boy"? That blessed old tune isn't in Moore's Irish Melodies, but people say his lyrics cast something of a similar spell on the Irish, maybe more so on emigres of the diaspora, Irish-Americans, than any residents of Dublin or County Cork these days. 

Moore's lyrics carry that same feel, a kind of "distressing reverie," an aching, even painful but somehow lovely. 

Like "Dannie Boy," "Oft, in the Stilly Night" carries the same sweet toxin.

Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm’d and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

I suppose you could call his visions nostalgia, but the effect is not quite so dear. Haunted doesn't do it either; the sleepless poet is not terrified by what he can't help but remember because there's just enough charm therein for him to spend a few minutes actually going back. 

It's not exactly sic gloria transit mundi either. What the poet confesses he feels is not someone waving a finger at his distress. The poem makes clear that whatever fevered source keeps him sleepless, it does have a root in loneliness, most likely a loneliness we all feel sometimes.

When I remember all
The friends, so link’d together,
I’ve seen around me fall,
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.

He can't help but call those moments sad, but, nonetheless, those very memories bring the light "of other days around me," amid the pain, and with them therefore their own blessed comfort in his sleeplessness. 

. . .Just a little more tomorrow--me and Thomas Moore.