Pádraig Ó hÉigeartaigh (1871–1936) was an Irish poet.

Life

Early life

A native of

Uíbh Ráthach The Iveragh Peninsula () is located in County Kerry in Ireland. It is the largest peninsula in southwestern Ireland. A mountain range, the MacGillycuddy's Reeks, lies in the centre of the peninsula. Carrauntoohil, its highest mountain, is a ...

County Kerry County Kerry ( gle, Contae Chiarraí) is a county in Ireland. It is located in the South-West Region and forms part of the province of Munster. It is named after the Ciarraige who lived in part of the present county. The population of the co ...

, Ó hÉigeartaigh emigrated with his father, Patrick, a laborer, and his mother, Mary Lynch, to the United States when he was 12 years old and worked in a cotton factory. He lived his adult life in

Springfield, Massachusetts Springfield is a city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States, and the seat of Hampden County. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers: the western Westfield River, the ...

Family and Civic Life

Ó hÉigeartaigh had 3 daughters and 4 sons with his wife, Catherine Ward. Two of his sons, Donncha and Diarmuid, were twins. He worked at the Charles F. Lynch Clothing Company for 30 years and then established his own clothing store. Ó hÉigeartaigh participated in many Irish organizations such as the Springfield branch of the Conradh na Gaeilge, established in 22 February 1897. His duties there included teaching and administrative work. He was also an active in the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Springfield unit of the Army of the Republic, The American Association for the Recognition for the Irish Republic, the John Boyle O'Reilly club and participated in the Springfield Feis events organized in the early part of the 1900s.

Literary Works

During the

Gaelic revival The Gaelic revival ( ga, Athbheochan na Gaeilge) was the late-nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism, national revival of interest in the Irish language (also known as Gaelic) and Irish Gaelic culture (including Irish folklore, folklore, Iri ...

, Ó hÉigeartaigh wrote a regular Irish-language column titled ''Ón dhomhan diar'', about the hardships faced by Irish immigrants in the United States for Patrick Pearse's '' An Claidheamh Soluis''. Ó hÉigeartaigh also wrote poetry for the same publication in Munster Irish. Ó hÉigeartaigh wrote one of his most famous poems, ''Ochón! a Dhonncha'' ("My Sorrow, Dhonncha!"), as a lament for his six-year-old son, Donncha, who, while walking home from school on the 22nd of August, 1905, fell into Springfield's Lombard Reservoir and drowned. The poem was first published in April 1906. At the time, authors of the

preferred to write in the Classical Gaelic, the literary language once common to the Gaels of both Ireland and Scotland, and felt scorn for the

oral poetry Oral poetry is a form of poetry that is composed and transmitted without the aid of writing. The complex relationships between written and spoken literature in some societies can make this definition hard to maintain. Background Oral poetry is ...

of the Gaeltachtaí. Ó hÉigeartaigh, however, drew upon that very tradition to express his grief and proved that it could still be used very effectively by an early 20th-century poet. ''Ochón! a Dhonncha'' has a permanent place in the literary canon of

Irish poetry Irish poetry is poetry written by poets from Ireland. It is mainly written in Irish language, Irish and English, though some is in Scottish Gaelic literature, Scottish Gaelic and some in Hiberno-Latin. The complex interplay between the two mai ...

in the

Irish language Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...

and has been translated into English by both Patrick Pearse and Thomas Kinsella.''Leabhar na hAthghabhála, Poems of Repossession'', ed. by Louis de Paor (Bloodaxe Books). Pages 29–31.

Death

Ó hÉigeartaigh died of pneumonia in 1936 in Springfield, MA.

References