Flower of Gortade, The

DESCRIPTION: The singer calls upon the muses to describe the Flower of Gortade. He compares her to many classical queens and beauties. The girl, Margaret O'Kane, must leave for America, and hopes Ireland will someday welcome her back
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1927 (Sam Henry collection)
KEYWORDS: beauty emigration
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Henry/Huntingdon/Herrmann-SamHenrysSongsOfThePeople H178, pp. 233-234, "The Flower of Gortade" (1 text, 1 tune)
Tunney-StoneFiddle, pp. 120-121, "The Flower of Gortade" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #2740
NOTES [306 words]: This is a strange piece in many ways. Sam Henry credits it to "[the] local blind poet Kane, in honor of his sister," but his text seems composite: four eight-line stanzas of classical allusions (to Orpheus, Homer, Penelope, Venus, Diana, Flora, Helen, Lucretia, Aurora, Hector) in praise of the woman, and then two first-person stanzas in which she prepares to depart.
In addition, the classical allusions are rather a mess. Homer is called a great poet, but one who "sang of Athenians and Spartans so bold." Spartans are certainly mentioned in the Iliad -- Helen of Troy was properly Helen of Sparta, and Menelaus became King of Sparta was her husband. Mentions of the Athenians and Athens are few, however. Menestheus (Μενεσθευς) King of Athens brought fifty ships to Troy (Iliad ii.546-556 in the Lattimore translation and in the Greek text of Munro and Allen), but was so obscure a figure that the Greeks couldn't even agree if he died there (according to Grant/Hazen, p. 227, one account says he died at Troy; another said he survived but lost control of Athens). Traditionally the family of Theseus was accounted kings of Athens, but not in the Catalog of Ships (Willcock, p. 27).
There is also the line "Queen Dido, who reigned with her sovereign in glory" -- which is sort of true (there was a time when she was supposed to reign with her brother; Grimal, p. 126) -- but it obviously omits the story of Aeneas, which is what everyone knows about Dido!
In the next few lines, the writer of this song commits the common abomination of referring to Greek goddesses by their Latin names.
Hector is described as having "consorts" (plural), but he had only one wife, Andromache.
After all the classical allusions, the poem shifts to the story of Susanna, which is Biblical/Apocryhal (one of the Additions to Daniel). And so it goes. - RBW
Bibliography

Grant/Hazel: Michael Grant and John Hazel, Gods and Mortals in Classical Mythology: A Dictionary, 1979; I use the 1985 Dorset Press edition
Grimal: Pierre Grimal, The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology, 1951; translated 1986; edited by Stephen Kershaw from the translation of A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop, 1990; published with this title by Penguin in 1991
Willcock: Malcolm M. Willcock, A Companion to the Iliad, University of Chicago Press, 1976

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File: HHH178

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