A beggar before you, Valentine Brown

That my old bitter heart was pierced in this black doom,
That foriegn devils have made our land a tomb,
That the sun that was Munster's glory has gone down
Has made me a beggar before you, Valentine Brown.

Aogan O Rathaille, trans. Frank O'Connor

Patricia Craig writes of this poem,

This 'hidden Ireland' - Daniel Corkery's term - was inhabited by people who took a very poor view indeed of the new English-speaking aristocracy that had ousted the old Irish-speaking one. They never conceded cultural superiority to the conquerors - far from it. The boot was on the other foot, and rearing to kick. Fun is poked (in a bitter spirit) at the kind of ludicrous name, such as Valentine Brown, by which an arriviste landowner might call himself - someone inappropriately installed in a demesne of the great MacCarthy family, now dead or dispersed.

From Introduction to The Oxford Book of Ireland  

More analysis of the poem Valentine Brown:

"With the breaking of the Treaty of Limerick by the English in 1691 the Irish Catholics descended into a slavery worse than anything experienced by Negroes in the Southern States. (When the Irish came to America, the Negroes called thm "White Niggers".) This period is best represented in the few authentic poems of Egan O'Rahilly, a Kerry poet who lived between 1670 and 1726. In this fine poem he approaches, not one of the masters he would have approached fifty years before - the MacCarthys - but Lord Kenmare, one of the new Anglo-Irish gentry. Hence the bitter repetition of the fellow's name. O'Rahilly himself would have considered "Valentine" a ridiculous name for anyone calling himself a gentleman, and as for "Brown" he would as soon have addressed a "Jones" or a "Robinson". O'Rahilly is a snob, but one of the great snobs of literature."

Read the full poem on this web page