page_title: Thomas Moore
section_title: Ireland's "national music"
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Moore / Irish Melodies / Ireland's "national music"
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of Lord Byron, facing left holding his red velvet cloak draped over his shoulders in his right hand, gold and white coat, white shirt
context_page_description: Thomas Moore was an Irish writer, poet and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. Their setting of English-Language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Gaelic to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot. Married to a Protestant actress and hailed as "Anacreon Moore" after the classical Greek composer of drinking songs and erotic verse, Moore made no profession of piety. But in the controversies that surrounded Catholic Emancipation he was seen to defend the tradition of the Church in Ireland against both evangelising Protestants and uncompromising lay Catholics. Longer prose works reveal more radical sympathies: a Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the United Irish leader depicted as a martyr in the cause of democratic reform; and, complementing Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Memoirs of Captain Rock, a saga, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of "Whiteboyism".
context_section_description: The "ultra-Tory" The Anti-Jacobin Review  ("Monthly Political and Literary Censor")  discerned something more than innocuous drawing-room ballads: "several of them were composed in a very disordered state of society, if not in open rebellion. They are the melancholy ravings of the disappointed rebel, or his ill-educated offspring". Moore was providing texts to what he described as "our national music", and his lyrics did often "reflect an unmistakable intimation of dispossession and loss in the music itself".
  
  Despite Moore's difficult relationship with O'Connell, in the early 1840s his Melodies were employed in the "Liberator's" renewed campaign for Repeal. The Repeal Association's monster meetings (crowds of over 100,000) were usually followed by public banquets. At Mallow, Co. Cork,, before the dinner speeches, a singer performed Moore's "Where is the Slave?": 
  On, where's the slave so lowly, Condemned to chains unholy, Who could be burst His bonds accursed, Would pie beneath them slowly.
   O'Connell leapt to his feet, threw his arms wide and cried "I am not that slave!" All the room followed: "We are not those slaves! We are not those slaves!" 
  In the greatest meeting of all, at the Hill of Tara (by tradition the inaugural seat of the High Kings of Ireland), on the feast-day of the Assumption, 15 August 1843, O'Connell's carriage proceeded through a crowd, reportedly of a million, accompanied by a harpist playing Moore's "The Harp that once through Tara's Halls".
caption: Byron: "When you read my Memoirs you will learn the evils of true dissipation."[52]
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "GIMP 2.6.11", "Image DateTime": "2010:11:20 21:06:37", "Image ExifOffset": "146", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "282", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4298", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "481", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "587"}