page_title: Thomas Moore
section_title: Death
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Moore / Death
caption_attribution_description: English: Ottawa Public Library stained glass window.
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: It is a criticism of Moore that he "wrote too much and catered too deliberately to his audiences". In his lyrics there is a bathos that speaks both to a love of recitation and to an abiding sense of tragedy that is perhaps lost on the modern reader. 
  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!...
  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!...
   In the late 1840s (and as the catastrophe of the Great Famine overtook Ireland), Moore's powers began to fail. He was reduced ultimately to senility, which came suddenly in December 1849.  Moore died on February 25, 1852, preceded by all his children and by most of his friends and companions.
caption: Stained glass at Ottawa Public Library features Charles Dickens, Archibald Lampman, Duncan Campbell Scott, Lord Byron, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Shakespeare, Thomas Moore
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