Poems I Like: "Ringsend" by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Gogarty had a wonderful gift for polished, mellifluous verse. "Streel" is an Irish term that usually means to stagger drunkenly. I've loved this poem for at least two decades but, so far as I can remember, I'd never encountered its subtitle ("after reading Tolstoy") until now. My two favourite lines in this poem are: "Imagined, outrageous, preposterous wrongs", and the brilliant last line. (Well, strictly speaking, they are both couplets, but we don't do pedantry on this blog.)

There's a joke that Oliver St. John Gogarty was famous as a poet and a surgeon; famous as a poet to his patients, and a surgeon to his readers. He was in fact an excellent poet, and is much underrated today-- although he does have a pub named after him in Dublin's Temple Bar, which seems always to be thronged.

Ringsend by Oliver St. John Gogarty

I will live in Ringsend
With a red-headed whore,
And the fan-light gone in
Where it lights the hall-door;
And listen each night
For her querulous shout,
As at last she streels in
And the pubs empty out.
To soothe that wild breast
With my old-fangled songs,
Till she feels it redressed
From inordinate wrongs,
Imagined, outrageous,
Preposterous wrongs,
Till peace at last comes,
Shall be all I will do,
Where the little lamp blooms
Like a rose in the stew;
And up the back-garden
The sound comes to me
Of the lapsing, unsoilable,
Whispering sea.