Mo ghrá go daingean thu — “my steadfast love.” So begins what many hold to be the greatest poem composed in the Irish language in the eighteenth century. It is also one of the most exact reccounts of grief ever set down — and it was set down two hundred years before anyone named the shape of grief as a thing of five psychological stages.
In May of 1773, a mare came home to Ráth Laoich without her rider, the saddle empty, the reins dangling, and the flank dark with blood. The woman of the house, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, did not wait for the news to be broken to her gently. She leaped on the mare’s back and let it carry her, and it brought her to a low furze bush near Carraig an Ime, where her husband lay dead in the road.
Art Ó Laoghaire had been outlawed and shot — over his refusal to sell a fine horse for five pounds, the sum the Penal Laws demanded a Catholic must accept for his horse no matter how valuable. Eibhlín knelt over him. She did not, in her own telling, stop to clean the wound or close his eyes. She cupped his blood in her two hands and drank it, because it was too precious to be left to the earth.
That is where grief erupts in this poem. Not with a word, but with a body, and a thirst that refuses the ordinary decencies of death.
We lazily render the word caoineadh as “lament” — as though it named a eulogy on the death of a beloved, a speech made about the dead. The truer rendering is grieving, and the truest meaning is buried in the act itself: a means of bearing the rending asunder of the soul through grief.
The eyewitness accounts of the old custom make this plain. The Caoineadh was never, in its ritual life, a personal narrative, it was a communal technology — formulaic utterances, panegyric phrases worn smooth by generations, into which the name of the newly dead would be set like a stone into an existing ring.
The keening woman did not invent her sorrow in original sentences; she could not, for the soul torn open cannot speak in its own new words. So the tradition, formed over centuries by people who knew exactly what grief requires, built a vessel strong enough to carry what no single heart could carry alone — and the bereaved accepted that the keening woman would graciously give full vent to this emotional turmoil before the community.
JB Yeats impression of Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill lamenting her murdered husband, Art Ó Laoghaire
The poem was not composed in a single night. Art was first buried in May 1773 at Kilnamartyra, in consecrated ground; some six months later, the authorities took notice and the interment of an outlawed Catholic in a churchyard was disallowed. His body was disinterred and removed to a field outside Kilcrea Friary, where it would lie for years before being eventually laid to rest within the friary walls. Eibhlín composed the caoineadh across that whole span — much of it over the body at the wake, and more of it again at the reinterment. So her grief was not narrated in one breath but stretched across the months in which her husband was twice taken from her: once by Morris’s shot, and once by the law that refused him the consecrated earth his faith would otherwise have claimed. He had been outlawed in life and was now outlawed in death.
What Eibhlín Dubh did with that vessel is why we are still speaking of her two hundred and fifty years on.
She took the inherited forms — the panegyric, the ritual architecture of the Caoineadh — and poured into them a narrative wholly her own. Not the generic panegyrical formulas with a name slotted in, but Art: the cut of him, the bed she had made for him, the body in the road. She made a personal Caoineadh inside a public form. She turned the collection of artefacts of grief that constitutes the Caoineadh tradition and turned them into a coherent artistic narrative of her personal grief, and in doing so created one of the great works of Irish literature.
But in the narrative of Caoineadh Art Uí Laoghaire something else takes shape on a personal level. As I read her poem I see that she travels through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — fully two centuries before Elisabeth Kübler-Ross gave them their modern names. That is a strikingly modern psychological framework but in 1773 Eibhlín Dubh constructed a poem which charts these stages of the opening of the wound of grief and the stages to its closing.
Which tells us two things at once: that the five stages are no twentieth-century invention but a true map of what the soul does under loss (Eibhlín traced the shape of the thing long before psychology named it); and that the Caoineadh as a form already knew this, holding room for every one of those movements, because it had been built across centuries by people who had walked the landscape of grief themselves.
The bargaining stage of her Caoineadh is the most remarkable of all, because Eibhlín does not bargain where we expect. We picture bargaining as the deal struck with God or with fate. In the scene at the wake, Eibhlín bargains with the living. At the wake, the Caoineadh turns into something closer to a trial, and it is Eibhlín who stands accused. The contest is led most sharply by Art’s sister; his father takes part too, less cutting but no less present, and the wider assembly closes around them. An energy of accusation enters the room, and Eibhlín must defend herself — her love, her vigilance, her very right to mourn him — before the whole assembled world. The voices turn by turns to the corpse, to the gathered mourners, and to one another. She is trying to wring from the human structure around the death some acknowledgement that might make the unbearable bearable. It cannot work — bargaining never can, which is why it is a stage to be passed through and not a place to live. But only by giving that contest its full and furious voice can the widow’s own voice finally sound.
Then comes the long fall, into the flat country, to depression and to acceptance, where there is nothing left to fight and no one left to bargain with — only the empty bed and the cold body and the years that will not now be lived, and righting herself with the community who she felt had not shared her grief sufficiently. The community, like the chorus in Greek tragedy, bend her back to the rituals of the living.
The poem closes six months later, and Eibhlín’s witness has gone through all of the described five stages of grief. The closing is the most achingly sweet declaration of love as she lays her husband down in his final resting place “Beneath clay and rock.” Acceptance — not resignation, and nothing so tidy as the word “closure.”
Acceptance is the stage we understand least and sentimentalise most. The Caoineadh ends as Eibhlín lays Art down for the last time, beneath clay and rock, the way a mother lays a child down to sleep: softly, tenderly, with the most ordinary gesture of care a body knows. That is what acceptance truly is — not the end of love but its last office. The tenderness has nowhere left to go but into the laying-down itself, and so it goes there fully: I will put you down softly, because it is the last thing I can do for you, and I will do it well.
She locks her grief away and lays him to rest in the proper ceremonial way before the whole community, including her duties of hospitality, as she places him in the “school of the dead”:
“Ní scaipfidh ar mo chumha
Atá i lár mo chroí á bhrú,
Dúnta suas go dlúth
Mar a bheadh glas a bheadh ar thrúnc
‘S go raghadh an eochair amú.
A mhná so amach ag gol
Stadaidh ar bhur gcois
Go nglaofaidh
Art Mhac Conchubhair deoch,
Agus tuilleadh thar cheann na mbocht,
Sula dtéann isteach don scoil –
Ní hag foghlaim léinn ná port.
Ach ag iompar cré agus cloch.”
“My grief will not disperse
but cram my heart’s core,
shut firmly in
like a trunk securely locked
when the key is lost.
O weeping women,
stay there where you are,
till Art Mac Conchúir summons drink
with some extra for the poor
– ere he enter that school
not for study or for music
but to bear clay and stones.”
The lullaby and the lament, it turns out, were always the same gesture — the body’s tender attendance on a soul it cannot keep. Eibhlín Dubh knew it in 1773. She needed no psychologist to chart the country of grief; she walked every mile of it with her eyes open, and left us the map in a form old enough to carry it.
Tuama Airt Uí Laoghaire i gCorcaigh
Lorcán Mac Mathúna is a singer and composer. Over twenty years he has written and recorded more than a dozen song cycles drawn from Irish myth, hagiography, and the bardic tradition, alongside works setting Norse, Icelandic and English-language sources. His new setting of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire premieres on Friday 19th June 2026 in collaboration with Éigse na hAoine in Caherdaniel, Co. Kerry. An Halla Pobal, 8pm