Chapter 5 From Dublin to London: Dermot O’Byrne, Arnold Bax, Pádraig Pearse, and the Music of Identity

Abstract

This chapter examines an extraordinary case of cultural and intermedial, chameleonism.2 En passant, it will also take stock of a number of ways in which the creative friction experienced by an individual attempting to establish viable positionalities within different places, cultures, and even art forms, may sometimes result in the enrichment of each milieu. Praised by W. B. Yeats but banned by the British censors, there is something rather slippery about Dermot O’Byrne’s lament for the Easter uprising – A Dublin Ballad and Other Poems (1918). On one hand, we need not doubt its sincerity. Its creator, after all, had certainly attracted the sympathetic attentions of the uprising’s leader, Pádraig Pearse: who, reciprocally, remained something of a hero to O’Byrne throughout his later life. On the other hand, as in so much of Yeats’s output, A Dublin Ballad is a work of masks and ventriloquism. Yet beyond even Yeats’s self-dramatizations, “Dermot O’Byrne” was himself a cipher: an acquired identity into which