1847 - Maura Dooley

The poem 1847 by Maura Dooley is set against the backdrop of the Irish Potato Famine which took place during 1846 – 1850. The Potato Famine began with a blight of the potato crop that left acres of Irish farmland covered with black rot. Peasants who ate the rotten produce sickened and were plagued with cholera and typhus. Hundreds of Irish were made to emigrate to America and Britain. They were forced into ships where the ship-owners crowded the desperate Irish onto rickety vessels labeled “coffin ships”. These ships reached port only after losing a third of their passengers to disease and hunger.

Dooley, being of Irish descent, tries to recreate the bitter experience of the Irish historical experience of displacement and emigration. In the poem Dooley gives voice to a girl escaping from the Great Famine. The speaker describes the gamut of emotions she had to face being in a ship for days together. She begins by describing ‘Ma’, whose ‘face is black’. During the famine a disease called typhus had plagued the Irish, a disease whose outbreaks occur in areas where people live in unhygienic and unsanitary conditions, resulti

Starvation was what made the people suffer and cause ‘knots’ in their stomach. But hunger was not what ‘knot(ted)’ the speaker’s ‘belly’ anymore, as stated in line 7, ‘what knots my belly now’s not hunger’. The word ‘now’ indicates that hunger was what the speaker suffered from earlier, but now something else had taken its place. ‘Anger’, capitalized so as to emphasize its depth, was what substituted the pangs of hunger. This anger could have surfaced due to several reasons – the ill-treatment of the people, the endless nights they had to spend on the ship, the uncertainty of the future. The third stanza of the poem is built up of only two lines which could signify how dramatic the situation is for the speaker, it also ends abruptly suggestive of the brusqueness generally associated with the feeling of anger.

In line 4 the speaker compares herself and people around her to ships. The ships are ‘toss(ed)’ about in the waves on stormy nights. In the same way the people are tossed about in the ships, ‘nights’ indicating the dark time of their life – the uncertainty and starvation, which has now lasted for several days justified by the ‘s’ in ‘nights’. The way the waves have no pity on the ship and tosses it about, the ship has no pity for the people hence tossing them about ‘cruelly’. The speaker is ‘afraid’ that she will not ‘wake’ anymore and thus sits still as a rock, ‘stony’.

‘Ships gob us up’ could indicate how the people were piled up in the ship. ‘We rot’ is

Some topics in this essay:
Justification Irish, Dooley Irish, Ma Ireland, Potato Famine, America Britain, Maura Dooley, irish people, Hundreds Irish, , speaker compares people, speaker compares, people ireland, pawing food, recognize speaker, stated line, hands paws, compares people, irish history, potato famine,