Book charting the life of patriot and 'workman' poet from Offaly launched

THE life of the so-called workman poet from Birr, John De Jean Frazer is charted in a new book which has just been published.

Frazer was a nationally recognised poet and committed Young Irelander who was known throughout Ireland in the mid 1800s but has since been largely forgotten.

His poetry was frequently published in The Nation newspaper, the organ of the Young Ireland movement.

His works often highlighted the injustice of British rule as well as touching on more personal topics.

The new book is entitled “The complete poems of John De Jean Frazer; the workman poet from Birr”.

As the book title suggest it publishes the full collection of Frazer's poetry.

The publication has been meticulously edited by Pádraig Turley, Terry Moylan and Laurel Grube, a direct descendant of Razer who lives in the united States, and was launched at two separate events in Birr and Tullamore.

Teacher and playwright Michael Donegan officially launched the book at both the functions.

In an excellent speech he expertly took us into the time machine of his imagination and described a typical day in the life of the Birr poet.

Michael said he always had a fascination with the dimly lit past, “a time not so distant as to lose its human relevance yet far enough away to intrigue with opaque mystery.”

“Every so often, over the past 40 years or so I have heard mutterings about a Parsonstown or Birr poet. His name when it was mentioned at all had a rather eccentric flavour to it. It definitely wasn’t flat and local like Carroll or Cahill. It had connotations of Frenchness, of classical learning, of recitals in baroque parlours with elegant plasterwork and subject matter hovering esoterically above the heads and dullard minds of ordinary folk. His work might be so removed from present experience as to be the possibly curious but largely irrelevant musings of a dandy parlour poet. How wrong I was to imagine so.

“Once I heard the now deceased Galway musician Sean Tyrrell sing a beautiful ballad about reconciling the differences of Orange and Green which he subsequently ascribed to the pen of 'a Birr poet called Jean De Jean Fraser'.

“Then In the 2012 edition of Birr Review magazine the wonderful Jack Ryan contributed an article on the poet which he titled 'Jean De Jean Frazer - Poet and Patriot.' According to Jack’s sources Jean was the son of a Presbyterian father who had come to Birr Barracks to serve in a Scottish regiment which was garrisoned there. His family lived in Connaught Street in the same premises now occupied by Smyth’s Barber Shop. There is a plaque on the wall erected there some years ago as part of the Birr Notables Trail. Jack listed 14 private schools in and around Birr, any one of which Jean de Jean might have attended. He might have received his education in Latin, Greek, English and possibly Gaelic (we know he spoke it) or even continental languages such as French and German. He wrote that Jean was a cabinet maker by trade and after moving to Dublin became involved with the Young Ireland movement, with Davis and Gavin Duffy and that he devoted his poetic skills to patriotic publications like the Nation. He quoted lines from his Birr poems and referred to his poor health, his poverty stricken later life and his unmarked grave in Glasnevin.

“Calculating his age at his death as 48 years, Padraig estimates that he was born in 1804/05. According to Padraig’s research, Jean’s father was a Presbyterian minister of Huguenot descent. Hence the French-sounding name. It is suggested that he planned to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a minister of the church but due to financial constraints had to abandon the idea. He was a cabinet maker and, with his brother Robert, worked for a while under a French cabinet maker in Green Street and that he also followed the upholstery trade. He moved to live in Dublin but at what precise age we cannot be sure. It’s probable that on finishing his apprenticeship he headed there to seek work. He would remain a cabinet maker until his death.

“Jean de Jean Frazer was born into a time of great change which included the construction of Crinkle Barracks, the construction of the extensive Shannon fortifications at Shannonbridge and Athlone and the numerous defensive Martello towers along the coast and on the line of the Shannon. It was quite obvious that something was afoot. The doctrines of revolution and egalitarianism were spreading from France and America. These 'heresies' had recently come to Ireland in the shape of the 1798 rebellion. Could the French use unrest in Ireland to undermine the United Kingdom by possibly invading in the west and bring the unwashed hordes to the back door of empire?

“There was the treachery of The Act of Union, the turmoil of O’Connell’s campaigns against it and the movement for Catholic Emancipation. There were tithe wars and agrarian unrest, the eternal strife between Orange and Green.

“The cataclysm of the great Famine was waiting in the wings with several lesser famines before it. A new movement of militant rebellion led by romantic intellectuals called Young Irelanders was afoot. In 1848 they would make their hapless stand in the Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch in South Tipperary.

“Birr experienced its own version of social upheaval around the 1820s with the arrival of the firebrand priest Michael Crotty and the turmoil of the schism that engulfed the town.

“As the son of a Presbyterian minister it is very probable that Jean was baptised into the Presbyterian religion. Baptism records did not commence until the 1840s so there is no record of this. It is said that he was a member of the Orange Order (as any good Presbyterian in his day would be) but that he left it and converted to Catholicism on the influence of O’Connell’s repeal movement at the age of 40. Whatever happened to Jean that he should have such a transformation in belief as to become a patriot poet of the first order? Can it be simply that he was a man with an innate sense of justice who could not allow class, religion or social prejudice to cloud his vision? Subsequent to his leaving Birr he was married at 24 to Letitia Reynolds and they had six children, two of whom died at the age of 10 and 15 respectively and within a short time of each other. Their deaths affected him greatly. Laurel Jean Lewis Grube, who was involved in the research and editing of this beautiful book and whom we are privileged to have here with us tonight, is a direct descendant of Jean’s, tracing her lineage to one of his daughters, Mary Anne Frazer born in Dublin in 1839.

“This book which Terry Moylan and his co-authors have brought us is a wonderful tribute to Jean De Jean Frazer. It has obviously been a labour of love and respect for a man who in his day devoted his being and his poetic talent to the care for and rights of his fellow man. What comes across to me at any rate is his sense of justice and fair-play. He believed that England’s contempt and disrespect for Ireland was at the root of its persistent mismanagement of our country. Yet his arguments were never vitriolic or extreme. With his steady rational mind and all the skills of his poetic craft he consistently exposes political hypocrisy. He uses his poems to encourage his fellow citizens to lift their heads and unite in the common cause of self-determination. Poems such as 'Advice' on Page 103 or ‘The Gathering of the Nation' on Page 73. He is scathing about a visit to Ireland by Queen Victoria in 1849 in his poem The Queen’s Visit Page 412. The debacle of the famine has just occurred and yet the same wretched poor are expected to line the streets and wave enthusiastically as she processes by.

This fine book is also dotted with over twenty contemporary illustrations which serve to enrich and contextualise the poetic content. There are reproductions of two sketches attributed to Jean de Jean and sourced by his great, great, great, granddaughter Laurel. Her lovely introduction piece is a fascinating account of her devotion to the cause of his acknowledgement and commemoration.

Terry Moylan told those assembled that it seemed “Frazer had become radicalised in the 1840s and became a supporter of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal movement. Many of the poems are versified appeals for public support for that campaign, but later pieces reflect, first, his outrage at the tactics of the British Government in thwarting the Movement’s activities and then his disappointment with the way the Movement disintegrated after the projected monster meeting at Clontarf was proscribed. This collection contains most of the poems that were later included in nationalist anthologies, and they include those pieces that have led Frazer to be described by some as ‘too strident’ in his poems.

“In 1851, when Frazer had been in poor health for a couple of years, his admirers arranged a third publication, Poems by J. De Jean. This was, again, a selection of poems that had appeared in the periodicals of the day, but also included lengthy pieces in which he returned to his liking for extended pieces that would allow him to develop almost forensic insights into the states of mind of his protagonists. The first, and longest, piece is ‘Jephtha’s Vow’ a story from the Book of Judges in which the warrior Jephtha is entreated by his people in Gilead to defend them against the Ammonites. He agrees to do so, but makes a rash vow as he sets off to war; he vows that, if he returns victorious, he will sacrifice to God the first thing that comes out of his house upon his return. He does return in victory, only to see his daughter emerge from their house. In due course he honours his vow but, in Frazer’s telling, not before the torments of Jephtha and his daughter are explored and laid before us.

“This collection also includes other narrative pieces, based on Irish legend, and on imagined scenes of Irish life. As the poems had been written and published at the height of the Famine, several of them express his horror and outrage at the sufferings of the Irish people, and his despair at their failure to react politically or militarily to their plight. The collection also includes more personal work – poems of place and of his own life and relationships.

“In 1851 also, the year before his death, he embarked on a new venture, the publication of a weekly newspaper entitled The Irish Trades’ Advocate. “

Laurel Grube charted her own family connections with the poet who was her great great great grandfather.