Sons of Dan Direach
Parenthetical Note: (I want to add something that I omitted in the first set of notes. Amra Choluim Chille or "Eulogy of Colum Cille, is one of the few very earliest Irish poems that have been preserved complete. This was composed by Dalian Forgaill on the Saint's death in 597 A.D. It is written in an archaic form called Reicne Déchubaid which is defined as a sequence of two or three alliterating words followed by a word that does not alliterate.)
Dán Díreach was the meter
practiced by professional poets from the
middle ages, and it continued
to be practiced extensively until the
dispersement of the Bardic
Schools after 1601. As its name
suggests, it was an exacting and difficult
form. Each syllable was
pronounced, and the
kind of Comhardach or
rhyme that had to be achieved
was Comhardach Slán a.k.a. Rím Fhoirfe or "perfect rhyme". Imperfect rhyme was
known as Comhardach Briste, and most of the syllabic poetry we will be looking at took this form. A looser form was known as Ogláchas ar Dhán Díreach because
it was practiced by apprentices or "young
upstarts", who did not adhere to the strict rules.
Dán Díreach and its spinoffs
consisted of Ceathrún or quatrains, i.e., stanzas made up of four lines each.
Another word for a quatrain is Rann. We
refer tio these lines as a,b,c, and d. Here are the ways that Comhardach (Slán
or Briste) could occur:
1. Between the last words of a and b; or
2. Between the last words of b and d; or
3. Between a word in the middle of line a and word in the middle of line b. Likewise, between a word in the middle of line c and a word in the middle of line d. (For this only gutai vowels had to rhyme, and this is called Amas or Assonance); or
4. Between the last word in a and another word in b, and between the last word of c and another word in d. This is a special device known as Aicill.
Another type of agreement was called Uaim or Alliteration where several consecutive accented words began with the same consan consonant or guta vowel. There was a looser form of uaim called Uaim Súl whereby the initial letters of consecutive accented words had to agree, but not necessarily the sound of the initial letters, mar shampla: bheidh could alliterate with bád . Uaim Súl was used extensively in Ogláchas.
There are six or seven kinds of meter used in Dan Direach and in Ogláchas ar Dán Díreach and we will look at some of them:
1 . An Rannaiacht Mhór : had seven syllables in each line, the last word of each line was a one syllable word. It is notated