Published 13 July 1844 Lyricist(s) early 1840s | Writer(s) Thomas Osborne Davis | |
"A Nation Once Again" is a song, written in the early to mid-1840s by Thomas Osborne Davis (1814–1845). Davis was a founder of Young Ireland, an Irish movement whose aim was the independence of Ireland.
Raymond Daly and Derek Warfield describe Davis's acute awareness that songs could have a strong emotional impact on people. Davis wrote that "a song is worth a thousand harangues". He felt that music could have a particularly strong influence on Irish people at that time. He wrote: "Music is the first faculty of the Irish... we will endeavour to teach the people to sing the songs of their country that they may keep alive in their minds the love of the fatherland."
"A Nation Once Again" was first published in The Nation on 13 July 1844 and quickly became a rallying call for the growing Irish nationalist movement at that time.
The song is a prime example of the "Irish rebel music" subgenre. The song's narrator dreams of a time when Ireland will be, as the title suggests, a free land, with "our fetters rent in twain". The lyrics exhort Irishmen to stand up and fight for their land: "And righteous men must make our land a nation once again".
It has been recorded by many Irish singers and groups, notably John McCormack, The Clancy Brothers, The Dubliners, The Wolfe Tones (a group with Republican leanings) in 1972, the Poxy Boggards, and The Irish Tenors (John McDermott, Ronan Tynan, Anthony Kearns) and Sean Conway for a 2007 single. In the Beatles' movie A Hard Day's Night, Paul McCartney's grandfather begins singing the song at the British police officers after they arrest him for peddling autographed pictures of the band members.
In 2002, after an orchestrated e-mail campaign, the Wolfe Tones' 1972 rendition of "A Nation Once Again" was voted the world's most popular song according to a BBC World Service global poll of listeners, ahead of "Vande Mataram", the national song of India.
Lyrics
The lyrics use a simple ABABCDCD rhyme scheme, with verses of eight lines, and alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Davis describes how he learned of ancient fighters for freedom as a boy — the three hundred Spartans who fought at the Battle of Thermopylae, and the three assassins of Julius Caesar (Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus) who aimed to preserve the Roman Republic from tyranny. (Given the context of the 300 Spartans defending the pass at Thermopylae, the "three men" may refer to Horatius Cocles and his two companions who defended the Sublician Bridge... particularly given that Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, including the poem "Horatius," had been published in 1842.) He relates this to his own hopes that Ireland may yet be freed, and be no longer a British "province" but a nation of its own. The use of the term "once again" refers to Gaelic Ireland, the pre-modern island of Gaelic culture largely independent of foreign control. Davis mentions his belief that only moral, religious men could set Ireland free, and his own aims to make himself worthy of such a task.