Poet
Born: August 6, 1927;
Died: January 30, 2018
RICHARD Murphy, who has died in Sri Lanka aged 90, was a distinguished Anglo-Irish poet. Born to an Irish diplomat father and a Scottish mother from Luss, many of his poems explored his Irish identity – perhaps the most famous is The Last Galway Hooker, which was inspired by his experience of buying and restoring a traditional sailing boat.
A contemporary and friend of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and WH Auden, Murphy was influenced early on by Dylan Thomas, Milton and Wordsworth. His work had a strong regional dimension, and he was firmly committed to accurate historical narrative – a commitment clearly evident in another of his best-known works, The Battle of Aughrim.
He was tall, fair-haired and handsome and often wore a seaman’s cap and a long, black leather raincoat over an Aran sweater. There was also often a pair of homespun tweed trousers tucked into black wellington boots, which had been turned over at the top.
He was born at Milford House, Co Galway, the third child of William Lindsay Murphy and his wife, Elizabeth Mary (née Ormsby). One of his ancestors, through an illegitimate line, was Charles I.
Part of his early childhood was spent in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, where his father was the last British mayor of Colombo. On his return to Ireland he attended Kylemore Abbey School and was later a boarder at Baymount Preparatory School, Dollymount, Dublin.
In 1937 he began studying music as a member of the Canterbury Cathedral choir. He became a senior chorister in 1940 and saw his future as a composer. However, the Second World War interrupted his studies and he returned to Ireland following the evacuation of Dunkirk.
On winning a scholarship to King’s School, Canterbury, he rejected the school’s – and his family’s – military traditions in favour of pacifism and began to write poetry.
In 1944 he won a demyship to Magdelen College, Oxford, where he studied English and literature under CS Lewis. After university, he went to live in Connemara, but returned and finished his BA in 1948, earning his MA in 1955.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s he worked at a variety of jobs, ranging from insurance broker in London to bailiff on the Erriff River, one of the finest angling rivers in Ireland.
In 1953, he taught English in Crete, and during the following year he took a course on French civilisation at the Sorbonne where he met his future wife, Patricia Avis. The couple visited Brittany and Crete and married in 1955, the year his first volume of poetry, The Archaeology of Love, was published. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959.
In pursuit of a more active life, Murphy bought the Ave Maria, the boat that inspired The Last Galway Hooker, and started a fishing and tourism business in Cleggan where, helped by villagers, he built a house by the pier.
He bought a second hooker, The Truelight, in 1961 and his business helped to revive Cleggan’s fishing industry that had gone into decline following the 1927 storm described in his poem The Cleggan Disaster.
On selling The Truelight in 1964 he did little sailing thereafter. In 1966 he completed the building of a house at Cleggan, and in 1969 purchased High Island where he could work in solitude. He built a second retreat on nearby Omey Island in 1974. Among the visitors he entertained in Cleggan were Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, WH Auden, Peter O’Toole, Sian Phillips and Louis MacNeice.
The sudden death of a close friend, Tony White, in 1976 affected Murphy deeply and he decided to move to Dublin.
By this time, The Battle of Aughrim (1968) and High Island (1974) had consolidated his reputation. The Battle of Aughrim, originally commissioned for radio by the BBC, had as its central theme the bridging of Ireland’s two cultures.
The title poem is a long narrative about the Protestant victory over Catholic forces in 1691. His ancestors had fought on opposite sides and Murphy declared, “My underlying wish was to unite my divided self, as a renegade from a family of Protestant imperialists, in our divided country in a sequence faithful to the disunity of both. The poetry was to occupy a no man’s land between music, myth and history.”
Other major works included The Price of Stone (1985) and Collected Poems(2001). A recording of The Battle of Aughrim, with music by Seán Ó Riada, was issued in 1969.
A regular broadcaster on RTÉ and the BBC, his work is included in many anthologies. He taught in many American and English universities.
He was a recipient of the American Irish Foundation Award, the British Arts Council Award and the Marten Toonder Award. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His autobiography, The Kick: A Life Among Writers, was published in 2002 by Granta and republished by Cork University Press last year. The collection The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952-2012 (2013) is his most recent publication.
His childhood in Ireland was documented in The Other Irish Travellers, a BBC documentary made by his niece, Fiona Murphy, in 2012.
Richard Murphy is survived by his daughter Emily and son William.
BILL HEANEY
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