SOURCE: "Pre-Famine Peasantry in Ireland: Definition and Theme," in Irish University Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, Autumn, 1974, pp. 190-92.

In the following excerpt, MacCurtain highlights the conflict between the courtly poetic genre of "The Midnight Court" and the poem's evocation of peasant culture.

From another angle (not quite that of Daniel Corkery⁷), there was a hidden Ireland that belonged to the peasantry who communicated with each other in the Irish language and through Irish customs. It was the rich Gaelic culture of "The Midnight Court": passionate, earthy, explicit in its sexual imagery, belonging to a world where sexual experience was highly valued, a known way of enjoying life. But note that the ideal of good conduct which comes through in "The Midnight Court" is a healthy one, the peasant demand for proof of fecundity and virility expressed in the begetting of children (a direct relationship with land as earth and...