Almost 100 years after he died, Ireland's national poet Thomas Moore inspired one of Bugs Bunny's best jokes, writes Frank McNally.
It occurred in the 1951 cartoon Ballot Box Bunny, in which Yosemite Sam runs for mayor of a small town, pledging to exterminate "every last rabbit". Bugs runs against him, on a rabbit conservation ticket, and the campaign soon turns dirty.
In the relevant scene, Sam rigs a piano with explosives, designed to blow up on the last note of the opening bar of Moore's classic, Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms. But invited to play the song, Bugs repeatedly fails to hit the right key. Whereupon a frustrated Sam shows him how to do it properly, with inevitable results.
The gag wasn't new, even then. Yet Warner Brothers liked it so much, they reprised the set-piece in another Bugs Bunny sketch and later lent it to Road Runner as well.
It was still going strong in the 1990s, when yet another WB character, Slappy Squirrel, introduced a twist. The joke still involved Endearing Young Charmsand a rigged keyboard, with a bulldog deputising for Yosemite Sam. The twist was that Slappy hit the right note and blew up the bulldog anyway.
Much as Moore might have enjoyed his song's fame as a detonator of cartoon explosives, it was also a measure of how far he had fallen in a century. At his height, he was probably the world's most famous Irishman. He was briefly considered the English language's greatest living poet. And his poetry and music combined to make him a superstar before the term existed.
The sheet music for his Last Rose of Summersold 1.5 million copies in the US alone. His exotic narrative poem Lalla Rookhearned him £3,000, a colossal sum in 1817. He was the toast of British high society, feted wherever he went.
Moore had been a youthful friend of Robert Emmet, who inspired his romantic nationalism and several songs. Later, he was a close friend of Lord Byron too. So much so that, at their last meeting, Byron entrusted him with his memoirs, to be published posthumously.
The memoirs were far too frank for Byron's family, however, and the manuscript was burned instead. But Moore atoned for his complicity in its destruction with his greatest prose work, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: a book that remained long afterwards the definitive account of its subject.
His lasting fame, however, would rest with Moore's Melodies: the lyrics he wrote to a collection of old Irish airs. The first volume was published 200 years ago - in April 1808 - and there were a further nine between then and 1834. It was through writing and performing these songs that Moore became synonymous with Irish music, Irish nationalism, and Ireland in general.
More than any other figure, he was responsible for the extraordinary popularity Irish songs once enjoyed in Britain and America - a phenomenon to which Bugs Bunny's joke was a backhanded compliment.
But in the century after his death, Moore's reputation went into sharp decline. The revisionism affected both his politics and his poetry. A fondness for the company of aristocrats had been one of his weaknesses, and as militant nationalism rose again, it made him look in retrospect like an Uncle Tom. Having been perhaps over-praised in his lifetime, his verse underwent hasty devaluation too.
Even his native city seemed to conspire against him. His statue in Dublin's College Green was erected over a public toilet, where it remains today (although the toilet is long closed). Leopold Bloom passes it in Ulysses, musing ironically on the title of another Moore standard - The Meeting of the Waters.
Today, Moore is enjoying a fitful revival. A mass outbreak of popular tenors - typically occurring in threes - during the 1990s helped. But now that this has been brought under control, the struggle to rehabilitate him again focuses mainly on singing competitions.
The Feis Ceoil features an annual Moore's Melodies contest (winners of which have included my wife). And anyone who drops into the DIT Conservatory of Music in Rathmines this evening, between about 5pm and 8pm, can witness the preliminary rounds of a new competition in similar vein.
The My Gentle Harpfestival is one of a series of events to mark the melodies' 200th anniversary. It is aimed at young singers between 18 and 26 - an age group not noted for downloading Thomas Moore songs on their iPods. Despite this, the competition has attracted a very encouraging 63 entries, according to the woman behind it, musicologist Una Hunt.
You can watch the preliminary heats at DIT for nothing. But it will cost you €15 (with concessions) to see the best 10 performers compete in the final at the National Concert Hall next Tuesday night.
A few months ago, on this very page, a letter-writer complained about a reference on RTÉ to a song called "Believe Me Of All Those Endearing Young Charms". The error was a small token of the poet's neglect, the correspondent wrote. He didn't add that maybe it was a sign of the waning influence of Warner Brothers too. Either way, we can only hope that Moore's Melodieswill be rescued, sooner or later, from their long exile among the Looney Tunes.