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FAT DOODLEY WENT A-COURTIN’

Fat Doodley fell in love with a pretty gal from Dingle
He got up on his horse and said ‘Lads I’m gonna make her tingle’
Skinny Pobes and Silky Jane did warn old Doodley
‘Her fader is a beast and he’s gonna kick ye.’

[There are 14 more stanzas]

Commentary by Tark Mackintosh

Fat Doodley A caricature of a middle-class Irish person from the past century. That is, the century past when it was written, the 19th. The mildly ribald lines are intended to be humourous and though bad, are in fact not TERRIBLY bad. Professor Stout was not known for a keen sense of humour, and in fact nearly always had to have jokes explained to him by his housekeeper and official biographer, Ada Potter Barclay.

fell in love We must simply take Professor Stout’s word for his character’s amorous condition. The circumstances beneath which the striking of stars occurred has been lost to literature.

gal The original boy has been scratched out in the manuscript (Barclay Papers Vol. 8, 3345) and the word girl scribbled above. This in its turn was at some point scratched out, and replaced with the final gal. With such painstaking delicacy did Professor Stout work and rework his verse!

Dingle Shocking perhaps to the ear of an Englishman or American, this is in fact a small coastal town in southwest Ireland. It has been called ‘the Acapulco of County Coomasaharn’.

horse Fat Doodley was going a-wooing in style, on the 19th century equivalent of a red Ford Mustang. Nay, Fat Doodley would not walk to Dingle. He would gallop, and prance his way to his lady’s doorstep.

tingle Rhymes with Dingle. A cluster of other rejected rhymes have been scribbled in the margin: single, mingle, linger, lick my finger. Professor Stout has clearly chosen the superior option, of this group. Dingle is a notoriously difficult rhyme.

Skinny Pobes In contrast to Doodley’s corpulence, is deftly proffered his rail-thin counterpart. Pobes is a common nickname in western Ireland for Fergal, especially in County Cloon West.

Silky Jane We see Professor Stout arranging his cast of County Cloons. Silky Jane was almost certainly also a fellow (cf. lads in line 2), though of a silkier persuasion than his fellows.

old Doodley Markenbaldi and others have taken the epithet literally to imply that Doodley is in fact a man passing middle age (see ‘Old Doodley Went A-Groomin’, Cashlagh Review, v.27 i.iii, Don Markenbaldi and Séamus Dramalonhurt). Their fussy nouvelle critique, as always dependent on intricately layered and highly speculative pre-Freudian psychology, need not be considered here. Fat Doodley was most assuredly between the ages of 17 and 23, as was our poet when he penned these (not completely terrible) lines.

fader ‘Irish’ for father. According to his autobiography (lost), Professor Stout was moderately fluent in what he thought was Gaelic. It was in fact English, half sung in a stereotypical American-Irish brogue, at local pubs.

kick ye Rhymes with Doodley, if you squint. Of course the pretty gal’s fader was not going to simply let a fat teenager from three counties over ride roughshod into his parlour and sweep his dodder off into the sunset. In the lines that follow, that Raddy refused to publish here, the conflict between potential fader-in-law and new son would receive center stage.

Read the rest of this not atrociously bad poem in the lovely volume Collected Irish Stout: From the Bedroom to Ballyheige from Poulpeasty Press (2017), edited by T. Mackintosh.

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