‘Here no treason lurks’: Post-Union Bardic Regeneration

Abstract

Thomson’s image of the hedgehog rolled up into its natural posture of spiky self-defence has been recognised as a powerful symbol of his circle’s retreat into local quietism during the turbulent period following the Irish Rebellion, but the poet’s clever puns on rebel imagery and final reference to the hedgehog’s apparent retreat to raise up a new generation of pups (‘creep awa the way ye came / And tend your squeakin pups at hame’), endows the hedgehog with a powerful allegorical currency to proffer a message of United Irish resistance, and even resurgence (Orr, 2009, pp. 124–5). The poem was written in 1798–9, immediately following the climactic Battle of Antrim at which United Irish rebels, armed with pikes for weapons, engaged with loyalist troops, ultimately unsuccessfully. Thomson’s evident sympathy for the hedgehog and his deliberate reference to its spines (‘pikes’), its defensive natural adaptation against the predator, is clearly a deliberately provocative pun on the weaponry of the recently defeated United Irishmen. Here, through a poem that is a product of the age of sensibility and the interrogation of ‘nature’s social union’ between man and animal, we have a symbol apropos of continued political resistance that defines his poetry of the period following the Rebellion and immediately predating the Act of Union.

Now creep awa the way ye came,

And tend your squeakin pups at hame.

Gin Colley should o’erhear the same,

It might be fatal,

For you, wi’ a the pikes ye claim,

Wi’ him to battle.

(‘To a Hedge-hog’, NP, p. 128, 11. 60–5)