young woman declares that she will keep trying to attract an older man in hopes that her unmarried humiliation will finally end. Finally, in the judgement section, Queen Aoibheal announces that there is nothing wrong with marriage and that she admires men who work hard every day to provide for their families. She, therefore, rules that all laymen must marry before the age of 21, on pain of flogging at the hands of Ireland's women. She advises the women to equally target the romantically indifferent, homosexuals, and male seducers who boast of the numbers of single and married women whose lives they have ruined. Aoibheal tells the women to be careful, however, not to flog any man until he is unable to father children. She also states that abolishing priestly celibacy is beyond her mandate. She expresses a belief, however, that the Pope will soon allow priests to openly act on their carnal urges and counsels patience until then. To the poet's horror, the young woman angrily points him out as a 30-year-old bachelor and describes her many failed attempts to become his wife. She declares that, despite the poet's crooked back and extreme ugliness, none of that would matter in the bedroom. She therefore demands that Merriman must be the first man to suffer the consequences of the new marriage law. As a crowd of infuriated single women gleefully prepares to flog Brian Merriman into a quivering bowl of jelly, he awakens along the shore of Loch Gréine to find it was all a terrible nightmare. Influence Language and metre The language of Merriman's poem is a mixture of the Classical Gaelic literary language of the Bards with everyday Munster Irish, the vernacular of rural County Clare during the late 18th century. The meter is the rarely used Dactylic Trimeter followed by a single Trochaic foot. The end rhymes are all feminine. In a 1926 preface to Arland Ussher's translation, William Butler Yeats wrote, "Brian Mac Giolla Meidhre – or to put it in English, Brian Merriman – wrote in Gaelic, one final and three internal rhymes, pouring all his mediaeval abundance into that narrow neck." The Poetic Courts According to Daniel Corkery, in 18th century Munster, a custom similar to the Welsh Eisteddfod existed. In what was also both mimicry and satire of the ceremonial of the English-dominated legal and court system, the Chief-Bard of a district would