"By the rising of the moon" is an order, not a description. The song opens with men being told when to gather: at moonrise, quietly, with their pikes, at a named place. It is a ballad about the Irish rebellion of 1798 — written nearly seventy years later, by a man preparing for the next one.

That distance is the point of the song. It is not a report from 1798. It is 1798 handed down, deliberately, to a new generation of rebels.

Written by a Fenian: John Keegan Casey and 1798

The writer was John Keegan Casey (1846–70), known as the "Fenian Poet." The ballad was in circulation by about 1865, and Casey published the lyric in his 1866 collection A Wreath of Shamrocks. He based it on the failed 1798 rising at Granard, County Longford — one of the last stands of the United Irishmen in that rebellion.

The United Irishmen of 1798 were Catholics, Protestants, and Presbyterians together, aiming at an Irish republic, and the rising was put down with great loss of life. Casey, writing as a young Fenian in the 1860s, reached back to that defeat and turned it into a rallying song. The air he used is "The Wearing of the Green," the great song of 1798's aftermath — the same air, in a comic key, as The Orange and the Green.

"The Pikes Must Be Together": What the Chorus Is Ordering

The chorus is a set of instructions. The pikes must be together at the rising of the moon. The pike was the poor man's weapon of 1798 — a long shaft with a steel head, cheap to make and carried by men who could not afford muskets. The rebels themselves were called "croppies," for the cropped hair that marked them out.

The verses carry the mechanics of a secret rising. There is a signal token — a whistled marching tune, so a man in the dark could tell friend from stranger without a word spoken. Casey put the actual working details of an underground army into a chorus, and the chorus is what survived: thousands of people who could not tell you what a signal token was can sing the words.

Why a Song About 1798 Was Aimed at 1867

Casey's hope in the song was aimed forward. The Fenians were organising in the 1860s, and the rising they were steeling men for came in 1867. It failed too. Casey paid for his part in that world: the Clancy Brothers' liner notes record that he suffered in prison and died at twenty-three as a result of his sufferings — a poet of one failed rising, killed by the preparation for another.

That chain is why the song is still sung. A Fenian wrote about 1798 to move the men of 1867, and the song kept moving people after him. The next chapter of the same story is a wedding on the eve of an execution in 1916 — our post on Grace — and the rebel-ballad tradition Casey helped set runs on to Sean South of Garryowen.

The best primary source is the Clancy Brothers' own liner notes, archived at The Balladeers, with Casey's story as the singers who carried the song told it. On the ground itself, Davy Holden's 1798 Rebellion Tour walks the actual sites with historian Colum Ó Ruairc, and his Short on the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone is worth a minute. Inside Irish Music's history of "The Wearing of the Green" covers the air both this song and 1798 share.

— hear us play it live (video above).