Chapter VI (1)

His knowledge and his poetic gift are often supposed to have been given to him by the invisible powers, who grow visible to those who have lost their earthly sight. An old woman who had often danced to his music, said:--'When he went to his rest at night, it's then he'd make the songs in the turn of a hand, and you would wonder in the morning where he got them.' And a man who 'was too much taken up with sport and hurling when he was a boy to think much about him,' says: 'He got the gift. It's said he was asked which would he choose, music or the talk. If he chose music, he would have been the greatest musician in the world; but he chose the talk, and so he was a great poet. Where could he have found all the words he put in his songs if it wasn't for that?' An old woman, who is more orthodox, says:--'I often used to see him when I was a little child, in my father's house at Corker. He'd often come in there, and here to Coole House he used to come as well. He couldn't see a stim, and that is why he had such great knowledge. God gave it to him. And his songs have gone all through the world; and he had a voice that was like the wind.'

Legends are already growing up about his death. It has been said that 'he knew the very day his time would be up; and he went to Galway, and brought a plank to the house he was stopping at, and he put it in the loft; and he told the people of the house his time was come, and bid them make a coffin for him with the plank--and he was dead before morning.' And another story says he died alone in an empty house, and that flames were seen about the house all night; and 'the flames were the angels waking him.' But many told me he had died in the house of a man near Craughwell; and one autumn day I went there to look for it, and the first person I asked was able to tell me that the house where Raftery had died was the other side of Craughwell, a mile and a half away. It was a warm, hazy day; and as I walked along the flat, deserted road that Raftery had often walked, I could see few landmarks--only a few more grey rocks, or a few more stunted hazel bushes in one stone-walled field than in another. At last I came to a thatched cottage; and when I saw an old man sitting outside it, with hat and coat of the old fashion, I felt sure it was he who had been with Raftery at the last. He was ready to talk about him, and told me how he had come there to die. 'I was a young chap at that time. It must have been in the year 1835, for my father died in '36, and I think it was a year before him that Raftery died. What did he die of? Of weakness. He had been bet up in Galway with some fit of sickness he had; and then he came to gather a little money about the country, and when he got here he was bet up again. He wasn't an old man--only about seventy years. He was in the bed for about a fortnight. When he got bad, my father said it was best get a priest for him; but the parish priest was away. But we saw Father Nagle passing the road, and I went out and brought him in, and he gave him absolution, and anointed him. He had no pain; only his feet were cold, and the boys used to be warming a stone in the fire and putting it to them in the bed. My mother wanted to send to Galway, where his wife and his daughter and his son were stopping, so that they would come and care him; but he wouldn't have them. Someway he didn't think they treated him well.'

I had been told that the priest had refused him absolution when he was dying, until he forgave some enemy; and that he had said afterwards, 'If I forgave him with my mouth, I didn't with my heart'; but this was not true. 'Father Nagle made no delay in anointing him; but there was a carpenter down the road there he said too much to, and annoyed him one time; and the carpenter had a touch of the poet too, and was a great singer, and he came out and beat him, and broke his fiddle; and I remember when he was dying, the priest bringing in the carpenter, and making them forgive one another, and shake hands; and the carpenter said: "If two brothers were to have a falling out, they'd forgive one another--and why wouldn't we?" He was buried in Killeenan; it wasn't a very big funeral, but all the people of the village came to it. He used often to come and stop with us.... It was of a Christmas Eve he died: and he had always said that, if God had a hand in it, it was of a Christmas Day he'd die.'

I went to Killeenan to look for his grave. There is nothing to mark it; but two old men who had been at his funeral pointed it out to me. There is a ruined church in the graveyard, which is crowded; 'there are people killing one another now to get a place in it.' I was asked into a house close by; and its owner said with almost a touch of jealousy: 'I think it was coming in here Raftery was the time he died; but he got bet up, and turned in at the house below. It was of a Christmas Eve he died, and that shows he was blessed; there's a blessing on them that die at Christmas. It was at night he was buried, for Christmas Day no work could be done, but my father and a few others made a little gathering to pay for a coffin, and it was made by a man in the village on St. Stephen's Day; and then he was brought here, and the people from the villages followed him, for they all had a wish for Raftery. But night was coming on when they got here; and in digging the grave there was a big stone in it, and the boys thought they would put him in a barn and take the night out of him. But my mother--the Lord have mercy on her--had a great veneration for Raftery; and she sent out two mould candles lighted; for in those days the women used to have their own mould, and to make their own candles for Christmas. And we held the candles there where the grave is, near the gable end of the church; and my brother went down in the grave and got the stone out, and we buried him. And there was a sharp breeze blowing at the time, but it never quenched the candles or moved the flame of them, and that shows that the Lord had a hand in him.'

He and all the neighbours were glad to hear that there is soon to be a stone over the grave. 'He is worthy of it; he is well worthy of it,' they kept saying. A man who was digging sand by the roadside, took me to his house, and his wife showed me a little book, in which the 'Repentance' and other poems had been put down for her, in phonetic Irish, by a beggar who had once stayed in the house. 'Many who go to America hear Raftery's songs sung out there,' they told me with pride.

As I went back along the silent road, there was suddenly a sound of horses and a rushing and waving about me, and I found myself in the midst of the County Galway Fox Hounds, coming back from cub-hunting. The English M.F.H. and his wife rode by; and I wondered if they had ever heard of the poet whose last road this had been. Most likely not; for it is only among the people that his name has been kept in remembrance.

There is still a peasant poet here and there, making songs in the 'sweet Irish tongue,' in which death spoke to Raftery; and I think these will be held in greater honour as the time of awakening goes on. But the nineteenth century has been a time of swift change in many countries; and in looking back on that century in Ireland, there seem to have been two great landslips--the breaking of the continuity of the social life of the people by the famine, and the breaking of the continuity of their intellectual life by the shoving out of the language. It seems as if there were no place left now for the wandering versemaker, and that Raftery may have closed the long procession that had moved unbroken during so many centuries, on its journey to 'the meadow of the dead.'

1900.

* * * * *

It was after I had written this that I went to see Raftery's birthplace, Cilleaden, in the County Mayo.

A cousin of his came to see me, and some other men, but none of them remembered him; but they were very proud of his song on Cilleaden, which 'is all through the world.' An old woman told me she had heard it in a tramcar in America; and an old man said: 'I was coming back from England one time, and there were a lot of Irish-speaking boys from Galway on board. There was one of them sick all through the night, but he was well in the morning; and the others came round him and asked him for a song, and the song he gave was 'Cilleaden.'

They did not seem to know many of his other songs, except the 'Repentance,' which someone remembered having seen sold as a ballad, with the English on one side and the Irish on the other. And one man told me: 'The first song Raftery wrote was about a hat that was stole from a man that was working in that middle field beyond. When the man was digging, he used to put his hat on a stick in the field to frighten away the crows; and Raftery got someone to bring away the hat, to make fun of the man. And then he made a song, making out it was the fairies had taken it; and he made the man follow them to Cruachmaa, and from that to Roscommon, and tell all that happened him there.'

And one of them told me: 'He was six years old when the smallpox took his sight from him; and he was marked very little by the pox, only three or four little marks--it seemed to settle in his eyes. His father was a cottier--there were many here in those times. His mother was a Brennan. There are cousins of his living yet; but in the schools they are Englished into Rochford.'

A young man said he had been told Raftery was born in some place beyond, at the foot of the mountain, but the others were very indignant; one got very angry, and said: 'Don't I know where he was born, and my father was the one age with him, and they sisters' sons; and isn't Michael Conroy there below his cousin? and it's up in that field was the house he was born in, so don't be trying to bring him away to the mountain.'

I went to see the birthplace, a very green field, with two thorn bushes growing close together by a stone. The field is called 'Sean Straid'--the old street--for a few cottages had stood there. A man who lives close by told me he had dug up a blackened stone just there, and a stone into which a bar had been let, to hang a pot on; and that may have been the very hearth where Raftery had sat as a child.

I found one old man who remembered him. 'He used to come to my father's house often, mostly from Easter to Whitsuntide, when the cakes were made, and there would be music and dancing. He used to play the fiddle for Frank Taafe that lived here, when he would be going out riding, and the horse used to prance when he heard it. And he made verses against one Seaghan Bradach, that used to be paid thirteen pence for every head of cattle he found straying in the Jordan's fields, and used to drive them in himself. There was another poet called Devine that praised Seaghan Bradach; and a verse was made against him again by a woman-poet that lived here at the time.'

* * * * *

There is a stone over Raftery's grave now; and the people about Killeenan gather there on a Sunday in August every year to do honour to his memory. This year they established a _Feis_; and there were prizes given for traditional singing, and for old poems repeated, and old stories told, all in the Irish tongue.

And the _Craoibhin Aoibhin_ is printing week by week all of Raftery's poems that can be found, with translations, and we shall soon have them in a book.

And he has written a little play, having Raftery for its subject; and at a Galway Feis this year he himself acted, and took the blind poet's part; and he will act it many times again, _le congnamh De_--with the help of God.

1902.

WEST IRISH BALLADS.

It was only a few years ago, when Douglas Hyde published his literal translations of Connacht Love Songs, that I realized that, while I had thought poetry was all but dead in Ireland, the people about me had been keeping up the lyrical tradition that existed in Ireland before Chaucer lived. While I had been looking in the columns of Nationalist newspapers for some word of poetic promise, they had been singing songs of love and sorrow in the language that has been pushed nearer and nearer to the western seaboard--the edge of the world. 'Eyes have we, but we see not; ears have we, but we do not understand.' It does not comfort me to think how many besides myself, having spent a lifetime in Ireland, must make this confession.

The ballads to be gathered now are a very few out of the great mass of traditional poetry that was swept away during the last century in the merciless sweeping away of the Irish tongue, and of all that was bound up with it, by England's will, by Ireland's need, by official pedantry.

To give an idea of the ballads of to-day, I will not quote from the translations of Douglas Hyde or of Dr. Sigerson already published. I will rather give a few of the more homely ballads, sung and composed by the people, and, as far as I know, not hitherto translated.

Those I have heard since I have begun to look for them in the cottages, are, for the most part, sad; but not long ago I heard a girl sing a merry one, in a mocking tone, about a boy on the mountain, who neglected the girls of his village to run after a strange girl from Galway; and the girls of the village were vexed, and they made a song about him; and he went to Galway after her, and there she laughed at him, and said he had never gone to school or to the priest, and she would have nothing to do with him. So then he went back to the village, and asked the smith's daughter to marry him; but she said she would not, and that he might go back to the strange girl from Galway. Another song I have heard was a lament over a boy and girl who had run away to America, and on the way the ship went down. And when they were going down, they began to be sorry they were not married; and to say that if the priest had been at home when they went away, they would have been married; but they hoped that when they were drowned, it would be the same with them as if they were married. And I heard another lament that had been made for three boys that had lately been drowned in Galway Bay. It is the mother who is making it; and she tells how she lost her husband, the father of her three boys. And then she married again, and they went to sea and were drowned; and she wouldn't mind about the others so much, but it is the eldest boy, Peter, she is grieving for. And I have heard one song that had a great many verses, and was about 'a poet that is dying, and he confessing his sins.'

The first ballad I give deals with sorrow and defeat and death; for sorrow is never far from song in Ireland; and the names best praised and kept in memory are of those--

'Lonely antagonists of destiny
That went down scornful under many spears;
Who soon as we are born are straight our friends,
And live in simple music, country songs,
And mournful ballads by the winter fire.'

In this simple lament, the type of a great many, only the first name of the young man it was made for is given: 'Fair-haired Donough.' It is likely the people of his own place know still to what family he belonged; but I have not heard it sung, and only know that he was 'some Connachtman that was hanged in Galway.' And it is clear it was for some political crime he was hanged, by the suggestion that if he had been tried nearer his own home, 'in the place he had a right to be,' the issue would have been different, and by the allusion to the Gall, the English:--

'It was bound fast here you saw him, and you wondered to see him,
Our fair-haired Donough, and he after being condemned;
There was a little white cap on him in place of a hat,
And a hempen rope in the place of a neckcloth.

'I am after walking here all through the night,
Like a young lamb in a great flock of sheep;
My breast open, my hair loosened out,
And how did I find my brother but stretched before me!

'The first place I cried my fill was at the top of the lake;
The second place was at the foot of the gallows;
The third place was at the head of your dead body
Among the Gall, and my own head as if cut in two.

'If you were with me in the place you had a right to be,
Down in Sligo or down in Ballinrobe,
It is the gallows would be broken, it is the rope would be cut,
And fair-haired Donough going home by the path.

'O fair-haired Donough, it is not the gallows was fit for you;
But to be going to the barn, to be threshing out the straw;
To be turning the plough to the right hand and to the left,
To be putting the red side of the soil uppermost.

'O fair-haired Donough, O dear brother,
It is well I know who it was took you away from me;
Drinking from the cup, putting a light to the pipe,
And walking in the dew in the cover of the night.

'O Michael Malley, O scourge of misfortune!
My brother was no calf of a vagabond cow;
But a well-shaped boy on a height or a hillside,
To knock a low pleasant sound out of a hurling-stick.

'And fair-haired Donough, is not that the pity,
You that would carry well a spur or a boot;
I would put clothes in the fashion on you from cloth that would be
lasting;
I would send you out like a gentleman's son.

'O Michael Malley, may your sons never be in one another's company;
May your daughters never ask a marriage portion of you;
The two ends of the table are empty, the house is filled,
And fair-haired Donough, my brother, is stretched out.

'There is a marriage portion coming home for Donough,
But it is not cattle nor sheep nor horses;
But tobacco and pipes and white candles,
And it will not be begrudged to them that will use it.'

A very pathetic touch is given by the idea of the 'marriage portion,' the provision for the wake, being brought home for the dead boy.

But it is chiefly in Aran, and on the opposite Connemara coast, that Irish ballads are still being made as well as sung. The little rock islands of Aran are fit strongholds for the threatened language, breakwaters of Europe, taking as they do the first onset of the ocean 'that hath no limits nearer than America.' The fisher-folk go out in their canvas curraghs to win a living from the Atlantic, or painfully carry loads of sand and seaweed to make the likeness of an earth-plot on the bare rock. The Irish coast seems far away; the setting sun very near. When a sea-fog blots out the mainland for a day, a feeling grows that the island may have slipped anchor, and have drifted into unfamiliar seas. The fisher-folk are not the only dwellers upon the islands; they are the home, the chosen resting-place, of 'the Others,' the Fairies, the Fallen Angels, the mighty Sidhe. From here they sweep across the sea, invisible or taking at pleasure the form of a cloud, of a full-rigged ship, of a company of policemen, of a flock of gulls. Sometimes they only play with mortals; sometimes they help them. But often, often, the fatal touch is given to the first-born child, or to the young man in his strength, or the girl in her beauty, or the young mother in her pride; and the call is heard to leave the familiar fireside life for the whirling, vain, unresting life of the irresistible host.

It is, perhaps, because of the very mistiness and dreaminess of their surroundings, the almost unearthly silences, the fantasy of story and of legend that lie about them, that the people of Aran and the Galway coast almost shrink from idealism in their fireside songs, and choose rather to dwell upon the slight incidents of daily life. It is in the songs of the greener plains that the depths of passion and heights of idealism have been reached.

It is at weddings that songs are most in use--even the saddest not being thought out of place; and at the evening gathering in one cottage or another, while the pipe, lighted at the turf-fire, is passed from hand to hand. Here is one that is a great favourite, though very simple, and somewhat rugged in metre; for it touches on the chief events of an islander's life--emigration, loss of life by sea, the land jealousy. It is called 'a sorrowful song that Bridget O'Malley made'; and she tells in it of her troubles at the Boston factory, of her lasting sorrow for her drowned brothers, and her as lasting anger against her sister's husband.

'Do you remember, neighbours, the day I left the white strand? I
did not find anyone to give me advice, or to tell me not to go. But
with the help of God, as I have my health, and the help of the King
of Grace, whichever State I will go to, I will never turn back
again.

'Do you remember, girls, that day long ago when I was sick and when
the priest said, and the doctor, that with care I would come
through? I got up after; I went to work at the factory, until
Sullivan wrote a letter that put me down a step.

'And Bab O'Donnell rose up and put a shawl about her. She went to
the office till she got work for me to do; there was never a woman
I was with that would not shake hands with me; now I am at work
again, and no thanks to Sullivan.

'It is a great shame to look down on Ireland, and I think myself it
is not right; for the potatoes are growing in the gardens there,
and the women milking the cows. That is not the way in Boston, but
you may earn it or leave it there; and if the man earns a dollar,
the woman will be out drinking it.

'My curse on the curraghs, and my blessings on the boats; my curse
on that hooker that did the treachery; for it was she snapped away
my four brothers from me; the best they were that ever could be
found. But what does Kelly care, so long as he himself is in their
place?

'My grief on you, my brothers, that did not come again to land; I
would have put a boarded coffin on you out of the hand of the
carpenter; the young women of the village would have keened you,
and your people and your friends; and is it not Bridget O'Malley
you left miserable in the world?

'It is very lonely after Pat and Tom I am, and in great trouble for
them, to say nothing of my fair-haired Martin that was drowned long
ago; I have no sister, and I have no other brother, no mother; my
father weak and bent down; and, O God, what wonder for him!

'My curse on my sister's husband; for it was he made the boat; my
own curse again on himself and on his tribe. He married my sister
on me, and he sent my brothers to death on me; and he came himself
into the farm that belonged to my father and my mother!

A Connemara schoolmaster tells me: 'At Killery Bay one time, I went into a house where there was an old man that had just lost his son by drowning. And he was sitting over the fire with his head in his hands, making a lament. I remember one verse of it that said: "My curse on the man that made the boat, that he did not tell me there was death lurking in it." I asked afterwards what the meaning of that was, and they said there is a certain board in every boat that the maker gives three blows of his hammer on, after he is done making it. And he knows someway by the sound of the blows if anyone will lose his life in that boat.' It is likely Bridget O'Malley had this idea in her mind when she made her lament.

Another little emigration song, very simple and charming, tells of the return of a brother from America. He finds his pretty brown sister, his 'cailin deas donn,' gathering rushes in a field, but she does not know him; and after they have exchanged words of greeting, he asks where her brother is, and she says 'beyond the sea'; then he asks if she would know him again, and she says she she would surely; and he asks by what sign, and she tells of a mark on his white neck. When she finds it is her brother who is there and speaking to her, she cries out, 'Kill me on the moment,' meaning that she is ready to die with joy.

This is the lament of a woman whose bridegroom was drowned as he was rowing the priest home, on the wedding day:--

'I am widow and maid, and I very young; did you hear my great
grief, that my treasure was drowned? If I had been in the boat
that day, and my hand on the rope, my word to you, O'Reilly, it is
I would have saved you sorrow.

'Do you remember the day the street was full of riders, and of
priests and brothers, and all talking of the wedding feast? The
fiddle was there in the middle, and the harp answering to it; and
twelve mannerly women to bring my love to his bed.

'But you were of those three that went across to Kilcomin, ferrying
Father Peter, who was three-and-eighty years old; if you came back
within a month itself, I would be well content; but is it not a
pity I to be lonely, and my first love in the waves?

'I would not begrudge you, O'Reilly, to be kinsman to a king; white
bright courts around you, and you lying at your ease; a quiet,
well-learned lady to be settling out your pillow; but it is a great
thing you to die from me when I had given you my love entirely.

'It is no wonder a broken heart to be with your father and your
mother; the white-breasted mother that crooned you, and you a baby;
your wedded wife, O thousand treasures, that never set out your
bed; and the day you went to Trabawn, how well it failed you to
come home.

'Your eyes are with the eels, and your lips with the crabs; and
your two white hands under the sharp rule of the salmon. Five
pounds I would give to him that would find my true love. Ohone! it
is you are a sharp grief to young Mary ni-Curtain!'

Some men and women who were drowned in the river Corrib, on their way to a fair at Galway, in the year 1820, have still their names kept green in a ballad:--

'Mary Ruane, that you would stand in a fair to look at, the
best-dressed woman in the place; John Cosgrave, the best a woman
ever reared; your mother thought that if a hundred were drowned,
your swimming would take the sway; but the boat went down, and
when I got up early on Friday, I heard the keening and the clapping
of women's hands, with the women that were drowsy and tired after
the night there, without doing anything but laying out the dead.'

There are laments for other things besides death. A man taken up 'not for sheep-stealing or any crime, but just for making a drop of _poteen_,' tells of his hardships in Galway gaol. A lover who has enlisted because he cannot get the girl he loves--'a pity I not to be going to Galway with my heart's love on my arm'--tells of his hardships in the army: 'The first day I enlisted I was well pleased and satisfied; the second day I was vexed and tormented; and the third day I would have given a pound if I had it to get my pardon.' And I have heard a song 'made by a woman out of her wits, that lost her husband and married again, and her three sons enlisted,' who cannot forgive herself for having driven them from home. 'If it was in Ballinakill I had your bones, I would not be half so much tormented after you; but you to be standing in the army of the Gall, and getting nothing after it but the bit in your mouth.'

Here is a song of daily life, in which a girl laments the wandering and covetous appetite of her cow:--

'It is following after the white cow I spent last night; and,
indeed, all I got by it was the bones of an old goose. Do you hear
me, Michael Taylor? Give word to your uncle John that, unless he
can lay his hand on her, Nancy will lose her wits.

'It's what she is wanting, is the three islands of Aran for
herself; Brisbeg, that is in Maimen, and the glens of Maam Cross;
all round about Oughterard, and the hills that are below it; John
Blake's farm where she often does be bellowing; and as far as
Ballinamuca, where the long grass is growing; and it's in the wood
of Barna she'd want to spend her life.

'And when I was sore with walking through the dark hours of the
night, it's the coastguard came crying after her, and he maybe with
a bit of her in his mouth.'

The little sarcastic hit at the coastguard, who may himself have stolen the cow he joins in the search for, is characteristic of Aran humour. The comic song, as we know it, is unknown on the islands; the nearest to it I have heard there is about the awkward meeting of two suitors, a carpenter and a country lad, at their sweetheart's house, and of the clever management of her mother, who promised to give her to the one who sang the best song, and how the country lad won her.

Douglas Hyde, who is almost a folk-poet, the people have taken so many of his songs to their heart, has caught this sarcastic touch in this 'love' song:--

'O sweet queen, to whom I gave my love; O dear queen, the flower of
fine women; listen to my keening, and look on my case; as you are
the woman I desire, free me from death.

'He speaks so humbly, humble entirely. Without mercy or pity she
looks on him with contempt. She puts mispleading in her cold
answer; there is a drop of poison in every quiet word:--

'"O man, wanting sense, put from you your share of love; it is bold
you are entirely to say such a thing as that; you will not get hate
from me; you will not get love from me; you will not get anything
at all, good or bad, for ever."

'I was myself the same night at the house of drink; and I saw the
man, and he under the table. Laid down by the strength of wine, and
without a twist in him itself; it was she did that much with the
talk of her mouth.'

There is another that I thought was meant to provoke laughter, the lament of a girl for her 'beautiful comb' that had been carried off by her lover, whom she had refused to marry, 'until we take a little more out of our youth,' and invites instead to 'come with me to Eochaill reaping the yellow harvest.' Then he steals the comb, and the mother gives her wise advice how to get it back:--

'He will go this road to-morrow, and let you welcome him; settle
down a wooden chair in the middle of the house; snatch the hat from
him, and do not give him any ease until you get back the beautiful
comb that was high on the back of your head.'

But an Aran man has told me: 'No, this is a very serious song; it was meant to praise the girl, and to tell what a loss she had in the comb.'

I am told that the song that makes most mirth in Aran is 'The Carrageen'; the day-dream of an old woman, too old to carry out her purpose, of all she will buy when she has gathered a harvest of the Carrageen moss, used by invalids:--

'If I had two oars and a little boat of my own, I would go pulling
the Carrageen; I would dry it up in the sun; I would bring a load
of it to Galway; it would go away in the train, to pay the rent to
Robinson, and what is over would be my own.

'It is long I am hearing talk of the Carrageen, and I never knew
what it was. If I spent the last spring-tide at it, and I to take
care of myself, I would buy a gown and a long cloak and a wide
little shawl; that, and a dress cap, with frills on every side like
feathers.'

* * * * *

'(This is what the Calleac said, that was over a hundred years
old:--)

'"I lost the last spring-tide with it, and I went into sharp
danger. I did not know what the Carrageen was, or anything at all
like it; but I will have tobacco from this out, if I lose the half
of my fingers!"'

This is a little song addressed by a fisherman to his little boat, his curragh-cin:--

'There goes my curragh-cin, it is she will get the prize; she will
he to-night in America, and back again with the tide....

'I put pins of oak in her, and oars of red pine; and I made her
ready for sailing; for she is the six-oared curragh-cin that never
gave heed to the storm; and it is she will be coming to land, when
the sailing boats will be lost.

'There was a man came from England to buy my little boat from me;
he offered me twenty guineas for her; there were many looking on.
If he would offer me as much again, and a guinea over and above, he
would not get my curragh-cin till she goes out and kills the
shark.'

For a shark will sometimes flounder into the fishing-nets and tear his way out; and even a whale is sometimes seen. I remember an Aran man beginning some story he was telling me with: 'I was going down that path one time, with the priest and a few others; for a whale had come ashore, and the jaw-bones of it were wanted, to make the piers of a gate.'

As for the love-songs of our coast and island people, they seem to be for the most part a little artificial in method, a little strained in metaphor perhaps so giving rise to the Scotch Gaelic saying: 'as loveless as an Irishman.' Love of country, _tir-gradh_, is I think the real passion; and bound up with it are love of home, of family, love of God. Constancy and affection in marriage are the rule; yet marriage 'for love' is all but unknown; marriage is a matter of commonsense arrangement between the heads of families. As Mr. Yeats puts it, the countryman's 'dream has never been entangled by reality.' However this may be, my Aran friends tell me: 'The people do not care for love-songs; they would rather have any others.'

Yet I have just seen some love-songs, taken down the other day by a Kinvara man from a Connemara man, that have some charming lines:--

'Going over the hills after parting from the store of my heart, there is a mist on them and the darkness of night.'

'It is my sharp grief, my thousand treasures, my road not to be to the door of your house; it is with you I wore out my shoes from the beginning of my youth until now.'

'It is not sorry I would be if there was the length of a year in the day, and the leaves of the trees dropping honey; I myself on the side where the blossoms are falling, my love beside me, and a little green branch in her hand.'

'She goes by me like a little breeze of the wind.'

And this line that in a country of separations is already, they tell me, 'passing into a proverb':--

'It is far from one another our rising is every day.'

But the tradition of classical allusions, brought in some centuries ago, joined to the exaggeration that has been the breath of Irish poets, from the time Naoise called Deirdre 'a woman brighter than the sun,' has brought monotony into most of the love-songs.

The ideal country girl, with her dew-grey eye and long amber hair, is always likened to Venus, to Juno, to Deirdre. 'I think she is nine times nicer than Deirdre,' says Raftery, 'or I may say Helen, the affliction of the Greeks'; and he writes of another country girl, that she is 'beyond Venus, in spite of all Homer wrote on her appearance, and Cassandra also, and Io that bewitched Mars; beyond Minerva, and Juno, the king's wife'; and he wishes 'they might be brought face to face with her, that they might be confused':--

'She comes to me like a star through the mist; her hair is golden
and goes down to her shoes; her breast is the colour of white
sugar, or like bleached bone on the card-table; her neck is whiter
than the froth of the flood, or the swan coming from swimming....
If France and Spain belonged to me, I'd give it up to be along with
you.'

And he gives 'a thousand praises to God, that I didn't lose my wits on account of her.' Raftery puts distinction into each one of his songs; but when lesser poets, echoing the voices of so many generations, bring in the same goddesses, and the same exaggerations, and the same amber hair, monotony brings weariness at last.

There is an Aran song, 'Brigid na Casad,' that has more originality than is usual:--

'Brigid's kiss was sweeter than the whole of the waters of Lough
Erne; or the first wheaten flour, worked with fresh honey into
dough; there are streams of bees' honey on every part of the
mountain, there is brown sugar thrown on all you take, Brigid, in
your hand.

'It is not more likely for water to change than for the mind of a
woman; and is it not a young man without courage will not run the
chance nine times? It's not nicer than you the swan is when he
comes to the shore swimming; it's not nicer than you the thrush is,
and he singing from tree to tree.'

And here is another, homely in the extreme in the beginning, and suddenly rising to wild exaggeration:--

'Late on the evening of last Monday, and it raining, I chanced to
come into Seaghan's and I sat down. It is there I saw her near me
in the corner of the hearth; and her laugh was better to me than to
have her eyes down; her hair was shining like the wool of a sheep,
and brighter than the swan swimming. It is then I asked who owned
her, and it is with Frank Conneely she was.

'It is a good house belongs to Frank Conneely, the people say that
do be going to it; plenty of whiskey and punch going round, and
food without stint for a man to get; and it is what I think the
girl is learned, for she has knowledge of books and of the pen,
and a schoolmaster coming to teach her every day.

'The troop is on the sea, sailing eternally, and looking always on
my Nora Ban. Is it not a great sin, she to be on a bare mountain,
and not to be dressed in white silk, and the king of the French
coming to the island for her, from France or from Germany?

'Is it not nice the jewel looked at the races and at the church in
Barna? She took the sway there as far as the big town. Is she not
the nice flower with the white breast, the comeliness of a woman?
and the sun of summer pleased with her, shining on her at every
side, and hundreds of men in love with her.

'It is I would like to run through the hills with her, and to go
the roads with her; and it is I would put a cloak around my Nora
Ban.'

The very _naïveté_, the simplicity of these ballads, make one feel that the peasants who make and sing them may be trembling on the edge of a great discovery; and that some day--perhaps very soon--one born among them will put their half-articulate, eternal sorrows and laments and yearnings into words that will be their expression for ever, as was done for the Hebrew people when the sorrow of exile was put into the hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm, and the sorrow of death into the lament for Saul and Jonathan, and the yearning of love into what was once known as 'the ballad of ballads,' the Song of Solomon.

I have one ballad at least to give, that shows, even in my prose translation, how near that day may be, if the language that holds the soul of our West Irish people can be saved from the 'West Briton' destroyer. There are some verses in it that attain to the intensity of great poetry, though I think less by the creation of one than by the selection of many minds; the peasants who have sung or recited their songs from one generation to another, having instinctively sifted away by degrees what was trivial, and kept only what was real, for it is in this way the foundations of literature are laid. I first heard of this ballad from the South; but when I showed it to an Aran man, he said it was well known there, and that his mother had often sung it to him when he was a child. It is called 'The Grief of a Girl's Heart':--

'O Donall og, if you go across the sea, bring myself with you and
do not forget it; and you will have a sweetheart for fair days and
market days, and the daughter of the King of Greece beside you at
night.

'It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was
speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird
through the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you
find me.

'You promised me, and you said a lie to me, that you would be
before me where the sheep are flocked; I gave a whistle and three
hundred cries to you, and I found nothing there but a bleating
lamb.

'You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold
under a silver mast; twelve towns with a market in all of them, and
a fine white court by the side of the sea.

'You promised me a thing that is not possible, that you would give
me gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of
the skin of a bird; and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

'O Donall og, it is I would be better to you than a high, proud,
spendthrift lady: I would milk the cow; I would bring help to you;
and if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you.

'O, ochone, and it's not with hunger or with wanting food, or
drink, or sleep, that I am growing thin, and my life is shortened;
but it is the love of a young man has withered me away.

'It is early in the morning that I saw him coming, going along the
road on the back of a horse; he did not come to me; he made nothing
of me; and it is on my way home that I cried my fill.

'When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness, I sit down and I go
through my trouble; when I see the world and do not see my boy, he
that has an amber shade in his hair.

'It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you; the Sunday that is
last before Easter Sunday. And myself on my knees reading the
Passion; and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

'O, aya! my mother, give myself to him; and give him all that you
have in the world; get out yourself to ask for alms, and do not
come back and forward looking for me.

'My mother said to me not to be talking with you to-day, or
to-morrow, or on the Sunday; it was a bad time she took for telling
me that; it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

'My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe, or as the black
coal that is on the smith's forge; or as the sole of a shoe left in
white halls; it was you put that darkness over my life.

'You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have
taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me; and my fear is
great that you have taken God from me!

1901.

JACOBITE BALLADS.

I was looking the other day through a collection of poems, lately taken down from Irish-speaking country people for the _Oireactas_, the great yearly meeting of the Gaelic League; and a line in one of them seemed strange to me: '_Prebaim mo chroidhe le mo Stuart glegeal_,' 'my heart leaps up with my bright Stuart'; for I did not know there was still a memory of James and Charles among the people. The refrain of the poem was: 'Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!' and these are some of its verses:--

'There are young girls through the whole country would sit
alongside of me through a half-hour, till we would be telling you
the story together of what it was put myself under trouble; I make
my complaints, wanting my comrade. Och, my grief, my friend stole
away from me!

'Where are my people that were wise and learned? Where is the troop
readying their spears, that they do not smooth out this knot for
me? Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!

'I was for a while airy and beautiful, and all my treasure with my
pleasant James.... On the top of all, my Stuart to leave me. Och,
my grief, my friend stole away from me!

'It is the truth I cannot sleep in the night, fretting for my
comrade; I to be lying down, and he weak under cold. My heart leaps
up with my bright Stuart. Och, my grief, my friend stole away from
me!

'It is hard for me to lie down after that; it is an empty thing to
be crying the loss of my comrade, and I lying down with the mean
people; it is my death the Stuart not to come at all. Och, my
grief, my friend stole away from me!'

I had not heard any songs of this sort in Galway, and I remembered that our Connaught Raftery, whose poems are still teaching history, dealt very shortly with the Royal Stuarts. 'James,' he says, 'was the worst man for habits.... He laid chains on our bogs and mountains.... The father wasn't worse than the son Charles, that left sharp scourges on Ireland. When God and the people thought it time the story to be done, he lost his head.... The next James--sharp blame to him--gave his daughter to William as woman and wife; made the Irish English, and the English Irish, like wheat and oats in the month of harvest. And it was at Aughrim on a Monday many a son of Ireland found sorrow, without speaking of all that died.'

So I went to ask some of the wise old neighbours, who sit in wide chimney-nooks by turf fires, and to whom I go to look for knowledge of many things, if they knew of any songs in praise of the Stuarts. But they were scornful. 'The Stuarts?' one said; 'no, indeed; they have no songs about them here in the West, whatever they may have in the South. Why would they, running away and leaving the country? And what good did they ever do it?' And another, who lives on the Clare border, said: 'I used to hear them singing "The White Cockade" through the country. "King James was beaten, and all his well-wishers; my grief, my boy that went with them!" But I don't think the people had ever much opinion of the Stuarts; but in those days they were all prone to versify. But the famine did away with all that.' And then he also was scornful, and said: 'Sure King James ran all the way from the Boyne to Dublin, after the battle. There was a lady walking in the street at Dublin when he got there; and he told her the battle was lost; and she said: "Faith you made good haste; you made no delay on the road." So he said no more after that.'

And then he told me of the Battle of Aughrim, that is still such a terrible memory; and how the 'Danes'--the De Danaan--the mysterious divine race that were conquered by the Gael, and who still hold an invisible kingdom--'were dancing in the raths around Aughrim the night after the battle. Their ancestors were driven out of Ireland before; and they were glad when they saw those that had put them out put out themselves, and every one of them skivered.'

And another old man said: 'When I was a young chap knocking about in Connemara, I often heard songs about the Stuarts, and talk of them and of the blackbird coming over the water. But they found it hard to get over James making off after the Battle of the Boyne.' And another says of James: 'They liked him well before he ran; they didn't like him after that.'