Poets and Dreamers Part 3

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 G.o.d.

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 ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p 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 thres.h.i.+ng 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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.