Poets and Dreamers Part 4

'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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 appet.i.te 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 gra.s.s 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; s.n.a.t.c.h 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 fis.h.i.+ng-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 ash.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.sion; and bound up with it are love of home, of family, love of G.o.d. 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, 'pa.s.sing into a proverb':--

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

But the tradition of cla.s.sical 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 Ca.s.sandra 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.ddesses, 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 sh.o.r.e 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:--