Poets and Dreamers Part 5

'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 s.h.i.+ning 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 _navete_, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 Pa.s.sion; 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 c.o.c.kade" 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 p.r.o.ne 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.'

And when I looked through the lately gathered bundle of songs again, and through some old collections of Jacobite songs in Irish, I found they almost all belonged to Munster. And if they are still sung there, it is not, I think, for the sake of the kings, but for the sake of the poets who made them--Red-haired Owen O'Sullivan, potato-digger, harvestman, hedge-schoolmaster, whose poems are still the joy of the Munster people; O'Rahilly, more learned, and as boundlessly redundant; O'Donnell, whose heart was set on translating Homer into Irish; O'Heffernan, the blind wanderer; and many others. For the Munstermen have always been more 'p.r.o.ne to versify' than their leaner neighbours on the bogs and stones of Connaught.

There is a common formula for most of these songs or 'Visions,'

_Aislinghe_, as they are called. Just as artists of to-day find no monotony in drawing Ireland over and over again with her harp, her wolf-dog, and her round tower, so the Munster poets found no monotony in representing her as a beautiful woman, white-skinned, with curling hair, with cheeks in which 'the lily and the rose were fighting for mastery.'

The poet asks her if she is Venus, or Helen, or Deirdre, and describes her beauty in torrents of alliterative adjectives. Then she makes her complaint against England, or her lament for her own sorrows or for the loss of her Stuart lover, spoken of sometimes as 'the bricklayer,' or 'the merchant's son.' The framework is artificial; but the laments are often very pathetic the love of Ireland, and the hatred of England born of that love, finding expression in them.

John O'Donnell sees her 'like a young queen that is going astray for the king being banished from her, that had a right to come and set her loose.' O'Rahilly, in one of his poems, shows the beautiful woman held to her Saxon lover by some strange enchantment:--

'I met brightness of brightness upon the path of loneliness; plaiting of plaiting in every lock of her yellow hair. News of news she gave me, and she as lonely as she was; news of the coming back of him that owns the tribute of the king.

'Folly of follies I to go so near to her; slave I was made by a slave that put me in hard bonds. She made away from me then, and I following after her, till we came to a house of houses made by Druid enchantments.

'They broke into mocking laughter, a troop of men of enchantments, and a troop of young girls with smooth-plaited hair. They put me up in chains; they made no delay about it; and my love holding to her breast an awkward ugly clown.

'I told her then with the truest words I could tell her, it was not right for her to be joined with a common clumsy churl; and the man that was three times fairer than the whole race of the Scots, waiting till she would come to him to be his beautiful bride.

'At the sound of my words her pride set her crying; the tears were running down over the kindling of her cheeks. She sent a lad to bring me safe from the place I was in. She is the brightness of brightness I met in the path of loneliness.'

Sometimes the Stuart is almost forgotten in the story of sorrows and the indictment of England. O'Heffernan complains in one of his songs that many of the heroes of Ireland have pa.s.sed away, and their names have never been put in a song by the poets; 'and they even leave their verses without any account of Charles the wanderer, though I promise you they are not satisfied without giving some lines on Seaghan Buidhe' (one of the names for England). Yet he himself, when very downhearted, 'on the edge of the great wood under a harsh cloak of sorrow,' is cheered by the pleasant sound of a swarm of bees in search of their ruler; and with the pleasant thought that 'the harvest will be a bad one and with no joy in it to Seaghan. George will be sent back over the sea, and the tribe that was so high up will be left without gold or townlands; and I not pitying their sorrow.' And he winds up: 'In Shronehill, if I were stretched at rest under a hard flag, and to hear this story moving about so pleasantly, by force and strength of my shoulders I would throw the sod off me; and I coming back leaping to hear the news.'

And another writer, Seaghan Clarach, looks forward to seeing 'timid George tame upon the road, without wine, without meat, without thread for his shoes.' And his last verse, his 'binding,' is, 'I beseech of G.o.d, I ask and I pray very hard, to cast out the gluttons that tormented the generous race of the Gael, from the island of the west, under hard bonds, and to banish the foreign devils from us.'

For poets and people found it hard to forget Cromwell; and how 'the sons of the Gael are scorched, tormented, pitchforked, put under the yoke, by boors that are used to doing treachery.'

When the Stuarts come to mind, they are given fair words enough. 'The prince and heart-secret Charles that is sorrowful now and under weariness ... will be under esteem; and the Gael pleasant in the lime-white house.' ... 'It is friendly, fair bright, companionable, loving, brave, Charles will be, with sway, without a mist about him.'