With flopping and with flapping it made a great display,
But I never stopped to question, what could the boatman say
But fol de rol de rolly O.
Now I am in the public-house and lean upon the wall,
So come in rags or come in silk, in cloak or country shawl,
And come with learned lovers or with what men you may,
For I can put the whole lot down and all I have to say
Is fol de rol de rolly O.
Yet another great poet had the unusual good fortune to encounter the ghost of William Carleton – a very solid ghost, for Carleton was a strong, solid man. Carleton and Seamus Heaney met somewhere around the enchanted Knockmany Hill, in the Clogher Valley, about which Carleton himself wrote one of his few poems. From any high ground in that neighbourhood you may see the glisten of the magical waters of Lough Erne.
THE LOUGH DERG PILGRIM
Cloud lifted off the mountain. Thin sunlight
moved a pale green over the hill-farms.
Lough Erne came clear, bog-cotton dried out white.
I was parked on a high moor, listening
to peewits and wind blowing round the car,
when something came to life in the driving mirror,
a man walking fast, in an overcoat
and boots, bareheaded, big, determined
in his sure haste along the crown of the road
like a farmer bearing down on trespassers.
There was no house for miles, I had not passed him
nor anyone, nor seen a sign of campers,
and I somehow felt myself the challenged one.
The car door slammed. I was suddenly out
standing face to face with William Carleton
who once in Georgian Ireland listened for
the gun-butt to come cracking on the door
the night the night-self of his Orange neighbour
swooped to hammer home the shape of things.
‘On this road you caught up with the two women,’
I said, faking confidence. ‘Your Lough Derg Pilgrim
haunts me every time I cross this mountain –
as if I am being followed or following.
I’m on my way there now to do the station.’
‘O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?’
His head jerked sharply side to side and up
like a diver’s surfacing after a plunge,
then with a look that said, let this cup
pass, he seemed to take cognizance again
of where he was: the road, the mountain top,
and the air, benign after the soft rain,
worked on his anger visibly, until:
‘It is a road you travel on your own.
I who read Gil Blas in the reek of flax
and smelt the bodies rotting on their gibbets
and saw their looped slime gleaming from the sacks –
hard-mouthed Ribbonmen and Orange bigots
made me into the old fork-tongued turncoat
who mucked the byre of our politics.
If times were hard, then I could be hard too.
I made the smiler in me sink the knife.
And maybe there’s a lesson there for you
whoever you are, wherever you came out of,
for though there’s something natural in your smile
there’s something in it strikes me as defensive.’
‘I have no mettle for the angry role,’
I said. ‘I come from County Derry,
born in earshot of an Hibernian hall
where a band of Ribbonmen played hymns to Mary.
By then that brotherhood was a frail procession
staggering back home drunk on Patrick’s Day
in collarettes and sashes fringed with green.
Obedient strains like theirs tuned me first
and not that harp of unforgiving iron
the Fenians strung. A lot of what you wrote
I heard and did: this Lough Derg station,
flax-pullings, dances, summer cross-roads chat
and the shaky local voice of education.
All that. And always, Orange drurns.
And neighbours on the roads at night with guns.’
‘I know, I know, I know, I know,’ he said,
‘nothing changes. But make sense of what comes,
remember everything and keep your head.’
‘Green slime that we called glit, wet mushrooms,
dark-clumped grass where cows or horses dunged,
the cluck when pith-lined chestnut-shells split open
in your hand, the melt of shells corrupting,
I seem to have known all these things forever.’
I felt my hand being shaken now by Carleton:
‘All this is like a trout kept in a spring
or maggots sown in wounds for desperate ointment –
another life that cleans our element.’
No poet of our time speaks with greater authority and feeling about that corner of Ireland than John Montague. He spent his boyhood and early youth between there and Armagh city, with occasional visits to Sweet Omagh Town.
LIKE DOLMENS ROUND MY CHILDHOOD, THE OLD PEOPLE
Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.
Jamie MacCrystal sang to himself,
A broken song without tune, without words;
He tipped me a penny every pension day,
Fed kindly crusts to winter birds.
When he died, his cottage was robbed,
Mattress and money-box torn and searched.
Only the corpse they didn’t disturb.
Maggie Owens was surrounded by animals,
A mongrel bitch and shivering pups,
Even in her bedroom a she-goat cried.
She was a well of gossip defiled,
Fanged chronicler of a whole countryside;
Reputed a witch, all I could find
Was her lonely need to deride.
The Nialls lived along a mountain lane
Where heather bells bloomed, clumps of foxglove.
All were blind, with Blind Pension and Wireless,
Dead eyes serpent-flicked as one entered
To shelter from a downpour of mountain rain.
Crickets chirped under the rocking hearthstone
Until the muddy sun shone out again.
Mary Moore lived in a crumbling gatehouse,
Famous as Pisa for its leaning gable.
Bag-apron and boots, she tramped the fields
Driving lean cattle from a miry stable.
A by-word for fierceness, she fell asleep
Over love stories, Red Star and Red Circle,
Dreamed of gypsy love rites, by firelight sealed.
Wild Billy Eagleson married a Catholic servant girl
When all his Loyal family passed on:
We danced round him shouting ‘To Hell with King Billy’,
And dodged from the arc of his flailing blackthorn.
Forsaken by both creeds, he showed little concern
Until the Orange drums banged past in the summer
And bowler and sash aggressively shone.
Curate and doctor trudged to attend them,
Through knee-deep snow, through summer heat,
From main road to lane to broken path,
Gulping the mountain air with painful breath.
Sometimes they were found by neighbours,
Silent keepers of a smokeless hearth,
Suddenly cast in the mould of death.
Ancient Ireland, indeed! I was reared by her bedside,
The rune and the chant, evil eye and averted head,
Fomorian fierceness of family and local feud.
Gaunt figures of fear and of friendliness,
For years they trespassed on my dreams,
Until once, in a standing circle of stones,
I felt their shadows pass
I
nto that dark permanence of ancient forms.
A LOST TRADITION
All around, shards of a lost tradition:
From the Rough Field I went to school
In the Glen of the Hazels. Close by
Was the bishopric of the Golden Stone;
The cairn of Carleton’s homesick poem.
Scattered over the hills, tribal
And placenames, uncultivated pearls.
No rock or ruin, dun or dolmen
But showed memory defying cruelty
Through an image-encrusted name.
The heathery gap where the Rapparee,
Shane Barnagh, saw his brother die –
On a summer’s day the dying sun
Stained its colours to crimson:
So breaks the heart, Brish-mo-Cree.
The whole landscape a manuscript
We had lost the skill to read,
A part of our past disinherited;
But fumbled, like a blind man,
Along the fingertips of instinct.
The last Gaelic speaker in the parish,
When I stammered my school Irish
One Sunday after mass, crinkled
A rusty litany of praise:
Tá an Ghaeilge againn arís … *
Tír Eoghain: Land of Owen,
Province of the O’Niall;
The ghostly tread of O’Hagan’s
Barefoot gallowglasses marching
To merge forces in Dun Geanainn
Push southward to Kinsale!
Loudly the war-cry is swallowed
In swirls of black rain and fog
As Ulster’s pride, Elizabeth’s foemen,
Founder in a Munster bog.
Paddy Tunney, poet, singer and story-teller, although he now lives near Letterkenny, is very much a man of Erne. For he was born and grew up and learned his music in the enchanted land where the Stone Fiddle of Castlecauldwell still stands in memory of the fiddler drowned in the lough.
In his book, The Stone Fiddle, you will find the words and music of this song, which Paddy introduces under the title, ‘Gael Meets Gael’:
In the whole corpus of traditional song couched in the borrowed Béarla, there is none to compare with the high-minded effusions of our hedgeschool-master poets. These songs are readily recognizable by the plenitude of classical allusion they contain and by the adaptation of the Gaelic assonantal rhyme, used extensively by the Gaelic Aisling poets of the eighteenth century.
When the classes dispersed and the master roamed, with the great god Pan down in the reeds by the river, then surely it was that his mind took fire and he wrote such a song as ‘Lough Erne Shore’.
One morning as I went a fowling, bright Phoebus adorned the plain,
’Twas down by the shores of Lough Erne, I met with this wonderful dame,
Her voice was so sweet and so pleasing, these beautiful notes she did sing,
The innocent fowl of the forest their love unto her they did bring.
It being the first time I saw her, my heart it did lep with surprise
I thought that she could be no mortal, but an angel who fell from the skies,
Her hair it resembled gold tresses, her skin was as white as the snow,
And her cheeks were as red as the roses that bloom around Lough Erne Shore.
When I found that my love was eloping, these words unto her I did say,
O take me to your habitation, for Cupid has led me astray.
For ever I’ll keep the commandments, they say that it is the best plan,
Fair maids who do yield to mens’ pleasure, the Scripture does say they are wrong.
O Mary don’t accuse me of weakness, for treachery I do disown,
I’ll make you a lady of honour, if with me this night you’ll come home.
O had I the lamp of Great Aladdin, his rings and his genie, that’s more,
I would part with them all for to gain you and live upon Lough Erne Shore.
‘The Maid of Lough Gowna Shore’
I find this on an ancient broadsheet presented to me many years ago by that great bibliophile and man of letters, M.J. MacManus:
One morning as I went a fowling,
As Phoebus adorned the plain,
’Twas down by the shades of Lough Gowna,
I met with this lovely young dame.
Her voice was so sweet and so charming,
These beautiful notes she did sing,
The innocent fowls of the forest
My love unto her they did bring.
It being the first time I had seen her,
My heart she had fill’d with surprise,
I thought that she could be no mortal,
But an angel that fell from the skies.
Her hair it resembled gold laces,
Her skin was as white as the snow,
Her cheeks were as red as the roses
That blow upon Lough Gowna’s shore.
I found that my love was eloping,
And this unto her I did say,
Come, bring me to your habitation,
For Cupid has led me astray.
My parents they left me some riches,
Five thousand I have now in store,
And I’ll spend it with you, my dear darling,
In pleasure upon Lough Gowna shore.
Kind sir, I don’t believe in such notions,
I know that you are not sincere,
Although you have done your endeavours
To leave my poor heart in a snare
For ever I’ll keep the commandment,
I’m told that it is the best plan,
For the maid that will yield to man’s pleasure
The Scripture does say she is wrong.
Dear Mary, do not accuse me of weakness,
For treachery I do disown,
I’ll make you a lady of honour,
If with me this night you’ll come home.
For had I the treasures of England,
The East and West Indies, that’s more,
I’d part with it all for to gain you,
And live upon Lough Gowna shore.
Kind sir, I am but a poor female,
For riches indeed I have none,
Besides, we are not one persuasion,
My heart lies in the Church of Rome
Then you would fulfil your desires,
Like Numbers in the days of yore,
And you’d leave me bewailing misfortune
Through grief on Lough Gowna shore.
O, Mary, if you were persuaded,
In wedlock we’d join our hands,
For believe me it was not my notion
To force you to break the commands.
So tell me your mind in a moment,
For you are the one I adore,
My heart it is lodged in your bosom,
This night near Lough Gowna shore.
Now my theme of this female is ended,
A blessing she’ll gain from above,
A fortune she gain’d with her darling,
And that by enchantments of love.
I wish I was able to praise her,
Her equal I ne’er saw before,
So Mary got married to Thomas,
And he brought her from Lough Gowna shore.
Margaret Barry of the travelling people used to wander this country and London and portions of the USA with Michael Gorman, one of the famous men of music from around Templehouse lake in south Sligo. Michael had learned to play the fiddle at the building of a house near Mucklety Mountain for people by the name of Devaney, relations of my own. Michael was a boy at the time and working at the building was Jamesie Gannon, then a famous fiddler. Jamesie undertook the teaching of Michael, even to the writing of the music on ceiling boards, which were afterwards built into the house. ‘Music built the towers of Troy,’ the poet said.
Here is one of Margaret’s favourite songs, which so often she sang in the old Brazen Head in Dublin.
&n
bsp; THE MANTLE SO GREEN
As I went out a walking one morning in June,
To view the fields and the meadows in full bloom,
I espied a young damsel, she appeared like a queen,
With her costly fine robes and her mantle so green.
I stood with amazement and was struck with surprise,
I thought her an angel that fell from the skies.
Her eyes were like diamonds, her cheeks like the rose,
She is one of the fairest that nature composed.
I said, my pretty fair maid, if you will come with me,
We’ll both join in wedlock, and married we’ll be,
I’ll dress in rich attire, you’ll appear like a queen,
With costly fine robes and your mantle so green.
She answered, young man, you must me excuse,
For I’ll wed with no man, you must be refused,
To the woods I’ll wander to shun all men’s view,
For the lad that I love is in famed Waterloo.
If you won’t marry tell me your love’s name,
For I being in battle I might know the same.
Draw near to my garment and there will be seen,
His name all embroidered on my mantle of green.
In raising her mantle there I did behold
His name and surname were in letters of gold,
Young William O’Reilly appeared to my view,
He was my chief comrade in famed Waterloo.
We fought so victorious where bullets did fly,
In the field of honour your true love does lie,
We fought for three days till the fourth afternoon,
He received his death-summons on the eighteenth of June.
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 5