They thought His Majesty was slain,
Yet it did him little harm.
Then Duke Schomberg he in friendly care,
His King would often caution
To shun the spot where bullets hot
Retained their rapid motion;
But William said, ‘He don’t deserve
The name of Faith’s Defender,
Who would not venture life and limb
To make a foe surrender.’
When we the Boyne began to cross,
The enemy they descended;
But few of our brave men were lost,
So stoutly we defended;
The horse were the first that marched o’er,
The foot soon followed after;
But brave Duke Schomberg was no more,
By venturing over the water.
When valiant Schomberg he was slain,
King William then accosted
His warlike men for to march on
And he would be the foremost:
‘Brave boys,’ he said, ‘be not dismayed,
For the losing of one Commander,
For God will be our King this day,
And I’ll be the general under.’
Then stoutly we the Boyne did cross,
To give our enemies battle:
Our cannon, to our foe’s great cost,
Like thundering claps did rattle;
In majestic mien our Prince rode o’er,
His men soon followed after,
With blow and shout put foes to the rout
The day we crossed the Water.
The Protestants of Drogheda
Have reason to be thankful,
That they were not to bondage brought,
They being but a handful,
First to the Tholsel they were brought,
And tied at the Millmount after;
But brave King William set them free,
By venturing over the Water.
The cunning French near to Duleek
Had taken up their quarters,
And fenced themselves on every side,
Awaiting for new orders;
But in the dead time of the night
They set the fields on fire,
And long before the morning light
To Dublin they did retire.
Then said King William to his men,
After the French departed,
‘I’m glad indeed that none of ye
Seemed to be faint-hearted;
So sheathe your swords and rest awhile
In time we’ll follow after.’
Those words he uttered with a smile
The day he crossed the Water.
Come let us all with heart and voice
Applaud our lives’ defender,
Who at the Boyne his valour showed
And made his foe surrender.
To God above the praise we’ll give
Both now and ever after;
And bless the glorious Memory
Of William that crossed the Water.
But perhaps a better way to go to Dublin would be to travel on the train with Louis MacNeice, and afterwards to walk the city with him while he meditates on the delicate relationship between this strange city and a man from Ulster.
TRAIN TO DUBLIN
Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps
Against the basic facts repatterned without pause,
I can no more gather my mind up in my fist
Than the shadow of the smoke of this train upon the grass –
This is the way that animals’ lives pass.
The train’s rhythms never relent, the telephone posts
Go striding backwards like the legs of time to where
In a Georgian house you turn at the carpet’s edge
Turning a sentence while, outside my window here,
The smoke makes broken queries in the air.
The train keeps moving and the rain holds off,
I count the buttons on the seat, I hear a shell
Held hollow to the ear, the mere
Reiteration of integers, the bell
That tolls and tolls, the monotony of fear.
At times we are doctrinaire, at times we are frivolous,
Plastering over the cracks, a gesture making good,
But the strength of us does not come out of us.
It is we, I think, are the idols and it is God
Has set us up as men who are painted wood,
And the trains carry us about. But not consistently so,
For during a tiny portion of our lives we are not in trains,
The idol living for a moment, not muscle-bound
But walking freely through the slanting rain,
Its ankles wet, its grimace relaxed again.
All over the world people are toasting the King,
Red lozenges of light as each one lifts his glass,
But I will not give you any idol or idea, creed or king,
I give you the incidental things which pass
Outward through space exactly as each was.
I give you the disproportion between labour spent
And joy at random; the laughter of the Galway sea
Juggling with spars and bones irresponsibly,
I give you the toy Liffey and the vast gulls,
I give you fuchsia hedges and whitewashed walls.
I give you the smell of Norman stone, the squelch
Of bog beneath your boots, the red bog-grass,
The vivid chequer of the Antrim hills, the trough of dark
Golden water for the cart-horses, the brass
Belt of serene sun upon the lough.
And I give you the faces, not the permanent masks,
But the faces balanced in the toppling wave –
His glint of joy in cunning as the farmer asks
Twenty per cent too much, or a girl’s, forgetting to be suave,
A tiro choosing stuffs, preferring mauve.
And I give you the sea and yet again the sea’s
Tumultuous marble,
With Thor’s thunder or taking his ease akimbo,
Lumbering torso, but finger-tips a marvel
Of surgeon’s accuracy.
I would like to give you more but I cannot hold
This stuff within my hands and the train goes on;
I know that there are further syntheses to which,
As you have perhaps, people at last attain
And find that they are rich and breathing gold.
DUBLIN
Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals –
O’Connell, Grattan, Moore –
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.
This was never my town,
I was not born nor bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian façades –
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.
The lights jig in the river
With a concertina movement
And the sun comes up in the morning
Like barley-sugar on the water
And the mist on the Wicklow hills
Is close, as close
As the peasantry were to the landlord,
As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,
To the man he kills,
Or as the moment itself
Is close to the next moment.
She is not an Irish town
And she is not English,
Historic with guns and vermin
And the cold renown
Of a fragment of Church latin
Of an oratorical phrase.
But O the days are soft,
Soft enough to forget
The lesson better learnt,
The bullet on the wet
Streets, the crooked deal,
The steel behind the laugh,
The Four Courts burnt.
Fort of the Dane,
Garrison of the Saxon,
Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought,
You give me time for thought
And by a juggler’s trick
You poise the toppling hour –
O greyness run to flower,
Grey stone, grey water
And brick upon grey brick.
On another and an older bagpipe, this is Dublin.
Oh, Dublin City, there is no doubting,
Bates every city upon the say.
’Tis there you’ll hear O’Connell spouting
And see Lady Morgan makin’ tay …
For it is the capital of the finest nation
That ever grew on a fruitful sod,
Fightin’ like divils for Conciliation
And hatin’ each other for the love of God.
But perish that ancient and sardonic thought and let us begin our tribute to Dublin right here where I stand, and sit, and occasionally lie prostrate: in Donnybrook, where the famous fair was established by King John of England. A long time after that, while the fair was still functioning, its Humours were celebrated by an anonymous balladeer:
To Donnybrook steer, all you sons of Parnassus,
Poor painters, poor poets, poor newsmen and knaves,
To see what the fun is, that all fun surpasses,
The sorrow and sadness of green Erin’s slaves …
O you lads that are witty, from famed Dublin city,
And you that in pastime take any delight,
To Donnybrook fly, for the time’s drawing nigh
When fat pigs are hunted and lean cobblers fight,
When maidens, so swift, run for a new shift,
Men, muffled in sacks, for a shirt they race there,
There jockeys well-booted and horses sure-footed,
All keep up the Humours of Donnybrook Fair.
The mason does come with his line and his plumb,
The sawyer and carpenter, brothers in chips.
There are carvers and gilders and all sorts of builders,
With soldiers from barracks and sailors from ships.
There confectioners, cooks and printers of books,
There stampers of linen and weavers repair,
There widows and maids, and all sorts of trades
Go join in the Humours of Donnybrook Fair.
’Tis there are dogs dancing and wild beasts a-prancing,
With neat bits of painting in red, yellow and gold,
Toss-players and scramblers, and showmen and gamblers,
Pickpockets in plenty, both of young and of old.
There are brewers and bakers and jolly shoe-makers,
With butchers and porters and men that cut hair.
There are mountebanks grinning, while others are sinning
To keep up the Humours of Donnybrook Fair …
John Keegan, the Laois poet (not to be confused with John Keegan Casey, who wrote ‘The Rising of the Moon’), saw Donnybrook Fair somewhat differently. Keegan, a hedgeschoolmaster and of a family of much-devoted and illrewarded pedants, wrote verse and lamented for poor Pinch and Caoch O’Leary. He also wrote interesting prose fragments on folk-beliefs around Grantstown Lough in his part of the Midlands and elsewhere, collected into one volume by the notable Canon O’Hanlon, who wrote forever about the lives and doings of the saints of Ireland.
Keegan was morose and a misogynist and may have had good reason for his misery. Sometime before 1847 he saw Donnybrook Fair and this is what he thought:
I was two days and a piece of one night at Donnybrook Fair. I was told (and from previous description I believe it) that the fair this year was no more to the carnivals of other days than the puppet Punch is to the Colossus of Rhodes. Heaven knows, it would be a blessing if Donnybrook was sunk in hell and expunged forever from the map of our unfortunate country. I had conceptions of vice, of profligacy and debauchery, I had read Eugene Sue and Lytton Bulwer and George Sand, but never did I dream of human debasement until I went to Donnybrook. In my opinion (and I try to be moderate), on last Thursday there were at least 40,000 females in Donnybrook: of these, I would be on my oath, there were at five o’clock in the evening, 30,000 more or less intoxicated …
And on goes John, my dear ghost:
You tell me of Irish virtue. I once gloried in the dreams of Irish modesty, but, alas, in Donnybrook my eyes were opened. I was grieved, I was humbled, I was mortified. Indeed, I will never again go to Donnybrook or, if I do, I never again will mingle in the vortex of degraded human beings which unfortunately contribute the great mass of the meeting. I saw hundreds of ladies and gentlemen there, but unless the depraved portion of this class (and there are ladies enough depraved in Dublin), they remained in their carriages and cars, and did not mingle at all amongst the mob. But people of the highest rank go to see the fair.
Dear John, dear ghost, my suffering fellow Irishman, we know that you had your worries about women. They did not suit you, and I’m not blaming you for that. But thirty thousand drunken women between my garden gate and the bridge, three hundred yards away, over the River Dodder, dear John, I fear that you grossly exaggerate.
You were also, I grieve to note, a bit of a snob. All those ladies and gentlemen who came to study the drive-in movie from the safety of their horse-mobiles. May we hope that they enjoyed themselves and were proud of Donnybrook and the neighbouring town of Dublin: as was my dear friend Donagh MacDonagh, the son of Thomas MacDonagh:
Dublin made me and no little town
With the country closing in on its streets,
The cattle walking proudly on its pavements,
The jobbers, the gombeenmen and the cheats
Devouring the fair day between them,
A public-house to half a hundred men,
And the teacher, the solicitor and the bank-clerk
In the hotel bar, drinking for ten.
Dublin made me, not the secret poteen still,
The raw and hungry hills of the West,
The lean road flung over profitless bog
Where only a snipe could nest,
Where the sea takes its tithe of every boat.
Bawneen and curragh have no allegiance of mine,
Nor the cute, self-deceiving talkers of the South
Who look to the East for a sign.
The soft and dreary midlands with their tame canals
Wallow between sea and sea, remote from adventure,
And Northward a far and fortified province
Crouches under the lash of arid censure.
I disclaim all fertile meadows, all tilled land,
The evil that grows from it and the good,
But the Dublin of old statutes, this arrogant city,
Stirs proudly and secretly in my blood.
One of my most treasured possessions is a typescript copy of a comic verse-play, ‘Down by the Liffey Side’ by Donagh MacDonagh, presented to me by the author. Written as a send-up of Dion Boucicault and set in the Marshalsea prison for debtors, it has wonderful moments. Here you have, in the first verse, the high-class roisterer, the eternally hopeful gambler, the sad amorist, and then the Fourth Man: a hapless and ordinary citizen like yourself or myself; and all aro
und them, the bustling life of the ancient prison. This scene closely resembles St Luke’s Hospital as illustrated in Ackroyd’s ‘Microcosm of London’. William, without his wig, his lace soiled and torn, is sitting dejectedly on a bench while, around him, the other debtors drink, smoke and sing.
First Debtor
Behold the pauper’s prison, the hell of bankrupt debtors,
Where sadly we’re repenting for our spendthrift, happy days,
Remembering the bottles that emptied down our gullets,
The wigs, the lace, the satins and the ruinous displays.
Oh, once I lived contentedly and friends I loved surrounded me;
Care nor grief ne’er troubled me nor made my heart feel sore,
But now those days are over and here I rot in misery,
Reflecting on the abstinence that fifty times I swore.
Debtors
Ochone, och ochone.
Second Debtor
’Twas dice that proved my downfall, the cards and little horses
Whose speed was far inferior to every other horse;
The fly I had my cash on alighted last invariably;
My raindrop on the window panes dried up, nor stayed the course;
But were I rich and young again and could I all I’d lost regain,
I’d live the same life out again, and luck would turn my way;
With dice and cards and claret the night would vanish rapidly
And I would rise triumphant at the closing of the play.
Debtors
Ochone, och ochone.
Third Debtor
A dark eye or a grey eye, an eye that’s soft and tender,
A form that’s tall and slender, a breast that stands at bay,
An ankle trim and shapely, a hand that’s slim and playful,
A mouth that’s shaped for kissing and breath that’s a bouquet,
These are the charms that ruined me, yet I pursued them foolishly,
Certain that each new schooling would give me my degree;
But all a lifetime brought me the first girl could have taught me,
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 9