For all I ever learned of them was what they thought of me.
Debtors
Ochone, och ochone.
Fourth Debtor
I’ve never squandered money for I never had a penny,
I’ve never gambled madly, I was never drunk on wine,
The girls I had cost nothing except a bit of flattery,
Yet here I am in company that once was rich and fine.
I’ve hunted for prosperity, but still she has eluded me,
For bleak misfortune follows me no matter where I roam;
If I had had your fortunes I might be great and proud today,
Instead of sitting in the straw singing och, och ochone.
Debtors
Ochone, och ochone.
The TURNKEY enters and pushes the DEBTORS roughly out of his way.
Turnkey
Out of the way and be silent, you scum.
There are ladies approaching this villainous slum.
[to a DEBTOR] You owe me a crown for your bed and your board,
Bread and water, me boyo, is all you can afford.
[to the others] Jump to it and tidy this pigsty of yours,
And bow when you answer, you caricatures.
You bankrupt incompetents, I’ll teach you to work …
Ten strokes on the back for the first man to shirk.
But let us move on rapidly to a happier Dublin and one much closer to our own time. This would have been the Stillorgan Road, say, in the early 1940s, as the poet Roibeard Ó Faracháin saw it, before automobiles had completely taken over; anyway, the Second World War was on and petrol was not plentiful.
AUTUMN AFTERNOON
To think that a thing
as thoughtless as grass
could bring like a sting
the thought that there was
on ruggedy acorn,
horny nut,
on bead-bright berry,
fleshly fruit,
on pine-cone, gourd
– and grass of course –
a gloss!
On every other thing was there
a twinkle or a copper glare.
Trout would leap and crouch and linger.
O King Nuada’s silver finger!
(Lost a hand. With the metal thing
ducked the law and stayed a king.)
The weeshy Dodder-water’s top
was satinwood, and the butcher’s shop
a glimmering glass that shone and shone
and steel too hot to look upon:
you had to screw your eyes to look
where Something blazed upon a hook.
And on the smooth Stillorgan road,
where half the wheels in Ireland glowed,
the streamlined steel and vulcanite
were slithery with glinting light.
Riding their bicycles aflash
ladies were ladyly abashed
when frocks bob-bobbed
and, ducking the breeze,
went rippling back
from their glossy knees.
The polished legs of ladies glint
like guineas from an ancient mint
when knees arch up: they sleek like seals
when silk is straight from hams to heels:
ballet put on in crystal air
by switches of blackthorn sleekly bare.
Who would have thought a bike was bright
and sharp as a sculptured stalactite?
Or dreamed that the underwater green
of a beechleaf could turn tangerine?
Haws, coming crimson out, could flush
whitethorn into a burning bush?
Who was prepared for this (so soon)
enchanting Autumn afternoon?
Round about 1935 I was, very briefly, an actor. Hollywood didn’t hear about me so the matter never went further. But I was in two stage plays in Omagh Town Hall, as a small part of the Omagh Players. One of these was Padraic Gregory’s The Coming of the Magi, and I was one of the Magi, very wise for my years. Padraic came to see us and advise us, and even travelled with us when we went on tour all the thirty-four miles to Derry. He was a small man with delicate features and silver-white hair, and a dark coat with a Chestertonian cape. I find him here happy among the dancing children on the streets of Dublin:
DUBLIN’S CHILDREN
You’ve niver seen in all your lives the crowds o’ little childher
Ye’ll see the while ye bustle thro’ the streets o’ Dublin Town;
To count them all, ’tis my belief, it sorely would bewilder
The grandest scholar ye cud find in Ireland, up or down.
On Days o’ Obligation or on Sundays from the Masses
Ye’ll see them rompin’ out in hundreds, chatterin’ gay an’ free,
On week-days, see the bigger ones go trudgin’ to their classes,
Wi’ fresh-washed faces, boots well-polished, staid as staid can be.
You’ll see some wealthy childher (wi’ their Da an’ Ma go’n shoppin’)
A-drivin’ in to Dame Street from self-satisfied Rathgar,
An’ chubby back-street urchins o’er the pavements come a-hoppin’
To gaze at them that loll like lords inside a glistenin’ car.
You’ll see some ragged youngster – hardly more than fit to toddle –
A-carryin’ the baby o’ the family in a shawl
(Her mother’s out at work so she’s to larn to nurse an’ coddle)
Before she knows jist what it’s like to be a child at all.
There’s nurse-attended babies that are wheeled in spotless pramcars,
There’s sturdy-legged two-year-olds that use their own wee feet,
An’ laughin’ crowin’ infants in their mothers’ arms in tramcars,
An’ whiles, odd whiles, ye’ll see a lost child cryin’ in the street.
There’s rosy-cheeked, an’ pallid cheeked, an’ bunty, fat an’ slim ones,
Some that’s grimy, some half-clean, an’ some as white as snow,
There’s healthy, weakly, surly, happy, sober-faced an’ prim ones;
All sorts an’ shapes o’ boys and girls, no matter where ye go.
There’s handsome, ugly, roguish ones, an’ dark-haired, red an’ fair ones,
Deep-blue-eyed lasses, impish lads wi’ eyes as black as sloes,
There’s fly, an’ sly, an’ rough an’ tough, an’ ‘divil-a-hair-I-care’ ones,
Where all those different childher come from – Heaven only knows.
There’s quiet ones, an’ boisterous ones wi’ joy o’ life jist bubblin’,
Sedate, well-bred, or cheeky ones that pull each other’s hair,
Throughout the whole o’ Dublin, the pulsin’ heart o’ Dublin,
The great glad heart o’ Dublin, shure there’s childher everywhere.
Dublin, like many another city and town, has grown, for good or ill, over the years. Twenty years ago a friend of mine, an historical man and an authority on Old Dublin, came walking with me on the Hill of Killenarden. We walked up and up from Jobstown and over the Hill of Killenarden, looking from there on into Glenasmole, the Glen of the Thrushes, well praised by Patrick Pearse. And we recalled the verses written faraway beyond the ocean by Charles G. Halpine, a Kilkennyman, who got into some difficulties around about 1848. The hill Halpine wrote about, and the flat land all below it, is now part of the new suburbia. But Halpine, the Young Irelander, would be happy to see fine homes on good ground for the people of Ireland.
THE HILL OF KILLENARDEN
Though time effaces memory, and griefs the bosom harden,
I’ll ne’er forget, where’er I be, that day at Killenarden;
For there, while fancy revelled wide, the summer’s day flew o’er me;
The friends I loved were at my side, and Irish fields before me.
The road was steep; the pelting showers had cooled the sod beneath us;
And there were lots of mountain flowers, a garla
nd to enwreath us.
Far, far below the landscape shone with wheat, and new-mown meadows,
And as o’erhead the clouds flew on, beneath swept on their shadows.
O friends, beyond the Atlantic’s foam there may be noble mountains,
And in our new far western home green fields and brighter fountains;
But as for me, let time destroy all dreams, but this one pardon,
And barren memory long enjoy that day on Killenarden.
Round about fifty years ago I settled in Dublin city, and by virtue of being what used to be called a ‘working journalist’, had the right of entering the circle based in the Palace Bar, and later in the Pearl, around the renowned editor of The Irish Times, R.M. Smyllie. His weekly book-page, under the guidance of Bruce Williamson, carried every Saturday a new poem, and in 1944 Donagh MacDonagh made a selection of these under the simple title: Poems from Ireland.
It is a book I will always treasure. To me, no matter where or what those poems are about, the book smells and tastes and sings to me of my early and happy days as a Dubliner. But here, tucked inside the strong brown paper with which I have rebound the book, I find two yellowed newspaper clippings, both of book reviews. One, from 1958, has the poet Austin Clarke reviewing the poet Patrick MacDonogh; but let Patrick speak for himself out of the collection made by his fellow poet and namesake:
SHE WALKED UNAWARE
O, she walked unaware of her own increasing beauty
That was holding men’s thoughts from market or plough,
As she passed by intent on her womanly duties
And she without leisure to be wayward or proud;
Or if she had pride then it was not in her thinking
But thoughtless in her body like a flower of good breeding.
The first time I saw her spreading coloured linen
Beyond the green willow she gave me gentle greeting
With no more intention than the leaning willow tree.
Though she smiled without intention yet from that day forward
Her beauty filled like water the four corners of my being,
And she rested in my heart like a hare in the form
That is shaped to herself. And I that would be singing
Or whistling at all times went silently then;
Till I drew her aside among straight stems of beeches
When the blackbird was sleeping and she promised that never
The fields would be ripe but I’d gather all sweetness,
A red moon of August would rise on our wedding.
October is spreading bright flame among stripped willows,
Low fires of the dogwood burn down to grey water, –
God pity me now and all desolate sinners
Demented with beauty! I have blackened my thought
In drouths of bad longing, and all brightness goes shrouded
Since he came with his rapture of wild words that mirrored
Her beauty and made her ungentle and proud.
To-night she will spread her brown hair on his pillow,
But I shall be hearing the harsh cries of wild fowl.
The second clipping dates from the August of 1974, and has Seamus Heaney writing about the poems of Padraic Fallon, the Dolmen Press volume of that year. One great, and generous, poet writes about another, beginning his review:
Padraic Fallon has lived in important places where his mind kept growing bold as light in Greece – and if I begin by crossing Kavanagh on Clarke, it is not only to place Padraic Fallon within his poetic generation, but also to suggest that his gifts combine certain kinds of strength these two very different poets possessed separately, and that his achievement in some way enhances theirs. I feel these poems, which arrive like a windfall or a legacy, supply a missing link in the tradition of Irish poetry since Yeats …
We all know what Yeats had to say about the echoes and the ghost of Blind Raftery, and the crossroads of Kiltartan, and the bridge and the tower of Ballylee. Yet I feel that Yeats would have accepted with a grave nod of the head what Padraic Fallon had to say about all that and more.
MARY HYNES
(After the Irish of Raftery)
That Sunday, on my oath, the rain was a heavy overcoat
On a poor poet, and when the rain began
In fleeces of water to buckleap like a goat
I was only a walking penance reaching Kiltartan;
And there, so suddenly that my cold spine
Broke out on the arch of my back like a rainbow,
This woman surged out of the day with so much sunlight
I was nailed there like a scarecrow,
But I found my tongue and the breath to balance it
And I said: ‘If I bow to you with this hump of rain
I’ll fall on my collarbone, but look, I’ll chance it,
And after falling, bow again.’
She laughed, ah, she was gracious, and softly she said to me,
‘For all your lovely talking I go marketing with an ass,
I’m no hill-queen, alas, or Ireland, that grass widow,
So hurry on, sweet Raftery, or you’ll keep me late for Mass!’
The parish priest has blamed me for missing second Mass
And the bell talking on the rope of the steeple,
But the tonsure of the poet is the bright crash
Of love that blinds the irons on his belfry,
Were I making an Aisling I’d tell the tale of her hair,
But now I’ve grown careful of my listeners
So I pass over one long day and the rainy air
Where we sheltered in whispers.
When we left the dark evening at last outside her door,
She lighted a lamp though a gaming company
Could have sighted each trump by the light of her unshawled poll,
And indeed she welcomed me
With a big quart bottle and I mooned there over glasses
Till she took that bird, the phoenix, from the spit;
And ‘Raftery,’ says she, ‘a feast is no bad dowry,
Sit down now and taste it!’
If I praised Ballylee before it was only for the mountains
Where I broke horses and ran wild,
And not for its seven crooked smoky houses
Where seven crones are tied
All day to the listening top of a half door,
And nothing to be heard or seen
But the drowsy dropping of water
And a gander on the green.
But, Boys! I was blind as a kitten till last Sunday.
This town is Earth’s very navel!
Seven palaces are thatched there of a Monday,
And O the seven queens whose pale
Proud faces with their seven glimmering sisters,
The Pleiads, light the evening where they stroll,
And one can find the well by their wet footprints,
And make one’s soul;
For Mary Hynes, rising, gathers up there
Her ripening body from all the love stories;
And, rinsing herself at morning, shakes her hair
And stirs the old gay books in libraries;
And what shall I do with sweet Boccaccio?
And shall I send Ovid back to school again
With a new headline for his copybook,
And a new pain?
Like a nun she will play you a sweet tune on a spinet,
And from such grasshopper music leap
Like Herod’s hussy who fancied a saint’s head
For grace after meat;
Yet she’ll peg out a line of clothes on a windy morning
And by noonday put them ironed in the chest,
And you’ll swear by her white fingers she does nothing
But take her fill of rest.
And I’ll wager now that my song is ended,
Loughrea, that old dead city where the weavers
Have pined at the mouldering looms since Helen broke
the thread,
Will be piled again with silver fleeces:
O the new coats and big horses! The raving and the ribbons!
And Ballylee in hubbub and uproar!
And may Raftery be dead if he’s not there to ruffle it
On his own mare, Shank’s mare, that never needs a spur!
But ah, Sweet Light, though your face coins
My heart’s very metals, isn’t it folly without pardon
For Raftery to sing so that men, east and west, come
Spying on your vegetable garden?
We could be so quiet in your chimney corner –
Yet how could a poet hold you anymore than the sun,
Burning in the big bright hazy heart of harvest,
Could be tied in a henrun?
Bless your poet then and let him go!
He’ll never stack a haggard with his breath:
His thatch of words will not keep rain or snow
Out of the house, or keep back death.
But Raftery, rising, curses as he sees you
Stir the fire and wash delph,
That he was bred a poet whose selfish trade it is
To keep no beauty to himself.
In this same collection Robert Farren, who was always much devoted to Dublin, casts his imagination as far away as Dunquin in County Kerry:
THE WESTERN WORLD
Not a sinner in Dunquin
recollects John Synge –
‘that meditative man, John Synge’;
Cumeenole to Ballyferriter,
they’ve ‘never heard of him.’
I wonder, if I went enquiring
through the stone-piled Aran Islands,
round Glenmalure or Glenmacnass,
Kippure or Lough Nahanagan,
would there any remember him,
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 10