any have heard of him?
That meditative man, John Synge,
like the catgut and silken string
he brought out of France or Spain
and fingered for Maurice Keane,
is snapt, scrapped and unstrung,
is cast down in the dung;
the fiddle come-over from France
makes none in Beg-Innish dance;
the birdcatcher left no mark
on the sod of his lark.
That violent man, James Lynchehaun,
left sagas in Achill;
that mite of a man, O Crihan,
yarns Ireland to the Blaskets;
but Synge’s reverberant name –
like young men of Aran,
young girls of the Blaskets –
took ship from the Western World,
and has never returned.
Know you, child, that this great fool had laughter in his heart and eyes: a million echoes, distant thence, since Dublin taught him to be wise …
That was Patrick Kavanagh, as I first knew him, back in 1941, when he was, like myself, walking the streets of Dublin, doing a bit for the papers, being reasonably happy and wondering what it was all about. But here is Patrick looking back to his memory of the spraying of the potatoes on the stony, grey soil of Monaghan; and then ascending in one of the great devotional poems: devoted to all goodness in humanity and to what, if anything, may live above:
SPRAYING THE POTATOES
The barrels of blue potato-spray
Stood on a headland of July
Beside an orchard wall where roses
Were young girls swinging from the sky.
The flocks of green potato-stalks
Were blossom-spread for sudden flight;
The Arran Banners wearing blue,
The Kerrs Pinks in a frivelled white.
And over that potato field
A lazy veil of woven sun;
Dandelions growing on headlands, showing
Their unpraised hearts to everyone.
And I was there with a knapsack sprayer
On the barrel’s edge poised. A wasp was floating
Dead on a withered briar-leaf
Over a copper-poisoned ocean.
The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart
Broke the burnt stick of noon in two.
An old man came through a cornfield
Remembering his youth and the Ruth he knew.
He turned my way. ‘God further the work.’
He echoed an ancient farming prayer.
I thanked him. He eyed the potato drills.
He said: ‘You’re bound to have good ones there.’
We talked, and our talk was a theme of kings,
A theme for strings. He hunkered down
In the shade of the orchard wall. O roses,
The old man dies in the young girl’s frown.
And poet lost to potato fields,
Remembering the lime and copper smell
Of the spraying mixture, he is not lost,
Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell.
RENEWAL
We have tested and tasted too much, lover –
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in this Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child’s soul we’ll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.
And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard-gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.
O after Christmas we’ll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning –
We’ll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching
And we’ll hear it among simple decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won’t we be rich, my love and I, and please
God we shall not ask for Reason’s payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God’s breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour.
And Christ comes with a January flower.
But we are, at the moment, in Dublin city, and I hear Valentin Iremonger celebrating an encounter with spring in a Dublin suburb:
SPRING STOPS ME SUDDENLY
Spring stops me suddenly like ground
Glass under a door, squeaking and gibbering.
I put my hand to my cheek and the tips
Of my fingers feel blood pulsing and quivering.
A bud on a branch brushes the back
Of my hand and I look, without moving, down.
Summer is there, screwed and fused, compressed,
Neat as a bomb, its casing a dull brown.
From the window of a farther tree I hear
A chirp and a twitter; I blink.
A tow-headed vamp of a finch on a branch
Cocks a roving eye, tips me the wink
And, instantly, the whole great hot-lipped ensemble
Of birds and birds, of clay and glass doors,
Reels in with its ragtime chorus, staggering
The theme of the time, a jam-session’s rattle and roar
With drums of summer jittering in the background
Dully and, deeper down and more human, the sobbing
Oboes of autumn falling across the track of the tune,
Winter’s furtive bassoon like a sea-lion snorting and bobbing.
There is something here I do not get,
Some menace that I do not comprehend,
Yet, so intoxicating is the song,
I cannot follow its thought right to the end.
So up the garden path I go with Spring
Promising sacks and robes to rig my years
And a young girl to gladden my heart in a tartan
Scarf and freedom from my facile fears.
That great novelist Francis Stuart has never made a secret of his passion for the spectacle and excitement of the running horses. Here he is recording his admiration for a racehorse carefully observed on the Curragh of Kildare:
A RACEHORSE AT THE CURRAGH
I see her poised upon the four smooth hooves;
The hind legs stretch a little from the body
In one taut line that, like the line of a bow,
Curves to the feathered dart. As on wet rooves
Glistens the sunlight, on the silken skin
It flickers, as if half-hidden sinews throw
The strain up to the raised, expectant head.
I see her walk upon the summer grass
And the faint move of muscles under a coat
That turns from violent copper almost to mauve;
Then suddenly the head’s thrown up, the forelegs double
And the veiled speed is loosed
Into a bright shadow past our eyes,
Till, streaming neck outstretched, the hollow clap
Of flying hooves grows faint in the far distance.
And gazing after her I hear my heart
Beat as though stirred to quicker life again.
And now that we are into this romantic business of running horses and mares, let me give you a ballad to take with you to the Curragh, or Epsom or Longchamps or Newmarket or Kentucky.
(By the way, is there a ballad about the Curragh Races? Ther
e must be, but I never heard one. There is a sweet song about a fellow who, because of a broken heart, enlisted in the British Army, but this makes only one brief reference to the Curragh …)
MY LOVE IS LIKE THE SUN
The winter is past,
And the summer’s come at last
And the blackbirds sing on every tree;
The hearts of these are glad
But my poor heart is sad,
Since my true love is absent from me.
The rose upon the briar
By the water running clear
Gives joy to the linnet and the bee;
Their little hearts are blest
But mine is not at rest,
While my true love is absent from me.
A livery I’ll wear
And I’ll comb out my hair,
And in velvet so green I’ll appear
And straight I will repair
To the Curragh of Kildare
For it’s there I’ll find tidings of my dear.
I’ll wear a cap of black
With a frill around my neck,
Gold rings on my fingers I’ll wear:
All this I’ll undertake
For my true lover’s sake,
He resides at the Curragh of Kildare.
I would not think it strange
Thus the world for to range
If I only get tidings of my dear;
But here in Cupid’s chain
If I’m bound to remain,
I would spend my whole life in despair.
My love is like the sun
That in the firmament does run,
And always proves constant and true;
But he is like the moon
That wanders up and down,
And every month it is new.
All ye that are in love
And cannot it remove,
I pity the pains you endure;
For experience lets me know
That your hearts are full of woe,
And a woe that no mortal can cure.
No one knows who wrote that lovely song. Where are they now, the nameless authors of old sweet songs? Waiting for us in the shadows of eternity.
Nor, so far as I am aware, does anyone know who wrote the magnificent ballad about the Races of Bellewstown Hill, up above Laytown, where they horse-raced on the sands of the sea. It was written in 1860 by John Costello, editor of The Drogheda Argus, to celebrate the opening of ‘the new Monolithic Stand’, built by R.B. Daly of Drogheda to replace ‘a wooden, rickety structure’ which stood near the Duleek bend on the racecourse.
If respite you’d borrow from turmoil or sorrow,
I’ll tell you the secret of how it is done.
’Tis found in this statement of all the excitement
That Bellewstown knows when the Races come on.
Make one of a party whose spirits are hearty,
Get a seat on a trap that is safe not to spill.
In its well pack a hamper, then off for a scamper,
And Huroo for the Glories of Bellewstown Hill.
On the road how they dash on, Rank, Beauty and Fashion,
It Banagher bangs, by the table of war,
From the coach of the Quality down to the Jollity
Joggin’ along on an old low-backed car.
Though straw cushions are placed, two feet thick at the laste,
Its jigging and jogging to mollify, still
The cheeks of my Nelly are shakin’ like jelly
From the joltin’ she gets as she jogs to the Hill.
In the tents play the pipers, the fiddlers and fifers,
Those rollicking lilts such as Ireland best knows.
While Paddy is prancing, his colleen is dancing
Demure, with her eyes quite intent on her toes.
More power to you Micky, faith your foot isn’t sticky,
But bounds from the boards like a pen from the quill.
Oh, ’twould cure a rheumatic, he would jump up ecstatic
At Tatter Jack Walsh upon Bellewstown Hill.
Oh, ’tis there ’neath the haycocks all splendid like paycocks
In chattering groups that the Quality dine.
Sitting cross-legged like tailors the gentlemen dalers
In flattering spout and come out mighty fine.
And the gentry from Navan and Cavan are havin’
’Neath the shade of the trees an Arcadian quadrille.
All we read in the pages of pastoral ages
Tells of no scene like this upon Bellewstown Hill.
Arrived at the summit, the view that you come at
From etherealized Mourne to where Tara ascends,
There’s no scene in our sireland, dear Ireland, old Ireland,
To which Nature more exquisite loveliness lends.
And the soil ’neath your feet has a memory sweet
The patriot’s deeds they hallow it still
Eighty-two’s Volunteers (would today see their peers?)
Marched past in review upon Bellewstown Hill.
But hark there’s a shout, the horses are out
’Long the ropes on the strand what a hullabaloo.
To old Crockafotha the people that dot the
Broad plateau around are off for a view.
Come Ned, my tight fellow, I’ll bet on the Yellow,
Success to the Green, we will stand by it still.
The uplands and hollows they’re skimming like swallows
Till they flash by the post upon Bellewstown Hill.
A friend from Ardcath, County Meath, compiled a comprehensive account of old Bellewstown from many and varied sources. He had actual racecards from shortly after the Battle of the Boyne, when the Cromwellian and Williamite planters revived the racing event, which had lapsed in the troubled centuries following the Anglo-Norman invasion. The Curragh had similarly gone into the darkness. There was evidence that Bellewstown was contemporary with, if not older than, the famous Kildare event and that racing and hunting went on there with Fionn and Na Fianna in the third century, when they also cavorted around the Curragh. As far back as the Bronze Age the Ard Ri came over from Tara to hunt and sport on Bellewstown Hill. The Bellews had not yet arrived.
But Bellewstown Hill was also, in more recent times, a Place of Assembly, as the ballad mentions in passing. Grattan’s Volunteers marched there in July 1781, and Charlemont, accompanied by his aides, the Duke of Leinster and Henry Grattan MP, reviewed three thousand troops – horse, foot and artillery. And in 1843 Bellewstown had its Great Repeal Demonstration with twenty thousand people present.
On the way into Dublin we passed that way and saw never a ghost.
Since we are here in Dublin let us try for something of the ancient flavour of the place, and recall the good man by the name of Larry who went to meet his Maker in full view of the populace of the city:
THE NIGHT BEFORE LARRY WAS STRETCHED
The night before Larry was stretched,
The boys they all paid him a visit;
A bait in their sacks, too, they fetched;
They sweated their duds till they riz it:
For Larry was ever the lad,
When a boy was condemned to the squeezer,
Would fence all the duds that he had
To help a poor friend to a sneezer,
And warm his gob ‘fore he died.
The boys they came crowding in fast,
They drew all their stools round about him,
Six glims round his trap-case were placed,
He couldn’t be well waked without ’em.
When one of us asked could he die
Without having duly repented?
Says Larry, That’s all in my eye;
And first by the clergy invented,
To get a fat bit for themselves.’
‘I’m sorry, dear Larry,’ says I
‘To see you in this situation;
And blister my limbs if I lie,
I’d as
lieve it had been my own station.’
‘Ochone! it’s all over,’ says he,
‘For the neckcloth I’ll be forced to put on,
And by this time to-morrow you’ll see
Your poor Larry as dead as a mutton,
Because, why, his courage was good.
‘And I’ll be cut up like a pie,
And my nob from my body be parted.’
‘You’re in the wrong box, then,’ says I,
‘For blast me if they’re so hard-hearted:
A chalk on the back of your neck
Is all that Jack Ketch dares to give you;
Then mind not such trifles a feck,
For why should the likes of them grieve you?
And now, boys, come tip us the deck.’
The cards being called for, they played,
Till Larry found one of them cheated;
A dart at his napper he made
(The boy being easily heated):
‘O by the hokey, you thief,
I’ll scuttle your nob with my daddle!
You cheat me because I’m in grief,
But soon I’ll demolish your noddle,
And leave you your claret to drink.’
Then the clergy came in with his book,
He spoke him so smooth and so civil;
Larry tipped him a Kilmainham look,
And pitched his big wig to the devil;
Then sighing, he threw back his head
To get a sweet drop of the bottle,
And pitiful sighing, he said,
‘O the hemp will be soon round my throttle,
And choke my poor windpipe to death.
‘Though sure it’s the best way to die,
O the devil a better a-livin’!
For when the gallows is high
Your journey is shorter to heaven:
But what harasses Larry the most,
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 11