And makes his poor soul melancholy,
Is that he thinks of the time when his ghost
Will come in a sheet to sweet Molly;
O sure it will kill her alive!’
So moving these last words he spoke,
We all vented our tears in a shower;
For my part, I thought my heart broke,
To see him cut down like a flower.
On his travels we watched him next day;
O the throttler, I thought I could kill him;
But Larry not one word did say,
Nor changed till he come to King William,
Then, musha, his colour grew white.
When he came to the nobbling chit,
He was tucked up so neat and so pretty,
The rumbler jogged off from his feet,
And he died with his face to the city;
He kicked, too – but that was all pride,
For soon you might see ’twas all over;
Soon after the noose was untied,
And at darkee we waked him in clover,
And sent him to take a ground sweat.
That extraordinary Corkman Francis Sylvester Mahony took many liberties with people’s names, beginning with that of Father Prout, the quiet and inoffensive parish priest of Watergrasshill on the road to Cork city. In one of his learned considerations in Fraser’s Magazine, London, and under the title of The Songs of France’, he attributed the above elegy, or threnody, to the Rev. Robt Burrowes, Dean of St Finbar’s Cathedral, Cork. But Mahony, or Father Prout, claimed that the Rev. Burrowes had borrowed the masterpiece from a French original entitled ‘La Mort de Socrate’ by ‘L’Abbé de Prout, Curé de Mont-aux-Cressons, près de Cork’. He went on to give the French version, the first verse of which reads:
A la veille d’être perdu,
Notre Laurent reçu dans son gîte,
Honneur qui lui était bien dú,
De nombreux amis la visite;
Car chacun scavait que Laurent
A son tour rendrait la pareille,
Chapeau montre, et veste engageant,
Pour que l’ami, put boire, bouteille
Ni faire, à gosier sec, le saut.
Sing that, if you dare. And there are six more verses.
Brinsley MacNamara, novelist and playwright, took a devilish delight in these translations – or, as Mahony called them, ‘Upsettings’ – and I recall him dissertating on Mahony as the two of us walked the old Boyne Navigation towingpath from Navan to Slane. Brinsley was in the habit of doing that walk with his dear friend F.R. Higgins, who made the walk and the Meath man Brinsley matter for his poem ‘The Boyne Walk’.
‘What’s all this rich land,’ said I to the Meath man,
‘Just mirrors bedazzled with blazing air!’
And like flies on mirrors my parched thoughts ran
As we walked, half-hidden, through where the reeds stand
Between the Boyne and its green canal;
And sweltering I kept to the pace he planned,
Yet he wouldn’t even wait in the reeds
To watch a red perch, like a Japanese hand,
Grope in the sun-shot water and weeds –
He merely called back: ‘O, go be damned!’
With break-neck looks at the withered end
Of a stupefied town, I paced his heel
By moat, dead wall and under an arch
That was all of a crouch with the weight of the years;
But where the road led I’d have seen – were I wise –
From one running look in the dark of his eyes:
For each seemed the bright astrological plan
Of a new Don Quixote and his man
Again on campaign; but lacking their steeds,
I’d sooner have seen a flick of grey ears
Or a blue lackadaisical eye in the reeds
To lead to a smoky bare back; then cheers!
We’d have ridden our road as the Kings of Meath.
We walked, as became two kings outcast
From plains walled in by a grass-raising lord,
Whose saint is the Joker, whose hope is the Past –
What victuals for bards could that lad afford?
O, none! So off went his dust from our boots,
But his dust that day was of buttercup gold
From a slope, with a sight that was, man alive, grand:
Just two servant girls spreading blue clothes
On grass too deep for a crow to land;
And though they waved to us we kept on our track,
And though to the bank their own clothes soon toppled
We sweltered along – while my thoughts floated back
Through shy beauty’s bathing-pool, like an old bottle!
Heat trembled in halos on grass and on cattle
And each rock blazed like a drunken face;
So I cried to the man of the speedy wattle
‘In the name of Lot’s wife will you wait a space?
For Adam’s red apple hops dry in my throttle,’
And yet instead of easing the pace,
I saw on the broad blackboard of his back
His muscles made signs of a far greater chase,
Until as I tried to keep up on his track
Each pore of my skin became a hot spring
And every bone swam in a blister of pains
While all my bent body seemed as an old crane’s
Lost in a great overcoat of wings.
Soon out from my sight off went the big Meath man
Dodging the reeds of his nine-mile road.
So I lolled, as a bard bereft of his dæmon
Or a Moses awaiting a light-burdened cloud;
But heaven lay low all naked and brazen
Within the mad calm on that desert of green,
Where nothing, not even the water, is lean,
Where the orderly touches of Thought aren’t seen –
And yet not a wild thought sang in my noddle;
Ah, how could it sing, while speed bit each heel,
While heat tugged a tight noose into my throttle
And while, on my spine, the hung head went nodding
As on it fierce light picked with a black bill.
Then where in soft Meath can one find ease?
When the sun, like a scare-crow, stands in those meadows
Guarding their glory, not even the breeze,
That ghostly rogue, can crop a shadow;
When even I asked for ‘A drink, if you please,’
A woman, as proud as a motherly sow,
Hoked out of my way and hid where a larch
Leant like a derrick across an old barge
Stocked in the reeds; and so I went parched!
Ah, but soon down the Boyne, there, O the surprise
From a leaping fish – that silver flicker –
Was nothing compared to what hit my eyes:
An innocent house, marked ‘Licensed for Liquor!’
Could anyone treat me to brighter green meadows
Than the Meath man who finished his thirsty plan when
Between every swig he mooned through those windows?
And yet, on my oath, it was easier then
To coop a mountainy cloud in a henhouse
Than to group the Meath light into lines for my pen;
And still I must bless him since beauty was caught
In ears that were drumming, in eyes all sweat,
In nostrils slimmed by indrawn breath;
For I made, as we lay in the grass by that road
This poem – a gem from the head of a toad;
So here, will you take it – hall-marked by a day
Over the hills and far away?
Brinsley was a great believer in ghosts, in a humorous sort of a way, and he was, I often felt, a sibling of Jonathan Swift. He wrote about his vision of the Dean.
ON SEEING SWIFT IN LARACOR
I saw them walk that lane ag
ain
And watch the midges cloud a pool,
Laughing at something in the brain –
The Dean and Patrick Brell the fool.
Like Lear he kept his fool with him
Long into Dublin’s afterglow,
Until the wits in him grew dim
And Patrick sold him for a show.
Here were the days before Night came,
When Stella and the other – ‘slut’,
Vanessa, called by him – that flame
When Laracor was Lilliput!
And here, by walking up and down,
He made a man called Gulliver,
While bits of lads came out from town
To have a squint at him and her.
Still, was it Stella that they saw,
Or else some lassie of their own?
For in his story that’s the flaw,
The secret no one since has known.
Was it some wench among the corn
Had set him from the other two,
Some tenderness that he had torn,
Some lovely blossom that he knew?
For when Vanessa died of love,
And Stella learned to keep her place,
His Dublin soon the story wove
That steeped them in the Dean’s disgrace.
They did not know, ’twas he could tell!
The reason of his wildest rages,
The story kept by Patrick Brell,
The thing that put him with the ages.
Now when they mention of the Dean
Some silence holds them as they talk;
Some things there are unsaid, unseen,
That drive me to this lonely walk,
To meet the mighty man again,
And yet no comfort comes to me.
Although sometimes I see him plain,
That silence holds the Hill of Bree.
For, though I think I’d know her well,
I’ve never seen her on his arm,
Laughing with him, nor heard her tell
She had forgiven all that harm.
And yet I’d like to know ’twere true,
That here at last in Laracor,
Here in the memory of a few,
There was this rest for him and her.
Still I am indebted to Donagh MacDonagh’s anthology, so I must pay his ghost the compliment of quoting another of his poems – to be sung, he said, to the tune of ‘The Lowlands of Holland’:
GOING TO MASS LAST SUNDAY
Going to Mass last Sunday my true love passed me by,
I knew her mind was altered by the rolling of her eye;
And when I stood in God’s dark light my tongue could word no prayer
Knowing my saint had fled and left her reliquary bare.
Sweet faces smiled from holy glass, demure in saintly love,
Sweet voices ripe with Latin grace rolled from the choir above;
But brown eyes under Sunday wear were all my liturgy;
How can she hope for heaven who has so deluded me?
When daffodils Were altar gold her lips were light on mine
And when the hawthorn flame was bright we drank the year’s new wine;
The nights seemed stained-glass windows lit with love that paled the sky,
But love’s last ember perishes in the winter of her eye.
Drape every downcast day now in purple cloth of Lent,
Smudge every forehead now with ash, that she may yet repent,
Who going to Mass last Sunday could pass so proudly by
And show her mind was altered by the rolling of an eye.
Thomas MacDonagh translated from the Irish of Cathal Buidhe Mac Giolla Gunna (or Blondie Charley Gunn) the immortal poem about the nature of love, poetry, drink, and the thirsty, long-necked, yellow bittern:
THE YELLOW BITTERN
The yellow bittern that never broke out
In a drinking-bout, might as well have drunk;
His bones are thrown on a naked stone
Where he lived alone like a hermit monk.
O yellow bittern! I pity your lot,
Though they say that a sot like myself is curst –
I was sober a while, but I’ll drink and be wise
For fear I should die in the end of thirst.
It’s not for the common birds that I’d mourn,
The blackbird, the corncrake or the crane,
But for the bittern that’s shy and apart
And drinks from the marsh from the lone bog-drain.
Oh! if I had known you were near your death,
While my breath held out I’d have run to you,
Till a splash from the lake of the Son of the Bird
Your soul would have stirred and waked anew.
My darling told me to drink no more
Or my life would be o’er in a little short while;
But I told her ’tis drink gives me health and strength,
And will lengthen my road by many a mile.
You see how the bird of the long smooth neck,
Could get his death from the thirst at last –
Come, son of my soul, and drain your cup,
You’ll get no sup when your life is past.
In a wintering island by Constantine’s halls,
A bittern calls from a wineless place,
And tells me that hither he cannot come
Till the summer is here and the sunny days.
When he crosses the stream there and wings o’er the sea,
Then a fear comes to me he may fail in his flight –
Well, the milk and the ale are drunk every drop,
And a dram won’t stop our thirst this night.
We seem, at the moment, to be far away from Dublin. But Dublin is (is it not?) the centre of Ireland, and I can sit here at the centre, and, all around to the sea, survey and listen to the songs of my people.
F.R. Higgins, a notable public figure in my early days in Dublin, remembered with great affection his dear friend, Padraic Ó Conaire, storyteller and wandering man. And in Padraic’s memory and honour, Higgins wrote the most moving elegy, which links Winetavern Street, in the heart of Old Dublin, with the ways of Wicklow, and the Spanish Arch in Galway, and with all the roads of Ireland. The best man to speak this poem is, as we all know, Sean Mac Réamoinn:
PADRAIC O’CONAIRE – GAELIC STORYTELLER
They’ve paid the last respects in sad tobacco
And silent is this wakehouse in its haze;
They’ve paid the last respects; and now their whiskey
Flings laughing words on mouths of prayer and praise;
And so young couples huddle by the gables,
O let them grope home through the hedgy night –
Alone I’ll mourn my old friend, while the cold dawn
Thins out the holy candlelight.
Respects are paid to one loved by the people;
Ah, was he not – among our mighty poor –
The sudden wealth cast on those pools of darkness,
Those bearing, just, a star’s faint signature;
And So he was to me, close friend, near brother,
Dear Padraic of the wide and sea-cold eyes –
So lovable, so courteous and noble,
The very West was in his soft replies.
They’ll miss his heavy stick and stride in Wicklow –
His story-talking down Winetavern Street,
Where old men sitting in the wizen daylight
Have kept an edge upon his gentle wit;
While women on the grassy streets of Galway,
Who hearken for his passing – but in vain,
Shall hardly tell his step as shadows vanish
Through archways of forgotten Spain.
Ah, they’ll say: Padraic’s gone again exploring;
But now down glens of brightness, O he’ll find
An alehouse overflowing with fine Gaelic
That’s braced in vigour by the bardic mind,
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And there his thoughts shall find their own forefathers –
In minds to whom our heights of race belong,
In crafty men, who ribbed a ship or turned
The secret joinery of song.
Alas, death mars the parchment of his forehead;
And yet for him, I know, the earth is mild –
The windy fidgets of September grasses
Can never tease a mind that loved the wild;
So drink his peace – this grey juice of the barley
Runs with a light that ever pleased his eye –
While old flames nod and gossip on the hearthstone
And only the young winds cry.
And now consider, and memorize, this brilliant note on Georgian Dublin. The scholarly poet is Maurice Craig, who has also written the final book on the matter and who is a most learned, and unassuming, authority in many lands of scholarship:
GEORGIAN DUBLIN
‘So much to do,’ said Turgot, ‘and so little
Time to do it.’ Civilisation must wait
Impotently crouching over the grate,
Watching to seize the moment, the boiling kettle;
Must grasp it suddenly, deftly, like a nettle,
Without reluctance, not too early or late,
That in the flawed alembic of the State
Correct precipitates may form and settle.
In the quick sunlight of those thirty years
This Roman Empire waited for Sedan,
Though now their building is a hollow shell,
That sea-worn tracery can move to tears.
This capital is incorruptible,
Doric, lonic and Corinthian.
Like any city anywhere or, for that matter, any crossroads, Dublin has its ghosts. Ghosts are, after all, only memories. We all have loved the legend of Oliver Goldsmith, threadbare student in Trinity College, and not an overzealous student, writing ballads and selling them for pence to street-singers. And then haunting the corners up in the Liberties to hear his own songs sung. His ghost may, perhaps, be encountered in Temple Bar, now restored to fashion and an abode for Trinity students.
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 12