Lord, I have staked my soul, I have staked the lives of my kin
On the truth of Thy dreadful word. Do not remember my failures,
But remember this my faith.
And so I speak.
Yea, ere my hot youth pass, I speak to my people and say:
Ye shall be foolish as I; ye shall scatter, not save;
Ye shall venture your all, lest ye lose what is more than all;
Ye shall call for a miracle, taking Christ at His word.
And for this I will answer, O people, answer here and hereafter,
O people that I have loved, shall we not answer together?
At a later date in our brief acquaintance that lovely lady suggested, at a party of friends in Dalkey, that I should read out aloud the prayer that Mr Yeats prayed for his daughter. The lady said: ‘You have daughters. And a deep voice. Mr Yeats had a deep voice. I was a daughter. And any man who ever had a daughter should have ambitioned to write such a prayer for his daughter. And any daughter would admire to have such a prayer prayed for her. So read.’
So, to the best of my ability and in all humility, I read:
A PRAYER FOR MY DAUGHTER
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.
In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.
May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.
My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.
An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.
That brought me a long way from Dalkey and Dublin. All the way to Ballylee and the Tower. But it sets me to thinking that poetry, born under a dancing star, can like Ariel go anywhere and girdle the earth in an instant.
The original Spanish lady, in balladry and the Irish popular mind, must have walked the streets of Galway city. But when Joseph Campbell, up from Antrim, met her, she was, he says, and we must believe him, walking in Dublin:
As I walked down through Dublin City
At the hour of twelve in the night,
Who should I spy but a Spanish Lady,
Washing her feet by candlelight?
First she dipped them, and then she dried them,
Over a fire of ambery coal.
Never in all my life did I see
A maid so neat about the sole.
I stopped to peep, but the Watchman passed,
And says: Young fellow, the night is late.
Get home to bed, or I’ll wrastle you
At a double trot through the Bridewell gate!
So I waved a kiss to the Spanish Lady,
Hot as the fire of cramesy coal.
I’ve seen dark maids, though never one
So white and neat about the sole.
O, she’s too rich for a Poddle swaddy,
With her tortoise comb and mantle fine.
A Hellfire buck would fit her better,
Drinking brandy and claret wine.
I’m just a decent College sizar,
Poor as a sod of smouldery coal;
And how would I dress the Spanish Lady,
And she so neat about the sole?
O, she’d make a mott for the Provost Marshal,
Or a wife for the Mayor on his coach so high,
Or a queen of Andalusia,
Kicking her heel in the Cardinal’s eye.
I’m blue as cockles, brown as herrings
Over a grid of glimmery coal,
And all because of the Spanish Lady,
So mortial neat about the sole.
I wandered north, and I wandered south,
By Golden Lane and Patrick’s Close,
The Coombe, Smithfield and Stoneybatter,
Back to Napper Tandy’s house.
Old age has laid its hand upon me,
Cold as a fire of ashy coal. –
And where is the lovely Spanish Lady,
That maid so neat about the sole?
And it was in Dublin city, in the autumn of 1939, and in the home of Brian O’Higgins (Brian na Banban) in Hollybrook Road, Clontarf, that I first met, and began a most memorable friendship with, a lovely silver-haired lady, Teresa Brayton. And the following spring I was privileged to walk with her and
with William Walsh, the elder brother of Michael Walsh, the poet of Fore, and with Brian O’Higgins of the Abbey Theatre, son of Brian na Banban, along the Old Bog Road about which she had written the famous song. You will find that road off the main road betwen Kilcock and Enfield. And on our own first meeting I was honoured to be able to quote to her, word-perfect I hope, another poem of hers that like ‘The Old Bog Road’ came out of the longing of the exile for the island home:
THE OLD ROAD HOME
I would know it in the darkness were I deaf and dumb and blind,
I would know it o’er the thrashing of a million miles of foam,
I would know it sun or shadow, I would know it rain or wind,
The road that leads to Ireland, aye, the old road home.
Sure the angels up in Heaven would be pointing it to me
From every track that man has made since first he learned to roam,
And my feet would leap to greet it like a captive thing set free
The road that leads to Ireland, aye, the old road home.
I would find the hawthorn bushes, I would find the boreen’s gap
With one old cabin standing ’mid the soft and greening loam,
If the world was all a jumble on the great Creator’s lap
I would know the road to Ireland, aye, the old road home.
And now that Teresa has brought us on our way, and for a while, to the soft and green Midlands, we may brood for a moment over that young man from the Boyne Valley, whose life, like that of a million or more others, was wasted on far and horrible foreign fields.
Francis Ledwidge here mourns lost loves and the many dead and, in a gentle poem, remembers his mother:
THE LOST ONES
Somewhere is music from the linnets’ bills,
And thro’ the sunny flowers the bee-wings drone,
And white bells of convolvulus on hills
Of quiet May make silent ringing, blown
Hither and thither by the wind of showers,
And somewhere all the wandering birds have flown;
And the brown breath of Autumn chills the flowers.
But where are all the loves of long ago?
Oh, little twilight ship blown up the tide,
Where are the faces laughing in the glow
Of morning years, the lost ones scattered wide?
Give me your hand, Oh brother, let us go
Crying about the dark for those who died.
MY MOTHER
God made my mother on an April day,
From sorrow and the mist along the sea,
Lost birds’ and wanderers’ songs and ocean spray,
And the moon loved her wandering jealously.
Beside the ocean’s din she combed her hair,
Singing the nocturne of the passing ships,
Before her earthly lover found her there
And kissed away the music from her lips.
She came unto the hills and saw the change
That brings the swallow and the geese in turns,
But there was not a grief she deemed strange,
For there is that in her which always mourns.
Kind heart she has for all on hill or wave
Whose hopes grow wings like ants to fly away.
I bless the God who such a mother gave
This poor bird-hearted singer of a day.
III
From Leinster to Connacht
Well, Francis Ledwidge has brought us to the beautiful village of Slane, on the Boyne, and from the top of the Hill of Slane you may survey all Ireland.
Do I hear you say that I exaggerate? Well, perhaps in a physical sense, if you are thinking of altitudes above sealevel, contours, cloud-densities, et cetera. But in a spiritual sense?
St Patrick must have known something when he lighted his Paschal fire on the Hill of Slane and started something that, it was said, was never to die in Ireland (cynics have remarked that he was a bit of an optimist), and who are we to contradict a saint?
And from the top of the Hill of Slane I look to the north-west, or thereabouts, and see Collooney in the County Sligo. And I remember some of the lines about the Collooney boys who found themslves, it was said, in Gehenna:
‘A dreadful dream I fain would tell.
I dreamed I died and went to Hell.
And there, upon the topmost landing,
Some prime Collooney boys were standing.
‘Then gazing round I wondered where
Dwelt the scamps from Ballysodare,
And musing thus, I scanned each face,
And from within that dreadful place,
Prisoners of every nationality
And chaps renowned for all rascality,
My quest was vain. They were not there,
The rowdy rakes of Ballysodare.
“‘Sir Nick,” quoth I, “on every hand
I see your spoils from every land.
No doubt they well deserve their fate,
Their sins I wouldn’t dare deflate,
But, might I ask you, is it fair
To quite pass over Ballysodare?”
‘“Ha, Ha,” quoth Nick, with sinister mirth,
“There’s not a place on all this earth
Exempt from my bold operations,
Resist, who can, my machinations.
I’ll take you lower still, and there
You’ll find the bucks from Ballysodare.”
‘Still down we went to lower regions,
Encompassed by perspiring legions
From Straid, Kilvarnet and Killoran,
As well as Sligo and Bundoran.
Gaunt faces wore a look of worry,
Contingents, those, from Tobercurry.
‘At length we reached a dungeon rude
In Limbo’s lowest latitude,
And there I saw with apprehension
A saucepan grim, of vast dimension,
Upon a roaring furnace boiling
While stoking imps around were toiling.
‘With conscious pride Old Nick drew near
The huge Utensil. In the rear,
I peered with horror o’er his shoulder.
Despite the heat my blood ran colder.
He raised the lid and said: “In there
I boil the boys from Ballysodare.”’
Now that was an odd vision to see from the summit of St Patrick’s Slane. Whoever wrote that evil piece … well, we can only think, in mercy and charity towards him, that something must have happened to him in Ballysodare. A native of Ballysodare might rightfully say that whatever it was happened to him, he didn’t get half enough.
But what about the involvement of the Collooney boys in that Dantean ballad?
Thirty years ago I talked about that business with Philip Rooney, author of Captain Boycott, North Road, Singing River and other novels. Philip was a gentleman of the first order who did me the honour of his friendship. He was also a Collooney boy. And Philip explained to me:
‘Now the brawny men from North Galway and Mayo, on their way to Scotland in the old days for the potato harvest, took the Limerick to Collooney line, debarked at the station and walked across the town to embark at the Northern Counties station to continue their journey. So their tickets were always stamped “To Collooney” or “Ex Collooney”. And when those hard men kicked up a shindy on the train, on their way to and fro, the ticket-checker had a name for them.
‘Moving along the train, trying to keep the peace, he would enquire who was making the noise. And then, remembering the tickets he had checked, he would say: “Ah-ha, I know. The wild Collooney boys.”’
So, according to Philip, it was the strangers passing through who got the local boys the bad name.
That was a good story. Even if it was told to me by a Collooney boy.
From the summit of Slane one can see, among many other matters, the cattle fattening on the rich heart of Meath. And I think of the cattle-drover herding his, or his master’s, hoard from the West t
o the East to put the golden meat on their bones. He was probably at it in the days of St Patrick. But he had to wait for another Patrick to come along, Padraic Colum, before he could find his place in a poem:
A DROVER
To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford,
Go my cattle and me.
I hear in the darkness
Their slipping and breathing –
I name them the by-ways
They’re to pass without heeding;
Then the wet, winding roads,
Brown bogs with black water,
And my thoughts on white ships
And the King o’ Spain’s daughter.
O farmer, strong farmer!
You can spend at the fair,
But your face you must turn
To your crops and your care;
And soldiers, red soldiers!
You’ve seen many lands,
But you walk two by two,
And by captain’s commands!
O the smell of the beasts,
The wet wind in the morn,
And the proud and hard earth
Never broken for corn!
And the crowds at the fair,
The herds loosened and blind,
Loud words and dark faces,
And the wild blood behind!
(O strong men with your best
I would strive breast to breast,
I could quiet your herds,
With my words, with your words!)
I will bring you, my kine,
Where there’s grass to the knee,
But you’ll think of scant croppings
Harsh with salt of the sea.
Far from the land and the wet roads of the drover, and in one of the most stylish parts of New York City, Padraic Colum and his wife, Mary, had an apartment that would have dazzled a prince. On the Hallowe’en of 1964 I was honoured to enter, with some friends, that exquisite apartment to see Padraic surrounded by admirers and resting at his ease. So I quoted: and, since we were dear friends, no offence was taken at my harmless satire:
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 15