OLD WOMAN OF THE ROADS
Oh, to have a little house!
To own the hearth and stool and all!
The heaped-up sods upon the fire,
The pile of turf against the wall!
To have a clock with weights and chains
And pendulum swinging up and down,
A dresser filled with shining delph,
Speckled and white and blue and brown!
I could be busy all the day
Clearing and sweeping hearth and floor,
And fixing on their shelf again
My white and blue and speckled store!
I could be quiet there at night
Beside the fire and myself,
Sure of a bed and loth to leave
The ticking clock and the shining delph!
Och! but I’m weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there’s never a house nor bush,
And tired I am of bog and road,
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!
And I am praying to God on high,
And I am praying him night and day,
For a little house, a house of my own –
out of the wind’s and the rain’s way.
Padraic Colum used to say, in pleasant jest yet with a certain sort of nostalgia, that he had grown up in Longford Workhouse. The joke was partly about his stature, for he was not a very tall man. His father had been Master of the establishment then sadly so-called. And the little boy growing up under its shadow acquired very early an understanding of and deep sympathy for the ways and trials of the homeless poor.
Perhaps his mind was already absorbed, as a sort of escape, in the wonder-tales that he used so beautifully in that splendid book for the young of all ages, The King of Ireland’s Son. And he had a regard for Nora Hopper’s poem of the same title, which here follows:
Now all away to Tir na n’Og are many roads that run,
But he had ta’en the longest lane, the King of Ireland’s son.
There’s roads of hate, and roads of love, and many a middle way,
And castles keep the valleys deep where happy lovers stray –
Where Aongus goes there’s many a rose burns red ’mid shadows dun,
No rose there is will draw his kiss, the King of Ireland’s son.
And yonder, where the sun is high, Love laughs amid the hay,
But smile and sigh have passed him by, and never make delay.
And here (and O! the sun is low) they’re glad for harvest won,
But naught he cares for wheat or tares, the King of Ireland’s son!
And you have flung love’s apple by, and I’m to pluck it yet:
But what are fruits of gramarye with Druid dews beset?
Oh, what are magic fruits to him who meets the Leanan-sidhe
Or hears athwart the distance dim Fionn’s horn blow drowsily!
He follows on for ever when all your chase is done,
He follows after shadows, the King of Ireland’s son.
And now that that happy little piece has, I hope, put us in the mood, let us listen to the sweep of the scythe in an Irish field, in Michael Cavanagh’s translation into the Béarla. In the original the sweeping scything sound is even more distinct:
A DAY IN IRELAND
Four sharp scythes sweeping – in concert keeping
The rich-robed meadow’s broad bosom o’er.
Four strong men mowing with bright health glowing,
A long green sward spread each man before.
With sinews springing – my keen blade swinging –
I strode – the fourth man in that blithe band;
As stalk of corn that summer morn,
The scythe felt light in my stalwart hand.
Oh, King of Glory! How changed my story
Since in youth’s noontide – long, long ago,
I mowed that meadow – no cloudy shadow
Between my brow and the hot sun’s glow;
Fair girls raking the hay – and making
The fields resound with their laugh and glee,
Their voices ringing – than cuckoo’s singing,
Made music sweeter by far to me.
Bees hovered over the honied clover,
Then nestward hied upon wings of light;
No use in trying to trace them flying –
One brief low hum and they’re out of sight.
On downy thistle bright insects nestle,
Or flutter skyward on painted wings,
At times alighting on flowers inviting –
’Twas pleasant watching the airy things.
From hazel bushes came songs of thrushes
And blackbirds – sweeter than harper’s lay;
While high in ether – with sun-tipped feather –
The skylark warbled his anthem gay;
With throats distended, sweet linnets blended
A thousand notes in one glorious chime,
Oh, King Eternal, ’twas life supernal
In beauteous Erin, that pleasant time.
‘I begin through the grass once again to be bound to the Lord,’ AE wrote in what can only be considered as the beginning of a prayer. And he might have liked the music of the scythe in ‘An Spealadóir’ even if he might also have mourned that the grass, the work of the Lord, could ever be sacrilegiously cut down by the hand of man.
But here is AE away in the West in Erris and Tyrawley where the gorse and the heather defy man. Or did until recently. Man becomes more murderous.
CARROWMORE
It’s a lonely road through bogland to the lake at Carrowmore,
And a sleeper there lies dreaming where the water laps the shore;
Though the moth-wings of the twilight in their purples are unfurled,
Yet his sleep is filled with music by the Master of the World.
There’s a hand is white as silver that is fondling with his hair:
There are glimmering feet of sunshine that are dancing by him there:
And half-open lips of faery that were dyed a faery red
In their revels where the Hazel tree its holy clusters shed.
‘Come away,’ the red lips whisper, ‘all the world is weary now;
’Tis the twilight of the ages and it’s time to quit the plough.
Oh, the very sunlight’s weary ere it lightens up the dew,
And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.
‘Though your colleen’s heart be tender, a tenderer heart is near.
What’s the starlight in her glances when the stars are shining clear?
Who would kiss the fading shadow when the flower-face glows above?
’Tis the beauty of all Beauty that is calling for your love.’
Oh! the great gates of the mountain have opened once again,
And the sound of song and dancing falls upon the ears of men,
And the Land of Youth lies gleaming, flushed with rainbow light and mirth,
And the old enchantrnent lingers in the honey-heart of earth.
And now that we are in the Far West we must find somebody to sing the song that begins on the deck of Patrick Lynch’s boat. In my experience the best man ever to sing it was a Louisburgh man, Austin McDonnell, who was one of the chiefs of the Dublin Fire Brigade. He is no longer with us. But his fine and resounding tenor still stays in my ears, and his generous friendship in my heart. He had a fine patriotic life-story and an enduring affection for his own native places.
This translation from the Irish is generally attributed to a young man called George Fox, a friend of the poet Samuel Ferguson. Fox died far from home, away in South America, and one may feel that Ferguson worked hard to keep alive the name and fame of his young friend.
Here is a note on the poem by Edward Hayes in his valuable nineteenth-century book The Ballads of Ireland:
This specimen of our ancient Irish Literature is one of the most popular songs of the peasantry of the counties of Mayo and Galway, and
is evidently a composition of the seventeenth century. The original Irish, which is the composition of one Thomas Lavelle, has been published, without a translation, by Mr Hardiman, in his Irish Minstrelsy; but a very able translation of it was published by Mr Ferguson, in a review of that work in the ‘University Magazine’ for June, 1834. The original melody of the same name is of very great beauty and pathos and one which it is desirable to preserve with English words of appropriate simplicity of character.
THE COUNTY OF MAYO
On the deck of Patrick Lynch’s boat I sat in woeful plight,
Through my sighing all the weary day, and weeping all the night,
Were it not that full of sorrow from my people forth I go,
By the blessed sun, ’tis royally I’d sing thy praise, Mayo.
When I dwelt at home in plenty, and my gold did much abound,
In the company of fair young maids the Spanish ale went round –
’Tis a bitter change from those gay days that now I’m forced to go,
And must leave my bones in Santa Cruz, far from my own Mayo.
They are altered girls in Irrul now; ’tis proud they’re grown and high,
With their hair-bags and their top-knots, for I pass their buckles by –
But it’s little now I heed their airs, for God will have it so,
That I must depart for foreign lands, and leave my sweet Mayo.
’Tis my grief that Patrick Loughlin is not Earl in Irrul still,
And that Brian Duff no longer rules as Lord upon the hill;
And that Colonel Hugh Mac Grady should be lying dead and low,
And I sailing, sailing swiftly from the county of Mayo.
Jack Butler Yeats, great painter and most memorable gentleman, liked that old song, and all its Connacht connotations, so much that he called one of his strange, and most diverting, works of prose-fiction simply ‘Sailing, Sailing Swiftly’. For Jack Yeats was not only a great painter but a great writer – as Samuel Beckett would always have been the first man to say.
And Jack Yeats had cast his painter’s and writer’s eye on the Sporting Races of Galway and would always have welcomed the song that celebrated those Races.
It has been said that many’s the man went to Galway for the Races and never got as far as Ballybritt, where the horses are, but was delayed by good company in and around Eyre Square. That could be. I was there myself at the races and saw the horses.
Anyhow: listen to the song.
GALWAY RACES
It’s there you’ll see confectioners with sugar sticks and dainties,
The lozenges and oranges, lemonade and the raisins;
The gingerbread and spices to accommodate the ladies,
And a big crubeen for threepence to be picking while you’re able.
It’s there you’ll see the gamblers, the thimbles and the garters,
And the sporting Wheel of Fortune with the four and twenty quarters,
There was others without scruple pelting wattles at poor Maggy,
And her father well contented and he looking at his daughter.
It’s there you’ll see the pipers and fiddlers competing,
And the nimble-footed dancers and they tripping on the daisies.
There was others crying segars and lights, and bills of all the races,
With the colour of the jockeys, the prize and horses’ ages.
It’s there you’ll see the jockeys and they mounted on most stately,
The pink and blue, the red and green, the Emblem of our nation.
When the bell was rung for starting, the horses seemed impatient,
Though they never stood on ground, their speed was so amazing.
There was half a million people there of all denominations,
The Catholic, the Protestant, the Jew and Presbyterian.
There was yet no animosity, no matter what persuasion,
But fáilte and hospitality, inducing fresh acquaintance.
Beyond any shadow of a doubt we are now in the West, where again we encounter the ghost of James Clarence Mangan. You may meet Mangan, or his ghost, in the strangest places.
But, here and now, he allows us to share his vision of Connacht in the thirteenth century, and of Cáhal Mór of the Wine-Red Hand:
I walked entranced
Through a land of Morn;
The sun, with wondrous excess of light,
Shone down and glanced
Over seas of corn,
And lustrous gardens aleft and right.
Even in the clime
Of resplendent Spain
Beams no such sun upon such a land;
But it was the time,
’Twas in the reign,
Of Cáhal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.
Anon stood nigh
By my side a man
Of princely aspect and port sublime.
Him queried I,
‘O, my Lord and Khan,
What clime is this, and what golden time?’
When he – ‘The clime
Is a clime to praise,
The clime is Erin’s
The green and bland;
And it is the time,
These be the days,
Of Cáhal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.
Then saw I thrones,
And circling fires,
And a Dome rose near me, as by a spell,
Whence flowed the tones
Of silver lyres
And many voices in wreathed swell;
And their thrilling chime
Fell on mine ears
As the heavenly hymn of an angel-band –
‘It is now the time,
These be the years,
Of Cáhal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.
I sought the hall,
And, behold! – a change
From light to darkness, from joy to woe!
Kings, nobles, all,
Looked aghast and strange;
The minstrel-group sat in dumbest show!
Had some great crime
Wrought this dread amaze,
This terror? None seemed to understand!
’Twas then the time,
We were in the days,
Of Cáhal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.
I again walked forth;
But lo! the sky
Showed fleckt with blood, and an alien sun
Glared from the north,
And there stood on high,
Amid his shorn beams A SKELETON!
It was by the stream
Of the castled Maine,
One Autumn eve, in the Teuton’s land,
That I dreamed this dream
Of the time and reign
Of Cáhal Mór of the Wine-red Hand!
Closer to home and the hearth, though, and far away from the formidable lands of ancient kings, are the lovely lines that Douglas Hyde translated and rendered in his Love Songs of Connacht:
Ringleted youth of my love,
With thy locks bound loosely behind thee,
You passed by the road above,
but you never came in to find me;
Where were the harm for you
If you came for a little to see me;
Your kiss is a wakening dew
Were I ever so ill or so dreamy.
If I had a golden store,
I would make a nice little boreen,
To lead straight up to his door,
The door of the house of my storeen;
Hoping to God not to miss
The sound of his footfall in it,
I have waited so long for his kiss
That for days I have slept not a minute.
I thought O my love! you were so –
As the moon is, or sun on a fountain,
And I thought after that you were snow,
The cold snow on the top of the mountain;
And I thought after that you were more
Like God’s lamp shining to find me,
Or th
e bright star of knowledge before,
And the star of wisdom behind me.
You promised me high-heeled shoes,
And satin and silk, my storeen,
And to follow me, never to lose,
Though the ocean were round us roaring;
Like a bush in a gap in a wall
I am now left lonely without thee,
And this house I grow dead of, is all
That I see around or about me.
And since we are in touch with Douglas Hyde, and I once had the privilege of standing in his presence, it would be ill-mannered to pass by without recalling those most moving lines he wrote to the memory of that majestic man, the great Fenian John O’Mahony. Hyde broods on the broodings of O’Mahony in exile:
In a foreign land, in a lonesome city,
With few to pity or know or care,
I sleep each night while my heart is burning,
And wake each morning to new despair.
Let no one venture to ask my story
Who believes in glory or trusts to fame;
Yet! I have within me such demons in keeping
As are better sleeping without a name.
For many a day of blood and horror,
And night of terror and work of dread,
I have rescued nought but my honour only,
And this aged, lonely, and whitening head.
As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 16