Book: Poets and Dreamers

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POETS AND DREAMERS:
STUDIES & TRANSLATIONS FROM
THE IRISH, BY LADY GREGORY.



DUBLIN: HODGES, FIGGIS, & CO., LTD.
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
1903.




TO SOME UNDERGRADUATES OF TRINITY COLLEGE


'Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last,
In things best known to you finding the best, or as good as the best;
In folks nearest to you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest;
Happiness, knowledge not in another place, but this place--not for
another hour but this hour.'

WALT WHITMAN.




CONTENTS


PAGE
RAFTERY 1

WEST IRISH BALLADS 47

JACOBITE BALLADS 66

AN CRAOIBHIN'S POEMS 76

BOER BALLADS IN IRELAND 89

A SORROWFUL LAMENT FOR IRELAND 98

MOUNTAIN THEOLOGY 104

HERB-HEALING 111

THE WANDERING TRIBE 121

WORKHOUSE DREAMS 128

ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD 193

AN CRAOIBHIN'S PLAYS:-- 196

THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 200

THE MARRIAGE 216

THE LOST SAINT 236

THE NATIVITY 244




POETS AND DREAMERS




RAFTERY


I.

One winter afternoon as I sat by the fire in a ward of Gort Workhouse, I
listened to two old women arguing about the merits of two rival poets
they had seen and heard in their childhood.

One old woman, who was from Kilchreest, said: 'Raftery hadn't a stim of
sight; and he travelled the whole nation; and he was the best poet that
ever was, and the best fiddler. It was always at my father's house,
opposite the big tree, that he used to stop when he was in Kilchreest. I
often saw him; but I didn't take much notice of him then, being a child;
it was after that I used to hear so much about him. Though he was blind,
he could serve himself with his knife and fork as well as any man with
his sight. I remember the way he used to cut the meat--across, like
this. Callinan was nothing to him.'

The other old woman, who was from Craughwell, said: 'Callinan was a
great deal better than him; and he could make songs in English as well
as in Irish; Raftery would run from where Callinan was. And he was a
nice respectable man, too, with cows and sheep, and a kind man. _He_
would never put anything that wasn't nice into a poem, and _he_ would
never run anyone down; but if you were the worst in the world, he'd make
you the best in it; and when his wife lost her beetle, he made a song of
fifteen verses about it.'

'Well,' the Kilchreest old woman admitted, 'Raftery would run people
down; he was someway bitter; and if he had anything against a person,
he'd give him a great lacerating. But there were more for him than for
Callinan; some used to say Callinan's songs were too long.'

'I tell you,' said the other, 'Callinan was a nice man and a nice
neighbour. Raftery wasn't fit to put beside him. Callinan was a man that
would go out of his own back door, and make a poem about the four
quarters of the earth. I tell you, you would stand in the snow to listen
to Callinan!' But, just then, a bedridden old woman suddenly sat up and
began to sing Raftery's 'Bridget Vesach' as long as her breath lasted;
so the last word was for him after all.

Raftery died over sixty years ago; but there are many old people still
living, besides those two old women, who have seen him, and who keep his
songs in their memory. What they tell of him shows how closely he was in
the old tradition of the bards, the wandering poets of two thousand
years or more. His satire, his praises, his competitions with other
poets were the dread and the pride of many Galway and Mayo parishes. And
now the songs that he never wrote down, being blind, are known, if not
as our people say, 'all over the world,' at least in all places where
Irish is spoken.

Raftery's satires, as I have heard them repeated by the country people,
do not seem, even in their rhymed original--he only composed in
Irish--to have the 'sharp spur' of some of his predecessors, such as
O'Higinn, whose tongue was cut out by men from Sligo, who had suffered
from it, or O'Daly, who criticised the poverty of the Irish chiefs in
the sixteenth century until the servant of one of them stuck a knife
into his throat. Yet they were much dreaded. 'He was very sharp with
anyone that didn't please him,' I have been told; 'and no one would like
to be put in his songs.' And though it is said of his songs in praise of
his friends that 'whoever he praised was well praised,' it was thought
safer that one's own name should not appear in them. The man at whose
house he died said to me: 'He used often to come and stop with us, but
he never made a verse about us; my father wouldn't have liked that.
Someway it doesn't bring luck.' And another man says: 'My father often
told me about Raftery. He was someway gifted, and people were afraid of
him. I was often told by men that gave him a lift in their car when they
overtook him now and again, that if he asked their name, they wouldn't
give it, for fear he might put it in a song.' And another man says:
'There was a friend of my father's was driving his car on the road one
day, and he saw Raftery, but he didn't let on to see him. But when he
was passing, Raftery said: "There was never a soldier marching but would
get his billet. But the rabbit has an enemy in the ferret;" so then the
man said in a hurry, "Oh, Mr. Raftery, I never knew it was you: won't
you get up and take a seat in the car?"' A girl in whose praise he had
made a song, Mary Hynes, of Ballylee, died young, and had a troubled
life; and one of her neighbours says of her: 'No one that has a song
made about them will ever live long;' and another says: 'She got a great
tossing up and down; and at last she died in the middle of a bog.' They
tell, too, of a bush that he once took shelter under from the rain, and
how he 'praised it first; and then when it let the rain down, he
dispraised it, and it withered up, and never put out leaf or branch
after.' I have seen his poem on the bush in a manuscript book, carefully
written in the beautiful Irish character, and the great treasure of a
stonecutter's cottage. This is the form of the curse: 'I pronounce
ugliness upon you. That bloom or leaf may never grow on you, but the
flame of the mountain fires and of bonfires be upon you. That you may
get your punishment from Oscar's flail, to hack and to bruise you with
the big sledge of a forge.'

There are some other verses made by him that have been less legendary in
their effect. The story is:--'It was Anthony Daly, a carpenter, was
hanged at Seefin. It was the two Z's got him put away. He was brought
before a judge in Galway, and accused of being a Captain of Whiteboys,
and it was sworn against him that he fired at Mr. X. He was a one-eyed
man; and he said: "If I did, though I have but one eye, I would have hit
him"--for he was a very good shot; and he asked that some object should
be put up, and he would show the judge that he would hit it, but he said
nothing else. Some were afraid he'd give up the names of the other
Whiteboys; but he did not. There was a gallows put up at Seefin; and he
was brought there sitting on his coffin in a cart. There were people all
the way along the road, and they were calling on him to break through
the crowd, and they'd save him; and some of the soldiers were Irish, and
they called back that if he did they'd only fire their guns in the air;
but he made no attempt, but went to the gallows quiet enough. There was
a man in Gort was telling me he saw it, planting potatoes he was at
Seefin that day. It was in the year 1820; and Raftery was there at the
hanging, and he made a song about it. The first verse of the song said:
"Wasn't that the good tree, that wouldn't let any branch that was on it
fall to the ground?" He meant by that that he didn't give up the names
of the other Whiteboys. And at the end he called down judgment from God
on the two Z's, and, if not on them, on their children. And they that
had land and farms in all parts, lost it after; and all they had
vanished; and the most of their children died--only two left, one a
friar, and the other living in the town.' And quite lately I have been
told by another neighbour, in corroboration, that a girl of the Z family
married into a family near his home the other day, and was coldly
received; and when my neighbour asked one of the family why this was, he
was told that 'those of her people that went so high ought to have gone
higher'--meaning that they themselves ought to have been on the gallows;
and then he knew that Raftery's curse was still having its effect. And
he had also heard that the grass had never grown again at Seefin.

This is a part of the song:--

'The evening of Friday of the Crucifixion, the Gael was under the
mercy of the Gall. It was as heavy the same day as when the only
Son of Mary was on the tree. I have hope in the Son of God, my
grief! and it is of no use for me; and it was Conall and his wife
hung Daly, and may they be paid for it!

'But oh! young woman, while I live, I put death on the village
where you will be; plague and death on it; and may the flood rise
over it; that much is no sin at all, O bright God; and I pray with
longing it may fall on the man that hung Daly; that left his people
and his children crying.

'O stretch out your limbs! The air is murky overhead; there is
darkness on the sun, and the fish do not leap in the water; there
is no dew on the grass, and the birds do not sing sweetly. With
sorrow after you, Daly, till death, there never will be fruit on
the trees.

'And that is the true man, that didn't humble himself or lower
himself to the Gall; Anthony Daly, O Son of God! He was that with
us always, without a lie. But he died a good Irishman; and he never
bowed the head to any man; and it was with false swearing that
Daly was hung, and with the strength of the Gall.

'If I were a clerk--kind, light, cheerful with the pen--it is I
would write your ways in clear Irish on a flag above your head. A
thousand and eight hundred and sixteen, and four put to that, from
the coming of the Son of God, to the death of Daly at the Castle of
Seefin.'

I have heard, and have also seen in manuscript, a terrible list of
curses that he hurled at the head of another poet, Seaghan Burke. But
these were, I think, looked on as a mere professional display, and do
not seem to have any ill effect.

Here are some of them:--

'That God may perish you on the mountain-side, without a priest,
bishop, or clerk. Seven years may you be senseless and without wit,
going from door to door as an unfortunate creature.

'May you have a mouth that will go back to your ear, and may your
lips be turned back like gums; that your legs may lose feeling from
the knee down, your eyes lose their sight, and your hands lose
their strength.

'Deformity and lameness and corruption upon you; flight and defeat
and the hatred of your kin. That shivering fever may stretch you
nine times, and that particularly at the time of Easter ('because,'
it is explained, 'it was at Easter time our Lord was put to death,
and it is the time He can best hear the curses of the poor').

'May a sore heart and cold flesh be upon you; may there be no
marrow or moisture in your bones. That clay may never be put over
your coffin-boards, but wind and a sharp blast on you from the
north.

'Baldness and nakedness come upon you, judgment from above, and the
curses of the crowd. May dragon's gall and poison mixed through it
be your best drink at the hour of death.'

Sometimes he left a scathing verse on a place where he was not well
treated, as: 'Oranmore without merriment. A little town in scarce
fields--a broken little town, with its back to the water, and with women
that have no understanding.'

He did not spare persons any more than places, especially if they were
well-to-do, for his gentleness was for the poor. An old woman who
remembers him says: 'He didn't care much about big houses. Just if they
were people he liked, and that he was friendly with them, he would be
kind enough to go in and see them.' A Mr. Burke, who met him going from
his house, asked how he had fared, and he said in a scornful verse:--

'Potatoes that were softer than the fog,
And with neither butter nor meat,
And milk that was sourer than apples in harvest--
That's what Raftery got from Burke of Kilfinn.'

'And Mr. Burke begged him to rhyme no more, but to come back, and he
would be well taken care of.' I am told of another house he abused and
that is now deserted: 'Frenchforth of the soot, that was wedded to the
smoke, that is all that remains of the property.... There were some of
them on mules, and some of them unruly, and the biggest of them were
smaller than asses, and the master cracking them with a stick;' 'but he
went no further than that, because he remembered the good treatment used
to be there in former times, and he wouldn't have said that much if it
wasn't for the servants that vexed him.' A satire, that is remembered
in Aran, was made with the better intention of helping a barefooted
girl, who had been kept waiting a long time for a pair of shoes she had
ordered. Raftery came, and sat down before the shoemaker's house, and
began:--

'A young little girl without sense, the ground tearing her feet, is
not satisfied yet by the lying Peter Glynn. Peter Glynn, the liar,
in his little house by the side of the road, is without the
strength in his arms to slip together a pair of brogues.'

'And, before he had finished the lines, Peter Glynn ran out and called
to him to stop, and he set at work on the shoes then and there.' He even
ventured to poke a little satire at a priest sometimes. 'He went into
the chapel at Kilchreest one time, and there was some cabbage after
being stolen from a garden, and the priest was speaking about it.
Raftery was at the bottom of the chapel, and at last he called out in
verse:--"What a lot of talk about cabbage! If there was meat with it, it
would feed the whole parish!" The priest didn't mind, but afterwards he
came down, and said: "Where is the cabbage man?" and asked him to make
some more verses about it; but whether he did or not I don't know.' And
another time, I am told: 'A priest wanted to teach him the rite of lay
baptism; for there were scattered houses a priest might take a long time
getting to, away from the roads, and certain persons were authorized to
give the rite. So the priest put his hat in Raftery's hand, and told him
the words to say; but it is what he said: "I baptize you without either
foot or hand, without salt or tow, beer or drink. Your father was a ram
and your mother was a sheep, and your like never came to be baptized
before." He was put under a curse, too, one time by a priest, and he
made a song about him; but he said he put his frock out of the bargain,
and it was only the priest's own body he would speak about. And the
priest let him alone after that.' And an old basket-maker, who had told
me some of these things, said at the end: 'That is why the poets had to
be banished before in the time of St. Columcill. Sure no one could stand
the satire of them.'


II.

Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great
extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was
born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years. It is hard to say
where history ends in them and religion and politics begin; for history,
religion, and politics grow on one stem in Ireland, an eternal trefoil.
'He was a great historian,' it is said; 'for every book he'd get hold
of, he'd get it read out to him.' And a neighbour tells me: 'He used to
stop with my uncle that was a hedge schoolmaster in those times in
Ballylee, and that was very fond of drink; and when he was drunk, he'd
take his clothes off, and run naked through the country. But at evening
he'd open the school; and the neighbours that would be working all day
would gather in to him, and he'd teach them through the night; and there
Raftery would be in the middle of them.' His chief historical poem is
the 'Talk with the Bush,' of over three hundred lines. Many of the
people can repeat it, or a part of it, and some possess it in
manuscript. The bush, a forerunner of the 'Talking Oak' or the 'Father
of the Forest,' gives its recollections, which go back to the times of
the Firbolgs, the Tuatha De Danaan, 'without heart, without humanity';
the Sons of the Gael; the heroic Fianna, who 'would never put more than
one man to fight against one'; Cuchulain 'of the Grey Sword, that broke
every gap'; till at last it comes to 'O'Rourke's wife that brought a
blow to Ireland': for it was on her account the English were first
called in. Then come the crimes of the English, made redder by the crime
of Martin Luther. Henry VIII 'turned his back on God and denied his
first wife.' Elizabeth 'routed the bishops and the Irish Church. James
and Charles laid sharp scourges on Ireland.... Then Cromwell and his
hosts swept through Ireland, cutting before him all he could. He gave
estates and lands to Cromwellians, and he put those that had a right to
them on mountains.' Whenever he brings history into his poems, the same
strings are touched. 'At the great judgment, Cromwell will be hiding,
and O'Neill in the corner. And I think if William can manage it at all,
he won't stand his ground against Sarsfield.' And a moral often comes at
the end, such as: 'Don't be without courage, but join together; God is
stronger than the Cromwellians, and the cards may turn yet.'

For Raftery had lived through the '98 Rebellion, and the struggle for
Catholic Emancipation; and he saw the Tithe War, and the Repeal
movement; and it is natural that his poems, like those of the poets
before him, should reflect the desire of his people for 'the mayntenance
of their own lewde libertye,' that had troubled Spenser in his time.

Here are some verses from his '_Cuis da ple_,' 'cause to plead,'
composed at the time of the Tithe War:--

'The two provinces of Munster are afoot, and will not stop till
tithes are overthrown, and rents accordingly; and if help were
given them, and we to stand by Ireland, the English guard would be
feeble, and every gap made easy. The Gall (English) will be on
their back without ever returning again; and the Orangemen bruised
in the borders of every town, a judge and jury in the courthouse
for the Catholics, England dead, and the crown upon the Gael....

'There is many a fine man at this time sentenced, from Cork to
Ennis and the town of Roscrea, and fair-haired boys wandering and
departing from the streets of Kilkenny to Bantry Bay. But the cards
will turn, and we'll have a good hand: the trump shall stand on the
board we play at.... Let ye have courage. It is a fine story I
have. Ye shall gain the day in every quarter from the Sassanach.
Strike ye the board, and the cards will be coming to you. Drink out
of hand now a health to Raftery: it is he would put success for you
on the _Cuis da ple_.'

This is part of another song:--

'I have a hope in Christ that a gap will be opened again for us....
The day is not far off, the Gall will be stretched without anyone
to cry after them; but with us there will be a bonfire lighted up
on high.... The music of the world entirely, and Orpheus playing
along with it. I'd sooner than all that, the Sassanach to be cut
down.'

But with all this, he had plenty of common sense, and an old man at
Ballylee tells me:--'One time there were a sort of
nightwalkers--Moonlighters as we'd call them now, Ribbonmen they were
then--making some plan against the Government; and they asked Raftery to
come to their meeting. And he went; but what he said was this, in a
verse, that they should look at the English Government, and think of all
the soldiers it had, and all the police--no, there were no police in
those days, but gaugers and such like--and they should think how full up
England was of guns and arms, so that it could put down Buonaparty; and
that it had conquered Spain, and took Gibraltar from it; and the same in
America, fighting for twenty-one years. And he asked them what they had
to fight with against all those guns and arms?--nothing but a stump of a
stick that they might cut down below in the wood. So he bid them give up
their nightwalking, and come out and agitate in the daylight.'

I have been told--but I do not know if it is true--that he was once sent
to Galway Gaol for three months for a song he made against the
Protestant Church, 'saying it was like a wall slipping, where it wasn't
built solid.'


III.

When at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the poets O'Lewy and
O'Clery and their supporters held a 'Contention,' the results were
written down in a volume containing 7,000 lines. I think the greater
number of the 'Contentions' between Raftery and his fellow-poets were
never written down; but the country people still discuss them with all
the eagerness of partisans. On old man from Athenry says: 'Raftery
travelled Ireland, challenging all the poets of that time. There were
hundreds of country poets in those days, and a welcome for them all.
Raftery had enough to do to beat them, but he was the best; his poetry
was the gift of God, and his poems are sung as far away as Limerick and
Dublin.' There is a story of his knocking at a door one night, when he
was looking for the house of a poet he had heard of and wanted to
challenge, and saying: 'I am a poet seeing shelter'; and a girl answered
him from within with a verse, saying he must be a blind man to be out so
late looking for shelter; and then he knew it was the house he was
looking for. And it is said that the daughter of another poet was on his
way to see in Clare, gave him such a sharp answer when he met her
outside the house that he turned back and would not contend with her
father at all. And he is said to have 'hunted another poet Daly--hunted
him all through Ireland.' But these other poets do not seem to have left
a great name. There was a Connemara poet, Sweeny, that was put under a
curse by the priests 'because he used to make so much fun at the wakes';
and in one of Raftery's poems he thanks Sweeny for having come to his
help in some dispute; and there was 'one John Burke, who was a good
poet, too; he and Raftery would meet at fairs and weddings, and be
trying which would put down the other.' I am told of an 'attack' they
made on each other one day on the fair green of Cappaghtagle. Burke
said: 'After all your walk of land and callows, Burke is before you at
the fair of Cappagh.' And Raftery said: 'You are not Burke but a breed
of _scatties_, That's all over the country gathering _praties_; When I'm
at the table filling glasses, You are in the corner with your feet in
the ashes.' Then Burke said: 'Raftery a poet, and he with bracked
(speckled) shins, And he playing music with catgut; Raftery the poet,
and his back to the wall, And he playing music for empty pockets.
There's no one cares for his music at all, but he does be always craving
money.' For he was sometimes accused of love of money; 'he wouldn't play
for empty pockets, and he'd make the plate rattle at the end of a
dance.'

But his most serious rival in his own part of the country was Callinan,
the well-to-do farmer who lived near Craughwell, of whom the old women
in the workhouse spoke. I have heard some of Callinan's poems and songs;
but I do not find the imaginative power of Raftery in them. He seems, in
distinction to him, to be the poet of the domestic affections, of the
settled classes. His songs have melody and good sentiments; and they are
often accompanied by a rhymed English version, made by his brother, a
lesser poet. The favourite among them is a song on a wooden beetle, lost
by his wife when washing clothes at the river. She is made to lament the
loss of 'so good a servant' in a sort of allegory; and then its journey
is traced from the river to the sea. An old man gives me a little memory
of him: 'I saw Callinan one time when we went to dig potatoes for him at
his own place, the other side of Craughwell. We went into the house for
dinner; and we were in a hurry, and he was sitting by the hearth talking
all the time; for he was a great talker, so that the veins of his neck
swelled up. And he was telling us about the song he made about his own
Missus when she was out washing by the river. He was up to eighty years
at that time.' And there are accounts of the making of some of his songs
that show his kindly disposition and amiability. 'One time there was a
baby in the house, and there was a dance going on near, and Mrs.
Callinan was a young woman; and she said she'd go for a bit to the
dance-house; and she bid Callinan rock the cradle till she'd come back.
But she never came back till morning, and there he was rocking the
cradle still; and he had a song composed while she was away about the
time of a man's life, and the hours of the day, and the seasons of the
year; how when a man is young he is strong, and then he grows old and
passes away, and goes to the feast of the Saviour; and about the day,
how bright the morning is, and the birds singing; and a man goes out to
work, and he comes in tired out, and sits by the fire to talk with his
neighbour; and the night comes on, and he says his prayers, and thinks
of the feast of the Saviour; and about the seasons, the spring so nice,
and the summer for work; and autumn brings the harvest, and winter
brings Christmas, the feast of the Saviour. In Irish and English he made
that.' And this is another story: 'A carpenter made a plough for
Callinan one time, and when it came, it was the worst ever made; and he
said to his brother: "I'll make a song that will cut him down
altogether." But his brother said: "Do not, for if you cut him down, it
will take his means of living from him, but make a song in his praise."
And he did so, for he wouldn't like to do him any harm.' I have asked if
he made any love-songs, and was told of one he had made 'about a girl he
met going to a bog. He praised herself first, and then he said he had
information as well that she had fifty gold guineas saved up.'

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