The Kiltartan Poetry Book
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THE KILTARTAN POETRY BOOK
PROSE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE IRISH
BY LADY GREGORY
_Introduction_
I
If in my childhood I had been asked to give the name of an Irish poem,
I should certainly have said "Let Erin remember the days of old," or
"Rich and rare were the gems she wore"; for although among the
ornamental books that lay on the round drawingroom table, the only
one of Moore's was _Lalla Rookh_, some guest would now and then
sing one of his melodies at the piano; and I can remember vexing or
trying to vex my governess by triumphant mention of Malachi's collar
of gold, she no doubt as well as I believing the "proud invader" it
was torn from to have been, like herself, an English one. A little
later I came to know other verses, ballads nearer to the tradition
of the country than Moore's faint sentiment. For a romantic love of
country had awakened in me, perhaps through the wide beauty of my home,
from whose hillsides I could see the mountain of Burren and Iar Connacht,
and at sunset the silver western sea; or it maybe through the half
revealed sympathy of my old nurse for the rebels whose cheering she
remembered when the French landed at Killala in '98; or perhaps but
through the natural breaking of a younger child of the house from
the conservatism of her elders. So when we were taken sometimes as
a treat the five mile drive to our market town, Loughrea, I would,
on tiptoe at the counter, hold up the six pence earned by saying without
a mistake my Bible lesson on the Sunday, and the old stationer, looking
down through his spectacles would give me what I wanted saying that
I was his best customer for Fenian books; and one of my sisters, rather
doubtfully consenting to my choice of _The Spirit of the Nation_
for a birthday present, qualified the gift by copying into it "Patriotism
is the last refuge of a scoundrel." I have some of them by me yet,
the little books in gay paper or in green cloth, and some verses in
them seem to me no less moving than in those early days, such as Davis's
lament.
We thought you would not die, we were sure you would not go
And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell's cruel blow;
Sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky,
O why did you leave us Owen? Why did you die?
And if some others are little more than a catalogue, unmusical, as:--
Now to begin to name them I'll continue in a direct line,
There's John Mitchell, Thomas Francis Meagher and also William Smith
O'Brien;
John Martin and O'Donoghue, Erin sorely feels their loss,
And to complete their number I will include O'Donovan Ross--
yet there is in them a certain dignity, an intensity born of
continuity of purpose; they are roughly hammered links in a chain of
unequal workmanship, but stretching back through the centuries to the
Munster poets of the days of Elizabeth, advised by Spenser to harry
them out of Ireland. The names change from age to age, that is all.
The verses of the seventeenth century hallow those of MacCarthys and
Fitzgeralds who fought for the Stuarts or "knocked obedience out of
the Gall"; the eighteenth ended with the rebels of '98; the nineteenth
had Emmet and Mitchell and its Manchester martyrs. Already in these
early days of the twentieth the street singers cry out:
Mac Dermott, Mallin, Hanrahan, Daly, Colbert and Mac Bride
All men who for our country's cause have nobly bled and died.
Even Yeats, falling into the tradition, has put in a lyric the names
of some of those who died in Easter week, and through whose death "a
terrible beauty is born."
II
I am glad to remember that through the twelve years of our married
life, 1880-92, my husband and his people were able to keep their liking
and respect for each other. For those were the years of the land war,
tenant struggling to gain a lasting possession for his children,
landlord to keep that which had been given in trust to him for his;
each ready in his anger to turn the heritage of the other to
desolation; while the vision of some went yet farther, through breaking
to the rebuilding of a nation. The passion, the imagination of Ireland
were thrown into the fight. I often thought to find some poem putting
such passion into fiery or memorable lines. But the first I thought
worth the keeping,--I have it yet, was Katherine Tynan's lament for
Parnell, written two years after his death. In tearing it from the
corner of some newspaper I had unwittingly taken note of almost the
moment of a new impulse in literature, in poetry. For with that death,
the loss of that dominant personality, and in the quarrel that
followed, came the disbanding of an army, the unloosing of forces,
the setting free of the imagination of Ireland.
III
Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to
get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a
part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars
as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might
turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible. But my
asking, timid with the fear of mockery, was unheeded. Yet I missed
but by a little an opportunity that might have made me a real Irish
scholar, and not as I am, imperfect, stumbling. For a kinsman learned
in the language, the translator of the wonderful _Silva Gaedelica_
had been sometimes a guest in the house, and would still have been
welcomed there but that my mother, who had a great dislike to the marriage
of cousins had fancied he was taking a liking to one of my elder sisters;
and with that suspicion the "winged nymph, Opportunity" had passed
from my reach. After my marriage I bought a grammar and worked at it
for a while with the help of a gardener. But it was difficult and my
teacher was languid, suspecting it may be some hidden mockery, for
those were the days before Irish became the fashion. It was not till
a dozen or more years later, and after my husband's death, that my
son, having won the classical entrance scholarship at Harrow, took
a fancy to learn a nearer language, and rode over to Tillyra before
breakfast one morning to ask our neighbour Edward Martyn to help him
to a teacher. He came back without what he had sought, but with the
gift of a fine old Irish Bible, which became a help in our early lessons.
For we set to work together, and I found the task a light one in comparison
with those first attempts. For that young priest, Father Eugene O'Growney,
sent from Ireland to look for health in California, had used the short
space of life left to him in writing simple lessons in Irish grammar,
that made at least the first steps easy. And another thing had happened.
Dr. Douglas Hyde, _An Craoibhin,_ had founded the Gaelic League,
and through it country people were gathered together in the Irish
speaking places to give the songs and poems, old and new, kept in their
memory. This discovery, this disclosure of the folk learning, the folk
poetry, the ancient tradition, was the small beginning of a weighty
change. It was an upsetting of the table of values, an astonishing
excitement. The imagination of Ireland had found a new homing place.
IV
My own imagination was aroused. I was becoming conscious of a world
close to me and that I had been ignorant of. It was not now in the
corners of newspapers I looked for poetic emotion, nor even to the
singers in the streets. It was among farmers and potato diggers and
old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what
was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my
childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of
parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.
An Aran man, repeating to me _The Grief of a Girl's Heart_ in
Irish told me it was with that song his mother had often sung him to
sleep as a child. It was from an old woman who had known Mary Hynes
and who said of her "The sun and the moon never shone upon anything
so handsome" that I first heard Raftery's song of praise of her, "The
pearl that was at Ballylee," a song "that has gone around the world
& as far as America." It was in a stonecutter's house where I went
to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript
book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.
It was to a working farmer's house I walked on many a moonlit evening
with the manuscript that his greater knowledge helped me to understand
and by his hearth that I read for the first time the _Vision of
Death_ and the _Lament for O'Daly._ After that I met with many
old people who had in the days before the Famine seen or talked with
the wandering poet who was in the succession of those who had made
and recited their lyrics on the Irish roads before Chaucer wrote.
V
And so I came by the road nearest me to the old legends, the old heroic
poems. It was a man of a hundred years who told me the story of
Cuchulain's fight with his own son, the son of Aoife, and how the young
man as he lay dying had reproached him and said "Did you not see how
I threw every spear fair and easy at you, and you threw your spear
hard and wicked at me? And I did not come out to tell my name to one
or to two but if I had told it to anyone in the whole world, I would
soonest tell it to your pale face." Deirdre's beauty "that brought
the Sons of Usnach to their death" comes into many of the country songs.
Grania of the yet earlier poems is not so well thought of. An old
basket-maker said scornfully "Many would tell you she slept under the
cromlechs but I don't believe that, and she a king's daughter. And
I don't believe she was handsome, either. If she was, why would she
have run away?" And another said "Finn had more wisdom than all the
men of the world, but he wasn't wise enough to put a bar on Grania."
I was told in many places of Osgar's bravery and Goll's strength and
Conan's bitter tongue, and the arguments of Oisin and Patrick. And
I have often been given the story of Oisin's journey to Tir-nan-Og,
the Country of the Young, that is, as I am told, "a fine place and
everything that is good is in it. And if anyone is sent there for a
minute he will want to stop in it, and twenty years will seem to him
like one half hour;" and "they say Tir-nan-Og is there yet, and so
it may be in any place."
VI
In the ancient times the poets told of this Country of the Young, with
its trees bearing fruit and blossom at the one time; its golden apples
that gave lasting life; its armies "that go out in good order, ahead
of their beautiful king, marching among blue spears scattering their
enemies, an army with high looks, rushing, avenging;" before news had
come to Ireland, of the Evangelist's vision of the Tree of Life and
of the "white horse, and he that sat on him had a bow, and a crown
was given to him, and he went forth conquering and to conquer." They
had told of the place "where delight is common, and music" before saintly
Columcille on the night of the Sabbath of rest "reached to the troops
of the archangels and the plain where music has not to be born." But
in later days religion, while offering abundant pictures of an after
world of punishment, "the flagstone of pain," "the cauldron that is
boiling for ever," the fire the least flame of which is "bigger than
fifteen hundred of turf," so that Oisin listening to St. Patrick demands
a familiar weapon, an iron flail, to beat down such familiar terrors,
has left Heaven itself far off, mysterious, intangible, without earthly
similes or foreshadowings. I think it is perhaps because of this that
the country poets of to-day and yesterday have put their dream, their
vision of the Delectable Mountains, of the Land of Promise, into
exaggerated praise of places dear to them. Raftery sees something
beyond the barren Mayo bogs when he tells of that "fine place without
fog falling, a blessed place that the sun shines on, and the wind does
not rise there or anything of the sort," and where as he says in
another poem "logwood and mahogany" grow in company with its wind
twisted beech and storm bent sycamore. Even my own home "sweet Coole
demesne" has been transfigured in songs of the neighbourhood; and a
while ago an old woman asking alms at the door while speaking of a
monastery near Athenry broke into a chant of praise that has in it
perhaps some memory of the Well of Healing at the world's end that
helped the gods to new strength in their great battle at Moytura.
"Three barrels there are with water, and to see the first barrel
boiling it is certain you will get a cure. Water there does be rushing
down; you to stop you could hear it talking; to go there you would
get cured of anything unless it might be the stroke of the Fool."
VII
In translating these poems I have chosen to do so in the speech of
the thatched houses where I have heard and gathered them. _An
Craoibhin_ had already used this Gaelic construction, these
Elizabethan phrases, in translating the _Love Songs of Connacht_,
as I have used it even in my creative work. Synge had not yet used
it when he found in my _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ "the dialect
he had been trying to master," and of which he afterwards made such
splendid use. Most of the translations in this book have already been
printed in _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_, _Gods and Fighting Men_,
_Saints and Wonders_, and _Poets and Dreamers_. When in the
first month of the new year I began to choose from among them, it
seemed strange to me that the laments so far outnumbered any songs
of joy. But before that month was out news was brought to me that made
the keening of women for the brave and of those who are left lonely
after the young seem to be but the natural outcome and expression
of human life.
AUGUSTA GREGORY.
COOLE, May, 1918.
_CONTENTS_
The Grief of a Girl's Heart
A Lament for Fair-Haired Donough that Was Hanged in Galway
Raftery's Praise of Mary Hynes
His Lament for O'Daly
His Praise of the Little Hill and the Plains of Mayo
His Lament for O'Kelly
His Vision of Death
His Repentance
His Answer when Some Stranger Aske Who He Was
A Blessing on Patrick Sarsfield
An Aran Maid's Wedding
A Poem Written in Time of Trouble by an Irish Priest Who Had Taken
Orders in France
The Heart of the Wood
An Croaibhin Complain Because He Is a Poet
He Cries Out Against Love
He Meditates on the Life of a Rich Man
Forgaill's Praise of Columcille
The Deer's Cry
The Hymn of Molling's Guest, the Man Full of Trouble
The Hag of Beare
The Seven Heavens
The Journey of the Sun
The Nature of the Stars
The Call to Bran
The Army of the Sidhe
Credhe's Complaint at the Battle of the White Strand
A Sleepy Song that Grania Used to Be Singing Over Diarmuid the Time
They Were Wandering and Hiding From Finn
Her Song to Rouse Him from Sleep
Her Lament for His Death
The Parting of Goll and His Wife
The Death of Osgar
Oisin's Vision
His Praise of Finn
Oisin after the Fenians
The Foretelling of Cathbad the Druid
At Deidre's Birth
Deirdre's Lament for the Sons of Usnach
Emer's Lament for Cuchulain
THE KILTARTAN POETRY BOOK
_The Grief of a Girl's Heart_
O Donall og, if you go across the sea, bring myself with you and do
not forget it; and you will have a sweetheart for fair days and market
days, and the daughter of the King of Greece beside you at night. It
is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was speaking
of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird through the
woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find me.
You promised me, and you said a lie to me, that you would be before
me where the sheep are flocked; I gave a whistle and three hundred
cries to you, and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.
You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold under
a silver mast; twelve towns with a market in all of them, and a fine
white court by the side of the sea.
You promised me a thing that is not possible, that you would give me
gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of the skin
of a bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.
O Donall og, it is I would be better to you than a high, proud,
spendthrift lady: I would milk the cow; I would bring help to you;
and if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you.
O, ochone, and it's not with hunger or with wanting food, or drink,
or sleep, that I am growing thin, and my life is shortened; but it
is the love of a young man has withered me away.
It is early in the morning that I saw him coming, going along the road
on the back of a horse; he did not come to me; he made nothing of me;
and it is on my way home that I cried my fill.
When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness, I sit down and I go
through my trouble; when I see the world and do not see my boy, he
that has an amber shade in his hair.
It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you; the Sunday that is last
before Easter Sunday. And myself on my knees reading the Passion; and
my two eyes giving love to you for ever.
O, aya! my mother, give myself to him; and give him all that you have
in the world; get out yourself to ask for alms, and do not come back
and forward looking for me.
My mother said to me not to be talking with you to-day, or to-morrow,
or on the Sunday; it was a bad time she took for telling me that; it
was shutting the door after the house was robbed.
My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe, or as the black
coal that is on the smith's forge; or as the sole of a shoe left in
white halls; it was you put that darkness over my life.
You have taken the east from me; you have taken the west from me; you
have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken
the moon, you have taken the sun from me; and my fear is great that
you have taken God from me!
_A Lament for Fair-Haired Donough that Was Hanged in Galway_
It was bound fast here you saw him, and wondered to see him,
Our fair-haired Donough, and he after being condemned;
There was a little white cap on him in place of a hat,
And a hempen rope in the place of a neck-cloth.
I am after walking here all through the night,
Like a young lamb in a great flock of sheep;
My breast open, my hair loosened out,
And how did I find my brother but stretched before me!
The first place I cried my fill was at the top of the lake;
The second place was at the foot of the gallows;
The third place was at the head of your dead body
Among the Gall, and my own head as if cut in two.
If you were with me in the place you had a right to be,
Down in Sligo or down in Ballinrobe,
It is the gallows would be broken, it is the rope would be cut
And fair-haired Donough going home by the path.
O fair-haired Donough, it is not the gallows was fit for you;
But to be going to the barn, to be threshing out the straw;
To be turning the plough to the right hand and to the left,
To be putting the red side of the soil uppermost.
O fair-haired Donough, O dear brother,
It is well I know who it was took you away from me;
Drinking from the cup, putting a light to the pipe,
And walking in the dew in the cover of the night.
O Michael Malley, O scourge of misfortune!
My brother was no calf of a vagabond cow;
But a well-shaped boy on a height or a hillside,
To knock a low pleasant sound out of a hurling-stick.
And fair-haired Donough, is not that the pity,
You that would carry well a spur or a boot;
I would put clothes in the fashion on you from cloth that would be
lasting;
I would send you out like a gentleman's son.
O Michael Malley, may your sons never be in one another's company;
May your daughters never ask a marriage portion of you;
The two ends of the table are empty, the house is filled,
And fair-haired Donough, my brother, is stretched out.
There is a marriage portion coming home for Donough,
But it is not cattle or sheep or horses;
But tobacco and pipes and white candles,
And it will not be begrudged to them that will use it.
_Raftery's Praise of Mary Hynes_
Going to Mass by the will of God, the day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan, and I fell in love with
her there and then.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly, as by report was her own way; and
she said "Raftery my mind is easy; you may come to-day to Ballylee."
When I heard her offer I did not linger; when her talk went to my heart
my heart rose. We had only to go across the three fields; we had
daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure; she had fair hair
and she sitting beside me; and she said, "Drink, Raftery, and a hundred
welcomes; there is a strong cellar in Ballylee."
O star of light and O sun in harvest; O amber hair, O my share of the
world! Will you come with me on the Sunday, till we agree together
before all the people?
I would not begrudge you a song every Sunday evening; punch on the
table or wine if you would drink it. But O King of Glory, dry the roads
before me till I find the way to Ballylee.
There is sweet air on the side of the hill, when you are looking down
upon Ballylee; when you are walking in the valley picking nuts and
blackberries, there is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe.
What is the worth of greatness till you have the light of the flower
of the branch that is by your side? There is no good to deny it or
to try and hide it; she is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart.
There was no part in Ireland I did not travel, from the rivers to the
tops of the mountains; to the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is
hidden, and I saw no beauty but was behind hers. Her hair was shining
and her brows were shining too; her face was like herself, her mouth
pleasant and sweet; She is the pride and I give her the branch; she
is the shining flower of Ballylee.
It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman, has beauty in her mind and
in her face. If a hundred clerks were gathered together, they could
not write down a half of her ways.
_His Lament for O'Daly_
It was Thomas O'Daly that roused up young people and scattered them,
and since death played on him, may God give him grace. The country
is all sorrowful, always talking, since their man of sport died that
would win the goal in all parts with his music. The swans on the water
are nine times blacker than a blackberry since the man died from us
that had pleasantness on the top of his fingers. His two grey eyes
were like the dew of the morning that lies on the grass. And since
he was laid in the grave, the cold is getting the upper hand.
If you travel the five provinces, you would not find his equal for
countenance or behaviour, for his equal never walked on land or grass.
High King of Nature, you who have all powers in yourself, he that
wasn't narrow-hearted, give him shelter in heaven for it!
He was the beautiful branch. In every quarter that he ever knew he
would scatter his fill and not gather. He would spend the estate of
the Dalys, their beer and their wine. And that he may be sitting in
the chair of grace, in the middle of Paradise!
A sorrowful story on death, it's he is the ugly chief that did
treachery, that didn't give him credit, O strong God, for a little
time.
There are young women, and not without reason, sorry and heart-broken
and withered, since he was left at the church. Their hair thrown down
and hanging, turned grey on their head.
No flower in any garden, and the leaves of the trees have leave to
cry, and they falling on the ground. There is no green flower on the
tops of the tufts, since there did a boarded coffin go on Daly.
There is sorrow on the men of mirth, a clouding over the day, and no
trout swim in the river. Orpheus on the harp, he lifted up everyone
out of their habits; and he that stole what Argus was watching the
time he took away Io; Apollo, as we read, gave them teaching, and Daly
was better than all these musicians.
A hundred wouldn't be able to put together his actions and his deeds
and his many good works. And Raftery says this much for Daly, because
he liked him.
_His Praise of the Little Hill and the Plains of Mayo_
After the Christmas, with the help of Christ, I will never stop if
I am alive; I will go to the sharp-edged little hill; for it is a fine
place without fog falling; a blessed place that the sun shines on,
and the wind doesn't rise there or anything of the sort.
And if you were a year there you would get no rest, only sitting up
at night and forever drinking. The lamb and the sheep are there; the
cow and the calf are there, fine lands are there without heath and
without bog. Ploughing & seed-sowing in the right month, plough and
harrow prepared and ready; the rent that is called for there, they
have means to pay it. There is oats and flax & large eared barley.
There are beautiful valleys with good growth in them and hay. Rods
grow there, and bushes and tufts, white fields are there and respect
for trees; shade and shelter from wind and rain; priests and friars
reading their book; spending and getting is there, and nothing scarce.