Poets and Dreamers: Studies and translations from the Irish

by Lady Gregory

JACOBITE BALLADS.

I was looking the other day through a collection of poems, lately taken down from Irish-speaking country people for the Oireactas, the great yearly meeting of the Gaelic League; and a line in one of them seemed strange to me: 'Prebaim mo chroidhe le mo Stuart glegeal,' 'my heart leaps up with my bright Stuart'; for I did not know there was still a memory of James and Charles among the people. The refrain of the poem was: 'Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!' and these are some of its verses:—

'There are young girls through the whole country would sit alongside of me through a half-hour, till we would be telling you the story together of what it was put myself under trouble; I make my complaints, wanting my comrade. Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!

'Where are my people that were wise and learned? Where is the troop readying their spears, that they do not smooth out this knot for me? Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!

'I was for a while airy and beautiful, and all my treasure with my pleasant James.... On the top of all, my Stuart to leave me. Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!

'It is the truth I cannot sleep in the night, fretting for my comrade; I to be lying down, and he weak under cold. My heart leaps up with my bright Stuart. Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!

'It is hard for me to lie down after that; it is an empty thing to be crying the loss of my comrade, and I lying down with the mean people; it is my death the Stuart not to come at all. Och, my grief, my friend stole away from me!'

I had not heard any songs of this sort in Galway, and I remembered that our Connaught Raftery, whose poems are still teaching history, dealt very shortly with the Royal Stuarts. 'James,' he says, 'was the worst man for habits.... He laid chains on our bogs and mountains.... The father wasn't worse than the son Charles, that left sharp scourges on Ireland. When God and the people thought it time the story to be done, he lost his head.... The next James—sharp blame to him—gave his daughter to William as woman and wife; made the Irish English, and the English Irish, like wheat and oats in the month of harvest. And it was at Aughrim on a Monday many a son of Ireland found sorrow, without speaking of all that died.'

So I went to ask some of the wise old neighbours, who sit in wide chimney-nooks by turf fires, and to whom I go to look for knowledge of many things, if they knew of any songs in praise of the Stuarts. But they were scornful. 'The Stuarts?' one said; 'no, indeed; they have no songs about them here in the West, whatever they may have in the South. Why would they, running away and leaving the country? And what good did they ever do it?' And another, who lives on the Clare border, said: 'I used to hear them singing "The White Cockade" through the country. "King James was beaten, and all his well-wishers; my grief, my boy that went with them!" But I don't think the people had ever much opinion of the Stuarts; but in those days they were all prone to versify. But the famine did away with all that.' And then he also was scornful, and said: 'Sure King James ran all the way from the Boyne to Dublin, after the battle. There was a lady walking in the street at Dublin when he got there; and he told her the battle was lost; and she said: "Faith you made good haste; you made no delay on the road." So he said no more after that.'

And then he told me of the Battle of Aughrim, that is still such a terrible memory; and how the 'Danes'—the De Danaan—the mysterious divine race that were conquered by the Gael, and who still hold an invisible kingdom—'were dancing in the raths around Aughrim the night after the battle. Their ancestors were driven out of Ireland before; and they were glad when they saw those that had put them out put out themselves, and every one of them skivered.'

And another old man said: 'When I was a young chap knocking about in Connemara, I often heard songs about the Stuarts, and talk of them and of the blackbird coming over the water. But they found it hard to get over James making off after the Battle of the Boyne.' And another says of James: 'They liked him well before he ran; they didn't like him after that.'

And when I looked through the lately gathered bundle of songs again, and through some old collections of Jacobite songs in Irish, I found they almost all belonged to Munster. And if they are still sung there, it is not, I think, for the sake of the kings, but for the sake of the poets who made them—Red-haired Owen O'Sullivan, potato-digger, harvestman, hedge-schoolmaster, whose poems are still the joy of the Munster people; O'Rahilly, more learned, and as boundlessly redundant; O'Donnell, whose heart was set on translating Homer into Irish; O'Heffernan, the blind wanderer; and many others. For the Munstermen have always been more 'prone to versify' than their leaner neighbours on the bogs and stones of Connaught.

There is a common formula for most of these songs or 'Visions,' Aislinghe, as they are called. Just as artists of to-day find no monotony in drawing Ireland over and over again with her harp, her wolf-dog, and her round tower, so the Munster poets found no monotony in representing her as a beautiful woman, white-skinned, with curling hair, with cheeks in which 'the lily and the rose were fighting for mastery.' The poet asks her if she is Venus, or Helen, or Deirdre, and describes her beauty in torrents of alliterative adjectives. Then she makes her complaint against England, or her lament for her own sorrows or for the loss of her Stuart lover, spoken of sometimes as 'the bricklayer,' or 'the merchant's son.' The framework is artificial; but the laments are often very pathetic the love of Ireland, and the hatred of England born of that love, finding expression in them.

John O'Donnell sees her 'like a young queen that is going astray for the king being banished from her, that had a right to come and set her loose.' O'Rahilly, in one of his poems, shows the beautiful woman held to her Saxon lover by some strange enchantment:—

'I met brightness of brightness upon the path of loneliness; plaiting of plaiting in every lock of her yellow hair. News of news she gave me, and she as lonely as she was; news of the coming back of him that owns the tribute of the king.

'Folly of follies I to go so near to her; slave I was made by a slave that put me in hard bonds. She made away from me then, and I following after her, till we came to a house of houses made by Druid enchantments.

'They broke into mocking laughter, a troop of men of enchantments, and a troop of young girls with smooth-plaited hair. They put me up in chains; they made no delay about it; and my love holding to her breast an awkward ugly clown.

'I told her then with the truest words I could tell her, it was not right for her to be joined with a common clumsy churl; and the man that was three times fairer than the whole race of the Scots, waiting till she would come to him to be his beautiful bride.

'At the sound of my words her pride set her crying; the tears were running down over the kindling of her cheeks. She sent a lad to bring me safe from the place I was in. She is the brightness of brightness I met in the path of loneliness.'

Sometimes the Stuart is almost forgotten in the story of sorrows and the indictment of England. O'Heffernan complains in one of his songs that many of the heroes of Ireland have passed away, and their names have never been put in a song by the poets; 'and they even leave their verses without any account of Charles the wanderer, though I promise you they are not satisfied without giving some lines on Seaghan Buidhe' (one of the names for England). Yet he himself, when very downhearted, 'on the edge of the great wood under a harsh cloak of sorrow,' is cheered by the pleasant sound of a swarm of bees in search of their ruler; and with the pleasant thought that 'the harvest will be a bad one and with no joy in it to Seaghan. George will be sent back over the sea, and the tribe that was so high up will be left without gold or townlands; and I not pitying their sorrow.' And he winds up: 'In Shronehill, if I were stretched at rest under a hard flag, and to hear this story moving about so pleasantly, by force and strength of my shoulders I would throw the sod off me; and I coming back leaping to hear the news.'

And another writer, Seaghan Clarach, looks forward to seeing 'timid George tame upon the road, without wine, without meat, without thread for his shoes.' And his last verse, his 'binding,' is, 'I beseech of God, I ask and I pray very hard, to cast out the gluttons that tormented the generous race of the Gael, from the island of the west, under hard bonds, and to banish the foreign devils from us.'

For poets and people found it hard to forget Cromwell; and how 'the sons of the Gael are scorched, tormented, pitchforked, put under the yoke, by boors that are used to doing treachery.'

When the Stuarts come to mind, they are given fair words enough. 'The prince and heart-secret Charles that is sorrowful now and under weariness ... will be under esteem; and the Gael pleasant in the lime-white house.' ... 'It is friendly, fair bright, companionable, loving, brave, Charles will be, with sway, without a mist about him.'

And in one of Red Owen's 'Visions' he is told not to forget James, who is 'persevering, well-tempered, affectionate, stout, sweet, kind, poetical.'

Yet the Stuart seems to be always a faint and unreal image; a saint by whose name a heavy oath is sworn. There are no personal touches such as I find in a song taken down from some countryman, on Patrick Sarsfield, the brave, handsome fighter, the descendant of Conall Cearnach, the man who, after the Boyne, offered to 'change kings and fight the battle again.' This ballad seems to have more of Connaught simplicity than of Munster luxuriance in it:—

'O Patrick Sarsfield, health be to you, since you went to France and your camps were loosened; making your sighs along with the king, and you left poor Ireland and the Gael defeated—Och ochone!

'O Patrick Sarsfield, it is a man with God you are; and blessed is the earth you ever walked on. The blessing of the bright sun and the moon upon you, since you took the day from the hands of King William—Och ochone!

'O Patrick Sarsfield, the prayer of every person with you; my own prayer and the prayer of the Son of Mary with you, since you took the narrow ford going through Biorra, and since at Cuilenn O'Cuanac you won Limerick—Och ochone!

'I will go up on the mountain alone; and I will come hither from it again. It is there I saw the camp of the Gael, the poor troop thinned, not keeping with one another—Och ochone!

'My five hundred healths to you, halls of Limerick, and to the beautiful troop was in our company; it is bonfires we used to have and playing cards, and the word of God was often with us—Och ochone!

'There were many soldiers glad and happy that were going the way through seven weeks; but now they are stretched down in Aughrim—Och ochone!

'They put the first breaking on us at the Bridge of the Boyne; the second breaking on the Bridge of Slaney; the third breaking in Aughrim of O'Kelly; and O sweet Ireland, my five hundred healths to you—Och ochone!

'O'Kelly has manuring for his land, that is not sand or dung, but ready soldiers doing bravery with pikes, that were left in Aughrim stretched in ridges—Och ochone!

'Who is that beyond on the hill, Beinn Edair? I a poor soldier with King James. I was last year in arms and in dress, but this year I am asking alms—Och ochone!'

There are other symbolic songs besides the 'Visions.' Mangan's fine translation of Kathleen ni Houlihan is well known; and it is likely the king is calling to Ireland in 'Ceann dubh deelish,' that is beautiful in all translations. This is An Craoibhin's:—

'The women of the village are in madness and trouble,
Pulling their hair and letting it go with the wind;
They will not take a boy of the men of the country
Till they go into the rout with the boys of the king.

'Black head, darling, darling, darling,
Black head, darling, move over to me;
Black head brighter than swan and than seagull,
It's a man without heart gives not love to thee.'

But most of the translations have been in the affected style of the early part of the last century twisting the sense to give what was thought to be a romantic turn. A verse of Seaghan Clarach's, for instance, the lament of a farmer 'who has been wrestling with the world': 'The two that belong to me are without shelter, and my yoke of cattle without grass, without growth; there is misery on my people and their elbows without sound clothes,' is turned into:—

'The loved ones my life would have nourished
Are foodless, and bare, and cold.
My flocks by their fountain that flourished
Decay on the mountain wold.'

But there is one mistranslation for whose sake we must forgive many others, for it has given the sad refrain that has often been on Irish lips:—

'Seaghan O'Dwyer a Gleanna,
We're worsted in the game!'

Here are one or two of the many verses sung to the Little Black Rose by her lovers, poor or royal:—

'There is love through and through me for you all the length of a year; sore love, vexing love, lasting love, love that left me without health, without a road, without running; and for ever, ever, without any sway at all over my Fair Black Rose.

'I would travel through Munster with you, and the boundaries of the hills, if I thought I could find your secret, or a part of your love. O branch of the tree, it seems to me that you love me; that the flower of kind women is my Fair Black Rose.'

'My heart leaps up with my bright Stuart!' James and Charles are, I think, the only English kings whose names, as it were by accident, have found their way into Irish song. And it is likely they are the last to find a place there, for the imagination of Ireland still tilts the beam to the national side; and the loyalty the poets of many hundred years have called for, is loyalty to Kathleen ni Houlihan. 'Have they not given her their wills, and their hearts, and their dreams? What have they left for any less noble Royalty?'

1902.

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AN CRAOIBHIN'S POEMS

'"I would much rather (and I take every occasion of making this protest) write, so to say, in a dead language and for a dead people, than write in those deaf and stammering (sorde e mute) tongues, French and English, notwithstanding they are the fashion with their rules and exercises." This is so with me. Alfieri wrote these words a hundred years ago, and they express what is in my own mind. I would like better to make even one good verse in the language in which I am now writing, than to make a whole book of verses in English. For if there should be any good found in my English verses, it would not go to the credit of my mother, Ireland, but of my stepmother, England.'

I have translated this from Douglas Hyde's preface to his little book of poems, lately published in Dublin, Ubhla de'n Craoibh, "Apples from the Branch." An Craoibhin Aoibhin, "The delightful little branch," is the name by which he is called all over Irish-speaking Ireland; and a gold branch bearing golden apples is stamped on the cover of his book. The poems had already been published, one by one, in a weekly paper; and a friend of mine tells me he has heard them sung and repeated by country people in many parts of Ireland—in Connemara, in Donegal, in Galway, in Kerry, in the Islands of Aran.

Three or four of the thirty-three poems the book holds are, so to speak, official, written for the Gaelic League by its president; and these, like most official odes, are only for the moment. Some are ballads dealing with the old subjects of Irish ballads—emigration, exile, defeat, and death; for Douglas Hyde, as may be guessed from his preface, has, no less than his fellows—

'Hidden in his heart the flame out of the eyes
Of Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.'

But these national ballads, though very popular, are, I think, not so good as his more personal poems. I suppose no narrative of what others have done or felt or suffered can move one like a flash from 'that little infinite, faltering, eternal flame that one calls oneself.' Even in my bare prose translation, this poem will, I think, be found to have as distinct a quality as that of Villon or of Heine:—

'There are three fine devils eating my heart—
They left me, my grief! without a thing;
Sickness wrought, and Love wrought,
And an empty pocket, my ruin and my woe.
Poverty left me without a shirt,
Barefooted, barelegged, without any covering;
Sickness left me with my head weak
And my body miserable, an ugly thing.
Love left me like a coal upon the floor,
Like a half-burned sod, that is never put out,
Worse than the cough, worse than the fever itself,
Worse than any curse at all under the sun,
Worse than the great poverty
Is the devil that is called "Love" by the people.
And if I were in my young youth again,
I would not take, or give, or ask for a kiss!'

The next, in the form of a little folk-song, expresses the thought of the idealist of all time, that makes him cry, as one of the oldest of the poets cried long ago, 'Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird; the birds round about are against her.' Yet, with its whimsical fancies and exaggerations, it could hardly have been written in any but Irish air.

'It's my grief that I am not a little white duck,
And I'd swim over the sea to France or to Spain;
I would not stay in Ireland for one week only,
To be without eating, without drinking, without a full jug.

'Without a full jug, without eating, without drinking,
Without a feast to get, without wine, without meat,
Without high dances, without a big name, without music;
There is hunger on me, and I astray this long time.

'It's my grief that I am not an old crow;
I would sit for awhile up on the old branch,
I could satisfy my hunger, and I not as I am,
With a grain of oats or a white potato.

'It's my grief that I am not a red fox,
Leaping strong and swift on the mountains,
Eating cocks and hens without pity,
Taking ducks and geese as a conqueror.

'It's my grief that I am not a fair salmon,
Going through the strong full water,
Catching the mayflies by my craft,
Swimming at my choice, and swimming with the stream.

'It's my grief that I am of the race of the poets;
It would be better for me to be a high rock,
Or a stone or a tree or an herb or a flower
Or anything at all, but the thing that I am.'

The sympathy of the moods of nature with the moods of man is a traditional heritage that has come to us through the poets, from the old time when the three great waves of the sea answered to a cry of distress in Ireland, or when, as in Israel, the land mourned and the herbs of every field withered, for the wickedness of them that dwelt therein. The sea, and the winds blowing from the sea, can never be very far from the dweller in Ireland; and they echo the loneliness of the lonely listener.

'Cold, sharp lamentation
In the cold bitter winds
Ever blowing across the sky;
Oh, there was loneliness with me!

'The loud sounding of the waves
Beating against the shore,
Their vast, rough, heavy outcry,
Oh, there was loneliness with me!

'The light sea-gulls in the air,
Crying sharply through the harbours,
The cries and screams of the birds
With my own heart! Oh! that was loneliness.

'The voice of the winds and the tide,
And the long battle of the mighty war;
The sea, the earth, the skies, the blowing of the winds.
Oh! there was loneliness in all of them together.'

Here is a verse from another poem of loneliness:—

'It is dark the night is; I do not see one star at all;
And it is dark and heavy my thoughts are that are scattered and straying.
There is no sound about but of the birds going over my head—
The lapwing striking the air with long-drawn, weak blows
And the plover, that comes like a bullet, cutting the night with its whistle;
And I hear the wild geese higher again with their rough screech.
But I do not hear any other sound, it is that increases my grief—
Not one other cry but the cry and the call of the birds on the bog.'

Here is another, in which the storm outside and the storm within answer to one another:—

'The heavy clouds are threatening,
And it's little but they'll take the roof off the house;
The heavy thunder is answering
To every flash of the yellow fire.
I, by myself, within in my room,
That is narrow, small, warm, am sitting,
I look at the surly skies,
And I listen to the wind.

'I was light, airy, lively,
On the young morning of yesterday;
But when the evening came,
I was like a dead man!
I have not one jot of hope
But for a bed in the clay;
Death is the same as life to me
From this out, from a word I heard yesterday.'

The next is very simple, and puts into more homely words the feeling of 'lonesomeness' that is looked upon as almost the worst of evils by the Irish countryman, as we see by his proverb: 'It is better to be quarreling than to be lonesome.' 'I would be lonesome in it,' is often the reason given for a refusal to go from bog or mountain cabin to some crowded place 'where there is not heed for one or love.'

'Oh! if there were in this world
Any nice little place,
To be my own, my own for ever,
My own only,
I would have great joy—great ease—
Beyond what I have,
Without a place in the world where I can say:
"This is my own."

It's a pity for a man to know,
And it's a pain,
That there is no place in the world
Where there is heed for him or love;
That there is not in the world for him
A heart or a hand
To give help to him
To the mering of the next world.

'It is hard and it is bitter,
And a sharp grief,
It is woe and it is pity,
To be by oneself.
It is nothing the way you are,
To anyone at all.
It is nothing the way you are,
To yourself at last!'

I suppose the following may be called a political poem, from its elusive reference to Home Rule. I was not sure on the point myself; for I thought the wearer of the 'blue cloak and birds' feathers,' must be a fine lady, perhaps laying enchantment on the fields. But I heard some one ask the Craoibhin who he meant, and his answer was: 'I suppose I was thinking of an aide-de-camp':—

'I am looking at my cows walking,
What are you that would put me out of my luck?
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?

'I will not always be turned backwards.
If there is need to be humble to you, great is my grief,
If I cannot walk, if I cannot walk, if I cannot walk in my own fields.

'It's little my respect, and it's little my desire,
For your blue cloak, and your birds' feathers.
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?

'The day is coming as it's easy to see,
When there shall not be among us the ugly like of you.
And each one shall be walking, and each one shall be walking,
Wherever shall be his will and his own desire.'

There are some love songs in the little volume. But their writer has had, in his beautiful translations of the 'Love Songs of Connacht,' to put such intensity of passion into English, that he must despair of putting any new wings to passion, or any new exaggeration into lovers' words. In one of these Connacht songs, the lover says: 'Blacker is the sun when setting than your features, Mary!' And she answers back: 'Neither star nor sun shows one-third much light as your shadow!' Another lover says of the woman he desires: 'I will write largely of her, because of the thousands who hoped for her, and who have been lost; and a hundred men of these who still live, are in pain and under locks through love. And I myself am not free, but am a bondsman in bonds.' And another boasts of 'a love without littleness, without weakness; love from age till death, love from folly growing, love that shall send me close beneath the clay, love without a hope of the world, love without envy of fortune, love that left me outside in captivity, love of my heart beyond women.' Douglas Hyde's own love songs are quiet and staid in contrast to these; but nevertheless they have a sober charm. Here are the last verses of one of them:—

'Will you be as hard,
Colleen, as you are quiet?
Will you be without pity
On me for ever?

'Listen to me, Noireen,
Listen, aroon;
Put healing on me
From your quiet mouth.

'I am in the little road
That is dark and narrow,
The little road that has led
Thousands to sleep.'

In his preface to the 'Love Songs of Connacht' he says he finds in them 'more of grief and trouble, more of melancholy and contrition of heart, than of gaiety or hope'; and he writes: 'Not careless and light-hearted alone is the Gaelic nature; there is also beneath the loudest mirth a melancholy spirit; and if they let on to be without heed for anything but sport and revelry, there is nothing in it but letting on.' There is grief and trouble, as I have shown, in many of his own songs, which the people have taken to their hearts so quickly; but there is also a touch of hope, of glad belief that, in spite of heavy days of change, all things are working for good at the last.

Here are some verses from a poem called 'There is a Change coming':—

'When that time comes it will come heavily;
He will grow fat that was lean;
He will grow lean that was fat,
Without shelter for the head, without mirth, without help.

'The low will be raised up, says the poet;
The thing that was high will be thrown down again;
The world will be changed from end to end:
When that time comes it will come heavily.

'If you yourself see this thing coming,
And the country without luck, without law, without authority,
Swept with the storm, without knowledge, without strength,
Remember my words, and don't let your heart break.

'This life is like a tree;
The top green, branches soft, the bark smooth and shining;
But there is a little worm shut up in it
Sucking at the sap all through the day.

'But from this old, cold, withered tree,
A new plant will grow up;
The old world will die without pity,
But the young world will grow up on its grave.'

Here is a fine vision of a battle-field:—

'The time I think of the cause of Ireland
My heart is torn within me.

'The time I think of the death of the people
Who protected Ireland bravely and faithfully.

'They are stretched on the side of the mountain
Very low, one with another.

'Hidden under grass, or under tall herbs,
Far from friends or help or friendship.

'Not a child or a wife near them;
Not a priest to be found there or a friar;

'But the mountain eagle and the white eagle
Moving overhead across the skies.

'Without a defence against the sun in the daytime;
Without a shelter against the skies at night.

'It's many a good soldier, joyful and pleasant,
That has had his laughing mouth closed there.

'There is many a young breast with a hole through it;
The little black hole that is death to a man.

'There is many a brave man stripped there,
His body naked, without vest or shirt.

'The young man that was proud and beautiful yesterday,
When the woman he loved left a kiss on his mouth.

'There is many a married woman, with the child at her breast,
Without her comrade, without a father for her child to-night.

'There's many a castle without a lord, and many a lord without a house;
And little forsaken cabins with no one in them.

'I saw a fox leaving its den
Asking for a body to feed its hunger.

'There's a fierce wolf at Carrig O'Neill;
There is blood on his tongue and blood on his mouth.

'I saw them, and I heard the cries
Of kites and of black crows.

'Ochone! Is not the only Son of God angry;
Ochone! The red blood that was poured out yesterday!'

I do not know who the following poem was written about, or if it is about anyone in particular; but one line of it puts into words the emotion of many an Irish 'felon.' 'It is with the people I was; it is not with the law I was.' For the Irish crime, treason-felony, is only looked on as a crime in the eyes of the law, not in the eyes of the people:—

'I am lying in prison,
I am in bonds;
To-morrow I will be hanged,
Who am to-night so quiet,
So quiet;
Who am to-night so quiet.

'I am in prison,
My heart is cold and heavy;
To-morrow I will be hanged,
And there is no help for me,
My grief;
Och! there is no help for me.

'I am in prison,
And I did no wrong;
I only did the work
Was just, was right, was good,
I did,
Oh, I did the thing was good.

'It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was;
But they took me in my sleep,
On the side of Cnoc-na-Feigh;
And so
To-morrow they will hang me.'

'I am weak in my body,
I am vexed in my heart,
And to-morrow I will be hanged;
Lying beneath the clay,
My sorrow,
Lying beneath the clay.

'May God give pardon
To my vexed, sorrowful soul;
May God give mercy
To me now and forever,
Amen!
To me now and forever.'

But translation is poor work. Even if it gives a glimpse of the heart of a poem, too much is lost in losing the outward likeness. Here are the last lines of the lament of a felon's brother:—

'Now that you are stretched in the cold grave
May God set you free:
It's vexed and sorry and pitiful are my thoughts;
It's sorrowful I am to-day!'

I look at them and read them; and wonder why when I first read them, their sound had hung about me for days like a sobbing wind; but when I look at them in their own form, the sob is in them still:

Nois ann san uaiġ ḟuair ó tá tu sínte
Go saoraiġ Dia ṫu
Is buaiḋcarṫa, brónaċ boċt atá mo smaointe
Is bronaċ mé anḋiú.

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