V.
His life was always the wandering, homeless life of the old bards. After Cromwell's time, as the houses they went to grew poorer, they had added music to their verse-making; and Raftery's little fiddle helped to make him welcome in the Ireland which was, in spite of many sorrows, as merry and light-hearted up to the time of the great famine as England had been up to the time of the Puritans. 'He had no place of his own,' I am told, 'but to be walking the country. He did well to die before the bad years came. He used to play at Kiltartan cross for the dancing of a Sunday evening. And when he'd come to any place, the people would gather and he'd give them a dance; for there was three times as many people in the world then as what there is now. The people would never have let him want; but as to money, what could he do with it, and he with no place of his own?' An old woman near Craughwell says: 'He used to come here often; it was like home to him. He wouldn't have a dance then; my father liked better to be sitting listening to his talk and his stories; only when we'd come in, he'd take the fiddle and say: "Now we must give the youngsters a tune."' And an old man, who is still lamenting the fall in prices after the Battle of Waterloo, remembers having seen him 'one time at a shebeen house that used to be down there in Clonerle. He was playing the fiddle, and there used to be two couples at a time dancing; and they would put two halfpence in the plate, and Raftery would rattle them and say: "It's good for the two sorts to be together," and there would be great laughing.' And it is also said 'there was a welcome before him in every house he'd come to; and wherever he went, they'd think the time too short he would be with them.' There is a story I often hear told about the marriage near Cappaghtagle of a poor servant boy and girl, 'that was only a marriage and not a wedding, till Raftery chanced to come in; and he made it one. There wasn't a bit but bread and herrings in the house; but he made a great song about the grand feast they had, and he put every sort of thing into the song—all the beef that was in Ireland; and went to the Claddagh, and didn't leave a fish in the sea. And there was no one at all at it; but he brought all the bacach and poor men in Ireland, and gave them a pound each. He went to bed after, without them giving him a drop to drink; but he didn't mind that when they hadn't got it to give.'
The wandering, unrestrained life was probably to his mind; and I do not think there is a word of discontent or complaint in any of his verses, though he was always poor, and must often have known hardship. In the 'Talk with the Bush,' he describes in his whimsical, exaggerated way, a wetting, which must have been one of very many.
'It chanced that I was travelling and the rain was heavy; I stepped aside, and not without reason, till I'd get a wall or a bush that would shelter me.
'I didn't meet at the side of a gap only an old, withered, miserable bush by the side of the wall, and it bent with the west wind. I stepped under it, and it was a wet place; torrents of rain coming down from all quarters, east and west and straight downwards; its equal I couldn't see, unless it is seeds winnowed through a riddle. It was sharp, angry, fierce, and stormy, like a deer running and racing past me. The storm was drowning the country, and my case was pitiful, and I suffering without cause.
'An hour and a quarter it was raining; there isn't a drop that fell but would fill a quart and put a heap on it afterwards; there's not a wheat or rape mill in the neighbourhood but it would set going in the middle of a field.'
At last relief comes:—
'It was shortly then the rain grew weak, the sun shone, and the wind rose. I moved on, and I smothered and drowned in wet, till I came to a little house, and there was a welcome before me. Many quarts of water I squeezed from my skirt and my cape. I hung my hat on a nail, and I lying in a sweet flowery bed. But I was up again in a little while. We began sports and pleasures; and it was with pride we spent the night.'
But there is a verse in his 'Argument with Whisky' that seems to have a wistful thought in it, perhaps of the settled home of his rival, Callinan:—
'Cattle is a nice thing for a man to have, and his share of land to reap wheat and barley. Money in the chest, and a fire in the evening time; and to be able to give shelter to a man on his road; a hat and shoes in the fashion—I think, indeed, that would be much better than to be going from place to place drinking uisge beatha.'
And there is a little sadness in the verses he made in some house, when a stranger asked who he was:—
'I am Raftery the poet, full of hope and love; with eyes without light, with gentleness without misery.
'Going west on my journey with the light of my heart; weak and tired to the end of my road.
'I am now, and my back to a wall, playing music to empty pockets.'
'He was a thin man,' I am told by one who knew him, 'not very tall, with a long frieze coat and corduroy trousers. He was very strong; and he told my father there was never any man he wrestled with but he could throw him, and that he could lie on his back and throw up a bag with four hundred of wheat in it, and take it up again. He couldn't see a stim; but he would walk all the roads, and give the right turn, without ever touching the wall. My father was wondering at him one time they were out together; and he said: "Wait till we come to the turn to Athenry, and don't tell me of it, and see if I don't make it out right." And sure enough, when they came to it, he gave the right turn, and just in the middle.' This is explained by what another man tells me:—'There was a blind piper with him one time in Gort, and they set out together to go to Ballylee, and it was late, and they couldn't find the stile that led down there, near Early's house. And they would have stopped there till somebody would come by, but Raftery said he'd go back to Gort and step it again; and so he did, turned back a mile to Gort, and started from there. He counted every step that he stepped out; and when he got to the stile, he stopped straight before it.' And I was told also there used to be a flagstone put beside the bog-holes to leap from, and Raftery would leap as well as any man. He would count his steps back from the flag, and take a run and alight on the other side.