VI.
His knowledge and his poetic gift are often supposed to have been given to him by the invisible powers, who grow visible to those who have lost their earthly sight. An old woman who had often danced to his music, said:—'When he went to his rest at night, it's then he'd make the songs in the turn of a hand, and you would wonder in the morning where he got them.' And a man who 'was too much taken up with sport and hurling when he was a boy to think much about him,' says: 'He got the gift. It's said he was asked which would he choose, music or the talk. If he chose music, he would have been the greatest musician in the world; but he chose the talk, and so he was a great poet. Where could he have found all the words he put in his songs if it wasn't for that?' An old woman, who is more orthodox, says:—'I often used to see him when I was a little child, in my father's house at Corker. He'd often come in there, and here to Coole House he used to come as well. He couldn't see a stim, and that is why he had such great knowledge. God gave it to him. And his songs have gone all through the world; and he had a voice that was like the wind.'
Legends are already growing up about his death. It has been said that 'he knew the very day his time would be up; and he went to Galway, and brought a plank to the house he was stopping at, and he put it in the loft; and he told the people of the house his time was come, and bid them make a coffin for him with the plank—and he was dead before morning.' And another story says he died alone in an empty house, and that flames were seen about the house all night; and 'the flames were the angels waking him.' But many told me he had died in the house of a man near Craughwell; and one autumn day I went there to look for it, and the first person I asked was able to tell me that the house where Raftery had died was the other side of Craughwell, a mile and a half away. It was a warm, hazy day; and as I walked along the flat, deserted road that Raftery had often walked, I could see few landmarks—only a few more grey rocks, or a few more stunted hazel bushes in one stone-walled field than in another. At last I came to a thatched cottage; and when I saw an old man sitting outside it, with hat and coat of the old fashion, I felt sure it was he who had been with Raftery at the last. He was ready to talk about him, and told me how he had come there to die. 'I was a young chap at that time. It must have been in the year 1835, for my father died in '36, and I think it was a year before him that Raftery died. What did he die of? Of weakness. He had been bet up in Galway with some fit of sickness he had; and then he came to gather a little money about the country, and when he got here he was bet up again. He wasn't an old man—only about seventy years. He was in the bed for about a fortnight. When he got bad, my father said it was best get a priest for him; but the parish priest was away. But we saw Father Nagle passing the road, and I went out and brought him in, and he gave him absolution, and anointed him. He had no pain; only his feet were cold, and the boys used to be warming a stone in the fire and putting it to them in the bed. My mother wanted to send to Galway, where his wife and his daughter and his son were stopping, so that they would come and care him; but he wouldn't have them. Someway he didn't think they treated him well.'
I had been told that the priest had refused him absolution when he was dying, until he forgave some enemy; and that he had said afterwards, 'If I forgave him with my mouth, I didn't with my heart'; but this was not true. 'Father Nagle made no delay in anointing him; but there was a carpenter down the road there he said too much to, and annoyed him one time; and the carpenter had a touch of the poet too, and was a great singer, and he came out and beat him, and broke his fiddle; and I remember when he was dying, the priest bringing in the carpenter, and making them forgive one another, and shake hands; and the carpenter said: "If two brothers were to have a falling out, they'd forgive one another—and why wouldn't we?" He was buried in Killeenan; it wasn't a very big funeral, but all the people of the village came to it. He used often to come and stop with us.... It was of a Christmas Eve he died: and he had always said that, if God had a hand in it, it was of a Christmas Day he'd die.'
I went to Killeenan to look for his grave. There is nothing to mark it; but two old men who had been at his funeral pointed it out to me. There is a ruined church in the graveyard, which is crowded; 'there are people killing one another now to get a place in it.' I was asked into a house close by; and its owner said with almost a touch of jealousy: 'I think it was coming in here Raftery was the time he died; but he got bet up, and turned in at the house below. It was of a Christmas Eve he died, and that shows he was blessed; there's a blessing on them that die at Christmas. It was at night he was buried, for Christmas Day no work could be done, but my father and a few others made a little gathering to pay for a coffin, and it was made by a man in the village on St. Stephen's Day; and then he was brought here, and the people from the villages followed him, for they all had a wish for Raftery. But night was coming on when they got here; and in digging the grave there was a big stone in it, and the boys thought they would put him in a barn and take the night out of him. But my mother—the Lord have mercy on her—had a great veneration for Raftery; and she sent out two mould candles lighted; for in those days the women used to have their own mould, and to make their own candles for Christmas. And we held the candles there where the grave is, near the gable end of the church; and my brother went down in the grave and got the stone out, and we buried him. And there was a sharp breeze blowing at the time, but it never quenched the candles or moved the flame of them, and that shows that the Lord had a hand in him.'
He and all the neighbours were glad to hear that there is soon to be a stone over the grave. 'He is worthy of it; he is well worthy of it,' they kept saying. A man who was digging sand by the roadside, took me to his house, and his wife showed me a little book, in which the 'Repentance' and other poems had been put down for her, in phonetic Irish, by a beggar who had once stayed in the house. 'Many who go to America hear Raftery's songs sung out there,' they told me with pride.
As I went back along the silent road, there was suddenly a sound of horses and a rushing and waving about me, and I found myself in the midst of the County Galway Fox Hounds, coming back from cub-hunting. The English M.F.H. and his wife rode by; and I wondered if they had ever heard of the poet whose last road this had been. Most likely not; for it is only among the people that his name has been kept in remembrance.
There is still a peasant poet here and there, making songs in the 'sweet Irish tongue,' in which death spoke to Raftery; and I think these will be held in greater honour as the time of awakening goes on. But the nineteenth century has been a time of swift change in many countries; and in looking back on that century in Ireland, there seem to have been two great landslips—the breaking of the continuity of the social life of the people by the famine, and the breaking of the continuity of their intellectual life by the shoving out of the language. It seems as if there were no place left now for the wandering versemaker, and that Raftery may have closed the long procession that had moved unbroken during so many centuries, on its journey to 'the meadow of the dead.'
1900.
It was after I had written this that I went to see Raftery's birthplace, Cilleaden, in the County Mayo.
A cousin of his came to see me, and some other men, but none of them remembered him; but they were very proud of his song on Cilleaden, which 'is all through the world.' An old woman told me she had heard it in a tramcar in America; and an old man said: 'I was coming back from England one time, and there were a lot of Irish-speaking boys from Galway on board. There was one of them sick all through the night, but he was well in the morning; and the others came round him and asked him for a song, and the song he gave was 'Cilleaden.'
They did not seem to know many of his other songs, except the 'Repentance,' which someone remembered having seen sold as a ballad, with the English on one side and the Irish on the other. And one man told me: 'The first song Raftery wrote was about a hat that was stole from a man that was working in that middle field beyond. When the man was digging, he used to put his hat on a stick in the field to frighten away the crows; and Raftery got someone to bring away the hat, to make fun of the man. And then he made a song, making out it was the fairies had taken it; and he made the man follow them to Cruachmaa, and from that to Roscommon, and tell all that happened him there.'
And one of them told me: 'He was six years old when the smallpox took his sight from him; and he was marked very little by the pox, only three or four little marks—it seemed to settle in his eyes. His father was a cottier—there were many here in those times. His mother was a Brennan. There are cousins of his living yet; but in the schools they are Englished into Rochford.'
A young man said he had been told Raftery was born in some place beyond, at the foot of the mountain, but the others were very indignant; one got very angry, and said: 'Don't I know where he was born, and my father was the one age with him, and they sisters' sons; and isn't Michael Conroy there below his cousin? and it's up in that field was the house he was born in, so don't be trying to bring him away to the mountain.'
I went to see the birthplace, a very green field, with two thorn bushes growing close together by a stone. The field is called 'Sean Straid'—the old street—for a few cottages had stood there. A man who lives close by told me he had dug up a blackened stone just there, and a stone into which a bar had been let, to hang a pot on; and that may have been the very hearth where Raftery had sat as a child.
I found one old man who remembered him. 'He used to come to my father's house often, mostly from Easter to Whitsuntide, when the cakes were made, and there would be music and dancing. He used to play the fiddle for Frank Taafe that lived here, when he would be going out riding, and the horse used to prance when he heard it. And he made verses against one Seaghan Bradach, that used to be paid thirteen pence for every head of cattle he found straying in the Jordan's fields, and used to drive them in himself. There was another poet called Devine that praised Seaghan Bradach; and a verse was made against him again by a woman-poet that lived here at the time.'
There is a stone over Raftery's grave now; and the people about Killeenan gather there on a Sunday in August every year to do honour to his memory. This year they established a Feis; and there were prizes given for traditional singing, and for old poems repeated, and old stories told, all in the Irish tongue.
And the Craoibhin Aoibhin is printing week by week all of Raftery's poems that can be found, with translations, and we shall soon have them in a book.
And he has written a little play, having Raftery for its subject; and at a Galway Feis this year he himself acted, and took the blind poet's part; and he will act it many times again, le congnamh De—with the help of God.
1902.