Poets and Dreamers: Studies and translations from the Irish

by Lady Gregory

WEST IRISH BALLADS.

It was only a few years ago, when Douglas Hyde published his literal translations of Connacht Love Songs, that I realized that, while I had thought poetry was all but dead in Ireland, the people about me had been keeping up the lyrical tradition that existed in Ireland before Chaucer lived. While I had been looking in the columns of Nationalist newspapers for some word of poetic promise, they had been singing songs of love and sorrow in the language that has been pushed nearer and nearer to the western seaboard—the edge of the world. 'Eyes have we, but we see not; ears have we, but we do not understand.' It does not comfort me to think how many besides myself, having spent a lifetime in Ireland, must make this confession.

The ballads to be gathered now are a very few out of the great mass of traditional poetry that was swept away during the last century in the merciless sweeping away of the Irish tongue, and of all that was bound up with it, by England's will, by Ireland's need, by official pedantry.

To give an idea of the ballads of to-day, I will not quote from the translations of Douglas Hyde or of Dr. Sigerson already published. I will rather give a few of the more homely ballads, sung and composed by the people, and, as far as I know, not hitherto translated.

Those I have heard since I have begun to look for them in the cottages, are, for the most part, sad; but not long ago I heard a girl sing a merry one, in a mocking tone, about a boy on the mountain, who neglected the girls of his village to run after a strange girl from Galway; and the girls of the village were vexed, and they made a song about him; and he went to Galway after her, and there she laughed at him, and said he had never gone to school or to the priest, and she would have nothing to do with him. So then he went back to the village, and asked the smith's daughter to marry him; but she said she would not, and that he might go back to the strange girl from Galway. Another song I have heard was a lament over a boy and girl who had run away to America, and on the way the ship went down. And when they were going down, they began to be sorry they were not married; and to say that if the priest had been at home when they went away, they would have been married; but they hoped that when they were drowned, it would be the same with them as if they were married. And I heard another lament that had been made for three boys that had lately been drowned in Galway Bay. It is the mother who is making it; and she tells how she lost her husband, the father of her three boys. And then she married again, and they went to sea and were drowned; and she wouldn't mind about the others so much, but it is the eldest boy, Peter, she is grieving for. And I have heard one song that had a great many verses, and was about 'a poet that is dying, and he confessing his sins.'

The first ballad I give deals with sorrow and defeat and death; for sorrow is never far from song in Ireland; and the names best praised and kept in memory are of those—

'Lonely antagonists of destiny
That went down scornful under many spears;
Who soon as we are born are straight our friends,
And live in simple music, country songs,
And mournful ballads by the winter fire.'

In this simple lament, the type of a great many, only the first name of the young man it was made for is given: 'Fair-haired Donough.' It is likely the people of his own place know still to what family he belonged; but I have not heard it sung, and only know that he was 'some Connachtman that was hanged in Galway.' And it is clear it was for some political crime he was hanged, by the suggestion that if he had been tried nearer his own home, 'in the place he had a right to be,' the issue would have been different, and by the allusion to the Gall, the English:—

'It was bound fast here you saw him, and you 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 neckcloth.

'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 nor sheep nor horses;
But tobacco and pipes and white candles,
And it will not be begrudged to them that will use it.'

A very pathetic touch is given by the idea of the 'marriage portion,' the provision for the wake, being brought home for the dead boy.

But it is chiefly in Aran, and on the opposite Connemara coast, that Irish ballads are still being made as well as sung. The little rock islands of Aran are fit strongholds for the threatened language, breakwaters of Europe, taking as they do the first onset of the ocean 'that hath no limits nearer than America.' The fisher-folk go out in their canvas curraghs to win a living from the Atlantic, or painfully carry loads of sand and seaweed to make the likeness of an earth-plot on the bare rock. The Irish coast seems far away; the setting sun very near. When a sea-fog blots out the mainland for a day, a feeling grows that the island may have slipped anchor, and have drifted into unfamiliar seas. The fisher-folk are not the only dwellers upon the islands; they are the home, the chosen resting-place, of 'the Others,' the Fairies, the Fallen Angels, the mighty Sidhe. From here they sweep across the sea, invisible or taking at pleasure the form of a cloud, of a full-rigged ship, of a company of policemen, of a flock of gulls. Sometimes they only play with mortals; sometimes they help them. But often, often, the fatal touch is given to the first-born child, or to the young man in his strength, or the girl in her beauty, or the young mother in her pride; and the call is heard to leave the familiar fireside life for the whirling, vain, unresting life of the irresistible host.

It is, perhaps, because of the very mistiness and dreaminess of their surroundings, the almost unearthly silences, the fantasy of story and of legend that lie about them, that the people of Aran and the Galway coast almost shrink from idealism in their fireside songs, and choose rather to dwell upon the slight incidents of daily life. It is in the songs of the greener plains that the depths of passion and heights of idealism have been reached.

It is at weddings that songs are most in use—even the saddest not being thought out of place; and at the evening gathering in one cottage or another, while the pipe, lighted at the turf-fire, is passed from hand to hand. Here is one that is a great favourite, though very simple, and somewhat rugged in metre; for it touches on the chief events of an islander's life—emigration, loss of life by sea, the land jealousy. It is called 'a sorrowful song that Bridget O'Malley made'; and she tells in it of her troubles at the Boston factory, of her lasting sorrow for her drowned brothers, and her as lasting anger against her sister's husband.

'Do you remember, neighbours, the day I left the white strand? I did not find anyone to give me advice, or to tell me not to go. But with the help of God, as I have my health, and the help of the King of Grace, whichever State I will go to, I will never turn back again.

'Do you remember, girls, that day long ago when I was sick and when the priest said, and the doctor, that with care I would come through? I got up after; I went to work at the factory, until Sullivan wrote a letter that put me down a step.

'And Bab O'Donnell rose up and put a shawl about her. She went to the office till she got work for me to do; there was never a woman I was with that would not shake hands with me; now I am at work again, and no thanks to Sullivan.

'It is a great shame to look down on Ireland, and I think myself it is not right; for the potatoes are growing in the gardens there, and the women milking the cows. That is not the way in Boston, but you may earn it or leave it there; and if the man earns a dollar, the woman will be out drinking it.

'My curse on the curraghs, and my blessings on the boats; my curse on that hooker that did the treachery; for it was she snapped away my four brothers from me; the best they were that ever could be found. But what does Kelly care, so long as he himself is in their place?

'My grief on you, my brothers, that did not come again to land; I would have put a boarded coffin on you out of the hand of the carpenter; the young women of the village would have keened you, and your people and your friends; and is it not Bridget O'Malley you left miserable in the world?

'It is very lonely after Pat and Tom I am, and in great trouble for them, to say nothing of my fair-haired Martin that was drowned long ago; I have no sister, and I have no other brother, no mother; my father weak and bent down; and, O God, what wonder for him!

'My curse on my sister's husband; for it was he made the boat; my own curse again on himself and on his tribe. He married my sister on me, and he sent my brothers to death on me; and he came himself into the farm that belonged to my father and my mother!

A Connemara schoolmaster tells me: 'At Killery Bay one time, I went into a house where there was an old man that had just lost his son by drowning. And he was sitting over the fire with his head in his hands, making a lament. I remember one verse of it that said: "My curse on the man that made the boat, that he did not tell me there was death lurking in it." I asked afterwards what the meaning of that was, and they said there is a certain board in every boat that the maker gives three blows of his hammer on, after he is done making it. And he knows someway by the sound of the blows if anyone will lose his life in that boat.' It is likely Bridget O'Malley had this idea in her mind when she made her lament.

Another little emigration song, very simple and charming, tells of the return of a brother from America. He finds his pretty brown sister, his 'cailin deas donn,' gathering rushes in a field, but she does not know him; and after they have exchanged words of greeting, he asks where her brother is, and she says 'beyond the sea'; then he asks if she would know him again, and she says she she would surely; and he asks by what sign, and she tells of a mark on his white neck. When she finds it is her brother who is there and speaking to her, she cries out, 'Kill me on the moment,' meaning that she is ready to die with joy.

This is the lament of a woman whose bridegroom was drowned as he was rowing the priest home, on the wedding day:—

'I am widow and maid, and I very young; did you hear my great grief, that my treasure was drowned? If I had been in the boat that day, and my hand on the rope, my word to you, O'Reilly, it is I would have saved you sorrow.

'Do you remember the day the street was full of riders, and of priests and brothers, and all talking of the wedding feast? The fiddle was there in the middle, and the harp answering to it; and twelve mannerly women to bring my love to his bed.

'But you were of those three that went across to Kilcomin, ferrying Father Peter, who was three-and-eighty years old; if you came back within a month itself, I would be well content; but is it not a pity I to be lonely, and my first love in the waves?

'I would not begrudge you, O'Reilly, to be kinsman to a king; white bright courts around you, and you lying at your ease; a quiet, well-learned lady to be settling out your pillow; but it is a great thing you to die from me when I had given you my love entirely.

'It is no wonder a broken heart to be with your father and your mother; the white-breasted mother that crooned you, and you a baby; your wedded wife, O thousand treasures, that never set out your bed; and the day you went to Trabawn, how well it failed you to come home.

'Your eyes are with the eels, and your lips with the crabs; and your two white hands under the sharp rule of the salmon. Five pounds I would give to him that would find my true love. Ohone! it is you are a sharp grief to young Mary ni-Curtain!'

Some men and women who were drowned in the river Corrib, on their way to a fair at Galway, in the year 1820, have still their names kept green in a ballad:—

'Mary Ruane, that you would stand in a fair to look at, the best-dressed woman in the place; John Cosgrave, the best a woman ever reared; your mother thought that if a hundred were drowned, your swimming would take the sway; but the boat went down, and when I got up early on Friday, I heard the keening and the clapping of women's hands, with the women that were drowsy and tired after the night there, without doing anything but laying out the dead.'

There are laments for other things besides death. A man taken up 'not for sheep-stealing or any crime, but just for making a drop of poteen,' tells of his hardships in Galway gaol. A lover who has enlisted because he cannot get the girl he loves—'a pity I not to be going to Galway with my heart's love on my arm'—tells of his hardships in the army: 'The first day I enlisted I was well pleased and satisfied; the second day I was vexed and tormented; and the third day I would have given a pound if I had it to get my pardon.' And I have heard a song 'made by a woman out of her wits, that lost her husband and married again, and her three sons enlisted,' who cannot forgive herself for having driven them from home. 'If it was in Ballinakill I had your bones, I would not be half so much tormented after you; but you to be standing in the army of the Gall, and getting nothing after it but the bit in your mouth.'

Here is a song of daily life, in which a girl laments the wandering and covetous appetite of her cow:—

'It is following after the white cow I spent last night; and, indeed, all I got by it was the bones of an old goose. Do you hear me, Michael Taylor? Give word to your uncle John that, unless he can lay his hand on her, Nancy will lose her wits.

'It's what she is wanting, is the three islands of Aran for herself; Brisbeg, that is in Maimen, and the glens of Maam Cross; all round about Oughterard, and the hills that are below it; John Blake's farm where she often does be bellowing; and as far as Ballinamuca, where the long grass is growing; and it's in the wood of Barna she'd want to spend her life.

'And when I was sore with walking through the dark hours of the night, it's the coastguard came crying after her, and he maybe with a bit of her in his mouth.'

The little sarcastic hit at the coastguard, who may himself have stolen the cow he joins in the search for, is characteristic of Aran humour. The comic song, as we know it, is unknown on the islands; the nearest to it I have heard there is about the awkward meeting of two suitors, a carpenter and a country lad, at their sweetheart's house, and of the clever management of her mother, who promised to give her to the one who sang the best song, and how the country lad won her.

Douglas Hyde, who is almost a folk-poet, the people have taken so many of his songs to their heart, has caught this sarcastic touch in this 'love' song:—

'O sweet queen, to whom I gave my love; O dear queen, the flower of fine women; listen to my keening, and look on my case; as you are the woman I desire, free me from death.

'He speaks so humbly, humble entirely. Without mercy or pity she looks on him with contempt. She puts mispleading in her cold answer; there is a drop of poison in every quiet word:—

'"O man, wanting sense, put from you your share of love; it is bold you are entirely to say such a thing as that; you will not get hate from me; you will not get love from me; you will not get anything at all, good or bad, for ever."

'I was myself the same night at the house of drink; and I saw the man, and he under the table. Laid down by the strength of wine, and without a twist in him itself; it was she did that much with the talk of her mouth.'

There is another that I thought was meant to provoke laughter, the lament of a girl for her 'beautiful comb' that had been carried off by her lover, whom she had refused to marry, 'until we take a little more out of our youth,' and invites instead to 'come with me to Eochaill reaping the yellow harvest.' Then he steals the comb, and the mother gives her wise advice how to get it back:—

'He will go this road to-morrow, and let you welcome him; settle down a wooden chair in the middle of the house; snatch the hat from him, and do not give him any ease until you get back the beautiful comb that was high on the back of your head.'

But an Aran man has told me: 'No, this is a very serious song; it was meant to praise the girl, and to tell what a loss she had in the comb.'

I am told that the song that makes most mirth in Aran is 'The Carrageen'; the day-dream of an old woman, too old to carry out her purpose, of all she will buy when she has gathered a harvest of the Carrageen moss, used by invalids:—

'If I had two oars and a little boat of my own, I would go pulling the Carrageen; I would dry it up in the sun; I would bring a load of it to Galway; it would go away in the train, to pay the rent to Robinson, and what is over would be my own.

'It is long I am hearing talk of the Carrageen, and I never knew what it was. If I spent the last spring-tide at it, and I to take care of myself, I would buy a gown and a long cloak and a wide little shawl; that, and a dress cap, with frills on every side like feathers.'

---

'(This is what the Calleac said, that was over a hundred years old:—)

'"I lost the last spring-tide with it, and I went into sharp danger. I did not know what the Carrageen was, or anything at all like it; but I will have tobacco from this out, if I lose the half of my fingers!"'

This is a little song addressed by a fisherman to his little boat, his curragh-cin:—

'There goes my curragh-cin, it is she will get the prize; she will he to-night in America, and back again with the tide....

'I put pins of oak in her, and oars of red pine; and I made her ready for sailing; for she is the six-oared curragh-cin that never gave heed to the storm; and it is she will be coming to land, when the sailing boats will be lost.

'There was a man came from England to buy my little boat from me; he offered me twenty guineas for her; there were many looking on. If he would offer me as much again, and a guinea over and above, he would not get my curragh-cin till she goes out and kills the shark.'

For a shark will sometimes flounder into the fishing-nets and tear his way out; and even a whale is sometimes seen. I remember an Aran man beginning some story he was telling me with: 'I was going down that path one time, with the priest and a few others; for a whale had come ashore, and the jaw-bones of it were wanted, to make the piers of a gate.'

As for the love-songs of our coast and island people, they seem to be for the most part a little artificial in method, a little strained in metaphor perhaps so giving rise to the Scotch Gaelic saying: 'as loveless as an Irishman.' Love of country, tir-gradh, is I think the real passion; and bound up with it are love of home, of family, love of God. Constancy and affection in marriage are the rule; yet marriage 'for love' is all but unknown; marriage is a matter of commonsense arrangement between the heads of families. As Mr. Yeats puts it, the countryman's 'dream has never been entangled by reality.' However this may be, my Aran friends tell me: 'The people do not care for love-songs; they would rather have any others.'

Yet I have just seen some love-songs, taken down the other day by a Kinvara man from a Connemara man, that have some charming lines:—

'Going over the hills after parting from the store of my heart, there is a mist on them and the darkness of night.'

'It is my sharp grief, my thousand treasures, my road not to be to the door of your house; it is with you I wore out my shoes from the beginning of my youth until now.'

'It is not sorry I would be if there was the length of a year in the day, and the leaves of the trees dropping honey; I myself on the side where the blossoms are falling, my love beside me, and a little green branch in her hand.'

'She goes by me like a little breeze of the wind.'

And this line that in a country of separations is already, they tell me, 'passing into a proverb':—

'It is far from one another our rising is every day.'

But the tradition of classical allusions, brought in some centuries ago, joined to the exaggeration that has been the breath of Irish poets, from the time Naoise called Deirdre 'a woman brighter than the sun,' has brought monotony into most of the love-songs.

The ideal country girl, with her dew-grey eye and long amber hair, is always likened to Venus, to Juno, to Deirdre. 'I think she is nine times nicer than Deirdre,' says Raftery, 'or I may say Helen, the affliction of the Greeks'; and he writes of another country girl, that she is 'beyond Venus, in spite of all Homer wrote on her appearance, and Cassandra also, and Io that bewitched Mars; beyond Minerva, and Juno, the king's wife'; and he wishes 'they might be brought face to face with her, that they might be confused':—

'She comes to me like a star through the mist; her hair is golden and goes down to her shoes; her breast is the colour of white sugar, or like bleached bone on the card-table; her neck is whiter than the froth of the flood, or the swan coming from swimming.... If France and Spain belonged to me, I'd give it up to be along with you.'

And he gives 'a thousand praises to God, that I didn't lose my wits on account of her.' Raftery puts distinction into each one of his songs; but when lesser poets, echoing the voices of so many generations, bring in the same goddesses, and the same exaggerations, and the same amber hair, monotony brings weariness at last.

There is an Aran song, 'Brigid na Casad,' that has more originality than is usual:—

'Brigid's kiss was sweeter than the whole of the waters of Lough Erne; or the first wheaten flour, worked with fresh honey into dough; there are streams of bees' honey on every part of the mountain, there is brown sugar thrown on all you take, Brigid, in your hand.

'It is not more likely for water to change than for the mind of a woman; and is it not a young man without courage will not run the chance nine times? It's not nicer than you the swan is when he comes to the shore swimming; it's not nicer than you the thrush is, and he singing from tree to tree.'

And here is another, homely in the extreme in the beginning, and suddenly rising to wild exaggeration:—

'Late on the evening of last Monday, and it raining, I chanced to come into Seaghan's and I sat down. It is there I saw her near me in the corner of the hearth; and her laugh was better to me than to have her eyes down; her hair was shining like the wool of a sheep, and brighter than the swan swimming. It is then I asked who owned her, and it is with Frank Conneely she was.

'It is a good house belongs to Frank Conneely, the people say that do be going to it; plenty of whiskey and punch going round, and food without stint for a man to get; and it is what I think the girl is learned, for she has knowledge of books and of the pen, and a schoolmaster coming to teach her every day.

'The troop is on the sea, sailing eternally, and looking always on my Nora Ban. Is it not a great sin, she to be on a bare mountain, and not to be dressed in white silk, and the king of the French coming to the island for her, from France or from Germany?

'Is it not nice the jewel looked at the races and at the church in Barna? She took the sway there as far as the big town. Is she not the nice flower with the white breast, the comeliness of a woman? and the sun of summer pleased with her, shining on her at every side, and hundreds of men in love with her.

'It is I would like to run through the hills with her, and to go the roads with her; and it is I would put a cloak around my Nora Ban.'

The very naïveté, the simplicity of these ballads, make one feel that the peasants who make and sing them may be trembling on the edge of a great discovery; and that some day—perhaps very soon—one born among them will put their half-articulate, eternal sorrows and laments and yearnings into words that will be their expression for ever, as was done for the Hebrew people when the sorrow of exile was put into the hundred and thirty-seventh Psalm, and the sorrow of death into the lament for Saul and Jonathan, and the yearning of love into what was once known as 'the ballad of ballads,' the Song of Solomon.

I have one ballad at least to give, that shows, even in my prose translation, how near that day may be, if the language that holds the soul of our West Irish people can be saved from the 'West Briton' destroyer. There are some verses in it that attain to the intensity of great poetry, though I think less by the creation of one than by the selection of many minds; the peasants who have sung or recited their songs from one generation to another, having instinctively sifted away by degrees what was trivial, and kept only what was real, for it is in this way the foundations of literature are laid. I first heard of this ballad from the South; but when I showed it to an Aran man, he said it was well known there, and that his mother had often sung it to him when he was a child. It is called '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!

1901.

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