because, as he says, all heptasyllabic lines are to be read as trochaic, a theory which may apply very well to some lines, as to the above, but which is almost certain to break down after a line or two, as in the very next line of this verse which I have taken for a model—
"Théy sweet / ér are / thán Arts / snóre,"
a scansion which does extraordinary violence to the natural pronunciation of the words. I, for my part, do not believe that there was ever any real metrical accent, that is, any real alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in the classical Irish metres.[29] The one thing certain about them is the fixed number of syllables and the rhyme, but each verse was, as it were, separately scanned, if one may use such a term, on its own merits. Thus the verse just quoted would be read some way thus—
"To hear handsome
Women weep
In deep distress,
Sobbing sore,
Or gangs of geese
Scream from far,
They sweeter are
Than Arts snore."
I have frequently heard preserved in ranns or proverbs, even to this day, isolated quatrains in these classic metres pronounced by the people,[30] and they never dream of pronouncing them otherwise than according to the natural stress of the voice upon the words themselves, as if they were talking prose,—they never attempt to transform the seven-syllable lines into trochees, as Kuno Meyer would, nor the eight-syllable lines into iambics. Of this old Gaelic prosody there appears to be a distinct reminiscence in Burns. Take this verse of his for example—
"Blythe, blythe, and merry was she,
Blythe was she but and ben,
Blythe by the banks of Ern,
And blythe in Glenturit glen."
This, supplying, say the syllable "and," in the second and third lines makes a good Rannaigheacht mór quatrain, which the poet evidently pronounced exactly as an old Irish bard would have done.
"Blythe, blythe,
And merry was she,
And blythe was she
But and ben,
Blythe by
The banks of Ern,
And blythe in
Glenturit glen."
Bonaventura O'Hussey was another fine classical poet of the beginning of the seventeenth century. He was educated for a bard, but afterwards became a Franciscan in Louvain, where he wrote and published an Irish work on Christian Doctrine in 1608, which was reprinted in Antwerp three years later. The Irish, having no press of their own in Ireland (though they had some outside it), were obliged to print and set up all their books abroad, chiefly at Louvain, Antwerp, Rome, and Paris. Any attempt to introduce founts of Irish type in the teeth of the English Government would, I think, have been futile, so that except for the works she was able to print in Irish type abroad, and afterwards to smuggle in, Ireland during the seventeenth century was thrown nearly a couple of hundred years out of the world's course, by having to use manuscripts instead of printed books. It is curious to find O'Hussey compressing the Christian doctrine into two hundred and forty lines of the most accurate Deibhidh metre. When leaving for his foreign home he bade farewell to Erin in a poem of great beauty.