"Slowly pass my Aching Eye,
Her Holy Hills of beauty
Neath me TOSSING To and fro,
Hoarse CRies the CROSSING billow."[31]
In another poem he laments sorely at leaving the poets and the schools "to try another trade," that of a cleric, which he says he does, not because he thinks less of poetry, or because the glory that was once to be had from it was departing amongst the people of Erin, but from religious motives alone.
"Now I stand to Try a Trade
Mid Bardic Band less famèd
Than the Part of Poet is
Hacked is my Heart in pieces.
'Tis not that I Veer from Verse
So Followed by my Fathers,
Lest the fame it Once did Win
In vain be Asked in Erin."[32]
Fearfeasa O'Cainti was another well-known poet of this period who attempted to rouse the Irish to action. Here are a few of his verses to the O'Driscoll—
"Many a Mulct—requite their sin—
Fetch from them heir of Finnin;
Spare not to SPURN the brute Gall
To BURN the BEAR and jackal.[33]
Ruthless Rapine leads them on
Slaying CHief CHild CHampion!
BLood they BLINDLY spilt, no law
BINDING their guilt in Banba.
Pour their BLood to BLEND with blood,
Conor HAND of Hardihood,
CALL for ransom not my King;
Slay ALL, be Untransacting.
Lies they Lie! their Love is one
With TReachery and TReason,
Nay! thou Needest NOT my spur;
Revenge is HOT, Remember!"
The quantity of verse composed in these classic metres all through the seventeenth century was enormous, and amounts to at least twenty thousand lines of the known poets not to speak of the anonymous ones. Not more than a dozen of them have ever been published,[34] and yet no one can pretend to understand the inner history of Ireland at that period without a reference to them. Their chief characteristic is an intense compression which produces an air of weighty sententiousness. This was necessitated by the laws of their composition, which required at the end of every second line a break or suspension of the sense (such as in English would be usually expressed by a semi-colon or colon), and which absolutely forbade any carrying over of the sense from one stanza into another. Hence the thought of the poet had with each fresh quatrain to be concentrated into twenty-eight syllables (thirty syllables in Séadna metre), with a break or pause at the end of the fourteenth (or fifteenth). Accordingly O'Gnive calls the poets the "schoolmen of condensed speech,"[35] and the Scotch bard Mac Muirich in the Red Book of Clanranald speaks of Teig Dall O'Hĭginn as putting into less than a half-rann what others would take a whole crooked stanza to express.[36] The classical metres went, in Irish, under the generic name of Dán Direach, or "straight verse;" and O'Molloy, who wrote an Irish prosody in Latin in the seventeenth century, carried away by a contemplation of its difficulties, exclaims that it is "Omnium quæ unquam vidi vel audivi, ausim dicere quæ sub sole reperiuntur, difficilimum."
It was during the seventeenth century that the greatest change in the whole poetical system of the Irish and Scotch Gaels was accomplished, and that a new school of versification arose with new ideals, new principles, and new methods, which we shall briefly glance at in the following chapter.
[1] His real name was Mac Brodin, "Daré" or Dairé being his father's name.