It was only on the destruction of the great Milesian and Norman families in the seventeenth century, that the rules of poetry, so long and so carefully guarded in the bardic schools, ceased to be taught; and it was the break up of these schools which rendered the success of the new principles possible. A brilliant success they had. Almost in the twinkling of an eye Irish poetry completely changed its form and complexion, and from being, as it were, so bound up and swathed around with rules that none who had not spent years over its technicalities could move about in it with vigour, its spirit suddenly burst forth in all the freedom of the elements, and clothed itself, so to speak, in the colours of the rainbow. Now indeed for the first time poetry became the handmaid of the many, not the mistress of the few; and through every nook and corner of the island the populace, neglecting all bardic training, burst forth into the most passionate song. Now, too, the remnant of the bards—the great houses being fallen—turned instinctively to the general public, and threw behind them the intricate metres of the schools, and dropped too, at a stroke, several thousand words, which no one except the great chiefs and those trained by the poets understood, whilst they broke out into beautiful, and at the same time intelligible verse, which no Gael of Ireland and Scotland who has ever heard or learned it is likely ever to forget. This is to my mind perhaps the sweetest creation of all Irish literature, the real glory of the modern Irish nation, and of the Scottish Highlands, this is the truest note of the enchanting Celtic siren, and he who has once heard it and remains deaf to its charm can have little heart for song or soul for music. The Gaelic poetry of the last two centuries both in Ireland and in the Highlands is probably the most sensuous attempt to convey music in words, ever made by man. It is absolutely impossible to convey the lusciousness of sound, richness of rhythm, and perfection of harmony, in another language. Scores upon scores of new and brilliant metres made their appearance, and the common Irish of the four provinces deprived of almost everything else, clung all the closer to the Muse. Of it indeed they might have said in the words of Moore—
"Through grief and through danger thy smile has cheered my way
Till hope seemed to bud from each thorn that round about me lay."
It is impossible to convey any idea of this new outburst of Irish melody in another language. Suffice it to say that the principle of it was a wonderful arrangement of vowel sounds, so placed that in every accented syllable, first one vowel and then another fell upon the ear in all possible kinds of harmonious modifications. Some verses are made wholly on the Á sound, others on the Ó, Ú, É, Í sounds, but the majority on a wonderful and fascinating intermixture of two, three, or more. The consonants which played so very prominent a part under the old bardic system were utterly neglected now, and vowel sounds alone were sought for.
The Scottish Gaels, if I am not mistaken, led the way in this great change, which metamorphosed the poetry of an entire people in both islands. The bardic system, outside of the kingdom of the Lord of the Isles, had apparently scarcely taken the same hold upon the nobles, in Scotland as in Ireland, and the first modern Scotch Gaelic poet to start upon the new system seems to have been Mary, daughter of Alaster Rua MacLeod, who was born in Harris in 1569, and who appears to have possessed no higher social standing than that of a kind of lady nurse in the chief's family. If the nine poems in free vowel metres, which are attributed to her by Mackenzie in his great collection,[4] be genuine, then I should consider her as the pioneer of the new school. Certainly no Irishman nor Irishwoman of the sixteenth century has left anything like Mary's metres behind them, and indeed I have not met more than one or two of them used in Ireland during that century.[5] No one, for instance, would have dreamt of vowel-rhyming thus, as she does over the drowning of Mac'Illachallun:
"My grief my pain,
Relief was vain
The seething wave
Did leap and rave,
And reeve in twain,
Both sheet and sail,
And leave us bare
And FOUNDERING.
Alas, indeed,
For her you leave
Your brothers grief
To them will cleave.
It was on Easter
Monday's feast
The branch of peace
Went DOWN WITH YOU."
The earliest intimations of the new school in Ireland which I have been able to come across, occur towards the very close of the sixteenth century, one being a war ode on a victory of the O'Byrnes,[6] and the other being an abhran or song addressed by a bard unknown to me, one John Mac Céibhfinn to O'Conor Sligo, apparently on his being blockaded by Red Hugh in the country of the Clan Donogh in 1599.
As for the classical metres of the schools they were already completely lost by the middle of the eighteenth century, and the last specimen which I have found composed in Connacht is one by Father Patrick O'Curneen,[7] to the house of the O'Conors, of Belanagare, in 1734, which is in perfect Deibhidh metre.
"She who Rules the Race is one
SPrung from the sparring Ternon,
MARY MILD of MIEN O'Rorke,
Our FAIRY CHILD QUEEN bulwark.[8]