THE BANSHEE IN POETRY AND PROSE
“’Twas the Banshee’s lonely wailing,
Well I knew the voice of death,
On the night wind slowly sailing
O’er the bleak and gloomy heath.”
These are the dramatic lines Thomas Crofton Croker, in his inimitable “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,” puts in the mouth of the widow MacCarthy, as she is lamenting over the body of her son, Charles, whose death had been predicted by the Banshee; not the beautiful and dainty Banshee of the O’Briens, but a wild, unkempt, haggish creature that seemed in perfect harmony with the drear and desolate moorland from whence it sprang.
Mr Croker, indeed, almost invariably associates the Banshee with the heath and bogland, for at the commencement of his Tales of the Banshee in the same volume, we find these well-known lines:
“Who sits upon the heath forlorn,
With robe so free and tresses worn,
Anon she pours a harrowing strain,
And then she sits all mute again!
Now peals the wild funereal cry,
And now—it sinks into a sigh.”
Very different from this grim and repellent portrayal of the Banshee given by Mr Croker is the very pleasing and attractive description of it presented to us by Dr Kenealy, whose account of it in prose appears in an earlier chapter of this book.
Referring to the death of his brother, Dr Kenealy says:
“Here the Banshee, that phantom bright who weeps
Over the dying of her own loved line,
Floated in moonlight; in her streaming locks
Gleamed starshine; when she looked on me, she knew
And smiled.”
And again:
“The wish has but
Escaped my lips—and lo! once more it streams
In liquid lapse upon the fairy winds
That guard each slightest note with jealous care,
And bring them hither, even as angels might
To the beloved to whom they minister.”