[A COUNTRY FUNERAL]
Death, as they say, has taken somebody away under his oxter! I was coming into Ardara this morning from the Lochros side, and as I came up to the chapel on the hill I heard the bell tolling. That, I knew, was for a burying: it was only about ten o’clock, and the Angelus does not ring until midday. Farther on I met the funeral procession. It was just coming out of the village. The coffin, a plain deal one covered with rugs, was carried over the well of a side-car, and the relatives and country people walked behind. The road was thick with them—old men in their Sunday homespuns and wide-awakes, their brogues very dusty, as if they had come a long way; younger men with bronzed faces, and ash-plants in their hands; old women in the white frilled caps and coloured shawls peculiar to western Ireland; young married women, girls and children. Most of them walked, but several rode in ass-carts, and three men, I noticed, were on horseback. The tramping of so many feet, the rattle of the wheels and the talk made a great stir on the road, and the movement and colour suggested anything but a funeral. Still one could see that underneath all was a deep and beautiful feeling of sorrow, so different to the black-coated, slow-footed, solemn-faced thing of the towns. As the coffin approached I stood into the side of the road, saluted, and turned back with it the tri céimeanna na trocaire (three steps of mercy) as far as the chapel yard.
[YOUTH AND AGE]
An old man came dawdling out of a gap by the road, and he stopped to have a word with me. We were talking for some time when he said: “You’re a young man, by the looks of you?” I laughed and nodded. “Och,” says he, “but it’s a poor thing to be old, and all your colt-tricks over,” says he, “and you with nothing to do but to be watching the courses of the wind!”
[SUMMER DUSK]
Summer dusk. A fiddle is playing in a house by the sea. “Maggie Pickens” is the tune. The fun and devilment of it sets my heart dancing. Then the mood changes. It is “The Fanaid Grove” now, full of melancholy and yearning, full of the spirit of the landscape—the soft lapping tide, the dove-grey sands, the blue rhythmic line of hill and sky beyond. The player repeats it. . . . I feel as if I could listen to that tune forever.
[A NOTE]
Darkness, freshness, fragrance. Donegal fascinates one like a beautiful girl.
[THE PEASANT IN LITERATURE]
It has been said before that there is “too much peasant” in contemporary Irish literature, especially in the plays. The phenomenon is easily explained. Ireland is an agricultural country, a country of small farms, and therefore a nation of peasants; so that a literature which pretends to reflect the life of Ireland must deal in the main with peasants and the thoughts that peasants think. And peasants’ thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them now. The king himself is served by the field. Where there is contact with the unseen in this book, with the mysteries which we feel rather than understand, it is because of some strange thought dropped in strange words from a peasant’s mouth and caught by me here, as in a snare of leaves, for everyone to ponder. Impressions, with something of the roughness of peasant speech in them and something of the beauty, phases of a moment breathless and fluttering, the mystery of the sea, the thresh of rain, the sun on a bird’s wing, a wayfarer passing—those are the things I sought to capture in this book.