There is a stone over Raftery's grave now; and the people about Killeenan gather there on a Sunday in August every year to do honour to his memory. This year they established a Feis; and there were prizes given for traditional singing, and for old poems repeated, and old stories told, all in the Irish tongue.
And the Craoibhin Aoibhin is printing week by week all of Raftery's poems that can be found, with translations, and we shall soon have them in a book.
And he has written a little play, having Raftery for its subject; and at a Galway Feis this year he himself acted, and took the blind poet's part; and he will act it many times again, le congnamh De—with the help of God.
1902.
WEST IRISH BALLADS.
It was only a few years ago, when Douglas Hyde published his literal translations of Connacht Love Songs, that I realized that, while I had thought poetry was all but dead in Ireland, the people about me had been keeping up the lyrical tradition that existed in Ireland before Chaucer lived. While I had been looking in the columns of Nationalist newspapers for some word of poetic promise, they had been singing songs of love and sorrow in the language that has been pushed nearer and nearer to the western seaboard—the edge of the world. 'Eyes have we, but we see not; ears have we, but we do not understand.' It does not comfort me to think how many besides myself, having spent a lifetime in Ireland, must make this confession.
The ballads to be gathered now are a very few out of the great mass of traditional poetry that was swept away during the last century in the merciless sweeping away of the Irish tongue, and of all that was bound up with it, by England's will, by Ireland's need, by official pedantry.
To give an idea of the ballads of to-day, I will not quote from the translations of Douglas Hyde or of Dr. Sigerson already published. I will rather give a few of the more homely ballads, sung and composed by the people, and, as far as I know, not hitherto translated.