AN CRAOIBHIN'S POEMS
'"I would much rather (and I take every occasion of making this protest) write, so to say, in a dead language and for a dead people, than write in those deaf and stammering (sorde e mute) tongues, French and English, notwithstanding they are the fashion with their rules and exercises." This is so with me. Alfieri wrote these words a hundred years ago, and they express what is in my own mind. I would like better to make even one good verse in the language in which I am now writing, than to make a whole book of verses in English. For if there should be any good found in my English verses, it would not go to the credit of my mother, Ireland, but of my stepmother, England.'
I have translated this from Douglas Hyde's preface to his little book of poems, lately published in Dublin, Ubhla de'n Craoibh, "Apples from the Branch." An Craoibhin Aoibhin, "The delightful little branch," is the name by which he is called all over Irish-speaking Ireland; and a gold branch bearing golden apples is stamped on the cover of his book. The poems had already been published, one by one, in a weekly paper; and a friend of mine tells me he has heard them sung and repeated by country people in many parts of Ireland—in Connemara, in Donegal, in Galway, in Kerry, in the Islands of Aran.
Three or four of the thirty-three poems the book holds are, so to speak, official, written for the Gaelic League by its president; and these, like most official odes, are only for the moment. Some are ballads dealing with the old subjects of Irish ballads—emigration, exile, defeat, and death; for Douglas Hyde, as may be guessed from his preface, has, no less than his fellows—
'Hidden in his heart the flame out of the eyes
Of Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.'
But these national ballads, though very popular, are, I think, not so good as his more personal poems. I suppose no narrative of what others have done or felt or suffered can move one like a flash from 'that little infinite, faltering, eternal flame that one calls oneself.' Even in my bare prose translation, this poem will, I think, be found to have as distinct a quality as that of Villon or of Heine:—
'There are three fine devils eating my heart—
They left me, my grief! without a thing;
Sickness wrought, and Love wrought,
And an empty pocket, my ruin and my woe.
Poverty left me without a shirt,
Barefooted, barelegged, without any covering;
Sickness left me with my head weak
And my body miserable, an ugly thing.
Love left me like a coal upon the floor,
Like a half-burned sod, that is never put out,
Worse than the cough, worse than the fever itself,
Worse than any curse at all under the sun,
Worse than the great poverty
Is the devil that is called "Love" by the people.
And if I were in my young youth again,
I would not take, or give, or ask for a kiss!'
The next, in the form of a little folk-song, expresses the thought of the idealist of all time, that makes him cry, as one of the oldest of the poets cried long ago, 'Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird; the birds round about are against her.' Yet, with its whimsical fancies and exaggerations, it could hardly have been written in any but Irish air.