I suppose the following may be called a political poem, from its elusive reference to Home Rule. I was not sure on the point myself; for I thought the wearer of the 'blue cloak and birds' feathers,' must be a fine lady, perhaps laying enchantment on the fields. But I heard some one ask the Craoibhin who he meant, and his answer was: 'I suppose I was thinking of an aide-de-camp':—
'I am looking at my cows walking,
What are you that would put me out of my luck?
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?
'I will not always be turned backwards.
If there is need to be humble to you, great is my grief,
If I cannot walk, if I cannot walk, if I cannot walk in my own fields.
'It's little my respect, and it's little my desire,
For your blue cloak, and your birds' feathers.
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?
'The day is coming as it's easy to see,
When there shall not be among us the ugly like of you.
And each one shall be walking, and each one shall be walking,
Wherever shall be his will and his own desire.'
There are some love songs in the little volume. But their writer has had, in his beautiful translations of the 'Love Songs of Connacht,' to put such intensity of passion into English, that he must despair of putting any new wings to passion, or any new exaggeration into lovers' words. In one of these Connacht songs, the lover says: 'Blacker is the sun when setting than your features, Mary!' And she answers back: 'Neither star nor sun shows one-third much light as your shadow!' Another lover says of the woman he desires: 'I will write largely of her, because of the thousands who hoped for her, and who have been lost; and a hundred men of these who still live, are in pain and under locks through love. And I myself am not free, but am a bondsman in bonds.' And another boasts of 'a love without littleness, without weakness; love from age till death, love from folly growing, love that shall send me close beneath the clay, love without a hope of the world, love without envy of fortune, love that left me outside in captivity, love of my heart beyond women.' Douglas Hyde's own love songs are quiet and staid in contrast to these; but nevertheless they have a sober charm. Here are the last verses of one of them:—
'Will you be as hard,
Colleen, as you are quiet?
Will you be without pity
On me for ever?
'Listen to me, Noireen,
Listen, aroon;
Put healing on me
From your quiet mouth.
'I am in the little road
That is dark and narrow,
The little road that has led
Thousands to sleep.'
In his preface to the 'Love Songs of Connacht' he says he finds in them 'more of grief and trouble, more of melancholy and contrition of heart, than of gaiety or hope'; and he writes: 'Not careless and light-hearted alone is the Gaelic nature; there is also beneath the loudest mirth a melancholy spirit; and if they let on to be without heed for anything but sport and revelry, there is nothing in it but letting on.' There is grief and trouble, as I have shown, in many of his own songs, which the people have taken to their hearts so quickly; but there is also a touch of hope, of glad belief that, in spite of heavy days of change, all things are working for good at the last.