Like a Nightingale in spring, "Welcome home, my dearest."
To get any rhythm into this doggerel is like persuading a donkey to gallop. And yet how clearly one sees the dark night, the disguised sailor and his sweetheart talking together on the river strand, and the ships on its bosom in the gloom; while the wistful, deceitful tale he tells her is as old as Romance. Once get cantering, too; how pleasing is the motion!
[192]. "Dark Rosaleen."
From his childhood, which was spent in a little shop in Dublin, Mangan had a dark and troubled life. But always a passionate love for his country, Ireland—his Dark Rosaleen—burned on in his imagination as it is revealed in the wild and haunting music of this poem.
[197].
There are so many words in this poem strange to an English ear that it seems better to explain them here so as not to interrupt the actual reading of it too much. After all, the little that is not plain speaks in its music, and that is a very large part of what we call its "meaning." For the meaning of a poem is all the interest, thought, pictures, music, and happiness that we can get out of it—it is all that it does to us.
Stanza (1) "loaning" is a green path in the fields, and "ilka" means every; "wede" means faded or vanished. (2) "bught" is a sheepfold; "scorning" I suppose means cracking jokes at one another; "dowie" means sad and drooping; "daffing" and "gabbing" is larking and gossiping; a "leglin" is a milkpail. (3) "hairst" means harvest; "bandsters, "sheaf-binders"; "lyart" is faded with age; "runkled" wrinkled; "fleeching" is wheedling or coaxing or flirting. (4) "swankies" means the blithe lads of stanza 2; "bogle" means goblin or bogey—an evening game like "I spy," I should think. (5) "Dool and wae" means sorrow or grief and woe.
[199].
Robert Hayman, a Merchant of Bristol at the age of twenty-five, was a nephew of Sir Walter Raleigh's. He became Governor of a Plantation called The British Hope in Newfoundland. In 1628 he settled in Guiana (of whose gilded and barbaric Amazonian princesses his uncle tells in Hakluyt's Voyages). He made his will in 1633, and nothing more was afterwards heard of him—at least by the people of Bristol.