Nine children of one house there were, who on one tumbrel lay,
Which their poor mother dragged alone along the burial-way.
Their father followed, whistling, for his reason all had fled;
The mother wailed, and called on God, and pointed to her dead.
"Oh! bury my nine sons," she cried. "Oh! lay them in the ground;
A rope of wax I promise that shall thrice your walls surround,
Your church and sanctuary both therein shall be enwound.
"Nine sons I brought into the world: Death has not spared me one;
On my own hearth he struck them down, and left me all alone.
None have I now who might to me a drop of water give:
Ah! why am I not stricken too; for wherefore should I live?"
The cemetery full is piled, high as its walls, with dead;
The church heaped to the steps: the fields must now be hallowed.
In the church-yard I see an oak, and from its topmost bough
A white sheet hangs, the truce of death; for all are buried now.
There is no surer remedy, in the estimation of the Breton peasantry, against an epidemic than to make a song about it. "The Plague, finding herself discovered, fled away." Thus, as one among many examples of the practical utility of the popular poetry, we find that when, some years ago, Brittany was severely visited by the cholera, no attention was paid to the printed circulars which were issued by medical and magisterial authority; all the preparation made by the people to meet it was to dig an extra number of graves, until a popular poet put into verse the good advice concerning preventives and remedies which, when placarded in official prose, had been passed by with no more notice than a grave and incredulous shake of the head. But a week after the composition of the "Song upon the Cholera" it was heard in every remote hamlet or farm throughout Brittany. The verses in themselves were detestable, in the way of poetry; no matter, the cholera, finding itself the subject of a song, would take flight. From the power attributed by the people to poesy arises the Breton proverb, "Poesy is stronger than the three strongest things: stronger than evil, than tempest, or than fire." And again, "Song is the calmer of all sorrow." All the Keltic poems, which, like The Plague of Elliant, are written in strophes, are sung throughout to some national air, however lengthy they may be. "I remember," writes M. Émile Souvestre, "that one day, arriving at the Pardon of St. Jean du Doigt, near Morlaix, I heard a blind man who was singing Breton verses on the Nativity: in passing by again in the evening, I found him still in the same place, continuing his subject, which was by no means concluded, and which, he informed me, it required an entire day to get through, though he did not yet know the whole."
It is impossible to compute the number of the popular poems of Brittany. The author just quoted considers that eight or ten thousand would not reach the reality; and he proceeds to describe the manner in which they mingle with the very air of the country, as follows:
"No words can do justice to the intoxicating sensation which he who understands our old language experiences, when, on a fine summer evening, he traverses the mountains of Cornouaille, listening to the songs of the shepherds. At every step the voice, perhaps of a child, perhaps of an aged woman, sends forth to him from the distance a fragment of some antique ballad, sung to melodies such as are never now composed, and narrating the miracle of a former time, or a crime committed in the valley, or an attachment which has broken the heart. The couplets answer one another from rock to rock; the verses sport in the air like the insects of the evening; the wind carries them by gusts into your face, with the perfume of the black-wheat and the rye; and, immersed in this poetic atmosphere, enchanted and meditative, you advance into the midst of the rural solitudes. You perceive great Druidic stones, clothed with moss, leaning toward the border of the wood; feudal ruins, half-hidden in the thickets or breaking the slope of the hills, while at times, on the heights of the mountain, figures of men, with long hair flying in the wind, and strangely clad, pass like shadows between you and the horizon, marked out against the sky, which is just beginning to be illumined by the rising moon. It is like a vision of bygone times; like a waking dream that one might have after reading a page of Ossian."
We will close our present article with a translation of the Sône of Per Cöatmor, as promised in our last; hoping in a future one to conclude our notice of the more ancient and "learned" poetry of Brittany, that is, that which was composed according to the bardic rules, with some curious fragments relating to Merlin the Magician and Merlin the Bard; to be followed by specimens of the historical poems of Brittany.