A Recent Irish Literature III

So much for the prose. The poetry is far more satisfying to the ordinary reader. It includes every class of verse, from the rollicking drinking song to the tenderest love lyric. To Dr. Hyde we are indebted for the greater part of this branch of our literature, but others worthy of all praise are J. H. Lloyd, Tadhg O’Donoghue, Domhnal O’Foharty, J. C. Ward, Michael Martin, James Fenton, &c. Writing as far back as 1885 of these “Songs of the People,” Dr Hyde in the Dublin University Review paid a tribute to their beauty and delicacy.

“As to the verses themselves,” he says, “they are generally full of naivete, and as such they form the most extreme contrast to the poems of the regular bards, which are refined and polished away to a ruinous extent, making in too many instances the sense subservient to the sound…  It has always been the bane of Irish song that the bards lavished upon the poem that attention which ought to have been bestowed upon the matter, and while the structure of their verse in melody and smoothness, as well as variety of rhythmic measure, exceeds anything of which an Englishman could form a conception, surpassing by far what we meet with in most modern literature, the poverty of the matter is unhappily too often such as to render pitiable any attempt at translation, which, if at all literal, must only produce a smile of contempt. In this respect they resemble a good deal the collections which we meet in any Italian canzoniere, delicious to sing, and haunting the brain with their melody, but if in pursuit you go deeper,

‘Allured by the light that shone,’

…you generally find that as in Moore’s Lagenian mines, the sparkle has been merely on the surface. But with the Arcadian verses that live amongst the peasantry, verses generated from the locality and the issue of direct emotions and natural spontaneous feeling, it is quite otherwise. They are melodious, it is true, and rhythmical enough, but still there is a directness and force about them which we miss in the more educated productions of the last century… Of all the verses in which the peasantry delight, the love songs are by far the best. Many of them are genuinely pathetic, and speak the very excess of passion in nearly all its phases, generally its most despairing ones… Here is a song in which a lover, having opened all his mind to his mistress for the first time, and apparently meeting with a favourable answer, becomes suddenly enraptured with the beauty of everything round him and exclaims twice:

‘Ta na ba ag geimnig, agus na gamhna da ndiuil,
Agus a chuisle gheal mo chleibhe ‘s leat aleig me mo run.’

‘Oh! the kine they are lowing, and the calves are at play,
And you, white pulse of my bosom, you have had my secret to-day.’

In another poem the lover sems to have been less successful, for he cries in agony:

‘Is mar sin ata mo chroidhe sa deunadh piosaidhe ann mo lar,
Mar bheith crainn ilar sleibhe a’s e gan freamha no croidhe slan.’

‘Oh! my heart is breaking slowly, breaking in the midst of me
As the roots on some wild mountain give beneath the lonely tree.’

Another song sings the beauty of some ‘Ainnir na naoi n-orfholt,’ or ‘Girl of the Nine Gold Tresses,’ of whom her admirer cries with more than Celtic hyperbole:

‘Nac raibh a solus sgeimhe
I ngleann na Reultan,
Agus lasadh ceud i mbarr gach dlaoigh.’

‘In the valley of starlight
Such splendour of beauty,
There shines light for a hundred from each gold hair.’”

The title of the article from which I have taken these extracts is “The Unpublished Songs of Ireland.” Since then in various places, but more especially in the Gaelic Journal, in Dr. Hyde’s own book, “The Love Songs of Connacht,” in his articles, “Song of the Connacht Bards,” in the old Nation, and “Religious Songs of Connacht” in the New Ireland Review, in O’Foharty’s “Siamsa an Gheimhridh,” in United Ireland, the Cork Weekly Examiner, Fainne an Lae, An Claidheamh Soluis, the Independent, St. Patrick’s, quite a host of pieces have at least been preserved from extinction, so most of them are “unpublished” no longer.

The Connaught love songs are, of course, the most accessible of these collections, and even the mere English reader will be charmed with them. All the lyrical swing and rhythm peculiar to Irish song are here linked with a tenderness and pathos, or oftentimes a note of joyous triumph that one seeks for vainly in all the overwrought and sound-laden verse of English-writing poets. Listen to this little song by a Mayo peasant:

“Did I stand on the bald top of Nefin
And my hundred-times loved one with me,
We should nestle together as safe in
Its shades as the birds on a tree.
From your lips such a music is shaken,
When you speak it awakens my pain,
And my eyelids by sleep are forsaken,
And I seek for my slumber in vain.

But were I on the fields of the ocean
I should sport on its infinite room,
I should plough through the billows’ commotion
Though my friends should look dark at my doom.
For the flower of all maidens of magic
Is beside me where’er I may be,
And my heart like a coal is extinguished,
Not a woman takes pity on me.

How well for the birds in all weather,
They rise up on high in the air
And then sleep on one bough together
Without sorrow or trouble or care;
But so it is not in this world
For myself and my thousand-times fair,
For away, far apart from each other,
Each day rises barren and bare.

Say, what dost thou think of the heavens
When the heat overmasters the day,
Or what when the steam of the tide
Rises up in the face of the bay?
Even so is the man who has given
An inordinate love-gift away
Like a tree on a mountain all riven
Without blossom or leaflet or spray.”

And this song of a Connemara girl is delightful in its intensity of love and sorrow – it is wedded to a splendid air, but even in a cold reading the magical swing of its numbers cannot fail to attract:

“Ringleted youth of my love,
With thy locks bound loosely behind thee;
You passed by the road above,
But you never came in to find me.
Where were the harm for you
If you came for a little to see me?
Your kiss is a wakening dew
Were I ever so ill or so dreamy.

If I had golden store
I would make a nice little boreen
To lead straight up to his door,
The door of the house of my storeen;
Hoping to God not to miss
The sound of his footfall in it,
I have waited so long for his kiss
That for days I have slept not a minute.

I though, O my love! You were so –
As the moon is, or sun on a fountain,
And I thought after that you were snow,
The cold snow on top of the mountain;
And I thought after that, you were more
Like God’s lamp shining to find me,
Or the bright star of knowledge before,
And the star of knowledge behind me.

You promised me high-heeled shoes,
And satin and silk, my storeen,
And to follow me, never to lose,
Though the ocean were round us roaring;
Like a bush in a gap in a wall
I am now left lonely without thee,
And this house I grow dead of, is all
That I see around or about me.”

So, too, is that almost equally fine piece, entitled “An Bhrigdeach.” But possibly the queen of Irish love songs is that entitled “Cailin Beag an Ghleanna:”

“O youth whom I have kissed, like a star through the mist,
I have given thee this heart altogether;
And you promised me to be at the greenwood for me,
Until we took counsel together;
But know my love, though late, that no sin is so great,
For which angels hate the deceiver,
As first to steal the bliss of a maiden with a kiss,
To deceive after this and to leave her.

And do you now repent for leaving me down bent
With the trouble of the world going through me,
Preferring sheep and kine and the silver of the mine
And the black mountain heifers to me?
I would sooner win a youth to love me in his truth
Than the riches that you, love, have chosen,
Who would come to me and play by my side every day
With a young heart gay and unfrozen.

And when the sun goes round I sink upon the ground,
I feel my bitter wound at that hour;
All pallid, full of gloom, like one from out a tomb,
O Mary’s Son, without power.
And all my friends not dead are casting at my head
Reproaches at my own sad undoing,
And this is what they say, ‘Since yourself went astray
Go and suffer so to-day in your ruin.’”

That image of the star through the mist is a favourite one with our poets; and that warning which the maiden breathes in the first stanza appears also in a very favourite Ulster song, “Coillte Glas Tricuha” (The Green Woods of Truagh”), printed by Mr. Lloyd in the Gaelic Journal a few years ago, the only difference being that in this latter song it is the man upbraids the maiden. All the songs, however, are not in praise of women. In O’Foharty’s book such pieces as “An Chiomach,” or “The Slattern,” giving versions from Connacht, Beara, and Donegal, are included. This poem is a terribly sarcastic diatribe on the enormity of marrying for the sake of a few had of cattle or a “bit o’ land,” and in fact, to some extent, on the folly of marrying at all. Such pieces, however, are not very numerous, for evidently the poet takes greater pleasure in idealising life than in painting its grim realities. The sorrow of unrequited affection, the misery of blighted affection, or the uncertainty that is at once a pain and pleasure, these are generally his themes; but the prosaic miseries of matrimony, as a rule, seldom win his attention. The last four Oireachtasa brought out many fine pieces hitherto unknown outside their immediate districts. Michael Martin, of Dingle, was the greatest contributor, and his “Bolg Dana” contains examples of almost all kinds of verse, including love songs, dirges, and pathetical pieces. It is a remarkable fact that the political strife of the last hundred and fifty years has affected Gaelic poetry very little. Very few songs in Gaelic deal with ’98, songs about O’Connell are not very numerous either, and of later days there are no political songs. The only lays at all approaching that style of composition are the Ribbon songs, of which examples will be found in O’Daly and in this collection of Michael Martin. These, of course, narrow in their views, in no way represent the general political feeling of the people. That there were songs of a strongly National character in the political sense I am convinced, but the early collectors having little or no sympathy with the strong feelings of the poets looked on them with contempt, and neglected to take them down. A song extolling the Stuarts was a safe thing; but one inculcating an Irish policy for Irishmen was quite a different matter; hence we have but few songs that can be called political, for the generations that preserved them have been gone for many years. Of this class of song the most famous is one yet remembered in Tipperary, with the refrain, “Taim-se i mo chodladh no’s for mo sgenl,” or, “I’m Asleep or the Truth I Declare.” The air is a very fine one, not to be confounded with the great air “Taim-se I mo chodladh ‘s na duisigh me.”