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A BOOK OF IRISH VERSE

A BOOK OF

IRISH VERSE

SELECTED FROM MODERN WRITERS WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY W.B. YEATS

METHUEN AND CO. 36 ESSEX STREET, W.C. LONDON 1900

_Revised Edition_

W.H. WHITE AND CO. LTD. RIVERSIDE PRESS, EDINBURGH

TO THE MEMBERS

OF

THE NATIONAL LITERARY SOCIETY OF DUBLIN

AND THE

IRISH LITERARY SOCIETY OF LONDON CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface xiii

Modern Irish Poetry xvii

Old Age _Oliver Goldsmith_ (1725-1774) 1

The Village Preacher " " " " 2

The Deserter's Meditation _John Philpot Curran_ (1750--1817) 3

'Thou canst not boast' _Richard Brinsley Sheridan_ (1751-1816) 4

Kathleen O'More _James Nugent Reynolds_ ( -1802) 5

The Groves of Blarney _Richard Alfred Milliken_ (1767-1815) 6

The Light of other Days _Thomas Moore_ (1779-1852) 10

'At the Mid Hour of Night' " " " " 11

The Burial of Sir John Moore _Rev. Charles Wolfe_ (1791-1823) 12

The Convict of Clonmel _Jeremiah Joseph Callanan_ (1795-1839) 14

The Outlaw of Loch Lene " " " 16

Dirge of O'Sullivan Bear " " " 17

Love Song _George Darley_ (1795-1846) 20

The Whistlin' Thief _Samuel Lover_ (1797-1868) 22

Soggarth Aroon _John Banim_ (1798-1842) 24

Dark Rosaleen _James Clarence Mangan_ (1803-1849) 27

Lament for the Princes of Tyrone and Tyrconnell " " " 31 A Lamentation for the Death of Sir Maurice Fitzgerald " " " 41

The Woman of Three Cows _James Clarence Mangan_ (1803-1849) 43

Prince Alfrid's Itinerary through Ireland " " " 47

O'Hussey's Ode to The Maguire " " " 50

The Nameless One " " " 55

Siberia " " " 57

Hy-Brasail _Gerald Griffin_ (1803-1840) 59

Mo Craoibhin Cno _Edward Walsh_ (1805-1850) 61

Mairgréad Ni Chealleadh " " " " 63

From the Cold Sod that's o'er you " " " " 65

The Fairy Nurse " " " " 67

A cuisle geal mo chroidhe _Michael Doheny_ (1805-1863) 69

Lament of the Irish Emigrant _Lady Dufferin_ (1807-1867) 71

The Welshmen of Tirawley _Sir Samuel Ferguson_ (1810-1886) 74

Aideen's Grave " " " " " 91

Deirdre's Lament for the Sons of Usnach " " " " " 99

The Fair Hills of Ireland " " " " " 102

Lament over the Ruins of the Abbey of Timoleague " " " " " 104

The Fairy Well of Lagnanay " " " " " 107

On the Death of Thomas Davis " " " " " 111

The County of Mayo _George Fox_ 115

The Wedding of the Clans _Aubrey de Vere_ (1814) 117

The Little Black Rose _Aubrey de Vere_ (1814) 119 Song " " " " 120

The Bard Ethell " " " " 121

Lament for the Death of Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill _Thomas Davis_ (1814-1845) 135

Maire Bhan Astór " " " " 138

O! the Marriage " " " " 140

A Plea for Love " " " " 142

Remembrance _Emily Brontë_ (1818-1848) 143

A Fragment from 'The Prisoner: a Fragment' " " " " 145

Last Lines " " " " 147

The Memory of the Dead _John Kells Ingram_ (? 1820) 148

The Winding Banks of Erne _William Allingham_ (1824-1889) 150

The Fairies " " " " 157

The Abbot of Inisfalen. " " " " 160

Twilight Voices " " " " 164

'Four Ducks on a Pond' " " " " 166

The Lover and Birds " " " " 167

The Celts _Thomas D'Arcy McGee_ (1825-1868) 169 Salutation to the Celts " " " 172

The Gobban Saor " " " 174

Patrick Sheehan _Charles J. Kickham_ (1825-1882) 176

The Irish Peasant Girl " " " " " 180

To God and Ireland True _Ellen O'Leary_ (1831-1889) 182

The Banshee _John Todhunter_ (1836) 183

Aghadoe " " " 186

A Mad Song _Hester Sigerson_ 188

Lady Margaret's Song _Edward Dowden_ (1843) 188

Song _Arthur O'Shaughnessy_ (1844-1881) 189

Father O'Flynn _Alfred Perceval Graves_ (1846) 191

Song _Rosa Gilbert_ 192

Requiescat _Oscar Wilde_ (1855) 193

The Lament of Queen Maev _Thomas William Rolleston_ (1857) 195

The Dead at Clonmacnois " " " " 197

The Spell-struck " " " " 198

'Were you on the Mountain?' _Douglas Hyde_ 199

'My Grief on the Sea' " " 200

My Love, O, she is my Love " " 201

I shall not die for thee " " 204

Riddles " " 205

Lough Bray _Rose Kavanagh_ (1861-1891) 206

The Children of Lir _Katharine Tynan Hinkson_ 209

St. Francis to the Birds " " " 212

Sheep and Lambs " " " 215

The Gardener Sage " " " 216

The Dark Man _Nora Hopper_ 218

The Fairy Fiddler " " 219

Our Thrones Decay _A.E._ 220

Immortality " 221

The Great Breath " 221

Sung on a By-way " 222

Dream Love " 223

Illusion " 223

Janus " 224

Connla's Well " 225A

Names _John Eglinton_ 226A

That _Charles Weekes_ 227A

Think " " 227A

Te Martyrum Candidatus _Lionel Johnson_ 228A

The Church of a Dream " " 229A

Ways of War " " 230A

The Red Wind _Lionel Johnson_ 231A

Celtic Speech " " 232A

To Morfydd " " 225

Can Doov Deelish _Dora Sigerson_ 226

ANONYMOUS

Shule Aroon 231

The Shan Van Vocht 232

The Wearing of the Green 235

The Rakes of Mallow 237

Johnny, I hardly knew ye 238

Kitty of Coleraine 241

Lament of Morian Shehone for Miss Mary Bourke 242

The Geraldine's Daughter 246

By Memory Inspired 247

A Folk Verse 249

Notes 250

PREFACE

I have not found it possible to revise this book as completely as I should have wished. I have corrected a bad mistake of a copyist, and added a few pages of new verses towards the end, and softened some phrases in the introduction which seemed a little petulant in form, and written in a few more to describe writers who have appeared during the last four years, and that is about all. I compiled it towards the end of a long indignant argument, carried on in the committee rooms of our literary societies, and in certain newspapers between a few writers of our new movement, who judged Irish literature by literary standards, and a number of people, a few of whom were writers, who judged it by its patriotism and by its political effect; and I hope my opinions may have value as part of an argument which may awaken again. The Young Ireland writers wrote to give the peasantry a literature in English in place of the literature they were losing with Gaelic, and these methods, which have shaped the literary thought of Ireland to our time, could not be the same as the methods of a movement which, so far as it is more than an instinctive expression of certain moods of the soul, endeavours to create a reading class among the more leisured classes, which will preoccupy itself with Ireland and the needs of Ireland. The peasants in eastern counties have their Young Ireland poetry, which is always good teaching and sometimes good poetry, and the peasants of the western counties have beautiful poems and stories in Gaelic, while our more leisured classes read little about any country, and nothing about Ireland. We cannot move these classes from an apathy, come from their separation from the land they live in, by writing about politics or about Gaelic, but we may move them by becoming men of letters and expressing primary emotions and truths in ways appropriate to this country. One carries on the traditions of Thomas Davis, towards whom our eyes must always turn, not less than the traditions of good literature, which are the morality of the man of letters, when one is content, like A.E. with fewer readers that one may follow a more hidden beauty; or when one endeavours, as I have endeavoured in this book, to separate what has literary value from what has only a patriotic and political value, no matter how sacred it has become to us.

The reader who would begin a serious study of modern Irish literature should do so with Mr Stopford Brooke's and Mr Rolleston's exhaustive anthology. W.B.Y. _August 15, 1899_

MODERN IRISH POETRY

The Irish Celt is sociable, as may be known from his proverb, 'Strife is better than loneliness,' and the Irish poets of the nineteenth century have made songs abundantly when friends and rebels have been at hand to applaud. The Irish poets of the eighteenth century found both at a Limerick hostelry, above whose door was written a rhyming welcome in Gaelic to all passing poets, whether their pockets were full or empty. Its owner, himself a famous poet, entertained his fellows as long as his money lasted, and then took to minding the hens and chickens of an old peasant woman for a living, and ended his days in rags, but not, one imagines, without content. Among his friends and guests had been O'Sullivan the Red, O'Sullivan the Gaelic, O'Heffernan the blind, and many another, and their songs had made the people, crushed by the disasters of the Boyne and Aughrim, remember their ancient greatness. The bardic order, with its perfect artifice and imperfect art, had gone down in the wars of the seventeenth century, and poetry had found shelter amid the turf-smoke of the cabins. The powers that history commemorates are but the coarse effects of influences delicate and vague as the beginning of twilight, and these influences were to be woven like a web about the hearts of men by farm-labourers, pedlars, potato-diggers, hedge-schoolmasters, and grinders at the quern, poor wastrels who put the troubles of their native land, or their own happy or unhappy loves, into songs of an extreme beauty. But in the midst of this beauty was a flitting incoherence, a fitful dying out of the sense, as though the passion had become too great for words, as must needs be when life is the master and not the slave of the singer.

English-speaking Ireland had meanwhile no poetic voice, for Goldsmith had chosen to celebrate English scenery and manners; and Swift was but an Irishman by what Mr Balfour has called the visitation of God, and much against his will; and Congreve by education and early association; while Parnell, Denham, and Roscommon were poets but to their own time. Nor did the coming with the new century of the fame of Moore set the balance even, for all but all of his Irish melodies are artificial and mechanical when separated from the music that gave them wings. Whatever he had of high poetry is in 'The Light of other Days,' and in 'At the Mid Hour of Night,' which express what Matthew Arnold has taught us to call 'the Celtic melancholy,' with so much of delicate beauty in the meaning and in the wavering or steady rhythm that one knows not where to find their like in literature. His more artificial and mechanical verse, because of the ancient music that makes it seem natural and vivid, and because it has remembered so many beloved names and events and places, has had the influence which might have belonged to these exquisite verses had he written none but these. An honest style did not come into English-speaking Ireland, until Callanan wrote three or four naïve translations from the Gaelic. 'Shule Aroon' and 'Kathleen O'More' had indeed been written for a good while, but had no more influence than Moore's best verses. Now, however, the lead of Callanan was followed by a number of translators, and they in turn by the poets of 'Young Ireland,' who mingled a little learned from the Gaelic ballad-writers with a great deal learned from Scott, Macaulay, and Campbell, and turned poetry once again into a principal means for spreading ideas of nationality and patriotism. They were full of earnestness, but never understood that though a poet may govern his life by his enthusiasms, he must, when he sits down at his desk, but use them as the potter the clay. Their thoughts were a little insincere, because they lived in the half illusions of their admirable ideals; and their rhythms not seldom mechanical, because their purpose was served when they had satisfied the dull ears of the common man. They had no time to listen to the voice of the insatiable artist, who stands erect, or lies asleep waiting until a breath arouses him, in the heart of every craftsman. Life was their master, as it had been the master of the poets who gathered in the Limerick hostelry, though it conquered them not by unreasoned love for a woman, or for native land, but by reasoned enthusiasm, and practical energy. No man was more sincere, no man had a less mechanical mind than Thomas Davis, and yet he is often a little insincere and mechanical in his verse. When he sat down to write he had so great a desire to make the peasantry courageous and powerful that he half believed them already 'the finest peasantry upon the earth,' and wrote not a few such verses as

'Lead him to fight for native land, His is no courage cold and wary; The troops live not that could withstand The headlong charge of Tipperary,'

and to-day we are paying the reckoning with much bombast. His little book has many things of this kind, and yet we honour it for its public spirit, and recognise its powerful influence with gratitude. He was in the main an orator influencing men's acts, and not a poet shaping their emotions, and the bulk of his influence has been good. He was, indeed, a poet of much tenderness in the simple love-songs 'The Marriage,' 'A Plea for Love,' and 'Mary Bhan Astór,' and, but for his ideal of a Fisherman, defying a foreign soldiery, would have been as good in 'The Boatman of Kinsale'; and once or twice when he touched upon some historic sorrow he forgot his hopes for the future and his lessons for the present, and made moving verse. His contemporary, Clarence Mangan, kept out of public life and its half illusions by a passion for books, and for drink and opium, made an imaginative and powerful style. He translated from the German, and imitated Oriental poetry, but little that he did on any but Irish subjects is permanently interesting. He is usually classed with the Young Ireland poets, because he contributed to their periodicals and shared their political views; but his style was formed before their movement began, and he found it the more easy for this reason perhaps to give sincere expression to the mood which he had chosen, the only sincerity literature knows of; and with happiness and cultivation might have displaced Moore. But as it was, whenever he had no fine ancient song to inspire him, he fell into rhetoric which was only lifted out of commonplace by an arid intensity. In his 'Irish National Hymn,' 'Soul and Country,' and the like, we look into a mind full of parched sands where the sweet dews have never fallen. A miserable man may think well and express himself with great vehemence, but he cannot make beautiful things, for Aphrodite never rises from any but a tide of joy. Mangan knew nothing of the happiness of the outer man, and it was only when prolonging the tragic exultation of some dead bard, that he knew the unearthly happiness which clouds the outer man with sorrow, and is the fountain of impassioned art. Like those who had gone before him, he was the slave of life, for he had nothing of the self-knowledge, the power of selection, the harmony of mind, which enables the poet to be its master, and to mould the world to a trumpet for his lips. But O'Hussey's Ode over his outcast chief must live for generations because of the passion that moves through its powerful images and its mournful, wayward, and fierce rhythms.

'Though he were even a wolf ranging the round green woods, Though he were even a pleasant salmon in the unchainable sea, Though he were a wild mountain eagle, he could scarce bear, he, This sharp, sore sleet, these howling floods.'

Edward Walsh, a village schoolmaster, who hovered, like Mangan, on the edge of the Young Ireland movement, did many beautiful translations from the Gaelic; and Michael Doheny, while out 'on his keeping' in the mountains after the collapse at Ballingarry, made one of the most moving of ballads; but in the main the poets who gathered about Thomas Davis, and whose work has come down to us in 'The Spirit of the Nation,' were of practical and political, not of literary importance.

Meanwhile Samuel Ferguson, William Allingham, and Mr Aubrey de Vere were working apart from politics, Ferguson selecting his subjects from the traditions of the Bardic age, and Allingham from those of his native Ballyshannon, and Mr Aubrey de Vere wavering between English, Irish, and Catholic tradition. They were wiser than Young Ireland in the choice of their models, for, while drawing not less from purely Irish sources, they turned to the great poets of the world, Mr de Vere owing something of his gravity to Wordsworth, Ferguson much of his simplicity to Homer, while Allingham had trained an ear, too delicate to catch the tune of but a single master, upon the lyric poetry of many lands. Allingham was the best artist, but Ferguson had the more ample imagination, the more epic aim. He had not the subtlety of feeling, the variety of cadence of a great lyric poet, but he has touched, here and there, an epic vastness and naïveté, as in the description in 'Congal' of the mire-stiffened mantle of the giant spectre Mananan macLir, striking against his calves with as loud a noise as the mainsail of a ship makes, 'when with the coil of all its ropes it beats the sounding mast.' He is frequently dull, for he often lacked the 'minutely appropriate words' necessary to embody those fine changes of feeling which enthral the attention; but his sense of weight and size, of action and tumult, has set him apart and solitary, an epic figure in a lyric age. Allingham, whose pleasant destiny has made him the poet of his native town, and put 'The Winding Banks of Erne' into the mouths of the ballad-singers of Ballyshannon, is, on the other hand, a master of 'minutely appropriate words,' and can wring from the luxurious sadness of the lover, from the austere sadness of old age, the last golden drop of beauty; but amid action and tumult he can but fold his hands. He is the poet of the melancholy peasantry of the West, and, as years go on, and voluminous histories and copious romances drop under the horizon, will take his place among those minor immortals who have put their souls into little songs to humble the proud. The poetry of Mr Aubrey de Vere has less architecture than the poetry of Ferguson and Allingham, and more meditation. Indeed, his few but ever memorable successes are enchanted islands in grey seas of stately impersonal reverie and description, which drift by and leave no definite recollection. One needs, perhaps, to perfectly enjoy him, a Dominican habit, a cloister, and a breviary.