Part 4

As the years passed, James Thomson’s melancholy grew deeper and deeper. Dejected, poverty-stricken, unrecognized, he still tramped the streets, and still from his bed in his lodging house stared blankly into an ultimate void. In the beginning of the year 1882, something seems to have given way in him at last and, fully cognizant of what he was doing, he deliberately set about to drink himself to death. He was thrown out into the streets by his landlord. Again and again with a strange dogged determination he tried to force his way into the miserable abode which, after all, was the only home he knew. “I must have a roof over my head.”

Four months passed by and he was still alive. It is known that he spent some part of the time in jail; for the rest, he drifted about in the purlieus of Wapping-Old-Stairs and The Isle of Dogs. Most of his friends lost sight of him. A few of them saw him at rare intervals, and always from his finely moulded head, furrowed now with deep lines, his blue eyes looked out with abject defiance. On one occasion he was seen in a tavern, dressed in mud-stained, ragged clothes. He was wearing a pair of carpet slippers, through the broken soles of which his naked feet were clearly visible.

Then suddenly he appeared in the rooms of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet. Although Marston could not see his guest there was something about his wild speech that filled the blind man with terrible misgivings. Fortunately, William Sharp, the critic, happened to come in later in the afternoon. He found Thomson lying on Marston’s bed, in a pool of blood, almost unconscious. He had the sick man conveyed to the London University Hospital where, it is said, he lay for a long time on the bare bench of the common waiting-room until the house physician found time to attend to him. What, exactly, were Thomson’s last words has never been divulged. It has been hinted that they were such as to cause even his friends to look askance. “I shall get out of here on Monday, even if it’s in my coffin” was one sentence shrieked out by the frenzied man who could not die. His words proved happily true. On the following Monday he, the atheist, theophobist, life hater, found rest at last for his “homeless mind,” in a good hour, under six feet of honest earth. No religious service was said over his grave. Free at length from

Infections of unutterable sadness, Infections of incalculable madness, Infections of incurable despair,

he was simply put under ground, “unhouseled, unanneal’d,” cursed alike by man and God, a renegade and outcast who had been denied everything in the world except genius.

PADRAIC COLUM

It has been given to few writers of verse to express the mood of the land of their birth with an accent as autochthonous as that of Mr. Padraic Colum. It is not for nothing that this shy and delicate poet derives his family name from the most Irish of Irish saints and singers who himself most wonderfully, more than a thousand years ago, struck the very same note that delights us today in Mr. Colum’s poetry. For as the holy Columcille looked back from his small craft of skins and branches at the green fields of Ireland growing more and more indistinct behind him, it is said that the sound of his singing was heard far and wide over the cold, drab-coloured waves of the northern sea:

How swift is the speed of my coracle; Its stem towards Derry. I grieve at my errand o’er the noble sea Traveling to Alba of the Ravens. A grey eye looks back to Erin A grey eye full of tears.

It is just this same quality, so heightened, so imaginative and yet so convincingly realistic “with its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic,” that we find in Padraic Colum’s verse. For all the bewildering effrontery displayed by certain Celtic adventurers in the realm of Saxon literature, for all the dash and intellectual brilliance, for instance, of men like Burke, Sheridan, Moore, Wilde, and Shaw, it is not to them that we look for the true articulate expression of the sad soul of Ireland. We must turn to the ancient Catholic singers, to the country ballad-makers, to the vague, wistful, half-expressed romanticism of poets like Francis Mahony, James Clarence Mangan, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Padraic Colum, if we are to catch the wild, doleful music which the wandering west winds of the Atlantic awaken in the whin bushes and lone moorland trees of the dedicated and tragic Island.

Mr. Colum was born and brought up in one of the middle counties, and his spirit has been permeated with the very thrill of this articulation. His imagination is the imagination of the incorrigible and wilful people who have retained throughout history so strange an attitude to the bleak illusions which occupy, in so rigid a manner, the attention and interests of the rest of the world.

From the earliest times, the Irish have been irresistibly attracted by those half-uttered secrets of the earth’s margins which a chance phrase or unexpected word in Celtic literature seems often so nearly to reveal. Above everything these “amorous Gaedhils” are impressionable to what _can not be spoken_; to the inconstant, tremulous, spiritual messages that come to us with retrospection; to the indefinable, provocative calls, sad voices from lost worlds, as it were, that are brought to us each year with the passing of the seasons; to the incoherent evocations that emanate from certain localities or objects whose forlorn identity when once observed can never be forgotten.

It is indeed fitting enough that Padraic Colum should have called the one slim, precious volume he has given us “Wild Earth.” No more adequate title could possibly have been selected. Wild Earth!--in these poems one finds the dew of a thousand early mornings, drawn forth by the yellow sun from our wanton planet which after a million dancing æons remains to this day proud, and hard, and “wild,” and never entirely “broken for corn.”

Everything Mr. Colum writes has its peculiar interest. In a single illuminating sentence he has done much to elucidate the mysterious power of the most perplexing work of genius that has appeared in modern times. Of “Ulysses” he says: “James Joyce does not write savagely, he writes satanically, and his satire touches not individuals and institutions but life itself.” Again and again in Padraic Colum’s plays one comes upon passages which bear the stamp of his sensitive and fastidious genius. Take this quotation:

The people have to watch The black rain and it falling all the day.

And again,

God’s will is set Against us all; it is against The cattle in the field, and it was they Stood by his crib; they’re moaning always now He has forgotten them.

In the mere use of the simple words “black rain,” what a fresh, unsophisticated approach to the manifestations of the visible world is revealed; and in the second quotation what a winnowed, sensitive delicacy, so Celtic, so Catholic, is suggested by the “long long thoughts” which could conceive of a deity being laid under some kind of magnanimous obligation to the beasts of the field for no other reason, forsooth, than that they had been the mute spectators of the birth of a god! It is, indeed, this “fresh approach” which gives to Mr. Colum’s books written for children the clear, lucid tone which makes each of them, in its way, a perfect work of art. They seem always to be the narrations of one who has experienced something or seen something for the first time. In truth, to the eye of a poet, what matter that a thousand ages have passed since the world’s crust first cooled? Are not men, birds, animals, and flowers, created every hour, incredible and exultant, from the mysterious, fecund breathing of the nostrils of God?

How evasively and unpretentiously Padraic Colum conveys to us the poetry of life; lines, and even single words of his, brushing against our intelligence with the surprise and softness of a linnet’s wings. What a rich harvest of impressions his poet’s nature must have gathered in those days of his youth--the homely, simple look of white geese against a peat stack, the cottage interior with its shrine and corn bin, the “lonesome hush” of a deserted country road, “the fire-seed sleeping deep in white ashes”!

But valuable though his other contributions to literature are, it is to his poetry that one returns, time and again, when one wishes for the particular refreshment that in certain moods he alone can give us. Has he, one wonders, in his poem entitled “The Poet” presented us with a valuable clue by which to explain his power?

‘The blackbird’s nest, in the briar, The sea-gulls’ nests on the ground They are nests, and they’re more than nests’ he said ‘They are tokens I have found.’ . . . . . . ‘But close to the ground are they reared The wings that take widest way, And the birds that sing best in the wood,’ he said, ‘Are bred with their breasts to the clay.’

The poems of “Wild Earth” do in very fact remind one of the direct appeal of the familiar European blackbird with its liquid, flute-like song; but they also have in them something else, something unutterable, unaccountable, melancholy, which one might well associate with a different bird. Continually, as we read, we are startled by a note plaintive and intractable as the whistle of a curlew coming to us on the wind, in fitful intervals, from some far-off, desolate moorland.

The crows still fly to that wood, and out of the wood she comes Carrying her load of sticks, a little less now than before, Her strength being less; she bends as the hoar rush bends in the wind. . . . . . . And then, between daybreak and dark, And between the hill and the sea, Three Women, come down from the Mountain, Will raise the Keen over me. . . . . . . Och! but I’m weary of mist and dark, And roads where there’s never a house nor bush, And tired I am of bog and road, And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

Hidden away in many of his poems side by side with this haunting feeling of bane, one comes upon an extraordinary suggestion of those unexplained emotions which for want of a better word we call romantic. Perhaps what I mean will also best be illustrated by quoting from certain poems.

To Meath of the pastures, From wet hills by the sea, Through Leitrim and Longford, Go my cattle and me.

I hear in the darkness Their slipping and breathing-- I name them the bye-ways They’re to pass without heeding;

Then the wet, winding roads, Brown bogs with black water; And my thoughts on white ships And the King o’ Spain’s daughter.

We hear it again in

Mavourneen is going From me and from you, Where Mary will fold him With mantle of blue!

From reek of the smoke And cold of the floor, And the peering of things Across the half-door.

Or in,

She’ll hear my boat on the shingles, And she’ll hear my step on the land, And the corncrake hid in the meadow Will tell her I’m at hand!

But it may very well be that in its ultimate essence what constitutes the chief value of Padraic Colum’s work is the faculty he possesses for calling up before our eyes the peculiar characteristics of the native Irish, characteristics so simple and yet so imaginative, lingering on even yet, in the more out of the way districts of their country-side. In his writings we hear once more the exact intonation of the fiddlers and the wavering voices of the harp-players who for generations have gone wailing through each white-washed hovel, and whose wandering footprints have been mingled for centuries with the webbed indentures of ganders and ducks which mark each muddy bohereen. Again and yet again we catch the echoes of their doleful exclamations, Och! Ochone! or hear the reiterate murmur of their ranns and quaint benedictions.

I save the seed of fire to-night, Even so may Christ save me,

On the top of the house let Mary In the middle let Bridget be.

These are the people whose hearts for so many centuries have been entrammelled with a perilous love for their dark Rosaleen with “her holy delicate white hands.”

The priests are on the ocean green They march along the deep. There’s wine from the royal Pope, Upon the ocean green;

These are the people who “went forth to war, but always fell” and who to this day cherish deep in their hearts a proud contempt for the “creeping Saxon.”

Not forgetting Saxon faith Not forgetting Norman scath Not forgetting William’s word Not forgetting Cromwell’s sword

From Cruckmoylinn to Carricknabauna, from Glen Nefin to Leitrim, they have eaten “the scrape of hog’s lard” and looked upon the three most desolate things in the world, and yet have retained throughout the worst period of their agony a “deep affection and recollection” for the tragic soul of their country whose memory in retrospect ever haunts their minds.

In the old, old days, upon Innish, The fields were lucky and bright,

But possibly in one single poem of three verses Padraic Colum has succeeded more than in any other in giving perfect expression to his feeling not only for the romance and beauty that he finds in innocent, homely things but also for the silent glamour of nature in her most entranced and lambent moods. His poem called “Across the Door” is unsurpassed both in form and imaginative suggestiveness. These lines have upon them the simplicity and inevitability which belong only to great poetry.

With what ease our imagination re-creates the poem’s setting--the close interior with the candle-light making flickering patterns on the smoke-stained rafters, the quick elbow-movements of the fiddlers, and the young, eager girl who, transported by the music and dance, so soon feels on the moonlit threshold with “the dim, wide meadows” about her, a conscious, bewildered awakening to that wild mystery before which all creation trembles and faints. If Mr. Colum had written no other line of poetry except this piece, in my opinion, it would have ensured for him an undisputed place among the immortals:

The fiddles were playing and playing, The couples were out on the floor; From converse and dancing he drew me, And across the door.

Ah! strange were the dim, wide meadows, And strange was the cloud-strewn sky, And strange in the meadows the corncrakes, And they making cry!

The hawthorn bloom was by us, Around us the breath of the south. _White hawthorn, strange in the night-time--_ _His kiss on my mouth!_

Transcriber’s Notes

Typographical errors have been silently corrected. Italics have been indicated with surrounding underscores.