Part 2

The early poetry, we feel, is on the whole joyous; whether pagan or Christian in tone, it arises from a happy heart. The pagan is more robust, more vigorous; the Christian gentler and more reflective; but alike they are free from the mournful note of despair that throws a settled gloom over much of the later literature.

The Ossianic poems have quite a distinctive tone; in them we catch the abounding energy belonging to the days of the hunt of the wild native boar or stag, when all the country was one open hunting-ground, fit for men whose ideal was that of the sportsman and the warrior. Besides romantic tales, we have a whole body of poetry, loosely strung together under the covering name of Oisín, or Ossian, and usually ascribed to him or to Fionn mac Cumhall, his father and chief, dealing with the themes of war and of the chase. They are often in the nature of the protest of the fighting and hunting-man against the claims of religion. He is perpetually proclaiming that the sounds and sights of the forest and seashore are more dear to him than any others, and when he is called upon to give the first place to the duties of religion, placed before him, as it usually is, in its most enfeebling aspect, he raises the stout protest that the hunting-horn has greater attractions for him than the tinkling bell which calls to prayer.

"I have heard music sweeter far Than hymns and psalms of clerics are; The blackbird's pipe on Letterlea, The Dord Finn's wailing melody.

"The thrush's song of Glenna-Scál, The hound's deep bay at twilight's fall, The barque's sharp grating on the shore, Than cleric's chants delight me more."

There is the ring of the obstinate pagan about such verses; and many poems are wholly occupied by an unholy wrangling between the representative of the old order, Oisín, and the representative of the new, St. Patrick. The poems themselves probably date from a far later period than either.

More healthy are the true hunting songs. Many of these are in praise of the Isle of Arran, in the Clyde, a favourite resort during the sporting-season both for the Scottish and Irish huntsman. In the poem we have called "The Isle of Arran," from the "Colloquy of the Ancient Men," the charm of the Isle is well described. We have in it the same pure joy in natural scenery that we find in the poems of the religious hermits, but the tone is manlier and more emphatic.

Occasionally a fiercer note creeps into the hunter's mood. The chase of the boar and deer was not without its dangers. Winter, and the unfriendly clan hard by, or the lean prowling wolf at night, were real terrors to the small companies encamped on the open hill-side or in the forest. Though the warrior in peaceful times loved the chase of swine and stag, his hand had done and was always ready to do sterner work when opportunity offered. The poem "Chill Winter" has a note of almost savage exultation; the old fighter turns from his present perils and discomforts to remember the warrior onslaughts which had left the glen below him silent, and its once happy inhabitants cold in death; colder, as he gladly reflects, than even he himself feels on this chill winter's night. It is the voice of the ancient warrior, who thought no shame of slaying, but thanked God when he had knocked down his fellow. Whether he, in his turn, were the undermost man, or whether he escaped, he cared not at all.

Two difficulties face the modern reader in coming for the first time upon genuine Irish literature, whether poetry or prose. The first is the curious feeling that we are hung between two worlds, the seen and the unseen; that we are not quite among actualities, or rather that we do not know where the actual begins or where it ends. Even in dealing with history we may find ourselves suddenly wafted away into some illusory spirit-world with which the historian seems to deal with the same sober exactness as in detailing any fact of ordinary life. The faculty of discerning between the actual and the imaginary is absent, as it is absent in imaginative children; often, indeed, the illusory quite overpowers the real, as it does in the life of the Irish peasant to-day.

There is, in most literatures, a meeting-place where the Mythological and the Historic stand in close conjunction, the one dying out as the other takes its place. Only in Ireland we never seem to reach this point; we can never anywhere say, "Here ends legend, here begins history." In all Irish writing we find poetry and fact, dreams and realities, exact detail and wild imagination, linked closely hand in hand. This is the Gael as revealed in his literature. At first we are inclined to doubt the accuracy of any part of the story; but, as we continue our examination, we are surprised at the substantial correctness of the ancient records, so far as we are able to test them, whether on the historical or on the social side. The poet is never wholly poet, he is also practical man; and the historian is never wholly chronicler and annalist, he is also at the back of his mind folklorist, lover of nature, dreamer. It is the puzzle and the charm of Ireland.

A good example of this is the very beautiful anonymous Irish poem, rich in poetic imagery, addressed to Ragnall or Reginald, son of Somerled, lord of the Isles from 1164-1204. This poem, written for an historical prince, begins with a description of the joys of the fairy palace, "Emain of the Apples," whence this favoured prince is supposed by the poet to have issued forth:

"Many, in white grass-fresh Emain, Of men on whom a noble eye gazes (The rider of a bay steed impetuously) Through a countenance of foxglove hue, Shapely, branch-fresh.

"Many, in Emain of the pastures, From which its noble feast has not parted, Are the fields ploughed in autumn For the pure corn of the Lord's Body."

The poet's mind wanders from the ancient Emain, capital of Ulster, to the allegorical Emain, the dwelling of the gods or fairy-hosts, who were thought of as inhabiting the great tumuli on the Boyne; again, he transplants his fairy-land to the home of Ragnall, and seems to place it in Mull or the Isle of Man, which was indeed the especial abode of Manannan, the Ocean-god and Ruler of Fairy-land.

"What God from Brugh of the Boyne, Thou son of noble Sabia, Thou beauteous apple-rod Created thee with her in secret?

"O Man of the white steed, O Man of the black swan, Of the fierce band and the gentle sorrow, Of the sharp blade and the lasting fame.

"Thy fair side thou hast bathed, The grey branch of thy eyes like summer showers, Over thy locks, O descendant of Fergus, The wind of Paradise has breathed."[1]

We recognise that this is fine poetry, but we feel also that it needs a specialised education thoroughly to understand it. The world from which it hails is not our world, and to comprehend it we must do more than translate, we must add notes and glossary at every line; but no poetry, especially poetry under the initial disadvantage of a translation, could retain its qualities under such treatment.

In all the ancient verse we meet with these obstacles. Even much of the most imaginative Ossianic poetry becomes too difficult from this point of view for the untrained reader.

Take the fine poem detailing the history of the Shield of Fionn. Poetic addresses to noted weapons are common enough, and are not confined to Irish literature; but the adventures of this shield pass beyond the ordinary uses of human battles, and enter the realm of mythology. The very name given to it, the "Dripping Ancient Hazel," carries us into a world of poetic imagination.

"Scarce is there on the firm earth, whether it be man or woman, one that can tell why thy name abroad is known as the Dripping Ancient Hazel. "'Twas Balor that besought Lugh before his beheading: 'Set my head above thy own comely head and earn my blessing.' "That blessing Lugh Longarm did not earn; he set up the head above a wave of the east in a fork of hazel before him. "A poisonous milk drips down out of that hardened tree; through the baneful drip, it was not slight, the tree split right in two. "For full fifty years the hazel stood, but ever it was a cause of tears, the abode of vultures and ravens. "Manannan of the round eye went into the wilderness of the Mount of White-Hazel; there he saw a shadeless tree among the trees that vied in beauty. "Manannan sets workmen without delay to dig it out of the firm earth. Mighty was the deed! "From the root of that tree arises a poisonous vapour; there were killed by it (perilous the consequence) nine of the working folk. "Now I say to you, and let the prophecy be sought out: Around the mighty hazel without reproach was found the cause of many a woe."

* * * * *

"It was from that shield that Eitheor of the smooth brown face was called 'Son of Hazel,'--for this was the hazel that he worshipped."[2]

Or take again the strange mythological poem of the "Crane-bag," made out of the skin of a wandering haunted crane, which had once been a woman; condemned for "two hundred white years" to dwell in "the house of Manannan," _i.e._ in the wastes of the ocean, ever seeking and never finding land. When the wanderings came to an end, and the unhappy Crane-woman died, Manannan (the Ocean-god) made of her skin a bag into which he put "every precious thing he had; the shirt of Manannan and his knife, the girdle of Goibniu (the Vulcan of Irish legend); the king of Scotland's shears, the king of Lochlann's helmet, and the bones of the swine of Asal--these were the treasures that the Crane-bag held.... When the sea was full, its treasures were seen in its midst; when the fierce sea was on ebb, the Crane-bag was empty." The story has the impress of great age, and manifold changes; it belongs to the period when the gods were not yet transformed into human beings, but were still primaeval elemental powers, impersonations of fire and light and water, and the wisdom that is above mankind. But the link is lost, and the story remains a suggestion only, vague and indistinct. As an image of the hollow ocean, holding the treasures of the Sea-god, the idea is, however, full of force and beauty.[3]

The second difficulty, which is closely connected with the first, lies in the retention of the ancient and unfamiliar nomenclature; the old geographical and family names, which have dropped out of actual use, being everywhere found in the poetry.

Scotland is still Alba in Irish, as it was in the sixth century; Éire (gen. Érinn) is the ordinary name for Ireland, not only in poetry, as is commonly supposed, but in the living language of the country. But it has besides an abundance of specially poetic names, such as Inisfáil, "the island of Destiny," Banba, Fodla, &c., connected with early legends, and these, if we are to understand the poetry, we must accustom ourselves to.

England is still to-day the land of the Saxons to the Gael, and its inhabitants are the "Sassenachs"; the Irishman persists in disregarding the coming of the Angles. We may talk of the extinction of the Gaelic tongue, but in his poetry, as in every place-name of stream or hill or townland all over the country, it is about us still. In the poetry we are back in Gaelic Ireland; the old tribal distinctions, the old clan names, meet us on every page. What does the modern man know of Leth Cuinn or Leth Mogha, the ancient divisions of the North and South, or of the stories which gave them birth? What of Magh Breagh or Magh Murtheimne? What of Emain Macha and Kincora? Who, again, are the Clann Fiachrach or the Eoghanacht, or the Children of Ir or Eiber? Even before the much later titles of Thomond and Desmond, of Tyrconnell and Tyrowen he is somewhat at a loss.

But to the bard the past is always present, the ancient nomenclature is never extinct. The legend which caused the River Boyne to be called "The forearm of Nuada's wife," or the tumuli on its banks to be thought of as the "Elfmounds of the wife of Nechtan," are familiar to him; and to enter into the spirit of the mythological poetry we must know something of Irish folklore and tradition. Many of these expressions have a high imaginative significance, as when the sea is called the "Plain of Ler" (the elder Irish Sea-god), or its waves are "the tresses of Manannan's wife" or the "Steeds of Manannan."

Of the large body of bardic poetry we have been unable to give an adequate representation, partly from considerations of space, but also because we are not yet, until a larger quantity of this poetry has been published, able to estimate its actual poetic value. Much fine poetry by the historic bards undoubtedly exists, but we have as yet only a few published fragments to choose from. The first specimen we give, Teigue Dall O'Higgin's appeal to O'Rourke of the Bulwarks (_na murtha_), must stand as an example of much similar poetry in and about his own day.

The call to union against England or against some local enemy sounds loud and constant in the bardic poems. There is much anti-English poetry; poetry which has for its object the endeavour to unite for a single purpose the chiefs who had split up the provinces into small divisions under separate leaders, each fighting for his own hand.

To stir up the lagging or too peaceful chief was one of the prime duties of the bard; to address to him congratulations on his accession, or to bewail him when he died, was his official function; and to judge by the quantity of paper covered with these laudatory effusions and elegies, he performed his task with punctilious care. It was likely that he would do so, for the fees for a poem that gave satisfaction were substantial. We miss the family bard in these days; there is no one at hand to praise indifferently all that we do.

The bardic poetry attracted the genius of Mangan, and his "Farewell to Patrick Sarsfield" and O'Hussey's "Ode to the Maguire," are not only fine poetry, but excellent representations of two of the finest of the bardic poems. Elsewhere in his poems, we have usually too much Mangan to feel that the tone of the original is faithfully conveyed. His soaring poem, "The Dark Rosaleen," can hardly be said to represent the Irish "Roisín Dubh," of which, for purposes of comparison, we give a literal rendering; beautiful as Mangan's poem is, it has to our mind lost something of the exquisite grace of the original.

It may be well to indicate here the relations between Mangan's version and the original in the poem in which he keeps most strictly to the words of the bard. "O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire," that fine address of the Northern bard, O'Hussey, to his young chief, whose warlike foray into Munster in the depth of winter filled his mind with anxiety and distress. A literal translation of the opening passage reads as follows:

"Too cold for Hugh I deem this night, the drops so heavily downpouring are a cause for sadness; biting is this night's cold--woe is me that such is our companion's lot.

In the clouds' bosoms the water-gates of heaven are flung wide; small pools are turned by it to seas, all its destructiveness hath the firmament spewed out.

A pain to me that Hugh Maguire to-night lies in a stranger's land, 'neath lurid glow of lightning-bolts and angry armed clouds' clamour;

A woe to us that in the province of Clann Daire (Southwest Munster) our well-beloved is couched, betwixt a coarse cold-wet and grass-clad ditch and the impetuous fury of the heavens."[4]

But it is not, after all, the verses of the bards, even of the best of them, that will survive. It is the tender religious songs, the passionate love-songs, the exquisite addresses to nature; those poems which touch in us the common ground of deep human feeling. Whether it came to us from the sixth century or from the sixteenth, the song of Crede for the dead man, whom she had grown to love only when he was dying, would equally move us; the passionate cry of Liadan after Curithir would wring our hearts whatever century produced it. The voice of love is alike in every age. It has no date.

Having written so far, we begin to wonder whether it was wise or necessary to set so much prose between the reader and the poems which, as we hope, he wishes to read. In an ordinary anthology, the interruption of a long preface is a mistake and an intrusion, for, more than any other good art, good poetry must explain itself. The mood in which a poem touches us acutely may be recorded, but it cannot be reproduced in or for the reader. He must find his own moment. For the most part, these Irish poems need no introduction. We need no one to explain to us the beauty of the lines in the "Flower of Nut-brown Maids":

"I saw her coming towards me o'er the face of the mountain, Like a star glimmering through the mist";

or to remind us of the depth of Cuchulain's sorrow when over the dead body of his son he called aloud:

"The end is come, indeed, for me; I am a man without son, without wife; I am the father who slew his own child; I am a broken, rudderless bark Tossed from wave to wave in the tempest wild; An apple blown loose from the garden-wall, I am over-ripe, and about to fall;"

or to tell us that the "Blackthorn," or "Donall Oge," or "Eileen Aroon," are exquisite in their pathos and tenderness. But there are, besides these enchanting things, which we are prepared to expect from Irish verse, also things for which we are not prepared; unfamiliar themes, treated in a new manner; and to judge of these, some help from outside may be useful. The reader who does not know Ireland or know Gaelic, is ready to accept softness, the almost endless iteration of expressions conveying the sense of woman's beauty and of man's affection, in phrases that differ but little from each other; what he is not prepared for is the sudden break into matter-of-fact, the curt tone that cuts across much Irish poetry, revealing an unexpected side of life and character. Even the modern Irishman is tripped up by the swift intrusion of the grotesque; the cold, cynical note that exists side by side with the most fervent religious devotion, especially in the popular poetry, displeases him. He resents it, as he resents the tone of the "Playboy of the Western World"; yet it is the direct modern representative of the tone of mind that produced the Ossianic lays.

We find it in all the popular poetry; as an example take the argument of the old woman who warns a young man that if he persists in his evil ways, there will be no place in heaven for such as he. The youth replies:

"If no sinner ever goes to Paradise, But only he who is blessed, there will be wide empty places in it. If all who follow my way are condemned Hell must have been full twenty years and a year ago, And they could not take me in for want of space."

The same chill, almost harsh tone is heard in the colloquy between Ailill of Munster and the woman whom he has trysted on the night after his death,[5] or in the poem, "I shall not die for you" (p. 286), or in the verses on the fairy-hosts, published by Dr. Kuno Meyer, where, instead of praise of their ethereal loveliness, we are told:

"Good are they at man-slaying, Melodious in the ale-house, Masterly at making songs, Skilled at playing chess."[6]

Could anything be more matter-of-fact than the clever chess-playing of the shee-folk and their pride in it?

A collection of translations must always have some sense of disproportion. It is natural that translators should, as a rule, have been attracted, not only to the poems that most readily give themselves to an English translation, but to those which are most easily accessible. The love-songs, such as those collected by Hardiman and Dr. Douglas Hyde, have been attempted with more or less success by many translators, while much good poetry, not so easily brought to hand, has been overlooked. Dr. Kuno Meyer's fine translations of a number of older pieces, which came out originally either in separate publications,[7] or in the transactions of the Arts Faculty of University College, Liverpool, have now been rendered more accessible in a separate collection; but the English ear is wedded to rhyme, and a prose translation, however careful and choice, often misses its mark with the general reader. Long ago, Miss Brooke (in her _Reliques of Irish Poetry_) and Furlong (in Hardiman's _Irish Minstrelsy_) essayed the translation of a number of the longer "bardic remains"; and these earlier collectors and translators will ever retain the gratitude of their countrymen for rescuing and printing, at a time when little value was placed upon such things, these stores of Irish song.

But the translations suited better the taste of their own day than of ours; we cannot read them now, nor do they in the slightest way represent the verse they are intended to reproduce. Naturally, too, it is easier to give the spirit and language of a serious poem than that of a humorous one in another tongue, so that the more playful verse has been neglected.

It may be thought that this book is overweighted by religious and love poems; but in a collection essentially lyrical, religion and love must ever be the two chief themes. In Ireland, the inner spirit of the national genius ever spoke, and still speaks, through them.

Among the people of the quiet places where few strangers come, and where night passes into day and day again to night with little change of thought or outward emotion, simple sorrows and simple pleasures have still time to ripen into poetry. The grief that came to-day will not pass away with a new grief to-morrow; it will impress its groove, straight and deep, upon the heart that feels it, lying there without hope of a summer growth to hide its furrow. The long monotonous days, the dark unbroken evenings are the nurseries of sorrow; the white open roads are the highways of hope or the paths for the wayfaring thoughts of despair. The stranger who came one day comes again no more, though we watch the long white track never so earnestly; the boy or girl who went that way to foreign lands has not thrown his or her shadow across the road again. Where the turf fire rises curling and blue into the air, where the young girl stands waiting by the winding "boreen," where the old woman croons over the hearth, there we shall surely find, if we know how to draw it forth, that a well of poetry has been sunk, and that half-unconsciously the thought of the heart has expressed itself in simple verse, or in rhythmic prose almost more beautiful than verse. The minds that produced the touching melodies that wail and croon and sing to us out of Ireland, have not the less expressed themselves in melodious poetry. Here, if anywhere, we may look to find a style unspoiled by imitation, and a sentiment moving because it is perfectly sincere. It is thus that such poems as "Donall Oge" or the "Roísin Dubh" or "My Grief on the Sea" come into existence.