An Craoibhin’s Poems
‘“I would much rather (and I take every occasion of making this protest) write, so to say, in a dead language and for a dead people, than write in those deaf and stammering (sorde e mute) tongues, French and English, notwithstanding they are the fashion with their rules and exercises.” This is so with me. Alfieri wrote these words a hundred years ago, and they express what is in my own mind. I would like better to make even one good verse in the language in which I am now writing, than to make a whole book of verses in English. For if there should be any good found in my English verses, it would not go to the credit of my mother, Ireland, but of my stepmother, England.’
I have translated this from Douglas Hyde’s preface to his little book of poems, lately published in Dublin, Ubhla de’n Craoibh, “Apples from the Branch.” An Craoibhin Aoibhin, “The delightful little branch,” is the name by which he is called all over Irish-speaking Ireland; and a gold branch bearing golden apples is stamped on the cover of his book. The poems had already been published, one by one, in a weekly paper; and a friend of mine tells me he has heard them sung and repeated by country people in many parts of Ireland—in Connemara, in Donegal, in Galway, in Kerry, in the Islands of Aran.
Three or four of the thirty-three poems the book holds are, so to speak, official, written for the Gaelic League by its president; and these, like most official odes, are only for the moment. Some are ballads dealing with the old subjects of Irish ballads—emigration, exile, defeat, and death; for Douglas Hyde, as may be guessed from his preface, has, no less than his fellows—
‘Hidden in his heart the flame out of the eyes
Of Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.’
But these national ballads, though very popular, are, I think, not so good as his more personal poems. I suppose no narrative of what others have done or felt or suffered can move one like a flash from ‘that little infinite, faltering, eternal flame that one calls oneself.’ Even in my bare prose translation, this poem will, I think, be found to have as distinct a quality as that of Villon or of Heine:—
‘There are three fine devils eating my heart—
They left me, my grief! without a thing;
Sickness wrought, and Love wrought,
And an empty pocket, my ruin and my woe.
Poverty left me without a shirt,
Barefooted, barelegged, without any covering;
Sickness left me with my head weak
And my body miserable, an ugly thing.
Love left me like a coal upon the floor,
Like a half-burned sod, that is never put out,
Worse than the cough, worse than the fever itself,
Worse than any curse at all under the sun,
Worse than the great poverty
Is the devil that is called “Love” by the people.
And if I were in my young youth again,
I would not take, or give, or ask for a kiss!’
The next, in the form of a little folk-song, expresses the thought of the idealist of all time, that makes him cry, as one of the oldest of the poets cried long ago, ‘Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird; the birds round about are against her.’ Yet, with its whimsical fancies and exaggerations, it could hardly have been written in any but Irish air.
‘It’s my grief that I am not a little white duck,
And I’d swim over the sea to France or to Spain;
I would not stay in Ireland for one week only,
To be without eating, without drinking, without a full jug.
‘Without a full jug, without eating, without drinking,
Without a feast to get, without wine, without meat,
Without high dances, without a big name, without music;
There is hunger on me, and I astray this long time.
‘It’s my grief that I am not an old crow;
I would sit for awhile up on the old branch,
I could satisfy my hunger, and I not as I am,
With a grain of oats or a white potato.
‘It’s my grief that I am not a red fox,
Leaping strong and swift on the mountains,
Eating cocks and hens without pity,
Taking ducks and geese as a conqueror.
‘It’s my grief that I am not a fair salmon,
Going through the strong full water,
Catching the mayflies by my craft,
Swimming at my choice, and swimming with the stream.
‘It’s my grief that I am of the race of the poets;
It would be better for me to be a high rock,
Or a stone or a tree or an herb or a flower
Or anything at all, but the thing that I am.’
The sympathy of the moods of nature with the moods of man is a traditional heritage that has come to us through the poets, from the old time when the three great waves of the sea answered to a cry of distress in Ireland, or when, as in Israel, the land mourned and the herbs of every field withered, for the wickedness of them that dwelt therein. The sea, and the winds blowing from the sea, can never be very far from the dweller in Ireland; and they echo the loneliness of the lonely listener.
‘Cold, sharp lamentation
In the cold bitter winds
Ever blowing across the sky;
Oh, there was loneliness with me!
‘The loud sounding of the waves
Beating against the shore,
Their vast, rough, heavy outcry,
Oh, there was loneliness with me!
‘The light sea-gulls in the air,
Crying sharply through the harbours,
The cries and screams of the birds
With my own heart! Oh! that was loneliness.
‘The voice of the winds and the tide,
And the long battle of the mighty war;
The sea, the earth, the skies, the blowing of the winds.
Oh! there was loneliness in all of them together.’
Here is a verse from another poem of loneliness:—
‘It is dark the night is; I do not see one star at all;
And it is dark and heavy my thoughts are that are scattered and straying.
There is no sound about but of the birds going over my head—
The lapwing striking the air with long-drawn, weak blows
And the plover, that comes like a bullet, cutting the night with its whistle;
And I hear the wild geese higher again with their rough screech.
But I do not hear any other sound, it is that increases my grief—
Not one other cry but the cry and the call of the birds on the bog.’
Here is another, in which the storm outside and the storm within answer to one another:—
‘The heavy clouds are threatening,
And it’s little but they’ll take the roof off the house;
The heavy thunder is answering
To every flash of the yellow fire.
I, by myself, within in my room,
That is narrow, small, warm, am sitting,
I look at the surly skies,
And I listen to the wind.
‘I was light, airy, lively,
On the young morning of yesterday;
But when the evening came,
I was like a dead man!
I have not one jot of hope
But for a bed in the clay;
Death is the same as life to me
From this out, from a word I heard yesterday.’
The next is very simple, and puts into more homely words the feeling of ‘lonesomeness’ that is looked upon as almost the worst of evils by the Irish countryman, as we see by his proverb: ‘It is better to be quarreling than to be lonesome.’ ‘I would be lonesome in it,’ is often the reason given for a refusal to go from bog or mountain cabin to some crowded place ‘where there is not heed for one or love.’
‘Oh! if there were in this world
Any nice little place,
To be my own, my own for ever,
My own only,
I would have great joy—great ease—
Beyond what I have,
Without a place in the world where I can say:
“This is my own.”
It’s a pity for a man to know,
And it’s a pain,
That there is no place in the world
Where there is heed for him or love;
That there is not in the world for him
A heart or a hand
To give help to him
To the mering of the next world.
‘It is hard and it is bitter,
And a sharp grief,
It is woe and it is pity,
To be by oneself.
It is nothing the way you are,
To anyone at all.
It is nothing the way you are,
To yourself at last!’
I suppose the following may be called a political poem, from its elusive reference to Home Rule. I was not sure on the point myself; for I thought the wearer of the ‘blue cloak and birds’ feathers,’ must be a fine lady, perhaps laying enchantment on the fields. But I heard some one ask the Craoibhin who he meant, and his answer was: ‘I suppose I was thinking of an aide-de-camp’:—
‘I am looking at my cows walking,
What are you that would put me out of my luck?
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?
‘I will not always be turned backwards.
If there is need to be humble to you, great is my grief,
If I cannot walk, if I cannot walk, if I cannot walk in my own fields.
‘It’s little my respect, and it’s little my desire,
For your blue cloak, and your birds’ feathers.
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?
‘The day is coming as it’s easy to see,
When there shall not be among us the ugly like of you.
And each one shall be walking, and each one shall be walking,
Wherever shall be his will and his own desire.’
There are some love songs in the little volume. But their writer has had, in his beautiful translations of the ‘Love Songs of Connacht,’ to put such intensity of passion into English, that he must despair of putting any new wings to passion, or any new exaggeration into lovers’ words. In one of these Connacht songs, the lover says: ‘Blacker is the sun when setting than your features, Mary!’ And she answers back: ‘Neither star nor sun shows one-third much light as your shadow!’ Another lover says of the woman he desires: ‘I will write largely of her, because of the thousands who hoped for her, and who have been lost; and a hundred men of these who still live, are in pain and under locks through love. And I myself am not free, but am a bondsman in bonds.’ And another boasts of ‘a love without littleness, without weakness; love from age till death, love from folly growing, love that shall send me close beneath the clay, love without a hope of the world, love without envy of fortune, love that left me outside in captivity, love of my heart beyond women.’ Douglas Hyde’s own love songs are quiet and staid in contrast to these; but nevertheless they have a sober charm. Here are the last verses of one of them:—
‘Will you be as hard,
Colleen, as you are quiet?
Will you be without pity
On me for ever?
‘Listen to me, Noireen,
Listen, aroon;
Put healing on me
From your quiet mouth.
‘I am in the little road
That is dark and narrow,
The little road that has led
Thousands to sleep.’
In his preface to the ‘Love Songs of Connacht’ he says he finds in them ‘more of grief and trouble, more of melancholy and contrition of heart, than of gaiety or hope’; and he writes: ‘Not careless and light-hearted alone is the Gaelic nature; there is also beneath the loudest mirth a melancholy spirit; and if they let on to be without heed for anything but sport and revelry, there is nothing in it but letting on.’ There is grief and trouble, as I have shown, in many of his own songs, which the people have taken to their hearts so quickly; but there is also a touch of hope, of glad belief that, in spite of heavy days of change, all things are working for good at the last.
Here are some verses from a poem called ‘There is a Change coming’:—
‘When that time comes it will come heavily;
He will grow fat that was lean;
He will grow lean that was fat,
Without shelter for the head, without mirth, without help.
‘The low will be raised up, says the poet;
The thing that was high will be thrown down again;
The world will be changed from end to end:
When that time comes it will come heavily.
‘If you yourself see this thing coming,
And the country without luck, without law, without authority,
Swept with the storm, without knowledge, without strength,
Remember my words, and don’t let your heart break.
‘This life is like a tree;
The top green, branches soft, the bark smooth and shining;
But there is a little worm shut up in it
Sucking at the sap all through the day.
‘But from this old, cold, withered tree,
A new plant will grow up;
The old world will die without pity,
But the young world will grow up on its grave.’
Here is a fine vision of a battle-field:—
‘The time I think of the cause of Ireland
My heart is torn within me.
‘The time I think of the death of the people
Who protected Ireland bravely and faithfully.
‘They are stretched on the side of the mountain
Very low, one with another.
‘Hidden under grass, or under tall herbs,
Far from friends or help or friendship.
‘Not a child or a wife near them;
Not a priest to be found there or a friar;
‘But the mountain eagle and the white eagle
Moving overhead across the skies.
‘Without a defence against the sun in the daytime;
Without a shelter against the skies at night.
‘It’s many a good soldier, joyful and pleasant,
That has had his laughing mouth closed there.
‘There is many a young breast with a hole through it;
The little black hole that is death to a man.
‘There is many a brave man stripped there,
His body naked, without vest or shirt.
‘The young man that was proud and beautiful yesterday,
When the woman he loved left a kiss on his mouth.
‘There is many a married woman, with the child at her breast,
Without her comrade, without a father for her child to-night.
‘There’s many a castle without a lord, and many a lord without a house;
And little forsaken cabins with no one in them.
‘I saw a fox leaving its den
Asking for a body to feed its hunger.
‘There’s a fierce wolf at Carrig O’Neill;
There is blood on his tongue and blood on his mouth.
‘I saw them, and I heard the cries
Of kites and of black crows.
‘Ochone! Is not the only Son of God angry;
Ochone! The red blood that was poured out yesterday!’
I do not know who the following poem was written about, or if it is about anyone in particular; but one line of it puts into words the emotion of many an Irish ‘felon.’ ‘It is with the people I was; it is not with the law I was.’ For the Irish crime, treason-felony, is only looked on as a crime in the eyes of the law, not in the eyes of the people:—
‘I am lying in prison,
I am in bonds;
To-morrow I will be hanged,
Who am to-night so quiet,
So quiet;
Who am to-night so quiet.
‘I am in prison,
My heart is cold and heavy;
To-morrow I will be hanged,
And there is no help for me,
My grief;
Och! there is no help for me.
‘I am in prison,
And I did no wrong;
I only did the work
Was just, was right, was good,
I did,
Oh, I did the thing was good.
‘It is with the people I was,
It is not with the law I was;
But they took me in my sleep,
On the side of Cnoc-na-Feigh;
And so
To-morrow they will hang me.’
‘I am weak in my body,
I am vexed in my heart,
And to-morrow I will be hanged;
Lying beneath the clay,
My sorrow,
Lying beneath the clay.
‘May God give pardon
To my vexed, sorrowful soul;
May God give mercy
To me now and forever,
Amen!
To me now and forever.’
But translation is poor work. Even if it gives a glimpse of the heart of a poem, too much is lost in losing the outward likeness. Here are the last lines of the lament of a felon’s brother:—
‘Now that you are stretched in the cold grave
May God set you free:
It’s vexed and sorry and pitiful are my thoughts;
It’s sorrowful I am to-day!’
I look at them and read them; and wonder why when I first read them, their sound had hung about me for days like a sobbing wind; but when I look at them in their own form, the sob is in them still:
Nois ann san uaiġ ḟuair ó tá tu sínte
Go saoraiġ Dia ṫu
Is buaiḋcarṫa, brónaċ boċt atá mo smaointe
Is bronaċ mé anḋiú.