Poets and Dreamers | Page 2

only composed in
Irish--to have the 'sharp spur' of some of his predecessors, such as
O'Higinn, whose tongue was cut out by men from Sligo, who had
suffered from it, or O'Daly, who criticised the poverty of the Irish
chiefs in the sixteenth century until the servant of one of them stuck a
knife into his throat. Yet they were much dreaded. 'He was very sharp
with anyone that didn't please him,' I have been told; 'and no one would
like to be put in his songs.' And though it is said of his songs in praise
of his friends that 'whoever he praised was well praised,' it was thought
safer that one's own name should not appear in them. The man at whose
house he died said to me: 'He used often to come and stop with us, but

he never made a verse about us; my father wouldn't have liked that.
Someway it doesn't bring luck.' And another man says: 'My father often
told me about Raftery. He was someway gifted, and people were afraid
of him. I was often told by men that gave him a lift in their car when
they overtook him now and again, that if he asked their name, they
wouldn't give it, for fear he might put it in a song.' And another man
says: 'There was a friend of my father's was driving his car on the road
one day, and he saw Raftery, but he didn't let on to see him. But when
he was passing, Raftery said: "There was never a soldier marching but
would get his billet. But the rabbit has an enemy in the ferret;" so then
the man said in a hurry, "Oh, Mr. Raftery, I never knew it was you:
won't you get up and take a seat in the car?"' A girl in whose praise he
had made a song, Mary Hynes, of Ballylee, died young, and had a
troubled life; and one of her neighbours says of her: 'No one that has a
song made about them will ever live long;' and another says: 'She got a
great tossing up and down; and at last she died in the middle of a bog.'
They tell, too, of a bush that he once took shelter under from the rain,
and how he 'praised it first; and then when it let the rain down, he
dispraised it, and it withered up, and never put out leaf or branch after.'
I have seen his poem on the bush in a manuscript book, carefully
written in the beautiful Irish character, and the great treasure of a
stonecutter's cottage. This is the form of the curse: 'I pronounce
ugliness upon you. That bloom or leaf may never grow on you, but the
flame of the mountain fires and of bonfires be upon you. That you may
get your punishment from Oscar's flail, to hack and to bruise you with
the big sledge of a forge.'
There are some other verses made by him that have been less legendary
in their effect. The story is:--'It was Anthony Daly, a carpenter, was
hanged at Seefin. It was the two Z's got him put away. He was brought
before a judge in Galway, and accused of being a Captain of Whiteboys,
and it was sworn against him that he fired at Mr. X. He was a one-eyed
man; and he said: "If I did, though I have but one eye, I would have hit
him"--for he was a very good shot; and he asked that some object
should be put up, and he would show the judge that he would hit it, but
he said nothing else. Some were afraid he'd give up the names of the
other Whiteboys; but he did not. There was a gallows put up at Seefin;

and he was brought there sitting on his coffin in a cart. There were
people all the way along the road, and they were calling on him to
break through the crowd, and they'd save him; and some of the soldiers
were Irish, and they called back that if he did they'd only fire their guns
in the air; but he made no attempt, but went to the gallows quiet enough.
There was a man in Gort was telling me he saw it, planting potatoes he
was at Seefin that day. It was in the year 1820; and Raftery was there at
the hanging, and he made a song about it. The first verse of the song
said: "Wasn't that the good tree, that wouldn't let any branch that was
on it fall to the ground?" He meant by that that he didn't give up the
names of the other Whiteboys. And at the end he called down judgment
from God on