Poets and Dreamers | Page 4

he
would be kind enough to go in and see them.' A Mr. Burke, who met
him going from his house, asked how he had fared, and he said in a
scornful verse:--
'Potatoes that were softer than the fog, And with neither butter nor meat,
And milk that was sourer than apples in harvest-- That's what Raftery
got from Burke of Kilfinn.'
'And Mr. Burke begged him to rhyme no more, but to come back, and
he would be well taken care of.' I am told of another house he abused
and that is now deserted: 'Frenchforth of the soot, that was wedded to
the smoke, that is all that remains of the property.... There were some
of them on mules, and some of them unruly, and the biggest of them
were smaller than asses, and the master cracking them with a stick;' 'but
he went no further than that, because he remembered the good
treatment used to be there in former times, and he wouldn't have said
that much if it wasn't for the servants that vexed him.' A satire, that is
remembered in Aran, was made with the better intention of helping a
barefooted girl, who had been kept waiting a long time for a pair of
shoes she had ordered. Raftery came, and sat down before the
shoemaker's house, and began:--
'A young little girl without sense, the ground tearing her feet, is not

satisfied yet by the lying Peter Glynn. Peter Glynn, the liar, in his little
house by the side of the road, is without the strength in his arms to slip
together a pair of brogues.'
'And, before he had finished the lines, Peter Glynn ran out and called to
him to stop, and he set at work on the shoes then and there.' He even
ventured to poke a little satire at a priest sometimes. 'He went into the
chapel at Kilchreest one time, and there was some cabbage after being
stolen from a garden, and the priest was speaking about it. Raftery was
at the bottom of the chapel, and at last he called out in verse:--"What a
lot of talk about cabbage! If there was meat with it, it would feed the
whole parish!" The priest didn't mind, but afterwards he came down,
and said: "Where is the cabbage man?" and asked him to make some
more verses about it; but whether he did or not I don't know.' And
another time, I am told: 'A priest wanted to teach him the rite of lay
baptism; for there were scattered houses a priest might take a long time
getting to, away from the roads, and certain persons were authorized to
give the rite. So the priest put his hat in Raftery's hand, and told him the
words to say; but it is what he said: "I baptize you without either foot or
hand, without salt or tow, beer or drink. Your father was a ram and
your mother was a sheep, and your like never came to be baptized
before." He was put under a curse, too, one time by a priest, and he
made a song about him; but he said he put his frock out of the bargain,
and it was only the priest's own body he would speak about. And the
priest let him alone after that.' And an old basket-maker, who had told
me some of these things, said at the end: 'That is why the poets had to
be banished before in the time of St. Columcill. Sure no one could
stand the satire of them.'
II.
Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great
extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he
was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years. It is hard to
say where history ends in them and religion and politics begin; for
history, religion, and politics grow on one stem in Ireland, an eternal
trefoil. 'He was a great historian,' it is said; 'for every book he'd get hold

of, he'd get it read out to him.' And a neighbour tells me: 'He used to
stop with my uncle that was a hedge schoolmaster in those times in
Ballylee, and that was very fond of drink; and when he was drunk, he'd
take his clothes off, and run naked through the country. But at evening
he'd open the school; and the neighbours that would be working all day
would gather in to him, and he'd teach them through the night; and
there Raftery would be in the middle of them.' His chief historical
poem is the 'Talk with the Bush,' of over three hundred lines. Many of
the people can repeat it, or a part of it, and some possess it