Poets and Dreamers | Page 8

was on the night Callinan made him cry. My father was away at the
time; if he had been there, he never would have let Callinan come into
the house unknown to Raftery.' I have not heard all of Callinan's poem,
but this is part of it:--
'He left the County Mayo; he was hunted up from the country of the
brothons' (thick bed-coverings, then made in Mayo) 'without any for
the night, nor any shift for bedding, but with an old yellow blanket with
a thousand patches; he had a black trouser down to the ground with two
hundred holes and forty pieces; he had long legs like the shank of a
pipe, and a long great coat, for it is many the dab he put in his pocket.
His coat was greasy, and it was no wonder, and an old grey hat as grey
as snuff as it was many the day it was in the dunghill.'
It is said that 'Raftery could have answered that song better, but he had

no back here; and Callinan was well-to-do, and had so many of his
family and so many friends.' But others say there were some allusions
in it to the poverty of his home, that had become known through a
servant girl from Raftery's birth-place. But I think even Callinan's
friends are sorry now that Raftery was ever made to 'cry tears down.'
IV.
A man near Oranmore says: 'There used to be great talk of the Fianna;
and everyone had the poems about them till Raftery came, and he put
them out. For when the people got Raftery's songs in their heads, they
could think of nothing else: his songs put out everything else. I
remember when I was a boy of ten, I was so taken up with his rhymes
and songs, I had them all off. And I heard he was coming one night to a
stage he had below there where he used to come now and again. And I
begged my father to bring me with him that night, and he did; but
whatever happened, Raftery didn't come that time, and the next year he
died.'
But it is hard to judge of the quality of Raftery's poems. Some of them
have probably been lost altogether. There are already different versions
of those written out in manuscript books, and of these books many have
disappeared or been destroyed, and some have been taken to America
by emigrants. It is said that when he was on his deathbed, he was very
sorry that his songs had not all been taken down; and that he dictated
one he composed there to a young man who wrote it down in Irish, but
could not read his own writing when he had done, and that vexed
Raftery; and then a man came in, and he asked him to take down all his
songs, and he could have them for himself; but he said, 'If I did, I'd
always be called Raftery,' and he went out again.
I hear the people say now and then: 'If he had had education, he would
have been the greatest poet in the world.' I cannot but be sorry that his
education went so far as it did, for 'he used to carry a book about with
him--a Pantheon--about the heathen gods and goddesses; and whoever
he'd get that was able to read, he'd get him to read it to him, and then
he'd keep them in his mind, and use them as he wanted them.' If he had
been born a few decades later, he would have been caught, like other

poets of the time, in the formulas of English verse. As it was, both his
love poems and his religious poems were caught in the formulas
imported from Greece and from Rome; and any formula must make a
veil between the prophet who has been on the mountain top, and the
people who are waiting at its foot for his message. The dreams of
beauty that formed themselves in the mind of the blind poet become
flat and vapid when he embodies them in the well-worn names of
Helen and Venus. The truths of God that he strove in his last years, as
he says, 'to have written in the book of the people,' left those unkindled
whose ears were already wearied with the well-known words 'the keys
of Heaven,' 'penance, fasts, and alms,' to whom it was an old tale to
hear of hell as a furnace, and the grave as a dish for worms. When he
gets away from the formulas, he has often a fine line on death or on
judgment; the cheeks of the dead are 'cold as the snow that is at the
back of the sun;'