The Celtic Twilight | Page 8

an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon a
little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three times
last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman that
lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, "There is a cure
for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee," and to find out
from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall be
there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty years
ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of sorrow
to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man brought
me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long, narrow
boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he said,
"That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of it is taken
for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes that are growing
over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow any more. They say
she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was like dribbled
snow"--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--"and she had blushes in her
cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now!" I talked
to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about her,
and how it said, "there is a strong cellar in Ballylee." He said the strong
cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground, and he
brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a grey
boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water at
early morning "to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills."
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who fives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, "I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die," and that he was nearly blind, and had "no way of living but to
go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the neighbours
would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise you, but if you

did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest poet in Ireland, and
he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to stand under it. There
was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he made verses praising it,
and then when the water came through he made verses dispraising it."
She sang the poem to a friend and to myself in Irish, and every word
was audible and expressive, as the words in a song were always, as I
think, before music grew too proud to be the garment of words, flowing
and changing with the flowing and changing of their energies. The
poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry of the last century, for the
thoughts are arranged in a too obviously traditional form, so the old
poor half-blind man who made it has to speak as if he were a rich
farmer offering the best of everything to the woman he loves, but it has
naive and tender phrases. The friend that was with me has made some
of the translation, but some of it has been made by the country people
themselves. I think it has more of the simplicity of the Irish verses than
one finds in most translations.
Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind
rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love
with her then and there.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;

And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to
Ballylee."
When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my
heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,
We
had daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure,
She had fair hair,
and she sitting beside me;
And she said, "Drink, Raftery, and a
hundred welcomes,
There is a strong cellar in Ballylee."
O star of light and O sun in harvest,
O amber hair, O my share of the
world,
Will you come with me upon Sunday
Till we agree together
before all the people?

I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening,
Punch on the
table, or wine if you