The Kiltartan Poetry Book

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Kiltartan Poetry Book, by Lady
Gregory
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Title: The Kiltartan Poetry Book
Author: Lady Gregory
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6656]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
KILTARTAN POETRY BOOK ***
David Starner, Curtis A. Weyant, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE KILTARTAN POETRY BOOK
PROSE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE IRISH
BY LADY GREGORY
Introduction
I
If in my childhood I had been asked to give the name of an Irish poem,
I should certainly have said "Let Erin remember the days of old," or
"Rich and rare were the gems she wore"; for although among the
ornamental books that lay on the round drawingroom table, the only
one of Moore's was Lalla Rookh, some guest would now and then sing
one of his melodies at the piano; and I can remember vexing or trying
to vex my governess by triumphant mention of Malachi's collar of gold,
she no doubt as well as I believing the "proud invader" it was torn from
to have been, like herself, an English one. A little later I came to know
other verses, ballads nearer to the tradition of the country than Moore's
faint sentiment. For a romantic love of country had awakened in me,
perhaps through the wide beauty of my home, from whose hillsides I
could see the mountain of Burren and Iar Connacht, and at sunset the
silver western sea; or it maybe through the half revealed sympathy of
my old nurse for the rebels whose cheering she remembered when the
French landed at Killala in '98; or perhaps but through the natural
breaking of a younger child of the house from the conservatism of her
elders. So when we were taken sometimes as a treat the five mile drive
to our market town, Loughrea, I would, on tiptoe at the counter, hold
up the six pence earned by saying without a mistake my Bible lesson
on the Sunday, and the old stationer, looking down through his
spectacles would give me what I wanted saying that I was his best
customer for Fenian books; and one of my sisters, rather doubtfully

consenting to my choice of The Spirit of the Nation for a birthday
present, qualified the gift by copying into it "Patriotism is the last
refuge of a scoundrel." I have some of them by me yet, the little books
in gay paper or in green cloth, and some verses in them seem to me no
less moving than in those early days, such as Davis's lament.
We thought you would not die, we were sure you would not go And
leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell's cruel blow; Sheep without a
shepherd when the snow shuts out the sky, O why did you leave us
Owen? Why did you die?
And if some others are little more than a catalogue, unmusical, as:--
Now to begin to name them I'll continue in a direct line, There's John
Mitchell, Thomas Francis Meagher and also William Smith O'Brien;

John Martin and O'Donoghue, Erin sorely feels their loss, And to
complete their number I will include O'Donovan Ross--
yet there is in them a certain dignity, an intensity born of continuity of
purpose; they are roughly hammered links in a chain of unequal
workmanship, but stretching back through the centuries to the Munster
poets of the days of Elizabeth, advised by Spenser to harry them out of
Ireland. The names change from age to age, that is all. The verses of the
seventeenth century hallow those of MacCarthys and Fitzgeralds who
fought for the Stuarts or "knocked obedience out of the Gall"; the
eighteenth ended with the rebels of '98; the nineteenth had Emmet and
Mitchell and its Manchester martyrs. Already in these early days of the