The Kiltartan Poetry Book | Page 3

of the individual soul.
An Aran man, repeating to me The Grief of a Girl's Heart in Irish told
me it was with that song his mother had often sung him to sleep as a
child. It was from an old woman who had known Mary Hynes and who
said of her "The sun and the moon never shone upon anything so
handsome" that I first heard Raftery's song of praise of her, "The pearl
that was at Ballylee," a song "that has gone around the world & as far
as America." It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a

headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of
his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters. It was to a
working farmer's house I walked on many a moonlit evening with the
manuscript that his greater knowledge helped me to understand and by
his hearth that I read for the first time the _Vision of Death_ and the
Lament for O'Daly. After that I met with many old people who had in
the days before the Famine seen or talked with the wandering poet who
was in the succession of those who had made and recited their lyrics on
the Irish roads before Chaucer wrote.
V
And so I came by the road nearest me to the old legends, the old heroic
poems. It was a man of a hundred years who told me the story of
Cuchulain's fight with his own son, the son of Aoife, and how the
young man as he lay dying had reproached him and said "Did you not
see how I threw every spear fair and easy at you, and you threw your
spear hard and wicked at me? And I did not come out to tell my name
to one or to two but if I had told it to anyone in the whole world, I
would soonest tell it to your pale face." Deirdre's beauty "that brought
the Sons of Usnach to their death" comes into many of the country
songs. Grania of the yet earlier poems is not so well thought of. An old
basket-maker said scornfully "Many would tell you she slept under the
cromlechs but I don't believe that, and she a king's daughter. And I
don't believe she was handsome, either. If she was, why would she
have run away?" And another said "Finn had more wisdom than all the
men of the world, but he wasn't wise enough to put a bar on Grania." I
was told in many places of Osgar's bravery and Goll's strength and
Conan's bitter tongue, and the arguments of Oisin and Patrick. And I
have often been given the story of Oisin's journey to Tir-nan-Og, the
Country of the Young, that is, as I am told, "a fine place and everything
that is good is in it. And if anyone is sent there for a minute he will
want to stop in it, and twenty years will seem to him like one half
hour;" and "they say Tir-nan-Og is there yet, and so it may be in any
place."
VI

In the ancient times the poets told of this Country of the Young, with
its trees bearing fruit and blossom at the one time; its golden apples that
gave lasting life; its armies "that go out in good order, ahead of their
beautiful king, marching among blue spears scattering their enemies, an
army with high looks, rushing, avenging;" before news had come to
Ireland, of the Evangelist's vision of the Tree of Life and of the "white
horse, and he that sat on him had a bow, and a crown was given to him,
and he went forth conquering and to conquer." They had told of the
place "where delight is common, and music" before saintly Columcille
on the night of the Sabbath of rest "reached to the troops of the
archangels and the plain where music has not to be born." But in later
days religion, while offering abundant pictures of an after world of
punishment, "the flagstone of pain," "the cauldron that is boiling for
ever," the fire the least flame of which is "bigger than fifteen hundred
of turf," so that Oisin listening to St. Patrick demands a familiar
weapon, an iron flail, to beat down such familiar terrors, has left
Heaven itself far off, mysterious, intangible, without earthly similes or
foreshadowings. I think it is perhaps because of this that the country
poets of to-day and yesterday have put their dream, their vision of the
Delectable Mountains, of the Land of Promise, into exaggerated praise
of places dear to them. Raftery sees something beyond the barren Mayo
bogs when he tells of that "fine place without fog falling, a blessed