A BOOK OF

Name: A Book of Irish Verse / Selected from modern writers, with an introduction and notes by W. B. Yeats
Rating: 3.6 (101 reviews)
Author: Unknown Author

IRISH VERSE

SELECTED FROM MODERN WRITERS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

AND NOTES

BY W.B. YEATS

METHUEN AND CO.

36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.

LONDON

1900

Revised Edition

W.H. WHITE AND CO. LTD. RIVERSIDE PRESS, EDINBURGH

TO THE MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL LITERARY SOCIETY OF DUBLIN AND THE IRISH LITERARY SOCIETY OF LONDON

PREFACE

I HAVE not found it possible to revise this book as completely as I should have wished. I have corrected a bad mistake of a copyist, and added a few pages of new verses towards the end, and softened some phrases in the introduction which seemed a little petulant in form, and written in a few more to describe writers who have appeared during the last four years, and that is about all. I compiled it towards the end of a long indignant argument, carried on in the committee rooms of our literary societies, and in certain newspapers between a few writers of our new movement, who judged Irish literature by literary standards, and a number of people, a few of whom were writers, who judged it by its patriotism and by its political effect; and I hope my opinions may have value as part of an argument which may awaken again. The Young Ireland writers wrote to give the peasantry a literature in English in place of the literature they were losing with Gaelic, and these methods, which have shaped the literary thought of Ireland to our time, could not be the same as the methods of a movement which, so far as it is more than an instinctive expression of certain moods of the soul, endeavours to create a reading class among the more leisured classes, which will preoccupy itself with Ireland and the needs of Ireland. The peasants in eastern counties have their Young Ireland poetry, which is always good teaching and sometimes good poetry, and the peasants of the western counties have beautiful poems and stories in Gaelic, while our more leisured classes read little about any country, and nothing about Ireland. We cannot move these classes from an apathy, come from their separation from the land they live in, by writing about politics or about Gaelic, but we may move them by becoming men of letters and expressing primary emotions and truths in ways appropriate to this country. One carries on the traditions of Thomas Davis, towards whom our eyes must always turn, not less than the traditions of good literature, which are the morality of the man of letters, when one is content, like A.E. with fewer readers that one may follow a more hidden beauty; or when one endeavours, as I have endeavoured in this book, to separate what has literary value from what has only a patriotic and political value, no matter how sacred it has become to us.

The reader who would begin a serious study of modern Irish literature should do so with Mr Stopford Brooke's and Mr Rolleston's exhaustive anthology.

W.B.Y.

August 15, 1899

MODERN IRISH POETRY

THE Irish Celt is sociable, as may be known from his proverb, 'Strife is better than loneliness,' and the Irish poets of the nineteenth century have made songs abundantly when friends and rebels have been at hand to applaud. The Irish poets of the eighteenth century found both at a Limerick hostelry, above whose door was written a rhyming welcome in Gaelic to all passing poets, whether their pockets were full or empty. Its owner, himself a famous poet, entertained his fellows as long as his money lasted, and then took to minding the hens and chickens of an old peasant woman for a living, and ended his days in rags, but not, one imagines, without content. Among his friends and guests had been O'Sullivan the Red, O'Sullivan the Gaelic, O'Heffernan the blind, and many another, and their songs had made the people, crushed by the disasters of the Boyne and Aughrim, remember their ancient greatness. The bardic order, with its perfect artifice and imperfect art, had gone down in the wars of the seventeenth century, and poetry had found shelter amid the turf-smoke of the cabins. The powers that history commemorates are but the coarse effects of influences delicate and vague as the beginning of twilight, and these influences were to be woven like a web about the hearts of men by farm-labourers, pedlars, potato-diggers, hedge-schoolmasters, and grinders at the quern, poor wastrels who put the troubles of their native land, or their own happy or unhappy loves, into songs of an extreme beauty. But in the midst of this beauty was a flitting incoherence, a fitful dying out of the sense, as though the passion had become too great for words, as must needs be when life is the master and not the slave of the singer.

English-speaking Ireland had meanwhile no poetic voice, for Goldsmith had chosen to celebrate English scenery and manners; and Swift was but an Irishman by what Mr Balfour has called the visitation of God, and much against his will; and Congreve by education and early association; while Parnell, Denham, and Roscommon were poets but to their own time. Nor did the coming with the new century of the fame of Moore set the balance even, for all but all of his Irish melodies are artificial and mechanical when separated from the music that gave them wings. Whatever he had of high poetry is in 'The Light of other Days,' and in 'At the Mid Hour of Night,' which express what Matthew Arnold has taught us to call 'the Celtic melancholy,' with so much of delicate beauty in the meaning and in the wavering or steady rhythm that one knows not where to find their like in literature. His more artificial and mechanical verse, because of the ancient music that makes it seem natural and vivid, and because it has remembered so many beloved names and events and places, has had the influence which might have belonged to these exquisite verses had he written none but these. An honest style did not come into English-speaking Ireland, until Callanan wrote three or four naïve translations from the Gaelic. 'Shule Aroon' and 'Kathleen O'More' had indeed been written for a good while, but had no more influence than Moore's best verses. Now, however, the lead of Callanan was followed by a number of translators, and they in turn by the poets of 'Young Ireland,' who mingled a little learned from the Gaelic ballad-writers with a great deal learned from Scott, Macaulay, and Campbell, and turned poetry once again into a principal means for spreading ideas of nationality and patriotism. They were full of earnestness, but never understood that though a poet may govern his life by his enthusiasms, he must, when he sits down at his desk, but use them as the potter the clay. Their thoughts were a little insincere, because they lived in the half illusions of their admirable ideals; and their rhythms not seldom mechanical, because their purpose was served when they had satisfied the dull ears of the common man. They had no time to listen to the voice of the insatiable artist, who stands erect, or lies asleep waiting until a breath arouses him, in the heart of every craftsman. Life was their master, as it had been the master of the poets who gathered in the Limerick hostelry, though it conquered them not by unreasoned love for a woman, or for native land, but by reasoned enthusiasm, and practical energy. No man was more sincere, no man had a less mechanical mind than Thomas Davis, and yet he is often a little insincere and mechanical in his verse. When he sat down to write he had so great a desire to make the peasantry courageous and powerful that he half believed them already 'the finest peasantry upon the earth,' and wrote not a few such verses as

and to-day we are paying the reckoning with much bombast. His little book has many things of this kind, and yet we honour it for its public spirit, and recognise its powerful influence with gratitude. He was in the main an orator influencing men's acts, and not a poet shaping their emotions, and the bulk of his influence has been good. He was, indeed, a poet of much tenderness in the simple love-songs 'The Marriage,' 'A Plea for Love,' and 'Mary Bhan Astór,' and, but for his ideal of a Fisherman, defying a foreign soldiery, would have been as good in 'The Boatman of Kinsale'; and once or twice when he touched upon some historic sorrow he forgot his hopes for the future and his lessons for the present, and made moving verse. His contemporary, Clarence Mangan, kept out of public life and its half illusions by a passion for books, and for drink and opium, made an imaginative and powerful style. He translated from the German, and imitated Oriental poetry, but little that he did on any but Irish subjects is permanently interesting. He is usually classed with the Young Ireland poets, because he contributed to their periodicals and shared their political views; but his style was formed before their movement began, and he found it the more easy for this reason perhaps to give sincere expression to the mood which he had chosen, the only sincerity literature knows of; and with happiness and cultivation might have displaced Moore. But as it was, whenever he had no fine ancient song to inspire him, he fell into rhetoric which was only lifted out of commonplace by an arid intensity. In his 'Irish National Hymn,' 'Soul and Country,' and the like, we look into a mind full of parched sands where the sweet dews have never fallen. A miserable man may think well and express himself with great vehemence, but he cannot make beautiful things, for Aphrodite never rises from any but a tide of joy. Mangan knew nothing of the happiness of the outer man, and it was only when prolonging the tragic exultation of some dead bard, that he knew the unearthly happiness which clouds the outer man with sorrow, and is the fountain of impassioned art. Like those who had gone before him, he was the slave of life, for he had nothing of the self-knowledge, the power of selection, the harmony of mind, which enables the poet to be its master, and to mould the world to a trumpet for his lips. But O'Hussey's Ode over his outcast chief must live for generations because of the passion that moves through its powerful images and its mournful, wayward, and fierce rhythms.

Edward Walsh, a village schoolmaster, who hovered, like Mangan, on the edge of the Young Ireland movement, did many beautiful translations from the Gaelic; and Michael Doheny, while out 'on his keeping' in the mountains after the collapse at Ballingarry, made one of the most moving of ballads; but in the main the poets who gathered about Thomas Davis, and whose work has come down to us in 'The Spirit of the Nation,' were of practical and political, not of literary importance.

Meanwhile Samuel Ferguson, William Allingham, and Mr Aubrey de Vere were working apart from politics, Ferguson selecting his subjects from the traditions of the Bardic age, and Allingham from those of his native Ballyshannon, and Mr Aubrey de Vere wavering between English, Irish, and Catholic tradition. They were wiser than Young Ireland in the choice of their models, for, while drawing not less from purely Irish sources, they turned to the great poets of the world, Mr de Vere owing something of his gravity to Wordsworth, Ferguson much of his simplicity to Homer, while Allingham had trained an ear, too delicate to catch the tune of but a single master, upon the lyric poetry of many lands. Allingham was the best artist, but Ferguson had the more ample imagination, the more epic aim. He had not the subtlety of feeling, the variety of cadence of a great lyric poet, but he has touched, here and there, an epic vastness and naïveté, as in the description in 'Congal' of the mire-stiffened mantle of the giant spectre Mananan macLir, striking against his calves with as loud a noise as the mainsail of a ship makes, 'when with the coil of all its ropes it beats the sounding mast.' He is frequently dull, for he often lacked the 'minutely appropriate words' necessary to embody those fine changes of feeling which enthral the attention; but his sense of weight and size, of action and tumult, has set him apart and solitary, an epic figure in a lyric age. Allingham, whose pleasant destiny has made him the poet of his native town, and put 'The Winding Banks of Erne' into the mouths of the ballad-singers of Ballyshannon, is, on the other hand, a master of 'minutely appropriate words,' and can wring from the luxurious sadness of the lover, from the austere sadness of old age, the last golden drop of beauty; but amid action and tumult he can but fold his hands. He is the poet of the melancholy peasantry of the West, and, as years go on, and voluminous histories and copious romances drop under the horizon, will take his place among those minor immortals who have put their souls into little songs to humble the proud. The poetry of Mr Aubrey de Vere has less architecture than the poetry of Ferguson and Allingham, and more meditation. Indeed, his few but ever memorable successes are enchanted islands in grey seas of stately impersonal reverie and description, which drift by and leave no definite recollection. One needs, perhaps, to perfectly enjoy him, a Dominican habit, a cloister, and a breviary.

These three poets published much of their best work before and during the Fenian movement, which, like 'Young Ireland,' had its poets, though but a small number. Charles Kickham, one of the 'triumvirate' that controlled it in Ireland; John Casey, a clerk in a flour-mill; and Ellen O'Leary, the sister of Mr John O'Leary, were at times very excellent. Their verse lacks, curiously enough, the oratorical vehemence of Young Ireland, and is plaintive and idyllic. The agrarian movement that followed produced but little poetry, and of that little all is forgotten but a vehement poem by Fanny Parnell, and a couple of songs by Mr T.D. Sullivan, who is a good song-writer, though not, as the writer has read on an election placard, 'one of the greatest poets who ever moved the heart of man.' But while Nationalist verse has ceased to be a portion of the propaganda of a party, it has been written, and is being written, under the influence of the Nationalist newspapers and of Young Ireland societies and the like. With an exacting conscience, and better models than Thomas Moore and the Young Irelanders, such beautiful enthusiasm could not fail to make some beautiful verses. But, as things are, the rhythms are mechanical, and the metaphors conventional; and inspiration is too often worshipped as a Familiar who labours while you sleep, or forget, or do many worthy things which are not spiritual things. For the most part, the Irishman of our times loves so deeply those arts which build up a gallant personality, rapid writing, ready talking, effective speaking to crowds, that he has no thought for the arts which consume the personality in solitude. He loves the mortal arts which have given him a lure to take the hearts of men, and shrinks from the immortal, which could but divide him from his fellows. And in this century, he who does not strive to be a perfect craftsman achieves nothing. The poor peasant of the eighteenth century could make fine ballads by abandoning himself to the joy or sorrow of the moment, as the reeds abandon themselves to the wind which sighs through them, because he had about him a world where all was old enough to be steeped in emotion. But we cannot take to ourselves, by merely thrusting out our hands, all we need of pomp and symbol, and if we have not the desire of artistic perfection for an ark, the deluge of incoherence, vulgarity, and triviality will pass over our heads. If we had no other symbols but the tumult of the sea, the rusted gold of the thatch, the redness of the quicken-berry, and had never known the rhetoric of the platform and of the newspaper, we could do without laborious selection and rejection; but, even then, though we might do much that would be delightful, that would inspire coming times, it would not have the manner of the greatest poetry.

Here and there, the Nationalist newspapers and the Young Ireland societies have trained a writer who, though busy with the old models, has some imaginative energy; while Mr Lionel Johnson, Mrs Hinkson, Miss Nora Hopper, and A.E., the successors of Allingham and Ferguson and Mr de Vere, are more anxious to influence and understand Irish thought than any of their predecessors who did not take the substance of their poetry from politics. They are distinguished too by their deliberate art, and with their preoccupation with spiritual passions and memories. Mr Lionel Johnson and Mrs Hinkson are both Catholic and devout, but Mr Lionel Johnson's poetry is lofty and austere, and, like Mr de Vere's, never long forgets the greatness of his Church and the interior life whose expression it is, while Mrs Hinkson is happiest when she embodies emotions, that have the innocence of childhood, in symbols and metaphors from the green world about her. She has no reverie nor speculation, but a devout tenderness like that of S. Francis for weak instinctive things, old gardeners, old fishermen, birds among the leaves, birds tossed upon the waters. Miss Hopper belongs to that school of writers which embodies passions, that are not the less spiritual because no Church has put them into prayers, in stories and symbols from old Celtic poetry and mythology. The poetry of A.E., at its best, finds its symbols and its stories in the soul itself, and has a more disembodied ecstasy than any poetry of our time. He is the chief poet of the school of Irish mystics, which has shaped Mr Charles Weekes, who published recently, but withdrew immediately, a curious and subtle book, and Mr John Eglinton, who is best known for the orchestral harmonies of his 'Two Essays on the Remnant,' and certain younger writers who have heard the words, 'If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them,' and thought the labours that bring the mystic vision more important than the labours of any craft.

Except some few Catholic and mystical poets and Prof. Dowden in one or two poems, no Irishman living in Ireland has sung excellently of any but a theme from Irish experience, Irish history, or Irish tradition. Trinity College, which desires to be English, has been the mother of many verse-writers and of few poets; and this can only be because she has set herself against the national genius, and taught her children to imitate alien styles and choose out alien themes, for it is not possible to believe that the educated Irishman alone is prosaic and uninventive. Her few poets have been awakened by the influence of the farm-labourers, potato-diggers, pedlars, and hedge-schoolmasters of the eighteenth century, and their imitators in this, and not by a scholastic life, which, for reasons easy for all to understand and for many to forgive, has refused the ideals of Ireland, while those of England are but far-off murmurs. An enemy to all enthusiasms, because all enthusiasms seemed her enemies, she has taught her children to look neither to the world about them, nor into their own souls where some dangerous fire might slumber.

To remember that in Ireland the professional and landed classes have been through the mould of Trinity College or of English Universities, and are ignorant of the very names of the best writers in this book, is to know how strong a wind blows from the ancient legends of Ireland, how vigorous an impulse to create is in her heart to-day. Deserted by the classes from among whom have come the bulk of the world's intellect, she struggles on, gradually ridding herself of incoherence and triviality, and slowly building up a literature in English which, whether important or unimportant, grows always more unlike others; nor does it seem as if she would long lack a living literature in Gaelic, for the movement for the preservation of Gaelic, which has been so much more successful than anybody foresaw, has already its poets. Dr Hyde, who can only be represented here by some of his beautiful translations, has written Gaelic poems which pass from mouth to mouth in the west of Ireland. The country people have themselves fitted them to ancient airs, and many that can neither read nor write, sing them in Donegal and Connemara and Galway. I have, indeed, but little doubt that Ireland, communing with herself in Gaelic more and more, but speaking to foreign countries in English, will lead many that are sick with theories and with trivial emotion, to some sweet well-waters of primeval poetry.

W.B.Y.

The editor thanks Mr Aubrey de Vere, Mr T.W. Rolleston, Dr J. Todhunter, Mr Alfred Perceval Graves, Dr Douglas Hyde, Mr Lionel Johnson, A.E., Mr Charles Weekes, Mr John Eglinton, Mrs Hinkson, Miss Dora Sigerson (Mrs Clement Shortes), and Miss Nora Hopper for permission to quote from their poems, Lady Ferguson and Mrs Allingham for leave to give poems by Sir Samuel Ferguson and William Allingham, and Messrs Chatto & Windus for permission to include a song of Arthur O'Shaughnessy's. Two writers are excluded whom he would gladly have included—Casey, because the copyright holders have refused permission, and Mr George Armstrong, because his 'Songs of Wicklow,' when interesting, are too long for this book.

OLD AGE

From the 'Deserted Village'

Oliver Goldsmith

THE VILLAGE PREACHER

From the 'Deserted Village'

Oliver Goldsmith

THE DESERTER'S MEDITATION

John Philpot Curran

THOU CANST NOT BOAST

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

KATHLEEN O'MORE

James Nugent Reynolds

THE GROVES OF BLARNEY

Richard Alfred Milliken

THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS

Thomas Moore

AT THE MID HOUR OF NIGHT

Thomas Moore

THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE

Rev. Charles Wolfe

THE CONVICT OF CLONMELL

From the Irish

Jeremiah Joseph Callanan

THE OUTLAW OF LOCH LENE

From the Irish

Jeremiah Joseph Callanan

DIRGE OF O'SULLIVAN BEAR

From the Irish

Jeremiah Joseph Callanan

LOVE SONG

George Darley

THE WHISTLIN' THIEF

Samuel Lover

SOGGARTH AROON

John Banim

From the Irish

James Clarence Mangan

THE NAMELESS ONE

James Clarence Mangan

Michael Doheny

LAMENT OF THE IRISH EMIGRANT

Lady Dufferin

THE WELSHMEN OF TIRAWLEY

Sir Samuel Ferguson

AIDEEN'S GRAVE

Sir Samuel Ferguson

A PLEA FOR LOVE

Thomas Davis

REMEMBRANCE

Emily Brontë

A FRAGMENT FROM 'THE PRISONER: A

FRAGMENT'

Emily Brontë

Oscar Wilde

THE LAMENT OF QUEEN MAEV

From the Irish of the Book of Leinster

T.W. Rolleston

THE DEAD AT CLONMACNOIS

From the Irish of Enoch O'Gillan

T.W. Rolleston

CAN DOOV DEELISH

Dora Sigerson

ANONYMOUS

SHULE AROON

THE SHAN VAN VOCHT

THE WEARING OF THE GREEN

THE RAKES OF MALLOW

JOHNNY, I HARDLY KNEW YE

Street Ballad

KITTY OF COLERAINE

LAMENT OF MORIAN SHEHONE FOR MISS

MARY ROURKE

From an Irish keen

THE GERALDINE'S DAUGHTER

BY MEMORY INSPIRED

Street Ballad

A FOLK VERSE

NOTES

Page xxi, lines 21 to 25. A well-known poet of the Fenian times has made the curious boast—'Talking of work—since Sunday, two cols. notes, two cols. London gossip, and a leader one col., and one col. of verse for the Nation. For Catholic Opinion, two pages of notes and a leader. For Illustrated Magazine, three poems and a five col. story.'

Page 1. 'The deserted village' is Lissoy, near Ballymahon, and Sir Walter Scott tells of a hawthorn there which has been cut up into toothpicks by Goldsmith enthusiasts; but the feeling and atmosphere of the poem are unmistakably English.

Page xix. Some verses in 'The Epicurean' were put into French by Théophile Gautier for the French translation, and back again into English by Mr. Robert Bridges. If any Irish reader who thinks Moore a great poet, will compare his verses with the results of this double distillation, and notice the gradual disappearance of their vague rhythms and loose phrases, he will be the less angry with the introduction to this book. Moore wrote as follows—

These lines are certainly less amazing than the scrannel piping of his usual anapæsts; but few will hold them to be 'of their own arduous fullness reverent'! Théophile Gautier sets them to his instrument in this fashion,

Then comes Mr. Robert Bridges, and lifts them into the rapture and precision of poetry—

Page 27. 'Dark Rosaleen' is one of the old names of Ireland. Mangan's translation is very free; as a rule when he tried to translate literally, as in 'The Munster Bards,' all glimmer of inspiration left him.

Page 32, line 20. 'This passage is not exactly a blunder, though at first it may seem one: the poet supposes the grave itself transferred to Ireland, and he naturally includes in the transference the whole of the immediate locality about the grave' (Mangan note).

Page 47, line 6. The two Meaths once formed a distinct province.

Page 55, line 7. This poem is an account of Mangan's own life, and is, I think, redeemed out of rhetoric by its intensity. The following poem, 'Siberia,' describes, perhaps, his own life under a symbol.

Page 59. Hy Brasail, or Teer-Nan-Oge, is the island of the blessed, the paradise of ancient Ireland. It is still thought to be seen from time to time glimmering far off.

Page 61. Mo Craoibhin Cno means my cluster of nuts, and is pronounced Mo Chreevin Knò.

Page 64. Mr. O'Keefe has sent the writer a Gaelic version of this poem, possibly by Walsh himself. A correspondent of his got it from an old peasant who had not a word of English. A well-known Gaelic scholar pronounces it a translation, and not the original of the present poem. Mairgréad ni Chealleadh is pronounced Mairgréd nei Kealley. The Ceanabhan, pronounced Kanovan, is the bog cotton, and the Monadan is a plant with a red berry found on marshy mountains.

Page 69. A cuisle geal mo chroidhe, pronounced A cushla gal mo chre, means 'bright pulse of my heart.'

Page 74. Sir Samuel Ferguson introduces the poem as follows:—

Several Welsh families, associates in the invasion of Strongbow, settled in the West of Ireland. Of these, the principal, whose names have been preserved by the Irish antiquarians, were the Walshes, Joyces, Heils (a quibus MacHale), Lawlesses, Tolmyns, Lynotts, and Barretts, which last draw their pedigree from Walynes, son of Guyndally, the Ard Maor, or High Steward of the Lordship of Camelot, and had their chief seats in the territory of the two Bacs, in the barony of Tirawley, and county of Mayo. Clochan-na-n'all, i. e. 'The Blind Men's Stepping-stones,' are still pointed out on the Duvowen river, about four miles north of Crossmolina, in the townland of Garranard; and Tubber-na-Scorney, or 'Scrags Well,' in the opposite townland of Carns, in the same barony. For a curious terrier or applotment of the Mac William's revenue, as acquired under the circumstances stated in the legend preserved by Mac Firbis, see Dr. O'Donovan's highly-learned and interesting 'Genealogies, &c. of Hy. Fiachrach,' in the publications of the Irish Archæological Society—a great monument of antiquarian and topographical erudition.

Page 90, line 6. 'William Conquer' was William Fitzadelm De Burgh, the Conqueror of Connaught.

Page 91, line 4. Sir Samuel Ferguson introduces the poem as follows:—

Aideen, daughter of Angus of Ben-Edar (now the Hill of Howth), died of grief for the loss of her husband, Oscar, son of Ossian, who was slain at the battle of Gavra (Gowra, near Tara in Meath), A.D. 284. Oscar was entombed in the rath or earthen fortress that occupied part of the field of battle, the rest of the slain being cast in a pit outside. Aideen is said to have been buried on Howth, near the mansion of her father, and poetical tradition represents the Fenian heroes as present at her obsequies. The Cromlech in Howth Park has been supposed to be her sepulchre. It stands under the summits from which the poet Atharne is said to have launched his invectives against the people of Leinster, until, by the blighting effect of his satires, they were compelled to make him atonement for the death of his son.

Page 99. 'There was then no man in the host of Ulster that could be found who would put the sons of Usnach to death, so loved were they of the people and nobles. But in the house of Conor was one called Mainé Rough Hand, son of the king of Lochlen, and Naesi had slain his father and two brothers, and he undertook to be their executioners. So the sons of Usnach were then slain, and the men of Ulster, when they beheld their death, sent forth their heavy shouts of sorrow and lamentation. Then Deirdre fell down beside their bodies wailing and weeping, and she tore her hair and garments and bestowed kisses on their lifeless lips and bitterly bemoaned them. And a grave was opened for them, and Deirdre, standing by it, with her hair dishevelled and shedding tears abundantly, chanted their funeral song.' (Hibernian Nights' Entertainment.)

Page 102. Uileacan Dubh O', pronounced Uileacaun Doov O, is a phrase of lamentation.

Page 108, line 16. 'Anna Grace' is the heroine of another ballad by Ferguson. She also was stolen by the Fairies.

Page 112, line 6. Thomas Davis had an Irish father and a Welsh mother, and Emily Brontë an Irish father and a Cornish mother, and there seems no reason for including the first and excluding the second. I find, perhaps fancifully, an Irish vehemence in 'Remembrance.' Several of the Irish poets have been of mixed Irish-Celtic and British-Celtic blood. William Blake has been recently claimed as of Irish descent, upon the evidence of Dr. Carter Blake; and if, in the course of years, that claim becomes generally accepted, he should be included also in Irish anthologies.

Page 119, line 13. 'The little Black Rose' is but another form of 'Dark Rosaleen,' and has a like significance. 'The Silk of the Kine' is also an old name for Ireland.

Page 138. Maire Bhan Astór is pronounced Mauria vaun a-stór, and means 'Fair Mary, my treasure.'

Page 140. Mo bhuachaill, pronounced mo Vohil, means 'my boy.'

Page 174. The Goban Saor, the mason Goban, is a familiar personage in Irish folk-lore, and the reputed builder of the round towers.

Page 191. Slainté, ['your] health.'

Page 207. 'And their step-mother, being jealous of their father's great love for them, cast upon the king's children, by sorcery, the shape of swans, and bade them go roaming, even till Patrick's mass-bell should sound in Erin; but no farther in time than that did her power extend.'—The Fate of the Children of Lir.

Page 222. The wind was one of the deities of the Pagan Irish. 'The murmuring of the Red Wind from the East,' says an old poem, 'is heard in its course by the strong as well as the weak; it is the wind that wastes the bottom of the trees, and injurious to man is that red wind.'

Page 226. Can Doov Deelish means 'dear black head.'

Page 231. The chorus is pronounced Shoo-il, shoo-il, shoo-il, a rooin, Shoo-il go socair, ogus shoo-il go kiune, Shoo-il go den durrus ogus euli liom, Iss go de too, mo vourneen, slaun, and means—

Page 232. Shan van vocht, meaning 'little old woman', is a name for Ireland.

Page 235. This is not the most ancient form of the ballad, but it is the form into which it was recast by Boucicault, and which has long taken the place of all others.

Page 237, line 2. 'Sinking,' violent swearing.

THE END

IRISH BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

VERSE.

THE COUNTESS KATHLEEN. THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE. THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN.

PROSE.

THE CELTIC TWILIGHT. JOHN SHERMAN AND DHOYA.

ANTHOLOGIES.

IRISH FAIRY AND FOLK TALES. IRISH FAIRY STORIES. STORIES FROM CARLETON. IRISH TALES.

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London & Bungay.

A Book of Irish Verse / Selected from modern writers, with an introduction and notes by W. B. Yeats

About This Book

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A BOOK OF

IRISH VERSE

SELECTED FROM MODERN WRITERS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

AND NOTES

BY W.B. YEATS

METHUEN AND CO.

36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.

LONDON

1900

Revised Edition

CONTENTS

PREFACE

MODERN IRISH POETRY

OLD AGE

THE VILLAGE PREACHER

THE DESERTER'S MEDITATION

THOU CANST NOT BOAST

KATHLEEN O'MORE

THE GROVES OF BLARNEY

THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS

AT THE MID HOUR OF NIGHT

THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE

THE CONVICT OF CLONMELL

THE OUTLAW OF LOCH LENE

DIRGE OF O'SULLIVAN BEAR

LOVE SONG

THE WHISTLIN' THIEF

SOGGARTH AROON

DARK ROSALEEN

LAMENT FOR THE PRINCES OF TYRONE AND

TYRCONNELL

A LAMENTATION FOR THE DEATH OF SIR

MAURICE FITZGERALD, KNIGHT OF KERRY

THE WOMAN OF THREE COWS

PRINCE ALFRID'S ITINERARY THROUGH

IRELAND

O'HUSSEY'S ODE TO THE MAGUIRE

THE NAMELESS ONE

SIBERIA

HY-BRASAIL

MO CRAOIBHIN CNO

MAIRGRÉAD NI CHEALLEADH

FROM THE COLD SOD THAT'S O'ER YOU

THE FAIRY NURSE

A CUISLE GEAL MO CHROIDHE

LAMENT OF THE IRISH EMIGRANT

THE WELSHMEN OF TIRAWLEY

AIDEEN'S GRAVE

DEIRDRE'S LAMENT FOR THE SONS OF

USNACH

THE FAIR HILLS OF IRELAND

LAMENT OVER THE RUINS OF THE ABBEY

OF TIMOLEAGUE

THE FAIRY WELL OF LAGNANAY

ON THE DEATH OF THOMAS DAVIS

THE COUNTY OF MAYO

THE WEDDING OF THE CLANS

THE LITTLE BLACK ROSE

SONG

THE BARD ETHELL

LAMENT FOR THE DEATH OF EOGHAN

RUADH O'NEILL

MAIRE BHAN ASTÓR

O! THE MARRIAGE

A PLEA FOR LOVE

REMEMBRANCE

A FRAGMENT FROM 'THE PRISONER: A

FRAGMENT'

LAST LINES

THE MEMORY OF THE DEAD

THE WINDING BANKS OF ERNE; OR, THE

EMIGRANT'S ADIEU TO BALLYSHANNY

THE FAIRIES

THE ABBOT OF INISFALEN

TWILIGHT VOICES

FOUR DUCKS ON A POND