One winter afternoon as I sat by the fire in a ward of Gort Workhouse, I
listened to two old women arguing about the merits of two rival poets
they had seen and heard in their childhood.
One old woman, who was from Kilchreest, said: 'Raftery hadn't a stim of
sight; and he travelled the whole nation; and he was the best poet that
ever was, and the best fiddler. It was always at my father's house,
opposite the big tree, that he used to stop when he was in Kilchreest. I
often saw him; but I didn't take much notice of him then, being a child;
it was after that I used to hear so much about him. Though he was blind,
he could serve himself with his knife and fork as well as any man with
his sight. I remember the way he used to cut the meat--across, like
this. Callinan was nothing to him.'
The other old woman, who was from Craughwell, said: 'Callinan was a
great deal better than him; and he could make songs in English as well
as in Irish; Raftery would run from where Callinan was. And he was a
nice respectable man, too, with cows and sheep, and a kind man. _He_
would never put anything that wasn't nice into a poem, and _he_ would
never run anyone down; but if you were the worst in the world, he'd make
you the best in it; and when his wife lost her beetle, he made a song of
fifteen verses about it.'
'Well,' the Kilchreest old woman admitted, 'Raftery would run people
down; he was someway bitter; and if he had anything against a person,
he'd give him a great lacerating. But there were more for him than for
Callinan; some used to say Callinan's songs were too long.'
'I tell you,' said the other, 'Callinan was a nice man and a nice
neighbour. Raftery wasn't fit to put beside him. Callinan was a man that
would go out of his own back door, and make a poem about the four
quarters of the earth. I tell you, you would stand in the snow to listen
to Callinan!' But, just then, a bedridden old woman suddenly sat up and
began to sing Raftery's 'Bridget Vesach' as long as her breath lasted;
so the last word was for him after all.
Raftery died over sixty years ago; but there are many old people still
living, besides those two old women, who have seen him, and who keep his
songs in their memory. What they tell of him shows how closely he was in
the old tradition of the bards, the wandering poets of two thousand
years or more. His satire, his praises, his competitions with other
poets were the dread and the pride of many Galway and Mayo parishes. And
now the songs that he never wrote down, being blind, are known, if not
as our people say, 'all over the world,' at least in all places where
Irish is spoken.
Raftery's satires, as I have heard them repeated by the country people,
do not seem, even in their rhymed original--he only composed in
Irish--to have the 'sharp spur' of some of his predecessors, such as
O'Higinn, whose tongue was cut out by men from Sligo, who had suffered
from it, or O'Daly, who criticised the poverty of the Irish chiefs in
the sixteenth century until the servant of one of them stuck a knife
into his throat. Yet they were much dreaded. 'He was very sharp with
anyone that didn't please him,' I have been told; 'and no one would like
to be put in his songs.' And though it is said of his songs in praise of
his friends that 'whoever he praised was well praised,' it was thought
safer that one's own name should not appear in them. The man at whose
house he died said to me: 'He used often to come and stop with us, but
he never made a verse about us; my father wouldn't have liked that.
Someway it doesn't bring luck.' And another man says: 'My father often
told me about Raftery. He was someway gifted, and people were afraid of
him. I was often told by men that gave him a lift in their car when they
overtook him now and again, that if he asked their name, they wouldn't
give it, for fear he might put it in a song.' And another man says:
'There was a friend of my father's was driving his car on the road one
day, and he saw Raftery, but he didn't let on to see him. But when he
was passing, Raftery said: "There was never a soldier marching but would
get his billet. But the rabbit has an enemy in the ferret;" so then the
man said in a hurry, "Oh, Mr. Raftery, I never knew it was you: won't
you get up and take a seat in the car?"' A girl in whose praise he had
made a song, Mary Hynes, of Ballylee, died young, and had a troubled
life; and one of her neighbours says of her: 'No one that has a song
made about them will ever live long;' and another says: 'She got a great
tossing up and down; and at last she died in the middle of a bog.' They
tell, too, of a bush that he once took shelter under from the rain, and
how he 'praised it first; and then when it let the rain down, he
dispraised it, and it withered up, and never put out leaf or branch
after.' I have seen his poem on the bush in a manuscript book, carefully
written in the beautiful Irish character, and the great treasure of a
stonecutter's cottage. This is the form of the curse: 'I pronounce
ugliness upon you. That bloom or leaf may never grow on you, but the
flame of the mountain fires and of bonfires be upon you. That you may
get your punishment from Oscar's flail, to hack and to bruise you with
the big sledge of a forge.'
There are some other verses made by him that have been less legendary in
their effect. The story is:--'It was Anthony Daly, a carpenter, was
hanged at Seefin. It was the two Z's got him put away. He was brought
before a judge in Galway, and accused of being a Captain of Whiteboys,
and it was sworn against him that he fired at Mr. X. He was a one-eyed
man; and he said: "If I did, though I have but one eye, I would have hit
him"--for he was a very good shot; and he asked that some object should
be put up, and he would show the judge that he would hit it, but he said
nothing else. Some were afraid he'd give up the names of the other
Whiteboys; but he did not. There was a gallows put up at Seefin; and he
was brought there sitting on his coffin in a cart. There were people all
the way along the road, and they were calling on him to break through
the crowd, and they'd save him; and some of the soldiers were Irish, and
they called back that if he did they'd only fire their guns in the air;
but he made no attempt, but went to the gallows quiet enough. There was
a man in Gort was telling me he saw it, planting potatoes he was at
Seefin that day. It was in the year 1820; and Raftery was there at the
hanging, and he made a song about it. The first verse of the song said:
"Wasn't that the good tree, that wouldn't let any branch that was on it
fall to the ground?" He meant by that that he didn't give up the names
of the other Whiteboys. And at the end he called down judgment from God
on the two Z's, and, if not on them, on their children. And they that
had land and farms in all parts, lost it after; and all they had
vanished; and the most of their children died--only two left, one a
friar, and the other living in the town.' And quite lately I have been
told by another neighbour, in corroboration, that a girl of the Z family
married into a family near his home the other day, and was coldly
received; and when my neighbour asked one of the family why this was, he
was told that 'those of her people that went so high ought to have gone
higher'--meaning that they themselves ought to have been on the gallows;
and then he knew that Raftery's curse was still having its effect. And
he had also heard that the grass had never grown again at Seefin.