'O King, who art in heaven, ... I scream to Thee again and again
aloud, For it is Thy grace I am hoping for.
'I am in age, and my shape is withered; many a day I have been
going astray.... When I was young, my deeds were evil; I delighted
greatly in quarrels and rows. I liked much better to be playing or
drinking on a Sunday morning than to be going to Mass.... I was
given to great oaths, and I did not let lust or drunkenness pass me
by.... The day has stolen away, and I have not raised the hedge
until the crop in which Thou didst take delight is destroyed.... I
am a worthless stake in a corner of a hedge, or I am like a boat
that has lost its rudder, that would he broken against a rock in
the sea, and that would be drowned in the cold waves.'
But in spite of this self-denunciation, people who knew him say 'there
was no harm in him'; though it it is added: 'but as to a drop of drink,
he was fond of that to the end.' And in another mood, in his 'Argument
with Whisky,' he claims, as an excuse for this weakness, the desire for
companionship felt by a wanderer. 'And the world knows it's not for love
of what I drink, but for love of the people that do be near me.' And he
has always a confident belief in final absolution:--"I pray to you to
hear me, O Son of God; as you created the moon, the sun, the stars, it
is no task or trouble for you to ready me."
There are some fine verses in a poem made at the time of an outbreak of
cholera:--
'Look at him who was yesterday swift and strong, who would leap
stone wall, ditch and gap, who was in the evening walking the
street, and is going under the clay on the morrow.
'Death is quicker than the wave of drowning or than any horse,
however fast, on the racecourse. He would strike a goal against the
crowd; and no sooner is he there than he is on guard before us.
'He is changing, hindering, rushing, starting, unloosed; the day is
no better to him than the night; when a person thinks there is no
fear of him, there he is on the spot laid low with keening.
'Death is a robber who heaps together kings, high princes, and
country lords; he brings with him the great, the young, and the
wise, gripping them by the throat before all the people.
'It is a pity for him who is tempted with the temptations of the
world; and the store that will go with him is so weak, and his
lease of life no better if he were to live for a thousand years,
than just as if he had slipped over on a visit and back again.
'When you are going to lie down, don't be dumb. Bare your knee and
bruise the ground. Think of all the deeds that you put by you, and
that you are travelling towards the meadow of the dead.'
Some of his poems of places, usually places in Mayo, the only ones he
had ever looked on--for smallpox took his sight away in his
childhood--have much charm. 'Cnocin Saibhir,' 'the Plentiful Little
Hill,' must have sounded like a dream of Tir-nan-og to many a poor
farmer in a sodden-thatched cottage:--
'After the Christmas, with the help of Christ, I will never stop if
I am alive; I will go to the sharp-edged little hill; for it is a
fine place, without fog falling; a blessed place that the sun
shines on, and the wind doesn't rise there or any thing of the
sort.
'And if you were a year there, you would get no rest, only sitting
up at night and eternally drinking.
'The lamb and the sheep are there; the cow and the calf are there;
fine lands are there without heath and without bog. Ploughing and
seed-sowing in the right month, and plough and harrow prepared and
ready; the rent that is called for there, they have means to pay
it. There is oats and flax and large-eared barley.... There are
beautiful valleys with good growth in them, and hay. Rods grow
there, and bushes and tufts, white fields are there, and respect
for trees; shade and shelter from wind and rain; priests and friars
reading their book; spending and getting is there, and nothing
scarce.'