His life was always the wandering, homeless life of the old bards. After
Cromwell's time, as the houses they went to grew poorer, they had added
music to their verse-making; and Raftery's little fiddle helped to make
him welcome in the Ireland which was, in spite of many sorrows, as merry
and light-hearted up to the time of the great famine as England had been
up to the time of the Puritans. 'He had no place of his own,' I am told,
'but to be walking the country. He did well to die before the bad years
came. He used to play at Kiltartan cross for the dancing of a Sunday
evening. And when he'd come to any place, the people would gather and
he'd give them a dance; for there was three times as many people in the
world then as what there is now. The people would never have let him
want; but as to money, what could he do with it, and he with no place of
his own?' An old woman near Craughwell says: 'He used to come here
often; it was like home to him. He wouldn't have a dance then; my father
liked better to be sitting listening to his talk and his stories; only
when we'd come in, he'd take the fiddle and say: "Now we must give the
youngsters a tune."' And an old man, who is still lamenting the fall in
prices after the Battle of Waterloo, remembers having seen him 'one time
at a shebeen house that used to be down there in Clonerle. He was
playing the fiddle, and there used to be two couples at a time dancing;
and they would put two halfpence in the plate, and Raftery would rattle
them and say: "It's good for the two sorts to be together," and there
would be great laughing.' And it is also said 'there was a welcome
before him in every house he'd come to; and wherever he went, they'd
think the time too short he would be with them.' There is a story I
often hear told about the marriage near Cappaghtagle of a poor servant
boy and girl, 'that was only a marriage and not a wedding, till Raftery
chanced to come in; and he made it one. There wasn't a bit but bread and
herrings in the house; but he made a great song about the grand feast
they had, and he put every sort of thing into the song--all the beef
that was in Ireland; and went to the Claddagh, and didn't leave a fish
in the sea. And there was no one at all at it; but he brought all the
_bacach_ and poor men in Ireland, and gave them a pound each. He went to
bed after, without them giving him a drop to drink; but he didn't mind
that when they hadn't got it to give.'
The wandering, unrestrained life was probably to his mind; and I do not
think there is a word of discontent or complaint in any of his verses,
though he was always poor, and must often have known hardship. In the
'Talk with the Bush,' he describes in his whimsical, exaggerated way, a
wetting, which must have been one of very many.
'It chanced that I was travelling and the rain was heavy; I stepped
aside, and not without reason, till I'd get a wall or a bush that
would shelter me.
'I didn't meet at the side of a gap only an old, withered,
miserable bush by the side of the wall, and it bent with the west
wind. I stepped under it, and it was a wet place; torrents of rain
coming down from all quarters, east and west and straight
downwards; its equal I couldn't see, unless it is seeds winnowed
through a riddle. It was sharp, angry, fierce, and stormy, like a
deer running and racing past me. The storm was drowning the
country, and my case was pitiful, and I suffering without cause.
'An hour and a quarter it was raining; there isn't a drop that fell
but would fill a quart and put a heap on it afterwards; there's not
a wheat or rape mill in the neighbourhood but it would set going in
the middle of a field.'