His knowledge and his poetic gift are often supposed to have been given
to him by the invisible powers, who grow visible to those who have lost
their earthly sight. An old woman who had often danced to his music,
said:--'When he went to his rest at night, it's then he'd make the songs
in the turn of a hand, and you would wonder in the morning where he got
them.' And a man who 'was too much taken up with sport and hurling when
he was a boy to think much about him,' says: 'He got the gift. It's said
he was asked which would he choose, music or the talk. If he chose
music, he would have been the greatest musician in the world; but he
chose the talk, and so he was a great poet. Where could he have found
all the words he put in his songs if it wasn't for that?' An old woman,
who is more orthodox, says:--'I often used to see him when I was a
little child, in my father's house at Corker. He'd often come in there,
and here to Coole House he used to come as well. He couldn't see a
stim, and that is why he had such great knowledge. God gave it to him.
And his songs have gone all through the world; and he had a voice that
was like the wind.'
Legends are already growing up about his death. It has been said that
'he knew the very day his time would be up; and he went to Galway, and
brought a plank to the house he was stopping at, and he put it in the
loft; and he told the people of the house his time was come, and bid
them make a coffin for him with the plank--and he was dead before
morning.' And another story says he died alone in an empty house, and
that flames were seen about the house all night; and 'the flames were
the angels waking him.' But many told me he had died in the house of a
man near Craughwell; and one autumn day I went there to look for it, and
the first person I asked was able to tell me that the house where
Raftery had died was the other side of Craughwell, a mile and a half
away. It was a warm, hazy day; and as I walked along the flat, deserted
road that Raftery had often walked, I could see few landmarks--only a
few more grey rocks, or a few more stunted hazel bushes in one
stone-walled field than in another. At last I came to a thatched
cottage; and when I saw an old man sitting outside it, with hat and coat
of the old fashion, I felt sure it was he who had been with Raftery at
the last. He was ready to talk about him, and told me how he had come
there to die. 'I was a young chap at that time. It must have been in
the year 1835, for my father died in '36, and I think it was a year
before him that Raftery died. What did he die of? Of weakness. He had
been bet up in Galway with some fit of sickness he had; and then he came
to gather a little money about the country, and when he got here he was
bet up again. He wasn't an old man--only about seventy years. He was in
the bed for about a fortnight. When he got bad, my father said it was
best get a priest for him; but the parish priest was away. But we saw
Father Nagle passing the road, and I went out and brought him in, and he
gave him absolution, and anointed him. He had no pain; only his feet
were cold, and the boys used to be warming a stone in the fire and
putting it to them in the bed. My mother wanted to send to Galway, where
his wife and his daughter and his son were stopping, so that they would
come and care him; but he wouldn't have them. Someway he didn't think
they treated him well.'
I had been told that the priest had refused him absolution when he was
dying, until he forgave some enemy; and that he had said afterwards, 'If
I forgave him with my mouth, I didn't with my heart'; but this was not
true. 'Father Nagle made no delay in anointing him; but there was a
carpenter down the road there he said too much to, and annoyed him one
time; and the carpenter had a touch of the poet too, and was a great
singer, and he came out and beat him, and broke his fiddle; and I
remember when he was dying, the priest bringing in the carpenter, and
making them forgive one another, and shake hands; and the carpenter
said: "If two brothers were to have a falling out, they'd forgive one
another--and why wouldn't we?" He was buried in Killeenan; it wasn't a
very big funeral, but all the people of the village came to it. He used
often to come and stop with us.... It was of a Christmas Eve he died:
and he had always said that, if God had a hand in it, it was of a
Christmas Day he'd die.'
I went to Killeenan to look for his grave. There is nothing to mark it;
but two old men who had been at his funeral pointed it out to me. There
is a ruined church in the graveyard, which is crowded; 'there are people
killing one another now to get a place in it.' I was asked into a house
close by; and its owner said with almost a touch of jealousy: 'I think
it was coming in here Raftery was the time he died; but he got bet up,
and turned in at the house below. It was of a Christmas Eve he died, and
that shows he was blessed; there's a blessing on them that die at
Christmas. It was at night he was buried, for Christmas Day no work
could be done, but my father and a few others made a little gathering to
pay for a coffin, and it was made by a man in the village on St.
Stephen's Day; and then he was brought here, and the people from the
villages followed him, for they all had a wish for Raftery. But night
was coming on when they got here; and in digging the grave there was a
big stone in it, and the boys thought they would put him in a barn and
take the night out of him. But my mother--the Lord have mercy on
her--had a great veneration for Raftery; and she sent out two mould
candles lighted; for in those days the women used to have their own
mould, and to make their own candles for Christmas. And we held the
candles there where the grave is, near the gable end of the church; and
my brother went down in the grave and got the stone out, and we buried
him. And there was a sharp breeze blowing at the time, but it never
quenched the candles or moved the flame of them, and that shows that the
Lord had a hand in him.'
He and all the neighbours were glad to hear that there is soon to be a
stone over the grave. 'He is worthy of it; he is well worthy of it,'
they kept saying. A man who was digging sand by the roadside, took me to
his house, and his wife showed me a little book, in which the
'Repentance' and other poems had been put down for her, in phonetic
Irish, by a beggar who had once stayed in the house. 'Many who go to
America hear Raftery's songs sung out there,' they told me with pride.
As I went back along the silent road, there was suddenly a sound of
horses and a rushing and waving about me, and I found myself in the
midst of the County Galway Fox Hounds, coming back from cub-hunting. The
English M.F.H. and his wife rode by; and I wondered if they had ever
heard of the poet whose last road this had been. Most likely not; for it
is only among the people that his name has been kept in remembrance.
There is still a peasant poet here and there, making songs in the 'sweet
Irish tongue,' in which death spoke to Raftery; and I think these will
be held in greater honour as the time of awakening goes on. But the
nineteenth century has been a time of swift change in many countries;
and in looking back on that century in Ireland, there seem to have been
two great landslips--the breaking of the continuity of the social life
of the people by the famine, and the breaking of the continuity of their
intellectual life by the shoving out of the language. It seems as if
there were no place left now for the wandering versemaker, and that
Raftery may have closed the long procession that had moved unbroken
during so many centuries, on its journey to 'the meadow of the dead.'
1900.
* * * * *
It was after I had written this that I went to see Raftery's birthplace,
Cilleaden, in the County Mayo.
A cousin of his came to see me, and some other men, but none of them
remembered him; but they were very proud of his song on Cilleaden, which
'is all through the world.' An old woman told me she had heard it in a
tramcar in America; and an old man said: 'I was coming back from England
one time, and there were a lot of Irish-speaking boys from Galway on
board. There was one of them sick all through the night, but he was well
in the morning; and the others came round him and asked him for a song,
and the song he gave was 'Cilleaden.'
They did not seem to know many of his other songs, except the
'Repentance,' which someone remembered having seen sold as a ballad,
with the English on one side and the Irish on the other. And one man
told me: 'The first song Raftery wrote was about a hat that was stole
from a man that was working in that middle field beyond. When the man
was digging, he used to put his hat on a stick in the field to frighten
away the crows; and Raftery got someone to bring away the hat, to make
fun of the man. And then he made a song, making out it was the fairies
had taken it; and he made the man follow them to Cruachmaa, and from
that to Roscommon, and tell all that happened him there.'
And one of them told me: 'He was six years old when the smallpox took
his sight from him; and he was marked very little by the pox, only three
or four little marks--it seemed to settle in his eyes. His father was a
cottier--there were many here in those times. His mother was a Brennan.
There are cousins of his living yet; but in the schools they are
Englished into Rochford.'
A young man said he had been told Raftery was born in some place beyond,
at the foot of the mountain, but the others were very indignant; one got
very angry, and said: 'Don't I know where he was born, and my father was
the one age with him, and they sisters' sons; and isn't Michael Conroy
there below his cousin? and it's up in that field was the house he was
born in, so don't be trying to bring him away to the mountain.'
I went to see the birthplace, a very green field, with two thorn bushes
growing close together by a stone. The field is called 'Sean
Straid'--the old street--for a few cottages had stood there. A man who
lives close by told me he had dug up a blackened stone just there, and a
stone into which a bar had been let, to hang a pot on; and that may have
been the very hearth where Raftery had sat as a child.
I found one old man who remembered him. 'He used to come to my father's
house often, mostly from Easter to Whitsuntide, when the cakes were
made, and there would be music and dancing. He used to play the fiddle
for Frank Taafe that lived here, when he would be going out riding, and
the horse used to prance when he heard it. And he made verses against
one Seaghan Bradach, that used to be paid thirteen pence for every head
of cattle he found straying in the Jordan's fields, and used to drive
them in himself. There was another poet called Devine that praised
Seaghan Bradach; and a verse was made against him again by a woman-poet
that lived here at the time.'
* * * * *
There is a stone over Raftery's grave now; and the people about
Killeenan gather there on a Sunday in August every year to do honour to
his memory. This year they established a _Feis_; and there were prizes
given for traditional singing, and for old poems repeated, and old
stories told, all in the Irish tongue.
And the _Craoibhin Aoibhin_ is printing week by week all of Raftery's
poems that can be found, with translations, and we shall soon have them
in a book.
And he has written a little play, having Raftery for its subject; and at
a Galway Feis this year he himself acted, and took the blind poet's
part; and he will act it many times again, _le congnamh De_--with the
help of God.
1902.