'It is dark the night is; I do not see one star at all;
And it is dark and heavy my thoughts are that are scattered and
straying.
There is no sound about but of the birds going over my head--
The lapwing striking the air with long-drawn, weak blows
And the plover, that comes like a bullet, cutting the night with its
whistle;
And I hear the wild geese higher again with their rough screech.
But I do not hear any other sound, it is that increases my grief--
Not one other cry but the cry and the call of the birds on the bog.'
Here is another, in which the storm outside and the storm within answer
to one another:--
'The heavy clouds are threatening,
And it's little but they'll take the roof off the house;
The heavy thunder is answering
To every flash of the yellow fire.
I, by myself, within in my room,
That is narrow, small, warm, am sitting,
I look at the surly skies,
And I listen to the wind.
'I was light, airy, lively,
On the young morning of yesterday;
But when the evening came,
I was like a dead man!
I have not one jot of hope
But for a bed in the clay;
Death is the same as life to me
From this out, from a word I heard yesterday.'
The next is very simple, and puts into more homely words the feeling of
'lonesomeness' that is looked upon as almost the worst of evils by the
Irish countryman, as we see by his proverb: 'It is better to be
quarreling than to be lonesome.' 'I would be lonesome in it,' is often
the reason given for a refusal to go from bog or mountain cabin to some
crowded place 'where there is not heed for one or love.'
'Oh! if there were in this world
Any nice little place,
To be my own, my own for ever,
My own only,
I would have great joy--great ease--
Beyond what I have,
Without a place in the world where I can say:
"This is my own."
It's a pity for a man to know,
And it's a pain,
That there is no place in the world
Where there is heed for him or love;
That there is not in the world for him
A heart or a hand
To give help to him
To the mering of the next world.
'It is hard and it is bitter,
And a sharp grief,
It is woe and it is pity,
To be by oneself.
It is nothing the way you are,
To anyone at all.
It is nothing the way you are,
To yourself at last!'
I suppose the following may be called a political poem, from its elusive
reference to Home Rule. I was not sure on the point myself; for I
thought the wearer of the 'blue cloak and birds' feathers,' must be a
fine lady, perhaps laying enchantment on the fields. But I heard some
one ask the _Craoibhin_ who he meant, and his answer was: 'I suppose I
was thinking of an aide-de-camp':--
'I am looking at my cows walking,
What are you that would put me out of my luck?
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?
'I will not always be turned backwards.
If there is need to be humble to you, great is my grief,
If I cannot walk, if I cannot walk, if I cannot walk in my own fields.
'It's little my respect, and it's little my desire,
For your blue cloak, and your birds' feathers.
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?
'The day is coming as it's easy to see,
When there shall not be among us the ugly like of you.
And each one shall be walking, and each one shall be walking,
Wherever shall be his will and his own desire.'
There are some love songs in the little volume. But their writer has
had, in his beautiful translations of the 'Love Songs of Connacht,' to
put such intensity of passion into English, that he must despair of
putting any new wings to passion, or any new exaggeration into lovers'
words. In one of these Connacht songs, the lover says: 'Blacker is the
sun when setting than your features, Mary!' And she answers back:
'Neither star nor sun shows one-third much light as your shadow!'
Another lover says of the woman he desires: 'I will write largely of
her, because of the thousands who hoped for her, and who have been lost;
and a hundred men of these who still live, are in pain and under locks
through love. And I myself am not free, but am a bondsman in bonds.' And
another boasts of 'a love without littleness, without weakness; love
from age till death, love from folly growing, love that shall send me
close beneath the clay, love without a hope of the world, love without
envy of fortune, love that left me outside in captivity, love of my
heart beyond women.' Douglas Hyde's own love songs are quiet and staid
in contrast to these; but nevertheless they have a sober charm. Here are
the last verses of one of them:--
'Will you be as hard,
Colleen, as you are quiet?
Will you be without pity
On me for ever?
'Listen to me, Noireen,
Listen, aroon;
Put healing on me
From your quiet mouth.
'I am in the little road
That is dark and narrow,
The little road that has led
Thousands to sleep.'
In his preface to the 'Love Songs of Connacht' he says he finds in them
'more of grief and trouble, more of melancholy and contrition of heart,
than of gaiety or hope'; and he writes: 'Not careless and light-hearted
alone is the Gaelic nature; there is also beneath the loudest mirth a
melancholy spirit; and if they let on to be without heed for anything
but sport and revelry, there is nothing in it but letting on.' There is
grief and trouble, as I have shown, in many of his own songs, which the
people have taken to their hearts so quickly; but there is also a touch
of hope, of glad belief that, in spite of heavy days of change, all
things are working for good at the last.