[B] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old Mayo woman,
who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw
‘a woman with white borders to her cap going round the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months.’
‘DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN’S EYE.’
I
I HAVE been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, ‘There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee,’ and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, ‘That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they’ve got cranky, and they won’t grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow’—he meant driven snow, perhaps,—‘and she had blushes
in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now!’ I
talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about
her, and how it said, ‘there is a strong cellar in Ballylee.’ He said
the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground,
and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a
grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water
at early morning ‘to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills.’
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who lives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, ‘I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die,’ and that he was nearly blind, and had ‘no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he’d praise
you, but if you did not, he’d fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he’d make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it.’ She sang the poem to a friend and to myself
in Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in
a song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing
of their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry
of the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naïve and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.
‘Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, “Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee.”
When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,
We had daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure,
She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me;
And she said, “Drink, Raftery, and a hundred welcomes,
There is a strong cellar in Ballylee.”
O star of light and O sun in harvest,
O amber hair, O my share of the world,
Will you come with me upon Sunday
Till we agree together before all the people?
I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening,
Punch on the table, or wine if you would drink it,
But, O King of Glory, dry the roads before me,
Till I find the way to Ballylee.
There is sweet air on the side of the hill
When you are looking down upon Ballylee;
When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries,
There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe.
What is the worth of greatness till you have the light
Of the flower of the branch that is by your side?
There is no god to deny it or to try and hide it,
She is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart.
There was no part of Ireland I did not travel,
From the rivers to the tops of the mountains,
To the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is hidden,
And I saw no beauty but was behind hers.
Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too;
Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet.
She is the pride, and I give her the branch,
She is the shining flower of Ballylee.
It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman,
Has beauty in her mind and in her face.
If a hundred clerks were gathered together,
They could not write down a half of her ways.’
An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the
faeries) at night, says, ‘Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing
ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she’d be at every
hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as
eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn’t have
any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night
sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got
up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open
then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found
him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before
the famine.’ Another old man says he was only a child when he saw
her, but he remembered that ‘the strongest man that was among us, one
John Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing
rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee.’ This is perhaps the man
the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes.
There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge
hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old
poem said, ‘the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of
the wolves,’ but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of
ancient speech. She says, ‘The sun and the moon never shone on anybody
so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she
had two little blushes on her cheeks.’ And an old wrinkled woman who
lives close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says,
‘I often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches
of curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw
Mary Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that
was in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely
creature. I was at her wake too—she had seen too much of the world.
She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that field
beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal
(the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk.’ This old
woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of
silver, for though I knew an old man—he is dead now—who thought she
might know ‘the cure for all the evils in the world,’ that the Sidhe
knew, she has seen too little gold to know its colour. But a man by
the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says,
‘Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it
is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but
her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness.
And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one
another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with
her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made
about them will ever live long.’
Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, who
can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an
old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or
a husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says
‘God bless them’ when one’s eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang
the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was ‘taken,’ as the phrase is,
‘for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they
not take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and, maybe
there were some that did not say “God bless her.”’ An old man who lives
by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, ‘for there
are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[C] there
beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland.’ She
died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and
it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally,
meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and
countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years
nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain
of things, than are our men of learning. She ‘had seen too much of
the world’; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame
another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as
the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame
throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind,
and say, ‘I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see
her,’ or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have
been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their
kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I
asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool _na mna Sidhe_
where women of faery have been seen, how Raftery could have admired
Mary Hynes so much if he had been altogether blind? He said, ‘I think
Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of
seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more,
and to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight,
and a certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them.’ Everybody,
indeed, will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind
but a poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already
given, says, ‘His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are
three things that are the gift of the Almighty—poetry and dancing and
principles. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming down
from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than
a man with education you’d meet now, for they got it from God’; and a
man at Coole says, ‘When he put his finger to one part of his head,
everything would come to him as if it was written in a book’; and an
old pensioner at Kiltartan says, ‘He was standing under a bush one
time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say
it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in
it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The
bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now
between this and Rahasine.’ There is a poem of his about a bush, which
I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in
this shape.
A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died,
but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told
Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven
from the roof of the house where he lay, and ‘that was the angels who
were with him’; and all night long there was a great light in the
hovel, ‘and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that
honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious
songs.’ It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities
to immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes
and Raftery to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the
magnificence and penury of dreams.
1900.