My own imagination was aroused. I was becoming conscious of a world
close to me and that I had been ignorant of. It was not now in the
corners of newspapers I looked for poetic emotion, nor even to the
singers in the streets. It was among farmers and potato diggers and
old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what
was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my
childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of
parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.
An Aran man, repeating to me _The Grief of a Girl's Heart_ in
Irish told me it was with that song his mother had often sung him to
sleep as a child. It was from an old woman who had known Mary Hynes
and who said of her "The sun and the moon never shone upon anything
so handsome" that I first heard Raftery's song of praise of her, "The
pearl that was at Ballylee," a song "that has gone around the world
& as far as America." It was in a stonecutter's house where I went
to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript
book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.
It was to a working farmer's house I walked on many a moonlit evening
with the manuscript that his greater knowledge helped me to understand
and by his hearth that I read for the first time the _Vision of
Death_ and the _Lament for O'Daly._ After that I met with many
old people who had in the days before the Famine seen or talked with
the wandering poet who was in the succession of those who had made
and recited their lyrics on the Irish roads before Chaucer wrote.
V
And so I came by the road nearest me to the old legends, the old heroic
poems. It was a man of a hundred years who told me the story of
Cuchulain's fight with his own son, the son of Aoife, and how the young
man as he lay dying had reproached him and said "Did you not see how
I threw every spear fair and easy at you, and you threw your spear
hard and wicked at me? And I did not come out to tell my name to one
or to two but if I had told it to anyone in the whole world, I would
soonest tell it to your pale face." Deirdre's beauty "that brought
the Sons of Usnach to their death" comes into many of the country songs.
Grania of the yet earlier poems is not so well thought of. An old
basket-maker said scornfully "Many would tell you she slept under the
cromlechs but I don't believe that, and she a king's daughter. And
I don't believe she was handsome, either. If she was, why would she
have run away?" And another said "Finn had more wisdom than all the
men of the world, but he wasn't wise enough to put a bar on Grania."
I was told in many places of Osgar's bravery and Goll's strength and
Conan's bitter tongue, and the arguments of Oisin and Patrick. And
I have often been given the story of Oisin's journey to Tir-nan-Og,
the Country of the Young, that is, as I am told, "a fine place and
everything that is good is in it. And if anyone is sent there for a
minute he will want to stop in it, and twenty years will seem to him
like one half hour;" and "they say Tir-nan-Og is there yet, and so
it may be in any place."