by man and God, a renegade and outcast who had been denied everything
in the world except genius.
PADRAIC COLUM
It has been given to few writers of verse to express the mood of the
land of their birth with an accent as autochthonous as that of Mr.
Padraic Colum. It is not for nothing that this shy and delicate poet
derives his family name from the most Irish of Irish saints and singers
who himself most wonderfully, more than a thousand years ago, struck
the very same note that delights us today in Mr. Colum’s poetry. For
as the holy Columcille looked back from his small craft of skins
and branches at the green fields of Ireland growing more and more
indistinct behind him, it is said that the sound of his singing was
heard far and wide over the cold, drab-coloured waves of the northern
sea:
How swift is the speed of my coracle;
Its stem towards Derry.
I grieve at my errand o’er the noble sea
Traveling to Alba of the Ravens.
A grey eye looks back to Erin
A grey eye full of tears.
It is just this same quality, so heightened, so imaginative and yet
so convincingly realistic “with its turn for style, its turn for
melancholy, and its turn for natural magic,” that we find in Padraic
Colum’s verse. For all the bewildering effrontery displayed by certain
Celtic adventurers in the realm of Saxon literature, for all the dash
and intellectual brilliance, for instance, of men like Burke, Sheridan,
Moore, Wilde, and Shaw, it is not to them that we look for the true
articulate expression of the sad soul of Ireland. We must turn to the
ancient Catholic singers, to the country ballad-makers, to the vague,
wistful, half-expressed romanticism of poets like Francis Mahony, James
Clarence Mangan, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Padraic Colum, if we are
to catch the wild, doleful music which the wandering west winds of
the Atlantic awaken in the whin bushes and lone moorland trees of the
dedicated and tragic Island.
Mr. Colum was born and brought up in one of the middle counties,
and his spirit has been permeated with the very thrill of this
articulation. His imagination is the imagination of the incorrigible
and wilful people who have retained throughout history so strange an
attitude to the bleak illusions which occupy, in so rigid a manner, the
attention and interests of the rest of the world.
From the earliest times, the Irish have been irresistibly attracted
by those half-uttered secrets of the earth’s margins which a chance
phrase or unexpected word in Celtic literature seems often so nearly to
reveal. Above everything these “amorous Gaedhils” are impressionable
to what _can not be spoken_; to the inconstant, tremulous, spiritual
messages that come to us with retrospection; to the indefinable,
provocative calls, sad voices from lost worlds, as it were, that
are brought to us each year with the passing of the seasons; to the
incoherent evocations that emanate from certain localities or objects
whose forlorn identity when once observed can never be forgotten.
It is indeed fitting enough that Padraic Colum should have called
the one slim, precious volume he has given us “Wild Earth.” No more
adequate title could possibly have been selected. Wild Earth!--in
these poems one finds the dew of a thousand early mornings, drawn
forth by the yellow sun from our wanton planet which after a million
dancing æons remains to this day proud, and hard, and “wild,” and never
entirely “broken for corn.”
Everything Mr. Colum writes has its peculiar interest. In a single
illuminating sentence he has done much to elucidate the mysterious
power of the most perplexing work of genius that has appeared in modern
times. Of “Ulysses” he says: “James Joyce does not write savagely,
he writes satanically, and his satire touches not individuals and
institutions but life itself.” Again and again in Padraic Colum’s plays
one comes upon passages which bear the stamp of his sensitive and
fastidious genius. Take this quotation:
The people have to watch
The black rain and it falling all the day.
And again,
God’s will is set
Against us all; it is against
The cattle in the field, and it was they
Stood by his crib; they’re moaning always now
He has forgotten them.
In the mere use of the simple words “black rain,” what a fresh,
unsophisticated approach to the manifestations of the visible world
is revealed; and in the second quotation what a winnowed, sensitive
delicacy, so Celtic, so Catholic, is suggested by the “long long
thoughts” which could conceive of a deity being laid under some kind of
magnanimous obligation to the beasts of the field for no other reason,
forsooth, than that they had been the mute spectators of the birth of
a god! It is, indeed, this “fresh approach” which gives to Mr. Colum’s
books written for children the clear, lucid tone which makes each of
them, in its way, a perfect work of art. They seem always to be the
narrations of one who has experienced something or seen something for
the first time. In truth, to the eye of a poet, what matter that a
thousand ages have passed since the world’s crust first cooled? Are not
men, birds, animals, and flowers, created every hour, incredible and
exultant, from the mysterious, fecund breathing of the nostrils of God?
How evasively and unpretentiously Padraic Colum conveys to us the
poetry of life; lines, and even single words of his, brushing against
our intelligence with the surprise and softness of a linnet’s wings.
What a rich harvest of impressions his poet’s nature must have gathered
in those days of his youth--the homely, simple look of white geese
against a peat stack, the cottage interior with its shrine and corn
bin, the “lonesome hush” of a deserted country road, “the fire-seed
sleeping deep in white ashes”!
But valuable though his other contributions to literature are, it is to
his poetry that one returns, time and again, when one wishes for the
particular refreshment that in certain moods he alone can give us. Has
he, one wonders, in his poem entitled “The Poet” presented us with a
valuable clue by which to explain his power?
‘The blackbird’s nest, in the briar,
The sea-gulls’ nests on the ground
They are nests, and they’re more than nests’ he said
‘They are tokens I have found.’
. . . . . .
‘But close to the ground are they reared
The wings that take widest way,
And the birds that sing best in the wood,’ he said,
‘Are bred with their breasts to the clay.’
The poems of “Wild Earth” do in very fact remind one of the direct
appeal of the familiar European blackbird with its liquid, flute-like
song; but they also have in them something else, something unutterable,
unaccountable, melancholy, which one might well associate with a
different bird. Continually, as we read, we are startled by a note
plaintive and intractable as the whistle of a curlew coming to us on
the wind, in fitful intervals, from some far-off, desolate moorland.
The crows still fly to that wood, and out of the wood she comes
Carrying her load of sticks, a little less now than before,
Her strength being less; she bends as the hoar rush bends in the wind.
. . . . . .
And then, between daybreak and dark,
And between the hill and the sea,
Three Women, come down from the Mountain,
Will raise the Keen over me.
. . . . . .
Och! but I’m weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there’s never a house nor bush,
And tired I am of bog and road,
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!
Hidden away in many of his poems side by side with this haunting
feeling of bane, one comes upon an extraordinary suggestion of those
unexplained emotions which for want of a better word we call romantic.
Perhaps what I mean will also best be illustrated by quoting from
certain poems.
To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford,
Go my cattle and me.
I hear in the darkness
Their slipping and breathing--
I name them the bye-ways
They’re to pass without heeding;
Then the wet, winding roads,
Brown bogs with black water;
And my thoughts on white ships
And the King o’ Spain’s daughter.
We hear it again in
Mavourneen is going
From me and from you,
Where Mary will fold him
With mantle of blue!
From reek of the smoke
And cold of the floor,
And the peering of things
Across the half-door.
Or in,
She’ll hear my boat on the shingles,
And she’ll hear my step on the land,
And the corncrake hid in the meadow
Will tell her I’m at hand!
But it may very well be that in its ultimate essence what constitutes
the chief value of Padraic Colum’s work is the faculty he possesses
for calling up before our eyes the peculiar characteristics of the
native Irish, characteristics so simple and yet so imaginative,
lingering on even yet, in the more out of the way districts of their
country-side. In his writings we hear once more the exact intonation
of the fiddlers and the wavering voices of the harp-players who for
generations have gone wailing through each white-washed hovel, and
whose wandering footprints have been mingled for centuries with the
webbed indentures of ganders and ducks which mark each muddy bohereen.
Again and yet again we catch the echoes of their doleful exclamations,
Och! Ochone! or hear the reiterate murmur of their ranns and quaint
benedictions.
I save the seed of fire to-night,
Even so may Christ save me,
On the top of the house let Mary
In the middle let Bridget be.
These are the people whose hearts for so many centuries have been
entrammelled with a perilous love for their dark Rosaleen with “her
holy delicate white hands.”
The priests are on the ocean green
They march along the deep.
There’s wine from the royal Pope,
Upon the ocean green;
These are the people who “went forth to war, but always fell” and who
to this day cherish deep in their hearts a proud contempt for the
“creeping Saxon.”
Not forgetting Saxon faith
Not forgetting Norman scath
Not forgetting William’s word
Not forgetting Cromwell’s sword
From Cruckmoylinn to Carricknabauna, from Glen Nefin to Leitrim, they
have eaten “the scrape of hog’s lard” and looked upon the three most
desolate things in the world, and yet have retained throughout the
worst period of their agony a “deep affection and recollection” for the
tragic soul of their country whose memory in retrospect ever haunts
their minds.
In the old, old days, upon Innish,
The fields were lucky and bright,
But possibly in one single poem of three verses Padraic Colum has
succeeded more than in any other in giving perfect expression to his
feeling not only for the romance and beauty that he finds in innocent,
homely things but also for the silent glamour of nature in her most
entranced and lambent moods. His poem called “Across the Door” is
unsurpassed both in form and imaginative suggestiveness. These lines
have upon them the simplicity and inevitability which belong only to
great poetry.
With what ease our imagination re-creates the poem’s setting--the
close interior with the candle-light making flickering patterns on the
smoke-stained rafters, the quick elbow-movements of the fiddlers, and
the young, eager girl who, transported by the music and dance, so soon
feels on the moonlit threshold with “the dim, wide meadows” about her,
a conscious, bewildered awakening to that wild mystery before which all
creation trembles and faints. If Mr. Colum had written no other line of
poetry except this piece, in my opinion, it would have ensured for him
an undisputed place among the immortals:
The fiddles were playing and playing,
The couples were out on the floor;
From converse and dancing he drew me,
And across the door.
Ah! strange were the dim, wide meadows,
And strange was the cloud-strewn sky,
And strange in the meadows the corncrakes,
And they making cry!
The hawthorn bloom was by us,
Around us the breath of the south.
_White hawthorn, strange in the night-time--_
_His kiss on my mouth!_
Transcriber’s Notes
Typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Italics have been indicated with surrounding underscores.