Read As I Rode by Granard Moat Online
Authors: Benedict Kiely
As I Rode by Granard Moat (14 page)
Brinsley was a great believer in ghosts, in a humorous sort of a way, and he was, I often felt, a sibling of Jonathan Swift. He wrote about his vision of the Dean.
I saw them walk that lane again
And watch the midges cloud a pool,
Laughing at something in the brain –
The Dean and Patrick Brell the fool.
Like Lear he kept his fool with him
Long into Dublin’s afterglow,
Until the wits in him grew dim
And Patrick sold him for a show.
Here were the days before Night came,
When Stella and the other – ‘slut’,
Vanessa, called by him – that flame
When Laracor was Lilliput!
And here, by walking up and down,
He made a man called Gulliver,
While bits of lads came out from town
To have a squint at him and her.
Still, was it Stella that they saw,
Or else some lassie of their own?
For in his story that’s the flaw,
The secret no one since has known.
Was it some wench among the corn
Had set him from the other two,
Some tenderness that he had torn,
Some lovely blossom that he knew?
For when Vanessa died of love,
And Stella learned to keep her place,
His Dublin soon the story wove
That steeped them in the Dean’s disgrace.
They did not know, ’twas he could tell!
The reason of his wildest rages,
The story kept by Patrick Brell,
The thing that put him with the ages.
Now when they mention of the Dean
Some silence holds them as they talk;
Some things there are unsaid, unseen,
That drive me to this lonely walk,
To meet the mighty man again,
And yet no comfort comes to me.
Although sometimes I see him plain,
That silence holds the Hill of Bree.
For, though I think I’d know her well,
I’ve never seen her on his arm,
Laughing with him, nor heard her tell
She had forgiven all that harm.
And yet I’d like to know ’twere true,
That here at last in Laracor,
Here in the memory of a few,
There was this rest for him and her.
Still I am indebted to Donagh MacDonagh’s anthology, so I must pay his ghost the compliment of quoting another of his poems – to be sung, he said, to the tune of ‘The Lowlands of Holland’:
Going to Mass last Sunday my true love passed me by,
I knew her mind was altered by the rolling of her eye;
And when I stood in God’s dark light my tongue could word no prayer
Knowing my saint had fled and left her reliquary bare.
Sweet faces smiled from holy glass, demure in saintly love,
Sweet voices ripe with Latin grace rolled from the choir above;
But brown eyes under Sunday wear were all my liturgy;
How can she hope for heaven who has so deluded me?
When daffodils Were altar gold her lips were light on mine
And when the hawthorn flame was bright we drank the year’s new wine;
The nights seemed stained-glass windows lit with love that paled the sky,
But love’s last ember perishes in the winter of her eye.
Drape every downcast day now in purple cloth of Lent,
Smudge every forehead now with ash, that she may yet repent,
Who going to Mass last Sunday could pass so proudly by
And show her mind was altered by the rolling of an eye.
Thomas MacDonagh translated from the Irish of Cathal Buidhe Mac Giolla Gunna (or Blondie Charley Gunn) the immortal poem about the nature of love, poetry, drink, and the thirsty, long-necked, yellow bittern:
The yellow bittern that never broke out
In a drinking-bout, might as well have drunk;
His bones are thrown on a naked stone
Where he lived alone like a hermit monk.
O yellow bittern! I pity your lot,
Though they say that a sot like myself is curst –
I was sober a while, but I’ll drink and be wise
For fear I should die in the end of thirst.
It’s not for the common birds that I’d mourn,
The blackbird, the corncrake or the crane,
But for the bittern that’s shy and apart
And drinks from the marsh from the lone bog-drain.
Oh! if I had known you were near your death,
While my breath held out I’d have run to you,
Till a splash from the lake of the Son of the Bird
Your soul would have stirred and waked anew.
My darling told me to drink no more
Or my life would be o’er in a little short while;
But I told her ’tis drink gives me health and strength,
And will lengthen my road by many a mile.
You see how the bird of the long smooth neck,
Could get his death from the thirst at last –
Come, son of my soul, and drain your cup,
You’ll get no sup when your life is past.
In a wintering island by Constantine’s halls,
A bittern calls from a wineless place,
And tells me that hither he cannot come
Till the summer is here and the sunny days.
When he crosses the stream there and wings o’er the sea,
Then a fear comes to me he may fail in his flight –
Well, the milk and the ale are drunk every drop,
And a dram won’t stop our thirst this night.
We seem, at the moment, to be far away from Dublin. But Dublin is (is it not?) the centre of Ireland, and I can sit here at the centre, and, all around to the sea, survey and listen to the songs of my people.
F.R. Higgins, a notable public figure in my early days in Dublin, remembered with great affection his dear friend, Padraic Ó Conaire, storyteller and wandering man. And in Padraic’s memory and honour, Higgins wrote the most moving elegy, which links Winetavern Street, in the heart of Old Dublin, with the ways of Wicklow, and the Spanish Arch in Galway, and with all the roads of Ireland. The best man to speak this poem is, as we all know, Sean Mac Réamoinn:
’
CONAIRE – GAELIC STORYTELLER
They’ve paid the last respects in sad tobacco
And silent is this wakehouse in its haze;
They’ve paid the last respects; and now their whiskey
Flings laughing words on mouths of prayer and praise;
And so young couples huddle by the gables,
O let them grope home through the hedgy night –
Alone I’ll mourn my old friend, while the cold dawn
Thins out the holy candlelight.
Respects are paid to one loved by the people;
Ah, was he not – among our mighty poor –
The sudden wealth cast on those pools of darkness,
Those bearing, just, a star’s faint signature;
And So he was to me, close friend, near brother,
Dear Padraic of the wide and sea-cold eyes –
So lovable, so courteous and noble,
The very West was in his soft replies.
They’ll miss his heavy stick and stride in Wicklow –
His story-talking down Winetavern Street,
Where old men sitting in the wizen daylight
Have kept an edge upon his gentle wit;
While women on the grassy streets of Galway,
Who hearken for his passing – but in vain,
Shall hardly tell his step as shadows vanish
Through archways of forgotten Spain.
Ah, they’ll say: Padraic’s gone again exploring;
But now down glens of brightness, O he’ll find
An alehouse overflowing with fine Gaelic
That’s braced in vigour by the bardic mind,
And there his thoughts shall find their own forefathers –
In minds to whom our heights of race belong,
In crafty men, who ribbed a ship or turned
The secret joinery of song.
Alas, death mars the parchment of his forehead;
And yet for him, I know, the earth is mild –
The windy fidgets of September grasses
Can never tease a mind that loved the wild;
So drink his peace – this grey juice of the barley
Runs with a light that ever pleased his eye –
While old flames nod and gossip on the hearthstone
And only the young winds cry.
And now consider, and memorize, this brilliant note on Georgian Dublin. The scholarly poet is Maurice Craig, who has also written the final book on the matter and who is a most learned, and unassuming, authority in many lands of scholarship:
‘So much to do,’ said Turgot, ‘and so little
Time to do it.’ Civilisation must wait
Impotently crouching over the grate,
Watching to seize the moment, the boiling kettle;
Must grasp it suddenly, deftly, like a nettle,
Without reluctance, not too early or late,
That in the flawed alembic of the State
Correct precipitates may form and settle.
In the quick sunlight of those thirty years
This Roman Empire waited for Sedan,
Though now their building is a hollow shell,
That sea-worn tracery can move to tears.
This capital is incorruptible,
Doric, lonic and Corinthian.
Like any city anywhere or, for that matter, any crossroads, Dublin has its ghosts. Ghosts are, after all, only memories. We all have loved the legend of Oliver Goldsmith, threadbare student in Trinity College, and not an overzealous student, writing ballads and selling them for pence to street-singers. And then haunting the corners up in the Liberties to hear his own songs sung. His ghost may, perhaps, be encountered in Temple Bar, now restored to fashion and an abode for Trinity students.
That legend might, and certainly should, be true. None of the ballad, alas, has come down to us. But the man who wrote about the man and dog, the mad one, in Islington, London, may have been remembering and echoing earlier efforts. Anyway why should London have total claim to the piece? Men and mad dogs are the same the whole world over.
Good people, all, of every sort,
Give ear unto my song;
And if you find it wond’rous short,
It cannot hold you long.
In Islington there was a man,
Of whom the world might say,
That still a godly race he ran,
Whene’er he went to pray.
A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad,
When he put on his clothes.
And in that town a dog was found,
As many dogs there be,
Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
And curs of low degree.
This dog and man at first were friends;
But when a pique began,
The dog, to gain some private ends,
Went mad and bit the man.
Around from all the neighbouring streets
The wond’ring neighbours ran,
And swore the dog had lost his wits,
To bite so good a man.
The wound it seemed both sore and sad
To every Christian eye;
And while they swore the dog was mad,
They swore the man would die.
But soon a wonder came to light,
That shew’d the rogues they lied:
The man recover’d of the bite,
The dog it was that died.
Which of us has not met, at least once, the ghost of James Clarence Mangan, up the slope there in Summerhill or in a shady corner of Mountjoy Square. Several times I have spoken to him. Or he to me.
He died young and had little or no sense of the passage of time and, after a suggestion from another poet from faraway places, he seemed to think that twenty years was a long time. It all depends on where and how you spend them.
But not really long, I say to him, when you have staggered as far as seventy-two.
But let him speak for himself as most movingly he did:
O, the rain, the weary, dreary rain,
How it plashes on the window-sill!
Night, I guess too, must be on the wane,
Strass and gass around are grown so still.
Here I sit, with coffee in my cup –
Ah! ’twas rarely I beheld it flow
In the tavern where I loved to sup
Twenty golden years ago!
Twenty years ago, alas! – but stay –
On my life, ’tis half-past twelve o’clock!
After all, the hours do slip away –
Come, here goes to burn another block!
For the night, or morn, is wet and cold;
And my fire is dwindling rather low: –
I had fire enough, when young and bold
Twenty golden years ago.
Dear! I don’t feel well at all, somehow:
Few in Weimar dream how bad I am;
Floods of tears grow common with me now,
High-Dutch floods, that Reason cannot dam.
Doctors think I’ll neither live nor thrive
If I mope at home so – I don’t know –
Am I living now? I was alive
Twenty golden years ago.
Wifeless, friendless, flagonless, alone,
Not quite bookless, though, unless I choose,
Left with nought to do, except to groan,
Not a soul to woo, except the muse –
O! this is hard for me to bear,
Me, who whilome lived so much en haut,
Me, who broke all hearts like china-ware,
Twenty golden years ago!
Perhaps, ’tis better; – time’s defacing waves
Long have quenched the radiance of my brow –
They who curse me nightly from their graves,
Scarce could love me were they living now;
But my loneliness hath darker ills –
Such dull duns as Conscience, Thought and Co.,
Awful Gorgons! worse than tailors’ bills
Twenty golden years ago!
Did I paint a fifth of what I feel,
O, how plaintive you would ween I was!
But I won’t, albeit I have a deal
More to wail about than Kerner has!
Kerner’s tears are kept for withered flowers,
Mine for withered hopes, my scroll of woe
Dates, alas! from youth’s deserted bowers,
Twenty golden years ago!
Yet, may Deutschland’s bardlings flourish long,
Me, I tweak no beak among them; – hawks
Must not pounce on hawks: besides, in song
I could once beat all of them by chalks.
Though you find me as I near my goal,
Sentimentalizing like Rousseau,
O! I had a grand Byronian soul
Twenty golden years ago!
Tick-tick, tick-tick! – not a sound save Time’s,
And the windgust as it drives the rain –
Tortured torturer of reluctant rhymes,
Go to bed, and rest thine aching brain!
Sleep! – no more the dupe of hopes or schemes;
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow –
Curious anticlimax to thy dreams
Twenty golden years ago!