Read As I Rode by Granard Moat Online
Authors: Benedict Kiely
As I Rode by Granard Moat (16 page)
I feel that Joyce, in his time, must have considered this poem in which the German John Sterling, in 1840, lamented the epic aerial passing of that enchanting figure from Greek legend:
Wail for Dædalus, all that is fairest!
All that is tuneful in air or wave!
Shapes whose beauty is truest and rarest,
Haunt with your lamps and spells his grave!
Statues, bend your heads in sorrow,
Ye that glance ’mid ruins old,
That know not a past, nor expect a morrow
On many a moonlight Grecian wold!
By sculptur’d cave and darken’d river
Thee, Dædalus, oft the nymphs recall;
The leaves with a sound of winter quiver,
Murmur thy name, and withering fall.
Yet are thy visions in soul the grandest
Of all that crowd on the tear-dimm’d eye,
Though, Dædalus, thou no more commandest
New stars to that ever-widening sky.
Ever thy phantoms arise before us,
Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;
By bed and table they lord it o’er us
With looks of beauty and words of good.
They tell us and show us of man victorious
O’er all that’s blameless, blind, and base;
Their presence has made our nature glorious,
And given our night an illumined face.
Thy toil has won them a godlike quiet;
Thou hast wrought their path to a lovely sphere;
Their eyes to calm rebuke our riot,
And shape us a home of refuge here.
For Dædalus breathed in them his spirit;
In them their sire his beauty sees:
We too, a younger brood, inherit
The gifts and blessing bestow’d on these.
But, ah! their wise and bounteous seeming
Recalls the more that the sage is gone;
Weeping we wake from deceitful dreaming,
And find our voiceless chamber lone.
Dædalus, thou from the twilight fleest,
Which thou with visions hast made so bright;
And when no more those shapes thou seest,
Wanting thine eye they lose their light.
Ev’n in the noblest of man’s creations,
Those fresh worlds round those old of ours,
When the seer is gone, the orphan’d nations
Know but the tombs of perish’d Powers.
Wail for Dædalus, Earth and Ocean!
Stars and Sun, lament for him!
Ages, quake in strange commotion!
All ye realms of life, be dim!
Wail for Dædalus, awful voices,
From earth’s deep centre mankind appal;
Seldom ye sound, and then Death rejoices,
For he knows that then the mightiest fall.
The wonderful Oliver St John Gogarty is the first man mentioned, under another name, in that long book, a novel or something, by James Joyce. But no man could ever dare to say that Dr Gogarty was a ghost.
He had a deep devotion to swans. He had some trouble once with some gentlemen carrying guns who did not approve of his variety of politics. He abandoned the argument and withdrew from their company by jumping into and swimming the Liffey. And always afterwards he felt indebted to the river and the swans thereon. He even donated more swans to the balustraded stream. But, better still, he paid his respects, in his ‘Leda and the Swan’, to one of the earliest and greatest stories about the bird:
Though her mother told her
Not to go a-bathing,
Leda loved the river
And she could not keep away:
Wading in its freshets
When the noon was heavy;
Walking by the water
At the close of day.
Where beneath its waterfalls,
Underneath the beeches,
Gently flows a broader
Hardly moving stream,
And the balanced trout lie
In the quiet reaches;
Taking all her clothes off,
Leda went to swim.
There was not a flag-leaf
By the river’s margin
That might be a shelter
From a passer-by;
And a sudden whiteness
In the quiet darkness,
Let alone the splashing,
Was enough to catch an eye.
But the place was lonely,
And her clothes were hidden;
Even cattle walking
In the ford had gone away;
Every single farm-hand
Sleeping after dinner, –
What’s the use of talking?
There was no one in the way.
In, without a stitch on,
Peaty water yielded,
Till her head was lifted
With its ropes of hair;
It was more surprising
Than a lily gilded,
Just to see how golden
Was her body there:
Lolling in the water,
Lazily uplifting
Limbs that on the surface
Whitened into snow;
Leaning on the water,
Indolently drifting,
Hardly any faster
Than the foamy bubbles go.
You would say to see her
Swimming in the lonely
Pool, or after, dryer,
Putting on her clothes:
‘O but she is lovely,
Not a soul to see her,
And how lovely only
Leda’s Mother knows!’
Under moving branches
Leisurely she dresses,
And the leafy sunlight
Made you wonder were
All its woven shadows
But her golden tresses,
Or a smock of sunlight
For her body bare.
When on earth great beauty
Goes exempt from danger,
It will be endangered
From a source on high;
When unearthly stillnes
Falls on leaves, the ranger,
In his wood-lore anxious,
Gazes at the sky.
While her hair was drying,
Came a gentle languor,
Whether from the bathing
Or the breeze she didn’t know.
Anyway she lay there,
And her Mother’s anger
(Worse if she had wet hair)
Could not make her dress and go.
Whitest of all earthly
Things, the white that’s rarest,
Is the snow on mountains
Standing in the sun;
Next the clouds above them,
Then the down is fairest
On the breast and pinions
Of a proudly sailing swan.
And she saw him sailing
On the pool where lately
She had stretched unnoticed,
As she thought, and swum;
And she never wondered
Why, erect and stately,
Where no river weed was
Such a bird had come.
What was it she called him:
Gosey-goosey gander?
For she knew no better
Way to call a swan;
And the bird responding
Seemed to understand her,
For he left his sailing
For the bank to waddle on.
Apple blossoms under
Hills of Lacedaemon,
With the snow beyond them
In the still blue air,
To the swans who hid them
With his wings asunder,
Than the breasts of Leda,
Were not lovelier!
Of the tales that daughters
Tell their poor old mothers,
Which by all accounts are
Often very odd;
Leda’s was a story
Stranger than all others.
What was there to say but:
Glory be to God?
And she half-believed her,
For she knew her daughter;
And she saw the swan-down
Tangled in her hair.
Though she knew how deeply
Runs the stillest water;
How could she protect her
From the winged air?
Why is it effects are
Greater than their causes?
Why should causes often
Differ from effects?
Why should what is lovely
Fill the world with harness?
And the most deceived be
She who least suspects?
When the hyacinthine
Eggs were in the basket,
Blue as at the whiteness
Where a cloud begins:
Who would dream there lay there
All that Trojan brightness;
Agamemnon murdered;
And the mighty Twins?
Patrick Kavanagh is still a living voice in Dublin and, by the hand of the sculptor John Coll, he sits contemplating the waters of his beloved Grand Canal, remembering what he thought when he walked along the disused towing-path:
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
One seat on the canal bank was erected in memory of Mrs Dermot O’Brien, the wife of a great painter. That seat, because of the dedication and artistic associations, meant a great deal to Kavanagh, and set him to wishing that he might be similarly remembered. And thanks to John Ryan, and others who followed his lead, his wish was fulfilled.
O commemorate me where there is water,
Canal water preferably, so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother
Commemorate me thus beautifully.
Where by a lock Niagorously roars
The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence
Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose
Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.
A swan goes by head low with many apologies,
Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges –
And look! A barge comes bringing from Athy
And other far-flung towns mythologies.
O commemorate me with no hero-courageous
Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.
And was it walking by the bank of that canal and hearing the music of the wind in the topmost branches of the trees, that the poet Austin Clarke found himself far away by miles but much farther by centuries – and became the monk of ancient times who was enchanted for an instant, or an eternity, out of this earth when he hearkened to the singing of The Blackbird of Derrycairn’?
Stop, stop and listen for the bough top
Is whistling and the sun is brighter
Than God’s own shadow in the cup now!
Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins
Will sound, Patric, as well at nightfall.
Faintly through mist of broken water
Fionn heard my melody in Norway.
He found the forest track, he brought back
This beak to gild the branch and tell, there,
Why men must welcome in the daylight.
He loved the breeze that warns the black grouse,
The shouts of gillies in the morning
When packs are counted and the swans cloud
Loch Erne, but more than all those voices
My throat rejoicing from the hawthorn.
In little cells behind a cashel,
Patric, no handbell gives a glad sound.
But knowledge is found among the branches.
Listen! The song that shakes my feathers
Will thong the leather of your satchels.
Once upon a time (and that’s the proper opening for this story) I was chosen, and honoured to be chosen, to travel in the back of a taxi all the way from Dublin Airport to the far southern boundary of Dublin city, in the company of a beautiful American film-actress. The man who did the choosing was Ernie Anderson, right-hand man to John Huston.
The idea was that I was to act as the beautiful lady’s guide to Dublin, ancient and modern, and I set out to do my best. I discovered that the lady knew, all things considered, as much as I did. She was well read and/or well briefed by the inimitable Ernie.
And I was mute in wonder and admiration when, as we were passing the General Post Office, she started to recite the sonorous and solemn words of Patrick Pearse:
Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;
A fool that hath loved his folly,
Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses, or their quiet homes,
Or their fame in men’s mouths;
A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,
Never hath counted the cost, nor recked if another reaped
The fruit of his mighty sowing, content to scatter the seed;
A fool that is unrepentant, and that soon at the end of all
Shall laugh in his lonely heart as the ripe ears fall to the reaping-hooks
And the poor are filled that were empty,
Tho’ he go hungry.
I have squandered the splendid years that the Lord God gave to my youth
In attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil.
Was it folly or grace? Not men shall judge me, but God.
I have squandered the splendid years:
Lord, if I had the years I would squander them over again,
Aye, fling them from me!
For this I have heard in my heart, that a man shall scatter, not hoard,
Shall do the deed of to-day, nor take thought of to-morrow’s teen,
Shall not bargain or huxter with God; or was it a jest of Christ’s
And is this my sin before men, to have taken Him at His word?
The lawyers have sat in council, the men with the keen, long faces,
And said, ‘This man is a fool,’ and others have said, ‘He blasphemeth’;
And the wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life
In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things,
To a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold.
O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?
What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell
In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?
Lord, I have staked my soul, I have staked the lives of my kin
On the truth of Thy dreadful word. Do not remember my failures,
But remember this my faith.
And so I speak.
Yea, ere my hot youth pass, I speak to my people and say:
Ye shall be foolish as I; ye shall scatter, not save;
Ye shall venture your all, lest ye lose what is more than all;
Ye shall call for a miracle, taking Christ at His word.
And for this I will answer, O people, answer here and hereafter,
O people that I have loved, shall we not answer together?