Read As I Rode by Granard Moat Online
Authors: Benedict Kiely
As I Rode by Granard Moat (22 page)
And moving to the same rhythm, more or less, I recall this old fragment of a mummer’s song, by Padraic Colum. It appeared first, as far as I know, in his novel
Castle Conquer
. Which novel, he once told me, he did not like and I modestly begged to differ.
Howandever: the lively lines were repeated in a centenary volume in honour of Colum,
The Poet’s Circuits
(Dolmen Press 1981), for which I was privileged to write the introduction.
The mummers come dancing to the door, with designs, clearly not villainous, on the daughter of the house. And they are rousingly answered:
For a bride you have come! Is it with a full score
Of rake-hell rapscallions you’d fill up my door,
With a drum to your tail and a fiddle before,
And a bag-piper playing all through ye?
My faith! Do you think that a shy little maid
Would lift up her head before such a brigade,
When an arm round her waist would make her afraid?
By my hand! She has gone from my keeping.
Through the gap in the hedges away she has run;
Like the partridge across the wide stubble she’s gone,
And here I am, here I am, here I’m alone
With no daughter to give any comer!
Well, here she is back! I declare she has come
Like the cat to the cradle, and Nance she’s at home:
O my love, would you go to the bleak hills of Crome,
Where nor manners nor mirth are in fashion?
O say not you’ll go! That you’ll never embark
From a plentiful house where you prize every spark,
Where there’s milk in the crock and meal in the ark,
And a pair of fat ducks for the roasting!
Oh, mother sell all that you have to your name,
To give me a dowry to equal my fame –
Sell the cow, and the sow, and the gander that’s lame,
And the sack of black wool in the corner!
And my good-will I’ll leave to our Babe that stays here,
May she leave the bog-bottoms within the half-year,
Where the rushes are high and the curlews call near,
And the crows on the hill they are lonely.
With rake-hell young fellows my Babe will not go,
Nor look from her dormer on faction below,
From up where the picture and looking-glass show
That elegance holds and good order!
Maureen Jolliffe in her
The Third Book of Irish Ballads
(Mercier 1970) reminds us that Michael Hogan, the Bard of Thomond (1832–90), was a wheelwright who upheld the Irish tradition of artisan ballad-makers, in company with Thomas W. Condon, a locksmith of Waterford, John ‘de Jean’ Frazer, a cabinet-maker of Birr, Francis Davis, ‘The Belfast Man’, a weaver, and a man from Ballincollig, Co. Cork. And more. A sedentary occupation was a great help to the Muse.
But on another page of her book Maureen Jolliffe gives us Michael Scanlan, a Limerick man, who wrote one of the two greatest Fenian songs. The other was written by Peadar Cearnaigh.
It was said that men were sent to jail for singing Scanlan’s song and Scanlan (1836–1900) in exile in the States used to worry about that. (He also wrote one of my mother’s favourite songs, ‘The Jackets Green’.)
See who come over the red-blossomed heather,
Their green banners kissing the pure mountain air,
Head erect, eyes to front, stepping proudly together,
Sure freedom sits throned on each proud spirit there.
Down the hill twining,
Their blessed steel shining,
Like rivers of beauty that flow from each glen,
From mountain and valley,
’Tis Liberty’s rally –
Out and make way for the Bold Fenian Men.
Our prayers and our tears have been scoffed and derided,
They’ve shut out God’s sunlight from spirit and mind;
Our foes were united and we were divided,
We met and they scattered our ranks to the wind;
But once more returning,
Within our veins burning
The fires that illumined dark Aherlow Glen,
We raise the cry anew,
Slogan of Conn and Hugh –
Out and make way for the Bold Fenian Men!
Up for the cause, then, fling forth our green banners,
From the East to the West, from the South to the North –
Irish land, Irish men, Irish mirth, Irish manners –
From the mansion and cot let the slogan go forth.
Sons of old Ireland now,
Love you our sireland now?
Come from the kirk, or the chapel or glen;
Down with the faction old,
Concert and action bold,
This is the creed of the Bold Fenian Men!
We’ve men from the Nore, from the Suir and the Shannon,
Let the tyrants come forth, we’ll bring force against force,
Our pen is the sword and our voice is the cannon,
Rifle for rifle and horse against horse,
We’ve made the false Saxon yield
Many a red battlefield:
God on our side, we will triumph again;
Pay them back woe for woe,
Give them back blow for blow –
Out and make way for the Bold Fenian Men!
Side by side for the cause have our forefathers battled,
When our hills never echoed the tread of a slave;
In many a field where the leaden hail rattled,
Through the red gap of glory they marched to the grave.
And those who inherit
Their name and their spirit,
Will march ’neath the banners of Liberty then;
All who love foreign law –
Native or Sasanach –
Must out and make way for the Bold Fenian Men.
But appealing once again to the ghost of James Clarence Mangan … Let him recall us to the great glory of the ancient Limerick land:
[
from the Irish
]
Oh, where, Kincora! is Brian the Great?
And where is the beauty that once was thine?
Oh, where are the princes and nobles that sate
At the feast in thy halls, and drank the red wine?
Where, oh, Kincora?
Oh, where, Kincora! are thy valorous lords?
Oh, whither, thou Hospitable! are they gone?
Oh, where are the Dalcassians of the Golden Swords?
And where are the warriors Brian led on?
Where, oh, Kincora?
And where is Murrough, the descendant of kings –
The defeater of a hundred – the daringly brave –
Who set but slight store by jewels and rings –
Who swam down the torrent and laughed at its wave?
Where, oh, Kincora?
And where is Donogh, King Brian’s worthy son?
And where is Conaing, the Beautiful Chief?
And Kian, and Corc? Alas! they are gone –
They have left me this night alone with my grief,
Left me, Kincora!
And where are the chiefs with whom Brian went forth,
The ne’er vanquished son of Evin the Brave,
The great King of Onaght, renowned for his worth,
And the hosts of Baskinn, from the western wave?
Where, oh, Kincora?
Oh, where is Duvlann of the Swift-footed Steeds?
And where is Kian, who is son of Molloy?
And where is King Lonergan, the fame of whose deeds
In the red battle-field no time can destroy?
Where, oh, Kincora?
And where is that youth of majestic height,
The faith-keeping Prince of the Scots? – Even he,
As wide as his fame was, as great as was his might,
Was tributary, oh, Kincora, to thee!
Thee, oh, Kincora!
They are gone, those heroes of royal birth
Who plundered no churches, and broke no trust,
’Tis weary for me to be living on earth
When they, oh, Kincora, lie low in the dust!
Low, oh, Kincora!
Oh, never again will Princes appear,
To rival the Dalcassians of the Cleaving Swords!
I can never dream of meeting afar or anear,
In the east or the west, such heroes and lords!
Never, Kincora!
Oh, dear are the images my memory calls up
Of Brian Boru! – how he never would miss
To give me at the banquet the first bright cup!
Ah! why did he heap on me honour like this?
Why, oh, Kincora?
I am Mac Liag, and my home is on the Lake;
Thither often, to that palace whose beauty is fled,
Came Brian to ask me, and I went for his sake.
Oh, my grief! that I should live, and Brian be dead!
Dead, oh, Kincora!
And from Limerick on, by way of Con Houlihan’s Castleisland, into the World of the Southwest. Where to begin? Where to end? Or, perhaps, where to pause for breath. For in those sublime places there never is an end to poems and ballads.
And what place could be more sublime than St Finnbarr’s deep, strange glen:
There is a green island in lone Gougaune Barra,
Where Allua of songs rushes forth like an arrow;
In deep-valleyed Desmond – a thousand wild fountains
Come down to that lake, from their home in the mountains.
There grows the wild ash, and a time-stricken willow
Looks chidingly down on the mirth of the billow;
As, like some gay child, that sad monitor scorning,
It lightly laughs back to the laugh of the morning.
And its zone of dark hills – O to see them all brightening,
When the tempest flings out its red banner of lightning,
And the waters rush down, ’mid the thunder’s deep rattle,
Like clans from their hills at the voice of the battle;
And brightly the fire-crested billows are gleaming,
And wildly from Mullagh the eagles are screaming.
O where is the dwelling in valley or highland,
So meet for a bard as this lone little island?
How oft when the summer sun rested on Clara,
And lit the dark heath on the hills of Ivera,
Have I sought thee, sweet spot, from my home by the ocean,
And trod all thy wilds with a minstrers devotion,
And thought of thy bards, when assembling together,
In the cleft of thy rocks, or the depth of thy heather,
They fled from the Saxon’s dark bondage and slaughter,
And waked their last song by the rush of thy water?
High sons of the lyre, O how proud was the feeling!
To think while alone through that solitude stealing,
Though loftier Minstrels green Erin can number,
I only awoke your wild harp from its slumber,
And mingled once more with the voice of those fountains
The songs even echo forgot on her mountains;
And gleaned each grey legend that darkly was sleeping
Where the mist and the rain o’er their beauty were creeping!
Least bard of the hills! were it mine to inherit
The fire of thy harp, and the wing of thy spirit,
With the wrongs which like thee to our country have bound me,
Did your mantle of song fling its radiance around me,
Still, still in those wilds might young Liberty rally,
And send her strong shout over mountain and valley,
The star of the west might yet rise in its glory,
And the land that was darkest be brightest in story.
I too shall be gone; – but my name shall be spoken
When Erin awakes, and her fetters are broken;
Some Minstrel will come, in the summer eve’s gleaming,
When Freedom’s young light on his spirit is beaming,
And bend o’er my grave with a tear of emotion,
Where calm Avon-Bwee seeks the kisses of ocean,
Or plant a wild wreath, from the banks of that river,
O’er the heart and the harp that are sleeping for ever.
[J.J. Callanan]
Jeremiah Joseph Callanan, a poet and a lonely sort of a man, was born in Cork in 1795 and died in Lisbon in 1829. He had gone to Lisbon looking for health in a sunnier climate than Ireland could provide. He had been a student in Maynooth until ill-health drove him out. Then he was in TCD for two years and left for the same reason.
Then, through the influence of that eccentric friend of W.M. Thackeray, the Corkonian Dr William Maginn, of the ‘Homeric Ballads’ (and of course Mangan’s ‘the gulf and grave of Maginn and Burns’), Callanan became a contributor to the famous
Blackwood’s Magazine
in London. But Callanan stayed at home and wandered Ireland, listening to legends and songs, and even translating some of them. Then he rested for a while on the island of Inchidony and wrote a poem, ‘The Recluse of Inchidony’, which the young Mr Yeats, later on, did not exactly praise.
Poor Callanan went off to Lisbon, for the sake of his health and to work as a tutor to the family of an Irish gentleman. He died there.
He did write well about the sacred coomb of Gougane Barra. And being himself a lonely sort of man he was receptive to that most lonely song: ‘Sé dubhach é mo chás’.
Whoever wrote it captured agonizingly the loneliness of an unfortunate man on the eve of his hanging in the jail of Clonmel. And Callanan dressed it up in suitable mourning clothes in the English:
How hard is my fortune,
And vain my repining!
The strong rope of Fate
For this young neck is twining.
My strength is departed,
My cheek sunk and sallow,
While I languish in chains
In the jail of Cluanmeala.
No boy in the village
Was ever yet milder,
I’d play with a child
And my sport would be wilder.
I’d dance without tiring
From morning till even,
And my goal-ball I’d strike
To the lightning of Heaven.
At my bed-foot decaying,
My hurlbat is lying,
Through the boys of the village
My goal-ball is flying.
My horse, among the neighbours,
Neglected may fallow,
While I pine in my chains
In the jail of Cluanmeala.
Next Sunday the patron
At home will be keeping,
And the young, active hurlers
The field will be sweeping.
With the dance of fair maidens
The evening they’ll hallow,
While this heart, once so warm,
Will be cold in Cluanmeala.