Joseph Campbell

“ This is the dark that buried the rope that swung the sword that tracked the song was made to the breast that fired the love that followed the look the dreamer looked who dreamed the dream that came of the dark.
This is the dark, indeed!
REYNARDINE
If by chance you look for me
Perhaps you’ll not me find,
For I’ll be in my castle—
Enquire for Reynardine!
Sun and dark he courted me—
His eyes were red as wine:
He took me for his leman,
Did my sweet Reynardine.
Sun and dark the gay horn blows,
The beagles run like wind:
They know not where he harbours,
The fairy Reynardine. ”

“ After an hour of pleasant walking the road begins to drop and the rain to fall again. Slieve League is on our right, but we can only see the lower slopes of it, for the cairn is completely covered with driving mist. The wind has risen, and the rain beats coolingly on our cheeks, and exasperatingly, at times, down our necks. We pass a shepherd on the road making for Malin Mór, a shawled figure with a lantern, and several groups of boys and asses with creels bringing turf into the stackers; and farther on a side-car zig-zagging up hill on its way to the Glen. ”

“ Thou sittest in heaven, the white love of the Gael.
Thy head is crowned with stars, thy radiant hair
Shines like a river thro’ the twilight air;
Thou walkest by trodden ways and trackless seas,
Immaculate of man’s infirmities.
CORONACH
Come, pipes, sound
A crooning coronach round,
Till hill and hollow glen and shadowed lake o’erflow
With welling music of our woe.
Beat, beat, ye muffled drums, ye drones and chanters wail,
With heartbreak of the baffled, battle-broken Gael.
The clay is deep on Ireland’s breast:
Her proud and bleeding heart is laid at last to rest . ”

“ Not a soul is in sight—only a blue feather of turf-smoke here and there to show that human hearts do beat in this wilderness; that there are feet to follow the plough-tail and hands to tend the hearth. The sense of wonder over-masters me—the wonder that comes of silence and closeness to the elemental forces of nature. Then the mood changes, and I feel rising up in me the sorrow that is the dominating passion of my life. Do many people go mad here? I have heard tell that they do, and no wonder, for one would need to be a saint or a philosopher to resist the awful austerity of the place. ”

“ And the thoughts that rise in my crazed head
When the cloud is low and the wind’s dead.
Where you see only clay and stones
I see swords and blanching bones. . . .
But I’ll leave you now—it’s gone six,
And the smoke is curling over the ricks.
And it’s hardly like that the land-shark
Will trouble the furrows after dark.
A CRADLE-SONG
Sleep, white love, sleep,
A cedarn cradle holds thee,
And twilight, like a silver-woven coverlid,
Enfolds thee. ”

“ And I have tried Wordsworth’s sonnet beginning, “The world is too much with us,” by a criterion no less than that of the Atlantic itself, tumbling in foam on the foreshore of Maghery when daylight was deepening into twilight, and the moon was low over the hills, touching the rock-pools and the sand-pools with flakes of carmine light. When I said the sonnet aloud to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate itself with it again as my voice rose and fell in the wandering cadences of the verse. Nature, after all, is the final touchstone of art. ”

“ We pass numbers of houses on the way, each with a group of gaily-dressed peasants sunning themselves at the door. The ascent is gradual at first, but as we go on it gets steeper, and after a while’s climbing we begin to feel the sense of elevation and detachment. The air is delightfully warm, and the fragrance of sea and bracken and ling is in our hearts. In time we reach Carrigan Head, with its martello tower, seven hundred feet odd over the Atlantic. Southwards the blue waters of Donegal Bay spread themselves, with just the slightest ripple on their surface, glinting in the warm sunlight. ”

“ Dark and fierce and true—
Wanderer of the mountain,
Winger of the blue!
A PROPHECY
“The loins of the Galldacht
Shall wither like grass”—
Strange words I heard said
At the Fair of Dun-eas.
“A bard shall be born
Of the seed of the folk,
To break with his singing
The bond and the yoke.
“A sword, white as ashes,
Shall fall from the sky,
To rise, red as blood,
On the charge and the cry.
“Stark pipers shall blow,
Stout drummers shall beat,
And the shout of the north
Shall be heard in the street.
“The strong shall go down,
And the weak shall prevail,
And a glory shall sit
On the sign of the Gaodhal. ”

“ Those dark hills with the rack over them and the sun looking through on one little patch of tilled land, and the stone mearings about it, figure forth the sorrow that is the heritage of every Irishman; the darkness the sorrow, the sunshine the hope, iridescent and beautiful, but a thing of moments only and soon to fade away. I stand on the bridge here where the road forks, Slieve League to the left of me, a dim lowering bulk, and the road to Glen reaching away into the skyline beyond. ”

“ MY LITTLE DARK LOVE
My little dark love is a wineberry,
As swarth and as sweet, I hold;
But as the dew on the wineberry
Her heart is a-cold.
I would her love were as warm as the light
That lives in her eye of grey,
And then my heart would know the peace
It dreams in the hills away. ”

“ IN GLEN-COLUMCILLE Through blown rain and darkness I see the Atlantic tumble in white, ghost-like masses on the strand. Beevna is a shadow, the crosses shadows. Only one friendly light burns in the valley. The patter of rain and the dull boom of the surf ring ceaselessly in my ears. The hills brood: my thoughts brood with them. I stare into the sunset—a far-drawn, scarlet trail—with mute, wondering eyes. Remoteness grips me, and is become a reality in this ultimate mearing of a grey, ultimate land. ”

“ On Mary’s white breast.
King, priest and prophet—
A child, and no more—
Adonai the Maker!
Come, let us adore.
THE SILENCE OF UNLABOURED FIELDS
The silence of unlaboured fields
Lies like a judgment on the air:
A human voice is never heard:
The sighing grass is everywhere—
The sighing grass, the shadowed sky,
The cattle crying wearily!
Where are the lowland people gone?
Where are the sun-dark faces now?
The love that kept the quiet hearth,
The strength that held the speeding plough?
Grasslands and lowing herds are good,
But better human flesh and blood! ”

“ I see the mountainy people wending in from all parts to Mass. I am standing on high ground, and can see the hiving roads—the men with their black coats and wide-awakes, and the women with their bright-coloured kerchiefs and shawls. Some of them have trudged in for miles on bare feet. They carry their brogues, neatly greased and cleaned, over their shoulders. As they come near the chapel they stop by the roadside or go into a field and put them on. The young girls—grey-eyed, limber slips from the hills—are fixing themselves before they go in of the chapel door. ”

“ Of Gall and Gael.
I have seen the spume
On the dead priest’s lips,
And the “holy fire”
On the spars of ships;
And the shooting stars
On Barthelmy’s Night,
Blanching the dark
With ghostly light;
And the corpse-candle
Of the seer’s dream,
Bigger in girth
Than a weaver’s beam;
And the shy hearth-fairies
About the grate,
Blowing the turves
To a whiter heat.
All things on earth
To me are known,
For I have the gift
Of the Murrain Stone!
WHO BUYS LAND
Who buys land buys many stones,
Who buys flesh buys many bones;
Who buys eggs buys many shells,
Who buys love buys nothing else. ”

“ No other sign of life is visible. The walls of the gorge close in darkly on every side except the north. On that side is the sea, white on Maghery strand, and stretching away, a dull copper-green colour, into the sailless horizon beyond. Hearing the voices, a young man comes out from between two boulders serving as a sort of gateway to the house. His face is tanned with sun and exposure, and he is in his bare feet. We greet him in Irish and he answers—a little surprised, no doubt, at hearing the language from strangers. Then another man comes forward—a brother, if his looks don’t belie him. ”

“ The road was thick with them—old men in their Sunday homespuns and wide-awakes, their brogues very dusty, as if they had come a long way; younger men with bronzed faces, and ash-plants in their hands; old women in the white frilled caps and coloured shawls peculiar to western Ireland; young married women, girls and children. Most of them walked, but several rode in ass-carts, and three men, I noticed, were on horseback. The tramping of so many feet, the rattle of the wheels and the talk made a great stir on the road, and the movement and colour suggested anything but a funeral. ”

“ Laid the child upon the earth.
Then the dark-eyed rose did blow,
And rivers leaped from out the snow.
Earth grew lyrical: the grass,
As the light winds chanced to pass—
Than magian music more profound—
Murmured in a maze of sound. ”

“ BY LOCHROS BEAG A waste of blown sand. The Atlantic breakers white upon its extremest verge. A patch of sea-bog before, exhaling its own peculiar fragrance—part fibre, part earth, part salt. Ricks of black turf stacked over it here and there, ready to be creeled inland against the winter firing. The dark green bulk of Slieve a-Tooey rising like a wall behind, a wisp of cloud lying lightly upon its carn. The village of Maghery, a mere clachan of unmortared stone and rain-beaten straw, huddling at its foot. ”

“ With that dark beauty given thee,
That thou must crush the rose
That blows
So rarely on the tree!
LAMENT OF PADRAIC MOR MAC CRUIMIN OVER HIS SONS
I am Padraic Mor mac Cruimin,
Son of Domhnall of the Shroud,
Piper, like my kind before me,
To the household of MacLeod.
Death is in the seed of Cruimin—
All my music is a wail;
Early graves await the poets
And the pipers of the Gael. ”

“ SUNDAY ON THE ROAD BETWEEN CARRICK AND GLENGESH Sunday on the road between Carrick and Glengesh. It is drawing near sunset. We pass a group of country boys playing skittles in the middle of the road—quite a crowd of them, big, dark fellows, of all ages between twenty and thirty-five. Some are lolling on the ditch behind, and one has a flute. Farther on we come on a string of boys and girls paired off in twos with their arms about each other’s waists, like a procession on Bride’s Sunday. ”

“ Hills that were dark
At sparing-time last night
Now in the dawn-ring
Glimmer cold and white.
I AM THE GILLY OF CHRIST
I am the gilly of Christ,
The mate of Mary’s Son;
I run the roads at seeding time,
And when the harvest’s done.
I sleep among the hills,
The heather is my bed ”

“ Turning round to have a last look at the place, we see the chapel—a plain white cruciform building, with a queer detached belfry—the little grey, straggling village street (some of the houses with slate roofs, some with thatch) , the crosses standing up like gallan-stones on every side of it, the deep valley-bottom green as an emerald, Ballard mountain silhouetted against the sunset, and the vast Atlantic tumbling through mist on the yellow strand beyond. The air smells deliciously of peat. In Donegal one notices the smell of peat everywhere ”