Lady Gregory

“ The blessing of God and Mary on them.
Mary. That it may be well with you. O Martin, that is the first blessing I got in my own house. That blessing is better to me than gold.
Old Man. Aurah, is it not beautiful for people to have a house of their own, and to have eyes to look about with?
Martin. May God preserve you, right man; it is likely it is a poor thing to be without sight.
Old Man. You do not understand, nor any person that has his sight, what it is to be blind and dark the way I am. ”

“ Oh, my seven hundred thousand curses on you—the curse of the weak and of the strong—the curse of the poets and of the bards upon you! The curse of the priests on you and the friars! The curse of the bishops upon you, and the Pope! The curse of the widows on you, and the children! Open! (He beats on the door again and again.)
Sheamus. I am thankful to ye, neighbours; and Oona will be thankful to ye to-morrow. Beat away, you vagabond! Do your dancing out there with yourself now! Isn't it a fine thing for a man to be listening to the storm outside, and himself quiet and easy beside the fire? ”

“ Just where the road that runs by the bay turns northward to run by the Atlantic, a few white houses on either side turn it for a moment into a street. The grey road was not all grey yesterday, in spite of stones, and sea, and clouds, and a mist that blotted out the hills; for July had edged it with yellow rag-weed, the horses of the Sidhe, and with purple heather; and besides the tireless turf-laden donkeys, there were men in white and women in crimson flannel going towards the village. One woman sitting in a donkey-cart was chanting a song in Irish about a voyage across the sea ”

“ But as I listened, I was moved by the strange contrast between the poverty of the tellers and the splendours of the tales. These men who had failed in life, and were old and withered, or sickly, or crippled, had not laid up dreams of good houses and fields and sheep and cattle; for they had never possessed enough to think of the possession of more as a possibility. It seemed as if their lives had been so poor and rigid in circumstance that they did not fix their minds, as more prosperous people might do, on thoughts of customary pleasure. ”

“ There is still a peasant poet here and there, making songs in the 'sweet Irish tongue,' in which death spoke to Raftery; and I think these will be held in greater honour as the time of awakening goes on. But the nineteenth century has been a time of swift change in many countries; and in looking back on that century in Ireland, there seem to have been two great landslips—the breaking of the continuity of the social life of the people by the famine, and the breaking of the continuity of their intellectual life by the shoving out of the language. ”

“ It is through repentance we shall find forgiveness,
And the restoring of all that we have lost.
Let us put down the sum of our sins;
Oppression of the poor, thieving, robbery,
Great vows held in light esteem;
Giving our soul to the man that is the worst;
The strength of our pride was greater than our life,
The strength of our debts was more than we could pay.
It was with treachery Ireland was lost,
And the ill-will of men one to another. ”

“ Oona. Poetry is a wonderful gift from God; and [Pg 202] as long as you have that, you are richer than the people of stock and store, the people of cows and cattle.
Hanrahan. Ah, Oona, it is a great blessing, but it is a great curse as well for a man, he to be a poet. Look at me: have I a friend in this world? Is there a man alive that has a wish for me? is there the love of anyone at all on me? I am going like a poor lonely barnacle goose throughout the world; like Oisin after the Fenians; every person hates me: you do not hate me, Oona? ”

“ Tell the coachman to twist a rope for himself.
Sheamus. Oh! murder! he can't. There's that much vigour, and fire, and activity, and courage in the horses, that my poor coachman must take them by the heads; it's on the pinch of his life he's able to control them; he's afraid of his soul they'll go from him of a rout. They are neighing like anything; you never saw the like of them for wild horses.
Hanrahan. Are there no other people in the coach that will make a rope, if the coachman has to be at the horses' heads? Leave that, and let us dance. ”

“ On account of one woman only the Greeks departed, and they never stopped, and they never greatly stayed, till they destroyed Troy; and on account of one woman only this village shall be damned; go deo, ma neoir, and to the womb of judgment, by God of the graces, eternally and everlastingly, because they did not understand that Oona ni Regaun is the second Helen, who was born in their midst, and that she overcame in beauty Deirdre and Venus, and all that came before or that will come after her! ”

“ And the next day when they went out to the barn, it was full of potatoes—more than were ever in it before. And when she was dying, and her children about her, the priest said to her: "Mrs. Gallagher, it's in heaven you'll be at 12 o'clock to-morrow."'
But when death comes, it is not enough to have been charitable; and it is not right to touch the body or lay it out for a couple of hours; for the soul should be given time to fight for itself, and to go up to judgment. ”

“ He writes of friends that he has made in Galway as well as in Mayo, a weaver, a carpenter, a priest at Kilcolgan who is 'the good Christian, the clean wheat of the Gael, the generous messenger, the standing tree of the clergy.' Some of his eulogies both on persons and places are somewhat spoiled by grotesque exaggeration. Even Cilleaden has not only all sorts of native fishes, 'as plenty as turf,' and all sorts of native trees, but is endowed with 'tortoises,' with 'logwood and mahogany.' His country weaver must not only have frieze and linen in his loom, but satin and cambric. ”

“ Old Farmer. My soul to the devil, Seagan, do the thing decently. Give out one of those fleeces you have in the cart with you.
Miser. I never saw the like of you for fools since I was born. Is it mad you are?
All. From the man of cows, a half-ounce of snuff!
Miser. Oh, maisead, if there must be a present put down, take the fleece, and my share of misfortune on you! (Three or four of the boys run out.)
Old Farmer. Aurah, Seagan, what is your opinion of Raftery now? He has you destroyed worse than the bush! (The boys come back, a fleece with them.) ”

“ Mary. And it is you that made 'County Mayo,' and the 'Repentance,' and 'The Weaver,' and the 'Shining Flower.' It is often I thought there should be no woman in the world so proud as Mary Hynes, with the way you praised her.
Blind Man. O my poor Mary Hynes, without luck! (They hear the wheels of a cart outside the house, and an old farmer comes in, a frieze coat on him.)
Old Farmer. God save you, Martin; and is this your wife? God be with you, woman of the house. And, O Raftery, seven hundred thousand welcomes before you to this country. I would sooner see you than King George. ”

“ Raftery came, and sat down before the shoemaker's house, and began:—
'A young little girl without sense, the ground tearing her feet, is not satisfied yet by the lying Peter Glynn. Peter Glynn, the liar, in his little house by the side of the road, is without the strength in his arms to slip together a pair of brogues.'
'And, before he had finished the lines, Peter Glynn ran out and called to him to stop, and he set at work on the shoes then and there.' He even ventured to poke a little satire at a priest sometimes. ”

“ I would milk the cow; I would bring help to you; and if you were hard pressed, I would strike a blow for you.
'O, ochone, and it's not with hunger or with wanting food, or drink, or sleep, that I am growing thin, and my life is shortened; but it is the love of a young man has withered me away.
'It is early in the morning that I saw him coming, going along the road on the back of a horse; he did not come to me; he made nothing of me; and it is on my way home that I cried my fill. ”

“ The stories that they love are of quite visionary things; of swans that turn into kings' daughters, and of castles with crowns over the doors, and lovers' flights on the backs of eagles, and music-loving water-witches, and journeys to the other world, and sleeps that last for seven hundred years. ”

“ Connacht songs, the lover says: 'Blacker is the sun when setting than your features, Mary!' And she answers back: 'Neither star nor sun shows one-third much light as your shadow!' Another lover says of the woman he desires: 'I will write largely of her, because of the thousands who hoped for her, and who have been lost; and a hundred men of these who still live, are in pain and under locks through love. ”

“ As for the love-songs of our coast and island people, they seem to be for the most part a little artificial in method, a little strained in metaphor perhaps so giving rise to the Scotch Gaelic saying: 'as loveless as an Irishman.' Love of country, tir-gradh, is I think the real passion; and bound up with it are love of home, of family, love of God. Constancy and affection in marriage are the rule; yet marriage 'for love' is all but unknown; marriage is a matter of commonsense arrangement between the heads of families. ”

“ There is a river by her house that marks the boundary between Galway and Clare; and there are stepping-stones in the river, so that she can cross from Connaught to Munster when she has a mind. But she cannot do her marketing when she has a mind; for the nearest town, Gort, is ten miles away. The roof of her little cabin is thatched with rushes, and a garden of weeds grows on it, and the rain comes through. But she is soon to have a new thatch; for she thinks she won't live long, and she wouldn't like the rain to be coming down on her when she is dead and laid out. ”

“ His life was always the wandering, homeless life of the old bards. After Cromwell's time, as the houses they went to grew poorer, they had added music to their verse-making; and Raftery's little fiddle helped to make him welcome in the Ireland which was, in spite of many sorrows, as merry and light-hearted up to the time of the great famine as England had been up to the time of the Puritans. ”

“ Just as artists of to-day find no monotony in drawing Ireland over and over again with her harp, her wolf-dog, and her round tower, so the Munster poets found no monotony in representing her as a beautiful woman, white-skinned, with curling hair, with cheeks in which 'the lily and the rose were fighting for mastery.' The poet asks her if she is Venus, or Helen, or Deirdre, and describes her beauty in torrents of alliterative adjectives. ”

“ And this line that in a country of separations is already, they tell me, 'passing into a proverb':—
'It is far from one another our rising is every day.'
But the tradition of classical allusions, brought in some centuries ago, joined to the exaggeration that has been the breath of Irish poets, from the time Naoise called Deirdre 'a woman brighter than the sun,' has brought monotony into most of the love-songs. ”

“ But, my grief! the husband I have is a rough man, and there was fear on me to let them in; I was afraid he would do something to me, and I refused them. They said to me they were very tired; and they pressed so hard on me that I told them at last to go out and sleep in the barn, in the place the flax was, and my husband would not have knowledge of it. But about midnight my husband was struck with sickness, and a great pain came on him of a sudden, as if his death was near. When I thought him to be dying, I was in dread; and I ran out to the people I had put in the barn, asking help from them. ”

“ How I love love, and is it not beautiful?
(A shout and a noise, and Sheamus O'Heran rushes in.)
Sheamus. Ububu! Ohone-y-o, go deo! The big coach is overthrown at the foot of the hill! The bag in which the letters of the country are is bursted; and there is neither tie, nor cord, nor rope, nor anything to bind it up. They are calling out now for a hay sugaun—whatever kind of thing that is; the letters and the coach will be lost for want of a hay sugaun to bind them.
Hanrahan. Do not be bothering us; we have our poem done, and we are going to dance. The coach does not come this way at all. ”

“ King. We have brought from the rising of the sun, gold, and frankincense, and myrrh, and a share of every noble precious treasure there is in the world. It is not possible for the whole world to give a thing [Pg 253] we have not with us; and we have brought another thing the world has not to give, the knowledge and sense and wisdom of our own hearts. We have been gathering it through the years, from youth to old age; and we put it first of all these things. ”

“ It is, perhaps, because of the very mistiness and dreaminess of their surroundings, the almost unearthly silences, the fantasy of story and of legend that lie about them, that the people of Aran and the Galway coast almost shrink from idealism in their fireside songs, and choose rather to dwell upon the slight incidents of daily life. ”

“ The fisher-folk are not the only dwellers upon the islands; they are the home, the chosen resting-place, of 'the Others,' the Fairies, the Fallen Angels, the mighty Sidhe. From here they sweep across the sea, invisible or taking at pleasure the form of a cloud, of a full-rigged ship, of a company of policemen, of a flock of gulls. Sometimes they only play with mortals; sometimes they help them. But often, often, the fatal touch is given to the first-born child, [Pg 52] or to the young man in his strength, or the girl in her beauty, or the young mother in her pride ”

“ The swan of the brink of the waves, the royal ph [oe] nix, the pearl of the white breast, the Venus amongst the women, Oona ni Regaun, is standing up with me, and any place she rises up, the sun and the moon bow to her, and so shall ye yet. She is too handsome, too sky-like for any other woman to be near her. But wait a while! Before I'll show you how the Connacht boy can dance, I will give you the poem I made on the star of the province of Munster, on Oona ni Regaun. Get up, O sun among women, and we will sing the song together, verse about, and then we'll show them what right dancing is! ”

“ Swimming at my choice, and swimming with the stream.
[Pg 79] 'It's my grief that I am of the race of the poets;
It would be better for me to be a high rock,
Or a stone or a tree or an herb or a flower
Or anything at all, but the thing that I am.'
The sympathy of the moods of nature with the moods of man is a traditional heritage that has come to us through the poets, from the old time when the three great waves of the sea answered to a cry of distress in Ireland, or when, as in Israel, the land mourned and the herbs of every field withered, for the wickedness of them that dwelt therein. ”

“ This is a man has love to God,
Opening his hand to give out food;
Better a small house filled with wheat,
Than a big house that's bare of meat.
Old Farmer. Maisead, long life to you, Raftery.
Blind Man. Are you there, boy?
Boy. I am.
Blind Man. I hear more wheels coming. Go out, and tell the people Raftery will let no person come in here without a present for the woman of the house.
Boy. I am going. (He goes out.)
Old Farmer. They say there was not the like of you for a poet in Connacht these hundred years back. ”

“ There is no green flower on the tops of the tufts, since there did a boarded coffin go on Daly.
'There is sorrow on the men of mirth, a clouding over the day, and no trout swim in the river. Orpheus on the harp, he lifted up everyone out of their habits; and he that stole what Argus was watching the time he took away Io; Apollo, as we read, gave them teaching, and Daly was better than all these musicians.
'A hundred wouldn't be able to put together his actions and his deeds and his many good works. And Raftery says this much for Daly, because he liked him.' ”

“ Perhaps God heard me. God is for the most part ready to hear. The time we ourselves are empty without anything, God listens to us; and He does not think on the thing we are without, but gives us our fill. ”