IRISH LOVE POETRY

Poetry is a pleasant topic to write on, and of the many kinds of
poetry that to which our minds return most willingly as to pleasant
fields is, I suppose, love poetry. But Irish love poetry—ah! there’s a
charm with the sacred number on it, a charm thrice-mighty; for was it
not one of [those] same Irish who said: “For beauty and amourousness the
Gaedhils’ even as if his race had had no other trade but this one”? And
being longer at the [making] of tender songs than any other race in
Europe, are they not, by all he rules of the game, our masters?

I envy that delver among dusty tomes who by chance alighted on the
little cry that has come to us out of the heart of another world, the
cry of

  occan e
  poccan do,

which if it is not perfect has been perfected for us in Dr. Hyde’s
_Miss him not—kiss him, do!_ I envy, too, that other scholar who found
us Liadan with her _ceol [*]aille_—

  Forest music
  Sang out to me with Cuireathar
  And the voice of the purple sea.

I envy more than all Professor O’Rahilly who found not one but many
of those love-songs, love-songs of a different age, maybe, to that age
of “breathing beauty” but still among the finest things in the Irish
language.

Now that he has gathered together almost all there are of these
love-songs* [*_Dánta Grádha_. Edited by Tomás O Rahilly, with an
Introduction by Robin Flower. Cork University Press 5/] we may be
permitted a sly [purr] of content. For Professor O’Rahilly is a man of
taste, and knows how an anthology of poetry should be made; not as
though the poets were mere drudges of an ultimate and superior
scholarship, to be petted and scolded by turns. He treats them as
poets, and [it] is a poet who writes the Introduction to this book,
and tells us what we may expect to find in it. The poems themselves
are not flung at our heads neither, [willy-nilly], but are arranged in
a scheme which would have pleased the exacting soul of Matthew Arnold,
[opening] with the most exquisite of dedications and moving
imperceptibly upwards in tone till at last we come the final theme of
all Irish poetry, I suppose, the Death and Judgement.

This last group of poems I do not like. I say it in praise of this
little book, and I think I can give it no better praise. The measure
of its success in the things of life is the measure of its failure in
the things of [death]. No Irish poet, I think, ever wrote nobly of
death, as Shakespeare wrote nobly of it in “Fear no more the heat of
the sun,” but they did write nobly of life; they wrote of it more
passionately than any other race has done. Take this:

  But when we were young, ah ! then
  We gave all our hearts to men!

And this:

  Happy island of the sea.
  Tide on tide will come to thee,
  But to me no waters fare
  When the beach at last is bare.

And this again:

  These my hands, if they were seen,
  Are but bony, wasted things,
  Hands that once would grasp the hand,
  Clasp the royal neck of kings.

  These my hands, if they were seen,
  Are so bony and so thin
  That a boy might start in dread
  Feeling them about his head!

Philosophy, then, they will not make for us, and the freshness, the
beauty of their poetry is objectivity pushed to its last extremes.

Now for the contents of Professor O’Rahilly’s book.

Some years ago, before I had taken to the reading of Irish poetry, I
remember having found a passage in Goethe’s conversations which
puzzled and intrigued me. Goethe is speaking to his friend Eckermann
and says, apropos of some folk-songs, “‘This poem is beautiful,’
your young ladies say, and all they are thinking of is the feelings
and words and verse. But that the real power and effect of a poem lies
in the situation, in the motif, that nobody suspects....”

It was in Keating’s _Woman full of wile_ that I discovered for the first
time what Goethe meant. Now I have before me a book of verse in which
situation and motif is everything, feelings and words and verse a
trifle.

Mind, I am not saying that all poetry which is not situation
is bad poetry. I am not concerned with Goethe’s theory except as a
statement of qualities. I would not have readers of this book
searching for the enchantment of Nashe and Campion and Fletcher in it,
but rather for those qualities which the poetry of situation gives us
in place of enchantment, precision, character, alertness.

One is astonished to see what uses these qualities may be put to. A
piece of sheer fooling is very often turned into a delightful poem, as
in No. 11, where Laoiseach Mac an Bháird condoles with a weeping
lady. He seeks to encourage her to tell her trouble—a love affair?
Well, out with it, tell the man’s name—even if it be himself!

  Come and tell me all your woes,
  I assure you, that were best;
  Why, you even might—who knows?—
  Win me to your snowy breast!

  Where’s the man would spurn your prayer?
  Dearest maiden, come and woo,
  Never knowing when your care
  Yet might prove your dreaming true.

  That’s enough for once, my dear,
  Stop that crying and begin:
  Come, now! Not another tear—
  Lord! Look at the state you’re in!

A poem on a far higher plane is Ferriter’s _Leig diot l’airm_, [Leave
your weapons by] from which I translate a few verses.

  Prithee, leave your weapons by,
  Maid, lest men upon them die;
  If you do not, then I swear
  I shall snare you by and by.

  Hide your bosom, hide your hair,
  Cover up that side like snow,
  For Christ’s love, beware, beware,
  Lest those flowerlike breasts you show

  Hide those dewy eyes whose guile
  Drew so many to their death,
  Shut the laughing lips awhile
  Lest one see the shining teeth.

  If enough are there to tell
  Of your conquests, ere we die,
  Maid most dear, invincible,
  Leave, ah, leave your weapons by.


We are still very far from the passion of those Connaught songs which
we choose to call folk-songs (and which are not folk-songs); we are
very far from:

  Faraoir géar, gan tusa is mé, a ghrádh mo chroidhe,
  I ngleanntán  sléibhe le héirghe gréine ’s an drúcht ’na luighe.

(’Tis my bitter grief, O love of my heart, that thou and I may not be,
In a mountain glen with the breaking day and the dew on the grass.)

But we are also, and let us remember it, very far from the best (that
these poems can give us. Mr. Flower in his fine introduction (I would
recommend those who cannot read the poems to buy the book for the sake
of that introduction) refers at length to one poem, _The Wooing of
O’Rourke’s Wife_. I quote a passage of his. “The poem divides itself
into two halves, each of sixteen quatrains, the first half addressed
to the husband, the second to the lover, only the lover has the
lodgement of half a quatrain in the husband’s portion. This
distribution of the quatrains is in itself an exact image of the
woman’s mind. For she is going upon the razor edge of love; a nothing,
a breath, a feather, a snowflake, two lines of verse, would incline
her this way or that; she is faithful to her husband, yet, as she
wavers upon the debateable border, her mind has already passed over
and waits for her body to follow....” It is this remarkable
poem which I take as being the best of what we may expect from
Goethe’s poetry of situation, and I would ask no greater pleasure than
to quote it in full. Here is from the first part of the poem: I
translate it into free prose.

“...At other times he comes as a chaste boy, swooping upon me among
all others like a hawk seeking my love; and yet again comes as a man
and I were a wanton woos me, praying me with magic arts, with dark
verses, to fly with him.  He comes, a mortal man, and comes
again a fairy, and comes again a shadow—how can I resist him...I
cannot divide myself between you: your love, Hugh, is in my mind, but
(‘the razor edge’) locked in its cage, it has left me, Tomás,  to
your enchantments.”

Now it is all Tomás Costello.

“I am none of your complaisant women ripe for seduction, O young man
who art most bold, it is not for you to bewitch me, O sweet sunmist of
the summer. Do not believe them who say to you I am a harlot; I met my
mate in early youth, and that is long since. Do not wink at me!”

So the poem moves to its inevitable end. “My heart is telling me if
love I must drink to drink of yours...here comes my husband—quick, my
grief, pass me by; my grief, do not look at me!”

Read as it should be read in Irish with its proper perspective of war
and tumult, it does, I think, realise what Mr. Flower claims, “an
absolute and final intensity,” as does one other great poem of the
same period, the O Higgin elegy on O’Conor Sligo, than which nothing
could be greater.

But this love poetry!—

  There is nobody wise enough
  To find out all that is in it...

and maybe I have been praising the wrong things for all I would say of
them, and maybe neglecting those which I should have praised. But I
will quarrel with no man about it, and if someone should say to me
that the best poem in the book is that _History of the Art of Love_,
which tells us how Cuchulain, being enamoured of a lady of the ladies
of Greece, invented what we know as the “glad eye,” and how Naoise,
seeing Deirdre one day draw on her trews, invented the kiss, I for one
should murmur “exactly!” and apologise to him for not having spoken
more of it.

And unless I had quoted a good hundred pages of his book, I should
still feel I owed Professor O’Rahilly an apology for not treating
adequately the very beautiful anthology he has given us.

FRANK O’CONNOR.
Irish Statesman, 1926-05-15, pp. 270-274.