Lliterature and Life

TO SPAIN AND THE WORLD'S SIDE

Somewhere in the seventeenth century an Irish poet setting sail from
Bantry Bay made a little poem for his ship, a poem which, by th<
chance of things, has come down to us intact. It is a pleasant poem
which should be in every anthology; it is full of gallant music and the
delight in spars and ropes and the sea and all the other attributes of
romance that Irish poetry had forgotten through centuries of
schoolmen's verse. And it ends with a little gesture that is pure
romance:

  I pray to Jesus Christ Who suffered and died,
  That storm nor wreck may reach me as I ride
  With the wind in my sails on the swing of a flood tide
  From the shores of Dunboy to Spain and the world's side!

It was “re flaitheas Eilis,” in the reign of Elizabeth, so the copyist
tells us, that this poem was written, and we need not inquire too
closely if he wa right.

For during the sixteenth and seventeenth ccnturies a change had taken
place in Irish literature, a change that was largely due to changing
historical conditions. The poetry of the schools with its pedantic
forms had held the field for centuries; in stressed verse those forms
were shortly to return and hold the field to the end. But between the
two schools was another school which is of the deepest interest to
students of literature. And first for the conditions which gave birth
to this new school. Prose, the surest discipline of poetry, and a
medium almost entirely neglected by the bards was reviving and the
vulgarisation of learning had begun. There was a new interest in the
destinies of Europe, a continuous- passing “from the shores of Dunboy
to Spain” and back. Strange romantic figures, like the two Earls,
sprang up, just as in the European Renaissance. The Primate of
Ireland, another remarkable figure, besides the exquisite little
Nativity hymn which we find in the anthologies, wrote in excellent
Irish prose a treatise on the sacraments, and, more important still,
published his work. In fact, what we are looking at is a Gaelic
Renaissance, with all the accessory grandeur that attaches to a
cultural revival.

Now, the poetry of this period is vastly different to that of the
periods which immediately preceded and followed. In religious
literature it gives us Hew McCawell Nativity hymn; it gives us little
poems of circumstance like Fitzgerald _Ship_; it colours even the
formal elegies as in Ferriter’s _Knight of Kerry_; in the bardic
tradition it gives us the poem on the wooing of O’Rourkes wife which
traces through pages of pedantic versification the mind of a woman in
love. Above all, it expresses itself through love poetry, for there it
can indulge to the full its delight in drama, in the workings of the
mind, in wit, and on the conciseness and passion. It was this
naissance that Professor O’Rahilly revealed he published Dánta Grádha,
a collection of of the period.

I need not praise here the fine taste and which gave us that
epoch-making little book; it has already been nobly done by Mr. Robin
Flower in the dedicatory note to a volume of translations from those
Irish poets.* [*_Love’s Bitter Sweet_: translations from the Irish
poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, by Robin
Flower. Cuala Press. 10/6.]

Mr. Flower is himself a scholar, and a poet to boot. So, when I took
up his book the feeling that while I was very likely to disagree with
the way in which he had treated his originals, I was almost certainly
going to enjoy the results. And so, to some extent, it fell out.

Mr. Flower, I think, rather overrates the influence of Continental on
Irish poetry, ignoring the fact that, as a race we are at our best,
not when we are under the influence of the stranger but when we feel
that we are exerting influence upon the stranger—there is so much of
the Greek in us! And at the period of which we are speaking there is
in our literature just a touch of that arrogance which we find in
Newman's story of the two Irish students who landed in France during
the reign of Charlemagne and stood among the sellers on the quay
shouting, “Who will buy wisdom?”

Again, I do not agree with Mr. Flower that the love in these Irish
poems is simply the _amour courtois_. And with so much mental
reservation I opened his book. The first poem that attracted me was
the colophon, printed in red :

  “Finis” to all the manuscripts I've penned,
   And to life's fitful fever here “The End”;
  “The End” to lime-white women golden-tressed,
   And in God’s hands at Judgment be the rest.

After that exquisite fragment my reservations, for a while at least,
did not come between me and the poems I read.

Mr. Flower is a master of the epigram; he can put an unforgettable
touch of malice into an otherwise innocent stanza. The translation of
_The Curse_ on a nag who threw its master into a puddle before the girl
to whom he was about to be married is a joy that is tempered only by
the doubt that, like Mr. Stephens, Mr. Flower may really have improved
on his original. I have never quite forgiven James Stephens for
uniting two scattered lines of Ó Bruadair into the most unforgettable
curse in literature. But at any rate I envy Mr. Flower the delight he
must have got from writing

  The everlasting night-fiend ride you!
  My curse cling closer than your saddle!
  Hell's ravens pick your eyes like eggs!
  You scarecrow with your legs astraddle

Of the quality of this, and, indeed, of most other poems in his book,
I am sure. Of others I am not so sure, and here my reservations,
perhaps, have prejudiced me. I feel that Mr. Flower's theory about the
_amour courtois_, “the fantastic love of European tradition,” has
blinded him to a starkness, a certain intellectual asperity, that
others might find in his originals. For we must remember that the mind
which produced _Meabhraigh mo laoi chumainn-se_ also produced
Keating’s _A Bhean lán de stuaim_. I think, too, that when Padraic
Colum was translating _Ni bhfuighe meise bás duit_ he also must have
felt that note of intellectual asperity.

  The flowing limbs, the rounded heel,
  Slight men betray!

In Mr. Flower's phrasing, as well as in his outlook there is a
tendency to over-prettify the original; “Our fever of sorrow” becomes
“life's fitful fever,” “love-song” “the swansong of my passion,”
while “_gibé tir as a dtáinig_” is translated by “from lands that hear
the Siren.” But, in all fairness, one must add that in many poems he
gains as much as he loses by this method.

The _tri rainn is amhrán_ translations are particularly
delightful. The form is one that lends itself to light verse and while
there is nothing in them quite so daring as the comparison a Munster
poet makes between his lady's nose and syllabic poetry they are, I
think, among the best things in the book. Here is the amhrán to a
charming poem:

  'Tis Shiela s back that puts the bards to rout
  And her cold shoulder throws their music out;
  I rush through madness to my soul's undoing
  And yet I get no good of all my wooing.

Better still is one on a girl gathering honey:

  Though in thy lovely shining cheek the rose and lily vie.
  And by the sweetness of thy lips great warriors captured lie;
  Thou harriest now the harmless bees, but one day thou shalt die
  And a thousand bees on Judgment Day will hunt thee through the sky.

The picture that Mr. Flower gives us of Ireland is a pleasant one, and
for that reason I think it is not altogether true. In literature we
are at our best when verses leave a salt taste on the tongue, when the
Old Woman of Beare cries out on her right eye that is gone and on her
left that is going for better proportion’s sake, when Caoilte comforts
himself for the winter's cold, because the men he has slain are colder
than he, when Hackett thinks gleefully of candles that were quenched
in excommunication being lit again in the winsome cheeks of children,
We are rank Playboys, all of us!

But I think there is no one who will not enjoy _Love's Bitter Sweet_,
and in begging a public for it, I should like to draw the attention of
Irish speakers to _Laoithe Cumainn_, by Professor O’Rahilly, which
contains many of the original Irish poems. Who knows? Perhaps as they
read they may find them-selves being blown from their respective Dunboys
“go taoibh na cruinne sa Spáinn.” The volume is hand-printed and
bound with that austere good taste we have come to associate with the
Cuala Press. FRANK O'CONNOR.


Irish Statesman, Saturday, January 02, 1926