Grania Grania is the original Iseult of the Tristan legend. Married to the elderly Fionn, she drugged the watchmen’s drink andeloped with her lover Diarmuid. In the Lullaby we are to understand that they are being followed by Fionn and the Fianna, whose quest has set all nature in a tumult, but she sings Diarmuid to sleep with memories of the great lovers of Irish history. This was the basis of Yeats’s beautiful “Lullaby,” which he wrote after reading my first version of the poem. But I was never satisfied with that; nor am I particularly satisfied with this, except that it is closer in spirit to the original. Stag does not lay his side to sleep; He bellows from the mountainside, And tramples through the woods, and yet In no green thicket can he hide. Not even the birds within their house—— From bough to bough all night they leap, And stir the air with startled cries. Among the leaves they will not sleep. The duck that bears her brood tonight By many a sheltering bank must creep, And furrow the wild waters bright; Among the reeds she will not sleep. The curlew cannot sleep at all His voice is shrill above the deep Reverberations of the storm; Between the streams he will not sleep. But you must sleep as in the south He who from Conall long ago With all the arts of speech and song Made Morann’s daughter rise and go. Or sleep the sleep that Fionncha found In Ulster with his stolen bride, When Slaney ran from home with him And slept no more at Falvey’s side. Or sleep the sleep that Aunya slept When with the torchlight round her head, From Garnish and her father’s house To her beloved’s arms she fled. Or Dedaid’s sleep who in the east Did not think for one sweet night, His head upon his lover’s breast Of the terrors of the flight. Source: O'Connor, Frank (tr); Kings, Lords, & Commons: An Anthology from the Irish; 1962; London; Macmillan & Co; p.49