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