THE HOME-COMING OF DINNY PA.

When Dinny Pa came back [to us]
He came back in a golden hearse
  That had a glassy ceiling;
[We] waked him in the third [floor] [back],
And all his kindred, dressed in black,
  [Bedewed] the place with feeling.

[No] one of all the Pa's [before]
[Had] braved an unfriendly [foreign shore],
  Nor come to [eminence][....]
And there he lay in his black suit
Where one time he had run [barefoot]
  And begged the neighbors' pence.

The candles blazed up in the dark
Where Dinny Pa lay stiff and stark---
  "All mortal boys are [tame]"
The young girls wept, "for none at all
Can tell the thing that may befall
  Nor count tomorrow's gain."

But all the hags and all the old men
They drank and drank and drank again,
  And bid their young to see
How one that has an ambitious mind
May rise and leave at last behind
  Ill-luck and poverty.

"Behold," they cried, "the poorest one
Through sobriety can run
  A race with all the rest,
'Tis drink that brings the nation down,
And lack of application,
  And building no new nest!"

"For why," they said, "a man must roam,
He cannot always sit at home,
  Must take things as they come;
And all the Irish fighting men
Were earls and dukes in France and Spain
  Who'd have died poor at home!"

"Nor Pharaoh nor his wives," they said.
"Nor Julius Caesar'd such a bed[,]
  Or was laid out as well
As Dinny Pa, a neighbour's child,
That [lies and looks] as though he smiled
  On such as [leave a smell]!"

And twenty days and twenty nights
Musicians played and dazzling lights
  Burned  round that lucky man.
And in the beauty of his face
The old ones dreamed and did not guess
  The race their young ones ran.

For every girl cried "None at all
Can tell what sad fate may befall
  Our pleasures ere they come!"
And we'd delight and love to spare
Beneath a shawl on every stair
  When Dinny Pa came home.


FRANK O'CONNOR

Source: The Irish Statesman, June 9, 1928, p.267