Poets and Dreamers

Poets and Dreamers

Project Gutenberg's Poets and Dreamers, by Lady Augusta Gregory and
Others This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and
with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: Poets and Dreamers Studies and translations from the Irish
Author: Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
Translator: Lady Augusta Gregory
Release Date: March 29, 2006 [EBook #18070]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK POETS
AND DREAMERS ***

Produced by Ted Garvin, Taavi Kalju and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

POETS AND DREAMERS: STUDIES & TRANSLATIONS FROM
THE IRISH, BY LADY GREGORY.

DUBLIN: HODGES, FIGGIS, & CO., LTD. NEW YORK: CHARLES
SCRIBNER'S SONS. 1903.

TO SOME UNDERGRADUATES OF TRINITY COLLEGE
'Will you seek afar off? You surely come back at last, In things best
known to you finding the best, or as good as the best; In folks nearest to
you finding the sweetest, strongest, lovingest; Happiness, knowledge
not in another place, but this place--not for another hour but this hour.'
WALT WHITMAN.

CONTENTS
PAGE RAFTERY 1
WEST IRISH BALLADS 47
JACOBITE BALLADS 66
AN CRAOIBHIN'S POEMS 76
BOER BALLADS IN IRELAND 89
A SORROWFUL LAMENT FOR IRELAND 98
MOUNTAIN THEOLOGY 104
HERB-HEALING 111
THE WANDERING TRIBE 121
WORKHOUSE DREAMS 128
ON THE EDGE OF THE WORLD 193

AN CRAOIBHIN'S PLAYS:-- 196
THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 200
THE MARRIAGE 216
THE LOST SAINT 236
THE NATIVITY 244

POETS AND DREAMERS

RAFTERY
I.
One winter afternoon as I sat by the fire in a ward of Gort Workhouse, I
listened to two old women arguing about the merits of two rival poets
they had seen and heard in their childhood.
One old woman, who was from Kilchreest, said: 'Raftery hadn't a stim
of sight; and he travelled the whole nation; and he was the best poet
that ever was, and the best fiddler. It was always at my father's house,
opposite the big tree, that he used to stop when he was in Kilchreest. I
often saw him; but I didn't take much notice of him then, being a child;
it was after that I used to hear so much about him. Though he was blind,
he could serve himself with his knife and fork as well as any man with
his sight. I remember the way he used to cut the meat--across, like this.
Callinan was nothing to him.'
The other old woman, who was from Craughwell, said: 'Callinan was a
great deal better than him; and he could make songs in English as well
as in Irish; Raftery would run from where Callinan was. And he was a
nice respectable man, too, with cows and sheep, and a kind man. He
would never put anything that wasn't nice into a poem, and he would
never run anyone down; but if you were the worst in the world, he'd

make you the best in it; and when his wife lost her beetle, he made a
song of fifteen verses about it.'
'Well,' the Kilchreest old woman admitted, 'Raftery would run people
down; he was someway bitter; and if he had anything against a person,
he'd give him a great lacerating. But there were more for him than for
Callinan; some used to say Callinan's songs were too long.'
'I tell you,' said the other, 'Callinan was a nice man and a nice
neighbour. Raftery wasn't fit to put beside him. Callinan was a man that
would go out of his own back door, and make a poem about the four
quarters of the earth. I tell you, you would stand in the snow to listen to
Callinan!' But, just then, a bedridden old woman suddenly sat up and
began to sing Raftery's 'Bridget Vesach' as long as her breath lasted; so
the last word was for him after all.
Raftery died over sixty years ago; but there are many old people still
living, besides those two old women, who have seen him, and who
keep his songs in their memory. What they tell of him shows how
closely he was in the old tradition of the bards, the wandering poets of
two thousand years or more. His satire, his praises, his competitions
with other poets were the dread and the pride of many Galway and
Mayo parishes. And now the songs that he never wrote down, being
blind, are known, if not as our people say, 'all over the world,' at least
in all places where Irish is spoken.
Raftery's satires, as I have heard them repeated by the country people,
do not seem, even in their rhymed original--he