The Kiltartan Poetry Book | Page 2

twentieth the street singers cry out:
Mac Dermott, Mallin, Hanrahan, Daly, Colbert and Mac Bride All men
who for our country's cause have nobly bled and died.
Even Yeats, falling into the tradition, has put in a lyric the names of
some of those who died in Easter week, and through whose death "a
terrible beauty is born."
II

I am glad to remember that through the twelve years of our married life,
1880-92, my husband and his people were able to keep their liking and
respect for each other. For those were the years of the land war, tenant
struggling to gain a lasting possession for his children, landlord to keep
that which had been given in trust to him for his; each ready in his
anger to turn the heritage of the other to desolation; while the vision of
some went yet farther, through breaking to the rebuilding of a nation.
The passion, the imagination of Ireland were thrown into the fight. I
often thought to find some poem putting such passion into fiery or
memorable lines. But the first I thought worth the keeping,--I have it
yet, was Katherine Tynan's lament for Parnell, written two years after
his death. In tearing it from the corner of some newspaper I had
unwittingly taken note of almost the moment of a new impulse in
literature, in poetry. For with that death, the loss of that dominant
personality, and in the quarrel that followed, came the disbanding of an
army, the unloosing of forces, the setting free of the imagination of
Ireland.
III
Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get
leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of
his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could
find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the
only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible. But my asking, timid
with the fear of mockery, was unheeded. Yet I missed but by a little an
opportunity that might have made me a real Irish scholar, and not as I
am, imperfect, stumbling. For a kinsman learned in the language, the
translator of the wonderful Silva Gaedelica had been sometimes a guest
in the house, and would still have been welcomed there but that my
mother, who had a great dislike to the marriage of cousins had fancied
he was taking a liking to one of my elder sisters; and with that
suspicion the "winged nymph, Opportunity" had passed from my reach.
After my marriage I bought a grammar and worked at it for a while
with the help of a gardener. But it was difficult and my teacher was
languid, suspecting it may be some hidden mockery, for those were the
days before Irish became the fashion. It was not till a dozen or more

years later, and after my husband's death, that my son, having won the
classical entrance scholarship at Harrow, took a fancy to learn a nearer
language, and rode over to Tillyra before breakfast one morning to ask
our neighbour Edward Martyn to help him to a teacher. He came back
without what he had sought, but with the gift of a fine old Irish Bible,
which became a help in our early lessons. For we set to work together,
and I found the task a light one in comparison with those first attempts.
For that young priest, Father Eugene O'Growney, sent from Ireland to
look for health in California, had used the short space of life left to him
in writing simple lessons in Irish grammar, that made at least the first
steps easy. And another thing had happened. Dr. Douglas Hyde, An
Craoibhin, had founded the Gaelic League, and through it country
people were gathered together in the Irish speaking places to give the
songs and poems, old and new, kept in their memory. This discovery,
this disclosure of the folk learning, the folk poetry, the ancient tradition,
was the small beginning of a weighty change. It was an upsetting of the
table of values, an astonishing excitement. The imagination of Ireland
had found a new homing place.
IV
My own imagination was aroused. I was becoming conscious of a
world close to me and that I had been ignorant of. It was not now in the
corners of newspapers I looked for poetic emotion, nor even to the
singers in the streets. It was among farmers and potato diggers and old
men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was
beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my
childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting,
that are the disclosure