c'etait une
acquisition
inappreciable.
Yeats - Poems
Between the lids of one
The imaged meteors had flashed and run
And had disported in the stilly jet,
And the fixed stars had dawned and shone and set,
Since God made Time and Death and Sleep: the other
Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother,
The stream churned, churned, and churned--his lips apart,
As though he told his never slumbering heart
Of every foamdrop on its misty way:
Tying the horse to his vast foot that lay
Half in the unvesselled sea, we climbed the stairs
And climbed so long, I thought the last steps were
Hung from the morning star; when these mild words
Fanned the delighted air like wings of birds:
"My brothers spring out of their beds at morn,
"A-murmur like young partridge: with loud horn
"They chase the noontide deer;
"And when the dew-drowned stars hang in the air
"Look to long fishing-lines, or point and pare
"An ash-wood hunting spear.
"O sigh, O fluttering sigh, be kind to me;
"Flutter along the froth lips of the sea,
"And shores, the froth lips wet:
"And stay a little while, and bid them weep:
"Ah, touch their blue-veined eyelids if they sleep,
"And shake their coverlet.
"When you have told how I weep endlessly,
"Flutter along the froth lips of the sea
"And home to me again,
"And in the shadow of my hair lie hid,
"And tell me how you came to one unbid,
"The saddest of all men. "
A maiden with soft eyes like funeral tapers,
And face that seemed wrought out of moonlit vapours,
And a sad mouth, that fear made tremulous
As any ruddy moth, looked down on us;
And she with a wave-rusted chain was tied
To two old eagles, full of ancient pride,
That with dim eyeballs stood on either side.
Few feathers were on their dishevelled wings,
For their dim minds were with the ancient things.
"I bring deliverance," pearl-pale Niam said.
"Neither the living, nor the unlabouring dead,
"Nor the high gods who never lived, may fight
"My enemy and hope; demons for fright
"Jabber and scream about him in the night;
"For he is strong and crafty as the seas
"That sprang under the Seven Hazel Trees,
"And I must needs endure and hate and weep,
"Until the gods and demons drop asleep,
"Hearing Aed touch the mournful strings of gold. "
"Is he so dreadful? "
"Be not over bold,
"But flee while you may flee from him. "
Then I:
"This demon shall be pierced and drop and die,
"And his loose bulk be thrown in the loud tide. "
"Flee from him," pearl-pale Niam weeping cried,
"For all men flee the demons"; but moved not
My angry, king remembering soul one jot;
There was no mightier soul of Heber's line;
Now it is old and mouse-like: for a sign
I burst the chain: still earless, nerveless, blind,
Wrapped in the things of the unhuman mind,
In some dim memory or ancient mood
Still earless, nerveless, blind, the eagles stood.
And then we climbed the stair to a high door;
A hundred horsemen on the basalt floor
Beneath had paced content: we held our way
And stood within: clothed in a misty ray
I saw a foam-white seagull drift and float
Under the roof, and with a straining throat
Shouted, and hailed him: he hung there a star,
For no man's cry shall ever mount so far;
Not even your God could have thrown down that hall;
Stabling His unloosed lightnings in their stall,
He had sat down and sighed with cumbered heart,
As though His hour were come.
We sought the part
That was most distant from the door; green slime
Made the way slippery, and time on time
Showed prints of sea-born scales, while down through it
The captive's journeys to and fro were writ
Like a small river, and, where feet touched, came
A momentary gleam of phosphorus flame.
Under the deepest shadows of the hall
That maiden found a ring hung on the wall,
And in the ring a torch, and with its flare
Making a world about her in the air,
Passed under a dim doorway, out of sight
And came again, holding a second light
Burning between her fingers, and in mine
Laid it and sighed: I held a sword whose shine
No centuries could dim: and a word ran
Thereon in Ogham letters, "Mananan";
That sea god's name, who in a deep content
Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent
Out of the seven-fold seas, built the dark hall
Rooted in foam and clouds, and cried to all
The mightier masters of a mightier race;
And at his cry there came no milk-pale face
Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood,
But only exultant faces.
Niam stood
With bowed head, trembling when the white blade shone,
But she whose hours of tenderness were gone
Had neither hope nor fear. I bade them hide
Under the shadows till the tumults died
Of the loud crashing and earth shaking fight,
Lest they should look upon some dreadful sight;
And thrust the torch between the slimy flags.
A dome made out of endless carven jags,
Where shadowy face flowed into shadowy face,
Looked down on me; and in the self-same place
I waited hour by hour, and the high dome,
Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home
Of faces, waited; and the leisured gaze
Was loaded with the memory of days
Buried and mighty. When through the great door
The dawn came in, and glimmered on the floor
With a pale light, I journeyed round the hall
And found a door deep sunken in the wall,
The least of doors; beyond on a dim plain
A little runnel made a bubbling strain,
And on the runnel's stony and bare edge
A husky demon dry as a withered sedge
Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue:
In a sad revelry he sang and swung
Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro
His hand along the runnel's side, as though
The flowers still grew there: far on the sea's waste
Shaking and waving, vapour vapour chased,
While high frail cloudlets, fed with a green light,
Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright,
Hung in the passionate dawn. He slowly turned:
A demon's leisure: eyes, first white, now burned
Like wings of kingfishers; and he arose
Barking. We trampled up and down with blows
Of sword and brazen battle-axe, while day
Gave to high noon and noon to night gave way;
And when at withering of the sun he knew
The Druid sword of Mananan, he grew
To many shapes; I lunged at the smooth throat
Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote
A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top;
I held a dripping corpse, with livid chop
And sunken shape, against my face and breast,
When I tore down the tree; but when the west
Surged up in plumy fire, I lunged and drave
Through heart and spine, and cast him in the wave,
Lest Niam shudder.
Full of hope and dread
Those two came carrying wine and meat and bread,
And healed my wounds with unguents out of flowers
That feed white moths by some De Danaan shrine;
Then in that hall, lit by the dim sea shine,
We lay on skins of otters, and drank wine,
Brewed by the sea-gods, from huge cups that lay
Upon the lips of sea-gods in their day;
And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept.
But when the sun once more in saffron stept,
Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep,
We sang the loves and angers without sleep,
And all the exultant labours of the strong:
But now the lying clerics murder song
With barren words and flatteries of the weak.
In what land do the powerless turn the beak
Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?
For all your croziers, they have left the path
And wander in the storms and clinging snows,
Hopeless for ever: ancient Usheen knows,
For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies
On the anvil of the world.
S. PATRIC
Be still: the skies
Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,
For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;
Go cast your body on the stones and pray,
For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.
USHEEN
Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder
The Fenian horses; armour torn asunder;
Laughter and cries; the armies clash and shock;
All is done now; I see the ravens flock;
Ah, cease, you mournful, laughing Fenian horn!
We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn
I found, dropping sea foam on the wide stair,
And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair,
That demon dull and unsubduable;
And once more to a day-long battle fell,
And at the sundown threw him in the surge,
To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge
His new healed shape: and for a hundred years
So warred, so feasted, with nor dreams nor fears,
Nor languor nor fatigue: and endless feast,
An endless war.
The hundred years had ceased;
I stood upon the stair: the surges bore
A beech bough to me, and my heart grew sore,
Remembering how I had stood by white-haired Finn
Under a beech at Emen and heard the thin
Outcry of bats.
And then young Niam came
Holding that horse, and sadly called my name;
I mounted, and we passed over the lone
And drifting grayness, while this monotone,
Surly and distant, mixed inseparably
Into the clangour of the wind and sea.
"I hear my soul drop down into decay,
"And Mananan's dark tower, stone by stone,
"Gather sea slime and fall the seaward way,
"And the moon goad the waters night and day,
"That all be overthrown.
"But till the moon has taken all, I wage
"War on the mightiest men under the skies,
"And they have fallen or fled, age after age:
"Light is man's love, and lighter is man's rage;
"His purpose drifts and dies. "
And then lost Niam murmured, "Love, we go
"To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo!
"The Islands of Dancing and of Victories
"Are empty of all power. "
"And which of these
"Is the Island of Content? "
"None know," she said;
And on my bosom laid her weeping head.
BOOK III
Fled foam underneath us, and around us, a wandering and milky smoke,
High as the saddle girth, covering away from our glances the tide;
And those that fled, and that followed, from the
foam-pale distance broke;
The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.
I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And never a song sang Niam, and over my finger-tips
Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair,
And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.
Were we days long or hours long in riding, when rolled in a grisly peace,
An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?
And we stood on a sea's edge we saw not; for whiter
than new-washed fleece
Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke.
And we rode on the plains of the sea's edge; the sea's edge
barren and gray,
Gray sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.
But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;
Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark:
Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams
of the world and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.
Till the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems
of the hazel and oak,
A valley flowed down from his hoofs, and there in the long grass lay,
Under the starlight and shadow, a monstrous slumbering folk,
Their naked and gleaming bodies poured out and heaped in the way.
And by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade;
And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old
Could sleep on a couch of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid,
And more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold.
And each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men;
The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were
the claws of birds,
And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen,
The breathing came from those bodies, long-warless,
grown whiter than curds.
The wood was so spacious above them, that He who had stars for His flocks
Could fondle the leaves with His fingers, nor go from
His dew-cumbered skies;
So long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests
in their locks,
Filling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes.
And over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came,
Now in a place of star-fire, and now in a shadow place wide;
And the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees
in the soft star-flame,
Lay loose in a place of shadow: we drew the reins by his side.
Golden the nails of his bird-claws, flung loosely along the dim ground;
In one was a branch soft-shining, with bells more many than sighs,
In midst of an old man's bosom; owls ruffling and pacing around,
Sidled their bodies against him, filling the shade with their eyes.
And my gaze was thronged with the sleepers; no,
not since the world began,
In realms where the handsome were many, nor in glamours by demons flung,
Have faces alive with such beauty been known to the salt eye of man,
Yet weary with passions that faded when the seven-fold seas were young.
And I gazed on the bell-branch, sleep's forebear,
far sung by the Sennachies.
I saw how those slumberers, grown weary, there camping in grasses deep,
Of wars with the wide world and pacing the shores of the wandering seas,
Laid hands on the bell-branch and swayed it, and fed of unhuman sleep.
Snatching the horn of Niam, I blew a lingering note;
Came sound from those monstrous sleepers, a sound like
the stirring of flies.
He, shaking the fold of his lips, and heaving the pillar of his throat,
Watched me with mournful wonder out of the wells of his eyes.
I cried, "Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!
"And tell of your goodly household and the goodly works of your hands,
"That we may muse in the starlight and talk of the battles of old;
"Your questioner, Usheen, is worthy, he comes from the Fenian lands. "
Half open his eyes were, and held me, dull with
the smoke of their dreams;
His lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came;
Then he swayed in his fingers the bell-branch, slow dropping
a sound in faint streams
Softer than snow-flakes in April and piercing the marrow like flame.
Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth,
The moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a sea-covered stone
Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories
of the whole of my mirth,
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
In the roots of the grasses, the sorrels, I laid my body as low;
And the pearl-pale Niam lay by me, her brow on the midst of my breast;
And the horse was gone in the distance, and years after years 'gan flow;
Square leaves of the ivy moved over us, binding us down to our rest.
And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot;
How the fetlocks drip blood in the battle, when
the fallen on fallen lie rolled;
How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron's plot,
And the names of the demons whose hammers made armour for Conhor of old.
And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot;
That the spear-shaft is made out of ashwood, the shield
out of ozier and hide;
How the hammers spring on the anvil, on the spearhead's burning spot;
How the slow, blue-eyed oxen of Finn low sadly at evening tide.
But in dreams, mild man of the croziers, driving the dust
with their throngs,
Moved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales;
Came by me the kings of the Red Branch, with roaring
of laughter and songs,
Or moved as they moved once, love-making or piercing
the tempest with sails.
Came Blanid, Mac Nessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk,
Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle
on his beard never dry,
Dark Balor, as old as a forest, car borne, his mighty head sunk
Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-making eye.
And by me, in soft red raiment, the Fenians moved in loud streams,
And Grania, walking and smiling, sewed with her needle of bone,
So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not,
with creatures of dreams,
In a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.
At times our slumber was lightened. When the sun was on silver or gold;
When brushed with the wings of the owls, in the dimness
they love going by;
When a glow-worm was green on a grass leaf, lured from
his lair in the mould;
Half wakening, we lifted our eyelids, and gazed on the grass with a sigh.
So watched I when, man of the croziers, at the heel of a century fell,
Weak, in the midst of the meadow, from his miles in the midst of the air,
A starling like them that forgathered 'neath a moon waking
white as a shell.
When the Fenians made foray at morning with Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.
I awoke: the strange horse without summons out of the distance ran,
Thrusting his nose to my shoulder; he knew in his bosom deep
That once more moved in my bosom the ancient sadness of man,
And that I would leave the immortals, their dimness,
their dews dropping sleep.
O, had you seen beautiful Niam grow white as the waters are white,
Lord of the croziers, you even had lifted your hands and wept:
But, the bird in my fingers, I mounted, remembering alone that delight
Of twilight and slumber were gone, and that hoofs impatiently stept.
I cried, "O Niam! O white one! if only a twelve-houred day,
"I must gaze on the beard of Finn, and move where the old men and young
"In the Fenians' dwellings of wattle lean on the chessboards and play,
"Ah, sweet to me now were even bald Conan's slanderous tongue!
"Like me were some galley forsaken far off in Meridian isle.
"Remembering its long-oared companions, sails turning
to thread-bare rags;
"No more to crawl on the seas with long oars mile after mile,
"But to be amid shooting of flies and flowering of rushes and flags. "
Their motionless eyeballs of spirits grown mild with mysterious thought
Watched her those seamless faces from the valley's glimmering girth;
As she murmured, "O wandering Usheen, the strength of the
bell-branch is naught,
"For there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of earth.
"Then go through the lands in the saddle and see what the mortals do,
"And softly come to your Niam over the tops of the tide;
"But weep for your Niam, O Usheen, weep; for if only your shoe
"Brush lightly as haymouse earth's pebbles, you will come
no more to my side.
"O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest? "
"I saw from a distant saddle; from the earth she made her moan;
"I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn,
for breast unto breast
"We shall mingle no more, nor our gazes empty their sweetness lone.
"In the isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come.
"Were the winds less soft than the breath of a pigeon
who sleeps on her nest,
"Nor lost in the star-fires and odours the sound of the sea's vague drum?
"O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest? "
The wailing grew distant; I rode by the woods of the wrinkling bark,
Where ever is murmurous dropping, old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures live there, no weasels move in the dark;
In a reverie forgetful of all things, over the bubbling ground.
And I rode by the plains of the sea's edge, where all is barren and gray,
Gray sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away,
Like an army of old men lounging for rest from the moan of the seas.
And the winds made the sands on the sea's edge turning and turning go,
As my mind made the names of the Fenians. Far from the hazel and oak,
I rode away on the surges, where, high as the saddle bow,
Fled foam underneath me, and round me, a wandering and milky smoke.
Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,
Snatching the bird in secret; nor knew I, embosomed apart,
When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,
For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.
Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown.
If I were as I once was, the strong hoofs crushing
the sand and the shells,
Coming out of the sea as the dawn comes, a chaunt of love on my lips,
Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the bells,
I would leave no saint's head on his body from Rachlin to Bera of ships.
Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path
Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattles and woodwork made,
Your bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the rath,
And a small and a feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade.
Or weeding or ploughing with faces a-shining with much-toil wet;
While in this place and that place, with bodies unglorious,
their chieftains stood,
Awaiting in patience the straw-death, croziered one, caught in your net:
Went the laughter of scorn from my mouth like the roaring
of wind in a wood.
And because I went by them so huge and so speedy with eyes so bright,
Came after the hard gaze of youth, or an old man lifted his head:
And I rode and I rode, and I cried out, "The Fenians hunt
wolves in the night,
So sleep thee by daytime. " A voice cried, "The Fenians
a long time are dead. "
A whitebeard stood hushed on the pathway, the flesh
of his face as dried grass,
And in folds round his eyes and his mouth, he sad
as a child without milk;
And the dreams of the islands were gone, and I knew how
men sorrow and pass,
And their hound, and their horse, and their love, and their eyes
that glimmer like silk.
And wrapping my face in my hair, I murmured, "In old age they ceased";
And my tears were larger than berries, and I murmured,
"Where white clouds lie spread
"On Crevroe or broad Knockfefin, with many of old they feast
"On the floors of the gods. " He cried, "No, the gods
a long time are dead. "
And lonely and longing for Niam, I shivered and turned me about,
The heart in me longing to leap like a grasshopper into her heart;
I turned and rode to the westward, and followed the sea's old shout
Till I saw where Maive lies sleeping till starlight and midnight part.
And there at the foot of the mountain, two carried a sack full of sand,
They bore it with staggering and sweating, but fell
with their burden at length:
Leaning down from the gem-studded saddle, I flung it
five yards with my hand,
With a sob for men waxing so weakly, a sob for the Fenian's old strength.
The rest you have heard of, O croziered one; how, when divided the girth,
I fell on the path, and the horse went away like a summer fly;
And my years three hundred fell on me, and I rose,
and walked on the earth,
A creeping old man, full of sleep, with the spittle
on his beard never dry.
How the men of the sand-sack showed me a church with its belfry in air;
Sorry place, where for swing of the war-axe in my dim eyes
the crozier gleams;
What place have Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair?
Speak, you too are old with your memories, an old man surrounded
with dreams.
S. PATRIC
Where the flesh of the footsole clingeth on the burning stones
is their place;
Where the demons whip them with wires on the burning stones of wide hell,
Watching the blessed ones move far off, and the smile on God's face,
Between them a gateway of brass, and the howl of the angels who fell.
USHEEN
Put the staff in my hands; for I go to the Fenians, O cleric, to chaunt
The war-songs that roused them of old; they will rise, making clouds
with their breath
Innumerable, singing, exultant; the clay underneath them shall pant,
And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them in death.
And demons afraid in their darkness; deep horror of eyes and of wings,
Afraid their ears on the earth laid, shall listen and rise up and weep;
Hearing the shaking of shields and the quiver of stretched bowstrings,
Hearing hell loud with a murmur, as shouting and mocking we sweep.
We will tear out the flaming stones, and batter the gateway of brass
And enter, and none sayeth "No" when there enters the strongly
armed guest;
Make clean as a broom cleans, and march on as oxen move over young grass;
Then feast, making converse of wars, and of old wounds,
and turn to our rest.
S. PATRIC
On the flaming stones, without refuge, the limbs of the Fenians are tost;
None war on the masters of Hell, who could break up the world
in their rage;
But kneel and wear out the flags and pray for your soul that is lost
Through the demon love of its youth and its godless and passionate age.
USHEEN
Ah, me! to be shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain,
Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear;
All emptied of purple hours as a beggar's cloak in the rain,
As a hay-cock out on the flood, or a wolf sucked under a weir.
It were sad to gaze on the blessed and no man I loved of old there;
I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,
I will go to Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.
GLOSSARY AND NOTES
_The Pronunciation of the Irish Words. _--When I wrote the greater number
of these poems I had hardly considered the question seriously. I copied
at times somebody's perhaps fanciful phonetic spelling, and at times the
ancient spelling as I found it in some literal translation, pronouncing
the words always as they were spelt. I do not suppose I would have
defended this system at any time, but I do not yet know what system to
adopt. The modern pronunciation, which is usually followed by those who
spell the words phonetically, is certainly unlike the pronunciation of
the time when classical Irish literature was written, and, so far as I
know, no Irish scholar who writes in English or French has made that
minute examination of the way the names come into the rhythms and
measures of the old poems which can alone discover the old
pronunciation. A French Celtic scholar gave me the pronunciation of a
few names, and told me that Mr. Whitley Stokes had written something
about the subject in German, but I am ignorant of German. If I ever
learn the old pronunciation, I will revise all these poems, but at
present I can only affirm that I have not treated my Irish names as
badly as the mediaeval writers of the stories of King Arthur treated
their Welsh names.
_Mythological Gods and Heroes. _--I refer the reader for such names as
Balor and Finn and Usheen to Lady Gregory's "Cuchulain of Muirthemne"
and to her "Gods and Fighting Men. "
_The Ballad of Father Gilligan. _--A tradition among the people of
Castleisland, Kerry.
_The Ballad of Father O'Hart. _--This ballad is founded on the story of a
certain Father O'Hart, priest of Coloony, Sligo, in the last century, as
told by the present priest of Coloony in his _History of Ballisodare and
Kilvarnet_. The robbery of the lands of Father O'Hart was a kind of
robbery which occurred but rarely during the penal laws. Catholics,
forbidden to own landed property, evaded the law by giving a Protestant
nominal possession of their estates. There are instances on record in
which poor men were nominal owners of immense estates.
_The Ballad of the Foxhunter. _--Founded on an incident, probably itself
a Tipperary tradition, in Kickham's _Knockagow_.
_Bell-branch. _--A legendary branch whose shaking casts all men into a
sleep.
_The Countess Cathleen. _--I found the story of the Countess Cathleen in
what professed to be a collection of Irish folk-lore in an Irish
newspaper some years ago. I wrote to the compiler, asking about its
source, but got no answer, but have since heard that it was translated
from _Les Matinees de Timothe Trimm_ a good many years ago, and has been
drifting about the Irish press ever since. Leo Lespes gives it as an
Irish story, and though the editor of _Folklore_ has kindly advertised
for information, the only Christian variant I know of is a Donegal tale,
given by Mr. Larminie in his _West Irish Folk Tales and Romances_, of a
woman who goes to hell for ten years to save her husband, and stays
there another ten, having been granted permission to carry away as many
souls as could cling to her skirt. Leo Lespes may have added a few
details, but I have no doubt of the essential antiquity of what seems to
me the most impressive form of one of the supreme parables of the world.
The parable came to the Greeks in the sacrifice of Alcestis, but her
sacrifice was less overwhelming, less apparently irremediable. Leo
Lespes tells the story as follows:--
Ce que je vais vous dire est un recit du careme Irlandais. Le
boiteux, l'aveugle, le paralytique des rues de Dublin ou de
Limerick, vous le diraient mieux que moi, cher lecteur, si vous
alliez le leur demander, un sixpense d'argent a la main. --Il n'est
pas une jeune fille catholique a laquelle on ne l'ait appris
pendant les jours de preparation a la communion sainte, pas un
berger des bords de la Blackwater qui ne le puisse redire a la
veillee.
Il y a bien longtemps qu'il apparut tout-a-coup dans la vielle
Irlande deux marchands inconnus dont personne n'avait oui parler,
et qui parlaient neanmoins avec la plus grande perfection la langue
du pays. Leurs cheveux etaient noirs et ferres avec de l'or et
leurs robes d'une grande magnificence.
Tous deux semblaient avoir le meme age; ils paraissaient etre des
hommes de cinquante ans, car leur barbe grisonnait un peu.
Or, a cette epoque, comme aujourd'hui, l'Irlande etait pauvre, car
le soleil avait ete rare, et des recoltes presque nulles. Les
indigents ne savaient a quel sainte se vouer, et la misere devenait
de plus en plus terrible.
Dans l'hotellerie ou descendirent les marchands fastueux on chercha
a penetrer leurs desseins: mais ce fut en vain, ils demeurerent
silencieux et discrets.
Et pendant qu'ils demeurerent dans l'hotellerie, ils ne cesserent
de compter et de recompter des sacs de pieces d'or, dont la vive
clarte s'apercevait a travers les vitres du logis.
Gentlemen, leur dit l'hotesse un jour, d'ou vient que vous etes si
opulents, et que, venus pour secourir la misere publique, vous ne
fassiez pas de bonnes oeuvres?
--Belle hotesse, repondit l'un d'eux, nous n'avons pas voulu aller
au-devant d'infortunes honorables, dans la crainte d'etre trompes
par des miseres fictives: que la douleur frappe a la porte, nous
ouvrirons.
Le lendemain, quand on sut qu'il existait deux opulents etrangers
prets a prodiguer l'or, la foule assiegea leur logis; mais les
figures des gens qui en sortaient etaient bien diverses. Les uns
avaient la fierte dans le regard, les autres portaient la honte au
front. Les deux trafiquants achetaient des ames pour le demon.
L'ame d'un vieillard valait vingt pieces d'or, pas un penny de
plus; car Satan avait eu le temps d'y former hypotheque. L'ame
d'une epose en valait cinquante quand elle etait jolie, ou cent
quand elle etait laide. L'ame d'une jeune fille se payait des prix
fous: les fleurs les plus belles et les plus pures sont les plus
cheres.
Pendant ce temps, il existait dans la ville un ange de beaute, la
comtesse Ketty O'Connor. Elle etait l'idole du peuple, et la
providence des indigents. Des qu'elle eut appris que des mecreants
profitaient de la misere publique pour derober des coeurs a Dieu,
elle fit appeler son majordome.
--Master Patrick, lui dit elle, combien ai-je de pieces d'or dans
mon coffre?
--Cent mille.
--Combien de bijoux?
--Peur autant d'argent.
--Combien de chateux, de bois et de terres?
--Pour le double de ces sommes.
--Eh bien! Patrick, vendez tout ce qui n'est pas or et
apportez-m'en le montant. Je ne veux garder a moi que ce castel et
le champ qui l'entoure.
Deux jours apres, les ordres de la pieuse Ketty etaient executes et
le tresor etait distribue aux pauvres au fur et a mesure de leurs
besoins.
Ceci ne faisait pas le compte, dit la tradition, des
commis-voyageurs du malin esprit, qui ne trouvaient plus d'ames a
acheter.
Aides par un valet infame, ils penetrerent dans la retraite de la
noble dame et lui deroberent le reste de son tresor . . . en vain
lutta-t-elle de toutes ses forces pour sauver le contenu de son
coffre, les larrons diaboliques furent les plus forts. Si Ketty
avait eu les moyens de faire un signe de croix, ajoute la legende
Irlandaise, elle les eut mis en fuite, mais ses mains etaient
captives--Le larcin fut effectue. Alors les pauvres solliciterent
en vain pres de Ketty depouillee, elle ne pouvait plus secourir
leur misere;--elle les abandonnait a la tentation. Pourtant il n'y
avait plus que huit jours a passer pour que les grains et lea
fourrages arrivassent en abondance des pays d'Orient. Mais, huit
jours, c'etait un siecle: huit jours necessitaient une somme
immense pour subvenir aux exigences de la disette, et les pauvres
allaient ou expirer dans les angousses de la faim, ou, reniant les
saintes maximes de l'Evangile, vendre a vil prix leur ame, le plus
beau present de la munificence du Seigneur tout-puissant.
Et Ketty n'avait plus une obole, car elle avait abandonne son
chateux aux malheureux.
Elle passa douze heures dans les larmes et le deuil, arrachant ses
cheveux couleur de soleil et meurtrissant son sein couleur du lis:
puis elle se leva resolue, animee par un vif sentiment de
desespoir.
Elle se rendit chez les marchands d'ames.
--Que voulez-vous? dirent ils.
--Vous achetez des ames?
--Oui, un peu malgre vous, n'est ce pas, sainte aux yeux de saphir?
--Aujourd'hui je viens vous proposer un marche, reprit elle.
--Lequel?
--J'ai une ame a vendre; mais elle est chere.
--Qu'importe si elle est precieuse? l'ame, comme le diamant,
s'apprecie a sa blancheur.
--C'est la mienne, dit Ketty.
Les deux envoyes de Satan tressaillirent. Leurs griffes
s'allongerent sous leurs gants de cuir; leurs yeux gris
etincelerent--l'ame, pure, immaculee, virginale de Ketty! . . .
c'etait une acquisition inappreciable.
--Gentille dame, combien voulez-vous?
--Cent cinquante mille ecus d'or.
--C'est fait, dirent les marchands: et ils tendirent a Ketty un
parchemin cachete de noir, qu'elle signa en frissonnant.
La somme lui fut comptee.
Des qu'elle fut rentree, elle dit au majordome:
--Tenez, distribuez ceci. Avec la somme que je vous donne les
pauvres attendront la huitaine necessaire et pas une de leurs ames
ne sera livree au demon.
Puis elle s'enferma et recommanda qu'on ne vint pas la deranger.
Trois jours se passerent; elle n'appela pas; elle ne sortit pas.
Quand on ouvrit sa porte, on la trouva raide et froide: elle etait
morte de douleur.
Mais la vente de cette ame si adorable dans sa charite fut declaree
nulle par le Seigneur: car elle avait sauve ses concitoyens de la
morte eternelle.
Apres la huitaine, des vaisseaux nombreux amenerent a l'Irlande
affamee d'immenses provisions de grains.
La famine n'etait plus possible. Quant aux marchands, ils
disparurent de leur hotellerie, sans qu'on sut jamais ce qu'ils
etaient devenus.
Toutefois, les pecheurs de la Blackwater pretendent qu'ils sont
enchaines dans une prison souterraine par ordre de Lucifer jusqu'au
moment ou ils pourront livrer l'ame de Ketty qui leur a echappe. Je
vous dis la legende telle que je la sais.
--Mais les pauvres l'ont raconte d'age en age et les enfants de
Cork et de Dublin chantent encore la ballade dont voici les
derniers couplets:--
Pour sauver les pauvres qu'elle aime
Ketty donna
Son esprit, sa croyance meme:
Satan paya
Cette ame au devoument sublime,
En ecus d'or,
Disons pour racheter son crime,
_Confiteor_.
Mais l'ange qui se fit coupable
Par charite
Au sejour d'amour ineffable
Est remonte.
Satan vaincu n'eut pas de prise
Sur ce coeur d'or;
Chantons sous la nef de l'eglise,
_Confiteor_.
N'est ce pas que ce recit, ne de l'imagination des poetes
catholiques de la verte Erin, est une veritable recit de careme?
_The Countess Cathleen_ was acted in Dublin in 1899, with Mr. Marcus St.
John and Mr. Trevor Lowe as the First and Second Demon, Mr. Valentine
Grace as Shemus Rua, Master Charles Sefton as Teig, Madame San Carola as
Mary, Miss Florence Farr as Aleel, Miss Anna Mather as Oona, Mr. Charles
Holmes as the Herdsman, Mr. Jack Wilcox as the Gardener, Mr. Walford as
a Peasant, Miss Dorothy Paget as a Spirit, Miss M. Kelly as a Peasant
Woman, Mr. T. E. Wilkinson as a Servant, and Miss May Whitty as The
Countess Kathleen. They had to face a very vehement opposition stirred
up by a politician and a newspaper, the one accusing me in a pamphlet,
the other in long articles day after day, of blasphemy because of the
language of the demons or of Shemus Rua, and because I made a woman sell
her soul and yet escape damnation, and of a lack of patriotism because I
made Irish men and women, who, it seems, never did such a thing, sell
theirs. The politician or the newspaper persuaded some forty Catholic
students to sign a protest against the play, and a Cardinal, who avowed
that he had not read it, to make another, and both politician and
newspaper made such obvious appeals to the audience to break the peace,
that a score or so of police were sent to the theatre to see that they
did not. I had, however, no reason to regret the result, for the stalls,
containing almost all that was distinguished in Dublin, and a gallery of
artisans alike insisted on the freedom of literature.
After the performance in 1899 I added the love scene between Aleel and
the Countess, and in this new form the play was revived in New York by
Miss Wycherley as well as being played a good deal in England and
America by amateurs. Now at last I have made a complete revision to make
it suitable for performance at the Abbey Theatre. The first two scenes
are almost wholly new, and throughout the play I have added or left out
such passages as a stage experience of some years showed me encumbered
the action; the play in its first form having been written before I knew
anything of the theatre. I have left the old end, however, in the
version printed in the body of this book, because the change for
dramatic purposes has been made for no better reason than that
audiences--even at the Abbey Theatre--are almost ignorant of Irish
mythology--or because a shallow stage made the elaborate vision of armed
angels upon a mountain-side impossible. The new end is particularly
suited to the Abbey stage, where the stage platform can be brought out
in front of the proscenium and have a flight of steps at one side up
which the Angel comes, crossing towards the back of the stage at the
opposite side. The principal lighting is from two arc lights in the
balcony which throw their lights into the faces of the players, making
footlights unnecessary. The room at Shemus Rua's house is suggested by a
great grey curtain--a colour which becomes full of rich tints under the
stream of light from the arcs. The two or more arches in the third scene
permit the use of a gauze. The short front scene before the last is just
long enough when played with incidental music to allow the scene set
behind it to be changed. The play when played without interval in this
way lasts a little over an hour.
The play was performed at the Abbey Theatre for the first time on
December 14, 1911, Miss Maire O'Neill taking the part of the Countess,
and the last scene from the going out of the Merchants was as follows:--
(MERCHANTS _rush out_. ALEEL _crawls into the middle of the room;
the twilight has fallen and gradually darkens as the scene goes
on_. )
ALEEL
They're rising up--they're rising through the earth,
Fat Asmodel and giddy Belial,
And all the fiends. Now they leap in the air.
But why does Hell's gate creak so? Round and round.
Hither and hither, to and fro they're running.
(_He moves about as though the air was full of spirits. _ OONA _enters_. )
Crouch down, old heron, out of the blind storm.
OONA
Where is the Countess Cathleen? All this day
Her eyes were full of tears, and when for a moment
Her hand was laid upon my hand, it trembled.
And now I do not know where she is gone.
ALEEL
Cathleen has chosen other friends than us,
And they are rising through the hollow world.
Demons are out, old heron.
OONA
God guard her soul.
ALEEL
She's bartered it away this very hour,
As though we two were never in the world.
(_He kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words. The_
PEASANTS _return. They carry the_ COUNTESS CATHLEEN _and lay her upon
the ground before_ OONA _and_ ALEEL. _She lies there as if dead. _)
OONA
O, that so many pitchers of rough clay
Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!
(_She kisses the hands of_ CATHLEEN. )
A PEASANT
We were under the tree where the path turns
When she grew pale as death and fainted away.
CATHLEEN
O, hold me, and hold me tightly, for the storm
Is dragging me away.
(OONA _takes her in her arms_. A WOMAN _begins to wail_. )
PEASANTS
Hush!
PEASANTS
Hush!
PEASANT WOMEN
Hush!
OTHER PEASANT WOMEN
Hush!
CATHLEEN (_half rising_)
Lay all the bags of money in a heap,
And when I am gone, old Oona, share them out
To every man and woman: judge, and give
According to their needs.
A PEASANT WOMAN
And will she give
Enough to keep my children through the dearth?
ANOTHER PEASANT WOMAN
O, Queen of Heaven, and all you blessed saints,
Let us and ours be lost, so she be shriven.
CATHLEEN
Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel;
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
She wander the loud waters. Do not weep
Too great a while, for there is many a candle
On the High Altar though one fall. Aleel,
Who sang about the dancers of the woods,
That know not the hard burden of the world,
Having but breath in their kind bodies, farewell!
And farewell, Oona, you who played with me
And bore me in your arms about the house
When I was but a child--and therefore happy,
Therefore happy even like those that dance.
The storm is in my hair and I must go.
(_She dies. _)
OONA
Bring me the looking-glass.
(A WOMAN _brings it to her out of inner room_. OONA _holds glass over
the lips of_ CATHLEEN. _All is silent for a moment, then she speaks in a
half-scream. _)
O, she is dead!
A PEASANT
She was the great white lily of the world.
A PEASANT
She was more beautiful than the pale stars.
AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN
The little plant I loved is broken in two.
(ALEEL _takes looking-glass from_ OONA _and flings it upon floor, so
that it is broken in many pieces_. )
ALEEL
I shatter you in fragments, for the face
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more;
And die, dull heart, for you that were a mirror
Are but a ball of passionate dust again!
And level earth and plumy sea, rise up!
And haughty sky, fall down!
A PEASANT WOMAN
Pull him upon his knees,
His curses will pluck lightning on our heads.
ALEEL
Angels and devils clash in the middle air,
And brazen swords clang upon brazen helms.
Look, look, a spear has gone through Belial's eye!
(_A winged_ ANGEL, _carrying a torch and a sword, enters from the_ R.
_with eyes fixed upon some distant thing. The_ ANGEL _is about to pass
out to the_ L. _when_ ALEEL _speaks. The_ ANGEL _stops a moment and
turns_. )
Look no more on the half-closed gates of Hell,
But speak to me whose mind is smitten of God,
That it may be no more with mortal things:
And tell of her who lies there.
(_The_ ANGEL _turns again and is about to go, but is seized by_ ALEEL. )
Till you speak
You shall not drift into eternity.
THE ANGEL
The light beats down; the gates of pearl are wide.
And she is passing to the floor of peace,
And Mary of the seven times wounded heart
Has kissed her lips, and the long blessed hair
Has fallen on her face; the Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
(ALEEL _releases the_ ANGEL _and kneels_. )
OONA
Tell them to walk upon the floor of peace,
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
_Down by the Salley Gardens. _--An extension of three lines sung to me by
an old woman at Ballisodare.
_Findrinny (Findruine). _--A kind of white bronze.
_Finvarra (Finbar). _--The king of the faeries of Connaught.
_Hell. _--In the older Irish books Hell is always cold, and it may be
because the Fomoroh, or evil powers, ruled over the north and the
winter. Christianity adopted as far as possible the Pagan symbolism in
Ireland as elsewhere, and Irish poets, when they spoke of "the cold
flagstone of Hell," may have repeated Pagan symbolism. The folk-tales,
and Keating in his description of Hell, make use, however, of the
ordinary symbolism of fire.
_The Lamentation of the Pensioner. _--This poem is little more than a
translation into verse of the very words of an old Wicklow peasant. Fret
means doom or destiny.
_The Land of Heart's Desire. _--This little play was produced at the
Avenue Theatre in the spring of 1894, with the following cast:--Maurteen
Bruin, Mr. James Welch; Shawn Bruin, Mr. A. E. W. Mason; Father Hart, Mr.
G. R. Foss; Bridget Bruin, Miss Charlotte Morland; Maire Bruin, Miss
Winifred Fraser; A Faery Child, Miss Dorothy Paget. It ran for a little
over six weeks. It was revived in America in 1901, when it was taken on
tour by Mrs. Lemoyne. It has been played two or three times
professionally since then in America and a great many times in England
and America by amateurs. Till lately it was not part of the repertory of
the Abbey Theatre, for I had grown to dislike it without knowing what I
disliked in it. This winter, however, I have made many revisions and now
it plays well enough to give me pleasure. It is printed in this book in
the new form, which was acted for the first time on February 22, 1912,
at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. At the Abbey Theatre, where the platform
of the stage comes out in front of the curtain, the curtain falls before
the priest's last words. He remains outside the curtain and the words
are spoken to the audience like an epilogue.
_The Meditation of the Old Fisherman. _--This poem is founded upon some
things a fisherman said to me when out fishing in Sligo Bay.
_Northern Cold. _--The Fomor, the powers of death and darkness and cold
and evil, came from the north.
_Nuala. _--The wife of Finvarra.
_Rose. _--The rose is a favourite symbol with the Irish poets, and has
given a name to several poems both Gaelic and English, and is used in
love poems, in addresses to Ireland like Mr. Aubrey de Vere's poem
telling how "The little black rose shall be red at last," and in
religious poems, like the old Gaelic one which speaks of "the Rose of
Friday," meaning the Rose of Austerity.
_Salley. _--Willow.
_Seven Hazel-trees. _--There was once a well overshadowed by seven sacred
hazel-trees, in the midst of Ireland. A certain woman plucked their
fruit, and seven rivers arose out of the well and swept her away. In my
poems this well is the source of all the waters of this world, which are
therefore seven-fold.
_The Wanderings of Usheen. _--The poem is founded upon the middle Irish
dialogues of S. Patric and Usheen and a certain Gaelic poem of the last
century. The events it describes, like the events in most of the poems
in this volume, are supposed to have taken place rather in the
indefinite period, made up of many periods, described by the folk-tales,
than in any particular century; it therefore, like the later Fenian
stories themselves, mixes much that is mediaeval with much that is
ancient. The Gaelic poems do not make Usheen go to more than one island,
but a story in _Silva Gadelica_ describes "four paradises," an island to
the north, an island to the west, an island to the south, and Adam's
paradise in the east.
_Printed in Great Britain by_
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED
WOKING AND LONDON
Transcriber's Notes:
Page 16: 'thictkes' changed to 'thickets'
Page 172: 'He brings in' could be 'She brings in'
Page 263: 'Before this duy' changed to 'Before this day'
Page 290: 'Far from the hazel and oak. ' changed to 'Far from
the hazel and oak,'
Page 295: 'move far off' could be 'move far oft'
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The imaged meteors had flashed and run
And had disported in the stilly jet,
And the fixed stars had dawned and shone and set,
Since God made Time and Death and Sleep: the other
Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother,
The stream churned, churned, and churned--his lips apart,
As though he told his never slumbering heart
Of every foamdrop on its misty way:
Tying the horse to his vast foot that lay
Half in the unvesselled sea, we climbed the stairs
And climbed so long, I thought the last steps were
Hung from the morning star; when these mild words
Fanned the delighted air like wings of birds:
"My brothers spring out of their beds at morn,
"A-murmur like young partridge: with loud horn
"They chase the noontide deer;
"And when the dew-drowned stars hang in the air
"Look to long fishing-lines, or point and pare
"An ash-wood hunting spear.
"O sigh, O fluttering sigh, be kind to me;
"Flutter along the froth lips of the sea,
"And shores, the froth lips wet:
"And stay a little while, and bid them weep:
"Ah, touch their blue-veined eyelids if they sleep,
"And shake their coverlet.
"When you have told how I weep endlessly,
"Flutter along the froth lips of the sea
"And home to me again,
"And in the shadow of my hair lie hid,
"And tell me how you came to one unbid,
"The saddest of all men. "
A maiden with soft eyes like funeral tapers,
And face that seemed wrought out of moonlit vapours,
And a sad mouth, that fear made tremulous
As any ruddy moth, looked down on us;
And she with a wave-rusted chain was tied
To two old eagles, full of ancient pride,
That with dim eyeballs stood on either side.
Few feathers were on their dishevelled wings,
For their dim minds were with the ancient things.
"I bring deliverance," pearl-pale Niam said.
"Neither the living, nor the unlabouring dead,
"Nor the high gods who never lived, may fight
"My enemy and hope; demons for fright
"Jabber and scream about him in the night;
"For he is strong and crafty as the seas
"That sprang under the Seven Hazel Trees,
"And I must needs endure and hate and weep,
"Until the gods and demons drop asleep,
"Hearing Aed touch the mournful strings of gold. "
"Is he so dreadful? "
"Be not over bold,
"But flee while you may flee from him. "
Then I:
"This demon shall be pierced and drop and die,
"And his loose bulk be thrown in the loud tide. "
"Flee from him," pearl-pale Niam weeping cried,
"For all men flee the demons"; but moved not
My angry, king remembering soul one jot;
There was no mightier soul of Heber's line;
Now it is old and mouse-like: for a sign
I burst the chain: still earless, nerveless, blind,
Wrapped in the things of the unhuman mind,
In some dim memory or ancient mood
Still earless, nerveless, blind, the eagles stood.
And then we climbed the stair to a high door;
A hundred horsemen on the basalt floor
Beneath had paced content: we held our way
And stood within: clothed in a misty ray
I saw a foam-white seagull drift and float
Under the roof, and with a straining throat
Shouted, and hailed him: he hung there a star,
For no man's cry shall ever mount so far;
Not even your God could have thrown down that hall;
Stabling His unloosed lightnings in their stall,
He had sat down and sighed with cumbered heart,
As though His hour were come.
We sought the part
That was most distant from the door; green slime
Made the way slippery, and time on time
Showed prints of sea-born scales, while down through it
The captive's journeys to and fro were writ
Like a small river, and, where feet touched, came
A momentary gleam of phosphorus flame.
Under the deepest shadows of the hall
That maiden found a ring hung on the wall,
And in the ring a torch, and with its flare
Making a world about her in the air,
Passed under a dim doorway, out of sight
And came again, holding a second light
Burning between her fingers, and in mine
Laid it and sighed: I held a sword whose shine
No centuries could dim: and a word ran
Thereon in Ogham letters, "Mananan";
That sea god's name, who in a deep content
Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent
Out of the seven-fold seas, built the dark hall
Rooted in foam and clouds, and cried to all
The mightier masters of a mightier race;
And at his cry there came no milk-pale face
Under a crown of thorns and dark with blood,
But only exultant faces.
Niam stood
With bowed head, trembling when the white blade shone,
But she whose hours of tenderness were gone
Had neither hope nor fear. I bade them hide
Under the shadows till the tumults died
Of the loud crashing and earth shaking fight,
Lest they should look upon some dreadful sight;
And thrust the torch between the slimy flags.
A dome made out of endless carven jags,
Where shadowy face flowed into shadowy face,
Looked down on me; and in the self-same place
I waited hour by hour, and the high dome,
Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home
Of faces, waited; and the leisured gaze
Was loaded with the memory of days
Buried and mighty. When through the great door
The dawn came in, and glimmered on the floor
With a pale light, I journeyed round the hall
And found a door deep sunken in the wall,
The least of doors; beyond on a dim plain
A little runnel made a bubbling strain,
And on the runnel's stony and bare edge
A husky demon dry as a withered sedge
Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue:
In a sad revelry he sang and swung
Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro
His hand along the runnel's side, as though
The flowers still grew there: far on the sea's waste
Shaking and waving, vapour vapour chased,
While high frail cloudlets, fed with a green light,
Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright,
Hung in the passionate dawn. He slowly turned:
A demon's leisure: eyes, first white, now burned
Like wings of kingfishers; and he arose
Barking. We trampled up and down with blows
Of sword and brazen battle-axe, while day
Gave to high noon and noon to night gave way;
And when at withering of the sun he knew
The Druid sword of Mananan, he grew
To many shapes; I lunged at the smooth throat
Of a great eel; it changed, and I but smote
A fir-tree roaring in its leafless top;
I held a dripping corpse, with livid chop
And sunken shape, against my face and breast,
When I tore down the tree; but when the west
Surged up in plumy fire, I lunged and drave
Through heart and spine, and cast him in the wave,
Lest Niam shudder.
Full of hope and dread
Those two came carrying wine and meat and bread,
And healed my wounds with unguents out of flowers
That feed white moths by some De Danaan shrine;
Then in that hall, lit by the dim sea shine,
We lay on skins of otters, and drank wine,
Brewed by the sea-gods, from huge cups that lay
Upon the lips of sea-gods in their day;
And then on heaped-up skins of otters slept.
But when the sun once more in saffron stept,
Rolling his flagrant wheel out of the deep,
We sang the loves and angers without sleep,
And all the exultant labours of the strong:
But now the lying clerics murder song
With barren words and flatteries of the weak.
In what land do the powerless turn the beak
Of ravening Sorrow, or the hand of Wrath?
For all your croziers, they have left the path
And wander in the storms and clinging snows,
Hopeless for ever: ancient Usheen knows,
For he is weak and poor and blind, and lies
On the anvil of the world.
S. PATRIC
Be still: the skies
Are choked with thunder, lightning, and fierce wind,
For God has heard, and speaks His angry mind;
Go cast your body on the stones and pray,
For He has wrought midnight and dawn and day.
USHEEN
Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder
The Fenian horses; armour torn asunder;
Laughter and cries; the armies clash and shock;
All is done now; I see the ravens flock;
Ah, cease, you mournful, laughing Fenian horn!
We feasted for three days. On the fourth morn
I found, dropping sea foam on the wide stair,
And hung with slime, and whispering in his hair,
That demon dull and unsubduable;
And once more to a day-long battle fell,
And at the sundown threw him in the surge,
To lie until the fourth morn saw emerge
His new healed shape: and for a hundred years
So warred, so feasted, with nor dreams nor fears,
Nor languor nor fatigue: and endless feast,
An endless war.
The hundred years had ceased;
I stood upon the stair: the surges bore
A beech bough to me, and my heart grew sore,
Remembering how I had stood by white-haired Finn
Under a beech at Emen and heard the thin
Outcry of bats.
And then young Niam came
Holding that horse, and sadly called my name;
I mounted, and we passed over the lone
And drifting grayness, while this monotone,
Surly and distant, mixed inseparably
Into the clangour of the wind and sea.
"I hear my soul drop down into decay,
"And Mananan's dark tower, stone by stone,
"Gather sea slime and fall the seaward way,
"And the moon goad the waters night and day,
"That all be overthrown.
"But till the moon has taken all, I wage
"War on the mightiest men under the skies,
"And they have fallen or fled, age after age:
"Light is man's love, and lighter is man's rage;
"His purpose drifts and dies. "
And then lost Niam murmured, "Love, we go
"To the Island of Forgetfulness, for lo!
"The Islands of Dancing and of Victories
"Are empty of all power. "
"And which of these
"Is the Island of Content? "
"None know," she said;
And on my bosom laid her weeping head.
BOOK III
Fled foam underneath us, and around us, a wandering and milky smoke,
High as the saddle girth, covering away from our glances the tide;
And those that fled, and that followed, from the
foam-pale distance broke;
The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.
I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And never a song sang Niam, and over my finger-tips
Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold hair,
And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.
Were we days long or hours long in riding, when rolled in a grisly peace,
An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?
And we stood on a sea's edge we saw not; for whiter
than new-washed fleece
Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke.
And we rode on the plains of the sea's edge; the sea's edge
barren and gray,
Gray sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.
But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;
Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark:
Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams
of the world and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.
Till the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems
of the hazel and oak,
A valley flowed down from his hoofs, and there in the long grass lay,
Under the starlight and shadow, a monstrous slumbering folk,
Their naked and gleaming bodies poured out and heaped in the way.
And by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade;
And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old
Could sleep on a couch of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid,
And more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold.
And each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men;
The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were
the claws of birds,
And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen,
The breathing came from those bodies, long-warless,
grown whiter than curds.
The wood was so spacious above them, that He who had stars for His flocks
Could fondle the leaves with His fingers, nor go from
His dew-cumbered skies;
So long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests
in their locks,
Filling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes.
And over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came,
Now in a place of star-fire, and now in a shadow place wide;
And the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees
in the soft star-flame,
Lay loose in a place of shadow: we drew the reins by his side.
Golden the nails of his bird-claws, flung loosely along the dim ground;
In one was a branch soft-shining, with bells more many than sighs,
In midst of an old man's bosom; owls ruffling and pacing around,
Sidled their bodies against him, filling the shade with their eyes.
And my gaze was thronged with the sleepers; no,
not since the world began,
In realms where the handsome were many, nor in glamours by demons flung,
Have faces alive with such beauty been known to the salt eye of man,
Yet weary with passions that faded when the seven-fold seas were young.
And I gazed on the bell-branch, sleep's forebear,
far sung by the Sennachies.
I saw how those slumberers, grown weary, there camping in grasses deep,
Of wars with the wide world and pacing the shores of the wandering seas,
Laid hands on the bell-branch and swayed it, and fed of unhuman sleep.
Snatching the horn of Niam, I blew a lingering note;
Came sound from those monstrous sleepers, a sound like
the stirring of flies.
He, shaking the fold of his lips, and heaving the pillar of his throat,
Watched me with mournful wonder out of the wells of his eyes.
I cried, "Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!
"And tell of your goodly household and the goodly works of your hands,
"That we may muse in the starlight and talk of the battles of old;
"Your questioner, Usheen, is worthy, he comes from the Fenian lands. "
Half open his eyes were, and held me, dull with
the smoke of their dreams;
His lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came;
Then he swayed in his fingers the bell-branch, slow dropping
a sound in faint streams
Softer than snow-flakes in April and piercing the marrow like flame.
Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth,
The moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a sea-covered stone
Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories
of the whole of my mirth,
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
In the roots of the grasses, the sorrels, I laid my body as low;
And the pearl-pale Niam lay by me, her brow on the midst of my breast;
And the horse was gone in the distance, and years after years 'gan flow;
Square leaves of the ivy moved over us, binding us down to our rest.
And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot;
How the fetlocks drip blood in the battle, when
the fallen on fallen lie rolled;
How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron's plot,
And the names of the demons whose hammers made armour for Conhor of old.
And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot;
That the spear-shaft is made out of ashwood, the shield
out of ozier and hide;
How the hammers spring on the anvil, on the spearhead's burning spot;
How the slow, blue-eyed oxen of Finn low sadly at evening tide.
But in dreams, mild man of the croziers, driving the dust
with their throngs,
Moved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales;
Came by me the kings of the Red Branch, with roaring
of laughter and songs,
Or moved as they moved once, love-making or piercing
the tempest with sails.
Came Blanid, Mac Nessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk,
Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle
on his beard never dry,
Dark Balor, as old as a forest, car borne, his mighty head sunk
Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-making eye.
And by me, in soft red raiment, the Fenians moved in loud streams,
And Grania, walking and smiling, sewed with her needle of bone,
So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not,
with creatures of dreams,
In a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.
At times our slumber was lightened. When the sun was on silver or gold;
When brushed with the wings of the owls, in the dimness
they love going by;
When a glow-worm was green on a grass leaf, lured from
his lair in the mould;
Half wakening, we lifted our eyelids, and gazed on the grass with a sigh.
So watched I when, man of the croziers, at the heel of a century fell,
Weak, in the midst of the meadow, from his miles in the midst of the air,
A starling like them that forgathered 'neath a moon waking
white as a shell.
When the Fenians made foray at morning with Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.
I awoke: the strange horse without summons out of the distance ran,
Thrusting his nose to my shoulder; he knew in his bosom deep
That once more moved in my bosom the ancient sadness of man,
And that I would leave the immortals, their dimness,
their dews dropping sleep.
O, had you seen beautiful Niam grow white as the waters are white,
Lord of the croziers, you even had lifted your hands and wept:
But, the bird in my fingers, I mounted, remembering alone that delight
Of twilight and slumber were gone, and that hoofs impatiently stept.
I cried, "O Niam! O white one! if only a twelve-houred day,
"I must gaze on the beard of Finn, and move where the old men and young
"In the Fenians' dwellings of wattle lean on the chessboards and play,
"Ah, sweet to me now were even bald Conan's slanderous tongue!
"Like me were some galley forsaken far off in Meridian isle.
"Remembering its long-oared companions, sails turning
to thread-bare rags;
"No more to crawl on the seas with long oars mile after mile,
"But to be amid shooting of flies and flowering of rushes and flags. "
Their motionless eyeballs of spirits grown mild with mysterious thought
Watched her those seamless faces from the valley's glimmering girth;
As she murmured, "O wandering Usheen, the strength of the
bell-branch is naught,
"For there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of earth.
"Then go through the lands in the saddle and see what the mortals do,
"And softly come to your Niam over the tops of the tide;
"But weep for your Niam, O Usheen, weep; for if only your shoe
"Brush lightly as haymouse earth's pebbles, you will come
no more to my side.
"O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest? "
"I saw from a distant saddle; from the earth she made her moan;
"I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn,
for breast unto breast
"We shall mingle no more, nor our gazes empty their sweetness lone.
"In the isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come.
"Were the winds less soft than the breath of a pigeon
who sleeps on her nest,
"Nor lost in the star-fires and odours the sound of the sea's vague drum?
"O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest? "
The wailing grew distant; I rode by the woods of the wrinkling bark,
Where ever is murmurous dropping, old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures live there, no weasels move in the dark;
In a reverie forgetful of all things, over the bubbling ground.
And I rode by the plains of the sea's edge, where all is barren and gray,
Gray sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away,
Like an army of old men lounging for rest from the moan of the seas.
And the winds made the sands on the sea's edge turning and turning go,
As my mind made the names of the Fenians. Far from the hazel and oak,
I rode away on the surges, where, high as the saddle bow,
Fled foam underneath me, and round me, a wandering and milky smoke.
Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,
Snatching the bird in secret; nor knew I, embosomed apart,
When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,
For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.
Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown.
If I were as I once was, the strong hoofs crushing
the sand and the shells,
Coming out of the sea as the dawn comes, a chaunt of love on my lips,
Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the bells,
I would leave no saint's head on his body from Rachlin to Bera of ships.
Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path
Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattles and woodwork made,
Your bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the rath,
And a small and a feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade.
Or weeding or ploughing with faces a-shining with much-toil wet;
While in this place and that place, with bodies unglorious,
their chieftains stood,
Awaiting in patience the straw-death, croziered one, caught in your net:
Went the laughter of scorn from my mouth like the roaring
of wind in a wood.
And because I went by them so huge and so speedy with eyes so bright,
Came after the hard gaze of youth, or an old man lifted his head:
And I rode and I rode, and I cried out, "The Fenians hunt
wolves in the night,
So sleep thee by daytime. " A voice cried, "The Fenians
a long time are dead. "
A whitebeard stood hushed on the pathway, the flesh
of his face as dried grass,
And in folds round his eyes and his mouth, he sad
as a child without milk;
And the dreams of the islands were gone, and I knew how
men sorrow and pass,
And their hound, and their horse, and their love, and their eyes
that glimmer like silk.
And wrapping my face in my hair, I murmured, "In old age they ceased";
And my tears were larger than berries, and I murmured,
"Where white clouds lie spread
"On Crevroe or broad Knockfefin, with many of old they feast
"On the floors of the gods. " He cried, "No, the gods
a long time are dead. "
And lonely and longing for Niam, I shivered and turned me about,
The heart in me longing to leap like a grasshopper into her heart;
I turned and rode to the westward, and followed the sea's old shout
Till I saw where Maive lies sleeping till starlight and midnight part.
And there at the foot of the mountain, two carried a sack full of sand,
They bore it with staggering and sweating, but fell
with their burden at length:
Leaning down from the gem-studded saddle, I flung it
five yards with my hand,
With a sob for men waxing so weakly, a sob for the Fenian's old strength.
The rest you have heard of, O croziered one; how, when divided the girth,
I fell on the path, and the horse went away like a summer fly;
And my years three hundred fell on me, and I rose,
and walked on the earth,
A creeping old man, full of sleep, with the spittle
on his beard never dry.
How the men of the sand-sack showed me a church with its belfry in air;
Sorry place, where for swing of the war-axe in my dim eyes
the crozier gleams;
What place have Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair?
Speak, you too are old with your memories, an old man surrounded
with dreams.
S. PATRIC
Where the flesh of the footsole clingeth on the burning stones
is their place;
Where the demons whip them with wires on the burning stones of wide hell,
Watching the blessed ones move far off, and the smile on God's face,
Between them a gateway of brass, and the howl of the angels who fell.
USHEEN
Put the staff in my hands; for I go to the Fenians, O cleric, to chaunt
The war-songs that roused them of old; they will rise, making clouds
with their breath
Innumerable, singing, exultant; the clay underneath them shall pant,
And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them in death.
And demons afraid in their darkness; deep horror of eyes and of wings,
Afraid their ears on the earth laid, shall listen and rise up and weep;
Hearing the shaking of shields and the quiver of stretched bowstrings,
Hearing hell loud with a murmur, as shouting and mocking we sweep.
We will tear out the flaming stones, and batter the gateway of brass
And enter, and none sayeth "No" when there enters the strongly
armed guest;
Make clean as a broom cleans, and march on as oxen move over young grass;
Then feast, making converse of wars, and of old wounds,
and turn to our rest.
S. PATRIC
On the flaming stones, without refuge, the limbs of the Fenians are tost;
None war on the masters of Hell, who could break up the world
in their rage;
But kneel and wear out the flags and pray for your soul that is lost
Through the demon love of its youth and its godless and passionate age.
USHEEN
Ah, me! to be shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain,
Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear;
All emptied of purple hours as a beggar's cloak in the rain,
As a hay-cock out on the flood, or a wolf sucked under a weir.
It were sad to gaze on the blessed and no man I loved of old there;
I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,
I will go to Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.
GLOSSARY AND NOTES
_The Pronunciation of the Irish Words. _--When I wrote the greater number
of these poems I had hardly considered the question seriously. I copied
at times somebody's perhaps fanciful phonetic spelling, and at times the
ancient spelling as I found it in some literal translation, pronouncing
the words always as they were spelt. I do not suppose I would have
defended this system at any time, but I do not yet know what system to
adopt. The modern pronunciation, which is usually followed by those who
spell the words phonetically, is certainly unlike the pronunciation of
the time when classical Irish literature was written, and, so far as I
know, no Irish scholar who writes in English or French has made that
minute examination of the way the names come into the rhythms and
measures of the old poems which can alone discover the old
pronunciation. A French Celtic scholar gave me the pronunciation of a
few names, and told me that Mr. Whitley Stokes had written something
about the subject in German, but I am ignorant of German. If I ever
learn the old pronunciation, I will revise all these poems, but at
present I can only affirm that I have not treated my Irish names as
badly as the mediaeval writers of the stories of King Arthur treated
their Welsh names.
_Mythological Gods and Heroes. _--I refer the reader for such names as
Balor and Finn and Usheen to Lady Gregory's "Cuchulain of Muirthemne"
and to her "Gods and Fighting Men. "
_The Ballad of Father Gilligan. _--A tradition among the people of
Castleisland, Kerry.
_The Ballad of Father O'Hart. _--This ballad is founded on the story of a
certain Father O'Hart, priest of Coloony, Sligo, in the last century, as
told by the present priest of Coloony in his _History of Ballisodare and
Kilvarnet_. The robbery of the lands of Father O'Hart was a kind of
robbery which occurred but rarely during the penal laws. Catholics,
forbidden to own landed property, evaded the law by giving a Protestant
nominal possession of their estates. There are instances on record in
which poor men were nominal owners of immense estates.
_The Ballad of the Foxhunter. _--Founded on an incident, probably itself
a Tipperary tradition, in Kickham's _Knockagow_.
_Bell-branch. _--A legendary branch whose shaking casts all men into a
sleep.
_The Countess Cathleen. _--I found the story of the Countess Cathleen in
what professed to be a collection of Irish folk-lore in an Irish
newspaper some years ago. I wrote to the compiler, asking about its
source, but got no answer, but have since heard that it was translated
from _Les Matinees de Timothe Trimm_ a good many years ago, and has been
drifting about the Irish press ever since. Leo Lespes gives it as an
Irish story, and though the editor of _Folklore_ has kindly advertised
for information, the only Christian variant I know of is a Donegal tale,
given by Mr. Larminie in his _West Irish Folk Tales and Romances_, of a
woman who goes to hell for ten years to save her husband, and stays
there another ten, having been granted permission to carry away as many
souls as could cling to her skirt. Leo Lespes may have added a few
details, but I have no doubt of the essential antiquity of what seems to
me the most impressive form of one of the supreme parables of the world.
The parable came to the Greeks in the sacrifice of Alcestis, but her
sacrifice was less overwhelming, less apparently irremediable. Leo
Lespes tells the story as follows:--
Ce que je vais vous dire est un recit du careme Irlandais. Le
boiteux, l'aveugle, le paralytique des rues de Dublin ou de
Limerick, vous le diraient mieux que moi, cher lecteur, si vous
alliez le leur demander, un sixpense d'argent a la main. --Il n'est
pas une jeune fille catholique a laquelle on ne l'ait appris
pendant les jours de preparation a la communion sainte, pas un
berger des bords de la Blackwater qui ne le puisse redire a la
veillee.
Il y a bien longtemps qu'il apparut tout-a-coup dans la vielle
Irlande deux marchands inconnus dont personne n'avait oui parler,
et qui parlaient neanmoins avec la plus grande perfection la langue
du pays. Leurs cheveux etaient noirs et ferres avec de l'or et
leurs robes d'une grande magnificence.
Tous deux semblaient avoir le meme age; ils paraissaient etre des
hommes de cinquante ans, car leur barbe grisonnait un peu.
Or, a cette epoque, comme aujourd'hui, l'Irlande etait pauvre, car
le soleil avait ete rare, et des recoltes presque nulles. Les
indigents ne savaient a quel sainte se vouer, et la misere devenait
de plus en plus terrible.
Dans l'hotellerie ou descendirent les marchands fastueux on chercha
a penetrer leurs desseins: mais ce fut en vain, ils demeurerent
silencieux et discrets.
Et pendant qu'ils demeurerent dans l'hotellerie, ils ne cesserent
de compter et de recompter des sacs de pieces d'or, dont la vive
clarte s'apercevait a travers les vitres du logis.
Gentlemen, leur dit l'hotesse un jour, d'ou vient que vous etes si
opulents, et que, venus pour secourir la misere publique, vous ne
fassiez pas de bonnes oeuvres?
--Belle hotesse, repondit l'un d'eux, nous n'avons pas voulu aller
au-devant d'infortunes honorables, dans la crainte d'etre trompes
par des miseres fictives: que la douleur frappe a la porte, nous
ouvrirons.
Le lendemain, quand on sut qu'il existait deux opulents etrangers
prets a prodiguer l'or, la foule assiegea leur logis; mais les
figures des gens qui en sortaient etaient bien diverses. Les uns
avaient la fierte dans le regard, les autres portaient la honte au
front. Les deux trafiquants achetaient des ames pour le demon.
L'ame d'un vieillard valait vingt pieces d'or, pas un penny de
plus; car Satan avait eu le temps d'y former hypotheque. L'ame
d'une epose en valait cinquante quand elle etait jolie, ou cent
quand elle etait laide. L'ame d'une jeune fille se payait des prix
fous: les fleurs les plus belles et les plus pures sont les plus
cheres.
Pendant ce temps, il existait dans la ville un ange de beaute, la
comtesse Ketty O'Connor. Elle etait l'idole du peuple, et la
providence des indigents. Des qu'elle eut appris que des mecreants
profitaient de la misere publique pour derober des coeurs a Dieu,
elle fit appeler son majordome.
--Master Patrick, lui dit elle, combien ai-je de pieces d'or dans
mon coffre?
--Cent mille.
--Combien de bijoux?
--Peur autant d'argent.
--Combien de chateux, de bois et de terres?
--Pour le double de ces sommes.
--Eh bien! Patrick, vendez tout ce qui n'est pas or et
apportez-m'en le montant. Je ne veux garder a moi que ce castel et
le champ qui l'entoure.
Deux jours apres, les ordres de la pieuse Ketty etaient executes et
le tresor etait distribue aux pauvres au fur et a mesure de leurs
besoins.
Ceci ne faisait pas le compte, dit la tradition, des
commis-voyageurs du malin esprit, qui ne trouvaient plus d'ames a
acheter.
Aides par un valet infame, ils penetrerent dans la retraite de la
noble dame et lui deroberent le reste de son tresor . . . en vain
lutta-t-elle de toutes ses forces pour sauver le contenu de son
coffre, les larrons diaboliques furent les plus forts. Si Ketty
avait eu les moyens de faire un signe de croix, ajoute la legende
Irlandaise, elle les eut mis en fuite, mais ses mains etaient
captives--Le larcin fut effectue. Alors les pauvres solliciterent
en vain pres de Ketty depouillee, elle ne pouvait plus secourir
leur misere;--elle les abandonnait a la tentation. Pourtant il n'y
avait plus que huit jours a passer pour que les grains et lea
fourrages arrivassent en abondance des pays d'Orient. Mais, huit
jours, c'etait un siecle: huit jours necessitaient une somme
immense pour subvenir aux exigences de la disette, et les pauvres
allaient ou expirer dans les angousses de la faim, ou, reniant les
saintes maximes de l'Evangile, vendre a vil prix leur ame, le plus
beau present de la munificence du Seigneur tout-puissant.
Et Ketty n'avait plus une obole, car elle avait abandonne son
chateux aux malheureux.
Elle passa douze heures dans les larmes et le deuil, arrachant ses
cheveux couleur de soleil et meurtrissant son sein couleur du lis:
puis elle se leva resolue, animee par un vif sentiment de
desespoir.
Elle se rendit chez les marchands d'ames.
--Que voulez-vous? dirent ils.
--Vous achetez des ames?
--Oui, un peu malgre vous, n'est ce pas, sainte aux yeux de saphir?
--Aujourd'hui je viens vous proposer un marche, reprit elle.
--Lequel?
--J'ai une ame a vendre; mais elle est chere.
--Qu'importe si elle est precieuse? l'ame, comme le diamant,
s'apprecie a sa blancheur.
--C'est la mienne, dit Ketty.
Les deux envoyes de Satan tressaillirent. Leurs griffes
s'allongerent sous leurs gants de cuir; leurs yeux gris
etincelerent--l'ame, pure, immaculee, virginale de Ketty! . . .
c'etait une acquisition inappreciable.
--Gentille dame, combien voulez-vous?
--Cent cinquante mille ecus d'or.
--C'est fait, dirent les marchands: et ils tendirent a Ketty un
parchemin cachete de noir, qu'elle signa en frissonnant.
La somme lui fut comptee.
Des qu'elle fut rentree, elle dit au majordome:
--Tenez, distribuez ceci. Avec la somme que je vous donne les
pauvres attendront la huitaine necessaire et pas une de leurs ames
ne sera livree au demon.
Puis elle s'enferma et recommanda qu'on ne vint pas la deranger.
Trois jours se passerent; elle n'appela pas; elle ne sortit pas.
Quand on ouvrit sa porte, on la trouva raide et froide: elle etait
morte de douleur.
Mais la vente de cette ame si adorable dans sa charite fut declaree
nulle par le Seigneur: car elle avait sauve ses concitoyens de la
morte eternelle.
Apres la huitaine, des vaisseaux nombreux amenerent a l'Irlande
affamee d'immenses provisions de grains.
La famine n'etait plus possible. Quant aux marchands, ils
disparurent de leur hotellerie, sans qu'on sut jamais ce qu'ils
etaient devenus.
Toutefois, les pecheurs de la Blackwater pretendent qu'ils sont
enchaines dans une prison souterraine par ordre de Lucifer jusqu'au
moment ou ils pourront livrer l'ame de Ketty qui leur a echappe. Je
vous dis la legende telle que je la sais.
--Mais les pauvres l'ont raconte d'age en age et les enfants de
Cork et de Dublin chantent encore la ballade dont voici les
derniers couplets:--
Pour sauver les pauvres qu'elle aime
Ketty donna
Son esprit, sa croyance meme:
Satan paya
Cette ame au devoument sublime,
En ecus d'or,
Disons pour racheter son crime,
_Confiteor_.
Mais l'ange qui se fit coupable
Par charite
Au sejour d'amour ineffable
Est remonte.
Satan vaincu n'eut pas de prise
Sur ce coeur d'or;
Chantons sous la nef de l'eglise,
_Confiteor_.
N'est ce pas que ce recit, ne de l'imagination des poetes
catholiques de la verte Erin, est une veritable recit de careme?
_The Countess Cathleen_ was acted in Dublin in 1899, with Mr. Marcus St.
John and Mr. Trevor Lowe as the First and Second Demon, Mr. Valentine
Grace as Shemus Rua, Master Charles Sefton as Teig, Madame San Carola as
Mary, Miss Florence Farr as Aleel, Miss Anna Mather as Oona, Mr. Charles
Holmes as the Herdsman, Mr. Jack Wilcox as the Gardener, Mr. Walford as
a Peasant, Miss Dorothy Paget as a Spirit, Miss M. Kelly as a Peasant
Woman, Mr. T. E. Wilkinson as a Servant, and Miss May Whitty as The
Countess Kathleen. They had to face a very vehement opposition stirred
up by a politician and a newspaper, the one accusing me in a pamphlet,
the other in long articles day after day, of blasphemy because of the
language of the demons or of Shemus Rua, and because I made a woman sell
her soul and yet escape damnation, and of a lack of patriotism because I
made Irish men and women, who, it seems, never did such a thing, sell
theirs. The politician or the newspaper persuaded some forty Catholic
students to sign a protest against the play, and a Cardinal, who avowed
that he had not read it, to make another, and both politician and
newspaper made such obvious appeals to the audience to break the peace,
that a score or so of police were sent to the theatre to see that they
did not. I had, however, no reason to regret the result, for the stalls,
containing almost all that was distinguished in Dublin, and a gallery of
artisans alike insisted on the freedom of literature.
After the performance in 1899 I added the love scene between Aleel and
the Countess, and in this new form the play was revived in New York by
Miss Wycherley as well as being played a good deal in England and
America by amateurs. Now at last I have made a complete revision to make
it suitable for performance at the Abbey Theatre. The first two scenes
are almost wholly new, and throughout the play I have added or left out
such passages as a stage experience of some years showed me encumbered
the action; the play in its first form having been written before I knew
anything of the theatre. I have left the old end, however, in the
version printed in the body of this book, because the change for
dramatic purposes has been made for no better reason than that
audiences--even at the Abbey Theatre--are almost ignorant of Irish
mythology--or because a shallow stage made the elaborate vision of armed
angels upon a mountain-side impossible. The new end is particularly
suited to the Abbey stage, where the stage platform can be brought out
in front of the proscenium and have a flight of steps at one side up
which the Angel comes, crossing towards the back of the stage at the
opposite side. The principal lighting is from two arc lights in the
balcony which throw their lights into the faces of the players, making
footlights unnecessary. The room at Shemus Rua's house is suggested by a
great grey curtain--a colour which becomes full of rich tints under the
stream of light from the arcs. The two or more arches in the third scene
permit the use of a gauze. The short front scene before the last is just
long enough when played with incidental music to allow the scene set
behind it to be changed. The play when played without interval in this
way lasts a little over an hour.
The play was performed at the Abbey Theatre for the first time on
December 14, 1911, Miss Maire O'Neill taking the part of the Countess,
and the last scene from the going out of the Merchants was as follows:--
(MERCHANTS _rush out_. ALEEL _crawls into the middle of the room;
the twilight has fallen and gradually darkens as the scene goes
on_. )
ALEEL
They're rising up--they're rising through the earth,
Fat Asmodel and giddy Belial,
And all the fiends. Now they leap in the air.
But why does Hell's gate creak so? Round and round.
Hither and hither, to and fro they're running.
(_He moves about as though the air was full of spirits. _ OONA _enters_. )
Crouch down, old heron, out of the blind storm.
OONA
Where is the Countess Cathleen? All this day
Her eyes were full of tears, and when for a moment
Her hand was laid upon my hand, it trembled.
And now I do not know where she is gone.
ALEEL
Cathleen has chosen other friends than us,
And they are rising through the hollow world.
Demons are out, old heron.
OONA
God guard her soul.
ALEEL
She's bartered it away this very hour,
As though we two were never in the world.
(_He kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words. The_
PEASANTS _return. They carry the_ COUNTESS CATHLEEN _and lay her upon
the ground before_ OONA _and_ ALEEL. _She lies there as if dead. _)
OONA
O, that so many pitchers of rough clay
Should prosper and the porcelain break in two!
(_She kisses the hands of_ CATHLEEN. )
A PEASANT
We were under the tree where the path turns
When she grew pale as death and fainted away.
CATHLEEN
O, hold me, and hold me tightly, for the storm
Is dragging me away.
(OONA _takes her in her arms_. A WOMAN _begins to wail_. )
PEASANTS
Hush!
PEASANTS
Hush!
PEASANT WOMEN
Hush!
OTHER PEASANT WOMEN
Hush!
CATHLEEN (_half rising_)
Lay all the bags of money in a heap,
And when I am gone, old Oona, share them out
To every man and woman: judge, and give
According to their needs.
A PEASANT WOMAN
And will she give
Enough to keep my children through the dearth?
ANOTHER PEASANT WOMAN
O, Queen of Heaven, and all you blessed saints,
Let us and ours be lost, so she be shriven.
CATHLEEN
Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel;
I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes
Upon the nest under the eave, before
She wander the loud waters. Do not weep
Too great a while, for there is many a candle
On the High Altar though one fall. Aleel,
Who sang about the dancers of the woods,
That know not the hard burden of the world,
Having but breath in their kind bodies, farewell!
And farewell, Oona, you who played with me
And bore me in your arms about the house
When I was but a child--and therefore happy,
Therefore happy even like those that dance.
The storm is in my hair and I must go.
(_She dies. _)
OONA
Bring me the looking-glass.
(A WOMAN _brings it to her out of inner room_. OONA _holds glass over
the lips of_ CATHLEEN. _All is silent for a moment, then she speaks in a
half-scream. _)
O, she is dead!
A PEASANT
She was the great white lily of the world.
A PEASANT
She was more beautiful than the pale stars.
AN OLD PEASANT WOMAN
The little plant I loved is broken in two.
(ALEEL _takes looking-glass from_ OONA _and flings it upon floor, so
that it is broken in many pieces_. )
ALEEL
I shatter you in fragments, for the face
That brimmed you up with beauty is no more;
And die, dull heart, for you that were a mirror
Are but a ball of passionate dust again!
And level earth and plumy sea, rise up!
And haughty sky, fall down!
A PEASANT WOMAN
Pull him upon his knees,
His curses will pluck lightning on our heads.
ALEEL
Angels and devils clash in the middle air,
And brazen swords clang upon brazen helms.
Look, look, a spear has gone through Belial's eye!
(_A winged_ ANGEL, _carrying a torch and a sword, enters from the_ R.
_with eyes fixed upon some distant thing. The_ ANGEL _is about to pass
out to the_ L. _when_ ALEEL _speaks. The_ ANGEL _stops a moment and
turns_. )
Look no more on the half-closed gates of Hell,
But speak to me whose mind is smitten of God,
That it may be no more with mortal things:
And tell of her who lies there.
(_The_ ANGEL _turns again and is about to go, but is seized by_ ALEEL. )
Till you speak
You shall not drift into eternity.
THE ANGEL
The light beats down; the gates of pearl are wide.
And she is passing to the floor of peace,
And Mary of the seven times wounded heart
Has kissed her lips, and the long blessed hair
Has fallen on her face; the Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
(ALEEL _releases the_ ANGEL _and kneels_. )
OONA
Tell them to walk upon the floor of peace,
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
_Down by the Salley Gardens. _--An extension of three lines sung to me by
an old woman at Ballisodare.
_Findrinny (Findruine). _--A kind of white bronze.
_Finvarra (Finbar). _--The king of the faeries of Connaught.
_Hell. _--In the older Irish books Hell is always cold, and it may be
because the Fomoroh, or evil powers, ruled over the north and the
winter. Christianity adopted as far as possible the Pagan symbolism in
Ireland as elsewhere, and Irish poets, when they spoke of "the cold
flagstone of Hell," may have repeated Pagan symbolism. The folk-tales,
and Keating in his description of Hell, make use, however, of the
ordinary symbolism of fire.
_The Lamentation of the Pensioner. _--This poem is little more than a
translation into verse of the very words of an old Wicklow peasant. Fret
means doom or destiny.
_The Land of Heart's Desire. _--This little play was produced at the
Avenue Theatre in the spring of 1894, with the following cast:--Maurteen
Bruin, Mr. James Welch; Shawn Bruin, Mr. A. E. W. Mason; Father Hart, Mr.
G. R. Foss; Bridget Bruin, Miss Charlotte Morland; Maire Bruin, Miss
Winifred Fraser; A Faery Child, Miss Dorothy Paget. It ran for a little
over six weeks. It was revived in America in 1901, when it was taken on
tour by Mrs. Lemoyne. It has been played two or three times
professionally since then in America and a great many times in England
and America by amateurs. Till lately it was not part of the repertory of
the Abbey Theatre, for I had grown to dislike it without knowing what I
disliked in it. This winter, however, I have made many revisions and now
it plays well enough to give me pleasure. It is printed in this book in
the new form, which was acted for the first time on February 22, 1912,
at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. At the Abbey Theatre, where the platform
of the stage comes out in front of the curtain, the curtain falls before
the priest's last words. He remains outside the curtain and the words
are spoken to the audience like an epilogue.
_The Meditation of the Old Fisherman. _--This poem is founded upon some
things a fisherman said to me when out fishing in Sligo Bay.
_Northern Cold. _--The Fomor, the powers of death and darkness and cold
and evil, came from the north.
_Nuala. _--The wife of Finvarra.
_Rose. _--The rose is a favourite symbol with the Irish poets, and has
given a name to several poems both Gaelic and English, and is used in
love poems, in addresses to Ireland like Mr. Aubrey de Vere's poem
telling how "The little black rose shall be red at last," and in
religious poems, like the old Gaelic one which speaks of "the Rose of
Friday," meaning the Rose of Austerity.
_Salley. _--Willow.
_Seven Hazel-trees. _--There was once a well overshadowed by seven sacred
hazel-trees, in the midst of Ireland. A certain woman plucked their
fruit, and seven rivers arose out of the well and swept her away. In my
poems this well is the source of all the waters of this world, which are
therefore seven-fold.
_The Wanderings of Usheen. _--The poem is founded upon the middle Irish
dialogues of S. Patric and Usheen and a certain Gaelic poem of the last
century. The events it describes, like the events in most of the poems
in this volume, are supposed to have taken place rather in the
indefinite period, made up of many periods, described by the folk-tales,
than in any particular century; it therefore, like the later Fenian
stories themselves, mixes much that is mediaeval with much that is
ancient. The Gaelic poems do not make Usheen go to more than one island,
but a story in _Silva Gadelica_ describes "four paradises," an island to
the north, an island to the west, an island to the south, and Adam's
paradise in the east.
_Printed in Great Britain by_
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED
WOKING AND LONDON
Transcriber's Notes:
Page 16: 'thictkes' changed to 'thickets'
Page 172: 'He brings in' could be 'She brings in'
Page 263: 'Before this duy' changed to 'Before this day'
Page 290: 'Far from the hazel and oak. ' changed to 'Far from
the hazel and oak,'
Page 295: 'move far off' could be 'move far oft'
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