There is a deep sadness in this poem and I can remember feeling an ache of loneliness for the old woman as she trudged the roads in despair. Ours was the era of the Travelling People and when they came to our area they camped by the bridge at the bottom of the hill below our house. They came in colourful horse-drawn caravans, though some of them just had carts and at night would set up their canvas camps under the cart. Sometimes during the night they opened the gate into adjoining farm fields to give their horses free grazing, which did not endear them to some farmers, but others had no objections. Also, it was not unknown that they might occasionally help themselves to eggs, chickens or hens. The men were tinsmiths who would repair pots and pans and broken umbrellas, and they also swept chimneys, so they provided a much-needed service at the time. They also traded in horses, and large crowds of them gathered for the local horse fair in our town, and as long hours of drinking were part of these fairs that could sometimes finish up in drunken brawls either between themselves or with members of the local community, and the local guards often came to restore law and order. But both communities got on fairly well together and over the years each side forged working relationships with certain others, and they respected and trusted each other. The travelling women did likewise with rural women, and they brought a certain amount of colour into the lives of these women, as often they were fortune-tellers and they also came with baskets of colourful paper flowers, holy pictures, statues, medals, clothes pegs, mothballs, and endless supplies of other bits and pieces. Of course, we children loved them and to us they were exotic and colourful with their brightly coloured shawls framing tanned faces, from beneath which a brown baby might peep out. We thought that they had a great life on the road, a colourful life full of activity, a wonderful life and we envied them. So the following poem painted a perfect picture of what we visualised their life on the road to be. Children always want happy endings! Don’t we all?

  The Pedlar’s Caravan

  I wish I lived in a caravan,

  With a horse to drive, like a pedlar-man!

  Where he comes from nobody knows,

  Or where he goes to, but on he goes.

  His caravan has windows two,

  And a chimney of tin, that the smoke comes through;

  He has a wife, with a baby brown,

  And they go riding from town to town.

  Chairs to mend, and delf to sell!

  He clashes the basins like a bell;

  Tea-trays, baskets ranged in order,

  Plates with the alphabet round the border.

  The roads are brown, and the sea is green,

  But his house is like a bathing machine;

  The world is round, and he can ride,

  Rumble and splash to the other side.

  With the pedlar-man I should like to roam,

  And write a book when I came home;

  All the people would read my book,

  Just like the Travels of Captain Cook.

  W. B. Rands

  There was a different kind of traveller poem in our schoolbooks too, a kind of wanderer-dreamer poem, where we imagine another life, elsewhere. These we studied more at secondary-school level. I well remember our English teacher – she and her husband had set up a small secondary school in our town. She was quick-tempered, impatient and intolerant, and to our minds certainly not designed for teaching! But she had one overriding virtue in that she loved English literature with a passion, and she managed to impart this to us. She wanted desperately to get into our minds the images that the writers painted in hers and she must have suffered greatly trying to transplant the complexities of Hopkins and the intricacies of Shakespearean language into our disinterested heads. She tried very hard to encourage in us an appreciation of Yeats and explained his dream world, as expressed in this poem that everybody in Ireland will have learned at some stage.

  The Lake Isle of Innisfree

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

  Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

  Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

  There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

  And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

  I will arise and go now, for always night and day

  I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

  While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

  I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

  W.B.Yeats

  The travelling woman of ‘An Old Woman of the Roads’ and the poet W.B.Yeats were from two different worlds, but both dreamed of another place. I wonder if this fostered a wanderlust in us too? The poets and writers in our schoolbooks took us on many an imaginary and enjoyable journey, and the words and the imagery stayed forever printed on the back pages of our minds.

  In ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, Yeats created a vision of a visit into a fantasy world which opened doors in our minds that enabled us to extend our world into that zone. If a poet could create these worlds why not we as well? Children know no boundaries of the imagination. On a distant hill across the river from our house was a long, meandering wood known as the Island Wood, and as I learned ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ that became my hazel wood. We seldom visited it because it was so far away over many fields and we had to cross the river en route, but when we went there at Christmas to collect holly it was a dark, mysterious place full of glistening green holly. Maybe the fact that it was far away and somewhat unattainable added to its mystical appeal.

  The Song of Wandering Aengus

  I went out to the hazel wood,

  Because a fire was in my head,

  And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

  And hooked a berry to a thread;

  And when white moths were on the wing,

  And moth-like stars were flickering out,

  I dropped the berry in a stream

  And caught a little silver trout.

  When I had laid it on the floor

  I went to blow the fire a-flame,

  But something rustled on the floor,

  And someone called me by my name:

  It had become a glimmering girl

  With apple blossom in her hair

  Who called me by my name and ran

  And faded through the brightening air.

  Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass,

  And pluck till time and times are done,

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.

  W.B.Yeats

  And now on the road between Innishannon and Bandon we have a sculpture of ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ – not an easy poem to depict in stone, but this beautiful sculpture captures the indefinable imagery and magic of the poem.

  Chapter 12

  The Long Memory

  In our secondary-school years, poems were parsed and analysed, but when we were in the junior classes with no such requirements, the essence and rhythms of the words simply soaked into our senses and we took our own meaning and our own sense of rhythm from them. ‘The Minstrel Boy’ was up for grabs and we decided that this was a marching song with a military beat, so we marched around the kitchen in military formation, cracking our strong leather boots with their iron-tipped heels off the stone floor and singing it at the tops of our voices. This was to help us learn off the words because we must have thought that the rhythm of the steps would beat the words more easily into our brains. Our long-suffering mother never protested!

  The Minstrel Boy

  The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you’ll find him;

  His father’s sword he has girded on,

  And his wild harp slung behind him.

  ‘Land of song!’ said the warrior-bard,

  ‘Though all the world betrays thee,

  One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,

  One faithful harp shall praise thee!’

  The Minstrel fell!– but the foeman’s chain

  Could not bring his proud soul under;

  The harp he loved ne’er spoke again,

  For he tore its chords asunder;

  And said, ‘No chains shall sully thee,

  Thou soul of love and bravery!

  Thy songs were made for the pure and free,

  They shall never sound in slavery.’

  Thomas Moore

  Some of these poems and stories stayed with us, or at least bits of them did, never to be forgotten. It’s probably the lines that we loved most that we best remember. When my father quoted his favourite lines you could feel that he enjoyed remembering them because his face assumed a different expression and his voice changed, and you knew that he was visualising the scene he was describing. Years afterwards I could not differentiate whether it was he or I who had originally learnt the following poem, so maybe the two of us had learnt it and shared the pleasure of remembering it together. When my father quoted from it he did so in deep, sombre tones as if he was delivering a eulogy at a funeral. Maybe he felt that he should in some way be in harmony with what he was reciting.

  The Harp that Once through Tara’s Halls

  The harp that once through Tara’s halls

  The soul of music shed,

  Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls,

  As if that soul were fled.

  So sleeps the pride of former days,

  So glory’s thrill is oe’r,

  And hearts, that once beat high for praise,

  Now feel that pulse no more.

  No more to chiefs and ladies bright

  The harp of Tara swells,

  The chord alone that breaks at night,

  Its tale of ruin tells.

  Thus freedom now so seldom wakes,

  The only throb she gives,

  Is when some heart indignant breaks,

  To show that still she lives.

  Thomas Moore

  Whereas ‘The Minstrel Boy’ had an invigorating tempo and beat, and the memories of ‘Tara’s Halls’ spoke of faded glories of the past, there was another poem more finely tuned in its pathos and we learned this with a sense of sadness because the poet captured an almost intangible essence into which we were drawn. The ‘Lament for Thomas McDonagh’ has a deep sense of loss delicately interwoven into the fields, so we could identify with the scene that Francis Ledwidge was painting. The lowing of a cow is a deep, earthy, mournful sound – maybe the bellowing in the pain of calving echoes the pathos and depth of the poem. We knew all about the delight of the cows in ‘pleasant meads’ as we saw it regularly when they sighted fresh fields of grazing, so despite the sadness of the poem we got the ray of hope at the very end. Francis Ledwidge was speaking our language.

  Lament for Thomas McDonagh

  He shall not hear the bittern cry

  In the wild sky where he is lain,

  Nor voices of the sweeter birds,

  Above the wailing of the rain.

  Nor shall he know when loud March blows

  Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill,

  Blowing to flame the golden cup

  Of many an upset daffodil.

  But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor

  And pastures poor with greedy weeds

  Perhaps he’ll hear her low at morn,

  Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.

  Francis Ledwidge

  The poems of our poets were part of us and gave voice to our thoughts, and enabled us to see our world through their eyes. What a gift! As he grew old my father would sometimes smilingly quote his favourite bit from Thomas Moore’s song ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, a great favourite with his generation.

  …I feel like one

  Who treads alone

  Some banquet-hall deserted,

  Whose lights are fled,

  Whose garlands dead,

  And all but he departed!

  But he was not a singer, and on the night of the Stations or the threshing, or when there was a family gathering for returned emigrants and there was a sing-song, my father opted out. But the rest of us waded in whether we were talented or otherwise. My brother was our lead singer as he had a wonderful tenor voice and could soar high with ‘The Lark in the Clear Air’ or slow down to ‘She Moved through the Fair’. All my sisters were good singers and so we ranged from the foot of ‘Sliabh na mBan’ to where the ‘Shannon River Meets the Sea’. Eventually the self-appointed compere for the night would look in my direction, but unfortunately I was not vocally blessed and the sister who was in charge of operations was delighted to introduce me as the crow of the family. But the audience were kind and helpful, and would helicopter in with a rescue remedy when I faltered, and a combined chorus would help me get Kate and Pat McGee from ‘Way Down in the County Kerry’ jigging into action around the kitchen floor. When the repertoire of the young was eventually exhausted it was the turn of some of neighbours, and the party piece of one man was ‘Emmet’s Speech from the Dock’, to which we all listened with rapt attention. This particular neighbour had only one string to his party bow and because we heard it at every sing-song we could all repeat it word-perfect, so if Emmet lost his direction around the dock we soon had him upright and back in full flow. Recitations were very much part of any gathering and ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ and ‘The Road Downhill was an Easy Road, so that was the road we went’ were all familiar to our ears. Maybe because emigration was very much part of our lives, some of the recitations had an American cowboy flavour. Then Mick, who lived nearby, always had his ‘box’ at the ready and so the songs and recitations were often interspersed with instrumental recitals with which we could sometimes sing along. My mother was not into singing but would eventually be persuaded to comply and would come forth with:

  Darling, I am growing old,

  Silver threads among the gold.

  She had another song that I have never heard sung since and I now remember only the first few lines (I tried Google and it failed me! First time for everything.).

  In a tumble-down attic,

  That was grim and bare,

  An old man lay dying one day,

  He said he was dying

  But clasped in his hand

  Was a letter that was faded and grey.

  And the song continued on to tell a sad saga of a long-forgotten love affair where his beloved married his best friend, with all the usual romantic remembering. We thought that it was wonderful because, of course, little girls can never get enough romantic stories, especially ones about lost loves. So my poor mother had to make regular visits up to this tumble-down attic. She must often have regretted taking us up there in the first place!

  But mingled through all these songs, poems, myths, legends and facts, came a strong sense of our roots.

  Chapter 13

  Royal Roots

  For children, abandonment by their parents must be the most heart-breaking and unimaginable fate possible, and for that reason the story of the Children of Lir lingers forever in a child’s memory. So the fate that befell the Children of Lir was for us terrifying and the fact that it happened thousands of years earlier made no difference because children have no concept of that kind of time span. This myth connected us to our ancient roots of Irishness. In my childhood we were a new nation, but were still well rooted back in an ancient past of old stories and legends.

  The voices of the Children of Lir have never faded for me. They echo down through the corridors of our history and can still be heard in our music and song. We celebrate them too in many images, children’s stories and Celtic designs.

  This is the version I remember best. We learned it in one of the senior classes at primary school from the Land of Youth readers.

  The Children of Lir

  Silent; oh Moyle!, be the roar of thy waters,

  Break not, ye breezes, your chains of repose,

  While, murmuring mournfully, Lir’s lonely daughter,

  Tells to the night-star her tale of woes.

  When shall the swan, her death-note ringing,

  Sleep, with wings in darkness furl’d?

  When will heav’n, its sweet bell ringing,

  Call my spirit from this stormy world?

  Sadly, oh Moyle, to thy winter wave weeping,

  Fate bids me languish long ages away,

  Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping,

  Still doth the pure light its dawning delay.

  When will that day-star, mildly springing,

  Warm our isle with peace and love?

  When will heav’n, its sweet bell ringing,

  Call my spirit to the fields above.

  Thomas Moore

  In this poem Thomas Moore blends together the legend of the Children of Lir and the story of the first bells of Christianity pealing in Erin. The legend of the Children of Lir tells us about King Lir and his four much-loved, beautiful children, Fionnuala, Aodh, Fiachra and Conn, who had been turned into four swans by their jealous step-mother for nine hundred years. The heartbroken father spent the remainder of his life at the side of Lake Derravarragh to be near his children. Under the spell the children retained their human voices and could still sing beautifully, which was a great source of comfort to their father. People who came to the lakeside were soothed and calmed by their wonderful singing. Their first three hundred years were spent in that lake, the second three hundred years in the Sea of Moyle, and the third three hundred years in Sidh Fionnachaidh. The wicked spell would be broken only when they would hear the first bell of Christianity toll. When they heard the bell, the spell was broken and they came out of the lake but were immediately changed into very, very old people, who lay down and died. But before they died, the monk Caomhog christened them, and as they died the children changed back into the beautiful children they had been nine hundred years earlier.

 

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