The Book of Irish Poetry 1000

P R I N TED B Y TH E E DU CA TI ON A L COM P AN Y I RE LA N D LI M I TED TA LB OT P R E S S DU B LI N D eh i t at i un To DOU LA G S YDE . i t H LL D . D . t . , , L ’ P mu den t of th e Ga oh c Lea gue B ca u e a lumn i I r i sh Colle e e s , of one g , An d some of fa ther s of tbe self-se me Cb umh , S tr i ving to swell th e sum of I r i sh k n o led e w g , D a r Cr eeveen B avi a we un i te our e n , sem i) ; - And each of us an I r i sh B a t di e broth er “ ” I n S ongs of Con na ch t an d Th e " Ga l h as oun d e f , — Thi s P oem-B ook i s your s f or to n o oth er B y w eb a bound . A . P . G. 323292 T IN RODU CTION . OF es Irish anthologi of verse there have been many . ’ ’ Miss Irish P Charlotte Brooke s oetry , a volume of Irish the translations of her own from the , led way in the ’ 1 8 Hardiman s I rish year 7 9, and was followed by In 1 8 1 s Minstrelsy , 3 with metrical translation by Thomas ’ D Alton Furlong , Henry Grattan Curran , and John . Both these volumes contained the Irish originals , as well as the translations from them , and both volumes were extremely valuable for their preservation of those ff originals , but su ered from the over ornate , and , indeed , often extremely artificial English verse into which they were translated . Highly finished that verse undoubtedly was ’ here and there as fine as much of Macpherson s Ossian . i But it was , as a rule , as untrue a presentment in Engl sh ’ verse of Irish Gaelic poetry as Pope s version of the ’ Iliad and Dryden s translation of the Aeneid are untrue expressions Of the spirit and form of the Greek and Latin . t originals As a mat er of fact , these translators from the Irish had not learnt the lesson , not long afterwards learnt by Edward Walsh and Sir Samuel Ferguson , that the use - c of that poetical Hiberno English spee h , recently made popular by Douglas Hyde , Synge , Lady Gregory and others , was a far truer vehicle for the expression , in trans R vi INT ODUCTION . n n t latio or adaptatio , of Irish Gaelic poe ry . Walsh indeed published his own tran slations of Reliques of Ancient Jacobite Poetry ( 1 844) and his more char acteristic Irish Popular Songs it might almost i s be thought , as a protest aga n t the artificial character of not previous collections of the kind , excepting Mont ’ omer s g y anthology , which preceded his second volume ’ ” by a year . Dr . Drummond s Ancient Irish Minstrelsy , f in 1 8 2 at translated by himsel , which appeared 5 , is an tempt to hark back to the eighteenth century and early n of ineteenth century formal school poetry , but has ’ ” Cu chullin s fine passages , such as his Chariot , expanded from a passage in The Breach in the Plain at M irth m u e ne. an This wise tendency to treat Irish poetry in Irish way , through the medi um of what I have already called Hiberno of English speech , was lost sight by the Young Irelanders , whose work was , as a rule , oratorical rather than poetical , in when verse became the medium , or very large part , the medium of their political propaganda . Thomas Davis and his friends fell more under the influence of Scott and Macaulay than under that of the Gaelic poets immediately preceding them or contemporary with them . No doubt they took a pleasure in printing Irish words in Irish characters here and there in some of their national and lyrics , and now again we find , in Davis more par ticularl y , the Irish human touch , which , when he had time e s . to write poetry rather than v r e , so distinguishes him But as a rule the stirring appeals to patriotism on the part of the Y oung Ireland poets is little better than versified oratory . R INT ODUCTION . vii Thomas Moore was more individual as a poet than any of the Young Ireland group yet , whilst he undoubtedly possessed the Irish characteristics of wit and fancy , sentiment and satire , he had nothing of the spirit of the in Irish countryside his composition . Irish was not spoken by his parents or neighbours in Dublin , and when years afterwards he was seeking materials for his History of Ireland in the library of Trinity College , Dublin , he was amazed to find what a great body of Gaelic literature in prose and verse , utterly new to him , lay collected there before hi s eyes . The classics inspired the anacreontics of his i Thomas Little poet cal tales , coloured though they were by his Celti c imagination as well as by his West Indian recollections , were entirely derived from Eastern , never from Irish sources . The only purely Irish influence of upon his work was that Irish music , and that influence has made his Irish melodies , in part at any rate , imperish able . In spite of his fine as well as faithful translations f rom the Irish , the influence of Byron upon Callanan is O ffi bvious , and Gerald Gri n , though much nearer to the spirit of his native soil as a poet than most of his con temporaries , was drawn , like so many young Irishmen of o letters , under L ndon literary influences , and was never n . more tha half emancipated from them Mangan , on the n other ha d , had the good fortune to be able to study in translation some of the finer specimens of Gaelic verse , and his essentially mystic genius and fine musical ear drew from that old Irish poetry a something which is i lack ng in the writings of his contemporaries , Ferguson and Edward Walsh alone excepted . Yet Mangan , like R viii INT ODUCTION . n f or Moore , we t to the East some of his inspiration , l though , un ike Moore , he drew more of it from contem orar G n o i a p y erma p etry , wh ch he translated , dapted and a n imit ted with characteristic power . But Ma gan at the end of his career did a hasty piece of work of a thoroughly Irish kind in his translations of the Gaelic Poets and ” ’ P O Dal oetry of Munster , for John y , the Gaelic pub ” lisher few Of and bookseller , which , as Mr . D . T . ’ O Dono hue g , his biographer , rightly says , are of high ” poetical merit . But it is only fair to add , in Mr . ’ ' O Dono hu e s t g words hat Mangan , who did not live to see them published , would have given them , had he “ survived their appearance , as he often did with his earlier poems , an additional polish or other necessary revision . The vulgar verse which exploited the stage Irishman before hi s time was transformed by Samuel Lover into a new medium for the expression of humorous character sketches of Irish life . These lyrics , written to Irish popular airs or original compositions by the and author , had a great vogue in their day , on the strength Of the reputation achieved by them Lover pub l h d n - is e an A glo Irish anthology of Irish poetry , Lyrics " 1 8 8 . of Ireland , in 5 Much pains has been bestowed on the collection and classification of the poems in this - illustrated anthology . Its Anglo Irish character is evident from the small proportion of either translations or adap — tations from the Irish that it contains about one poem — “ in ten and sentimental poems are too predominant in the volume . Much of it , moreover , is mere con i ial v v and comic , historical and political verse , but it R U INT OD CTION . ix t s is , never heless the mo t comprehensive , as well as typical et a collection of Irish verse that had y ppeared , and , as c a s t in the it l im to be , the mos national widest sense ’ of Croker s P the word . Crofton opular Songs of Ireland is a collection of An glo - Irish folk songs and ballads gleaned from an unfortunately narrow field , but though much still remains to be done to supplement it , more especially in the north of Ireland , Dr . Joyce has in his Folk Song volume of 1 906 added a considerable number of Irish popular ballads in the English tongue ’ Crok r to e s anthology . Meantime other anthologies of Irish poetry were ’ n : ha Dufl s f seei g the light C rles Gavan y , a terwards ’ ff - k Sir Charles Gavan Du y s , well nown volume of P The Ballad oetry of Ireland , which had reached ’ a fortieth edition in 1 869 ; Hayes s two volumes of The Ballads of Ireland a very comprehensive but far ” n from choice collection , and The Harp of Eri , a small R but interesting anthology , edited by alph Varian , 1 86 N and published in 9, in which orthern writers are more adequately represented than elsewhere To these the may be added Spirit of the Nation , a collection of the best of the poems published in that famous political journal edited by Gavan Duffy ; and Michael Joseph ’ Barry s collection , The Songs of Ireland to which Thomas Davis wrote a stirring introduction Denis Florence Mccarthy ’s The Book of Irish Ballads and Hercules Ellis ’s Songs of Ireland and Romances and Ballads of Ireland ( 1 849 and 1 85 0 ) and William Johnston ’s Boyne Book of Poetry and ) 1 8 .

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