The Book of Irish Poetry

PstiHm liiiill 111 THE BOOK OF IRISH POETRY Drawn 6y] iceo. Morroxv Raftery, the Blind Poet of Connaught Every • Irishman's • Library General Editors: Ai^FRED PercEvai, Graves, m.a. William Magennis, m.a. Douglas Hyde, ll.d. THE BOOK OF IRISH POETRY ior..;<j j"»o.iaii'y i '^ EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALFRED PERCEVAL GRAVES, M.A. T. FISHER UNWIN LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE LEIPSIC: INSELSTRASSE 20 Printed by Thk Educational Company OF iRKirAND Limited AT The Tai^bot Press Dubinin ; 2?eliicatt0n . To . Douglas Hyde, ll.d., o.utt. Pr*»ident of the Gaelie Leaaue Because, alumni of one Irish College^ And sons of fathers of the self-same Church, Striving to swell the sum of Irish knowledge. Dear Creeveen Eevinn, we unite our search And each of us an Irish Bardic brother In ''Songs of Connachf and "The ' Gael ' has found, This Poem-Book is yours—for to no other By such a kindly friendship am I bound. A. P. G. Of«^o<jy.^ INTRODUCTION. Of anthologies of Irish verse there have been many. Miss Charlotte Brooke's " Irish Poetry," a volume of translations of her own from the Irish, led the way in the year 1789, and was followed by Hardiman's " Irish Minstrelsy," in 183 1 , with metrical translations by Thomas Furlong, Henry Grattan Curran, and John D 'Alton. 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 originals, but suffered 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. But it was, as a rule, as untrue a presentment in Eiiglish 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 originals. As a matter 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 of that poetical Hiberno-English speech, recently made popular by Douglas Hyde, Synge, Lady Gregory and others, was a far truer vehicle for the expression, in trans- V VI INTRODUCTION. lation or adaptation, of Irish Gaelic poetry. Walsh indeed published his own translations of " Reliques of Ancient Jacobite Poetry " (1844) and his more char- " " acteristic Irish Popular Songs (1847), it might almost be thought, as a protest against the artificial character of previous collections of the kind, not excepting Mont- gomery's anthology, which preceded his second volume by a year. Dr. Drummond's " Ancient Irish Minstrelsy," translated by himself, which appeared in 1852, is an at- tempt to hark back to the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century formal school of poetry, but has fine passages, such as his " CuchuUin's Chariot," expanded from a passage in " The Breach in the Plain at Muirthemne." This wise tendency to treat Irish poetry in an Irish way, through the medium of what I have already called Hiberno- English speech, was lost sight of by the Young Irelanders, whose work was, as a rule, oratorical rather than poetical, when verse became the medium, or in 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 lyrics, and now and again we find, in Davis more par- ticularly, the Irish human touch, which, when he had time to write poetry rather than verse, so distinguishes him. But as a rule the stirring appeals to patriotism on the part of the Young Ireland poets is Httle better than versified oratory. INTRODUCTION. Vll 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 Irish countryside in his composition. Irish was not spoken by his parents or neighbours in DubHn, 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 his eyes. The classics inspired the anacreontics " " of Thomas Little ; his poetical tales, coloured though they were by his Celtic imagination as well as by his West Indian recollections, were entirely derived from Eastern, never from Irish sources. The only purely Irish influence upon his work was that of 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 from the Irish, the influence of Byron upon Callanan is obvious, and Gerald Griffin, though much nearer to the spirit of his native soil as a poet than most of his contemporaries, was drawn, like so many young Irishmen of letters, under London literary influences, and was never more than half emancipated from them. Mangan, on the other hand, 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 lacking in the writings of his contemporaries, Ferguson and Edward Walsh alone excepted. Yet Mangan, like Vlll INTRODUCTION. Moore, went to the East for some of his inspiration, though, unlike Moore, he drew more of it from contemporary German poetry, which he translated, adapted and imitated with characteristic power. But Mangan 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 Poetry of Munster," for John O'Daly, the Gaelic pub- lisher and bookseller, " few of which," as Mr. D. T. O'Donoghue, his biographer, rightly says, " are of high poetical merit." But it is only fair to add, in Mr. O'Donoghue's words, that 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 his 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 author, had a great vogue in their day, and on the strength of the reputation achieved by them Lover published an Anglo-Irish anthology of Irish poetry, " Lyrics of Ireland," in 1858. 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- vivial and comic, historical and political " verse, but it "; INTRODUCTION. IX is, nevertheless the most comprehensive, as well as typical collection of Irish verse that had yet appeared, and, as it claims to be, the most " national " in the widest sense of the word. Crofton Croker's " Popular Songs of Ireland " is a collection of Anglo-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 1906 added a considerable number of Irish popular ballads in the English tongue to Croker's anthology. Meantime other anthologies of Irish poetry were seeing the light : Charles Gavan Duffy's, afterwards Sir Charles Gavan Duffy's, well-known volume of " The Ballad Poetry of Ireland," which had reached " a fortieth edition in 1869 ; Hayes's two volumes of The " Ballads of Ireland (1855), a very comprehensive but far from choice collection, and " The Harp of Erin," a small but interesting anthology, edited by Ralph Varian, and published in 1869, in which Northern writers are more adequately represented than elsewhere. To these may be added the " 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" (1845), to which Thomas Davis wrote a stirring introduction ; Denis Florence McCarthy's " The Book of Irish Ballads (1846), and Hercules Ellis's "Songs of Ireland" and " Romances and Ballads of Ireland " (1849 and 1850) and William Johnston's " Boyne Book of Poetry and Song " (an Orange collection), 1859. X INTRODUCTION, With the exception of a volume of my own in the Mayfair Library, and, as its title (" Songs of Irish Wit and Humour ") shows, of limited scope, no anthology of Irish poetry appeared for many years, until the interesting American collection of Alfred M. Williams. The circumstances under which that anthology was compiled were remarkable. Mr. Williams, a reporter of the " New York Tribune " during Fenian days, was imprisoned in Dublin under the Arms Act for carrying a weapon which, as an American citizen, he had always been in the habit of doing.

Load more