The Poem-Book of the Gael. Various
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prevent him from greeting the Dawn in a beautiful song.
The saint who, like St. Finan, lived shut up within his cell, in many cases lost his mental balance, and degenerated into a mere Fakir, winning heaven by the miseries of his self-imposed mortifications; but the monk who trusted himself to untrammelled intercourse with nature, preserved his underlying sanity. For whether or no the hundreds of daily genuflexions were performed, the patch of ground around the solitary's cell must be ploughed or sown or reaped; the apples must be gathered or the honeysuckles twined. The salmon or herring must be netted or angled for. Thus nature and its needs kept the hermit on the straight and simple paths of physical and mental healthfulness, however he might try to escape into a wilderness of his own imaginings.
The early poetry, we feel, is on the whole joyous; whether pagan or Christian in tone, it arises from a happy heart. The pagan is more robust, more vigorous; the Christian gentler and more reflective; but alike they are free from the mournful note of despair that throws a settled gloom over much of the later literature.
The Ossianic poems have quite a distinctive tone; in them we catch the abounding energy belonging to the days of the hunt of the wild native boar or stag, when all the country was one open hunting-ground, fit for men whose ideal was that of the sportsman and the warrior. Besides romantic tales, we have a whole body of poetry, loosely strung together under the covering name of Oisín, or Ossian, and usually ascribed to him or to Fionn mac Cumhall, his father and chief, dealing with the themes of war and of the chase. They are often in the nature of the protest of the fighting and hunting-man against the claims of religion. He is perpetually proclaiming that the sounds and sights of the forest and seashore are more dear to him than any others, and when he is called upon to give the first place to the duties of religion, placed before him, as it usually is, in its most enfeebling aspect, he raises the stout protest that the hunting-horn has greater attractions for him than the tinkling bell which calls to prayer.
"I have heard music sweeter far
Than hymns and psalms of clerics are;
The blackbird's pipe on Letterlea,
The Dord Finn's wailing melody.
"The thrush's song of Glenna-Scál,
The hound's deep bay at twilight's fall,
The barque's sharp grating on the shore,
Than cleric's chants delight me more."
There is the ring of the obstinate pagan about such verses; and many poems are wholly occupied by an unholy wrangling between the representative of the old order, Oisín, and the representative of the new, St. Patrick. The poems themselves probably date from a far later period than either.
More healthy are the true hunting songs. Many of these are in praise of the Isle of Arran, in the Clyde, a favourite resort during the sporting-season both for the Scottish and Irish huntsman. In the poem we have called "The Isle of Arran," from the "Colloquy of the Ancient Men," the charm of the Isle is well described. We have in it the same pure joy in natural scenery that we find in the poems of the religious hermits, but the tone is manlier and more emphatic.
Occasionally a fiercer note creeps into the hunter's mood. The chase of the boar and deer was not without its dangers. Winter, and the unfriendly clan hard by, or the lean prowling wolf at night, were real terrors to the small companies encamped on the open hill-side or in the forest. Though the warrior in peaceful times loved the chase of swine and stag, his hand had done and was always ready to do sterner work when opportunity offered. The poem "Chill Winter" has a note of almost savage exultation; the old fighter turns from his present perils and discomforts to remember the warrior onslaughts which had left the glen below him silent, and its once happy inhabitants cold in death; colder, as he gladly reflects, than even he himself feels on this chill winter's night. It is the voice of the ancient warrior, who thought no shame of slaying, but thanked God when he had knocked down his fellow. Whether he, in his turn, were the undermost man, or whether he escaped, he cared not at all.
Two difficulties face the modern reader in coming for the first time upon genuine Irish literature, whether poetry or prose. The first is the curious feeling that we are hung between two worlds, the seen and the unseen; that we are not quite among actualities, or rather that we do not know where the actual begins or where it ends. Even in dealing with history we may find ourselves suddenly wafted away into some illusory spirit-world with which the historian seems to deal with the same sober exactness as in detailing any fact of ordinary life. The faculty of discerning between the actual and the imaginary is absent, as it is absent in imaginative children; often, indeed, the illusory quite overpowers the real, as it does in the life of the Irish peasant to-day.
There is, in most literatures, a meeting-place where the Mythological and the Historic stand in close conjunction, the one dying out as the other takes its place. Only in Ireland we never seem to reach this point; we can never anywhere say, "Here ends legend, here begins history." In all Irish writing we find poetry and fact, dreams and realities, exact detail and wild imagination, linked closely hand in hand. This is the Gael as revealed in his literature. At first we are inclined to doubt the accuracy of any part of the story; but, as we continue our examination, we are surprised at the substantial correctness of the ancient records, so far as we are able to test them, whether on the historical or on the social side. The poet is never wholly poet, he is also practical man; and the historian is never wholly chronicler and annalist, he is also at the back of his mind folklorist, lover of nature, dreamer. It is the puzzle and the charm of Ireland.
A good example of this is the very beautiful anonymous Irish poem, rich in poetic imagery, addressed to Ragnall or Reginald, son of Somerled, lord of the Isles from 1164–1204. This poem, written for an historical prince, begins with a description of the joys of the fairy palace, "Emain of the Apples," whence this favoured prince is supposed by the poet to have issued forth:
"Many, in white grass-fresh Emain,
Of men on whom a noble eye gazes
(The rider of a bay steed impetuously)
Through a countenance of foxglove hue,
Shapely, branch-fresh.
"Many, in Emain of the pastures,
From which its noble feast has not parted,
Are the fields ploughed in autumn
For the pure corn of the Lord's Body."
The poet's mind wanders from the ancient Emain, capital of Ulster, to the allegorical Emain, the dwelling of the gods or fairy-hosts, who were thought of as inhabiting the great tumuli on the Boyne; again, he transplants his fairy-land to the home of Ragnall, and seems to place it in Mull or the Isle of Man, which was indeed the especial abode of Manannan, the Ocean-god and Ruler of Fairy-land.
"What God from Brugh of the Boyne,
Thou son of noble Sabia,
Thou beauteous apple-rod
Created thee with her in secret?
"O Man of the white steed,
O Man of the black swan,
Of the fierce band and the gentle sorrow,
Of the sharp blade and the lasting fame.
"Thy fair side thou hast bathed,
The grey branch of thy eyes like summer showers,
Over thy locks, O descendant of Fergus,
The wind of Paradise has breathed."[1]
We recognise that this is fine poetry, but we feel also that it needs a specialised education thoroughly to understand it. The world from which it hails is not our world, and to comprehend it we must do more than translate, we must add notes and glossary at every line; but no poetry, especially poetry under the initial disadvantage of a translation, could retain its qualities under such treatment.
In all the ancient verse we meet with these obstacles. Even much of the most imaginative Ossianic poetry becomes too difficult from this point of view