* * * * * * *
Brave Dan's on his back,
He's ready once more for the field.
He never will stop till the Tories,
He'll make them to yield.
Grotesque as this long rhyme appears, it has, as I said, a sort of
existence when it is crooned by the old man at his fireside, and it
has great fame in the island. The old man himself is hoping that I
will print it, for it would not be fair, he says, that it should die
out of the world, and he is the only man here who knows it, and none
of them have ever heard it on the mainland. He has a couple more
examples of the same kind of doggerel, but I have not taken them
down.
Both in English and in Irish the songs are full of words the people
do not understand themselves, and when they come to say the words
slowly their memory is usually uncertain.
All the morning I have been digging maidenhair ferns with a boy I
met on the rocks, who was in great sorrow because his father died
suddenly a week ago of a pain in his heart.
'We wouldn't have chosen to lose our father for all the gold there
is in the world,' he said, 'and it's great loneliness and sorrow
there is in the house now.'
Then he told me that a brother of his who is a stoker in the Navy
had come home a little while before his father died, and that he had
spent all his money in having a fine funeral, with plenty of drink
at it, and tobacco.
'My brother has been a long way in the world,' he said, 'and seen
great wonders. He does be telling us of the people that do come out
to them from Italy, and Spain, and Portugal, and that it is a sort
of Irish they do be talking - not English at all - though it is only a
word here and there you'd understand.'
When we had dug out enough of roots from the deep crannies in the
rocks where they are only to be found, I gave my companion a few
pence, and sent him back to his cottage.
The old man who tells me the Irish poems is curiously pleased with
the translations I have made from some of them.
He would never be tired, he says, listening while I would be reading
them, and they are much finer things than his old bits of rhyme.
Here is one of them, as near the Irish as I am able to make it: -
RUCARD MOR.
I put the sorrow of destruction on the bad luck,
For it would be a pity ever to deny it,
It is to me it is stuck,
By loneliness my pain, my complaining.
