W. B. Yeats

W.B. Yeats: Early poems and ballads

THE BALLAD OF FATHER O'HART

GOOD Father John O'Hart

In penal days rode out

To a shoneen who had free lands

And his own snipe and trout.

In trust took he John's lands;

Sleiveens were all his race;

And he gave them as dowers to his daughters,

And they married beyond their place.

But Father John went up,

And Father John went down;

And he wore small holes in his shoes,

And he wore large holes in his gown

All loved him, only the shoneen,

Whom the devils have by the hair,

From the wives, and the cats, and the children,

To the birds in the white of the air.

The birds, for he opened their cages

As he went up and down;

And he said with a smile, 'Have peace now';

And he went his way with a frown.

But if when anyone died

Came keeners hoarser than rooks,

He bade them give over their keening;

For he was a man of books.

And these were the works of John,

When, weeping score by score,

People came into Colooney;

For he'd died at ninety-four.

There was no human keening;

The birds from Knocknarea

And the world round Knocknashee

Came keening in that day.

The young birds and old birds

Came flying, heavy and sad;

Keening in from Tiraragh,

Keening from Ballinafad;

Keening from Inishmurray,

Nor stayed for bite or sup;

This way were all reproved

Who dig old customs up.

THE BALLAD OF MOLL MAGEE

Come round me, little childer;

There, don't fling stones at me

Because I mutter as I go;

But pity Moll Magee.

My man was a poor fisher

With shore lines in the say;

My work was saltin' herrings

The whole of the long day.

And sometimes from the saltin' shed

I scarce could drag my feet,

Under the blessed moonlight,

Along the pebbly street.

I'd always been but weakly,

And my baby was just born;

A neighbour minded her by day,

I minded her till morn.

I lay upon my baby;

Ye little childer dear,

I looked on my cold baby

When the morn grew frosty and clear.

A weary woman sleeps so hard!

My man grew red and pale,

And gave me money, and bade me go

To my own place, Kinsale.

He drove me out and shut the door,

And gave his curse to me;

I went away in silence,

No neighbour could I see.

The windows and the doors were shut,

One star shone faint and green,

The little straws were turnin' round

Across the bare boreen.

I went away in silence:

Beyond old Martin's byre

I saw a kindly neighbour

Blowin' her mornin' fire.

She drew from me my story&emdash;

My money's all used up,

And still, with pityin', scornin' eye,

She gives me bite and sup.

She says my man will surely come,

And fetch me home agin;

But always, as I'm movin' round,

Without doors or within,

Pilin' the wood or pilin' the turf.

Or goin' to the well,

I'm thinkin' of my baby

And keenin' to mysel'.

And sometimes I am sure she knows

When, openin' wide His door,

God lights the stars, His candles,

And looks upon the poor.

So now, ye little childer,

Ye won't fling stones at me;

But gather with your shinin' looks

And pity Moll Magee.

THE BALLAD OF THE FOXHUNTER

'LAY me in a cushioned chair;

Carry me, ye four,

With cushions here and cushions there,

To see the world once more.

'To stable and to kennel go;

Bring what is there to bring;

Lead my Lollard to and fro,

Or gently in a ring.

'Put the chair upon the grass:

Bring Rody and his hounds,

That I may contented pass

From these earthly bounds.'

His eyelids droop, his head falls low,

His old eyes cloud with dreams;

The sun upon all things that grow

Falls in sleepy streams.

Brown Lollard treads upon the lawn,

And to the armchair goes,

And now the old man's dreams are gone,

He smooths the long brown nose.

And now moves many a pleasant tongue

Upon his wasted hands,

For leading aged hounds and young

The huntsman near him stands.

'Huntsman Rody, blow the horn,

Make the hills reply.'

The huntsman loosens on the morn

A gay wandering cry.

Fire is in the old man's eyes,

His fingers move and sway,

And when the wandering music dies

They hear him feebly say,

'Huntsman Rody, blow the horn,

Make the hills reply.'

'I cannot blow upon my horn,

I can but weep and sigh.'

Servants round his cushioned place

Are with new sorrow wrung;

Hounds are gazing on his face,

Aged hounds and young.

One blind hound only lies apart

On the sun-smitten grass;

He holds deep commune with his heart:

The moments pass and pass;

The blind hound with a mournful din

Lifts slow his wintry head;

The servants bear the body in;

The hounds wail for the dead.

THE BALLAD OF FATHER GILLIGAN

THE old priest Peter Gilligan

Was weary night and day;

For half his flock were in their beds,

Or under green sods lay.

Once, while he nodded on a chair,

At the moth-hour of eve,

Another poor man sent for him,

And he began to grieve.

'I have no rest, nor joy, nor peace,

For people die and die';

And after cried he, 'God forgive!

My body spake, not I!'

He knelt, and leaning on the chair

He prayed and fell asleep;

And the moth-hour went from the fields,

And stars began to peep.

They slowly into millions grew,

And leaves shook in the wind;

And God covered the world with shade,

And whispered to mankind.

Upon the time of sparrow-chirp

When the moths came once more,

The old priest Peter Gilligan

Stood upright on the floor.

'Mavrone, mavrone! the man has died

While I slept on the chair';

He roused his horse out of its sleep,

And rode with little care.

He rode now as he never rode,

By rocky lane and fen;

The sick man's wife opened the door:

'Father! you come again!'

'And is the poor man dead?

'He died an hour ago.'

The old priest Peter Gilligan

In grief swayed to and fro.

'When you were gone, he turned and died

As merry as a bird.'

The old priest Peter Gilligan

He knelt him at that word.

'He Who hath made the night of stars

For souls who tire and bleed,

Sent one of His great angels down

To help me in my need.

'He Who is wrapped in purple robes

With planets in His care,

Had pity on the least of things

Asleep upon a chair.'

DOWN BY THE SALLEY GARDENS

DOWN by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

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 aflame,

But something rustled on the floor

And some one 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: Introduction to Broadsides: A Collection of Old and New Songs, 1935:

The earliest Anglo-Irish ballads we know anvthing about were made at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Gaelic civilisation had been defeated at the Boyne. Increasing numbers began to speak English words that found no reverberation in their minds; those minds had no sounding-box left, they were all strings. Many of these Irish ballads, translations or original poems, were the work of hedge schoolmasters, packed with Latin mythology and long words derived from the Latin, but all were sung to Gaelic music, all showed the influence of Gaelic pronunciation and metre&emdash;'e' in Gaelic must always sound like 'a':&emdash;

"O, were I Hector that noble victor who died a victim to Grecian skill;

O, were I Paris whose deeds are various an arbitrator on Ida's hill;

I'd range through Asia, likewise Arabia, Pennsylvania seeking for you 

The burning regions like sage Orpheus to see your face, my sweet Colleen Rue."

Their speech, apart from its pedantry, is like that of the Europeanised Indians, the speech of men who have perhaps fluent English yet understand nothing of the words but their dictionary meaning. Then come original ballads, some purged, some unpurged of pedantry:&emdash;

"I'll sell rny rock, I'll sell my reel, 

When flax is spun I'll sell my wheel, 

To buy my love a sword of steel. 

Gotheen mavourneen slaun."  

But the pedantry has never died; the "Boys of Mullabaun" might have been written at any time during the last two hundred years:

"To end my lamentations I am in consternation;

No one can roam for recreation until the day do dawn; 

Without a hesitation we're charged with combination 

And sent for transportation with the Boys of Mullabaun."

From the great houses or through wandering labourers came Scotch and English ballads. Goldsmith heard "Barbara Allen" sung in the Midlands, one of the present writers heard it sung by a girl out of a Dublin slum; it had come down, one knows not how long, from mother to daughter: but these ballads, generally in the towns, always in the country cottages, are sung to Irish music, their rhythm modified, sometimes enriched, by the new notes. In town and country alike, as in the old English carols, every song is a narrative. So and so is telling the story of his life, so and so did this or that. Perhaps popular Gaelic litcrature had always been narrative. The song that expresses emotion only, the pure lyric, the song of love or grief, had reached Ireland after the twelfth century as it had all Europe, from the South of France, but in Ireland it remained in noblemen's houses, or among the pupils in the Monasteries. Among the cottages the twelfth century lingered and still lingers. The street songs were more dramatic in their narrative, the singer had to shout, clatter-bones in hand, to draw the attention of the passer-by. One thinks of "Johnny I hardly Knew Ye", magnificent in gaiety and horror, of the "Kilmainham Minut", of "The Night Before Larry Was Stretched"; nor were the song-makers always of the people. Goldsmith while still at

College wrote ballads for five shillings a-piece, Swift's political lampoons were still sung; in the Coombe when Sir Walter Scott visited Ireland, and one of the present writers remembers a libel action about a song some Dublin shop-keeper wrote upon an enemy and committed to the street singers. At the close of the eighteenth century Dublin street singers had some wealth and much influence; a political ballad had more effect than a speech. Lever, while a college student, disguised himself, turned street singer, and returned at evening with thirty shillings. One attributes to this period "The Croppy Boy", "The Shan Van Vocht", perhaps "The Wearing of the Green". The political ballads have never ceased to be written and sung, the Boer war created many, recent events not so many, but it is to Cardinal MacHale, "the Lion of the West", the Land League, the Phoenix Park Murders, Parnell, that the popular mind goes back:&emdash;

"The American Eagle 

It burst asunder

When it saw the Blackbird of Avondale".

Some of the ballads may have been danced, for one of the present writers saw at Rosses Point, County Sligo, a man dance a ballad called "The Rocky Road to Dublin", but if so the Gaelic dance, no expression, no movement above the waist, the Gaelic dance as we know it, was not the only dance.  

"But he dances there 

As if his kin were dead, 

Clay in his thoughts, 

And lightning in his tread."  

The dancer at Rosses Point used his whole body; he went by steamer, swayed his body as the steamer tossed on the waves, came at last to the rocky road, wherever that is, moved his feet as if climbing over great rocks.   

Both town and country ballads get their characteristics from the music. Because that music permits, like much Asiatic music, quarter-tones, the stress will sometimes lack sharpness, certainty. In "The Groves of Blarney" the third line 

"Being banks of posies that spontaneous grow there" 

halts because the stress falling upon "spontalleous" carries too many syllables. Sung to Irish music all runs smoothly; the stress, though falling mainly upon the second syllable,enriches the whole word. A singer cannot indeed sing it adequately if he does not like words for their own sake however little he understands them. If he sang to a musician trained in modern music he would be condemned for the imperfection of his ear, yet no rich-sounding two or three syllabled word can be spoken or sung without quarter-tones. When Florence Farr spoke or sang to her psaltery her mastery of the subtle rhythm of words made her out of tune to ears responsive alone to the modern rhythm of notes. On the other hand, a reader who knows nothing of Irish music finds that line in "The Groves of Blarney" unmetrical; a paeon or foot of four syllables, is not permissible in English ballad metre. Sometimes a poet accustomed, like Tom Moore, to Irish music, can, while avoiding unmetrical effects, give a line a lingering, wavering poignancy. Consider:&emdash;

"In the mid hour of night when the stars are weeping I fly 

To the lone vale we loved, when life shone warm in thine eye."  

the stress falling on"mid", on "weep", on "lone", on "warm", syllables not sufficiently isolated to sustain it, compels us to speak "mid hour" "are weeping" "lone vale" "shone warm" slowly, prolonging the syllables; it is as though the stress suffused itself like a drop of dye. This poem, and perhaps one other, are the only poems of Moore that have the poet's rhythm; his musician Stephenson made Irish tunes conform to modern notation, and Moore, a man without background, tradition, felt himself free to invent or copy mechanical, facile rhythm&emdash; 

"The young May moon is shining bright" 

"Moore" William Morris said once "is a great song writer. He is not a poet, he has not the poet's rhythm." The present writers add that he was half way to the music hall, to the rhymed burlesque, to the Gilbert and Sullivan opera, to the hurdy-gurdy rhyme of the mechanised town, equivalent of Mutt and Jeff and the comic figures upon the posters. Neither his songs nor those of "Young Ireland", nor any songs set by professional musicians, have become folk-lore as have the songs of such recent poets as Graves, Fahy, Campbell and Colum; he is confined to the schoolroom, the concert platform; ears trained by country singers reject him. 

The quarter-tones in Japanese music permit speech to rise imperceptibly into song, and because Irish songs close on three beats on a single note the singer will sometimes speak the last three words&emdash;an effect imitated on the Abbey stage when the last words of a song by Zozimus were spoken, then caught up and shouted by the stage crowd. A study of our music might unite music and speech once more. Modern verse copies daily speech, rejects no word because it is prosaic, modern, abstract, so long as it is in general use. One of the present writers had to change the word "politic" in a song because it was "unsingable", but a country singer would not have found it "unsingable", might indeed have taken a particular pleasure in it. No word effective in speech should perhaps be unsingable. To the country singer the words are more important than the music; he will sing different poems to the same tune, should they run to some tune he has forgotten he is told to "word it out", or speak the poem. All Gaelic poems, or all but a few modern exceptions, were written to some tune, whatever tune came to mind perhaps; the words themselves had suffcient novelty. 

If what is called the gapped scale, if the wide space left unmeasured by the mathematical ear where the voice can rise wavering, quivering, through its quarter-tones, is necessary if we are to preserve in song the natural rhythm of words, one understands why the Greeks murdered the man who added a fourth string to the lyre.  

Frederick Myers suggested once that a poet may hear musical notes, not through the ear, but through the nerves of the tongue. One of the writers of this essay is accustomed to write his poetry, when it has a marked stanzaic movement, to Irish tunes; he is a musician and knows what he is doing. The other cannot recognise a tune when he hears it, yet wrote in early life poems to simple tunes, sometimes of his own composition; the "Song of the Old Mother" to a tune in the gapped scale. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch took them down, and others from Mr. Laurence Binyon incapable also of recognising a tune when he hears it. The reciter of a poem, not less than its creator, will sometimes speak it to a tune. Mr. Dolmetsch took down the notes of a recitation by Mr. A. H. Bullen the Elizabethan scholar, also incapable of recognising a tune when he heard it. Some of these tunes can be found at the end of "Speaking to the Psaltery " in Essays by W. B. Yeats. 

There is a possibility that the simple metres based on lines of three and four accents, eight or six syllables, all that constitute what Mr. G. M. Young calls the fundamental "sing-song of the language," come to the poet's tongue with their appropriate tunes; that when a poet has not grown up in a country civilisation hearing these tunes sung by servants and nurses, his musical sense is changed. Mr. Young has suggested that such a change is taking place in England and America where civilisation grows more and more a town civilisation. It seems possible, though he does not say so, that the tongue may lose that part of its function which is related to sound, not merely its sensitiveness to tune but its subconscious memory of a music that flourished when the Greeks murdered their man. A distinguished poet, who has written admirably upon other occasions writes:&emdash; 

"Our half-thought thoughts divide in sifted wisps

Against the basic facts repatterned without pause, 

I can no more gather my mind up in my fist". . .  

He may interest the mind, he is describing a journey by rail with some accuracy, but he does not give pleasure to the tongue. What change of language did to the hedge-schoolmasters, town civilisation does to us all in some measure, imposing upon popular arts a mechanical pattern of sound and shape, upon the arts of the intellectual classes a stark individuality, a bundle of dry sticks. Mr. Young suggests that poetry is seeking a relation with instrumental music; he points out that certain American writers, anxious to create a popular poetry, write their poems to jazz tunes. Some recent philosophical poems by their richness of suggestion, by their strange emotion, make the present writers fancy a relation, not yet fully conscious, with great instrumental music:&emdash;  

"Beneath a thundery glaze 

The raindrops fall.  

What is this new oppression of myheart?  

Have I not looked upon this scene before ! 

These leafy dromedaries 

Dark green, 

Painted upon that wall 

Of livid sky 

Where vacancy's bright silent spiders crawl !  

The hills' pure outlined contours on that light 

Empty my soul. 

I watch those spidery lines 

Bright violet.  

And there's a poisonous cloud as dark as jet 

Pouring from heaven." 

F. R. Higgins. 

W. B. Yeats.