Literature and Life.

EGAN O'RAHILLY.

The vicissitudes of a reputation are an uncanny quantity in the art of
criticism. For Longfellow, whom the young pre-Raphaelites set so high
in their gallery of immortals, higher than Wordsworth, or Milton, or
Isaiah even, no critic of to-day would say a good word. And when a
reputation is being made or unmade, which of us can say that his own
judgments are concerned purely with fundamentals, if such there be,
and are not dictated to him by a Time Spirit moving outside himself;
the Time Spirit which Arnold saw in art and did not see in criticism?

It is thoughts such as these which must occur to the literary man when
he opens a book like the little book on Egan O'Bahilly which I have
just been reading.*[* Aodhagan O Rathaille. Seamus O hAodha, M.A., do
scriobh. Educational Company of Ireland. 2/6] For of all the Irish
poets O'Rahilly has most successfully bridged the gap of time and
thought that lies between his day and ours. To a generation as unlike
his own as it could well be, he is at least a great name. In James
Stephens he has found a poet to deliver his message in another
language; in Daniel Corkery a critic to write of him more lyrically
than most people to-day dare write of Shakespeare; in the columns of
the newspapers even he has his adherents. And now comes Séamus Ó
hAodha, with an appreciation of his work in the language which he
himself enriched.

Yet it is of this Egan O’Rahilly that Mr. Ó hAodha can say :

  “We do not know when he was born or when he died. In the beginning
  of his life he lived near Killarney, first at Scrahanaveal and
  afterwards at Stagmount; it is said that he spent some time in
  Iveleary and some time in Corkaguiney; he is buried in Muckross
  Abbey, at the foot of the tower.... His father had a large farm in
  Mágh gCoinche, but after his death the farm, passed from his widow’s
  hands and the family sank into poverty; at the end of his life Egan
  was miserably poor. We know little else of him.”

Whether or not O’Rahilly was a remarkable or loveable figure, we may
judge from a further quotation:

  “Tradition, which clings so closely to Eoghan Ruadh, which follows
  so faithfully Seán O Tuama and the Maigue poets, about Egan is
  almost silent.”

And then his work. What is there of him that one would remember
besides half a dozen lyrics, and these not in any way the poetry of
illumination as is Keating’s famous poem, or as those most lovely
epigrams of Father Hackett's are? Over O’Rahilly's work, as over his
life, there is a shadow; it is as though the man had determined to
hide himself completely from our eyes: like the musician in Hopkins’
poem, “he worked but as he was to work and must obey.”

What then is the secret of O’Rahilly's influence on our own day?
Mr. Ó hAodha, who is a poet, answers the question for himself. He
finds in the verse he examines no note of rustic coarseness; in the
artist he finds a sort of hauteur; something which he happily calls
“literary pride,” _uabhar na litriochta_. For our poet is that rare
thing in Irish literature, the artist concerned with his art and not
continually at the mercy of his own personality and intellect as was Ó
Bruadair, for instance. And what a picture these two make in an age
of anthologies! Egan O’Rahilly, least self-assertive of men, with his
half-dozen lyrics, is everywhere; Ó Bruadair, “the giant,” as Séan
Ó Faoláin calls him, with his flashing personality, his intellect, his
wit, his stormy beauty, is nowhere; he has left not a single perfect
poem behind him.

To me, the most interesting portion of Séamus Ó hAodha's essay is
that in which he describes the influences that went to the formation
of the young poet's character. As he points out, O’Rahilly's most
impressionable years must have been those years of half-peace which
followed 1670, when the broken Irish lords got breathing-space, when
the big houses were opened again to musicians and poets, when schools
and scholarship were once more respected. It was Ó Bruadair, I think,
who sketched just such a lull in a memorable verse which tells how the
fine ladies of Cork trembled with sheer terror as they heard the watch
going about the streets, humming old tunes they had not used to
sing. But when this lull was over the giant was still the giant,
responsive still to every turn of fate. With O’Rahilly it was
different. The day of the great houses once done with, he responded to
nothing more. His verse deepened, but it did. not broaden; memory with
him became a second Calvary. “Never,” say Father Dinneen, “perhaps
since Jeremias sat by the wayside and chanted a mournful dirge over
the ruin of Jerusalem, were a nation’s woes depicted with such vivid
anguish and such passionate bursts of grief.”

I could have wished that the selection of O’Rahilly's poems which
Mr. Ó hAodha gives us had contained more of the lyric poetry, even to
the exclusion of poems like _The Wounds of the Land of Ireland_. It
is, I confess, not at all so impressive as the political verse, but it
is more truly representative of the singer; minor verse, too, I admit
but of a sort rare in Irish verse, a young Tennyson young Yeats.  Take
that lovely poem which begins, “One morning ere Titan thought of
stirring his feet.” There is nothing in it but the music and the
half-sketched picture of the hooded queens lighting their three
candles to the sunless morning, and yet the music and the
half-sketched picture remain in one’s mind. Another thing: with _Gile
na Gile_ it best shows us the man so rapt up in his own passion for
beauty that he can think of nothing else, and it was such a one, and
no Ó Bruadair, no Dante, who on his death-bed said, “I shall not cry
for help.”

Outside these two songs there are three other poems which reflect for
me the tragedy of Egan O’Rahilly. They are the three which, I think,
come nearest to our idea of personal utterance, and I should like to
quote them in full, both Irish and English. But I must content myself
with some few verses; I can only give in full a translation of the
first poem in Séamus Ó hAodha’s selection. The wandering poet has at
last found a _hospitable home near Dunmanway, in County Cork, and he
sings:

  I travelled through Munster bright and fair
  To Doonaree from Durrow, and there
  Even then I found no ease to my care
    But in Tadhg a’ Dúna’s mansion.

  Oh! I dreamed in my mind, in my soul I dreamed.
  That the dead who was dead was living! It seemed
  That the light of our old carousing gleamed
    In the torrents of punch and brandy.

  There was fowl on spits for all to eat,
  And spotless honey and roasted meat,
  And drink; and the music and song were sweet,
    And the baying of hounds and the dancing.

  And a throng passed in and a throng passed out.
  And a throng cast merry old songs about,
  And a throng sang prayers till their bright shout
    Tore Heaven's high house asunder!

  One told me, seeing my wondering gaze .
  That the light of Warner’s love and grace
  Shone now in that glad, sweet, ancient place
    A torch to the poor and plundered.

  ’Tis God the merciful, lordliest Of lords,
  Who raised all things from the dust.
  Has given us, prop for the prop we lost,
    This man with the heart of a hundred.

Despite the looseness of the translation, one can, I think, see in
this song the man who wrote _Gile na Gile_ with its lovely decorative
outline and music as of rustling dresses. Here, though, we have also
another touch; in the first lines of the second verse there is the
later O’Rahilly. The pathos of those two lines in the Irish is
extraordinary, and if I were asked to name the predominant
characteristic of our poet’s verse at its best I should say it was
precisely this pathos. Mr. Yeats, looking back on the little book of
translations which James Stephens has given us,
remembers two lines:

  The periwinkle and the tough dogfish
  At eventide have got into my dish.

But the pathos of the original is still more intolerable. The poet
cannot sleep because there is a storm on the sea and he is lonely and
poor “without stock, without wealth, sheep or horned cattle.” It is in
this plight that he cries:

“Storm on the wave beside me hath troubled my head, and as a child I
was not used either to dogfish or periwinkles.”

But it is not this poem, beautiful as it is, that I take as the second
poem of O'Rahilly's tragedy, for in it there is just a suggestion of
shifting planes—the Irish note—as if, to quote Mr. Ó hAodha, the old
poet had indeed turned upon the elements that warred against him and
called them “servile ministers.” It is in another poem, _Valentine
Brown_, that we get the real pathos of the old man’s poverty. He has
come to Valentine Brown with some ode of praise in his hands and he
meets only inhospitalHy and contempt. Then the litany of his wrongs
breaks forth in a flood:

  That my old bitter heart has part in this black doom,
  That foreign devils have made our land a tomb,
  That the bright sun that was Munster’s fame went down,
  Hath caused me ever to seek you, Valentine Brown.

  And most, that Cashel is bare of house or guest,
  That Brian’s turreted home is the otter’s nest,
  That the kings of the land have neither land nor crown,
  Hath caused me ever to seek you, Valentine Brown.

And again the terrible note of pathos. He remembers that in the west
is Dairinis, an earldom without its lord; in Hamburg, an earl without
his fief, and says: “An old grey eye shedding bitter tears for both of
these hath caused me ever to seek vou. Valentine Brown!”

And while I read I remember another poet who, by the death of one
patron and the imprisonment of another, is left a tramp, poor and
broken in health, wandering about with nothing but a corner to rest
his head in, till, as he himself says, “desire of sleep becomes a
fever.” But, meeting such others as Valentine Brown, he has a
different cry: spoiling no song for their sakes, he says, he will
leave them to their own devices. With him, indeed, with Dáithí Ó
Bruadair—for it is of him I am speaking—tragedy has become triumph,
for who, reading that great Barry elegy, could believe that the poet
had still many years of work before him? When O’Rahilly has said
_stadfad-sa feasta_ we hear no more of him.

We are at the end now. Lying on his bed of death he takes his leave of
poetry in lines that are a heartbreak to read:

  I shall not cry for help, not till the coffin holds me,
  And what if I should cry? Help is no longer here
  Since His, our Lord's, our Captain's strength no more upholds me,
  Since that proud pulse is pierced, that heart so dear.

Weeping about the roads the only sound he hears is the splash of the
Tore (Hog) waterfall, " the voice of the pig that arrows cannot
wound," he cries in a sudden flash of bitterness. And so his one great
poem ebbs to its close. t

  I shall cease now. Death comes, and will not brook delay,
  Since the warriors of Laune, Lene, and Lee are no more with us,
  I shall follow the love of heroes even into clay,
  The princes my fathers served ere Christ died on the cross.

O Bruadair could not have written such a poem? No, nor, for that
matter, could any other Irish poet I can think of. Personal, yet
detached; intense, yet beautifully wrought, the artist's hand is in
every line of it. There, I think, is O’Rahilly's appeal to our own
day; in this and in his other lyric poems he was the artist where all
others were craftsmen, intellectuals sometimes, but never fashioners
of content as they were of form. Poems as we understand them Ó Bruadair
made, but he made them in two lines and went on. Take this, for
instance: “You would have thought no more of the oncoming sea than of
the majesty of his thigh upon a horse.” James Stephens could make a
beautiful poem of those two lines; the thing that a lover of Ó
Bruadair like myself regrets is that Ó Bruadair did not. So, to come
back to our opening theme, the Time Spirit has been kinder to
O’Rahilly than to most, it has made of the poet whom tradition does
not remember the most memorable figure of his time Séamus Ó
hAodha's little book is worthy of a place on all our shelves. Reading
it one wishes—vainly, I suppose—that our Irish colleges, which should
be playing some part in the cultural life of the nation, would turn
their attention now and again to things of the spirit and produce a
book or two of the kind, a series of them even. The price at which it
is published should bring it well within the means of senior students,
and it should prove an admirable text-book. FRANK O'CONNOR

Irish Statesman, Saturday, January 30, 1926