e people got Raftery's songs in their heads, they could think of nothing else: his songs put out everything else. I remember when I was a boy of ten, I was so

night, and he did; but whatever happened, Raftery

d some have been taken to America by emigrants. It is said that when he was on his deathbed, he was very sorry that his songs had not all been taken down; and that he dictated one he composed there to a young man who wrote it down in Irish, but coul

se. As it was, both his love poems and his religious poems were caught in the formulas imported from Greece and from Rome; and any formula must make a veil between the prophet who has been on the mountain top, and the people who are waiting at its foot for his message. The dreams of beauty that formed themselves in the mind of the blind poet become flat and vapid when he embodies them in the well-worn names of Helen and Venus. The truths of God that he strove in his last years, as he says, 'to have written in the book of the people,' left

lare-Galway.' And an old woman tells me, with a sigh of regret for what might have been, that she saw Raftery one time at a dance, and he spoke to her and said: 'Well planed you are; the carpenter that planed you knew his trade.' 'And I said: "Better than you know yours;" for there were two or three of the strings of

without food, without drink, without any share of anything, on an island of Lough Erne, with desire for you and me to be together till we should settle our case.... My heart started with trouble, and I was frightened nine times that morning that I heard yo

his habit of mixing comparisons drawn from

ts Deirdre in the beauty of her voice; or I might say Helen,

mouth is as sweet as the cuckoo on the branch. You would not find a m

he road on a fine sunny day, the light flashing from the wh

promise of the evening star. If she had been living in the ti

o the mouth of her shoes; her locks spread out wide and pa

yes still open to the sun; and if the estate of Lord Lucan belo

er cheek, and her amber hair; Virgil, Cicero, and Homer could tel

but love the flower of the branch. If I cannot get a hundred w

and gave me a stool, and it not in the corner. At the time that I

, for many who knew her still speak of her beauty, of her long, shining hair, and the 'little blushes in her cheeks.' An old woman says: 'I never can think of her but I'll get a trembling, she was so nice; and if sh

s to the tops of the mountains, to the edge of Lough Greine, w

as like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet. She is the pride,

geal-the 'shining flower'-is spoken of, it is a

, and what he felt was the bones and the thinness of death. And his sight came to him, and he saw where his wrapper was hanging on the wall. And death said he had come to bring him away, or else one of the neighbours that lived in such a house. And after they had talked a while, he said he would give him a certain time before he'd come for him again, and he went away. And in the morning when his wife came in, he asked where did she hang his wrapper the night before, and she told him it was

his poem on the 'Vision,'

ere bending like the bottom of a riddle; his nose thin, that it would go through a cambric needle; his shoulders hard and sharp, that they would cut tobacco; his head dark and bushy like the top of a hill; and there is no

on follows; Rafte

Hannibal, Pompey, Julius C?sar; I was in the way with Queen Helen. I made Hector fall, that conquered the Greeks, and Conchubar, that was king of Ireland; Cuchulain and Goll, Oscar and Diarmuid, and Oisin, that lived after the Fenians; and the children of Usnach that brought away Deirdre from

lemnly to him then,

g will be closed, deaf, without sound, without hearing; your tongue that was so sweet to make verses will be without a word in the same w

with the story of the Pass

nate exaggeration of St. Paul or of Bunyan. In his 'Tal

was a child, swearing big oaths and blaspheming. I never think to go to Mass. Confession at Christmas I wouldn't ask to go to. I would laugh at my neighbour's dow

fter women and drink. And that night he made up his "Repentance"; and the next day he went again, and Father Pat Burke, the curate, was with Father Bartley, and he said: "Well, Raftery, what have you compos

finest of his p

ream to Thee again and again aloud,

day morning than to be going to Mass.... I was given to great oaths, and I did not let lust or drunkenness pass me by.... The day has stolen away, and I have not raised the hedge until the crop in which Thou didst

'Argument with Whisky,' he claims, as an excuse for this weakness, the desire for companionship felt by a wanderer. 'And the world knows it's not for love of what I drink, but for love of the people that

in a poem made at the time

leap stone wall, ditch and gap, who was in the evening wa

owever fast, on the racecourse. He would strike a goal against t

is no better to him than the night; when a person thinks there

d country lords; he brings with him the great, the young, and

that will go with him is so weak, and his lease of life no better if he were to live

and bruise the ground. Think of all the deeds that you put by y

x took his sight away in his childhood-have much charm. 'Cnocin Saibhir,' 'the Plentiful Little Hill

o to the sharp-edged little hill; for it is a fine place, without fog falling; a blessed

would get no rest, only sitting u

d ready; the rent that is called for there, they have means to pay it. There is oats and flax and large-eared barley.... There are beautiful valleys with good growth in them, and hay. Rods grow ther

he same manner on 'C

k upon Carra and the two towns below it, on the two-mile bush, and on the plains of Mayo.... And

,' and all sorts of native trees, but is endowed with 'tortoises,' with 'logwood and mahogany.' His country weaver must not only have frieze and linen in his loom, but satin and cambric. A carpenter near Ardrahan, Seaghan Conroy, is praised with more simplicity for his 'quick, lucky work,' and for the pleasure he takes in it. 'I never met his master; the trade was in his nature'; and he gives a

hat gives him a touch of kinship with the poets who have mourned their Astrophel, their Lycidas, their Adonais, their Thyrsis. This is how I

h played on him, may God give him grace. The country is all sorrowful, always talkin

t had pleasantness on the top of his fingers. His two grey eyes were like the dew of the mornin

viour, for his equal never walked on land or grass. High King of Nature, you who have a

is fill and not gather. He would spend the estate of the Dalys, their beer and thei

ugly chief that did treachery, that didn't gi

art-broken and withered, since he was left at the church. Th

o cry, and they falling on the ground. There is no green flower on

n the harp, he lifted up everyone out of their habits; and he that stole what Argus was watching the tim

ions and his deeds and his many good works. And Raf

the poor, for the people, he has left

es are withering and the trees complaining of the cold. There is no sun or moon in the air or

that did not bring grief or trouble on any hear

t; there's no return in the grain; the plants don't blossom as they used since O'Kell

tell us, would gain victory in every step he would take; since he died, such a story never came