Ballads and Lyrics, “The Rose,” “The Wanderings of Oisin.”—When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of romance, but presently I convinced myself, for such reasons as those in “Ireland and the Arts,” that I should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to that conviction to the end. I was very young; and, perhaps because I belonged to a Young Ireland Society in Dublin, I wished to be as easily understood as the Young Ireland writers, to write always out of the common thought of the people.
I have put the poems written while I was influenced by this desire, though with an always lessening force, into those sections which I have called “Early Poems.” I read certain of them now with no little discontent, for I find, especially in the ballads, some triviality and sentimentality. Mangan and Davis, at their best, are not sentimental and trivial, but I became so from an imitation that was not natural to me. When I was writing the poems in the second of the three, the section called “The Rose,” I found that I was becoming unintelligible to the young men who had been in my thought. We have still the same tradition, but I have been like a traveller who, having when newly arrived in the city noticed nothing but the news of the marketplace, the songs of the workmen, the great public buildings, has come after certain months to let his thoughts run upon some little carving in its niche, some Ogham on a stone, or the conversation of a countryman who knows more of the “Boar without Bristles” than of the daily paper.
When writing I went for nearly all my subjects to Irish folklore and legends, much as a Young Ireland poet would have done, writing “Down by the Salley Garden” by adding a few lines to a couple of lines I heard sung at Ballisodare; “The Meditation of the Old Fisherman” from the words of a not very old fisherman at Rosses Point; “The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner” from words spoken by a man on the Two Rock Mountain to a friend of mine; “The Ballad of the Old Foxhunter” from an incident in one of Kickham’s novels; and “The Ballad of Moll Magee” from a sermon preached in a chapel at Howth; and “The Wanderings of Oisin” from a Gaelic poem of the Eighteenth Century and certain Middle Irish poems in dialogue. It is no longer necessary to say who Oisin and Cuchulain and Fergus and the other bardic persons are, for Lady Gregory, in her Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne has retold all that is greatest in the ancient literature of Ireland in a style that has to my ears an immortal beauty. ↩
The Pronunciation of the Irish Names.—I wrote the greater number of these poems I had hardly considered the question seriously. I copied at limes somebody’s perhaps fanciful phonetic spelling, and at times the ancient spelling as I found it in some literal translation, pronouncing the words always as they were spelt. I can only affirm that I did not even in my youth treat Irish names as badly as the medieval writers of the stories of King Arthur treated their Welsh names. ↩
Many of the poems in Crossways, certainly those upon Indian subjects or upon shepherds and fauns, must have been written before I was twenty, for from the moment when I began “The Wanderings of Usheen,” which I did at that age, I believe, my subject matter became Irish. Every time I have reprinted them I have considered the leaving out of most, and then remembered an old school friend who has some of them by heart, for no better reason, as I think, than that they remind him of his own youth. The little Indian dramatic scene was meant to be the first scene of a play about a man loved by two women, who had the one soul between them, the one woman waking when the other slept, and knowing but daylight as the other only night. It came into my head when I saw a man at Rosses Point carrying two salmon. “One man with two souls,” I said, and added, “Oh, no, two people with one soul.” I am now once more in “A Vision” busy with that thought, the antitheses of day and of night and of moon and of sun. “The Rose” was part of my second book, The Countess Cathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, 1892, and I notice upon reading these poems for the first time for several years that the quality symbolized as The Rose differs from The Intellectual Beauty of Shelley and of Spencer in that I have imagined it as suffering with man and not as something pursued and seen from afar. It must have been a thought of my generation, for I remember the mystical painter Horton, whose work had little of his personal charm and real strangeness writing me these words, “I met your beloved in Russell Square, and she was weeping,” by which he meant that he had seen a vision of my neglected soul. I have altered several of these poems, “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Waves,” “The Dedication to a Book of Stories,” and “
