NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 12 January 1922, Page 25

NOTES

Gaelic Literature Tf you want to know the essential difference between the Irish and the English go back to the past and examine from what sort of stock each sprung. You will turn towards the literature of the olden times for some measure of the people who made it, just as we judge the Greeks and the Romans and admire their high civilisation from what records we still have in the works of Sophocles, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, and Vergil. In the English past you will find a literature of no account and it is a fair standard of the people who lived in England, but in Ireland you will find a treasury of prose and poetry of which any people might well be proud. It was England’s policy for years to prevent the Irish people from learning anything of their past, and to this end the foreign despots tried to kill the language that was the key to the treasure-house of ancient Irish culture. England failed in that, »as she failed to kill Irish nationality and the Catholic faith; and owing to the revival we have now unlocked to us and translated into English marvellous riches which are proof of the existence of a splendid culture that was suppressed and almost destroyed by the piiates and marauders that came from the country at present so fitly ruled by Lloyd George. Irish literature covers a wide range. In the heroic tales there is a real Iliad; and Standish O’Gradv has done meritorious work for us in making them accessible to those who as yet have not the Gacdhelic. To Finn Mac Cool is ascribed a beautiful poem m praise of nature, revelling in the beauty of God’s creatures; to St. Columba, an exile from Erin in lona, another that stirs all. lovers of the sea to-day. There are lovely descriptions of mountain and mead, tender love songs, and piercing laments, and beyond all that a wealth of Christian literature and religious songs and prayers worthy of the island to which men came from alLEurope to find learning at the feet of the Irish monks.

Love of Nature As instances of poems in which the love of nature was take the following pagan-poem c i great antiquity: ° 5 - May-day ! delightful day ! Bright colors play the vale along. Now wakes at'morning's slender ray Wild and gay the blackbird’s song. Now comes the bird of dusky hue, he loud cuckoo, the summer lover. Branchy trees are thick with leaves The bitter evil time is over. A bright shaft has smit the streams, With gold gleams the water-flag; Leaps the fish, and on the hills Ardor thrills the leaping stag. By the northern shore Columba sang That 1 might hear the thunder of the clamorous - waves Upon the rocks! That * might bear the roar ,by the side of the church - -r Ur the surrounding sea; That I might watch its. noble bird-flocks Flying over the watery surf;' ™ ia t m iffht see the ocean-monsters, '' •' Greatest of all wonders, ■

■And Manchan, the hermit, would have his hut with A southern aspect to catch the sun, a brook across the floor, A choice land, rich with gracious gifts, down-stretching from my door. Laments Miss Hull gives us the lament of a country girl for her Donall Oge: You have taken the East from me and you have taken the West, You have taken the path that is - before me and the path that is behind; The moon is gone from me by night, and the sun is gone by day Alas! I greatly dread you have stolen my God away! * i i .• 'A • • • • * I heard the dog speak of you and the sun gone down, I heard the snipe calling aloud from the marshlands brown; It is you are the lonely bird flitting from tree to tree May you never find your mate if you find not me! To Miss Hull also we owe the following translation: The stars stand up in the air, The sun and the moon are set, The sea that ebbed dry of its tide Leaves no single pebble wet; The cuckoo keeps saying each hour That she, my Storeen, is fled — 0 Girl of the brave free tresses, Far better had you struck me dead! Prayer Speaking of these old songs, Robert Lynd says: “No study of the psychology of race could enlighten the careful reader in regard to Ireland half so well as the songs of love, of war, of religion, of death, of revenge. Irish history survives alike in flashing warsongs, and in triumphant pieces of melancholy, such as Mangan’s 0 Woman of the Piercing Wail. Not less important as a key to the secrets of the old Irish civilisation are the religious poems, like that noble prayer of St. Patrick’s which contains the lines: ' Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me. And in Douglas Hyde’s translations of the religious songs of Connacht you will find abundant evidence of what religion meant to the old forebears of the men and women who in after years were able to defy the power of England arrayed against them for the extermination of their faith. In our time Ireland has awakened from her sleep and gone back to the fountains of nationhood and is" drawing from them that strength which is at present sustaining her in her fight against the low ideals and the materialistic principles which enable Englishmen. to survive their shame before the whole round world to-day.