Chapter II: Part 2

The reappearance of his cousin, Lady Hasketh, into his life was undoubtedly of the greatest advantage to Cowper. This excellent woman did all that was in her power to enliven the poet’s days. She persuaded the singular household to move from Olney to Weston Underwood and encouraged its two inmates to enjoy such harmless pleasures as were provided by the society of the neighborhood. William Cowper had inherited from his forefathers the manners and easy grace of a well-bred gentleman, and now that fame had come to him his cousin was evidently anxious that he should cut something of a figure in Olney. Commenting upon his clothes at this time, the poet says: “Green and buff are colors in which I am oftener seen than any others, and are become almost as natural to me as to a parrot.” The Rev. John Newton was not a little put out by this sudden change in his friend’s manner of life. “I find,” he wrote, “after all my supposed acquaintance with the human heart there are windings and depths in it of which I know no more than of the dark, unfathomable caves of the ocean,” and he never penned a truer word. One feels in entire sympathy with the good sense of Lady Hasketh when she declared, in explanation of her cousin’s sadness, “The eternal praying and preaching were too much.” As a matter of fact, the Rev. John Newton need have felt no misgiving. Cowper remained still the helpless quarry of the Hound of Heaven, though he disguised himself never so cleverly by “associating with gay people, wearing a green coat and becoming an archer.”

In 1787 he tried once more to commit suicide. In superstitious awe he would await the appearance of each new moon and the yearly return of his black month--the month of January. Little enough it availed him to write verses to a dead bullfinch when the following morning he would awake in tremulous apprehension with this line from Milton ringing in his ears:

The wonted roar is up amid the woods.

In 1791 a fresh disaster overtook him. Mrs. Unwin had a paralytic stroke, “Oh, Mr. Cowper, don’t let me fall!” came the frightened cry as he stood one morning at his desk in his parlor. The seizure had an unexpected effect upon the behavior of this woman, “more polite than a Duchess.” From thenceforth, instead of feeling concern for the comfort of the aging and demented poet, Mary Unwin became more and more exacting in her querulous demands upon his attention. His work, his walks, his diversions had each in turn to be abandoned, until every hour of his day was occupied in looking after her slightest wish and whim.

The strain became too much. Again his hallucinations took audible form. He heard voices. With questionable veracity a stone in the wall called out, “I am God.” And once at midnight he listened to this mysterious and baleful utterance, “He shall eat eleven days longer or thereabout.”

At last he was persuaded by his kinsman, “Johnny of Norfolk,” to leave Weston and travel to East Anglia. John Baily alludes to this drastic change in the poet’s life as “a last heroic service rendered to him by his cousin.” The wisdom and kindness of the move have always seemed dubious. “Johnny of Norfolk” happened to be a progenitor of the present writer, and even as a child he remembers noting the strangely unimaginative look of the good man’s features as represented in a family portrait. It is incredible to believe that so spruce and bepowdered an individual should have been able to understand the difficult and delicate nature of the obligations he was undertaking. There is evidence that the ailing poet resented the change. A few days before he left he wrote on a window shutter of his home the following words:

Farewell, dear scenes, forever closed to me;
Oh, for what sorrows must I now exchange ye?

Once in Norfolk, under the care of his energetic kinsman, things went from bad to worse. The few remaining letters penned by Cowper hit one to the heart. He recognized in the wayside grass of the Norfolk lanes the same herbs that he had so often gathered for his pet birds and is reminded of that long interim of years when he was at least _half-happy_. He writes to Lady Hasketh:

Oh, that there could be pity, or if not that, at least forbearance,
for the most forlorn of all men! Such I am, and expect to be in a
condition worse than such tomorrow. Farewell--W. C.

Mrs. Unwin was slowly dying and the poet knew it. “Sally, is there life above-stairs?” he asked the maidservant on the morning before the end came. When told of her death he persisted in declaring that she was not “actually dead,” but it was easy enough to dislodge any delusion upon that score by simply showing him the face of the woman who had been his constant companion for so many years. With one shrill, wild cry the nightcapped hermaphrodite turned from the bedside, never to mention her name again.

Slowly the years passed, with William Cowper sitting “still and silent as a stone.” Terrible indeed must have been the thoughts that passed through that diseased brain! Once more he heard voices; and to counteract their influence “Johnny of Norfolk,” a man of infinite resource, had tubes let into that silent chamber, little tin tubes, through which he caused to have piped words of comfort in attempted emulation of the awful voice of God!

The end approached. They asked him how he felt. “I feel,” answered William Cowper, “unutterable despair.” On his deathbed they brought him a cordial, but he waved it aside. “What can it signify?”

It is satisfactory to learn that in the opinion of my great-grandfather, when at length at liberty to scrutinize the corpse, there rested upon the dead poet’s face an expression of “holy surprise.”

Cowper was buried at East Dereham. A month before his death for one short interval his poetic genius returned to him and taking pen in hand he wrote “The Castaway.” Even to this day the terrible and tragic lines of this tremendous poem trouble our imaginations. What a cry is here! What an appalling cry!

No voice divine the storm allayed,
No light propitious shone,
When, snatched from all effectual aid,
We perished, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea
And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.

JAMES THOMSON

The attitude of forlorn despair which finds perpetual recurrence in the minds of certain types of human beings when they come to look beneath the surface of existence, has never, perhaps, been given more complete and final expression than in the poetry of James Thomson. There remains indeed nothing further to be said, for this unfortunate man has found it in him to curse the womb that bare him and the paps which he has sucked and to outface God and go down into the pit at last with his terrible avowals still unretracted.

James Thomson was born in 1834, of Scots parentage. His father was a sea-captain, and a man apparently as capable of holding his own against the storms of the Atlantic as was his son against those other more terrible gales that beat in upon him from eternity. For six days, we are told, the master of the good ship “Eliza Stewart” never left the bridge; stood there, in fact, until carried below broken and paralyzed; and up to the very last year of his tragic life his son may be said to have remained at his post with no less resolution.

James Thomson was trained to be an army school master. At the age of eighteen, while quartered at Ballincollig, in Cork, he fell in love with a young girl named Matilda Wella. After he had known her for two years she died; a calamity of which the full and bitter consciousness remained with Thomson for a quarter of a century. There is scarcely one of his poems that has not some allusion to this child, and in the end, when the awful history of his days was at last concluded, a lock of her hair was buried with him.

In Ireland, he also met Charles Bradlaugh who, having already got into trouble for his free-thinking views, had enlisted as a common trooper. When Bradlaugh was on sentry duty it was Thomson’s custom to walk by his side, and one gets an interesting picture of these two men who were destined to become so famous, discoursing philosophy under the summer stars.

In 1862, Thomson was expelled from the service for a slight breach of military discipline. For the next five years he lived in London in the house of Charles Bradlaugh, earning his livelihood as best he could by office work and journalism. This period was in all probability the happiest of his life. With his friend to satisfy his craving for companionship, and Hypatia and Alice Bradlaugh to satisfy his more sentimental affections, he would seem to have attained to some measure of contentment. In the evenings, he would tell stories to the children or sit smoking with their father, and on Sundays and holidays the whole party would often go out for excursions or perhaps walk together to the grave of Charles Lamb.

It was now that his poems began to appear in the _National Reformer_. Many of them are marred by that same tone of forced jocularity which spoils his letters. Now and again, however, they are excellent, as, for example, the one entitled “l’Ancien Régime,” the bitter, satyrical quality of which is altogether characteristic of his temper.

Who has a thing to bring
For a gift to our Lord the King?
A harlot brought him her flesh,
Her lusts, and the manifold mesh
Of her wiles, intervolved with caprice;
Harlotry’s just the thing
To bring as a gift for our King.

Thomson made at this time two expeditions out of England, one to America as the secretary to some mining corporation in Colorado, and one to Spain as a correspondent for the New York _World_. The latter enterprise proved a complete failure: sufficient copy was not forthcoming. Soon after his return a quarrel with Bradlaugh threw him once for all upon his own resources and he became for the rest of his life what is known as a “single-room bachelor” in the East End of London.

There were thousands and thousands of human kind
In this desert of brick and stone:
But some were deaf and some were blind,
And he was there alone.

Closed up in one small room, as it were in a cage, he dragged out the rest of his life, day by day.

The publication in 1874, of his masterpiece “The City of Dreadful Night,” brought him into contact with several of the more discerning men of letters of the day. George Meredith, Philip Bourke Marston, W. M. Rossetti, Emerson and Longfellow all recognized its value. He sent copies of it to Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, no comment, however, being evoked from the former old curmudgeon, though the ethical-minded novelist was considerate enough to write a letter to him in which she expressed the hope “that a mind informed with so much passionate energy would soon produce works with a wide embrace of human fellowship in them.”

Slowly the dull years passed by with penury, disappointment and insomnia as his three constant companions. At certain periods he would endeavour to drown in alcohol the misery of his weary and jaded mind, but it was only to return to his sordid surroundings, after the bout was over, in a fit of even greater depression. That people could ever think of time as passing swiftly was to James Thomson incomprehensible--

This Time which crawleth like a monstrous snake
Wounded and slow and very venomous;

From his diaries we get a devastating insight into the dreariness of his life, into the agony that too often, alas! in this world besets an imaginative and sensitive nature submerged in commonplace surroundings. Day followed day in uneventful melancholy procession, and each was as like to each in its neutral tone as one dull English penny is to another. From his walks along the depressing streets of London, he would return to his lodging house, would open the dreary house-door and, passing through the tiny hall, smelling of today’s cooking, yesterday’s gas, and innumerable forgotten inmates, stumble up the dark stairway to be confronted at last by the same books, the same dirty and hateful litter that he had left so short a time before. It is no wonder that references to the weather play so important a part in these journals, references to the visibility or invisibility of sun or moon, those two free luminaries that moved above his head with so large and tranquil an assurance.

Bitter easterly. Some sun. Aftn. walk about Soho. (bought
coal-scuttle; after three years!) Moon keen as crystal, sky pale
and cloudless, stars few and dim, ground like iron, wind like a
razor.

... Cold slight snow; fine morning, livid day. Snowing pretty
heavily at night (9 p. m.). Picked just twenty-one sticks out of my
grate, the rest being quite enough to light the fire.

Nov. 2nd, 1874. Forty years old to-day. Cold; third day of fog.
Congenial natal weather.

It was at this time that James Thomson wrote that curious poem called “In the Room.”

The afternoon has grown late and still the curtains of the apartment remain undrawn,

And nimble mice slept, wearied out
With such a double night’s uproar;

At last in the silent dimness the very furniture becomes articulate! The mirror, the cupboard and finally the bed, speak!

I know when men are good or bad,
When well or ill, he slowly said;
When sad or glad, when sane or mad,
And when they sleep alive or dead.
. . . . . .
The bed went on, ‘This man who lies
Upon me now is stark and cold;
He will not any more arise,
And do the things he did of old.’

But envisage his release as he might in imaginative verse, James Thomson’s life still dragged on, dragged on, with all the horrible tenacity of some wretched animal whose spine is broken and yet does not die. His insomnia grew worse, but still he survived,

Feeling the hands of the Infernal Powers
Heavy upon me for enormous ill.

In his ghastly poem to insomnia he describes with intolerable vividness, the nerve-tortured state of one to whose brain even the solace of sleep is denied; as if he alone, James Thomson, ex-army schoolmaster, had been selected by some incredible and malign causality to bear the burden of an immortal consciousness when all other men had rest.

I heard the sounding of the midnight hour;
The others one by one had left the room,
In certain assurance that the gracious power
Of sleep’s fine alchemy would bless the gloom.
. . . . . .
But I with infinite weariness outworn,
Haggard with endless nights unblessed by sleep,
Ravaged by thoughts unutterably forlorn,
Plunged in despairs unfathomably deep,
Went cold and pale and trembling with affright
Into the desert vastitude of Night
Arid and wild and black.
. . . . . .
How I got through I know not, faint as death;
And then I had to climb the awful scarp,
. . . . . .
Perspiring with faint chills instead of heat,
Trembling, and bleeding hands and knees and feet;
Falling, to rise anew;
Until, with lamentable toil and travel
Upon the ridge of arid sand and gravel
I lay supine half-dead and heard the bells chime two.

Towards the end of his life he was occupied in writing certain literary essays, selecting, curiously enough, amongst other writers no less a subject than Walt Whitman, whose poetry at that time was little known in England. There is something extremely affecting in this appreciation of the great American avoucher written by the hand of the man who of all others was the most unhappy. Might it really have been possible, had the two ever met, that the great, life-giving, life-accepting heart of Walt Whitman would have had vigour enough in its ample aplomb to fortify and sustain the darkened spirit of the London poet? At any rate, one experiences a strange sensation, as of miraculous help arriving suddenly in a situation of desperate need, when one comes upon a quotation of this kind in an article by Thomson:

Let the physicians and priest go home
I seize the descending man, and raise him with resistless will.
O despairer, here is my neck:
By God! you shall not go down! Hang your whole weight upon me.
I dilate you with tremendous breath--I buoy you up;
Every room of the house I fill with armed force,
Lovers of me; bafflers of the graves.

It would be a mistake, however, to regard Thomson as a spiritual weakling. He was not that. Rather, like Dante’s proud Italian, damned for ever in the blackest abyss of Hell, he raises his hand in blasphemous imprecation against Almighty God. “Take it, God, for it is at thee that I aim it.”

“The City of Dreadful Night” contains passages of extraordinary and appalling power. But, as James Thomson himself declared, its appeal is likely always to be limited.

If any care for the weak words here written,
It must be some one desolate, Fate-smitten,
Whose faith and hope are dead, and who would die.

The conception of the poem, with its sombre imagery, is terrific. The world in which we live is likened to a vast, doomed city which lifts its “mass enorm” in the centre of an arid desert. The city is enveloped in a dim penumbra through the nebulous light of which street-lights burn obscurely. “Amidst the sounding solitudes,” “ranged mansions” overshadow everything, “still as tombs” where

Myriads of habitants are ever sleeping,
Or dead, or fled from nameless pestilence!

Along the darkened sidewalks of this tremendous and awful metropolis, James Thomson makes his way, following close upon another figure “because he seemed to walk with an intent.”

As I came through the desert, thus it was,
As I came through the desert.

How the reiteration of those famous lines beats in upon the brain after a while, like the regular trending, appalling in its heavy monotony, of hostile feet on a pavement outside one’s door:

As I came through the desert, thus it was
As I came through the desert ...
But I strode on austere;
No hope could have no fear.

In the resonant alleys along which they go they see

worn faces that look deaf and blind
Like tragic masks of stone. With weary tread,
Each wrapt in his own doom, they wander, wander,
Or sit foredone and desolately ponder
Through sleepless hours with heavy drooping head.

They glimpse a thousand evil things ominous and dreadful.

After a hundred steps I grew aware
Of something crawling in a lane below;
It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there
That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
To drag.

The thing looked up, and behold it was a man:

Long grey unreverened locks befouled with mire.
A haggard filthy face with bloodshot eyes,
An infamy for manhood to behold.

At last they draw near to a vast cathedral whose portentous sculptured mass, shadowed far up in the cold, limitless darkness of the night, overlooks a moonlit, cloistral lawn across the wide expanse of which dim crowds of wavering phantom citizens are hurrying. The two travellers enter with the throng, and there in the vast, hollow, many-aisled sanctuary, with tinted moonbeams slanting down through the high mullioned windows, they await the Preacher. Suddenly a voice goes echoing through the vaulted tracery.

And I have searched the heights and depths, the scope
Of all our Universe, with desperate hope
To find some solace for your wild unrest.

And now at last authentic word I bring,
Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
It is to satiate no Being’s gall.
. . . . . .
I find no hint throughout the Universe
Of good or ill, of blessings or of curse;
I find alone Necessity Supreme;
With infinite Mystery, abysmal dark,
Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
For us the flitting shadows of a dream.
. . . . . .
The world rolls round for ever like a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will.
. . . . . .
This little life is all we must endure,
The grave’s most holy peace is ever sure,
We fall asleep and never wake again.

As the years passed, James Thomson’s melancholy grew deeper and deeper. Dejected, poverty-stricken, unrecognized, he still tramped the streets, and still from his bed in his lodging house stared blankly into an ultimate void. In the beginning of the year 1882, something seems to have given way in him at last and, fully cognizant of what he was doing, he deliberately set about to drink himself to death. He was thrown out into the streets by his landlord. Again and again with a strange dogged determination he tried to force his way into the miserable abode which, after all, was the only home he knew. “I must have a roof over my head.”

Four months passed by and he was still alive. It is known that he spent some part of the time in jail; for the rest, he drifted about in the purlieus of Wapping-Old-Stairs and The Isle of Dogs. Most of his friends lost sight of him. A few of them saw him at rare intervals, and always from his finely moulded head, furrowed now with deep lines, his blue eyes looked out with abject defiance. On one occasion he was seen in a tavern, dressed in mud-stained, ragged clothes. He was wearing a pair of carpet slippers, through the broken soles of which his naked feet were clearly visible.

Then suddenly he appeared in the rooms of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet. Although Marston could not see his guest there was something about his wild speech that filled the blind man with terrible misgivings. Fortunately, William Sharp, the critic, happened to come in later in the afternoon. He found Thomson lying on Marston’s bed, in a pool of blood, almost unconscious. He had the sick man conveyed to the London University Hospital where, it is said, he lay for a long time on the bare bench of the common waiting-room until the house physician found time to attend to him. What, exactly, were Thomson’s last words has never been divulged. It has been hinted that they were such as to cause even his friends to look askance. “I shall get out of here on Monday, even if it’s in my coffin” was one sentence shrieked out by the frenzied man who could not die. His words proved happily true. On the following Monday he, the atheist, theophobist, life hater, found rest at last for his “homeless mind,” in a good hour, under six feet of honest earth. No religious service was said over his grave. Free at length from

Infections of unutterable sadness,
Infections of incalculable madness,
Infections of incurable despair,

he was simply put under ground, “unhouseled, unanneal’d,” cursed alike by man and God, a renegade and outcast who had been denied everything in the world except genius.

PADRAIC COLUM

It has been given to few writers of verse to express the mood of the land of their birth with an accent as autochthonous as that of Mr. Padraic Colum. It is not for nothing that this shy and delicate poet derives his family name from the most Irish of Irish saints and singers who himself most wonderfully, more than a thousand years ago, struck the very same note that delights us today in Mr. Colum’s poetry. For as the holy Columcille looked back from his small craft of skins and branches at the green fields of Ireland growing more and more indistinct behind him, it is said that the sound of his singing was heard far and wide over the cold, drab-coloured waves of the northern sea:

How swift is the speed of my coracle;
Its stem towards Derry.
I grieve at my errand o’er the noble sea
Traveling to Alba of the Ravens.
A grey eye looks back to Erin
A grey eye full of tears.

It is just this same quality, so heightened, so imaginative and yet so convincingly realistic “with its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic,” that we find in Padraic Colum’s verse. For all the bewildering effrontery displayed by certain Celtic adventurers in the realm of Saxon literature, for all the dash and intellectual brilliance, for instance, of men like Burke, Sheridan, Moore, Wilde, and Shaw, it is not to them that we look for the true articulate expression of the sad soul of Ireland. We must turn to the ancient Catholic singers, to the country ballad-makers, to the vague, wistful, half-expressed romanticism of poets like Francis Mahony, James Clarence Mangan, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Padraic Colum, if we are to catch the wild, doleful music which the wandering west winds of the Atlantic awaken in the whin bushes and lone moorland trees of the dedicated and tragic Island.

Mr. Colum was born and brought up in one of the middle counties, and his spirit has been permeated with the very thrill of this articulation. His imagination is the imagination of the incorrigible and wilful people who have retained throughout history so strange an attitude to the bleak illusions which occupy, in so rigid a manner, the attention and interests of the rest of the world.

From the earliest times, the Irish have been irresistibly attracted by those half-uttered secrets of the earth’s margins which a chance phrase or unexpected word in Celtic literature seems often so nearly to reveal. Above everything these “amorous Gaedhils” are impressionable to what _can not be spoken_; to the inconstant, tremulous, spiritual messages that come to us with retrospection; to the indefinable, provocative calls, sad voices from lost worlds, as it were, that are brought to us each year with the passing of the seasons; to the incoherent evocations that emanate from certain localities or objects whose forlorn identity when once observed can never be forgotten.

It is indeed fitting enough that Padraic Colum should have called the one slim, precious volume he has given us “Wild Earth.” No more adequate title could possibly have been selected. Wild Earth!--in these poems one finds the dew of a thousand early mornings, drawn forth by the yellow sun from our wanton planet which after a million dancing æons remains to this day proud, and hard, and “wild,” and never entirely “broken for corn.”

Everything Mr. Colum writes has its peculiar interest. In a single illuminating sentence he has done much to elucidate the mysterious power of the most perplexing work of genius that has appeared in modern times. Of “Ulysses” he says: “James Joyce does not write savagely, he writes satanically, and his satire touches not individuals and institutions but life itself.” Again and again in Padraic Colum’s plays one comes upon passages which bear the stamp of his sensitive and fastidious genius. Take this quotation:

The people have to watch
The black rain and it falling all the day.

And again,

God’s will is set
Against us all; it is against
The cattle in the field, and it was they
Stood by his crib; they’re moaning always now
He has forgotten them.

In the mere use of the simple words “black rain,” what a fresh, unsophisticated approach to the manifestations of the visible world is revealed; and in the second quotation what a winnowed, sensitive delicacy, so Celtic, so Catholic, is suggested by the “long long thoughts” which could conceive of a deity being laid under some kind of magnanimous obligation to the beasts of the field for no other reason, forsooth, than that they had been the mute spectators of the birth of a god! It is, indeed, this “fresh approach” which gives to Mr. Colum’s books written for children the clear, lucid tone which makes each of them, in its way, a perfect work of art. They seem always to be the narrations of one who has experienced something or seen something for the first time. In truth, to the eye of a poet, what matter that a thousand ages have passed since the world’s crust first cooled? Are not men, birds, animals, and flowers, created every hour, incredible and exultant, from the mysterious, fecund breathing of the nostrils of God?

How evasively and unpretentiously Padraic Colum conveys to us the poetry of life; lines, and even single words of his, brushing against our intelligence with the surprise and softness of a linnet’s wings. What a rich harvest of impressions his poet’s nature must have gathered in those days of his youth--the homely, simple look of white geese against a peat stack, the cottage interior with its shrine and corn bin, the “lonesome hush” of a deserted country road, “the fire-seed sleeping deep in white ashes”!

But valuable though his other contributions to literature are, it is to his poetry that one returns, time and again, when one wishes for the particular refreshment that in certain moods he alone can give us. Has he, one wonders, in his poem entitled “The Poet” presented us with a valuable clue by which to explain his power?

‘The blackbird’s nest, in the briar,
The sea-gulls’ nests on the ground
They are nests, and they’re more than nests’ he said
‘They are tokens I have found.’
. . . . . .
‘But close to the ground are they reared
The wings that take widest way,
And the birds that sing best in the wood,’ he said,
‘Are bred with their breasts to the clay.’

The poems of “Wild Earth” do in very fact remind one of the direct appeal of the familiar European blackbird with its liquid, flute-like song; but they also have in them something else, something unutterable, unaccountable, melancholy, which one might well associate with a different bird. Continually, as we read, we are startled by a note plaintive and intractable as the whistle of a curlew coming to us on the wind, in fitful intervals, from some far-off, desolate moorland.

The crows still fly to that wood, and out of the wood she comes
Carrying her load of sticks, a little less now than before,
Her strength being less; she bends as the hoar rush bends in the wind.
. . . . . .
And then, between daybreak and dark,
And between the hill and the sea,
Three Women, come down from the Mountain,
Will raise the Keen over me.
. . . . . .
Och! but I’m weary of mist and dark,
And roads where there’s never a house nor bush,
And tired I am of bog and road,
And the crying wind and the lonesome hush!

Hidden away in many of his poems side by side with this haunting feeling of bane, one comes upon an extraordinary suggestion of those unexplained emotions which for want of a better word we call romantic. Perhaps what I mean will also best be illustrated by quoting from certain poems.

To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,
Through Leitrim and Longford,
Go my cattle and me.

I hear in the darkness
Their slipping and breathing--
I name them the bye-ways
They’re to pass without heeding;

Then the wet, winding roads,
Brown bogs with black water;
And my thoughts on white ships
And the King o’ Spain’s daughter.

We hear it again in

Mavourneen is going
From me and from you,
Where Mary will fold him
With mantle of blue!

From reek of the smoke
And cold of the floor,
And the peering of things
Across the half-door.

Or in,

She’ll hear my boat on the shingles,
And she’ll hear my step on the land,
And the corncrake hid in the meadow
Will tell her I’m at hand!

But it may very well be that in its ultimate essence what constitutes the chief value of Padraic Colum’s work is the faculty he possesses for calling up before our eyes the peculiar characteristics of the native Irish, characteristics so simple and yet so imaginative, lingering on even yet, in the more out of the way districts of their country-side. In his writings we hear once more the exact intonation of the fiddlers and the wavering voices of the harp-players who for generations have gone wailing through each white-washed hovel, and whose wandering footprints have been mingled for centuries with the webbed indentures of ganders and ducks which mark each muddy bohereen. Again and yet again we catch the echoes of their doleful exclamations, Och! Ochone! or hear the reiterate murmur of their ranns and quaint benedictions.

I save the seed of fire to-night,
Even so may Christ save me,

On the top of the house let Mary
In the middle let Bridget be.

These are the people whose hearts for so many centuries have been entrammelled with a perilous love for their dark Rosaleen with “her holy delicate white hands.”

The priests are on the ocean green
They march along the deep.
There’s wine from the royal Pope,
Upon the ocean green;

These are the people who “went forth to war, but always fell” and who to this day cherish deep in their hearts a proud contempt for the “creeping Saxon.”

Not forgetting Saxon faith
Not forgetting Norman scath
Not forgetting William’s word
Not forgetting Cromwell’s sword

From Cruckmoylinn to Carricknabauna, from Glen Nefin to Leitrim, they have eaten “the scrape of hog’s lard” and looked upon the three most desolate things in the world, and yet have retained throughout the worst period of their agony a “deep affection and recollection” for the tragic soul of their country whose memory in retrospect ever haunts their minds.

In the old, old days, upon Innish,
The fields were lucky and bright,

But possibly in one single poem of three verses Padraic Colum has succeeded more than in any other in giving perfect expression to his feeling not only for the romance and beauty that he finds in innocent, homely things but also for the silent glamour of nature in her most entranced and lambent moods. His poem called “Across the Door” is unsurpassed both in form and imaginative suggestiveness. These lines have upon them the simplicity and inevitability which belong only to great poetry.

With what ease our imagination re-creates the poem’s setting--the close interior with the candle-light making flickering patterns on the smoke-stained rafters, the quick elbow-movements of the fiddlers, and the young, eager girl who, transported by the music and dance, so soon feels on the moonlit threshold with “the dim, wide meadows” about her, a conscious, bewildered awakening to that wild mystery before which all creation trembles and faints. If Mr. Colum had written no other line of poetry except this piece, in my opinion, it would have ensured for him an undisputed place among the immortals:

The fiddles were playing and playing,
The couples were out on the floor;
From converse and dancing he drew me,
And across the door.

Ah! strange were the dim, wide meadows,
And strange was the cloud-strewn sky,
And strange in the meadows the corncrakes,
And they making cry!

The hawthorn bloom was by us,
Around us the breath of the south.
_White hawthorn, strange in the night-time--_
_His kiss on my mouth!_

Transcriber’s Notes

Typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Italics have been indicated with surrounding underscores.