As I Rode by Granard Moat Page 14

  Think of all your murder’d chieftains – all your rifled homes and shrines –

  Then rush down, with whetted vengeance, like fierce wolves upon their lines!

  Think of Bangor – think of Mayo – and Senanus’ holy tomb –

  Think of all your past endurance – what may be your future doom!

  On this day the God-man suffered, look upon the sacred sign –

  May we conquer ’neath its shadow, as of old did Constantine!

  May the heathen tribes of Odin fade before it like a dream,

  And the triumph of this glorious day in future annals gleam!

  God of Heaven, bless our banner – nerve our sinews for the strife!

  Fight we now for all that’s holy – for our altars, land, and life –

  For red vengeance on the spoiler, whom the blazing temples trace –

  For the honour of our maidens, and the glory of our race!

  Should I fall before the foeman, ’tis the death I seek to-day;

  Should ten thousand daggers pierce me, bear my body not away,

  Till this day of days be over – till the field is fought and won –

  Then the holy Mass be chaunted, and the funeral rites be done.

  Curses darker than Ben Heder light upon the craven slave

  Who prefers the life of traitor to the glory of the grave!

  Freedom’s guerdon now awaits you, or a destiny of chains –

  Trample down the dark oppressor while one spark of life remains!

  Think not now of coward mercy – Heaven’s curse is on their blood!

  Spare them not, though myriad corpses float upon the purple flood!

  By the memory of great Daithi, and the valiant chiefs of yore,

  This day we’ll scourge the viper brood for ever from our shore!

  Men of Erin! men of Erin! grasp the battle-axe and spear!

  Chase these Northern wolves before you like a herd of frightened deer!

  Burst their ranks, like bolts from heaven! Down on the heathen crew,

  For the glory of the Crucifix, and Erin’s glory too!

  Perhaps the most notable of Dublin’s ghosts answers, if you call him, to the name of James Joyce. Not only does he continue to walk the streets by night and day and, every Bloomsday, to manifest himself to more and more people. But, like the Lord Himself, he created other people, whose ghosts also parade most impressively: Stephen Dedalus, for instance, whose ghost is a shadow of his Maker.

  I feel that Joyce, in his time, must have considered this poem in which the German John Sterling, in 1840, lamented the epic aerial passing of that enchanting figure from Greek legend:

  LAMENT FOR DÆDALUS

  Wail for Dædalus, all that is fairest!

  All that is tuneful in air or wave!

  Shapes whose beauty is truest and rarest,

  Haunt with your lamps and spells his grave!

  Statues, bend your heads in sorrow,

  Ye that glance ’mid ruins old,

  That know not a past, nor expect a morrow

  On many a moonlight Grecian wold!

  By sculptur’d cave and darken’d river

  Thee, Dædalus, oft the nymphs recall;

  The leaves with a sound of winter quiver,

  Murmur thy name, and withering fall.

  Yet are thy visions in soul the grandest

  Of all that crowd on the tear-dimm’d eye,

  Though, Dædalus, thou no more commandest

  New stars to that ever-widening sky.

  Ever thy phantoms arise before us,

  Our loftier brothers, but one in blood;

  By bed and table they lord it o’er us

  With looks of beauty and words of good.

  They tell us and show us of man victorious

  O’er all that’s blameless, blind, and base;

  Their presence has made our nature glorious,

  And given our night an illumined face.

  Thy toil has won them a godlike quiet;

  Thou hast wrought their path to a lovely sphere;

  Their eyes to calm rebuke our riot,

  And shape us a home of refuge here.

  For Dædalus breathed in them his spirit;

  In them their sire his beauty sees:

  We too, a younger brood, inherit

  The gifts and blessing bestow’d on these.

  But, ah! their wise and bounteous seeming

  Recalls the more that the sage is gone;

  Weeping we wake from deceitful dreaming,

  And find our voiceless chamber lone.

  Dædalus, thou from the twilight fleest,

  Which thou with visions hast made so bright;

  And when no more those shapes thou seest,

  Wanting thine eye they lose their light.

  Ev’n in the noblest of man’s creations,

  Those fresh worlds round those old of ours,

  When the seer is gone, the orphan’d nations

  Know but the tombs of perish’d Powers.

  Wail for Dædalus, Earth and Ocean!

  Stars and Sun, lament for him!

  Ages, quake in strange commotion!

  All ye realms of life, be dim!

  Wail for Dædalus, awful voices,

  From earth’s deep centre mankind appal;

  Seldom ye sound, and then Death rejoices,

  For he knows that then the mightiest fall.

  The wonderful Oliver St John Gogarty is the first man mentioned, under another name, in that long book, a novel or something, by James Joyce. But no man could ever dare to say that Dr Gogarty was a ghost.

  He had a deep devotion to swans. He had some trouble once with some gentlemen carrying guns who did not approve of his variety of politics. He abandoned the argument and withdrew from their company by jumping into and swimming the Liffey. And always afterwards he felt indebted to the river and the swans thereon. He even donated more swans to the balustraded stream. But, better still, he paid his respects, in his ‘Leda and the Swan’, to one of the earliest and greatest stories about the bird:

  Though her mother told her

  Not to go a-bathing,

  Leda loved the river

  And she could not keep away:

  Wading in its freshets

  When the noon was heavy;

  Walking by the water

  At the close of day.

  Where beneath its waterfalls,

  Underneath the beeches,

  Gently flows a broader

  Hardly moving stream,

  And the balanced trout lie

  In the quiet reaches;

  Taking all her clothes off,

  Leda went to swim.

  There was not a flag-leaf

  By the river’s margin

  That might be a shelter

  From a passer-by;

  And a sudden whiteness

  In the quiet darkness,

  Let alone the splashing,

  Was enough to catch an eye.

  But the place was lonely,

  And her clothes were hidden;

  Even cattle walking

  In the ford had gone away;

  Every single farm-hand

  Sleeping after dinner, –

  What’s the use of talking?

  There was no one in the way.

  In, without a stitch on,

  Peaty water yielded,

  Till her head was lifted

  With its ropes of hair;

  It was more surprising

  Than a lily gilded,

  Just to see how golden

  Was her body there:

  Lolling in the water,

  Lazily uplifting

  Limbs that on the surface

  Whitened into snow;

  Leaning on the water,

  Indolently drifting,

  Hardly any faster

  Than the foamy bubbles go.

  You would say to see her

  Swimming in the lonely

  Pool, or after,
dryer,

  Putting on her clothes:

  ‘O but she is lovely,

  Not a soul to see her,

  And how lovely only

  Leda’s Mother knows!’

  Under moving branches

  Leisurely she dresses,

  And the leafy sunlight

  Made you wonder were

  All its woven shadows

  But her golden tresses,

  Or a smock of sunlight

  For her body bare.

  When on earth great beauty

  Goes exempt from danger,

  It will be endangered

  From a source on high;

  When unearthly stillnes

  Falls on leaves, the ranger,

  In his wood-lore anxious,

  Gazes at the sky.

  While her hair was drying,

  Came a gentle languor,

  Whether from the bathing

  Or the breeze she didn’t know.

  Anyway she lay there,

  And her Mother’s anger

  (Worse if she had wet hair)

  Could not make her dress and go.

  Whitest of all earthly

  Things, the white that’s rarest,

  Is the snow on mountains

  Standing in the sun;

  Next the clouds above them,

  Then the down is fairest

  On the breast and pinions

  Of a proudly sailing swan.

  And she saw him sailing

  On the pool where lately

  She had stretched unnoticed,

  As she thought, and swum;

  And she never wondered

  Why, erect and stately,

  Where no river weed was

  Such a bird had come.

  What was it she called him:

  Gosey-goosey gander?

  For she knew no better

  Way to call a swan;

  And the bird responding

  Seemed to understand her,

  For he left his sailing

  For the bank to waddle on.

  Apple blossoms under

  Hills of Lacedaemon,

  With the snow beyond them

  In the still blue air,

  To the swans who hid them

  With his wings asunder,

  Than the breasts of Leda,

  Were not lovelier!

  Of the tales that daughters

  Tell their poor old mothers,

  Which by all accounts are

  Often very odd;

  Leda’s was a story

  Stranger than all others.

  What was there to say but:

  Glory be to God?

  And she half-believed her,

  For she knew her daughter;

  And she saw the swan-down

  Tangled in her hair.

  Though she knew how deeply

  Runs the stillest water;

  How could she protect her

  From the winged air?

  Why is it effects are

  Greater than their causes?

  Why should causes often

  Differ from effects?

  Why should what is lovely

  Fill the world with harness?

  And the most deceived be

  She who least suspects?

  When the hyacinthine

  Eggs were in the basket,

  Blue as at the whiteness

  Where a cloud begins:

  Who would dream there lay there

  All that Trojan brightness;

  Agamemnon murdered;

  And the mighty Twins?

  Patrick Kavanagh is still a living voice in Dublin and, by the hand of the sculptor John Coll, he sits contemplating the waters of his beloved Grand Canal, remembering what he thought when he walked along the disused towing-path:

  CANAL BANK WALK

  Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal

  Pouring redemption for me, that I do

  The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,

  Grow with nature again as before I grew.

  The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third

  Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,

  And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word

  Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.

  O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web

  Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,

  Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib

  To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech

  For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven

  From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

  One seat on the canal bank was erected in memory of Mrs Dermot O’Brien, the wife of a great painter. That seat, because of the dedication and artistic associations, meant a great deal to Kavanagh, and set him to wishing that he might be similarly remembered. And thanks to John Ryan, and others who followed his lead, his wish was fulfilled.

  LINES WRITTEN ON A SEAT ON THE GRAND CANAL

  O commemorate me where there is water,

  Canal water preferably, so stilly

  Greeny at the heart of summer. Brother

  Commemorate me thus beautifully.

  Where by a lock Niagorously roars

  The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence

  Of mid-July. No one will speak in prose

  Who finds his way to these Parnassian islands.

  A swan goes by head low with many apologies,

  Fantastic light looks through the eyes of bridges –

  And look! A barge comes bringing from Athy

  And other far-flung towns mythologies.

  O commemorate me with no hero-courageous

  Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.

  And was it walking by the bank of that canal and hearing the music of the wind in the topmost branches of the trees, that the poet Austin Clarke found himself far away by miles but much farther by centuries – and became the monk of ancient times who was enchanted for an instant, or an eternity, out of this earth when he hearkened to the singing of The Blackbird of Derrycairn’?

  Stop, stop and listen for the bough top

  Is whistling and the sun is brighter

  Than God’s own shadow in the cup now!

  Forget the hour-bell. Mournful matins

  Will sound, Patric, as well at nightfall.

  Faintly through mist of broken water

  Fionn heard my melody in Norway.

  He found the forest track, he brought back

  This beak to gild the branch and tell, there,

  Why men must welcome in the daylight.

  He loved the breeze that warns the black grouse,

  The shouts of gillies in the morning

  When packs are counted and the swans cloud

  Loch Erne, but more than all those voices

  My throat rejoicing from the hawthorn.

  In little cells behind a cashel,

  Patric, no handbell gives a glad sound.

  But knowledge is found among the branches.

  Listen! The song that shakes my feathers

  Will thong the leather of your satchels.

  Once upon a time (and that’s the proper opening for this story) I was chosen, and honoured to be chosen, to travel in the back of a taxi all the way from Dublin Airport to the far southern boundary of Dublin city, in the company of a beautiful American film-actress. The man who did the choosing was Ernie Anderson, right-hand man to John Huston.

  The idea was that I was to act as the beautiful lady’s guide to Dublin, ancient and modern, and I set out to do my best. I discovered that the lady knew, all things considered, as much as I did. She was well read and/or well briefed by the inimitable Ernie.

  And I was mute in wonder and admiration when, as we were passing the General Post Office, she started to recite the sonorous and solemn words of Patrick P
earse:

  THE FOOL

  Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak that am only a fool;

  A fool that hath loved his folly,

  Yea, more than the wise men their books or their counting houses, or their quiet homes,

  Or their fame in men’s mouths;

  A fool that in all his days hath done never a prudent thing,

  Never hath counted the cost, nor recked if another reaped

  The fruit of his mighty sowing, content to scatter the seed;

  A fool that is unrepentant, and that soon at the end of all

  Shall laugh in his lonely heart as the ripe ears fall to the reaping-hooks

  And the poor are filled that were empty,

  Tho’ he go hungry.

  I have squandered the splendid years that the Lord God gave to my youth

  In attempting impossible things, deeming them alone worth the toil.

  Was it folly or grace? Not men shall judge me, but God.

  I have squandered the splendid years:

  Lord, if I had the years I would squander them over again,

  Aye, fling them from me!

  For this I have heard in my heart, that a man shall scatter, not hoard,

  Shall do the deed of to-day, nor take thought of to-morrow’s teen,

  Shall not bargain or huxter with God; or was it a jest of Christ’s

  And is this my sin before men, to have taken Him at His word?

  The lawyers have sat in council, the men with the keen, long faces,

  And said, ‘This man is a fool,’ and others have said, ‘He blasphemeth’;

  And the wise have pitied the fool that hath striven to give a life

  In the world of time and space among the bulks of actual things,

  To a dream that was dreamed in the heart, and that only the heart could hold.

  O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?

  What if the dream come true? and if millions unborn shall dwell

  In the house that I shaped in my heart, the noble house of my thought?