Adrian Radu

AN INTRODUCTION TO
IRISH LITERATURE

Part 2
Annotated Reader

Cluj-Napoca
2014
Contents

From The Táin ................................................................................................................................... 3

The Exploits of Cú Chulainn [Cuchulainn] .................................................................................. 3
From The Madness of Sweeney (Sweeney Astray, translated by Seamus Heaney)............. 4
Ronan’s Curse ................................................................................................................................. 4
Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig ................................................................................................. 5
Colmán mac Léníni ........................................................................................................................... 5
From The Apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas ................................................................................ 6
Hymn to St. Colum Cille ................................................................................................................ 6
Colum Cille in Exile ....................................................................................................................... 7
Óengus of Clonenach ........................................................................................................................ 7
Old haunts of the heathen… ......................................................................................................... 7
Invocation to the Martyrs .............................................................................................................. 7
Pangur Bán ..................................................................................................................................... 8
The Lament of Líadan and Cuirithir ............................................................................................ 9
Winter ............................................................................................................................................. 9
If you have a feeble king… ............................................................................................................ 9
Shannon ........................................................................................................................................ 10
Mathghamhain Ó Hifearnáin ....................................................................................................... 10
I ask you, who will buy a poem?... ............................................................................................... 10
Dáibhí Ó Bruadair .......................................................................................................................... 11
The High Poets Are Gone ............................................................................................................ 11
A Shrewish, Barren, Bony, Nosey Servant................................................................................. 11
Aodhagán (or Aogán) Ó Rathaille ............................................................................................... 11
The Drenching Night Drags On .................................................................................................. 11
Valentine Browne ......................................................................................................................... 11
Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin ......................................................................................................... 12
A Magic Mist................................................................................................................................. 12
Aoghán Ó Rathaille ......................................................................................................................... 13
An Aisling (The Vision) ................................................................................................................ 13
The Redeemers Son (Mac an Cheannaí) ..................................................................................... 13
Maria Edgeworth ............................................................................................................................ 14
From Castle Rackrent ...................................................................................................................... 14
Author’s Preface ........................................................................................................................... 14
Sir Murtagh .................................................................................................................................. 15
William Carleton ............................................................................................................................. 18
From Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry ............................................................................. 18
The Hedge School ......................................................................................................................... 18
Somerville and Ross ....................................................................................................................... 20
From Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. ....................................................................................... 20
Great-Uncle McCarthy ................................................................................................................ 20
Sheridan LeFanu ............................................................................................................................. 22
From ‘Carmilla’ ................................................................................................................................ 22
A Very Strange Agony ................................................................................................................. 22

1
 Contents

Bram Stoker ..................................................................................................................................... 24

From Dracula .................................................................................................................................. 24
The Encounter with Dracula ....................................................................................................... 24
Douglas Hyde ................................................................................................................................... 26
The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland ................................................................................... 26
Lady Augusta Gregory ................................................................................................................... 29
From Gods and Fighting Men ........................................................................................................ 29
The Wedding at Ceann Slieve ..................................................................................................... 29
John Millington Synge ................................................................................................................... 32
From the Playboy of the Western World ......................................................................................... 32
Christy’s Crime ............................................................................................................................ 32
Christy’s Punishment .................................................................................................................. 34
William Butler Yeats....................................................................................................................... 36
The Lake Isle of Innisfree ............................................................................................................ 36
September 1913 ............................................................................................................................ 37
Easter 1916 ................................................................................................................................... 37
The Wild Swans at Coole ............................................................................................................. 38
Coole Park, 1929 .......................................................................................................................... 39
Sailing to Byzantium ................................................................................................................... 40
Byzantium .................................................................................................................................... 40
The Second Coming ...................................................................................................................... 40
Leda and the Swan ...................................................................................................................... 41
James Joyce...................................................................................................................................... 41
From Dubliners ................................................................................................................................ 41
From ‘The Dead’ ........................................................................................................................... 41
From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man .............................................................................. 44
From Ulysses: [Lestrygonians] ....................................................................................................... 46
From Finnegans Wake..................................................................................................................... 49
Appendices ........................................................................................................................................ 53
Emily Gerard ................................................................................................................................... 53
From The Land beyond the Forest: ‘Transylvania Superstitions’ ............................................. 53
The Lass of Aughrim ....................................................................................................................... 55
The Ballad of Tom Finnegan .......................................................................................................... 55
Source of texts ................................................................................................................................. 57

2
From The Táin

The Exploits of Cú Chulainn [Cuchulainn]

‘Another time the Ulstermen were in their °weakness1. There was not among us,’ said °Fergus,
‘weakness on women and boys, nor on any one who was outside the country of the Ulstermen, nor
on Cuchulainn and his father. And so no one dared to shed their blood; for the suffering springs on
him who wounds them. [Gloss incorporated in text: ‘or their decay, or their shortness of life.’]
‘Three times nine men came to us from the Isles of Faiche. They went over our back court when we
were in our weakness. The women screamed in the court. The boys were in the play-field; they
come at the cries. When the boys saw the dark, black men, they all take to flight except Cuchulainn
alone. He plies hand-stones and his playing-club on them. He kills nine of them, and they leave
fifty wounds on him, and they go forth besides. A man who did these deeds when his five years
were not full, it would be no wonder that he should have come to the edge of the boundary and that
he should have cut off the heads of yonder four.’
‘We know him indeed, this boy,’ said Conall Cernach, ‘and we know him none the worse that
he is a fosterling of ours. It was not long after the deed that Fergus has just related, when he did
another deed. When Culann, the smith, served a feast to °Conchobar, Culann said that it was not
a multitude that should be brought to him, for the preparation which he had made was not from
land or country, but from the fruit of his two hands and his pincers. Then Conchobar went, and
fifty chariots with him, of those who were noblest and most eminent of the heroes. Now Conchobar
visited then his play-field. It was always his custom to visit and revisit them at going and coming,
to seek a greeting of the boys. He saw then Cuchulainn driving his ball against the three fifties of
boys, and he gets the victory over them. When it was hole-driving that they did, he filled the hole
with his balls and they could not ward him off. When they were all throwing into the hole, he
warded them off alone, so that not a single ball would go in it. When it was wrestling they were
doing, he overthrew the three fifties of boys by himself, and there did not meet round him a number
that could overthrow him. When it was stripping that they did, he stripped them all so that they
were quite naked, and they could not take from him even his brooch out of his cloak.
‘Conchobar thought this wonderful. He said “Would he bring his deeds to completion, provided
the age of manhood came to them?” Every one said: “He would bring them to completion.”
Conchobar said to Cuchulainn: “Come with me,” said he, “to the feast to which we are going,
because you are a guest.”
‘“I have not had enough of play yet, O, friend Conchobar,” said the boy; “I will come after you.”
‘When they had all come to the feast, Culann said to Conchobar: “Do you expect any one to
follow you?” said he.
‘“No,” said Conchobar. He did not remember the appointment with his foster-son who was
following him.
‘“I’ll have a watch-dog,” said Culann; “there are three chains on him, and three men to each
chain. [Gloss incorporated in text: ‘He was brought from Spain.’] Let him be let slip because of our
cattle and stock, and let the court be shut.”
‘Then the boy comes. The dog attacks him. He went on with his play still: he threw his ball,
and threw his club after it, so that it struck the ball. One stroke was not greater than another; and
he threw his toy-spear after them, and he caught it before falling; and it did not hinder his play,
though the dog was approaching him. Conchobar and his retinue – this, so that they could not
move; they thought they would not find him alive when they came, even though the court were
open. Now when the dog came to him, he threw away his ball and his club, and seized the dog with
his two hands; that is, he put one of his hands to the apple of the dog’s throat; and he put the other
at its back; he struck it against the pillar that was beside him, so that every limb sprang apart.
(According to another, it was his ball that he threw into its mouth, and brought out its entrails
through it.)
‘The Ulstermen went towards him, some over the wall, others over the doors of the court. They
put him on Conchobar’s knee. A great clamour arose among them, that the king’s sister’s son should
have been almost killed. Then Culann comes into the house.

1 The meaning of the words preceded by a degree sign (°) is explained in the Glossary and Notes section
following each text.

3
 From The Madness of Sweeney
(Sweeney Astray, translated by Seamus Heaney)

‘“Welcome, boy, for the sake of your mother. Would that I had not prepared a feast! My life is
a life lost, and my husbandry is a husbandry without, without my dog. He had kept honour and
life for me,” said he, “the man of my household who has been taken from me, that is, my dog. He
was defence and protection to our property and our cattle; he was the protection of every beast to
us, both field and house.”
‘“It is not a great matter,” said the boy; “a whelp of the same litter shall be raised for you by
me, and I will be a dog for the defence of your cattle and for your own defence now, until that dog
grows, and until he is capable of action; and I will defend Mag Murthemne, so that there shall not
be taken away from me cattle nor herd, unless I have –.”
‘“Then your name shall be Cu-chulainn,” said °Cathbad.
‘“I am content that it may be my name,” said Cuchulainn.
(The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) : An Old Irish Prose-Epic by Faraday, Project
Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14391, Oct 2014)
Glossary and notes
Cathbad (Cathbhadh) is the chief druid in the court of King Conchobar mac Nessa in the Ulster Cycle of
Irish mythology.
Conchobar (Conchobar mac Nessa) was the king of Ulster in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. He ruled
from Emain Macha (Navan Fort, near Armagh).
Fergus (also known as Fergus mac Róig or Fergus mac Rossa) is a character of the Ulster Cycle of Irish
mythology. Formerly the king of Ulster, he is tricked out of the kingship and betrayed by Conchobar
mac Nessa, and becomes the ally and lover of Conchobar’s enemy queen Medb of Connacht, and joins
her expedition against Ulster in the Táin Bó Cúailnge.
weakness was the condition of all Ulstermen (with the exception of young boys and Cú Chulainn) when they
had to fight and show their manly strength, imposed on them by goddess Macha’s curse that in such
moments they be seized by the pangs of childbirth and be as weak of a woman finding herself in such
condition.

From The Madness of Sweeney

(Sweeney Astray, translated by Seamus Heaney)

Ronan’s Curse
Sweeney has trespassed on me
and abused me grievously
and laid violent hands on me
to drag me with him from Killarney.
5 When Sweeney heard my bell ringing
He came all of a sudden hurtling
In terrible rage against me
To drive me off and banish me.
Outrage like that and elation
10 from the first place I had chosen,
were too much for me to bear.
Therefore God answered my prayer.
My hand was locked in Sweeney’s hand
until he heard the loud command
15 to battle: Come away and join
arms with Donal and Moira’s plain.
So I offered thanks and praise
for the merciful release,
that unhoped-for, timely summons
20 to arm and join the high prince.
From far off he approached the field
that drove his mind and senses wild.
He shall roam Ireland, mad and bare.
He shall find death on the point of a spear.
25 The psalter that he grabbed and tore
from me and cast into the deep water –
Christ brought it back without a spot.
The psalter stayed immaculate.
A day and a night in brimming waters,
30 my speckled book was none the worse!
Through the will of God the Son
An otter gave me it again.
This psalter that he profaned
I bequeath with a malediction:
35 that it bode evil for Colman’s race
the day this psalter meets their eyes.
Bare to the world, here came Sweeney
to harass and to harrow me:
therefore, it is God’s decree
40 bare to the world he’ll always be.
Eorann, daughter of Conn of Ciannacht,
tried to hold him by his cloak.
Eorann has my blessing for this

4
 Colmán mac Léníni

but Sweeney lives under my curse.

45 (Heaney 4-6)

Sweeney’s Lament on Ailsa Craig

Without bed or board Skimming the waves
I face the dark days 30 at °Dunseverick,
in frozen lairs listening to billows
and wind-driven snow. at Dun Rodairce,
5 Ice scoured by winds. hurtling from that great wave
Watery shadows from weak sun. to the wave running
Shelter from the one tree 35 in tidal Barrow,
on a plateau. one night in hard Dun Cernan,
Haunting deer-paths, the next among the wild flowers
10 enduring rain, of Benn Boirne;
first-footing the grey and then a stone pillow
frosted-grass. 40 on the °screes of °Croagh Patrick,

I climb towards the pass But to have ended up

and the stag’s belling lamenting here
15 rings off the wood, on °Ailsa Craig,
surf-noise rises A hard station!
where I go, heartbroken 45 Ailsa Craig,
and worn out, the seagulls’ home,
sharp-haunched Sweeney, God knows it is
20 raving and moaning. hard lodgings.
The sough of the winter night, Ailsa Craig,
my feet packing the hailstones 50 bell-shaped rock,
as I pad the dappled reaching sky-high,
banks of Mourne snout in the sea –
25 or lie unslept, in a wet bed it hard-beaked,
on the hills by °Lough Erne, me seasoned and scraggy:
tensed for first light 55 we mated like a couple
and an early start. of hard-shanked cranes. (Heaney 139-41)

Glossary and notes

Ailsa Craig, also known as Alasdair’s Rock, is an uninhabited island in the outer Firth of Clyde, 10 miles
from mainland Scotland.
Croagh Patrick is a 764 metres (2,507 ft) mountain and an important site of pilgrimage in County Mayo in
Ireland.
Dunseverick is the name of a hamlet near the Giant's Causeway in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.
Lough Erne is the name of two connected lakes in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.
scree: steep mass of small particles of rock on the side of a mountain.

Colmán mac Léníni

Luin oc elaib,
Blackbirds compared with swans,
ungi oc díraib,
10 ounces with hundredweights,
drecha ban n-aithech
peasant women’s faces with great queens;
oc ródaib rígnaib;
kings compared with Domnall,
5 ríg oc Domnall,
yodelling with a choir,
dord oc aidbse
a spark compared with a candle,
adand od caindil
15 is every sword compared with my sword.
calg oc mo chailgse.
(in Greene and O’Connor 3)

5
From The Apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas
When he was only five years old From the wet clay.’
Jesus, son of God,
Jesus clapped his hands;
Made twelve little waterholes
His voice was clear and bright;
In the wet mud.
Before their eyes, a marvel,
5 Then he made twelve little birds… 20 The little birds took flight.
Passers as they say;
Then the voice of Jesus
He made them on the Sabbath
Was heard to proclaim;
faultlessly of clay.
‘To show you know who made you
A certain Jew denounced him Go back whence you came!’
10 For what he had done,
25 Another Jew reported
And by the hand to Joseph
Without a word of lie
He took God’s only son.
That far in the distance
‘Correct your son, Joseph, He heard the birds cry. […]
For on the Sabbath day (in Greene and O’Connor 5)
15 He made graven images

Hymn to St. Colum Cille

Fo réir Choluim céin ad-fías
find for nime snáidsium secht;
sét fri úathu úair no tías
ní cen taoisech, táhum nert.
5 Nípu fri coilcthi tincha
tindscain airnaidi cassa;
crochais, nípu i cinta
a chorp for tonna glassa.
Gabais a adamrae ae,
10 is choir Mu Chumma i nÍ;
is mó imrádud cech aí
ando-rigéni in Rí […]
As long as I speak under the obedience of
Colum,
15 may the fair one escort me past the
seven heavens;
when I go the path of terrors it is not
without a leader –
I have strength.
20 It was not on soft beds
that he undertook hard vigils
it was not for his sins
that he crucified his body on the blue
waves.
25 He made a marvellous claim;
it is right that Mo Chumma should be
in Iona.
Greater than any man can think
is what the king has done for him…
30 He turned aside from Ireland, he made his
covenant,
he crossed in ships the whales’
sanctuary.
He broke the wave that pressed on him,
35 a bold man over the sea’s ridge.
He fought bitter battles with the flesh,
he read pure wisdom with masters;
he sewed and hoisted the tops of sails –
across the current of the sea a
40 kingdom was his reward.
Lucky and numerous, a whirlwind swept
them safely
across the sea in curraghs –
Colum Cille, candle of Ireland,
45 none like him was ever found in
human body.
Bold the band whose bravery is his,
a priesthood moving about like true
angels.
50 Though they might be deaf, he was
hearing to them,
though they might be sickly, he was
strength to them...
My song shall be Colum Cille’s as long as
55 he shall exact it,
a bounteous interchange;
in every danger I shall call on him,
with all my strength I shall praise
him.
60 What is on my lips is no cry in the desert,
I shall pray God for my hero’s reward;
because of that he is my guarantee
that he will carry me past the king
who inhabits the fire.
65 May the royal brother, a conqueror of
kings,

6
 Óengus of Clonenach

the gracious lord, protect us with his the supplications of his poet will
power; perhaps protect me.
he will drive away the snare of the devil (in Greene and O’Connor
70 from me, 19-22)

Colum Cille in Exile

Robad mellach, a Meic Muire,
30 Wretched the journey that was imposed on
dingnaib rémenn
me,
ascam tar tuinn topur ndílenn
O King of Mysteries –
dochum nÉireann.
ah, would that I had never gone
5 Co Mag nEólairg sech Beinn Foibne to the battle of Cúl Dremne!
tar Loch Febail,
35 Lucky for the son of Dímna
airm i cluinfinn cuibdis cubaid
in his pious cell,
ac na helaib.
where I used to hear westwards in
Slúag na faílenn roptís fáltaig Durrow,
10 rér seól súntach the delight of my mind:
dia rísad Port na ferg fáiltech
40 The sound of the wind
in Derg Drúchtach. […]
playing music to us in the elm-tree,
It would be delightful, son of Mary, and the cry of the grey blackbird
in strange journeys with pleasure when it had clapped its
15 to travel over the sea, the well of floods wings.
to Ireland.
45 To listen early in Ros Grencha
To Mag nÉolairg by Bevenagh to the stags,
across Lough Foyle and the cuckoos calling from the woods
where I would hear fitting harmony on the brink of summer.
20 from the swans.
I have left the three things
The host of the seagulls 50 I love best in the populated world –
would rejoice at our swift sail Durrow, Derry, the high angelic
if the dewy Derg [his ship] homestead,
were to reach welcoming Port na And Tír Luigdech.
25 bhFearg.
I have loved the lands of Ireland,
Sorrow filled me leaving Ireland 55 I speak truth;
when I was powerful, it would be delightful to spend the night
so that mournful grief came to me with Comgall and visit Canice.
in the foreign land. (in Greene and O’Connor
181-3)

Óengus of Clonenach

Old haunts of the heathen…

Old haunts of the heathen Peopled sanctuaries.
Filled from ancient days
Heathendom has gone down
Are but deserts now
10 Though it spread everywhere;
Where no pilgrim prays.
God the father’s kingdom
5 Little places taken Fills heaven and earth and air.
First by twos and threes (in Greene and O’Connor 10-1)
Are like Rome reborn

Invocation to the Martyrs

Sén, a Christ mo labrae, Dom-berthar búaid léire
a Choimmdiu secht nime! a Rí gréine gile.

7
 Óengus of Clonenach
5 A gelgrían for-osnai
ríched co mméit noíbe,
a Rí con-ic aingliu
a Choimmdiu na ndoine! […]
O Christ, bless my utterance!
10 Lord of the seven heavens!
Give the gift of diligence,
King of the bright sun!
Bright sun who lights
heaven with all its sanctity,
15 King who rules the angels,
Lord of the people.
Lord of the people,
just and faithful king
grant me all favour
20 for the praising of your kingly
household.
Your household that I praise
because you are my king –
I set my mind
25 on always praying to it.
May what I have undertaken protect me,
I urge my prayer on them,
the lovely people with shining colour,
the kingly household I have
30 commemorated.
I have commemorated the kingly
household
round the above the clouds,
partly on bright days,
35 partly in bitter tears.
May it restrain me from wantonness,
since I am but a poor wretch –
the race that host ran
at the behest of the King.
Pangur Bán
Meisse ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria shaindán;
bíth a memna-sam fri seilgg
mo memna céin im shaincheird.
5 Caraim-se foss, ferr cach clú,
oc mo lebrán léir ingnu;
ní foirmtech frimm Pangur Bán,
caraid cesin a macedon. […]
Myself and White Pangur
10 are each at his own trade;
he has mind on hunting,
my mind is on my own task.
Better than any fame
I prefer peace with my book, pursuing
15 knowledge;
White Pangur does not envy me,
8
40 They hewed out roads
that would have been impossible for
weaklings;
they suffered torments
before they came to the kingdom.
45 For all their virtues
they were flogged before hosts;
they crushed to death in assemblies;
they were slaughtered before kings.
They were tortured with spears;
50 they were torn in pieces;
they were burned
over fires an white-hot gridirons.
They were thrown to wild beasts
by brutes without honour;
55 they were flogged, a cruel ordeal,
through blazing furnaces.
They were taken from prisons
to be crucified later,
mocked by the crowd
60 when they had been flayed with
swords.
Joyous at every fate
whose horror is overwhelming;
all the time they suffered many tortures,
65 a noble shedding of blood.
All this lamentation they endured,
a great feat of valour,
to earn proper thanks
from Jesus, Son of Mary.
70 Woe to all those who killed them,
all who dared to slay them,
happy are they
after their brief suffering.
(in Greene and O’Conor 56-60)
he loves his own childish trade […] (in
Greene and O’Connor 81-3).
I and Pangur Bán my cat;
20 ’Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
’Tis to sit with books and pen;
25 Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.
’Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are wee,
When at home we sit and find
30 Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
 Óengus of Clonenach

In the hero Pangur’s way; When I solve the doubts I love!

Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
35 ’Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
’Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
When a mouse darts from its den
40 O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat and I;
45 In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
50 turning darkness into light.
(in Flower 24-5).

The Lament of Líadan and Cuirithir

Cen áinius as they say.
in gním hí do-rigénus;
I was only a short while
an ro charus ro cráidius.
20 in Cuirithir’s company.
Ba mire I had a good time with him.
5 nád dernad a airersom
The music of the wood sang to me
mainbed omun Ríg nime. […]
when I was with Cuirithir,
Joyless is the thing and the sound of the blue sea.
I have done.
25 I would have thought
I have angered the one I loved.
no tryst I ever made
10 It would be madness would anger Cuirithir against me.
not to do what pleased him
Do not hide it!
were it not for fear of the King of Heavens.
He was my first love,
The tryst I desire – 30 though I had loved everyone else beside.
to escape beyond Hell into Paradise –
A blast of fame has pierced my heart.
15 was no loss to him.
Most certainly,
I am Líadan; It will endure without him.
I have loved Cuirithir: it is as true (in Greene and O’Connor 72-3)

Winter
Scél lem dúib;
I have news for you:
dordaid dam,
the stag bellows,
snigid gaim
winter snows,
ro fáith sam.
20 summer has gone.
5 Gáeth ard úar,
The wind is high and cold,
ísel grían;
the sun is low;
gair a rrith
its course is brief,
ruirthech rían.
the tide runs high.
Rorúaid raith,
25 The bracken has reddened,
10 ro cleth cruth,
its shape has been hidden;
ro gab gnáth
the wild goose,
giugrann guth.
has raised his customary cry.
Ro gab úacht
Cold has caught
etti én;
30 the wings of birds;
15 aigrid ré –
it is the time of ice –
é mo scél.
this is my tale.
(in Greene and Connor 98-9)

If you have a feeble king…

9
 Mathghamhain Ó Hifearnáin
If you have a feeble king
Or him offend in anything,
On the rich earth it bodes ill
And works confusion in your will.
5 Lugh’s great bow, Finn’s noble heart,
Alexander’s royal part,
Trojan Hector’s weapons bright,
Achilles’ prowess in stern flight;
Croesus’ riches famed of old,
10 Lovely Orpheus’ harp of gold,
Absalom’s own steadfast skill,
Pharaoh’s indurated will;
Shannon
Shannon! King Brian’s native river,
– Ah! The wide wonder of thy glee –
No more thy waters babble and quiver
As here they join the Western sea.
5 By ancient Borivy thou flowest
And past Kincora rippling by
With sweet unceasing chant thou goest,
For Mary’s babe a lullaby.
Born first in Breffney’s Iron Mountain
10 – I hide not thy nativity –
Thou speediest from that northern
fountain
Swift through they lakes, Loch Derg, Loch
Ree.
15 Over Dunass all underlying
Thy sheer unbridled waters flee
Mathghamhain Ó Hifearnáin
I ask you, who will buy a poem?...
I ask, who will buy a poem?
It holds right thoughts of scholars.
Who needs it? Will anyone take it?
A fine poem to make him immortal.
5 A poem of close-knit skill,
I have walked all Munster with it
from market cross to cross
for a year, and I’m no better of.
Not a man or a woman would give me
10 down-payment, no tiniest groat.
And no one would tell me why
– ignored by Gael and stranger.
What use is a craft like this
a shame though it has to die?
15 Making combs would earn more honour.
10
Strength of Manoa’s long-haired son,
The wise heart of Solomon,
15 Octavian’s sway o’er land’s and seas
And the mind of Hercules;
If these glories, I aver,
Gathered in one mortal were,
His deeds, his valour all were vain,
20 Did no king above him reign.
He that will not serve on earth
His own king of noble worth
Shall find not at the end of things
Mercy from the King of kings.
25 (in Flower 99-100)
Past Limerick town they loiter, staying
Their flight into the western sea.
From Limerick, where the tidal welling
20 Of the swift water comes and goes,
By Scattery, saintly Seanán’s dwelling,
Thou goest and whither then who knows?
Thomond is clasped in thy embraces
And all her shores thou lovest well,
25 Where by Dunass thy cataract races
And where thy seaward waters swell.
Boyne, Siuir and Laune of ancient story,
And Suck’s swift flood – these have their
fame;
30 But in the poet’s roll of glory
Thine, Shannon, is a noble name.
(in Flower 92-3)
Why would anyone take to verse?
Core of Cashel is dead, and Cian,
who hoarded no cattle or cash,
men happy to pay their poets.
20 So goodbye to the seed of Éibhear.
They kept the palm for giving
until Cobhthach was lost, and Tál.
Many I leave unmentioned
that I might have made poems for still.
25 I’m a ship with a ruined cargo
now the famous Fitzgeralds are gone.
No answer. A terrible case.
It is all in vain that I ask.
(in Kinsella, Irish Verse 167-8)
 Dáibhí Ó Bruadair

Dáibhí Ó Bruadair

The High Poets Are Gone

The high poets are gone
and I mourn for the world’s wanting
10
the sons of those learned masters
emptied of sharp response.
5 I mourn for their fading books,
reams of no earnest stupidity,
lost – unjustly abandoned – 15
begotten by drinkers of wisdom.
After those poets, for whom art and
knowledge were wealth
alas to have lived to see this fate befall
us:
their books in corners greying into nothing
and their sons without one syllable of
their secret treasure.
(in Ó Tuama 115-7)

A Shrewish, Barren, Bony, Nosey Servant

A shrewish, barren, bony, nosey servant
A rusty little boiling with a musicless
refused me when my throat was parched
mouth,
in crisis.
she hurled me out with insult through the
May a phantom fly her starving over the
porch.
5 sea,
20 The Law requires I gloss over her pedigree
the bloodless midget that wouldn’t attend
– but little the harm if she bore a cat to a
my thirst.
ghost.
If I cursed her crime and herself, she’d
She’s a club-footed slut and not a woman
learn a lesson.
at all,
10 The couple she serves would give me a
25 with the barrenest face you would meet on
cash on credit
the open road,
but she growled at me in anger, and the
and certain to be a fool to the end of the
beer nearby.
world.
May the King of Glory not leave her long
May she drop her dung down stupidly into
15 at her barrels.
30 the porridge!
(in Ó Tuama 117-9)

Aodhagán (or Aogán) Ó Rathaille

The Drenching Night Drags On

[…] My heart has dried in my ribs, my
You wave down there, lifting your loudest
humours scoured,
10 roar,
that those never-niggardly lords, whose
the wits in my head are worsted by your
holdings ranged
wails.
5 from Caiseal to Clíona’s Wave and out to
If help ever came to lovely Ireland again
Thomond,
I’d wedge your ugly howling down your
are savaged by alien hordes in land and
15 throat! (in Ó Tuama 141)
townland.

Valentine Browne
A mist of pain has covered my dour old
First, Cashel’s company gone, its guest
heart
10 houses and youth;
since the alien devils entered the land of
the gabled palace of Brian’s flooded dark
Conn;
with others;
5 our Western Sun, Munster’s right ruler,
Ealla left leaderless, lacking royal
clouded
Munster sons
– there’s the reason I’d ever to call on you,
15 – there’s the reason I’d ever to call on you,
Valentine Browne.
Valentine Browne.

11
 Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin
The deer has altered her erstwhile noble
shape
since the alien raven roosted in Ros’s
20 fastness;
fish fled the sunlit stream and the quiet
current
– there’s the reason I’d ever to call on you,
Valentine Browne.
25 Dairinis in the West with no Earl of the
noble race;
in Hamburg, to our coast, that Earl over
grey peaceful hawks;
and these old grey eyes weeping for both
30 these things
– there’s the reason I’d ever to call on you,
Valentine Browne.
Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin
A Magic Mist
Through the deep night a magic mist led
me
like a simpleton roaming the land,
no friends of bosom beside me,
5 an outcast in places unknown.
I stretched out dejected and tearful
in a nut-sheltered wood all alone
and prayed to the bright King of Glory
with ‘Mercy!’ alone on my lips.
10 My heart, I declare, full of turmoil
in that wood with no human soul nigh,
the thrush’s sweet voice the sole pleasure,
ever singing its tunes on each bough.
Then a noble sídh-girl sat beside me
15 like a saint in her figure and form:
in her countenance roses contended
with white – and I know not which lost.
Furrowed thick, yellow twisting and
golden
20 was a lady’s hair down to her shoes,
her brows without flaw, and like amber
her luring eye, death to the brave.
Sweet, lovely, delicious – pure music –
the harp-notes of the sídh from her lips,
25 breasts rounded, smooth, chalk-white,
most proper
– never marred by another, I swear.
Though lost to myself till that moment,
with love for the lady I throbbed
30 and I found myself filled with great
pleasure
that she was directed my way.
12
Feathers of the swift bird-flock drift on the
wind
35 tattered like a cat’s fur in a waste of
heather;
cattle deny the flow of milk to their calves
– since ‘Sir Val’ walked into the rights of
the gentle Carthy.
40 Into the uplands Pan directed his gaze
to see where the Mars vanished, who left
us to die.
Dwarf monsters have taken up the Blade
of the Three
45 and hacked our dead across from heel to
top. (in Ó Tuama 161-3)
How it fell, I write out in these verses
– how I let my lips speak unrestrained,
35 the sweet things that I told the fair
maiden
as we stretched on the green mountain-
slope:
‘Are you, languid-eyed lady who pierced
40 me
with love for your face and your form,
the Fair-One caused hordes to be
slaughtered
as they write in the Battle of Troy?
45 Or the mild royal girl who let languish
the chief of Boru and his troop?
Or the queen who decreed that the great
prince
from Howth follow far in pursuit?’
50 Delicious, sweet, tender, she answered,
ever shedding tears down in her pain:
‘I am none of those women you speak of,
and I see that you don’t know my clan.
I’m the bride wed in bliss for a season
55 – under right royal rule – to the King
over Caiseal of Conn and of Eoghain
who ruled undisputed o’er Fódla.
‘Gloomy my state, sad and mournful,
by horned tyrants daily devoured,
60 and heavy oppressed by grim blackguards
while the prince is set sailing abroad.
I look to the great Son of Glory
to send my lion back to his sway
in his strong native towns, in good order,
 Aoghán Ó Rathaille

65 to flay the swarth goats with blades.’ ‘If our Stuart returned o’er the ocean
to the lands of Inís Áilge in full course
‘Mild, golden-haired, courteous fair lady,
with a fleet of Louis’ men, and the
of true royal blood, and no lie,
Spaniard’s,
I mourn for your plight among
80 by dint of joy truly I’d be
blackguards,
70 sad and joyless, dark under a pall. on a prancing pure steed of swift mettle
ever sluicing them out with much shot
If your king to his strong native mansions
– after which I’d not injure my spirit
the Son of Glory should send, in His aid,
standing guard for the rest of my life.’
those swarth goats – swift, freely and
85 (in Ó Tuama 187-9)
willing –
75 with shot would I joyfully flay!’

Aoghán Ó Rathaille

An Aisling (The Vision)

One morning ere Titan had thought to stir 20 Then I followed the flock of cloaked women
his feet, as far as Thomond
on the top of a fine hill I had laboured up, and questioned them on their diligent
I chanced on a pleasant flock of joyous round of tasks.
5 girls,
Then answered the lady Aoibhill, of aspect
a troop from Sídh Seanadh’s bright
25 bright,
mansions to the North.
they had cause to light three candles
A film of enchantment spread, of aspect above the harbours:
bright, in the name of the faithful king who is
10 from the shining boulders of Galway to soon to come
Cork of the harbours: 30 to rule and defend the triple realm for
clusters of fruit appearing in every ever.
treetop,
I started up – soft, sudden – out of my
acorns in woods, pure honey upon the
dream
15 stones.
believing the good news Aoibhill told me
Three candles they lit, of indescribable 35 was true,
light, but found that I was nerve-shaken,
on Cnoc Fírinne’s lofty summit in downcast and morose
Conallach Rua. that morning ere Titan had thought to stir
his feet. (in Ó Tuama 153-5)

The Redeemers Son (Mac an Cheannaí)

A bitter vision I beheld till he come, her Mac an Cheannaí.
in bed as I lay weary:
Hundreds hurt for love of her
a maiden mild whose name was Éire
– her smooth skin Bin soft passion:
coming toward me riding,
kingly children, sons of Míle,
5 with eyes of green hair curled and thick,
20 champions, wrathful dragons.
fair her waist and brows,
Her face, her countenance, is dead,
declaring he was on his way
in weariness declining,
– her loved one Mac an Cheannaí.
and nowhere near is there relief
Her mouth so sweet, her voice so mild, till he come, her Mac an Cheannaí.
10 I love the maiden dearly,
25 A fearful tale, by her account
wife to Brian, acclaimed of heroes
– her weakness my heart’s ruin!
– her troubles are my ruin!
She, musicless and weeping tears,
Crushed cruelly under alien flails
her faint troops leaderless;
my fair-haired slim kinswoman:
no meat or game; she suffers much
15 she’s a dried branch, that pleasant queen,
30 – a scrap for every dog;

13
 Maria Edgeworth

wasted, weak, with mourning eyes, Her dappled Friars are overseas,
till he come, her Mac an Cheannaí. 50 those droves that she held dear;
no welcome, no regard or love,
The sweet mild woman spoke again:
for her friends in any quarter.
her former kings being fallen
Their cheeks are wet; no ease or sleep;
35 – Conn and Art of violent reigns
dressed in black, for sorrow
and deadly hands in combat;
55 – dried branch she’ll stay, with no man lie,
strong Críomthainn home with hostages,
till he come, her Mac an Cheannaí.
Luighdheach Mac Céin the sturdy –
dried branch she’ll stay, with no man lie, I told her, when I heard her tale,
40 till he come, her Mac an Cheannaí. in a whisper, he was dead,
that he had found death up in Spain,
Her eye looks South day after day
60 that no one heard her plaint.
to the shore for ships arriving,
She heard my voice beside her;
to sea Southeast she gazes long
her body shook; she shrieked;
(her troubles are my grief!)
her soul departed in a leap.
45 and a Westward eye, with hope in God,
Alas, that woman lifeless.
o’er wild and sandy billows
65 (in Ó Tuama 157-60)
– defeated, lifeless, powerless,
till he come, her Mac an Cheannaí.

Maria Edgeworth

From Castle Rackrent

Author’s Preface
The Prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics who
aspire to the character of superior wisdom; but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste
is an incontestable proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times.
Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their
labours! The heroes of history are so decked out by the fine fancy of the professed historian; they
talk in such measured prose, and act from such sublime or such diabolical motives, that few have
sufficient taste, wickedness, or heroism, to sympathise in their fate. Besides, there is much
uncertainty even in the best authenticated ancient or modern histories; and that love of truth,
which in some minds is innate and immutable, necessarily leads to a love of secret memoirs and
private anecdotes. We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect
accuracy, from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations,
their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover
their real characters. The life of a great or of a little man written by himself, the familiar letters,
the diary of any individual published by his friends or by his enemies, after his decease, are
esteemed important literary curiosities. We are surely justified, in this eager desire, to collect the
most minute facts relative to the domestic lives, not only of the great and good, but even of the
worthless and insignificant, since it is only by a comparison of their actual happiness or misery in
the privacy of domestic life that we can form a just estimate of the real reward of virtue, or the real
punishment of vice. That the great are not as happy as they seem, that the external circumstances
of fortune and rank do not constitute felicity, is asserted by every moralist: the historian can
seldom, consistently with his dignity, pause to illustrate this truth; it is therefore to the biographer
we must have recourse. After we have beheld splendid characters playing their parts on the great
theatre of the world, with all the advantages of stage effect and decoration, we anxiously beg to be
admitted behind the scenes, that we may take a nearer view of the actors and actresses.
Some may perhaps imagine that the value of biography depends upon the judgment and taste
of the biographer; but on the contrary it may be maintained, that the merits of a biographer are
inversely as the extent of his intellectual powers and of his literary talents. A plain unvarnished
tale is preferable to the most highly ornamented narrative. Where we see that a man has the power,
we may naturally suspect that he has the will to deceive us; and those who are used to literary

14
 Maria Edgeworth

manufacture know how much is often sacrificed to the rounding of a period, or the pointing of an
antithesis.
That the ignorant may have their prejudices as well as the learned cannot be disputed; but we
see and despise vulgar errors: we never bow to the authority of him who has no great name to
sanction his absurdities. The partiality which blinds a biographer to the defects of his hero, in
proportion as it is gross, ceases to be dangerous; but if it be concealed by the appearance of candour,
which men of great abilities best know how to assume, it endangers our judgment sometimes, and
sometimes our morals. If her Grace the Duchess of Newcastle, instead of penning her lord’s
elaborate eulogium, had undertaken to write the life of Savage, we should not have been in any
danger of mistaking an idle, ungrateful libertine for a man of genius and virtue. The talents of a
biographer are often fatal to his reader. For these reasons the public often judiciously countenance
those who, without sagacity to discriminate character, without elegance of style to relieve the
tediousness of narrative, without enlargement of mind to draw any conclusions from the facts they
relate, simply pour forth anecdotes, and retail conversations, with all the minute prolixity of a
gossip in a country town.
The author of the following Memoirs has upon these grounds fair claims to the public favour
and attention; he was an illiterate old steward, whose partiality to the family, in which he was bred
and born, must be obvious to the reader. He tells the history of the Rackrent family in his
vernacular idiom, and in the full confidence that Sir Patrick, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Condy
Rackrent’s affairs will be as interesting to all the world as they were to himself. Those who were
acquainted with the manners of a certain class of the gentry of Ireland some years ago, will want
no evidence of the truth of honest Thady’s narrative; to those who are totally unacquainted with
Ireland, the following Memoirs will perhaps be scarcely intelligible, or probably they may appear
perfectly incredible. For the information of the ignorant English reader, a few notes have been
subjoined by the editor, and he had it once in contemplation to translate the language of Thady
into plain English; but Thady’s idiom is incapable of translation, and, besides, the authenticity of
his story would have been more exposed to doubt if it were not told in his own characteristic
manner. Several years ago he related to the editor the history of the Rackrent family, and it was
with some difficulty that he was persuaded to have it committed to writing; however, his feelings
for ‘the honour of the family,’ as he expressed himself, prevailed over his habitual laziness, and he
at length completed the narrative which is now laid before the public.
The editor hopes his readers will observe that these are ‘tales of other times;’ that the manners
depicted in the following pages are not those of the present age; the race of the Rackrents has long
since been extinct in Ireland; and the drunken Sir Patrick, the litigious Sir Murtagh, the fighting
Sir Kit, and the slovenly Sir Condy, are characters which could no more be met with at present in
Ireland, than Squire Western or Parson Trulliber in England. There is a time when individuals
can bear to be rallied for their past follies and absurdities, after they have acquired new habits and
a new consciousness. Nations, as well as individuals, gradually lose attachment to their identity,
and the present generation is amused, rather than offended, by the ridicule that is thrown upon
its ancestors.
Probably we shall soon have it in our power, in a hundred instances, to verify the truth of these
observations.
When Ireland loses her identity by an union with Great Britain, she will look back, with a
smile of good-humoured complacency, on the Sir Kits and Sir Condys of her former existence.
1800. (Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent 61-3)

Sir Murtagh
Now it was that the world was to see what was in Sir Patrick. On coming into the estate he gave
the finest entertainment ever was heard of in the country; not a man could stand after supper but
Sir Patrick himself who could sit out the best man in Ireland, °let alone the three kingdoms itself.
He had his house, from one year’s end to another, as full of company as ever it could hold, and
fuller; for rather than be left out of the parties at Castle Rackrent, many gentlemen, and those
men of the first consequence and landed estates in the country – such as the O’Neills of
Ballynagrotty, and the Moneygawls of Mount Juliet’s Town, and O’Shannons of New Town
Tullyhog – made it their choice, often and often, when there was no room to be had for love nor
money, in long winter nights, to sleep in the chicken-house, which Sir Patrick had fitted up for the
purpose of accommodating his friends and the public in general, who honoured him with their

15
 Maria Edgeworth

company unexpectedly at Castle Rackrent; and this went on I can’t tell you how long. The whole
country rang with his praises! – long life to him! I’m sure I love to look upon his picture, now
opposite to me; though I never saw him, he must have been a portly gentleman – his neck
something short, and remarkable for the largest pimple on his nose, which, by his particular desire,
is still extant in his picture, said to be a striking likeness, though taken when young. He is said
also to be the inventor of raspberry whisky, which is very likely, as nobody has ever appeared to
dispute it with him, and as there still exists a broken punch-bowl at Castle Rackrent, in the garret,
with an inscription to that effect – a great curiosity. A few days before his death he was very merry;
it being his honour’s birthday, he called my grandfather in – God bless him! – to drink the
company’s health, and filled a bumper himself, but could not carry it to his head, on account of the
great shake in his hand; on this he cast his joke, saying, ‘What would my poor father say to me if
he was to pop out of the grave, and see me now? I remember when I was a little boy, the first
bumper of claret he gave me after dinner, how he praised me for carrying it so steady to my mouth.
Here’s my thanks to him – a bumper toast.’ Then he fell to singing the favourite song he learned
from his father – for the last time, poor gentleman – he sung it that night as loud and as hearty as
ever, with a chorus:
He that goes to bed, and goes to bed sober
falls as the leaves do, falls as the leaves do,
and dies in October;
But he that goes to bed, and goes to bed mellow,
lives as he ought to do, lives as he ought to do,
and dies honest fellow.
Sir Patrick died that night: just as the company rose to drink his health with three cheers, he fell
down in a sort of fit, and was carried off; they sat it out, and were surprised, on inquiry in the
morning, to find that it was all over with poor Sir Patrick. Never did any gentleman live and die
more beloved in the country by rich and poor. His funeral was such a one as was never known
before or since in the county! All the gentlemen in the three counties were at it; far and near, how
they flocked! my great-grandfather said, that to see all the women, even in their red cloaks, you
would have taken them for the army drawn out. Then such a fine °whillaluh! you might have heard
it to the farthest end of the county, and happy the man who could get but a sight of the hearse! But
who’d have thought it? Just as all was going on right, through his own town they were passing,
when the body was seized for debt – a rescue was apprehended from the mob; but the heir, who
attended the funeral, was against that, for fear of consequences, seeing that those villains who
came to serve acted under the disguise of the law: so, to be sure, the law must take its course, and
little gain had the creditors for their pains. First and foremost, they had the curses of the country:
and Sir Murtagh Rackrent, the new heir, in the next place, on account of this affront to the body,
refused to pay a shilling of the debts, in which he was countenanced by all the best gentlemen of
property, and others of his acquaintance; Sir Murtagh alleging in all companies that he all along
meant to pay his father’s debts of honour, but the moment the law was taken of him, there was an
end of honour to be sure. It was whispered (but none but the enemies of the family believe it) that
this was all a sham seizure to get quit of the debts which he had bound himself to pay in honour.
It’s a long time ago, there’s no saying how it was, but this for certain, the new man did not take
at all after the old gentleman; the cellars were never filled after his death, and no open house, or
anything as it used to be; the tenants even were sent away without °their whisky. I was ashamed
myself, and knew not what to say for the honour of the family; but I made the best of a bad case,
and laid it all at my lady’s door, for I did not like her anyhow, nor anybody else; she was of the
family of the Skinflints, and a widow; it was a strange match for Sir Murtagh; the people in the
country thought he °demeaned himself greatly, but I said nothing; I knew how it was. Sir Murtagh
was a great lawyer, and looked to the great Skinflint estate; there, however, he overshot himself;
for though one of the co-heiresses, he was never the better for her, for she outlived him many’s the
long day – he could not see that to be sure when he married her. I must say for her, she made him
the best of wives, being a very notable, stirring woman, and looking close to everything. But I
always suspected she had Scotch blood in her veins; anything else I could have looked over in her,
from a regard to the family. She was a strict observer, for self and servants, of Lent, and all fast-
days, but not holidays. One of the maids having fainted three times the last day of Lent, to keep
soul and body together, we put a morsel of roast beef into her mouth, which came from Sir
Murtagh’s dinner, who never fasted, not he; but somehow or other it unfortunately reached my

16
 Maria Edgeworth

lady’s ears, and the priest of the parish had a complaint made of it the next day, and the poor girl
was forced, as soon as she could walk, to do penance for it, before she could get any peace or
absolution, in the house or out of it. However, my lady was very charitable in her own way. She
had a charity school for poor children, where they were taught to read and write gratis, and where
they were kept well to spinning gratis for my lady in return; for she had always heaps of duty yarn
from the tenants, and got all her household linen out of the estate from first to last; for after the
spinning, the weavers on the estate took it in hand for nothing, because of the looms my lady’s
interest could get from the Linen Board to distribute gratis. Then there was a bleach-yard near us,
and the tenant dare refuse my lady nothing, for fear of a lawsuit Sir Murtagh kept hanging over
him about the watercourse. With these ways of managing, ‘tis surprising how cheap my lady got
things done, and how proud she was of it. Her table the same way, °kept for next to nothing; duty
fowls, and duty turkeys, and duty geese, came as fast as we could eat ‘em, for my lady kept a sharp
lookout, and knew to a tub of butter everything the tenants had, all round. They knew her way,
and what with fear of driving for rent and Sir Murtagh’s lawsuits, they were kept in such good
order, they never thought of coming near Castle Rackrent without a present of something or other
– nothing too much or too little for my lady – eggs, honey, butter, meal, fish, game, grouse, and
herrings, fresh or salt, all went for something. As for their young pigs, we had them, and the best
bacon and hams they could make up, with all young chickens in spring; but they were a set of poor
wretches, and we had nothing but misfortunes with them, always breaking and running away.
This, Sir Murtagh and my lady said, was all their former landlord Sir Patrick’s fault, who let ‘em
all get the half-year’s rent into arrear; there was something in that to be sure. But Sir Murtagh
was as much the contrary way; for let alone making English tenants of them, every soul, he was
always driving and driving, and pounding and pounding, and °canting and canting, and °replevying
and replevying, and he made a good living of trespassing cattle; there was always some tenant’s
pig, or horse, or cow, or calf, or goose, trespassing, which was so great a gain to Sir Murtagh, that
he did not like to hear me talk of repairing fences. Then his °heriots and °duty-work brought him
in something, his turf was cut, his potatoes set and dug, his hay brought home, and, in short, all
the work about his house done for nothing; for in all our leases there were strict clauses heavy with
penalties, which Sir Murtagh knew well how to enforce; so many days’ duty-work of man and horse,
from every tenant, he was to have, and had, every year; and when a man vexed him, why, the finest
day he could pitch on, when the cratur was getting in his own harvest, or thatching his cabin, Sir
Murtagh made it a principle to call upon him and his horse; so he taught ‘em all, as he said, to
know the law of landlord and tenant. As for law, I believe no man, dead or alive, ever loved it so
well as Sir Murtagh. He had once sixteen suits pending at a time, and I never saw him so much
himself: roads, lanes, bogs, wells, ponds, eel-wires, orchards, trees, tithes, vagrants, gravelpits,
sandpits, dunghills, and nuisances, everything upon the face of the earth furnished him good
matter for a suit. He used to boast that he had a lawsuit for every letter in the alphabet. How I
used to wonder to see Sir Murtagh in the midst of the papers in his office! Why, he could hardly
turn about for them. I made bold to shrug my shoulders once in his presence, and thanked my stars
I was not born a gentleman to so much toil and trouble; but Sir Murtagh took me up short with his
old proverb, ‘learning is better than house or land.’ Out of forty-nine suits which he had, he never
lost one but seventeen; the rest he gained with costs, double costs, treble costs sometimes; but even
that did not pay. He was a very learned man in the law, and had the character of it; but how it was
I can’t tell, these suits that he carried cost him a power of money: in the end he sold some hundreds
a year of the family estate; but he was a very learned man in the law, and I know nothing of the
matter, except having a great regard for the family; and I could not help grieving when he sent me
to post up notices of the sale of the fee simple of the lands and appurtenances of Timoleague.
(Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent 66-70)
Glossary and notes
canting does not mean talking or writing hypocritical nonsense, but selling substantially by auction.
demeaned himself greatly: he lowered or disgraced himself much.
duty-work: it was formerly common in Ireland to insert clauses in leases, binding tenants to furnish their
landlords with labourers and horses for several days in the year.
heriot: a feudal service or tribute due to the lord on the death of a tenant.
kept for next to nothing: in many leases in Ireland, tenants were formerly bound to supply an inordinate
quantity of poultry to their landlords.
let alone, in this sentence, means put out of consideration.
replevy: to recover possession of goods or belongings wrongfully taken or detained.

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their whisky: It is usual with some landlords to give their inferior tenants a glass of whisky when they pay
their rents. Thady calls it their whisky; not that the whisky is actually the property of the tenants, but
that it becomes their right after it has been often given to them.
willaluh: Ullaloo, Gol, or lamentation over the dead.

William Carleton

From Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry

The Hedge School

The village of Findramore was situated at the foot of a long green hill, the outline of which formed
a low arch, as it rose to the eye against the horizon. This hill was studded with clumps of beeches,
and sometimes enclosed as a meadow. In the month of July, when the grass on it was long, many
an hour have I spent in solitary enjoyment, watching the wavy motion produced upon its pliant
surface by the sunny winds, or the flight of the cloud-shadows, like gigantic phantoms, as they
swept rapidly over it, whilst the murmur of the rocking-trees, and the glancing of their bright
leaves in the sun produced a heartfelt pleasure, the very memory of which rises in my imagination
like some fading recollection of a brighter world. At the foot of this hill ran a clear, deep-banked
river, bounded on one side by a slip of rich, level meadow, and on the other by a kind of common
for the village geese, whose white feathers, during the summer season, lay scattered over its green
surface. It was also the play-ground for the boys of the village school; for there ran that part of the
river which, with very correct judgment, the urchins had selected as their bathing-place. A little
slope, or watering-ground in the bank, brought them to the edge of the stream, where the bottom
fell away into the fearful depths of the whirlpool, under the hanging oak on the other bank. Well
do I remember the first time I ventured to swim across it, and even yet do I see, in imagination,
the two bunches of water flaggons on which the inexperienced swimmers trusted themselves in the
water.
About two hundred yards from this, the °boreen which led from the village to the main road,
crossed the river, by one of those old narrow bridges whose arches rise like round ditches across
the road – an almost impassable barrier to horse and car. On passing the bridge in a northern
direction, you found a range of low thatched houses on each side of the road: and if one o’clock, the
hour of dinner, drew near, you might observe columns of blue smoke curling up from a row of
chimneys, some made of wicker creels plastered over with a rich coat of mud; some, of old, narrow,
bottomless tubs; and others, with a greater appearance of taste, ornamented with thick, circular
ropes of straw, sewed together like bees’ skeps, with a peel of a briar; and many having nothing
but the open vent above. But the smoke by no means escaped by its legitimate aperture, for you
might observe little clouds of it bursting out of the doors and windows; the panes of the latter being
mostly stopped at other times with old hats and rags, were now left entirely open for the purpose
of giving it a free escape.
Before the doors, on right and left, was a series of dunghills, each with its concomitant sink of
green, rotten water; and if it happened that a stout-looking woman, with watery eyes, and a yellow
cap hung loosely upon her matted locks, came, with a chubby urchin on one arm, and a pot of dirty
water in her hand, its unceremonious ejection in the aforesaid sink would be apt to send you up
the village with your finger and thumb (for what purpose you would yourself perfectly understand)
closely, but not knowingly, applied to your nostrils. But, independently of this, you would be apt to
have other reasons for giving your horse, whose heels are by this time surrounded by a dozen of
barking curs, and the same number of shouting urchins, a pretty sharp touch of the spurs, as well
as for complaining bitterly of the odor of the atmosphere. It is no landscape without figures; and
you might notice, if you are, as I suppose you to be, a man of observation, in every sink as you pass
along, a “slip of a pig,” stretched in the middle of the mud, the very beau ideal of luxury, giving
occasionally a long, luxuriant grunt, highly-expressive of his enjoyment; or, perhaps, an old
farrower, lying in indolent repose, with half a dozen young ones jostling each other for their
draught, and punching her belly with their little snouts, reckless of the fumes they are creating;
whilst the loud crow of the cock, as he confidently flaps his wings on his own dunghill, gives the
warning note for the hour of dinner.

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As you advance, you will also perceive several faces thrust out of the doors, and rather than
miss a sight of you, a grotesque visage peeping by a short cut through the paneless windows – or a
tattered female flying to snatch up her urchin that has been tumbling itself, heels up, in the dust
of the road, lest “the gentleman’s horse might ride over it;” and if you happen to look behind, you
may observe a shaggy-headed youth in tattered frieze, with one hand thrust indolently in his
breast, standing at the door in conversation with the inmates, a broad grin of sarcastic ridicule on
his face, in the act of breaking a joke or two upon yourself, or your horse; or perhaps, your jaw may
be saluted with a lump of clay, just hard enough not to fall asunder as it flies, cast by some ragged
gorsoon from behind a hedge, who squats himself in a ridge of corn to avoid detection.
Seated upon a hob at the door, you may observe a toil-worn man, without coat or waistcoat; his
red, muscular, sunburnt shoulder peering through the remnant of a skirt, mending his shoes with
a piece of twisted flax, called a lingel, or, perhaps, sewing two footless stockings (or martyeens) to
his coat, as a substitute for sleeves.
In the gardens, which are usually fringed with nettles, you will see a solitary laborer, working
with that carelessness and apathy that characterizes an Irishman when he labors for himself –
leaning upon his spade to look after you, glad of any excuse to be idle. The houses, however, are
not all such as I have described – far from it. You see here and there, between the more humble
cabins, a stout, comfortable-looking farm-house, with ornamental thatching and well-glazed
windows; adjoining to which is a hay-yard, with five or six large stacks of corn, well-trimmed and
roped, and a fine, yellow, weather-beaten old hay-rick, half cut – not taking into account twelve or
thirteen circular strata of stones, that mark out the foundations on which others had been raised.
Neither is the rich smell of oaten or wheaten bread, which the good wife is baking on the griddle,
unpleasant to your nostrils; nor would the bubbling of a large pot, in which you might see, should
you chance to enter, a prodigious square of fat, yellow, and almost transparent bacon tumbling
about, to be an unpleasant object; truly, as it hangs over a large fire, with well-swept hearthstone,
it is in good keeping with the white settle and chairs, and the dresser with noggins, wooden
trenchers, and pewter dishes, perfectly clean, and as well polished as a French courtier.
As you leave the village, you have, to the left, a view of the hill which I have already described,
and to the right a level expanse of fertile country, bounded by a good view of respectable mountains,
peering decently into the sky; and in a line that forms an acute angle from the point of the road
where you ride, is a delightful valley, in the bottom of which shines a pretty lake; and a little
beyond, on the slope of a green hill, rises a splendid house, surrounded by a park, well wooded and
stocked with deer. You have now topped the little hill above the village, and a straight line of level
road, a mile long, goes forward to a country town, which lies immediately behind that white church,
with its spire cutting into the sky, before you. You descend on the other side, and, having advanced
a few perches, look to the left, where you see a long, thatched chapel, only distinguished from a
dwelling-house by its want of chimneys and a small stone cross that stands on the top of the eastern
gable; behind it is a graveyard; and beside it a snug public-house, well whitewashed; then, to the
right, you observe a door apparently in the side of a clay bank, which rises considerably above the
pavement of the road. What! you ask yourself, can this be a human habitation? – but ere you have
time to answer the question, a confused buzz of voices from within reaches your ear, and the
appearance of a little “gorsoon,” with a red, close-cropped head and Milesian face, having in his
hand a short, white stick, or the thigh-bone of a horse, which you at once recognize as “the pass” of
a village school, gives you the full information. He has an ink horn, covered with leather, dangling
at the button-hole (for he has long since played away the buttons) of his frieze jacket – his mouth
is circumscribed with a streak of ink – his pen is stuck knowingly behind his ear – his shins are
dotted over with fire-blisters, black, red, and blue – on each heel a kibe – his “leather crackers,”
videlicet – breeches shrunk up upon him, and only reaching as far down as the caps of his knees.
Having spied you, he places his hand over his brows, to throw back the dazzling light of the sun,
and peers at you from under it, till he breaks out into a laugh, exclaiming, half to himself, half to
you: –
“You a gintleman! – no, nor one of your breed never was, you procthorin’ thief, you!”
You are now immediately opposite the door of the seminary, when half a dozen of those seated
next it notice you.
“Oh, sir, here’s a gintleman on a horse! – masther, sir, here’s a-gintleman on a horse, wid boots
and spurs on him, that’s looking in at us.”
“Silence!” exclaims the master; “back from the door; boys, rehearse; every one of you, rehearse,
I say, you Boeotians, till the gintleman goes past!”

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“I want to go out, if you plase, sir.”

“No, you don’t, Phelim.”
“I do, indeed, sir.”
“What! – is it after conthradictin’ me you’d be? Don’t you see the ‘porter’s’ out, and you can’t
go.”
“Well, ‘tis Mat Meehan has it, sir: and he’s out this half-hour, sir; I can’t stay in, sir – iplrfff –
iphfff!”
“You want to be idling your time looking at the gintleman, Phelim.”
“No, indeed, sir – iphfff!”
“Phelim, I know you of ould – go to your sate. I tell you, Phelim, you were born for the
encouragement of the hemp manufacture, and you’ll die promoting it.”
In the meantime, the master puts his head out of the door, his body stooped to a “half bend” –
a phrase, and the exact curve which it forms, I leave for the present to your own sagacity – and
surveys you until you pass. That is an Irish hedge school, and the personage who follows you with
his eye, a hedge schoolmaster. His name is Matthew Kavanagh.
Glossary and notes
boreen: little road.

Somerville and Ross

From Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.

Great-Uncle McCarthy
A Resident Magistracy in Ireland is not an easy thing to come by nowadays; neither is it a very
attractive job; yet on the evening when I first propounded the idea to the young lady who had
recently consented to become Mrs. Sinclair Yeates, it seemed glittering with possibilities. There
was, on that occasion, a sunset, and a string band playing “The Gondoliers,” and there was also an
ingenuous belief in the omnipotence of a godfather of Philippa’s – (Philippa was the young lady) –
who had once been a member of the Government.
I was then climbing the steep ascent of the Captains towards my Majority. I have no fault to
find with Philippa’s godfather; he did all and more than even Philippa had expected; nevertheless,
I had attained to the dignity of mud major, and had spent a good deal on postage stamps, and on
railway fares to interview people of influence, before I found myself in the hotel at Skebawn,
opening long envelopes addressed to “Major Yeates, R.M.”
My most immediate concern, as any one who has spent nine weeks at Mrs. Raverty’s hotel will
readily believe, was to leave it at the earliest opportunity; but in those nine weeks I had learned,
amongst other painful things, a little, a very little, of the methods of the artisan in the West of
Ireland. Finding a house had been easy enough. I had had my choice of several, each with some
hundreds of acres of shooting, thoroughly poached, and a considerable portion of the roof intact. I
had selected one; the one that had the largest extent of roof in proportion to the shooting, and had
been assured by my landlord that in a fortnight or so it would be fit for occupation.
“There’s a few little odd things to be done,” he said easily; “a lick of paint here and there, and
a slap of plaster – ”
I am short-sighted; I am also of Irish extraction; both facts that make for toleration – but even
I thought he was understating the case. So did the contractor.
At the end of three weeks the latter reported progress, which mainly consisted of the facts that
the plumber had accused the carpenter of stealing sixteen feet of his inch-pipe to run a bell wire
through, and that the carpenter had replied that he wished the divil might run the plumber
through a wran’s quill. The plumber having reflected upon the carpenter’s parentage, the work of
renovation had merged in battle, and at the next Petty Sessions I was reluctantly compelled to
allot to each combatant seven days, without the option of a fine.
These and kindred difficulties extended in an unbroken chain through the summer months,
until a certain wet and windy day in October, when, with my baggage, I drove over to establish
myself at Shreelane. It was a tall, ugly house of three storeys high, its walls faced with weather-
beaten slates, its windows staring, narrow, and vacant. Round the house ran an area, in which

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grew some laurustinus and holly bushes among ash heaps, and nettles, and broken bottles. I stood
on the steps, waiting for the door to be opened, while the rain sluiced upon me from a broken
eaveshoot that had, amongst many other things, escaped the notice of my landlord. I thought of
Philippa, and of her plan, broached in to-day’s letter, of having the hall done up as a sitting-room.
The door opened, and revealed the hall. It struck me that I had perhaps overestimated its
possibilities. Among them I had certainly not included a flagged floor, sweating with damp, and a
reek of cabbage from the adjacent kitchen stairs. A large elderly woman, with a red face, and a cap
worn helmet-wise on her forehead, swept me a magnificent curtsey as I crossed the threshold.
“Your honour’s welcome – ” she began, and then every door in the house slammed in obedience
to the gust that drove through it. With something that sounded like “Mend ye for a back door!”
Mrs. Cadogan abandoned her opening speech and made for the kitchen stairs. (Improbable as it
may appear, my housekeeper was called Cadogan, a name made locally possible by being
pronounced Caydogawn.)
Only those who have been through a similar experience can know what manner of afternoon I
spent. I am a martyr to colds in the head, and I felt one coming on. I made a laager in front of the
dining-room fire, with a tattered leather screen and the dinner table, and gradually, with cigarettes
and strong tea, baffled the smell of must and cats, and fervently trusted that the rain might avert
a threatened visit from my landlord. I was then but superficially acquainted with Mr. Florence
McCarthy Knox and his habits.
At about 4.30, when the room had warmed up, and my cold was yielding to treatment, Mrs.
Cadogan entered and informed me that “Mr. Flurry” was in the yard, and would be thankful if I’d
go out to him, for he couldn’t come in. Many are the privileges of the female sex; had I been a
woman I should unhesitatingly have said that I had a cold in my head. Being a man, I huddled on
a mackintosh, and went out into the yard.
My landlord was there on horseback, and with him there was a man standing at the head of a
stout grey animal. I recognised with despair that I was about to be compelled to buy a horse.
“Good afternoon, Major,” said Mr. Knox in his slow, sing-song brogue; “it’s rather soon to be
paying you a visit, but I thought you might be in a hurry to see the horse I was telling you of.”
I could have laughed. As if I were ever in a hurry to see a horse! I thanked him, and suggested
that it was rather wet for horse-dealing.
“Oh, it’s nothing when you’re used to it,” replied Mr. Knox. His gloveless hands were red and
wet, the rain ran down his nose, and his covert coat was soaked to a sodden brown. I thought that
I did not want to become used to it. My relations with horses have been of a purely military
character, I have endured the Sandhurst riding-school, I have galloped for an impetuous general,
I have been steward at regimental races, but none of these feats have altered my opinion that the
horse, as a means of locomotion, is obsolete. Nevertheless, the man who accepts a resident
magistracy in the south-west of Ireland voluntarily retires into the prehistoric age; to institute a
stable became inevitable.
“You ought to throw a leg over him,” said Mr. Knox, “and you’re welcome to take him over a
fence or two if you like. He’s a nice flippant jumper.”
Even to my unexacting eye the grey horse did not seem to promise flippancy, nor did I at all
desire to find that quality in him. I explained that I wanted something to drive, and not to ride.
“Well, that’s a fine raking horse in harness,” said Mr. Knox, looking at me with his serious grey
eyes, “and you’d drive him with a sop of hay in his mouth. Bring him up here, Michael.”
Michael abandoned his efforts to kick the grey horse’s forelegs into a becoming position, and
led him up to me.
I regarded him from under my umbrella with a quite unreasonable disfavour. He had the
dreadful beauty of a horse in a toy-shop, as chubby, as wooden, and as conscientiously dappled, but
it was unreasonable to urge this as an objection, and I was incapable of finding any more technical
drawback. Yielding to circumstance, I “threw my leg” over the brute, and after pacing gravely
round the quadrangle that formed the yard, and jolting to my entrance gate and back, I decided
that as he had neither fallen down nor kicked me off, it was worth paying twenty-five pounds for
him, if only to get in out of the rain.
Mr. Knox accompanied me into the house and had a drink. He was a fair, spare young man,
who looked like a stable boy among gentlemen, and a gentleman among stable boys. He belonged
to a clan that cropped up in every grade of society in the county, from Sir Valentine Knox of Castle
Knox down to the auctioneer Knox, who bore the attractive title of Larry the Liar. So far as I could
judge, Florence McCarthy of that ilk occupied a shifting position about midway in the tribe. I had

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met him at dinner at Sir Valentine’s, I had heard of him at an illicit auction, held by Larry the
Liar, of brandy stolen from a wreck. They were “Black Protestants,” all of them, in virtue of their
descent from a godly soldier of Cromwell, and all were prepared at any moment of the day or night
to sell a horse.
“You’ll be apt to find this place a bit lonesome after the hotel,” remarked Mr. Flurry,
sympathetically, as he placed his foot in its steaming boot on the hob, “but it’s a fine sound house
anyway, and lots of rooms in it, though indeed, to tell you the truth, I never was through the whole
of them since the time my great-uncle, Denis McCarthy, died here. The dear knows I had enough
of it that time.” He paused, and lit a cigarette – one of my best, and quite thrown away upon him.
“Those top floors, now,” he resumed, “I wouldn’t make too free with them. There’s some of them
would jump under you like a spring bed. Many’s the night I was in and out of those attics, following
my poor uncle when he had a bad turn on him – the horrors, y’ know – there were nights he never
stopped walking through the house. Good Lord! will I ever forget the morning he said he saw the
devil coming up the avenue! ‘Look at the two horns on him,’ says he, and he out with his gun and
shot him, and, begad, it was his own donkey!”
Mr. Knox gave a couple of short laughs. He seldom laughed, having in unusual perfection, the
gravity of manner that is bred by horse-dealing, probably from the habitual repression of all
emotion save disparagement.
The autumn evening, grey with rain, was darkening in the tall windows, and the wind was
beginning to make bullying rushes among the shrubs in the area; a shower of soot rattled down
the chimney and fell on the hearthrug.
“More rain coming,” said Mr. Knox, rising composedly; “you’ll have to put a goose down these
chimneys some day soon, it’s the only way in the world to clean them. Well, I’m for the road. You’ll
come out on the grey next week, I hope; the hounds’ll be meeting here. Give a roar at him coming
in at his jumps.” He threw his cigarette into the fire and extended a hand to me. “Good-bye, Major,
you’ll see plenty of me and my hounds before you’re done. There’s a power of foxes in the plantations
here.”
This was scarcely reassuring for a man who hoped to shoot woodcock, and I hinted as much.
“Oh, is it the cock?” said Mr. Flurry; “b’leeve me, there never was a woodcock yet that minded
hounds, now, no more than they’d mind rabbits! The best shoots ever I had here, the hounds were
in it the day before.”
When Mr. Knox had gone, I began to picture myself going across country roaring, like a man
on a fire-engine, while Philippa put the goose down the chimney; but when I sat down to write to
her I did not feel equal to being humorous about it. I dilated ponderously on my cold, my hard
work, and my loneliness, and eventually went to bed at ten o’clock full of cold shivers and hot
whisky-and-water.

Sheridan LeFanu

From ‘Carmilla’

A Very Strange Agony

When we got into the drawing room, and had sat down to our coffee and chocolate, although
Carmilla did not take any, she seemed quite herself again, and Madame, and Mademoiselle De
Lafontaine, joined us, and made a little card party, in the course of which papa came in for what
he called his “dish of tea.”
When the game was over he sat down beside Carmilla on the sofa, and asked her, a little
anxiously, whether she had heard from her mother since her arrival.
She answered “No.”
He then asked whether she knew where a letter would reach her at present.
“I cannot tell,” she answered ambiguously, “but I have been thinking of leaving you; you have
been already too hospitable and too kind to me. I have given you an infinity of trouble, and I should
wish to take a carriage tomorrow, and post in pursuit of her; I know where I shall ultimately find
her, although I dare not yet tell you.”

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 Sheridan LeFanu

“But you must not dream of any such thing,” exclaimed my father, to my great relief. “We can’t
afford to lose you so, and I won’t consent to your leaving us, except under the care of your mother,
who was so good as to consent to your remaining with us till she should herself return. I should be
quite happy if I knew that you heard from her: but this evening the accounts of the progress of the
mysterious disease that has invaded our neighborhood, grow even more alarming; and my beautiful
guest, I do feel the responsibility, unaided by advice from your mother, very much. But I shall do
my best; and one thing is certain, that you must not think of leaving us without her distinct
direction to that effect. We should suffer too much in parting from you to consent to it easily.”
“Thank you, sir, a thousand times for your hospitality,” she answered, smiling bashfully. “You
have all been too kind to me; I have seldom been so happy in all my life before, as in your beautiful
chateau, under your care, and in the society of your dear daughter.”
So he gallantly, in his old-fashioned way, kissed her hand, smiling and pleased at her little
speech.
I accompanied Carmilla as usual to her room, and sat and chatted with her while she was
preparing for bed.
“Do you think,” I said at length, “that you will ever confide fully in me?”
She turned round smiling, but made no answer, only continued to smile on me.
“You won’t answer that?” I said. “You can’t answer pleasantly; I ought not to have asked you.”
“You were quite right to ask me that, or anything. You do not know how dear you are to me, or
you could not think any confidence too great to look for. But I am under vows, no nun half so
awfully, and I dare not tell my story yet, even to you. The time is very near when you shall know
everything. You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the
more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or
else hate me and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word
as indifference in my apathetic nature.”
“Now, Carmilla, you are going to talk your wild nonsense again,” I said hastily.
“Not I, silly little fool as I am, and full of whims and fancies; for your sake I’ll talk like a sage.
Were you ever at a ball?”
“No; how you do run on. What is it like? How charming it must be.”
“I almost forget, it is years ago.”
I laughed.
“You are not so old. Your first ball can hardly be forgotten yet.”
“I remember everything about it – with an effort. I see it all, as divers see what is going on
above them, through a medium, dense, rippling, but transparent. There occurred that night what
has confused the picture, and made its colours faint. I was all but assassinated in my bed, wounded
here,” she touched her breast, “and never was the same since.”
“Were you near dying?”
“Yes, very – a cruel love – strange love, that would have taken my life. Love will have its
sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood. Let us go to sleep now; I feel so lazy. How can I get up just
now and lock my door?”
She was lying with her tiny hands buried in her rich wavy hair, under her cheek, her little
head upon the pillow, and her glittering eyes followed me wherever I moved, with a kind of shy
smile that I could not decipher.
I bid her good night, and crept from the room with an uncomfortable sensation.
I often wondered whether our pretty guest ever said her prayers. I certainly had never seen
her upon her knees. In the morning she never came down until long after our family prayers were
over, and at night she never left the drawing room to attend our brief evening prayers in the hall.
If it had not been that it had casually come out in one of our careless talks that she had been
baptised, I should have doubted her being a Christian. Religion was a subject on which I had never
heard her speak a word. If I had known the world better, this particular neglect or antipathy would
not have so much surprised me.
The precautions of nervous people are infectious, and persons of a like temperament are pretty
sure, after a time, to imitate them. I had adopted Carmilla’s habit of locking her bedroom door,
having taken into my head all her whimsical alarms about midnight invaders and prowling
assassins. I had also adopted her precaution of making a brief search through her room, to satisfy
herself that no lurking assassin or robber was “ensconced.”

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 Bram Stoker

These wise measures taken, I got into my bed and fell asleep. A light was burning in my room.
This was an old habit, of very early date, and which nothing could have tempted me to dispense
with.
Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up
dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they
please, and laugh at locksmiths.
I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony.
I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep.
But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was.
I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except that it was very
dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately
distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It
appeared to me about four or five feet long for it measured fully the length of the hearthrug as it
passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in
a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing
faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see
anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my
face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep
into my breast. I waked with a scream. The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all
through the night, and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right
side. It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone
could not have been more still. There was not the slightest stir of respiration. As I stared at it, the
figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the door
opened, and it passed out.
I was now relieved, and able to breathe and move. My first thought was that Carmilla had been
playing me a trick, and that I had forgotten to secure my door. I hastened to it, and found it locked
as usual on the inside. I was afraid to open it – I was horrified. I sprang into my bed and covered
my head up in the bedclothes, and lay there more dead than alive till morning. (Sheridan LeFanu,
Ina Glass Darkly 261-4)

Bram Stoker

From Dracula

The Encounter with Dracula

Jonathan Harker’s Journal
5 May. I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had been fully awake I must have noticed the
approach of such a remarkable place. In the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, and
as several dark ways led from it under great round arches, it perhaps seemed bigger than it really
is. I have not yet been able to see it by daylight.
When the calèche stopped, the driver jumped down and held out his hand to assist me to alight.
Again I could not but notice his prodigious strength. His hand actually seemed like a steel vice that
could have crushed mine if he had chosen. Then he took out my traps, and placed them on the
ground beside me as I stood close to a great door, old and studded with large iron nails, and set in
a projecting doorway of massive stone. I could see even in the dim light that the stone was
massively carved, but that the carving had been much worn by time and weather. As I stood, the
driver jumped again into his seat and shook the reins; the horses started forward, and trap and all
disappeared down one of the dark openings.
I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of bell or knocker there was no
sign; through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my voice could
penetrate. The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What
sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on
which I had embarked? Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor’s clerk sent out to
explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner? Solicitor’s clerk! Mina would not like that.
Solicitor – for just before leaving London I got word that my examination was successful; and I am

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now a full-blown solicitor! I began to rub my eyes and pinch myself to see if I were awake. It all
seemed like a horrible nightmare to me, and I expected that I should suddenly awake, and find
myself at home, with the dawn struggling in through the windows, as I had now and again felt in
the morning after a day of overwork. But my flesh answered the pinching test, and my eyes were
not to be deceived. I was indeed awake and among the Carpathians. All I could do now was to be
patient, and to wait the coming of the morning.
Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door,
and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling
chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise
of long disuse, and the great door swung back.
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black
from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an
antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing
long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me
in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange
intonation: –
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” He made no motion of stepping to
meet me, but stood like a statue, as though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The
instant, however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively forward, and holding
out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened
by the fact that it seemed as cold as ice – more like the hand of a dead than a living man. Again he
said: –
“Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you
bring!” The strength of the handshake was so much akin to that which I had noticed in the driver,
whose face I had not seen, that for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person to whom I
was speaking; so to make sure, I said interrogatively: –
“Count Dracula?” He bowed in a courtly way as he replied: –
“I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in; the night air is chill,
and you must need to eat and rest.” As he was speaking, he put the lamp on a bracket on the wall,
and stepping out, took my luggage; he had carried it in before I could forestall him. I protested but
he insisted: –
“Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late, and my people are not available. Let me see to your
comfort myself.” He insisted on carrying my traps along the passage, and then up a great winding
stair, and along another great passage, on whose stone floor our steps rang heavily. At the end of
this he threw open a heavy door, and I rejoiced to see within a well-lit room in which a table was
spread for supper, and on whose mighty hearth a great fire of logs, freshly replenished, flamed and
flared.
The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing the room, opened
another door, which led into a small octagonal room lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a
window of any sort. Passing through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to enter. It
was a welcome sight; for here was a great bedroom well lighted and warmed with another log fire,
– also added to but lately, for the top logs were fresh – which sent a hollow roar up the wide
chimney. The Count himself left my luggage inside and withdrew, saying, before he closed the door:
–
“You will need, after your journey, to refresh yourself by making your toilet. I trust you will
find all you wish. When you are ready, come into the other room, where you will find your supper
prepared.”
The light and warmth and the Count’s courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all my
doubts and fears. Having then reached my normal state, I discovered that I was half famished with
hunger; so making a hasty toilet, I went into the other room.
I found supper already laid out. My host, who stood on one side of the great fireplace, leaning
against the stonework, made a graceful wave of his hand to the table, and said: –
“I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will, I trust, excuse me that I do not join
you; but I have dined already, and I do not sup.”
I handed to him the sealed letter which Mr. Hawkins had entrusted to me. He opened it and
read it gravely; then, with a charming smile, he handed it to me to read. One passage of it, at least,
gave me a thrill of pleasure.

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 Douglas Hyde

“I must regret that an attack of gout, from which malady I am a constant sufferer, forbids
absolutely any travelling on my part for some time to come; but I am happy to say I can send a
sufficient substitute, one in whom I have every possible confidence. He is a young man, full of
energy and talent in his own way, and of a very faithful disposition. He is discreet and silent, and
has grown into manhood in my service. He shall be ready to attend on you when you will during
his stay, and shall take your instructions in all matters.”
The Count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell to at once on an
excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese and a salad and a bottle of old Tokay, of which I
had two glasses, was my supper. During the time I was eating it the Count asked me many
questions as to my journey, and I told him by degrees all I had experienced.
By this time I had finished my supper, and by my host’s desire had drawn up a chair by the
fire and begun to smoke a cigar which he offered me, at the same time excusing himself that he
did not smoke. I had now an opportunity of observing him, and found him of a very marked
physiognomy.
His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly
arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but
profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with
bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the
heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these
protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his
years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and
strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.
Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they
had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that
they were rather coarse – broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre
of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me
and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was
rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.
The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back; and with a grim sort of smile, which showed more than
he had yet done his protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace. We
were both silent for a while; and as I looked towards the window I saw the first dim streak of the
coming dawn. There seemed a strange stillness over everything; but as I listened I heard as if from
down below in the valley the howling of many wolves. The Count’s eyes gleamed, and he said: –
“Listen to them – the children of the night. What music they make!” Seeing, I suppose, some
expression in my face strange to him, he added: –
“Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.” Then he rose and
said: –
“But you must be tired. Your bedroom is all ready, and to-morrow you shall sleep as late as you
will. I have to be away till the afternoon; so sleep well and dream well!” With a courteous bow, he
opened for me himself the door to the octagonal room, and I entered my bedroom....
I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to
my own soul. God keep me, if only for the sake of those dear to me! (Bram Stoker, Dracula 24-9)

Douglas Hyde

The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland

Delivered before the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin, 25 November 1892.

When we speak of ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicising the Irish Nation’, we mean it, not as a protest
against imitating what is best in the English people, for that would be absurd, but rather to show
the folly of neglecting what is Irish, and hastening to adopt, pell-mell, and indiscriminately,
everything that is English, simply because it is English.
This is a question which most Irishmen will naturally look at from a National point of view,
but it is one which ought also to claim the sympathies of every intelligent Unionist, and which, as
I know, does claim the sympathy of many.

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If we take a bird’s eye view of our island today, and compare it with what it used to be, we must
be struck by the extraordinary fact that the nation which was once, as every one admits, one of the
most classically learned and cultured nations in Europe, is now one of the least so; how one of the
most reading and literary peoples has become one of the least studious and most un-literary, and
how the present art products of one of the quickest, most sensitive, and most artistic races on earth
are now only distinguished for their hideousness.
I shall endeavour to show that this failure of the Irish people in recent times has been largely
brought about by the race diverging during this century from the right path, and ceasing to be
Irish without becoming English. I shall attempt to show that with the bulk of the people this change
took place quite recently, much more recently than most people imagine, and is, in fact, still going
on. I should also like to call attention to the illogical position of men who drop their own language
to speak English, of men who translate their euphonious Irish names into English monosyllables,
of men who read English books, and know nothing about Gaelic literature, nevertheless protesting
as a matter of sentiment that they hate the country which at every hand’s turn they rush to imitate.
I wish to show you that in Anglicising ourselves wholesale we have thrown away with a light
heart the best claim which we have upon the world’s recognition of us as a separate nationality.
What did Mazzini say? What is Goldwin Smith never tired of declaiming? What do the Spectator
and Saturday Review harp on? That we ought to be content as an integral part of the United
Kingdom because we have lost the notes of nationality, our language and customs.
It has always been very curious to me how Irish sentiment sticks in this half-way house – how
it continues to apparently hate the English, and at the same time continues to imitate them; how
it continues to clamour for recognition as a distinct nationality, and at the same time throws away
with both hands what would make it so. If Irishmen only went a little farther they would become
good Englishmen in sentiment also. But – illogical as it appears – there seems not the slightest
sign or probability of their taking that step. It is the curious certainty that come what may
Irishmen will continue to resist English rule, even though it should be for their good, which
prevents many of our nation from becoming Unionists upon the spot. It is a fact, and we must face
it as a fact, that although they adopt English habits and copy England in every way, the great bulk
of Irishmen and Irishwomen over the whole world are known to be filled with a dull, ever-abiding
animosity against her, and right or wrong – to grieve when she prospers, and joy when she is hurt.
Such movements as Young Irelandism, Fenianism, Land Leagueism, and Parliamentary
obstruction seem always to gain their sympathy and support. It is just because there appears no
earthly chance of their becoming good members of the Empire that I urge that they should not
remain in the anomalous position they are in, but since they absolutely refuse to become the one
thing, that they become the other; cultivate what they have rejected, and build up an Irish nation
on Irish lines.
But you ask, why should we wish to make Ireland more Celtic than it is – why should we de-
Anglicise it at all?
I answer because the Irish race is at present in a most anomalous position, imitating England
and yet apparently hating it. How can it produce anything good in literature, art, or institutions
as long as it is actuated by motives so contradictory? Besides, I believe it is our Gaelic past which,
though the Irish race does not recognise it just at present, is really at the bottom of the Irish heart,
and prevents us becoming citizens of the Empire, as, I think, can be easily proved.
To say that Ireland has not prospered under English rule is simply a truism; all the world
admits it, England does not deny it. But the English retort is ready. You have not prospered, they
say, because you would not settle down contentedly, like the Scotch, and form part of the Empire.
‘Twenty years of good, resolute, grandfatherly government’, said a well-known Englishman, will
solve the Irish question. He possibly made the period too short, but let us suppose this. Let us
suppose for a moment – which is impossible – that there were to arise a series of Cromwells in
England for the space of one hundred years, able administrators of the Empire, careful rulers of
Ireland, developing to the utmost our national resources, whilst they unremittingly stamped out
every spark of national feeling, making Ireland a land of wealth and factories, whilst they
extinguished every thought and every idea that was Irish, and left us, at last, after a hundred
years of good government, fat, wealthy, and populous, but with all our characteristics gone, with
every external that at present differentiates us from the English lost or dropped; all our Irish
names of places and people turned into English names; the Irish language completely extinct; the
O’s and the Macs dropped; our Irish intonation changed, as far as possible by English
schoolmasters into something English; our history no longer remembered or taught; the names of

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our rebels and martyrs blotted out; our battlefields and traditions forgotten; the fact that we were
not of Saxon origin dropped out of sight and memory, and let me now put the question – How many
Irishmen are there who would purchase material prosperity at such a price? It is exactly such a
question as this and the answer to it that shows the difference between the English and Irish race.
Nine Englishmen out of ten would jump to make the exchange, and I as firmly believe that nine
Irishmen out of ten would indignantly refuse it.
And yet this awful idea of complete Anglicisation, which I have here put before you in all its
crudity is, and has been, making silent inroads upon us for nearly a century.
Its inroads have been silent, because, had the Gaelic race perceived what was being done, or
had they been once warned of what was taking place in their own midst, they would, I think, never
have allowed it. When the picture of complete Anglicisation is drawn for them in all its nakedness
Irish sentimentality becomes suddenly a power and refuses to surrender its birthright...
So much for the greatest stroke of all in our Anglicisation, the loss of our language. I have often
heard people thank God that if the English gave us nothing else they gave us at least their
language. In this way they put a bold face upon the matter, and pretend that the Irish language is
not worth knowing, and has no literature. But the Irish language is worth knowing, or why would
the greatest philologists of Germany, France, and Italy be emulously studying it, and it does
possess a literature, or why would a German savant have made the calculation that the books
written in Irish between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries, and still extant, would fill a
thousand octavo volumes.
I have no hesitation at all in saying that every Irish-feeling Irishman, who hates the reproach
of West-Britonism, should set himself to encourage the efforts, which are being made to keep alive
our once great national tongue. The losing of it is our greatest blow, and the sorest stroke that the
rapid Anglicisation of Ireland has inflicted upon us. In order to de-Anglicise ourselves we must at
once arrest the decay of the language. We must bring pressure upon our politicians not to snuff it
out by their tacit discouragement merely because they do not happen themselves to understand it.
We must arouse some spark of patriotic inspiration among the peasantry who still use the
language, and put an end to the shameful state of feeling – a thousand-tongued reproach to our
leaders and statesmen – which makes young men and women blush and hang their heads when
overheard speaking their own language. Maynooth has at last come splendidly to the front, and it
is now incumbent upon every clerical student to attend lectures in the Irish language and history
during the first three years of his course. But in order to keep the Irish language alive where it is
still spoken – which is the utmost we can at present aspire to – nothing less than a house-to-house
visitation and exhortation of the people themselves will do, something – though with a very
different purpose – analogous to the procedure that James Stephens adopted throughout Ireland
when he found her like a corpse on the dissecting table. This and some system of giving medals or
badges of honour to every family who will guarantee that they have always spoken Irish amongst
themselves during the year. But unfortunately, distracted as we are and torn by contending
factions, it is impossible to find either men or money to carry out this simple remedy, although to
a dispassionate foreigner – to a Zeuss, Jubainville, Zimmer, Kuno Meyer, Windisch, or Ascoli, and
the rest – this is of greater importance than whether Mr. Redmond or Mr. MacCarthy lead the
largest wing of the Irish party for the moment, or Mr. So-and-So succeed with his election petition.
To a person taking a bird’s eye view of the situation a hundred or five hundred years hence, believe
me, it will also appear of greater importance than any mere temporary wrangle, but, unhappily,
our countrymen cannot be brought to see this.
We can, however, insist, and we shall insist if Home Rule be carried, that the Irish language,
which so many foreign scholars of the first calibre find so worthy of study, shall be placed on a par
with – or even above – Greek, Latin, and modern languages, in all examinations held under the
Irish Government. We can also insist, and we shall insist, that in those baronies where the children
speak Irish, Irish shall be taught, and that Irish-speaking schoolmasters, petty sessions clerks,
and even magistrates be appointed in Irish-speaking districts. If all this were done, it should not
be very difficult, with the aid of the foremost foreign scholars, to bring about a tone of thought
which would make it disgraceful for an educated Irishman especially of the old Celtic race,
MacDermotts, O’Conors, O’Sullivans, MacCarthys, O’Neills – to be ignorant of his own language
– would make it at least as disgraceful as for an educated Jew to be quite ignorant of Hebrew...
I have now mentioned a few of the principal points on which it would be desirable for us to
move, with a view to de-Anglicising ourselves; but perhaps the principal point of all I have taken
for granted. That is the necessity for encouraging the use of Anglo-Irish literature instead of

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English books, especially instead of English periodicals. We must set our face sternly against penny
dreadfuls, shilling shockers, and still more, the garbage of vulgar English weeklies like Bow Bells
and the Police Intelligence. Every house should have a copy of Moore and Davis. In a word, we
must strive to cultivate everything that is most racial, most smacking of the soil, most Gaelic, most
Irish, because in spite of the little admixture of Saxon blood in the north-east corner, this island is
and will ever remain Celtic at the core, far more Celtic than most people imagine, because, as I
have shown you, the names of our people are no criterion of their race. On racial lines, then, we
shall best develop, following the bent of our own natures; and, in order to do this, we must create
a strong feeling against West-Britonism, for it – if we give it the least chance, or show it the
smallest quarter – will overwhelm us like a flood, and we shall find ourselves toiling painfully
behind the English at each step following the same fashions, only six months behind the English
ones; reading the same books, only months behind them; taking up the same fads, after they have
become stale there, following them in our dress, literature, music, games, and ideas, only a long
time after them and a vast way behind. We will become, what, I fear, we are largely at present, a
nation of imitators, the Japanese of Western Europe, lost to the power of native initiative and alive
only to second-hand assimilation. I do not think I am overrating this danger. We are probably at
once the most assimilative and the most sensitive nation in Europe. A lady in Boston said to me
that the Irish immigrants had become Americanised on the journey out before ever they landed at
Castle Gardens. And when I ventured to regret it, she said, shrewdly, ‘If they did not at once
become Americanised they would not be Irish.’ I knew fifteen Irish workmen who were working in
a haggard in England give up talking Irish amongst themselves because the English farmer
laughed at them. And yet O’Connell used to call us the ‘finest peasantry in Europe’. Unfortunately,
he took little care that we should remain so. We must teach ourselves to be less sensitive, we must
teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves, because the Gaelic people can never produce its
best before the world as long as it remains tied to the apron-strings of another race and another
island, waiting for it to move before it will venture to take any step itself.
In conclusion, I would earnestly appeal to every one, whether Unionist or Nationalist, who
wishes to see the Irish nation produce its best – surely whatever our politics are we all wish that
– to set his face against this constant running to England for our books, literature, music,
games, fashions, and ideas. I appeal to every one whatever his politics – for this is no political
matter – to do his best to help the Irish race to develop in future upon Irish lines, even at the
risk of encouraging national aspirations, because upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once
more become what it was of yore – one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming
peoples of Europe. (in The Field Day Anthology 527-33)

Lady Augusta Gregory

From Gods and Fighting Men

The Wedding at Ceann Slieve

Finn and the Fianna made a great hunting one time on the hill of Torc that is over Loch Lein and
Feara Mor. And they went on with their hunting till they came to pleasant green Slieve Echtge,
and from that it spread over other green-topped hills, and through thick tangled woods, and rough
red-headed hills, and over the wide plains of the country. And every chief man among them chose
the place that was to his liking, and the gap of danger he was used to before. And the shouts they
gave in the turns of the hunt were heard in the woods all around, so that they started the deer in
the wood, and sent the foxes wandering, and the little red beasts climbing rocks, and badgers from
their holes, and birds flying, and fawns running their best. Then they let out their angry small-
headed hounds and set them hunting. And it is red the hands of the Fianna were that day, and it
is proud they were of their hounds that were torn and wounded before evening.
It happened that day no one stopped with Finn but only Diorraing, son of Domhar. “Well,
Diorraing,” said Finn, “let you watch for me while I go asleep, for it is early I rose to-day, and it is
an early rising a man makes when he cannot see the shadow of his five fingers between himself
and the light of day, or know the leaves of the hazel from the leaves of the oak.” With that he fell

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into a quiet sleep that lasted till the yellow light of the evening. And the rest of the Fianna, not
knowing where he was gone, gave over the hunt.
And the time was long to Diorraing while Finn was asleep, and he roused him and told him
the Fianna must have given up the hunt, for he could not hear a cry or a whistle from them. “The
end of day is come,” said Finn then, “and we will not follow them to-night. And go now to the wood,”
he said, “and bring timber and dead branches for a shelter, and I will go looking for food for the
night.” So Diorraing went to the wood, but he was not gone far till he saw a fine well-lighted house
of the Sidhe before him on the edge of the wood near at hand, and he went back to Finn with the
news. “Let us go to it,” said Finn, “for we ought not to be working in this place, and people living
so near at hand.” They went then to the door of the house and knocked at it, and the door-keeper
came to it. “Whose house is this?” said Diorraing. “It belongs to Conan of Ceann Slieve,” said the
door-keeper. “Tell him,” said Diorraing, “there are two of the Fianna of the Gael at the door.”
The door-keeper went in then and told Conan there were two men of the Fianna at the door.
“The one of them,” he said, “is young and strong, and quiet and fair-haired, and more beautiful
than the rest of the men of the world, and he has in his hand a small-headed, white-breasted hound,
having a collar of rubbed gold and a chain of old silver. And the other of them,” he said, “is brown
and ruddy and white-toothed, and he is leading a yellow-spotted hound by a chain of bright bronze.”
“It is well you have made your report of them,” said Conan, “and I know them by it; for the man
you spoke of first is Finn, son of Cumhal, Head of the Fianna of Ireland, and Bran in his hand; and
the other is Diorraing, and Sceolan in his hand. And go now quickly and let them in,” he said.
Finn and Diorraing were brought in then, and they got good attendance, and their arms were
taken from them, and a grand feast was made ready that pleased them well. And the wife of Conan
was at the one side of Finn, and his daughter, Finndealbh, of the Fair Shape, was at his other side.
And they had a great deal of talk together, and at last, seeing her so beautiful, the colour of gold
on her curled hair, and her eyes as blue as flowers, and a soft four-cornered cloak fastened at her
breast with a silver pin, he asked her of Conan for his wife. “Leave asking that, Finn,” said Conan,
“for your own courage is not greater than the courage of the man she is promised to.” “Who is that?”
said Finn. “He is Fatha, son of the King of Ess Ruadh,” said Conan. “Your wounds and your danger
on yourself,” said Diorraing; “and it would be right,” he said, “that stammering tongue that gave
out those words to be tied and to be shortened for ever, and a drink of death to be given to you; for
if the whole of the Men of Dea,” he said, “could be put into the one body, Finn would be better than
them all.” “Leave off, Diorraing,” said Finn, “for it is not fighting I am here, but asking a wife, and
I will get her whether the Men of Dea think good or bad of it.” “I will not be making a quarrel with
you,” said Conan, “but I put you under bonds as a true hero to answer me everything I am going to
ask you.” “I will do that,” said Finn.
With that Conan put questions to Finn as to his birth and his rearing, and the deeds he had
done since he came to the Fianna, and Finn gave full answers to them all. And at last he said: “Let
us go on with this no longer, but if you have musicians with you, let them be brought to us now;
for it is not my custom,” he said, “to be for a single night without music.” “Tell me this first,” said
Conan, “who was it made the Dord Fiann, the Mutterer of the Fianna, and when was it made?” “I
will tell you the truth of that,” said Finn; “it was made in Ireland by the three sons of Cearmait
Honey-Mouth; and nine men used to be sounding it, and since it came to me I have fifty men
sounding it.” “And tell me this,” said Conan, “what is the music pleased you best of all you ever
heard?” “I will tell you that,” said Finn; “the time the seven battalions of the Fianna are gathered
in the one place and raise their spear-shafts over their heads, and the sharp whining of the clear,
cold wind goes through them, that is very sweet to me. And when the drinking-hall is set out in
Almhuin, and the cup-bearers give out the bright cups to the chief men of the Fianna, that is very
sweet to me; and it is sweet to me to be listening to the voice of the sea-gull and the heron, and the
noise of the waves of Traig Liath, the song of the three sons of Meardha, the whistle of Lugaidh’s
Son, and the voice of the cuckoo in the beginning of summer, and the grunting of the pigs on the
Plain of Eithne, and the shouting of laughter in Doire.” And it is what he said: “The Dord in the
green-topped woods, the lasting wash of the waves against the shore, the noise of the waves at
Traig Liath meeting with the river of the White Trout; the three men that came to the Fianna, a
man of them gentle and a man of them rough, another man of them ploughing the clouds, they
were sweeter than any other thing.
“The grey mane of the sea, the time a man cannot follow its track; the swell that brings the
fish to the land, it is sleep-music, its sound is sweet.

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 Lady Augusta Gregory

“Feargall, son of Fionn, a man that was ready-handed, it is long his leap was, it is well marked
his track is; he never gave a story that did not do away with secrets; it is his voice was music of
sleep to me.”
And when Finn had answered all the questions so well, Conan said he would give him his
daughter, and that he would have a wedding-feast ready at the end of a month.
They spent the rest of the night then in sleep; but Finn saw a dreadful vision through his sleep
that made him start three times from his bed. “What makes you start from your bed, Finn?” said
Diorraing. “It was the Tuatha de Danaan I saw,” said he, “taking up a quarrel against me, and
making a great slaughter of the Fianna.”
Now as to the Fianna, they rested at Fotharladh of Moghna that night, and they were
downhearted, having no tidings of Finn. And early on the morrow two of them, Bran Beag and
Bran Mor, rose up and went to Mac-an-Reith, son of the Ram, that had the gift of true knowledge,
and they asked him where did Finn spend the night. And Mac-an-Reith was someway unwilling to
tell them, but at the last he said it was at the house of Conan of Ceann Slieve.
The two Brans went on then to Conan’s house, and Finn made them welcome; but they blamed
him when they heard he was taking a wife, and none of his people with him. “Bid all the Fianna to
come to the feast at the end of a month,” said Conan then. So Finn and Diorraing and the two
Brans went back to where the Fianna were and told them all that had happened, and they went
on to Almhuin.
And when they were in the drinking-hall at Almhuin that night, they saw the son of the King
of Ireland coming to where they were. “It is a pity the king’s son to have come,” said Finn; “for he
will not be satisfied without ordering everything in the hall in his own way.” “We will not take his
orders,” said Oisin, “but we will leave the half of the hall to him, and keep the other half ourselves.”
So they did that; but it happened that in the half of the house that was given up to the King of
Ireland’s son, there were sitting two of the Men of Dea, Failbhe Mor and Failbhe Beag; and it is
what they said, that it is because they were in that side of the hall it was given up. “It is a pity,”
said Failbhe Beag, “this shame and this great insult to have been put on us to-night; and it is likely
Finn has a mind to do more than that again to us,” he said, “for he is going to bring away the
woman that is promised to the third best man of the Tuatha de Danaan, and against the will of
her father and mother.” And these two went away early in the morning to Fionnbhar of Magh
Feabhail, and told him of the insults Finn and the Fianna of Ireland had a mind to put on the
Tuatha de Danaan.
And when Fionnbhar that was king over the Tuatha de Danaan heard that, he sent out
messengers through the length of Ireland to gather them all to him. And there came six good
battalions to him on the edge of Loch Derg Dheirc at the end of a month; and it was the same day
Conan had the wedding-feast made ready for Finn and his people.
And Finn was at Teamhair Luachra at that time, and when he heard the feast was ready, he
set out to go to it. And it chanced that the most of the men he had with him at that time were of
the sons of Morna. And when they were on their way, Finn said to Goll, “O Goll,” he said, “I never
felt any fear till now going to a feast. And there are but few of my people with me,” he said; “and I
know there is no good thing before me, but the Men of Dea are going to raise a quarrel against me
and to kill my people.” “I will defend you against anything they may do,” said Goll.
They went on then to Conan’s house, and there was a welcome before them, and they were
brought into the drinking-hall, and Finn was put in the place beside the door, and Goll on his right
and Finndeilb, of the Fair Shape, on his left, and all the rest in the places they were used to.
And as to Fionnbhar of Magh Feabhail and the Tuatha de Danaan, they put a Druid mist about
themselves and went on, hidden and armed, in sixteen battalions, to the lawn before Conan’s
house. “It is little profit we have being here,” they said then, “and Goll being with Finn against us.”
“Goll will not protect him this time,” said Ethne, the woman-Druid, “for I will entice Finn out of
the house, however well he is watched.”
She went on to the house then, and took her stand before Finn outside. “Who is that before
me?” she said then. “It is I myself,” said Finn. “I put you under the bonds a true hero never broke,”
she said, “to come out to me here.” When Finn heard that, he made no delay and went out to her;
and for all there were so many in the house, not one of them took notice of him going, only Caoilte,
and he followed him out. And at the same time the Tuatha de Danaan let out a flock of blackbirds
having fiery beaks, that pitched on the breasts of all the people in the house, and burned them and
destroyed them, till the young lads and the women and children of the place ran out on all sides,
and the woman of the house, Conan’s wife, was drowned in the river outside the dun.

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But as to Ethne, the woman-Druid, she asked Finn would he run against her. “For it is to run
a race against you I called you out,” she said. “What length of a race?” said Finn. “From Doire da
Torc, the Wood of the Two Boars, to Ath Mor, the Great Ford,” she said. So they set out, but Finn
got first over the ford. And Caoilte was following after them, and Finn was urging him, and he
said: “It is ashamed of your running you should be, Caoilte, a woman to be going past you.” On that
Caoilte made a leap forward, and when he was in front of the witch he turned about and gave a
blow of his sword that made two equal halves of her.
“Power and good luck to you, Caoilte!” said Finn; “for though it is many a good blow you have
struck, you never struck a better one than this.”
They went back then to the lawn before Conan’s dun, and there they found the whole company
of the Tuatha de Danaan, that had put the Druid mist off them. “It seems to me, Caoilte,” said
Finn, “that we are come into the middle of our enemies.”
With that they turned their backs to one another, and they were attacked on all sides till groans
of weakness from the unequal fight were forced from Finn. And when Goll, that was in the house,
heard that, he said: “It is a pity the Tuatha de Danaan to have enticed Finn and Caoilte away from
us; and let us go to their help and make no delay,” he said.
Then he rushed out, and all that were there of the Fianna with him, and Conan of Ceann Slieve
and his sons. And great anger came on Goll, that he looked like a tall mountain under his grey
shield in the battle. And he broke through the Tuatha de Danaan till he reached to Fionnbhar their
leader, and they attacked one another, cutting and wounding, till at the last Fionnbhar of Magh
Feabhail fell by the strokes of Goll. And a great many others fell in that battle, and there never
was a harder battle fought in Ireland, for there was no man on one side or the other had a mind to
go back one step before whoever he was fighting against. For they were the two hardest fighting
troops to be found in the four parts of the world, the strong, hardy Fianna of the Gael, and the
beautiful Men of Dea; and they went near to being all destroyed in that battle.
But after a while they saw the rest of the Fianna that were not in the battle coming from all
parts of Ireland. And when the Tuatha de Danaan saw them coming, they put the Druid mist about
themselves again and made away. And clouds of weakness came on Finn himself, and on them that
were with him, with the dint of the fight. And there were many men of the Fianna lost in that
battle; and as to the rest, it is a long time they stopped in Almhuin of Leinster, till their wounds
were entirely healed. (Lady Augusta Gregory, Gods and Fighting Men, Project Gutenberg,
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14465, Oct.2014)

John Millington Synge

From the Playboy of the Western World

Christy’s Crime
SHAWN – [opening the door a chink and putting in his head, in a small voice.] – Michael James!
MICHAEL – [imitating him.] – What ails you?
SHAWN. The queer dying fellow’s beyond looking over the ditch. He’s come up, I’m thinking,
stealing your hens. (Looks over his shoulder.) God help me, he’s following me now (he runs into
room), and if he’s heard what I said, he’ll be having my life, and I going home lonesome in the
darkness of the night. [For a perceptible moment they watch the door with curiosity. Some one
coughs outside. Then Christy Mahon, a slight young man, comes in very tired and frightened
and dirty.]
CHRISTY – [in a small voice.] – God save all here!
MEN. God save you kindly.
CHRISTY – [going to the counter.] – I’d trouble you for a glass of porter, woman of the house. [He
puts down coin.]
PEGEEN – [serving him.] – You’re one of the tinkers, young fellow, is beyond camped in the glen?
CHRISTY. I am not; but I’m destroyed walking.
MICHAEL – [patronizingly.] Let you come up then to the fire. You’re looking famished with the
cold.

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CHRISTY. God reward you. (He takes up his glass and goes a little way across to the left, then
stops and looks about him.) Is it often the police do be coming into this place, master of the
house?
MICHAEL. If you’d come in better hours, you’d have seen “Licensed for the sale of Beer and Spirits,
to be consumed on the premises,” written in white letters above the door, and what would the
polis want spying on me, and not a decent house within four miles, the way every living
Christian is a bona fide, saving one widow alone?
CHRISTY – [with relief.] – It’s a safe house, so. [He goes over to the fire, sighing and moaning.
Then he sits down, putting his glass beside him and begins gnawing a turnip, too miserable to
feel the others staring at him with curiosity.]
MICHAEL – [going after him.] – Is it yourself fearing the polis? You’re wanting, maybe?
CHRISTY. There’s many wanting.
MICHAEL. Many surely, with the broken harvest and the ended wars. (He picks up some
stockings, etc., that are near the fire, and carries them away furtively.) It should be larceny,
I’m thinking?
CHRISTY – [dolefully.] I had it in my mind it was a different word and a bigger.
PEGEEN. There’s a queer lad. Were you never slapped in school, young fellow, that you don’t know
the name of your deed?
CHRISTY – [bashfully.] I’m slow at learning, a middling scholar only.
MICHAEL. If you’re a dunce itself, you’d have a right to know that larceny’s robbing and stealing.
Is it for the like of that you’re wanting?
CHRISTY – [with a flash of family pride.] – And I the son of a strong farmer (with a sudden qualm),
God rest his soul, could have bought up the whole of your old house a while since, from the butt
of his tailpocket, and not have missed the weight of it gone.
MICHAEL – [impressed.] If it’s not stealing, it’s maybe something big.
CHRISTY – [flattered.] Aye; it’s maybe something big.
JIMMY. He’s a wicked-looking young fellow. Maybe he followed after a young woman on a lonesome
night.
CHRISTY – [shocked.] Oh, the saints forbid, mister; I was all times a decent lad.
PHILLY – [turning on Jimmy.] – You’re a silly man, Jimmy Farrell. He said his father was a farmer
a while since, and there’s himself now in a poor state. Maybe the land was grabbed from him,
and he did what any decent man would do.
MICHAEL – [to Christy, mysteriously.] – Was it bailiffs?
CHRISTY. The divil a one.
MICHAEL. Agents?
CHRISTY. The divil a one.
MICHAEL. Landlords?
CHRISTY – [peevishly.] Ah, not at all, I’m saying. You’d see the like of them stories on any little
paper of a Munster town. But I’m not calling to mind any person, gentle, simple, judge or jury,
did the like of me. [They all draw nearer with delighted curiosity.]
PHILLY. Well, that lad’s a puzzle–the world.
JIMMY. He’d beat Dan Davies’ circus, or the holy missioners making sermons on the villainy of
man. Try him again, Philly.
PHILLY. Did you strike golden guineas out of solder, young fellow, or shilling coins itself?
CHRISTY. I did not, mister, not sixpence nor a farthing coin.
JIMMY. Did you marry three wives maybe? I’m told there’s a sprinkling have done that among the
holy Luthers of the preaching north.
CHRISTY – [shyly.] – I never married with one, let alone with a couple or three.
PHILLY. Maybe he went fighting for the Boers, the like of the man beyond, was judged to be
hanged, quartered and drawn. Were you off east, young fellow, fighting bloody wars for Kruger
and the freedom of the Boers?
CHRISTY. I never left my own parish till Tuesday was a week.
PEGEEN – [coming from counter.] – He’s done nothing, so. (To Christy.) If you didn’t commit
murder or a bad, nasty thing, or false coining, or robbery, or butchery, or the like of them, there
isn’t anything that would be worth your troubling for to run from now. You did nothing at all.
CHRISTY – [his feelings hurt.] – That’s an unkindly thing to be saying to a poor orphaned traveller,
has a prison behind him, and hanging before, and hell’s gap gaping below.

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PEGEEN [with a sign to the men to be quiet.] – You’re only saying it. You did nothing at all. A soft
lad the like of you wouldn’t slit the windpipe of a screeching sow.
CHRISTY – [offended.] You’re not speaking the truth.
PEGEEN – [in mock rage.] – Not speaking the truth, is it? Would you have me knock the head of
you with the butt of the broom?
CHRISTY – [twisting round on her with a sharp cry of horror.] – Don’t strike me. I killed my poor
father, Tuesday was a week, for doing the like of that.
PEGEEN [with blank amazement.] – Is it killed your father?
CHRISTY – [subsiding.] With the help of God I did surely, and that the Holy Immaculate Mother
may intercede for his soul.
PHILLY – [retreating with Jimmy.] – There’s a daring fellow.
JIMMY. Oh, glory be to God!
MICHAEL – [with great respect.] – That was a hanging crime, mister honey. You should have had
good reason for doing the like of that.
CHRISTY – [in a very reasonable tone.] – He was a dirty man, God forgive him, and he getting old
and crusty, the way I couldn’t put up with him at all.
PEGEEN. And you shot him dead?
CHRISTY – [shaking his head.] – I never used weapons. I’ve no license, and I’m a law-fearing man.
MICHAEL. It was with a hilted knife maybe? I’m told, in the big world it’s bloody knives they use.
CHRISTY – [loudly, scandalized.] – Do you take me for a slaughter-boy?
PEGEEN. You never hanged him, the way Jimmy Farrell hanged his dog from the license, and had
it screeching and wriggling three hours at the butt of a string, and himself swearing it was a
dead dog, and the peelers swearing it had life?
CHRISTY. I did not then. I just riz the loy and let fall the edge of it on the ridge of his skull, and
he went down at my feet like an empty sack, and never let a grunt or groan from him at all.
MICHAEL – [making a sign to Pegeen to fill Christy’s glass.] – And what way weren’t you hanged,
mister? Did you bury him then?
CHRISTY – [considering.] Aye. I buried him then. Wasn’t I digging spuds in the field?
MICHAEL. And the peelers never followed after you the eleven days that you’re out?
CHRISTY – [shaking his head.] – Never a one of them, and I walking forward facing hog, dog, or
divil on the highway of the road.
PHILLY – [nodding wisely.] – It’s only with a common week-day kind of a murderer them lads
would be trusting their carcase, and that man should be a great terror when his temper’s
roused.
MICHAEL. He should then. (To Christy.) And where was it, mister honey, that you did the deed?
CHRISTY – [looking at him with suspicion.] – Oh, a distant place, master of the house, a windy
corner of high, distant hills. (Synge, The Playboy of the Western World 47-52)

Christy’s Punishment
[Christy comes in, half dazed, and goes to fire.]
WIDOW QUIN [coming in, hurriedly, and going to him]: They’re turning again you. Come on, or
you’ll be hanged, indeed.
CHRISTY: I’m thinking, from this out, Pegeen’ll be giving me praises the same as in the hours
gone by.
WIDOW QUIN [impatiently]: Come by the back-door. I’d think bad to have you stifled on the
gallows tree.
CHRISTY [indignantly]: I will not, then. What good’d be my life-time, if I left Pegeen?
WIDOW QUIN: Come on, and you’ll be no worse than you were last night; and you with a double
murder this time to be telling to the girls.
CHRISTY: I’ll not leave Pegeen Mike.
WIDOW QUIN [impatiently]: Isn’t there the match of her in every parish public, from
Binghamstown unto the plain of Meath? Come on, I tell you, and I’ll find you finer sweethearts
at each waning moon.
CHRISTY: It’s Pegeen I’m seeking only, and what’d I care if you brought me adrift of chosen
females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the Eastern World?

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SARA [runs in, pulling off one of her petticoats]: They’re going to hang him. [Holding out petticoat
and shawl.] Fit these upon him, and let him run off to the east.
WIDOW QUIN: He’s raving now; but we’ll fit them on him, and I’ll take him, in the ferry, to the
Achill boat.
CHRISTY [struggling feebly]: Leave me go, will you? when I’m thinking of my luck to-day, for she
will wed me surely, and I a proven hero in the end of all. [They try to fasten petticoat round
him.]
WIDOW QUIN: Take his left hand, and we’ll pull him now. Come on, young fellow.
CHRISTY [suddenly starting up]. You’ll be taking me from her? You’re jealous, is it, of her wedding
me? Go on from this. [He snatches up a stool, and threatens them with it]
WIDOW QUIN [going]: It’s in the mad-house they should put him, not in jail, at all. We’ll go by the
back-door, to call the doctor, and we’ll save him so. [She goes out, with Sara, through inner
room. Men crowd in the doorway. Christy sits down again by the fire.]
MICHAEL [in a terrified whisper]: Is the old lad killed surely?
PHILLY. I’m after feeling the last gasps quitting his heart. [They peer in at Christy.]
MICHAEL [with a rope]: Look at the way he is. Twist a hangman’s knot on it, and slip it over his
head, while he’s not minding at all.
PHILLY: Let you take it, Shaneen. You’re the soberest of all that’s here.
SHAWN: Is it me to go near him, and he the wickedest and worst with me? Let you take it, Pegeen
Mike.
PEGEEN: Come on, so. [She goes forward with the others, and they drop the double hitch over his
head.]
CHRISTY: What ails you?
SHAWN [triumphantly, as they pull the rope tight on his arms]: Come on to the °peelers, till they
stretch you now.
CHRISTY. Me!
MICHAEL. If we took pity on you, the Lord God would, maybe, bring us ruin from the law to-day,
so you’d best come easy, for hanging is an easy and a speedy end.
CHRISTY: I’ll not stir. [To Pegeen] And what is it you’ll say to me, and I after doing it this time in
the face of all?
PEGEEN: I’ll say, a strange man is a marvel, with his mighty talk; but what’s a °squabble in your
back-yard, and the blow of a °loy, have taught me that there’s a great gap between a gallous
story and a dirty deed. [To Men] Take him on from this, or the lot of us will be likely put on
trial for his deed to-day.
CHRISTY [with horror in his voice]: And it’s yourself will send me off, to have a horny-fingered
hangman hitching his bloody slip-knots at the butt of my ear.
MEN [pulling rope]: Come on, will you? [He is pulled down on the floor.]
CHRISTY [twisting his legs round the table]: Cut the rope, Pegeen, and I’ll quit the lot of you, and
live from this out, like the madmen of Keel, eating °muck and green weeds, on the faces of the
cliffs.
PEGEEN: And leave us to hang, is it, for a saucy liar, the like of you? [To men] Take him on, out
from this.
SHAWN: Pull a twist on his neck, and squeeze him so.
PHILLY: Twist yourself. Sure he cannot hurt you, if you keep your distance from his teeth alone.
SHAWN: I’m afeard of him. [To Pegeen] Lift a lighted °sod, will you, and scorch his leg.
PEGEEN [blowing the fire, with a bellows]: Leave go now, young fellow, or I’ll scorch your shins.
CHRISTY: You’re blowing for to torture me [His voice rising and growing stronger.] That’s your
kind, is it? Then let the lot of you be wary, for, if I’ve to face the gallows, I’ll have a gay march
down, I tell you, and shed the blood of some of you before I die.
SHAWN [in terror]: Keep a good hold, Philly. Be wary, for the love of God. For I’m thinking he
would °liefest wreak his pains on me.
CHRISTY [almost gaily]: If I do lay my hands on you, it’s the way you’ll be at the fall of night,
hanging as a scarecrow for the fowls of hell. Ah, you’ll have a gallous jaunt I’m saying, coaching
out through °Limbo with my father’s ghost.
SHAWN [to Pegeen]: Make haste, will you? Oh, isn’t he a holy terror, and isn’t it true for Father
Reilly, that all drink’s a curse that has the lot of you so shaky and uncertain now?
CHRISTY: If I can wring a neck among you, I’ll have a royal judgment looking on the trembling
jury in the courts of law. And won’t there be crying out in Mayo the day I’m stretched upon the

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 William Butler Yeats

rope with ladies in their silks and satins snivelling in their lacy kerchiefs, and they rhyming
songs and ballads on the terror of my fate? [He squirms round on the floor and bites Shawn’s
leg.]
SHAWN [shrieking]: My leg’s bit on me. He’s the like of a mad dog, I’m thinking, the way that I
will surely die.
CHRISTY [delighted with himself]: You will then, the way you can shake out hell’s flags of welcome
for my coming in two weeks or three, for I’m thinking Satan hasn’t many have killed their da
in Kerry, and in Mayo too.
[Old Mahon comes in behind on all fours and looks on unnoticed.]
MEN [to Pegeen]: Bring the sod, will you?
PEGEEN [coming over]: God help him so. [Burns his leg.]
CHRISTY [kicking and screaming]: O, glory be to God! [He kicks loose from the table, and they all
drag him towards the door.]
JIMMY [seeing old Mahon]: Will you look what’s come in? [They all drop Christy and run left.]
CHRISTY [scrambling on his knees face to face with old Mahon]: Are you coming to be killed a
third time, or what ails you now?
MAHON: For what is it they have you tied?
CHRISTY: They’re taking me to the peelers to have me hanged for slaying you.
MICHAEL [apologetically]: It is the will of God that all should guard their little cabins from the
treachery of law, and what would my daughter be doing if I was ruined or was hanged itself?
MAHON [grimly, loosening Christy]: It’s little I care if you put a bag on her back, and went picking
cockles till the hour of death; but my son and myself will be going our own way, and we’ll have
great times from this out telling stories of the villainy of Mayo, and the fools is here. [To
Christy, who is freed] Come on now.
CHRISTY: Go with you, is it? I will then, like a gallant captain with his heathen slave. Go on now
and I’ll see you from this day stewing my oatmeal and washing my °spuds, for I’m master of
all fights from now. [Pushing Mahon] Go on, I’m saying.
MAHON: Is it me?
CHRISTY: Not a word out of you. Go on from this.
MAHON [walking out and looking back at Christy over his shoulder]: Glory be to God! [With a
broad smile] I am crazy again! [Goes.]
CHRISTY: Ten thousand blessings upon all that’s here, for you’ve turned me a likely gaffer in the
end of all, the way I’ll go romancing through a romping lifetime from this hour to the dawning
of the judgment day. [He goes out.]
MICHAEL: By the will of God, we’ll have peace now for our drinks. Will you draw the porter,
Pegeen?
SHAWN [going up to her: It’s a miracle Father Reilly can wed us in the end of all, and we’ll have
none to trouble us when his vicious bite is healed.
PEGEEN [hitting him a box on the ear]: Quit my sight. [°Putting her shawl over her head and
breaking out into wild lamentations] Oh my grief, I’ve lost him surely. I’ve lost the only Playboy
of the Western World. (Synge, The Playboy of the Western World 105-11)
Glossary and notes
liefest: most gladly.
lighted sod: piece of burning turf.
Limbo: region on the border of Hell.
loy: club.
muck: farmyard manure; dirt.
peelers: police.
putting her shawl over her head: gesture of a woman mourning someone’s death.
spuds: potatoes.
squabble: noisy quarrel.

William Butler Yeats

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

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 William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to
Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and
wattles made:
5 Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive
for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for
peace comes dropping slow,
10 Dropping from the veils of the morning to
where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon
a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
15 I will arise and go now, for always night
and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds
by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the
20 pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
(in Yeats’s Poems 74)

September 1913
What need you, being come to sense, It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
But fumble in a greasy °till
20 Was it for this the °wild geese spread
And add the halfpence to the pence
The grey wing upon every tide;
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
For this that all that blood was shed,
5 You have dried the marrow from the
For this °Edward Fitzgerald died,
bone;
And °Robert Emmet and °Wolfe Tone,
For men were born to pray and save;
25 All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with °O’Leary in the grave.
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
10 Yet they were of a different kind,
Yet could we turn the years again,
The names that stilled your childish
And call those exiles as they were
play,
30 In all their loneliness and pain,
They have gone about the world like
You’d cry ‘°Some woman’s yellow hair
wind,
Has maddened every mother’s son’:
15 But little time had they to pray
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
And what, God help us, could they save?
35 They’re with O’Leary in the grave.
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
(in Yeats’s Poems 210)
Glossary and notes
Edward Fitzgerald (1763-1798) was an Irish MP, who, after being dismissed from the army for disloyal
activities, joined then the United Irishmen, became president of its military committee and died of the
wounds received when he resisted arrest.
O’Leary, John (1830-1907) was a revolutionary nationalist of great integrity and a man of letters. He was
influenced by the Young Ireland Movement and, later on, became identified with the Fenian movement
(of the Irish Republican Brotherhood). He was arrested but was released after five years on condition
that he kept out of Ireland for fifteen years. Yeats identified him with the traditions of old Irish
nationalism.
Robert Emmett (1778-1803) was an Irish nationalist, accused of treason and then executed for leading an
uprising for Irish independence.
some woman refers to Cathleen Ni Houlihan who personified the cause of Ireland.
till: (here) combination of clay, sand and gravel. The combination ‘greasy till’ shows Yeast’s contempt for the
materialism of contemporary Ireland.
wild geese were called the Irish expatriates who served as professional soldiers in the armies of the Catholic
powers of Europe, such as France, Spain and Austria from the late 17th century to the early 20th
century.
Wolfe Tone, Theobald (1763-1798) was an Irish nationalist one of the chief founders of the Society of United
Irishmen. He turned to France for help in the fight for Irish independence, became an adjutant-general
in the French army and sailed with French military forces into Ireland. He was captured and sentenced
to death but committed suicide in prison.

Easter 1916
I have met °them at close of day From counter or desk among grey
Coming with vivid faces Eighteenth-century houses.

37
 William Butler Yeats

5 I have passed with a nod of the head To trouble the living stream.
Or polite meaningless words, 45 The horse that comes from the road,
Or have lingered awhile and said The °rider, the birds that range
Polite meaningless words, From cloud to tumbling cloud,
And thought before I had done Minute by minute they change;
10 Of a mocking tale or a °gibe A shadow of cloud on the stream,
To please a companion 50 Changed minute by minute;
Around the fire at the club; A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
Being certain that they and I And a horse plashes within it;
But lived where motley is worn: The long-legged moor-hens dive,
15 All changed, changed utterly: And hens to moor-cocks call;
A terrible beauty is born. 55 Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of it all.
°That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will, Too long a sacrifice
Her nights in argument Can make a °stone of the heart.
20 Until her voice grew shrill. O when may it suffice?
What voice more sweet than hers 60 That is Heaven’s part, our part
When, young and beautiful, To murmur name upon name,
She °rode to harriers? As a mother names her child
°This man had kept a school When sleep at last has come
25 And rode our wingéd horse; On limbs that had run wild.
°This other his helper and friend 65 What is it but nightfall?
Was coming into his force; No, no, not night but death;
He might have won fame in the end, Was it needless death after all?
So sensitive his nature seemed, For England may keep faith
30 So daring and sweet his thought. For all that is done and said.
°This other man I had dreamed 70 We know their dream; enough
A drunken, vainglorious lout. To know they dreamed and are dead;
He had done most bitter wrong And what if excess of love
To °some who are near my heart, Bewildered them till they died?
35 Yet I number him in the song; I write it out in a verse –
He, too, has resigned his part 75 MacDonagh and MacBride
In the casual comedy; And °Connolly and Pearse
He, too, has been changed in his turn, Now and in time to be,
Transformed utterly: Wherever green is worn,
40 A terrible beauty is born. Are changed, changed utterly:
80 A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone
(in Yeats’s Poems 287)
Through summer and winter seem
°Enchanted to a stone
Glossary and notes
Connolly, James (1870-1916) organised the Citizens’ Army in the Rising and was Commander General of
the insurgent forces in Dublin. He was executed in 1916.
enchanted to a stone: Yeats refers here to those people who devote themselves entirely to a cause without
thinking of life and love.
gibe or jibe: derisive or provoking remark.
rider implies Patrick Pearse. He and the horse become Perseus and Pegassus in a mythological setting.
rode to harriers: took part in hunting parties with dogs. The harrier is a breed of dog used in hunting rabbit.
some who are near my heart are Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult.
stone of the heart refers to Maud Gonne completely devoted to revolutionary ideas. Yeats believed that Maud
Gonne would lose her feminism if she became associated with political fanaticism.
that woman refers to Constance Gore-Booth (afterwards Countess Markiewicz), a member of the Sligo
County aristocracy. She was a merry and beautiful woman who became and Irish nationalist in 1908,
which annoyed Yeats. She was staff officer in the Rising, was then arrested and was sentenced to death,
commuted afterwards to life imprisonment. She was, however, released in amnesty in 1917. She joined
the Fianna Fáil party of the Irish Free State and was elected to the Dáil in 1927.
them: Yeats refers here to the people taking part in the Rising.

38
 William Butler Yeats
this man makes reference to Patrick Pearse (1879-1916) who was a school-master and member of the Irish
Bar. He published prose and poetry and fought to restore Irish language. He was one of the leaders of
the Easter Rising.
this other man is Major John McBride (1865-1916), Maud Gonne’s husband since 1903. Their marriage
ended in divorce and he was accused of adultery and indecent behaviour. He was executed in the
aftermath of the Easter Rising.
this other refers to Thomas MacDonagh (1878-1916), a poet, dramatist and critic, who taught at University
College, Dublin.
The Wild Swans at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
5 Upon the brimming water among the
stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
10 I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant
15 creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
Coole Park, 1929
I meditate upon a swallow’s flight,
Upon an aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
5 Great works constructed there in nature’s
spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single
thought,
10 A dance-like glory that those walls begot.
There Hyde before he had beaten into
prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
15 For all his timid heart, there that slow
man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and
those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh
20 Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well Set and excellent company.
They came like swallows and like swallows
went,
39
The bell-beat of their wings above my
20 head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
25 Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they
will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
30 Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some
day
35 To find they have flown away? (in Yeats’s
Poems 233)
25 And yet a woman’s powerful character
Could keep a Swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-
point,
30 Found certainty upon the dreaming air,
The intellectual sweetness of those lines
That cut through time or cross it
withershins.
Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your
35 stand
When all those rooms and passages are
gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless
mound
40 And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate – eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the
sun
And all the sensuality of the shade –
45 A moment’s memory to that laurelled
head. (in Yeats’s Poems 357)
 William Butler Yeats

Sailing to Byzantium
I 20 To the holy city of Byzantium.
That is no country for old men. The young III
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
– Those dying generations – at their song,
As in the gold mosaic of a wall
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
5 seas,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer
25 Consume my heart away; sick with desire
long
And fastened to a dying animal
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Into the artifice of eternity.
10 Monuments of unageing intellect.
IV
II
Once out of nature I shall never take
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
30 My bodily form from any natural thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder
make
sing
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
15 For every tatter in its mortal dress,
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Nor is there singing school but studying
35 Or set upon a golden bough to sing
Monuments of its own magnificence;
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
And therefore I have sailed the seas and
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (in
come
Yeats’s Poems 301)
Byzantium
The unpurged images of day recede; Common bird or petal
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed; And all complexities of mire or blood.
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement
song
flit
5 After great cathedral gong;
30 Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
lit,
All that man is,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of
All mere complexities,
flame,
The fury and the mire of human veins.
Where blood-begotten spirits come
10 Before me floats an image, man or shade, 35 And all complexities of fury leave,
Shade more than man, more image than a Dying into a dance,
shade; An agony of trance,
For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth An agony of flame that cannot singe a
May unwind the winding path; sleeve.
15 A mouth that has no moisture and no
40 Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
breath
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the
Breathless mouths may summon;
flood.
I hail the superhuman;
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.
Marbles of the dancing floor
20 Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, 45 Break bitter furies of complexity,
More miracle than bird or handiwork, Those images that yet
Planted on the star-lit golden bough, Fresh images beget,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud sea. (in Yeats’s Poems 363)
25 In glory of changeless metal

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

40
 James Joyce

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
5 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst
10 Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those
words out
15 When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of
the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a
man,
20 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about
it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert
birds.
25 The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come
30 round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(in Yeats’s Poems 294)

Leda and the Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating But feel the strange heart beating where it
still lies?
Above the staggering girl, her thighs
15 A shudder in the loins engenders there
caressed
The broken wall, the burning roof and
5 By the dark webs, her nape caught in his
tower
bill,
And Agamemnon dead.
He holds her helpless breast upon his
Being so caught up,
breast.
20 So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
How can those terrified vague fingers push Did she put on his knowledge with his
10 The feathered glory from her loosening power
thighs? Before the indifferent beak could let her
And how can body, laid in that white rush, drop? (in Yeats’s Poems 322)

James Joyce

From Dubliners

From ‘The Dead’

He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm swiftly about her body and
drawing her towards him, he said softly:
“Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?”
She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly:
“Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?”
She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears:
“O, I am thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim.”
She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-rail, hid
her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he
passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, well-filled
shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his
glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses. He halted a few paces from her and said:
“What about the song? Why does that make you cry?”
She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a child.
A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.
“Why, Gretta?” he asked.
“I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.”
“And who was the person long ago?” asked Gabriel, smiling.
“It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother,” she said.

41
 James Joyce

The smile passed away from Gabriel’s face. A dull anger began to gather again at the back of
his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins.
“Someone you were in love with?” he asked ironically.
“It was a young boy I used to know,” she answered, “named Michael Furey. He used to sing
that song, The Lass of Aughrim. He was very delicate.”
Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.
“I can see him so plainly,” she said, after a moment. “Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And
such an expression in them– an expression!”
“O, then, you are in love with him?” said Gabriel.
“I used to go out walking with him,” she said, “when I was in Galway.”
A thought flew across Gabriel’s mind.
“Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?” he said coldly.
She looked at him and asked in surprise:
“What for?”
Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:
“How do I know? To see him, perhaps.”
She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.
“He is dead,” she said at length. “He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing
to die so young as that?”
“What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically.
“He was in the gasworks,” she said.
Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the
dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of
tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful
consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a
pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and
idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the
mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned
upon his forehead.
He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and
indifferent.
“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.
“I was great with him at that time,” she said.
Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her
whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:
“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”
“I think he died for me,” she answered.
A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph,
some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its
vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of reason and continued to caress her
hand. He did not question her again, for he felt that she would tell him of herself. Her hand was
warm and moist: it did not respond to his touch, but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed
her first letter to him that spring morning.
“It was in the winter,” she said, “about the beginning of the winter when I was going to leave
my grandmother’s and come up here to the convent. And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in
Galway and wouldn’t be let out, and his people in Oughterard were written to. He was in decline,
they said, or something like that. I never knew rightly.”
She paused for a moment and sighed.
“Poor fellow,” she said. “He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We used to go
out together, walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the country. He was going to
study singing only for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey.”
“Well; and then?” asked Gabriel.
“And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the convent he was
much worse and I wouldn’t be let see him so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin
and would be back in the summer, and hoping he would be better then.”
She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on:
“Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother’s house in Nuns’ Island, packing up,
and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so wet I couldn’t see, so I ran

42
 James Joyce

downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the garden and there was the poor fellow at the
end of the garden, shivering.”
“And did you not tell him to go back?” asked Gabriel.
“I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain. But he
said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing at the end of the
wall where there was a tree.”
“And did he go home?” asked Gabriel.
“Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was buried in
Oughterard, where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!”
She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face downward on the
bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of
intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and walked quietly to the window.
She was fast asleep.
Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled hair and
half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that romance in her life: a
man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband,
had played in her life. He watched her while she slept, as though he and she had never lived
together as man and wife. His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he
thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly
pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer
beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had braved death.
Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she had
thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot stood upright, its limp
upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour
before. From what had it proceeded? From his aunt’s supper, from his own foolish speech, from the
wine and dancing, the merry-making when saying good-night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk
along the river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of
Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a moment when
she was singing Arrayed for the Bridal. Soon, perhaps, he would be sitting in that same drawing-
room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate
would be sitting beside him, crying and blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He
would cast about in his mind for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and
useless ones. Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the
sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly
into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He
thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her
lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman,
but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in
the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree.
Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the
dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His
own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead
had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He
watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had
come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general
all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling
softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon
waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey
lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little
gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through
the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
(Joyce, Dubliners, 219-25)

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 James Joyce

From A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

When evening had fallen he left the house, and the first touch of the damp dark air and the noise
of the door as it closed behind him made ache again his conscience, lulled by prayer and tears.
Confess! Confess! It was not enough to lull the conscience with a tear and a prayer. He had to kneel
before the minister of the Holy Ghost and tell over his hidden sins truly and repentantly. Before
he heard again the footboard of the housedoor trail over the threshold as it opened to let him in,
before he saw again the table in the kitchen set for supper he would have knelt and confessed. It
was quite simple.
The ache of conscience ceased and he walked onward swiftly through the dark streets. There
were so many flagstones on the footpath of that street and so many streets in that city and so many
cities in the world. Yet eternity had no end. He was in mortal sin. Even once was a mortal sin. It
could happen in an instant. But how so quickly? By seeing or by thinking of seeing. The eyes see
the thing, without having wished first to see. Then in an instant it happens. But does that part of
the body understand or what? The serpent, the most subtle beast of the field. It must understand
when it desires in one instant and then prolongs its own desire instant after instant, sinfully. It
feels and understands and desires. What a horrible thing! Who made it to be like that, a bestial
part of the body able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman
thing moved by a lower soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself
out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust. O why was that so? O
why?
He cowered in the shadow of the thought, abasing himself in the awe of God Who had made all
things and all men. Madness. Who could think such a thought? And, cowering in darkness and
abject, he prayed mutely to his guardian angel to drive away with his sword the demon that was
whispering to his brain.
The whisper ceased and he knew then clearly that his own soul had sinned in thought and
word and deed wilfully through his own body. Confess! He had to confess every sin. How could he
utter in words to the priest what he had done? Must, must. Or how could he explain without dying
of shame? Or how could he have done such things without shame? A madman! Confess! O he would
indeed to be free and sinless again! Perhaps the priest would know. O dear God!
He walked on and on through ill-lit streets, fearing to stand still for a moment lest it might
seem that he held back from what awaited him, fearing to arrive at that towards which he still
turned with longing. How beautiful must be a soul in the state of grace when God looked upon it
with love!
Frowsy girls sat along the curbstones before their baskets. Their dank hair hung trailed over
their brows. They were not beautiful to see as they crouched in the mire. But their souls were seen
by God; and if their souls were in a state of grace they were radiant to see: and God loved them,
seeing them.
A wasting breath of humiliation blew bleakly over his soul to think of how he had fallen, to feel
that those souls were dearer to God than his. The wind blew over him and passed on to the myriads
and myriads of other souls on whom God’s favour shone now more and now less, stars now brighter
and now dimmer sustained and failing. And the glimmering souls passed away, sustained and
failing, merged in a moving breath. One soul was lost; a tiny soul: his. It flickered once and went
out, forgotten, lost. The end: black, cold, void waste.
Consciousness of place came ebbing back to him slowly over a vast tract of time unlit, unfelt,
unlived. The squalid scene composed itself around him; the common accents, the burning gas-jets
in the shops, odours of fish and spirits and wet sawdust, moving men and women. An old woman
was about to cross the street, an oilcan in her hand. He bent down and asked her was there a
chapel near.
– A chapel, sir? Yes, sir. Church Street chapel.
– Church?
She shifted the can to her other hand and directed him; and, as she held out her reeking
withered right hand under its fringe of shawl, he bent lower towards her, saddened and soothed
by her voice.
– Thank you.
– You are quite welcome, sir.
The candles on the high altar had been extinguished but the fragrance of incense still floated
down the dim nave. Bearded workmen with pious faces were guiding a canopy out through a side

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 James Joyce

door, the sacristan aiding them with quiet gestures and words. A few of the faithful still lingered
praying before one of the side-altars or kneeling in the benches near the confessionals. He
approached timidly and knelt at the last bench in the body, thankful for the peace and silence and
fragrant shadow of the church. The board on which he knelt was narrow and worn and those who
knelt near him were humble followers of Jesus. Jesus too had been born in poverty and had worked
in the shop of a carpenter, cutting boards and planing them, and had first spoken of the kingdom
of God to poor fishermen, teaching all men to be meek and humble of heart.
He bowed his head upon his hands, bidding his heart be meek and humble that he might be
like those who knelt beside him and his prayer as acceptable as theirs. He prayed beside them but
it was hard. His soul was foul with sin and he dared not ask forgiveness with the simple trust of
those whom Jesus, in the mysterious ways of God, had called first to His side, the carpenters, the
fishermen, poor and simple people following a lowly trade, handling and shaping the wood of trees,
mending their nets with patience.
A tall figure came down the aisle and the penitents stirred; and at the last moment, glancing
up swiftly, he saw a long grey beard and the brown habit of a capuchin. The priest entered the box
and was hidden. Two penitents rose and entered the confessional at either side. The wooden slide
was drawn back and the faint murmur of a voice troubled the silence.
His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep
to hear its doom. Little flakes of fire fell and powdery ashes fell softly, alighting on the houses of
men. They stirred, waking from sleep, troubled by the heated air.
The slide was shot back. The penitent emerged from the side of the box. The farther side was
drawn. A woman entered quietly and deftly where the first penitent had knelt. The faint murmur
began again.
He could still leave the chapel. He could stand up, put one foot before the other and walk out
softly and then run, run, run swiftly through the dark streets. He could still escape from the shame.
Had it been any terrible crime but that one sin! Had it been murder! Little fiery flakes fell and
touched him at all points, shameful thoughts, shameful words, shameful acts. Shame covered him
wholly like fine glowing ashes falling continually. To say it in words! His soul, stifling and helpless,
would cease to be.
The slide was shot back. A penitent emerged from the farther side of the box. The near slide
was drawn. A penitent entered where the other penitent had come out. A soft whispering noise
floated in vaporous cloudlets out of the box. It was the woman: soft whispering cloudlets, soft
whispering vapour, whispering and vanishing.
He beat his breast with his fist humbly, secretly under cover of the wooden armrest. He would
be at one with others and with God. He would love his neighbour. He would love God who had
made and loved him. He would kneel and pray with others and be happy. God would look down on
him and on them and would love them all.
It was easy to be good. God’s yoke was sweet and light. It was better never to have sinned, to
have remained always a child, for God loved little children and suffered them to come to Him. It
was a terrible and a sad thing to sin. But God was merciful to poor sinners who were truly sorry.
How true that was! That was indeed goodness.
The slide was shot to suddenly. The penitent came out. He was next. He stood up in terror and
walked blindly into the box.
At last it had come. He knelt in the silent gloom and raised his eyes to the white crucifix
suspended above him. God could see that he was sorry. He would tell all his sins. His confession
would be long, long. Everybody in the chapel would know then what a sinner he had been. Let
them know. It was true. But God had promised to forgive him if he was sorry. He was sorry. He
clasped his hands and raised them towards the white form, praying with his darkened eyes,
praying with all his trembling body, swaying his head to and fro like a lost creature, praying with
whimpering lips.
– Sorry! Sorry! O sorry!
The slide clicked back and his heart bounded in his breast. The face of an old priest was at the
grating, averted from him, leaning upon a hand. He made the sign of the cross and prayed of the
priest to bless him for he had sinned. Then, bowing his head, he repeated the Confiteor in fright.
At the words my most grievous fault he ceased, breathless.
– How long is it since your last confession, my child?
– A long time, father.
– A month, my child?

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 James Joyce

– Longer, father.
– Three months, my child?
– Longer, father.
– Six months?
– Eight months, father.
He had begun. The priest asked:
– And what do you remember since that time?
He began to confess his sins: masses missed, prayers not said, lies.
– Anything else, my child?
Sins of anger, envy of others, gluttony, vanity, disobedience.
– Anything else, my child?
There was no help. He murmured:
– I... committed sins of impurity, father.
The priest did not turn his head.
– With yourself, my child?
– And... with others.
– With women, my child?
– Yes, father.
– Were they married women, my child?
He did not know. His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from
his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth,
sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his head, overcome.
The Priest was silent. Then he asked:
– How old are you, my child?
– Sixteen, father.
The priest passed his hand several times over his face. Then, resting his forehead against his
hand, he leaned towards the grating and, with eyes still averted, spoke slowly. His voice was weary
and old.
– You are very young, my child, he said, and let me implore of you to give up that sin. It is a
terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills the soul. It is the cause of many crimes and misfortunes.
Give it up, my child, for God’s sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. You cannot know where that
wretched habit will lead you or where it will come against you. As long as you commit that sin, my
poor child, you will never be worth one farthing to God. Pray to our mother Mary to help you. She
will help you, my child. Pray to Our Blessed Lady when that sin comes into your mind. I am sure
you will do that, will you not? You repent of all those sins. I am sure you do. And you will promise
God now that by His holy grace you will never offend Him any more by that wicked sin. You will
make that solemn promise to God, will you not?
– Yes, father.
The old and weary voice fell like sweet rain upon his quaking parching heart. How sweet and
sad!
– Do so my poor child. The devil has led you astray. Drive him back to hell when he tempts you
to dishonour your body in that way – the foul spirit who hates our Lord. Promise God now that you
will give up that sin, that wretched wretched sin.
Blinded by his tears and by the light of God’s mercifulness he bent his head and heard the
grave words of absolution spoken and saw the priest’s hand raised above him in token of
forgiveness.
– God bless you, my child. Pray for me.
He knelt to say his penance, praying in a corner of the dark nave; and his prayers ascended to
heaven from his purified heart like perfume streaming upwards from a heart of white rose. (Joyce,
A Portrait 158-66)

From Ulysses: [Lestrygonians]

Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl shovelling scoopfuls of
creams for a christian brother. Some school treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and
comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne
sucking red jujubes white.

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 James Joyce

5 A sombre Y. M. C. A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of Graham
Lemon’s, placed a °throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom.
Heart to heart talks.
°Bloo…. Me? No.
Blood of the Lamb.
10 His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the
blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a
building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druids’ altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John
Alexander °Dowie restorer of the church in Zion is coming.
Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!!
All heartily welcome.
Paying game. °Torry and Alexander last year. Polygamy. His wife will put the
15 stopper on that. Where was that ad some Birmingham firm the luminous crucifix. Our
Saviour. Wake up in the dead of night and see him on the wall, hanging. Pepper’s ghost
idea. °Iron nails ran in.
Phosphorus it must be done with. If you leave a bit of codfish for instance. I could
see the bluey silver over it. Night I went down to the pantry in the kitchen. Don’t like
20 all the smells in it waiting to rush out. What was it °she wanted? The Malaga raisins.
Thinking of Spain. Before °Rudy was born. The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny.
Very good for the brain.
From Butler’s monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor’s walk. Dedalus’
daughter there still outside Dillon’s auctionrooms. Must be selling off some old
25 furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father. Lobbing about waiting for him. Home
always breaks up when the mother goes. Fifteen children he had. Birth every year
almost. That’s in their theology or the priest won’t give the poor woman the confession,
the absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat you out of
house and home. No families themselves to feed. Living on the fat of the land. Their
30 butteries and larders. I’d like to see them do the black fast °Yom Kippur. Crossbuns.
One meal and a collation for fear he’d collapse on the altar. A housekeeper of one of
those fellows if you could pick it out of her. Never pick it out of her. Like getting °L.s.d.
out of him. Does himself well. No guests. All for number one. Watching his water. Bring
your own bread and butter. His reverence: mum’s the word.
35 Good Lord, that poor child’s dress is in °flitters. Underfed she looks too. Potatoes
and °marge, marge and potatoes. It’s after they feel it. Proof of the pudding.
Undermines the constitution.
As he set foot on O’Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from the parapet.
Brewery barge with export stout. England. Sea air sours it, I heard. Be interesting
40 some day get a pass through Hancock to see the brewery. Regular world in itself. °Vats
of porter wonderful. Rats get in too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating.
Dead drunk on the porter. Drink till they °puke again like christians. Imagine drinking
that! Rats: vats. Well, of course, if we knew all the things.
Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quaywalls,
45 gulls. Rough weather outside. If I threw myself down? °Reuben J’s son must have
swallowed a good bellyful of that °sewage. One and eightpence too much. Hhhhm. It’s
the droll way he comes out with the things. Knows how to tell a story too.
They wheeled lower. Looking for °grub. Wait.
He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. °Elijah thirtytwo feet per sec
50 is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the °wake of °swells, floated under by
the bridgepiers. Not such damn fools. Also the day I threw that stale cake out of the
Erin’s King picked it up in the wake fifty yards °astern. Live by their wits. They
wheeled, flapping.
The hungry famished gull
Flaps o’er the waters dull.
That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has no rhymes:
55 blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn.

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 James Joyce

°Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit

Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth.
– Two apples a penny! Two for a penny!
His gaze passed over the glazed apples °serried on her stand. Australians they
must be this time of year. Shiny peels: polishes them up with a rag or a handkerchief.
Wait. Those poor birds.
60 He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes for a
penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down into the Liffey. See
that? The gulls swooped silently, two, then all from their heights, °pouncing on prey.
Gone. Every morsel. Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb
from his hands. They never expected that. Manna. Live on fish, fishy flesh they have,
65 all seabirds, gulls, seagoose. Swans from °Anna Liffey swim down here sometimes to
preen themselves. No accounting for tastes. Wonder what kind is swanmeat. Robinson
Crusoe had to live on them.
They wheeled flapping weakly. I’m not going to throw any more. Penny quite
enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a °caw. They spread foot and mouth disease too.
70 If you cram a turkey say on chestnutmeal it tastes like that. Eat pig like pig. But then
why is it that saltwater fish are not salty? How is that?
His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the
°treacly swells lazily its plastered board.
Kino’s.
75 °II/-.
Trousers.
Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water
really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we
trace. Because life is a stream. All kinds of places are good for ads. That °quack doctor
80 for the °clap used to be stuck up in all the °greenhouses. Never see it now. Strictly
confidential. Dr Hy Franks. Didn’t cost him a red like Maginni the dancing master self
advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up or stick them up himself for that matter
on the q.t. running in to loosen a button. Flybynight. Just the place too. POST NO BILLS.
POST IIO PILLS. Some chap with a dose burning him.
85 °If he ..?
O!
Eh?
No …… No.
No, no. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t surely?
90 No, no.
Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about that. After one.
Timeball on the °ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time. Fascinating little book that is of sir
Robert Ball’s. °Parallax. I never exactly understood. There’s a priest. Could ask him. Par it’s
Greek: parallel, parallax. °Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her about the
95 transmigration. O rocks! (Joyce, Ulysses 144-7)
Glossary and notes
Besides the cited sources, the notes above are also drawn on those found in James Joyce, Ulysses (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1998) 819-20.
Anna Liffey is the river Liffey that flows from the Wicklow Mountains and runs through the centre of
Dublin.
astern: to the rear; towards the rear end of a ship.
Bloo: As Bloom reads the religious leaflet that he has been handed, he at first mistakes the word ‘blood’ in
‘Blood of the Lamb’ for his name, Bloom.
caw: harsh, raucous cry of the crow.
clap: gonorrhoea (a sexually transmitted disease).
Dowie was a Scottish-American evangelist, founder of the ‘Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion’, in
Zion City (Illinois, USA). He used to prophesise the coming of the Hebrew prophet Elijah.
Elijah thirtytwo feet per sec , i.e. ‘Elijah is coming’ is the legend of the handbill that Bloom received. He is
throwing it away and it is falling according to the acceleration rate of all bodies, i.e. 32 feet per second
in every second.
greenhouse: (here) public urinal.

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 James Joyce

grub: soft, thick wormlike larva of an insect; food.

Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit … quotation taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1, V: 9-10), where it is ‘I am
thy father’s spirit; / Doomed for a certain term to walk the night’.
If he ..?: Blooms thinks that Blazes Boylan, a showy philanderer, who was due to call on Molly that
afternoon to discuss with her the concert she is about to give (Molly is a singer) might have sex with his
wife and will give her thus a ‘dose’ of venereal disease.
II/-: eleven shillings (11 / -) is what you pay for Kino’s trousers. This is associated with Bloom’s profession as
advertising canvasser; he is paid by newspapers if he finds tradesmen willing to place their
advertisements in that particular newspaper.
in flitters: in rags.
Iron nails ran in: the initials of these words are INRI, like those on the inscription placed over Jesus
Christ’s head during Crucifixion and standing for ‘Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum’, i.e. ‘Jesus of
Nazareth, King of the Jews’.
L.s.d. were the abbreviations for pounds, shillings and pence. What is expressed here is the idea of money,
in general.
marge: margarine.
Met him pike hoses: this is the way Molly pronounced the word ‘metempsychosis’ that morning (at the
beginning of the novel). When he tried to explain the meaning of the word then, she exclaimed ‘O
rocks!’, to dismiss the word as too difficult for her. ‘Parallax’ is considered the same by Bloom now.
parallax: (in astronomy) the difference in direction of a planet or a star or other celestial body as measured
from two points on earth or on the earth’s orbit round the sun.
pounce: to fly down abruptly and seize something with the claws.
puke: to vomit.
q.t.: quietly.
quack: who pretends to have special knowledge or ability.
Reuben J. Dodd was a Dublin solicitor whose son almost got drowned in the Liffey River if he hadn’t been
rescued by a man who was rewarded by Reuben J. with two shillings, ‘one and eightpence too much’, as
Dedalus had remarked earlier that morning when the two were discussing the event.
Rudy was Bloom and Molly’s son, who had died as an infant, eleven years previously.
serried: crossed or pressed together.
sewage: waste mater carried by underground drains or pipes.
she wanted refers to Molly, Bloom’s wife, born in Gibraltar (belonging to Spain), where the Malaga raisins
also come from.
swell: (here) surge of the water.
the ballastoffice, i.e. the Ballast Office, is the observatory at Dunsink, Dublin’s Big Ben, where the time is
recorded by a timeball. Since the timeball is down, it implies that it is 1 o’clock. The observatory’s
timeball reminds Bloom of the name of the Irish astronomer Sir Robert Ball, of his book on astronomy,
The Story of Heaven, and of the astronomical term ‘parallax’ found there which he never understood.
throwaway: free handbill.
Torry and Alexander were contemporary preachers who, like Dowie, used to announce the approaching
coming of the prophet.
treacly: like molasses.
vat: large cistern or tank, use to hold liquids in the process of manufacture, such as brewing.
wake: trail left by a ship moving in water.
Yom Kippur is the Jewish Day of Atonement, a day of fasting when prayers of penitence are recited in
synagogues.

From Finnegans Wake

1 °riverrun, °past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
2 °commodius °vicus of recirculation back to °Howth Castle and Environs.
3 °Sir Tristram, °violer d’amores, fr’over the °short sea, had °passencore °rearrived from
4 °North Armorica on this side the °scraggy isthmus of °Europe minor to °wielderfight his
5 °penisolate war, nor had °topsawyer’s rocks by the stream °Oconee exaggerated themselse to
6 °Laurens Country’s °gorgios while they went °doublin their °mumper all the time, nor °avoice
7 from °afire °bellowsed °mishe mishe to tauf-tauf thuartpeatrick, °not yet, though °vennissoon
8 after, had a °kidscad °buttened °a bland old isaac, not yet, though all’s fair in °vanessy, were
9 °sosie sesters wroth with °thone nathandjoe. Rot a °peck of pa’s °malt had °Jhem or Shen
10 °brewed by archlight and °rory end to the °regginbrow was to be seen °ringsome on the
11 aquaface.
12 The °fall (bababadalgharaghtakmminorronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntro-
13 varrhhounawskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once °wallstrait oldparr is related early in

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 James Joyce

14 bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall
15 entailed at such short notice the °pftjschute of Finnegan, °erse solid man, that the
16 °humptyhillhead of himself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west quest of his
17 °tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepoindandplace is at the knock out in the park where
18 °oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since °devlinsfirst loved livvy. (Joyce,
19 Finnegans Wake 5)

Glossary and notes

The lexical notes on this text extract are drawn on William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce’s
‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969) 29-32.
a bland old isaac: (Genesis 27) Blind Isaac had two sons Esau and Jacob. The younger son, Jacob wanted to
be his father’s heir and get the old man’s blessing for him instead of Esau. He and his mother think of a
stratagem. When Isaac wants to eat venison from the field and asks his son Esau to bring him this in
exchange for his blessing, Rebekah, Jacob’s mother calls her son and tells him to bring her two young
goats (kids). She cooks them like venison and makes Jacob gloves from their skin in case Isaac wanted
to feel him to recognise him. This is how blind – also bland (i.e. mild) – Isaac is deceived and Jacob is
made the butt of his blessing. Therefore, Jacob fools Isaac and Essau with false hair, venison and kids.
‘Bland’ is a combination of ‘blind’ (Isaac), ‘blond’ (Finn) and ‘blend’, i.e. the father is a blend of his
opposing sons. But it also implies Isaac Butt – a leader of the Irish Home Rule Party until 1877, when
he was displaced by Parnell (a kid and a cad or cadet). Butt ended – i.e. ended his leadership.
afire: a fire.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,
avoice: a voice.
bellowsed: from ‘to bellow’ (to roar, to shout) – ‘bellowed’ , but also ‘below said’, i.e. ‘nor a voice from below
said…’
brewed by archlight: made beer by arch light – rainbow light – this liquor will make father Noah drunk and
naked (protectionless) before his sons. This reference and the previous one point to the two typically
Irish drinks: whiskey and Guinness beer.
buttened: ‘but’ meaning ‘aim’, Jacob made his father the butt (i.e. aim, object) of his deceit.
commodius: reference to Commodus (Lucius Aelius Aurelius Commodus Antonius, the son of Marcus
Aurelius), a Roman emperor who introduced a regime of terror and corruption and died assassinated in
192 ad, but also a reference to a commode, a piece of furniture in the form of a chair, with a hinged flap,
concealing a chamber pot, a suitable container for riverrun!
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
devlinsfirst loved livvy: Dublin – ‚Dubh-linn’. Dublin first loved Liffey (also ALP) – HCE has met ALP, the
first man and the first woman. But they also include the Devil – the principle of man, that of
destruction, is also related to the Devil. ‘Livvy’ goes with ‘riverrun’ meaning ‘Liffey’, ‘ivy’ or ‘Eve’, but
also ‘Livy’ (Titus Livius), the Roman famous historian who was Vico’s favourite historian. ‘Devlin’ may
also imply Dublin’s de Valera.
doublin: ‘Dublin’ – the capital, but there is another Dublin, a small town in Georgia, USA, lying on the river
Oconee. Old Dublin is repeated in the New World (‘North Armorica’). It may also imply ‘double’ – the
capital has been doubled by the town in the USA, therefore ‘the gorgio’ might be ‘the little one’, the son
of the Irish town, as Shaun is the son of HCE.
erse: (German) ‘erst’ meaning ‘first’, but is also suggests ‘Éirin’: Irish (Éire), connected with the legend of the
fall of Finnegan (the symbol for fall and rise) – the symbol for the history of mankind. Joyce introduces
then HCE, representing the ‘first’, the beginning of Ireland.
Europe minor: Ireland.
gorgios: a gypsy term for ‘youngster’, the younger brother, but also ‘gorges’, or ‘gorgeous’, or ‘Georgia’,
founded by a man named Sawyer on the Oconee river in Laurens County.
Howth Castle and Environs: another HCE (situated in Dublin); but also HCE seen as a foreigner coming to
Ireland – a Viking, a villain, in fact (the Viking invaders of Ireland are considered bands of marauders)
– and nobody knows who he is, or where he came from. Before we had Anna Livia, she is the river – he
is hill and castle; also, he is Adam, she is Eve.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
humptyhillhead: Humpty Dumpty, considered a good-for-nothing man, ironically viewed as the ancestor of
the Irish, but also linked with another fall (from a wall), as in the nursery-rhyme:
Jhem or Shen: refers to Noah’s three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth, but also, but also to distilling by ‘Jhem
or Shem’, Shaun and Shem or John Jameson & Son, distillers of Irish whiskey.
kidscad: ‘kids’ – young goats and also ‘cad’ – ‘cadet’ meaning ‘a young man’.
Laurens County: in Georgia, the USA. History repeats itself not only in time, but also in space, as well.
malt: grain softened in water, allowed to germinate, then used in brewing and distilling.

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 James Joyce

mishe, mishe to tauf-tauf thuartpeatrick: I am, I am – this is what St Briget, as mother of Ireland, said,
asserting her immortality, but also what Shaun the artist says, he is the creative voice from the fire.
But practical Shaun says ‘tauf, tauf’ and ‘thuartpeatrick’ (you are Peter, the stone, St Patrick, and
Swift, tricky dean of St Patrick’s, near the peat rocks, large peat stacks.). St Peter – ‘thou art Peter’ – is
symbol of Catholic church. Patrick: came to Ireland in 432, by order of Pope Cellestine to baptise (in
German ‘taufen’) the Celts as a missionary; the sense is ‘not yet had the Irish said to Patrick baptize me
‘thou art Patrick’.
mumper: a strong beer brewed since 1492 – America had not been discovered and its Dublin had not been
founded, also ‘number’.
North armorica: America, or ‘armour’ – he came as a fighter.
not yet implies that everything happened before that.
Oconee: river in Georgia, USA, but also Irish ‘ochón’ meaning ‘alas’ (interjection), ‘wail’, ‘lament’.
orange … rust … green: suggest probably Ireland, probably the dump, full of orange peel.
passencore: French ‘pas encore’: not yet, but also ‘passenger’ – he came as a passenger.
past Eve and Adam’s: the church of the same name situated on the bank of Liffey. It also signifies
temptation, fall and renewal, linking Dublin with Eden.
peck: measure of volume or capacity (2 gallons).
penisolate war: isolate war of the pen (i.e. the writer) – the lonely pen, but also the ‘peninsular war’ –
Wellington against Napoleon, but also the sexual war, that of the penis – the lonely penis. Shem and
Shaun are also implied here – Tristram Shaun longs for Isolde and Shem is the lonely penman.
pftjschute: combination suggesting the sound of the fall and the fall itself – ‘chute’ means ‘fall’ in French.
rearrived: arrived again. According to Vico, history repeats itself.
regginbrow: rainbow, from German ‘Reggenbogen’: ‘arc’ and ‘rainbow’. They point to Noah. The ‘regginbrow’,
according to Joyce himself, is an eyebrow on the face of the waters.
ringsome: refers to Wagner’s ring, i.e. to his opera Das Nibelungenring.
riverrun: the river Liffey. The word ‘riverrun’ is in fact the central word of the book, signifying the river.
Anna Livia is also Liffey, or the feminine creative principle, the river of time and space. It flows past
the church of Adam and Eve (see next note).
rory: Ruaídhrí (pronounced [ru: ri:]) Ó Conchobhair (1116-1198), anglicised Roderick, was the last high king
of Ireland. Also, Rory O’More, the amusing, good-natured and absurdly behaving peasant, hero of the
homonymous popular ballad.
scraggy isthmus: England.
Sir Tristram: the character from the old legend, Tristram of Lyonesse sent by Mark of Cornwall to get Iseult
for him. He comes from Armorica (Brittany) to get Isolde in ‘Europe Minor’ (Ireland). But it may also be
Sir Almerick Tristram St Lawrence, Earl of Howth who built Howth Castle and who, across the ‘scraggy
isthmus’ of Sutton, presided over Howth castle and environs. He is the founder of St Lawrence family of
Howth in Dublin. St Lawrence was a Roman martyr who died in 258 ad; according to tradition he was
roasted on a gridiron. His feast day is 10 August.
sosie sesthers wroth : the three sisters in the Bible: Susan, Esther and Ruth, all the aim of old men’s passion,
three sisters who tempt and enchant, like the Weird Sisters, the three witches in Macbeth. ‘Sosie’ is
French for a person resembling another.
the fall: men are considered angels who fell, tempted by women – men are the fallen angels of the legend of
Adam and Eve – therefore, mankind is somehow cursed. Adam’s fall and Vico’s thunder are suggested
by a hundred letter word (the first of ten thunders in the ‘Wake’) which suggests a catastrophe. This
enormous word is composed of words for noise and thunder (‘tonner’ – ‘thunn’) and for defecation; it also
contains some Irish words used for their sonority and suggestions – ‘gharaghtak’: ‘gaireachtach’
meaning ‘boisterous’; ‘skawn’: ‘scán’ meaning ‘crack’, ‘thurnuk’: ‘tórnach’ meaning ‘thunder’.
‘Konnbronn’ refers to general Pierre Cambronne and ‘merde’ his word. ‘Le mot de Cambronne’ becomes
thus a suggestion of strong contempt. Other falls follow: those of stocks in Wall Street, of Humpty
Dumpty from the wall and of Finnegan, the bricklayer, from his ladder.
the short sea: the sea between Ireland and England.
topsawyer’s rocks: situated on the Mississippi, it could also imply the shamrocks, but is also an allusion to
Mark Twain.
tumptytumtoes: the ‘Humpty Dumpties’.
twone nathandjoe: Nath and Joe – Nathan – the old wise in the Bible, and Joseph the untemptable – with
his twelve brothers. He was sold as a slave in Egypt, where he interpreted the Pharaoh’s dream and
became a powerful statesman, a sort of nourishment minister who saved the Egyptians from starvation.
He was tempted by Potiphar, who sold him to the Egyptians. It may also refer to Jonathan Swift – ‘Jo-
Nathan’ anagrammed, the ‘wise’ and ‘untemptable’. ‘Twone’ – ‘two in one’, union of opposites – refers to
both Joseph and Jonathan.
vanessy: Inverness – where all is fair in Ireland, or Vanessa.
venisson: very soon, but also Vanessa, one of the fiancées, beloved women by J. Swift, an Irishman and
ironist. Swift had an obscure relationship with two women, Esther Johnson and Esther Vanhomrigh,

51
 James Joyce

better known as Stella and Vanessa. Echoed later on as ‘vanessy’ and in ‘sosie sesthers’. Stella and
Vanessa introduce the theme of two girls and an old man.
vicus: (Latin for ‘lane’, or ‘vicinity’) is Vico Road, along the shore of Dublin Bay. ‘Vicus’ is Giambattista
Vicus, i.e. Vico, the philosopher of ‘recirculation’.
violer d’amore: violin of tender love song, or from ‘to violate’, which makes of Sir Tristram either a tender
singer or a brutish rapist, who violates Iseult and her honour.
wallstrait oldparr: old Parr of Shropshire of the 17th century was reported to have lived 152 years; but
‘parr’ is the first stage of the developing salmon. It also refers to the business life in Wall Street, New
York. The construction suggests the Wall Street Crash (1929), also Adam’s fall.
wielderfight: German ‘wieder’: again, meaning ‘to fight again’, or ‘wild’ implying ‘to fight
savagely’.

52
 Appendices

Appendices

Emily Gerard

From The Land beyond the Forest: ‘Transylvania Superstitions’

Transylvania might well be termed the land of superstition, for nowhere else does this curious
crooked plant of delusion flourish as persistently and in such bewildering variety. It would almost
seem as though the whole species of demons, pixies, witches, and hobgoblins, driven from the rest
of Europe by the wand of science, had taken refuge within this mountain rampart, well aware that
here they would find secure lurking-places, whence they might defy their persecutors yet awhile.
There are many reasons why these fabulous beings should retain an abnormally firm hold on
the soil of these parts; and looking at the matter closely we find here no less than three separate
sources of superstition.
First, there is what may be called the indigenous superstition of the country, the scenery of
which is peculiarly adapted to serve as background to all sorts of supernatural beings and
monsters. There are innumerable caverns, whose mysterious depths seem made to harbor whole
legions of evil spirits: forest glades fit only for fairy folk on moonlight nights, solitary lakes which
instinctively call up visions of water sprites; golden treasures lying hidden in mountain chasms,
all of which have gradually insinuated themselves into the minds of the, oldest inhabitants, the
Romanians, and influenced their way of thinking, so that these people, by nature imaginative and
poetically inclined, have built up for themselves out of the surrounding materials a whole code of
fanciful superstition, to which they adhere as closely as to their religion itself.
Secondly, there is here the imported superstition! That is to say, the old German customs and
beliefs brought hither seven hundred years ago by the Saxon colonists from their native land, and
like many other things, preserved here in greater perfection than in the original country.
Thirdly, there is the wandering superstition of the gypsy tribes, themselves a race of fortune-
tellers and witches, whose ambulating caravans cover the country as with a network, and whose
less vagrant members fill up the suburbs of towns and villages.
Of course, all these various sorts of superstition have twined and intermingled, acted and
reacted upon each other, until in many cases it is a difficult matter to determine the exact
parentage of some particular belief or custom; but in a general way the three sources I have named
may be admitted as a rough sort of classification in dealing with the principal superstitions afloat
in Transylvania.
There is on this subject no truer saying than that of Grimm, to the effect that ‘superstition in
all its manifold varieties constitutes a sort of religion, applicable to the common household
necessities of daily life,’ and as such, particular forms of superstition may very well serve as guide
to the characters and habits of the particular nation in which they are prevalent.
The spirit of evil (or, not to put too fine a point upon it, the devil) plays a conspicuous part in
the Romanian code of superstition, and such designations as the Gregynia Drakuluj (devil’s
garden), the Gania Drakuluj (devil’s mountain), Yadu Drakuluj (devil’s hell or abyss), etc., etc.,
which we frequently find attached to rocks, caverns, or heights, attest the fact that these people
believe themselves to be surrounded on all sides by a whole legion of evil spirits.
The devils are furthermore assisted by witches and dragons, and to all of these dangerous
beings are ascribed peculiar powers on particular days and at certain places.
Perhaps the most important day in the year is St George’s, the 23rd of April (corresponds to
our 5th of May), the eve of which is still frequently kept by occult meetings taking place at night
in lonely caverns or within ruined walls, and where all the ceremonies usual to the celebration of
a witches’ Sabbath are put into practice.
The feast itself is the great day to beware of witches, to counteract whose influence square-cut
blocks of green turf are placed in front of each door and window. This is supposed effectually to bar
their entrance to the house or stables, but for still greater safety it is usual here for the peasants
to keep watch all night by the sleeping cattle.
This same night is the best for finding treasures, and many people spend it in wandering about
the hills trying to probe the earth for the gold it contains. Vain and futile as such researches usually
are, yet they have in this country a somewhat greater semblance of reason than in most other

53
 Appendices

parts, for perhaps nowhere else have so many successive nations been forced to secrete their riches
in flying from an enemy, to say nothing of the numerous veins of undiscovered gold and silver
which must be seaming the country in all directions. Not a year passes without bringing to light
some earthen jar containing old Dacian coins, or golden ornaments of Roman origin, and all such
discoveries serve to feed and keep up the national superstition.
In the night of St George’s Day (so say the legends) all these treasures begin to burn, or, to
speak in mystic language, to ‘bloom’ in the bosom of the earth, and the light they give forth,
described as a bluish flame resembling the color of lighted spirits of wine, serves to guide favored
mortals to their place of concealment. The conditions to the successful raising of such a treasure
are manifold, and difficulty of accomplishment. In the first place, it is by no means easy for a
common mortal who has not been born on a Sunday nor at midday when the bells are ringing, to
hit upon a treasure at all. If he does, however, catch sight of a flame such as I have described, he
must quickly stick a knife through the swaddling rags of his right foot, and then throw the knife
in the direction of the flame he has seen. If two people are together during this discovery they must
not on any account break silence till the treasure is removed, neither is it allowed to fill up the hole
from which anything has been taken, for that would induce a speedy death. Another important
feature to be noted is that the lights seen before midnight on St George’s Day, denote treasures
kept by benevolent spirits, while those which appear at a later hour are unquestionably of a
pernicious nature.
There are two sorts of vampires-living and dead. The living vampire is, in general, the
illegitimate offspring of two illegitimate persons, but even a flawless pedigree will not ensure
anyone against the intrusion of a vampire into his family vault, since every person killed by a
nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other
innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised, either by opening the grave of the person
suspected and driving a stake through the corpse, or firing a pistol shot into the coffin. In very
obstinate cases it is further recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the
mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing the ashes over the grave.
That such remedies are often resorted to, even in our enlightened days, is a well-attested fact,
and there are probably few Roumenian villages where such has not taken place within the memory
of the inhabitants.
First cousin to the vampire, the long exploded were-wolf of the Germans is here to be found,
lingering yet under the name of the Prikolitsch. Sometimes it is a dog instead of a wolf, whose form
a man has taken either voluntarily or as penance for his sins. In one of the villages a story is still
told (and believed) of such a man, who driving home from church on Sunday with his wife, suddenly
felt that the time for his transformation had come. He therefore gave over the reins to her, and
stepped aside into the bushes, where, murmuring the mystic formula he turned three somersaults
over a ditch. Soon after this the woman, waiting in vain for her husband, was attacked by a furious
dog, which rushed, barking, out of the bushes and succeeded in biting her severely, as well as
tearing her dress. When, an hour later, this woman reached home alone she was met by her
husband, who advanced smiling to meet her, but between his teeth she caught sight of the shreds
of her dress which had been bitten out by the dog, and the horror of the discovery caused her to
faint away.
Another man used gravely to assert that for more than five years he had gone about in the
form of a wolf, leading on a troop of these animals, until a hunter, in striking off his head, restored
him to his natural shape.
A French traveler relates an instance of a harmless botanist who, while collecting herbs on a
hillside in a crouching attitude, was observed by some peasants at a distance and taken for a wolf
Before they had time to reach him, however, he had risen to his feet and disclosed himself in the
form of a man; but this, in the minds of the Rumanians who now regarded him as an aggravated
case of wolf, was but additional motive for attacking him. They were quite sure that he must be a
Prikolitsch, for only such could change his shape in such an unaccountable manner, and in another
minute they were all in full cry after the wretched victim of science, who might have fared badly
indeed, had he not happened to gain a carriage on the high road before his pursuers came up.
We do not require to go far for the explanation of the extraordinary tenacity of life of the were-
wolf legend in a country like Transylvania, where real wolves still abound. Every winter here
brings fresh proof of the boldness and cunning of these terrible animals, whose attacks on flocks
and farms are often conducted with a skill which would do honor to a human intellect. Sometimes
a whole village is kept in trepidation for weeks together by some particularly audacious leader of

54
 Appendices
a flock of wolves, to whom the peasants not unnaturally attribute a more than animal nature, and
one may safely prophesy that so long as the real wolf continues to haunt the Transylvanian forests,
so long will his specter brother survive in the minds of the inhabitants.
The Lass of Aughrim
If you be the lass of Aughrim
As I suppose you to be
Come tell me the last token
That passed between you and me
O Gregory don’t you remember
That night on the hill
When we both met together
Which I am sorry now to tell.
The rain falls on my yellow locks
The dew it wets my skin
My babe lies cold within my arms
Oh Gregory, let me in.
Oh Gregory, don’t you remember
One night on the hill
When we swapped rings off each other’s
hands,
Sorely against my will?
Yours was of the beaten gold
Mine was but black tin
Yours was of the beaten gold
Mine was but black tin.
The Ballad of Tom Finnegan
Tom Finnegan liv’d in Walkin Street
a gentleman Irish mighty odd.
He had a tongue both rich and sweet,
an’ to rise in the world he carried a hod.
Now Tim had a sort of a tipplin’ way,
with the love for the liquor he was born,
An’ to help him on with his work each day
he’d a drop of the craythur ev’ry morn.
Chorus: Whack fol the dah
dance to your partner
Welt the flure yer trotters shake
Wasn’t it the truth I told you,
Lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake.
One morning Tim was rather full,
His head felt heavy which made him
shake,
He fell from the ladder and broke his skull,
So, they carried him home his corpse to
wake,
They rolled up in a nice clean sheet
And laid him out upon the bed,
With a gallon of whiskey at his feet,
And a barrel of porter at his head.
His friends assembled at the wake,
And Mrs Finnegan called for lunch,
55
Oh Gregory don’t you remember
One night on the hill,
When we swapped smocks off each
other’s backs,
Sorely against my will?
Yours was of the Holland fine,
Mine was but Scotch cloth
Yours was of the Holland fine,
Mine was but Scotch cloth
Oh Gregory, don’t you remember
That night in my father’s hall,
When you had your will of me?
And that was worse than all.
The rain falls on my yellow locks
The dew it wets my skin
My babe lies cold within my arms
Oh Gregory, let me in.
(in Ireland First,
<http://www.eirefirst.com/l.
html>, 12.11.2006)
First they brought in tay and cake,
The pipes, tobacco, and whiskey punch.
Miss Biddy O’Brien began to cry,
‘Such a neat clean corpse, did you ever
see,
Arrah, Tim avourneen, why did you die?’
‘Ah, hould your gab,’ said Paddy McGee.
Then Biddy O’Connor took up the job,
‘Biddy,’ says she, ‘you’re wrong I’m sure,’
Bud Biddy gave her a belt in the gob,
And left her sprawling on the floor;
Oh, then the war did soon enrage;
’Twas woman to woman and man to
man,
Shillelagh law did all engage,
And a row and a ruction soon began.
Then Mickey Maloney raised his head,
When a noggin of whiskey flew at him,
It missed and falling on the bed,
The liquor scattered all over Tim;
Bedad he revives, see how he rises,
And Timothy rising from his bed,
Says, ‘Whirl your liquor round like blazes,
 Appendices

Thanam o’n dhoul, do ye think I’m

dead?’ (in The Field Day
Anthology 101)

56
Source of texts

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Publications, 1992
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Dingle: Brandon, 1990.
Heaney, Seamus. Sweeney Astray. 1983. London: Faber and Faber, 1984.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. 1939. New York: The Viking Press, 1968.
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Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1914. London: Penguin, 1992.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. London: Penguin, 1996.
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Ó Tuama, Seán, ed. An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed. Trans. Thomas Kinsella.
Mountrath: The Dolmen Press, 1981.
Synge, John Millington. The Playboy of the Western World. 1907. London: Methuen, 1983.
Yeats, William Butler. Yeats’s Poems. Third edition. Houndmills (Hampshire) and London:
Macmillan, 1996.
Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/.
Bram Stoker. Dracula. 1897. London: Penguin, 1994.
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