IRISH POETS

BOOK I

THERE are two classes of anonymous poems-those which seem to have grown up among the people, often perhaps the work of more than one hand, and reflecting the spirit rather of a class or of a race than of an individual; and those which are distinctly individual and are only anonymous by the accident that no author's name has ever been affixed to them. The former class of poems are represented in the first and briefest book of this Anthology. They represent, mainly, the earliest attempts of the Irish peasantry to express themselves in poetic form in the English language.

Multitudes of such attempts must have been made and lost. Now and then a stray line or two has by virtue of its pathetic music caught the ear of some man of letters and found its way into print. Sir Charles Duffy has recorded his early. recollection of a rude ballad of this description, at the singing of which he saw a whole dinner company dissolved in tears, and in which the warm-hearted reception given by Belfast to Wolfe Tone and the Catholic envoys of 1793 on their way to plead for the freedom of their faith was thus spoken of:

The Lord in His mercy be kind to Belfast:

The poor Irish exile she soothed as he passed.

Many such things there must have been, many more than ever found their way into print, and many which were printed as ballad sheets and are now lost for ever. But some have

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survived in chapbooks, anthologies, old newspapers, stray records of every kind, and of these a selection is here given. In some the grandiloquent phrase of the hedge-schoolmaster is noticeable, some are pieces of wild irresponsible humour, some have a tender and unconscious grace, or are animated by a grotesque vitality, or express with rude fervour the patriotic devotion of the peasant. A peasant-poetry of far greater beauty and elevation was in process of creation at the time when the majority of these pieces were written-the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth-but this was in the Gaelic tongue, then the language of the masses of the people. In his "Love Songs" and "Religious Songs" of Connacht, Dr. Douglas Hyde has turned much of this popular poetry into English verse, retaining the characteristic traits of the original. Specimens of this will be found under his name in Book V. Here, however, we present only the first stammerings of the Irish spirit in the new tongue which, about the beginning of this century, began to be the language of Irish literature.

THE WEARIN' O' THE GREEN

The finest of Irish street-ballads, and described by a writer in the Athenæum in 1887 as probably the finest street-ballad ever written. One of its numerous variants sung in a play of Boucicault's has given rise to the belief that he wrote it, but it appears to date from about the year 1798. It deserves to be called the Irish National Anthem, if any piece of poetry can claim that title.

OH, Paddy dear! an' did ye hear the news that's goin' round?
The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish ground!
No more St. Patrick's Day we'll keep, his colour can't be seen,
For there's a cruel law agin the wearin' o' the green!

I met wid Napper Tandy, and he took me by the hand,
And he said, How's poor Ould Ireland, and how does she stand?'
She's the most disthressful country that iver yet was seen,
For they're hangin' men and women there for wearin' o' the green.

An' if the colour we must wear is England's cruel red,
Let it remind us of the blood that Ireland has shed;
Then pull the shamrock from your hat, and throw it on the sod,—
And never fear, 'twill take root there, tho' under foot 'tis trod !