The Kiltartan Poetry Book prose translations from the Irish

The Kiltartan Poetry Book; prose translations from the Irish

If in my childhood I had been asked to give the name of an Irish poem, I should certainly have said Let Erin remember the days of old, or Rich and rare were the gems she wore; for although among the ornamental books that lay on the round drawingroom table, the only one of Moores was Lalla Rookh, some guest would now and then sing one of his melodies at the piano; and I can remember vexing or trying to vex my governess by triumphant mention of Malachis collar of gold, she no doubt as well as I believing the proud invader it was torn from to have been, like herself, an English one. A little later I came to know other verses, ballads nearer to the tradition of the country than Moores faint sentiment. For a romantic love of country had awakened in me, perhaps through the wide beauty of my home, from whose hillsides I could see the mountain of Burren and Iar Connacht, and at sunset the silver western sea; or it maybe through the half revealed sympathy of my old nurse for the rebels whose cheering she remembered when the French landed at Killala in 98; or perhaps but through the natural breaking of a younger child of the house from the conservatism of her elders. So when we were taken sometimes as a treat the five mile drive to our market town, Loughrea, I would, on tiptoe at the counter, hold up the six pence earned by saying without a mistake my Bible lesson on the Sunday, and the old stationer, looking down through his spectacles would give me what I wanted saying that I was his best customer for Fenian books; and one of my sisters, rather doubtfully consenting to my choice of The Spirit of the Nation for a birthday present, qualified the gift by copying into it Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I have some of them by me yet, the little books in gay paper or in green cloth, and some verses in them seem to me no less moving than in those early days, such as Daviss lament. And if some others are little more than a catalogue, unmusical, as: yet there is in them a certain dignity, an intensity born of continuity of purpose; they are roughly hammered links in a chain of unequal workmanship, but stretching back through the centuries to the Munster poets of the days of Elizabeth, advised by Spenser to harry them out of Ireland. The names change from age to age, that is all. The verses of the seventeenth century hallow those of MacCarthys and Fitzgeralds who fought for the Stuarts or knocked obedience out of the Gall; the eighteenth ended with the rebels of 98; the nineteenth had Emmet and Mitchell and its Manchester martyrs. Already in these early days of the twentieth the street singers cry out: ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 6656
Author: Gregory, Lady
Release Date: Oct 1, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English