but all are gone
now!" I talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet,
made about her, and how it said, "there is a strong cellar in
Ballylee." He said the strong cellar was the great hole where the river
sank underground, and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter
hurried away under a grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up
out of the dark water at early morning "to taste the fresh water coming
down from the hills."

I first heard of the poem from an old woman who fives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, "I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die," and that he was nearly blind, and had "no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise
you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it." She sang the poem to a friend and to myself in
Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in a
song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing of
their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry of
the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.

Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.

I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee."

When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,