His having been well off seems to make his poetic merit the greater in the eyes of farmers; for one says: 'He was as good a poet, for he had a plough and horses and a good way of living, and never sang in any public-house; but Raftery had no way of living but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the neighbours would gather in to hear him.' Another says: 'Raftery was the best poet, for he had nothing else to do, and laid his mind to it; but Callinan was a strong farmer, and had other things to think of;' and another says: 'Callinan was very apt: it was all Raftery could do to beat him;' and another sums up by saying: 'The both of them was great.' But a supporter of Raftery says: 'He was the best; he put his words so strong and stiff, following one another.'
I had been often told, by supporters of either side, that there was one contest between the two, at which Callinan 'made Raftery cry tears down;' and I wondered how it was that his wit had so far betrayed him. It has been explained to me lately. Raftery had made a long poem, 'The Hunt,' in which he puts 'a Writer' in the place of the fox, and calls on all the gentlemen of Galway and Mayo, and even on 'Sarsfield from Limerick,' to come and hunt him through their respective neighbourhoods with a pack of hounds. It contains many verses; and he seems to have improvised others in the different places where he sang it. In the written copy I have seen, Burke is the 'Writer' who is thus hunted. But he probably put in the name of any other rival from time to time. This is the story: 'He and the Callinans were sometimes vexed with one another, but they'd make friends after; but there was one day he was put down by them. There was a funeral going on at Killeenan, and Raftery was there; and he was asked into the corpse-house afterwards, and the people asked him for the song about Callinan, and he began hunting him all through the country, and the people were laughing and making him go on; but Callinan's brother had come in, and was listening to him, and Raftery didn't see him, being blind; and he brought him to Killeenan at last, and he said: "Where can the rogue go now, unless he'll swim the turlough?" And at that Callinan's brother stood up and said, "Who is it you are calling a rogue?" And Raftery tried to laugh it off, and he said, "You mustn't expect poetry and truth to go together." But Callinan said: "I'll give you poetry that's truth as well;" and he began to say off some verses his brother had made on Raftery; and Raftery was choked up that time, and hadn't a word.' This story is corroborated by an eye-witness who said to me: 'It was in this house he was on the night Callinan made him cry. My father was away at the time; if he had been there, he never would have let Callinan come into the house unknown to Raftery.' I have not heard all of Callinan's poem, but this is part of it:—
'He left the County Mayo; he was hunted up from the country of the brothons' (thick bed-coverings, then made in Mayo) 'without any for the night, nor any shift for bedding, but with an old yellow blanket with a thousand patches; he had a black trouser down to the ground with two hundred holes and forty pieces; he had long legs like the shank of a pipe, and a long great coat, for it is many the dab he put in his pocket. His coat was greasy, and it was no wonder, and an old grey hat as grey as snuff as it was many the day it was in the dunghill.'
It is said that 'Raftery could have answered that song better, but he had no back here; and Callinan was well-to-do, and had so many of his family and so many friends.' But others say there were some allusions in it to the poverty of his home, that had become known through a servant girl from Raftery's birth-place. But I think even Callinan's friends are sorry now that Raftery was ever made to 'cry tears down.'
IV.
A man near Oranmore says: 'There used to be great talk of the Fianna; and everyone had the poems about them till Raftery came, and he put them out. For when the people got Raftery's songs in their heads, they could think of nothing else: his songs put out everything else. I remember when I was a boy of ten, I was so taken up with his rhymes and songs, I had them all off. And I heard he was coming one night to a stage he had below there where he used to come now and again. And I begged my father to bring me with him that night, and he did; but whatever happened, Raftery didn't come that time, and the next year he died.'
But it is hard to judge of the quality of Raftery's poems. Some of them have probably been lost altogether. There are already different versions of those written out in manuscript books, and of these books many have disappeared or been destroyed, and some have been taken to America by emigrants. It is said that when he was on his deathbed, he was very sorry that his songs had not all been taken down; and that he dictated one he composed there to a young man who wrote it down in Irish, but could not read his own writing when he had done, and that vexed Raftery; and then a man came in, and he asked him to take down all his songs, and he could have them for himself; but he said, 'If I did, I'd always be called Raftery,' and he went out again.
I hear the people say now and then: 'If he had had education, he would have been the greatest poet in the world.' I cannot but be sorry that his education went so far as it did, for 'he used to carry a book about with him—a Pantheon—about the heathen gods and goddesses; and whoever he'd get that was able to read, he'd get him to read it to him, and then he'd keep them in his mind, and use them as he wanted them.' If he had been born a few decades later, he would have been caught, like other poets of the time, in the formulas of English verse. As it was, both his love poems and his religious poems were caught in the formulas imported from Greece and from Rome; and any formula must make a veil between the prophet who has been on the mountain top, and the people who are waiting at its foot for his message. The dreams of beauty that formed themselves in the mind of the blind poet become flat and vapid when he embodies them in the well-worn names of Helen and Venus. The truths of God that he strove in his last years, as he says, 'to have written in the book of the people,' left those unkindled whose ears were already wearied with the well-known words 'the keys of Heaven,' 'penance, fasts, and alms,' to whom it was an old tale to hear of hell as a furnace, and the grave as a dish for worms. When he gets away from the formulas, he has often a fine line on death or on judgment; the cheeks of the dead are 'cold as the snow that is at the back of the sun;' the careless—those who 'go out looking at their sheep on Sunday instead of going to Mass'—are warned that 'on the side of the hill of the tears there will be Ochone!'
His love songs are many; and they were not always thought to bring ill luck; for I am told of a girl 'that was not handsome at all, but ugly, that he made a song about her for civility; for she used to be in a house where he used to lodge, and the song got her a husband; and there is a son of hers living now down in Clare-Galway.' And an old woman tells me, with a sigh of regret for what might have been, that she saw Raftery one time at a dance, and he spoke to her and said: 'Well planed you are; the carpenter that planed you knew his trade.' 'And I said: "Better than you know yours;" for there were two or three of the strings of his fiddle broke. And then he said something about O'Meara, that lived near us; and my father got vexed at what he said, and would let him speak no more with me. And if it wasn't for him speaking about O'Meara, and my father getting vexed, he might have made words about me like he did for Mary Hynes and for Mary Brown.'
'Bridget