Irish Songs and Poems By William Allingham: Second Edition: With Nine Airs for Voice and Pianoforte, and a Permanent Photograph of the Waterfall of Asaroe |
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INVITATION TO A PAINTER,
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 | Irish Songs and Poems |  |
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INVITATION TO A PAINTER,
SENT FROM THE WEST OF IRELAND.
I.
Flee from London, good my Walter! boundless jail of bricks and gas,Weary purgatorial flagstones, dreary parks of burnt-up grass,
Exhibitions, evening parties, dust and swelter, glare and crush,
Fashion's costly idle pomp, Mammon's furious race and rush;
Leave your hot tumultuous city for the breaker's rival roar,
Quit your small suburban garden for the rude hills by the shore,
Leagues of smoke for morning vapour lifted off a mountain-range,
Silk and lace for barefoot beauty, and for ‘something new and strange’
All your towny wit and gossip. You shall both in field and fair,
Paddy's cunning and politeness with the Cockney ways compare,
Catch those lilts and old-world tunes the maidens at their needle sing,
Peep at dancers, from an outskirt of the blithe applausive ring,
See our petty Court of Justice, where the swearing's very strong,
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Hear the brogue and Gaelic round you; sketch a hundred Irish scenes,
(Not mere whisky and shillelagh)—wedding banquets, funeral keenes;
Rove at pleasure, noon or midnight; change a word with all you meet;
Ten times safer than in England, far less trammell'd in your feet.
Here, the only danger known
Is walking where the land's your own.
Landscape-lords are left alone.
II.
We are barren, I confess it; but our scope of view is fine;Dignifying shapes of mountains wave on each horizonline,
So withdrawn that never house-room utmost pomp of cloud may lack,
Dawn or sunset, moon or planet, or mysterious zodiac;
Hills beneath run all a-wrinkle, rocky, moory, pleasant green;
From its Lough the Flood descending, flashes like a sword between,
Through our crags and woods and meadows, to the mounded harbour-sand,
To the Bay, calm blue, or, sometimes, whose Titanic arms expand
Welcome to the mighty billow rolling in from New-foundland.
Oats, potatoes, cling in patches round the rocks and boulder-stones,
Like a motley ragged garment for the lean Earth's jutting bones;
Moors extend, and bogs and furzes, where you seldom meet a soul,
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Stoops beneath a nodding burden of the scented heather-plant,
Or a jolly gaiter'd Sportsman, striding near the grouse's haunt,—
Slow the anchoritic heron, musing by his voiceless pond,
Startled with the startled echo from the lonely cliff beyond,
Rising, flaps away. And now a summit shows us, wide and bare,
All the brown uneven country, lit with waters here and there;
Southward, mountains—northward, mountains—westward, golden mystery
Of coruscation, when the Daystar flings his largesse on the sea;
Peasant cots with humble haggarts; mansions with obsequious groves;
A Spire, a Steeple, rival standards, which the liberal distance loves
To set in union. There the dear but dirty little Town abides,
And you and I come home to dinner after all our walks and rides.
You shall taste a cleanly pudding;
But, bring shoes to stand a mudding.
III.
Let me take you by the murvagh, sprinkled with those Golden Weeds50
Wherefore sacred and abundant over all the land are they.
Many cows are feeding through it; cooling, of a sultry day,
By the River's brink, that journeys under Fairy Hill, and past
Gentle cadences of landscape sloping to the sea at last.
Now the yellow sand is round us, drifted in fantastic shapes,
Heights and hollows, forts, and bastions, pyramids and curving capes,
Breezy ridges thinly waving with the bent-weed's pallid green,
Delicate for eye that sips it, till a better feast is seen,
Where the turf swells thick-embroider'd with the fragrant purple thyme,
Where, in plots of speckled orchis, poet larks begin their rhyme,
Honey'd galium wafts an invitation to the gipsy bees,
Rabbits' doorways wear for garlands azure tufts of wild heartsease,
Paths of sward around the hillocks, dipping into ferny dells,
Show you heaps of childhood's treasure—twisted, vary-tinted shells
Lapt in moss and blossoms, empty, and forgetful of the wave.
Ha! a creature scouring nimbly, hops at once into his cave;
Brother Coney sits regardant,—wink an eye, and where is he?
Rabbit villages we pass through, but the people skip and flee.
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There the savage twins of eagles, gaping, hissing to be fed,
Welcome back their wide-wing'd parent with a rabbit scarcely dead
Hung in those powerful yellow claws, and gorge the bloody flesh and fur
On ledge of rock, their cradle. Shepherd-boy! with limbs and voice bestir
To your watch of tender lambkins on a lonesome valley-side,
If you, careless in the sunshine, see a rapid shadow glide
Down the verdant undercliff. Afar that conquering eye can sweep
Mountain-glens, and moy, and warren, to the margin of the deep,
Worse than dog or ferret;—vanish from your goldgreen-mossy dells,
Nibbling natives of the burrow! seek your inmost winding cells
When such cruelties appear;
But a Painter do not fear,
Nor a Poet loitering near.
IV.
Painter, what is spread before you? 'Tis the great Atlantic Sea!Many-colour'd floor of ocean, where the lights and shadows flee;
Waves and wavelets running landward with a sparkle and a song,
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Thousand living shapes of wonder in the clear pools of the rock;
Lengths of strand, and seafowl armies rising like a puff of smoke;
Drift and tangle on the limit where the wandering water fails;
Level faintly-clear horizon, touch'd with clouds and phantom sails,—
O come hither! weeks together let us watch the big Atlantic,
Blue or purple, green or gurly, dark or shining, smooth or frantic.
Far across the tide, slow-heaving, rich autumnal daylight sets;
See our crowd of busy row-boats, hear us noisy with our nets,
Where the glittering sprats in millions from the rising mesh are stript,
Till there scarce is room for rowing, every gunwale nearly dipt;
Gulls around us, flying, dropping, thick in air as flakes of snow,
Snatching luckless little fishes in their silvery overflow.
Now one streak of western scarlet lingers upon ocean's edge,
Now through ripples of the splendour of the moon we swiftly wedge
Our loaded bows; the fisher hamlet beacons with domestic light;
On the shore the carts and horses wait to travel through the night
To a distant city market, while the boatmen sup and sleep,
While the firmamental stillness arches o'er the dusky deep,
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Round its rocks and sandy verges.
V.
Now I've thought of something! mind me, for no artist's clever sake,Merely artist, should I dare to sit his comrade at a Wake;
You're at home with tears and laughter, friend of mine, and bear a heart
Full of sympathetic kindness, taking every brother's part.
Through the mob that fills the kitchen, clouded with tobacco-fume,
Joking, singing—we have cross'd the threshold of that inside room
Where the seniors and relations sitting gravely by the wall
Speak in murmurs; on a table, lighted candles thick and tall;
Straight the bed-quilt and the curtains; on the pillow calm within
A moveless Face with close-shut eyelids and a cloth about the chin,
Under a crucifix. You see: and sideways through the open door
Laughing looks and odd grimaces, and you hear a blithe uproar
From the youthful merrymakers. Kneeling silent by the bed
Prays a woman; weeps a woman, rocking, sobbing, at its head,
Nigh the Face, which spoke this morning, unregarding, undiscerning.
Louder bursts the lively voices; wearily the candles burning;
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Bringing round the book and spade,
Another hillock duly made,
The cottage swept, the grief allay'd.
VI.
Ere we part at winter's portal, I shall row you of a nightOn a swirling Stygian river, to a ghostly yellow light.
When the nights are black and gusty, then do eels in myriads glide
Through the pools and down the rapids, hurrying to the ocean-tide,
(But they fear the frost or moonshine, in their mudbeds coiling close)
And the wearmen, on the platform of that pigmy water-house
Built among the river-currents, with a dam to either bank,
Pull the purse-net's heavy end to swing across their wooden tank,
Ere they loose the cord about it, then a slimy wriggling heap
Falls with splashing, where a thousand fellow-prisoners heave and creep.
Chill winds roar above the wearmen, darkling rush the floods below;
There they watch and work their eel-nets, till the late dawn lets them go.
There we'll join their eely supper, bearing smoke the best we can,
(House's furniture a salt-box, truss of straw, and frying-pan),
Hearken Con's astounding stories, how a mythologic eel
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To the hissing, bubbling music of the pan and pratie-pot.
Denser grows the reek around us, each like Mussulman a-squat,
Each with victuals in his fingers, we devour them hot and hot;
Smoky rays our lantern throwing,
Ruddy peat-fire warmly glowing,
Noisily the River flowing.
VII.
Time's at hand, though, first of all, to journey to our Holy Well,Clear as when the old Saint bless'd it, rising in its rock-bound cell.
Two great Crosses, carved in bosses, curves, and fillets interlacing,
Spread their aged arms of stone, as if in sempiternal blessing;
Five much-wrinkled thorntrees bend, as though in everlasting pray'r.
Greenly shines the growing crop, along the shelter'd hill-side there;
But the tristful little Abbey, crumbling among weeds and grass,
Nevermore can suns or seasons bring a smile to as they pass;
By a window-gap or mullion creeps the fringe of ivy leaves,
Nettles crowd the sculptured doorway, where the wind goes through and grieves;
Sad the tender blue of harebells on its ledges low and high;
Merry singing of the goldfinch there sounds pensive as a sigh.
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Scarlet petticoat, blue mantle, gray frieze, mingling in the throng.
By the pathway sit the Beggars, each an ailment and a whine;
Lame and sickly figures pass them, tottering in that pilgrim line;
Children carried by their parents, very loth to let them die;
Lovely girls, too, with their eyelids downcast on a rosary;
Shrunken men, and witch-like women; young men in their proudest prime;
Guilty foreheads, hot-blood faces, penance-vow'd for secret crime.
All by turn, in slow procession, pace the venerable bounds,
Barefoot, barehead, seven times duly kneeling in th' accustom'd rounds;
Thrice among the hoary ruins, once before the wasted shrine,
Once at each great carven cross, and once to form the Mystic Sign,
Dipping reverential finger in the Well, on brow and breast.
Meanwhile worn and wan, the Sick under those rooted thorntrees rest,
Waiting sadly. Here are human figures of our land and day,
On a thousand-years-old background,—still in keeping, it and they!
Walter, make a vow nor break it; turn your pilgrim steps our way.
Oh might you come, before there fell
One hawthorn-flow'r in Columb's Well!
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