Books: Stories of Red Hanrahan
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W. B. Yeats >> Stories of Red Hanrahan
He stood up with her then, and led her out by the hand, and some of
the young men were vexed, and some began mocking at his ragged coat
and his broken boots. But he took no notice, and Oona took no notice,
but they looked at one another as if all the world belonged to
themselves alone. But another couple that had been sitting together
like lovers stood out on the floor at the same time, holding one
another's hands and moving their feet to keep time with the music.
But Hanrahan turned his back on them as if angry, and in place of
dancing he began to sing, and as he sang he held her hand, and his
voice grew louder, and the mocking of the young men stopped, and the
fiddle stopped, and there was nothing heard but his voice that had in
it the sound of the wind. And what he sang was a song he had heard or
had made one time in his wanderings on Slieve Echtge, and the words
of it as they can be put into English were like this:
O Death's old bony finger
Will never find us there
In the high hollow townland
Where love's to give and to spare;
Where boughs have fruit and blossom
At all times of the year;
Where rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
An old man plays the bagpipes
In a gold and silver wood;
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
Are dancing in a crowd.
And while he was singing it Oona moved nearer to him, and the colour
had gone from her cheek, and her eyes were not blue now, but grey
with the tears that were in them, and anyone that saw her would have
thought she was ready to follow him there and then from the west to
the east of the world.
But one of the young men called out: 'Where is that country he is
singing about? Mind yourself, Oona, it is a long way off, you might
be a long time on the road before you would reach to it.' And another
said: 'It is not to the Country of the Young you will be going if you
go with him, but to Mayo of the bogs.' Oona looked at him then as if
she would question him, but he raised her hand in his hand, and
called out between singing and shouting: 'It is very near us that
country is, it is on every side; it may be on the bare hill behind it
is, or it may be in the heart of the wood.' And he said out very loud
and clear: 'In the heart of the wood; oh, death will never find us in
the heart of the wood. And will you come with me there, Oona?' he
said.
But while he was saying this the two old women had gone outside the
door, and Oona's mother was crying, and she said: 'He has put an
enchantment on Oona. Can we not get the men to put him out of the
house?'
'That is a thing you cannot do, said the other woman,' for he is a
poet of the Gael, and you know well if you would put a poet of the
Gael out of the house, he would put a curse on you that would wither
the corn in the fields and dry up the milk of the cows, if it had to
hang in the air seven years.'
'God help us,' said the mother, 'and why did I ever let him into the
house at all, and the wild name he has!'
'It would have been no harm at all to have kept him outside, but
there would great harm come upon you if you put him out by force. But
listen to the plan I have to get him out of the house by his own
doing, without anyone putting him from it at all.'
It was not long after that the two women came in again, each of them
having a bundle of hay in her apron. Hanrahan was not singing now,
but he was talking to Oona very fast and soft, and he was saying:
'The house is narrow but the world is wide, and there is no true
lover that need be afraid of night or morning or sun or stars or
shadows of evening, or any earthly thing.' 'Hanrahan,' said the
mother then, striking him on the shoulder, 'will you give me a hand
here for a minute?' 'Do that, Hanrahan,' said the woman of the
neighbours, 'and help us to make this hay into a rope, for you are
ready with your hands, and a blast of wind has loosened the thatch on
the haystack.'
'I will do that for you,' said he, and he took the little stick in
his hands, and the mother began giving out the hay, and he twisting
it, but he was hurrying to have done with it, and to be free again.
The women went on talking and giving out the hay, and encouraging
him, and saying what a good twister of a rope he was, better than
their own neighbours or than anyone they had ever seen. And Hanrahan
saw that Oona was watching him, and he began to twist very quick and
with his head high, and to boast of the readiness of his hands, and
the learning he had in his head, and the strength in his arms. And as
he was boasting, he went backward, twisting the rope always till he
came to the door that was open behind him, and without thinking he
passed the threshold and was out on the road. And no sooner was he
there than the mother made a sudden rush, and threw out the rope
after him, and she shut the door and the half-door and put a bolt
upon them.
She was well pleased when she had done that, and laughed out loud,
and the neighbours laughed and praised her. But they heard him
beating at the door, and saying words of cursing outside it, and the
mother had but time to stop Oona that had her hand upon the bolt to
open it. She made a sign to the fiddler then, and he began a reel,
and one of the young men asked no leave but caught hold of Oona and
brought her into the thick of the dance. And when it was over and the
fiddle had stopped, there was no sound at all of anything outside,
but the road was as quiet as before.
As to Hanrahan, when he knew he was shut out and that there was
neither shelter nor drink nor a girl's ear for him that night, the
anger and the courage went out of him, and he went on to where the
waves were beating on the strand.
He sat down on a big stone, and he began swinging his right arm and
singing slowly to himself, the way he did always to hearten himself
when every other thing failed him. And whether it was that time or
another time he made the song that is called to this day 'The
Twisting of the Rope,' and that begins, 'What was the dead cat that
put me in this place,' is not known.
But after he had been singing awhile, mist and shadows seemed to
gather about him, sometimes coming out of the sea, and sometimes
moving upon it. It seemed to him that one of the shadows was the
queen-woman he had seen in her sleep at Slieve Echtge; not in her
sleep now, but mocking, and calling out to them that were behind her:
'He was weak, he was weak, he had no courage.' And he felt the
strands of the rope in his hand yet, and went on twisting it, but it
seemed to him as he twisted, that it had all the sorrows of the world
in it. And then it seemed to him as if the rope had changed in his
dream into a great water-worm that came out of the sea, and that
twisted itself about him, and held him closer and closer, and grew
from big to bigger till the whole of the earth and skies were wound
up in it, and the stars themselves were but the shining of the ridges
of its skin. And then he got free of it, and went on, shaking and
unsteady, along the edge of the strand, and the grey shapes were
flying here and there around him. And this is what they were saying,
'It is a pity for him that refuses the call of the daughters of the
Sidhe, for he will find no comfort in the love of the women of the
earth to the end of life and time, and the cold of the grave is in
his heart for ever. It is death he has chosen; let him die, let him
die, let him die.'
HANRAHAN AND CATHLEEN THE DAUGHTER OF HOOLIHAN.
It was travelling northward Hanrahan was one time, giving a hand to a
farmer now and again in the hurried time of the year, and telling his
stories and making his share of songs at wakes and at weddings.
He chanced one day to overtake on the road to Collooney one Margaret
Rooney, a woman he used to know in Munster when he was a young man.
She had no good name at that time, and it was the priest routed her
out of the place at last. He knew her by her walk and by the colour
of her eyes, and by a way she had of putting back the hair off her
face with her left hand. She had been wandering about, she said,
selling herrings and the like, and now she was going back to Sligo,
to the place in the Burrough where she was living with another woman,
Mary Gillis, who had much the same story as herself. She would be
well pleased, she said, if he would come and stop in the house with
them, and be singing his songs to the bacachs and blind men and
fiddlers of the Burrough. She remembered him well, she said, and had
a wish for him; and as to Mary Gillis, she had some of his songs off
by heart, so he need not be afraid of not getting good treatment, and
all the bacachs and poor men that heard him would give him a share of
their own earnings for his stories and his songs while he was with
them, and would carry his name into all the parishes of Ireland.
He was glad enough to go with her, and to find a woman to be
listening to the story of his troubles and to be comforting him. It
was at the moment of the fall of day when every man may pass as
handsome and every woman as comely. She put her arm about him when he
told her of the misfortune of the Twisting of the Rope, and in the
half light she looked as well as another.
They kept in talk all the way to the Burrough, and as for Mary
Gillis, when she saw him and heard who he was, she went near crying
to think of having a man with so great a name in the house.
Hanrahan was well pleased to settle down with them for a while, for
he was tired with wandering; and since the day he found the little
cabin fallen in, and Mary Lavelle gone from it, and the thatch
scattered, he had never asked to have any place of his own; and he
had never stopped long enough in any place to see the green leaves
come where he had seen the old leaves wither, or to see the wheat
harvested where he had seen it sown. It was a good change to him to
have shelter from the wet, and a fire in the evening time, and his
share of food put on the table without the asking.
He made a good many of his songs while he was living there, so well
cared for and so quiet, The most of them were love songs, but some
were songs of repentance, and some were songs about Ireland and her
griefs, under one name or another.
Every evening the bacachs and beggars and blind men and fiddlers
would gather into the house and listen to his songs and his poems,
and his stories about the old time of the Fianna, and they kept them
in their memories that were never spoiled with books; and so they
brought his name to every wake and wedding and pattern in the whole
of Connaught. He was never so well off or made so much of as he was
at that time.
One evening of December he was singing a little song that he said he
had heard from the green plover of the mountain, about the fair-haired
boys that had left Limerick, and that were wandering and going
astray in all parts of the world. There were a good many people in
the room that night, and two or three little lads that had crept in,
and sat on the floor near the fire, and were too busy with the
roasting of a potato in the ashes or some such thing to take much
notice of him; but they remembered long afterwards when his name had
gone up, the sound of his voice, and what way he had moved his hand,
and the look of him as he sat on the edge of the bed, with his shadow
falling on the whitewashed wall behind him, and as he moved going up
as high as the thatch. And they knew then that they had looked upon a
king of the poets of the Gael, and a maker of the dreams of men.
Of a sudden his singing stopped, and his eyes grew misty as if he was
looking at some far thing.
Mary Gillis was pouring whiskey into a mug that stood on a table
beside him, and she left off pouring and said, 'Is it of leaving us
you are thinking?'
Margaret Rooney heard what she said, and did not know why she said
it, and she took the words too much in earnest and came over to him,
and there was dread in her heart that she was going to lose so
wonderful a poet and so good a comrade, and a man that was thought so
much of, and that brought so many to her house.
'You would not go away from us, my heart?' she said, catching him by
the hand.
'It is not of that I am thinking,' he said, 'but of Ireland and the
weight of grief that is on her.' And he leaned his head against his
hand, and began to sing these words, and the sound of his voice was
like the wind in a lonely place.
The old brown thorn trees break in two high over Cummen Strand
Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;
Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,
But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes
Of Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.
The winds was bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea
And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say;
Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat,
But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet
Of Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.
The yellow pool has overflowed high upon Clooth-na-Bare,
For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air;
Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood,
But purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood
Is Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.
While he was singing, his voice began to break, and tears came
rolling down his cheeks, and Margaret Rooney put down her face into
her hands and began to cry along with him. Then a blind beggar by the
fire shook his rags with a sob, and after that there was no one of
them all but cried tears down.
RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE.
One fine May morning a long time after Hanrahan had left Margaret
Rooney's house, he was walking the road near Collooney, and the sound
of the birds singing in the bushes that were white with blossom set
him singing as he went. It was to his own little place he was going,
that was no more than a cabin, but that pleased him well. For he was
tired of so many years of wandering from shelter to shelter at all
times of the year, and although he was seldom refused a welcome and a
share of what was in the house, it seemed to him sometimes that his
mind was getting stiff like his joints, and it was not so easy to him
as it used to be to make fun and sport through the night, and to set
all the boys laughing with his pleasant talk, and to coax the women
with his songs. And a while ago, he had turned into a cabin that some
poor man had left to go harvesting and had never come to again. And
when he had mended the thatch and made a bed in the corner with a few
sacks and bushes, and had swept out the floor, he was well content to
have a little place for himself, where he could go in and out as he
liked, and put his head in his hands through the length of an evening
if the fret was on him, and loneliness after the old times. One by
one the neighbours began to send their children in to get some
learning from him, and with what they brought, a few eggs or an oaten
cake or a couple of sods of turf, he made out a way of living. And if
he went for a wild day and night now and again to the Burrough, no
one would say a word, knowing him to be a poet, with wandering in his
heart.
It was from the Burrough he was coming that May morning, light-
hearted enough, and singing some new song that had come to him. But
it was not long till a hare ran across his path, and made away into
the fields, through the loose stones of the wall. And he knew it was
no good sign a hare to have crossed his path, and he remembered the
hare that had led him away to Slieve Echtge the time Mary Lavelle was
waiting for him, and how he had never known content for any length of
time since then. 'And it is likely enough they are putting some bad
thing before me now,' he said.
And after he said that he heard the sound of crying in the field
beside him, and he looked over the wall. And there he saw a young
girl sitting under a bush of white hawthorn, and crying as if her
heart would break. Her face was hidden in her hands, but her soft
hair and her white neck and the young look of her, put him in mind of
Bridget Purcell and Margaret Gillane and Maeve Connelan and Oona
Curry and Celia Driscoll, and the rest of the girls he had made songs
for and had coaxed the heart from with his flattering tongue.
She looked up, and he saw her to be a girl of the neighbours, a
farmer's daughter. 'What is on you, Nora?' he said. 'Nothing you
could take from me, Red Hanrahan.' 'If there is any sorrow on you it
is I myself should be well able to serve you,' he said then, 'for it
is I know the history of the Greeks, and I know well what sorrow is
and parting, and the hardship of the world. And if I am not able to
save you from trouble,' he said, 'there is many a one I have saved
from it with the power that is in my songs, as it was in the songs of
the poets that were before me from the beginning of the world. And it
is with the rest of the poets I myself will be sitting and talking in
some far place beyond the world, to the end of life and time,' he
said. The girl stopped her crying, and she said, 'Owen Hanrahan, I
often heard you have had sorrow and persecution, and that you know
all the troubles of the world since the time you refused your love to
the queen-woman in Slieve Echtge; and that she never left you in
quiet since. But when it is people of this earth that have harmed
you, it is yourself knows well the way to put harm on them again. And
will you do now what I ask you, Owen Hanrahan?' she said. 'I will do
that indeed,' said he.
'It is my father and my mother and my brothers,' she said, 'that are
marrying me to old Paddy Doe, because he has a farm of a hundred
acres under the mountain. And it is what you can do, Hanrahan,' she
said, 'put him into a rhyme the same way you put old Peter Kilmartin
in one the time you were young, that sorrow may be over him rising up
and lying down, that will put him thinking of Collooney churchyard
and not of marriage. And let you make no delay about it, for it is
for to-morrow they have the marriage settled, and I would sooner see
the sun rise on the day of my death than on that day.'
'I will put him into a song that will bring shame and sorrow over
him; but tell me how many years has he, for I would put them in the
song?'
'O, he has years upon years. He is as old as you yourself, Red
Hanrahan.' 'As old as myself,' said Hanrahan, and his voice was as if
broken; 'as old as myself; there are twenty years and more between
us! It is a bad day indeed for Owen Hanrahan when a young girl with
the blossom of May in her cheeks thinks him to be an old man. And my
grief!' he said, 'you have put a thorn in my heart.'
He turned from her then and went down the road till he came to a
stone, and he sat down on it, for it seemed as if all the weight of
the years had come on him in the minute. And he remembered it was not
many days ago that a woman in some house had said: 'It is not Red
Hanrahan you are now but yellow Hanrahan, for your hair is turned to
the colour of a wisp of tow.' And another woman he had asked for a
drink had not given him new milk but sour; and sometimes the girls
would be whispering and laughing with young ignorant men while he
himself was in the middle of giving out his poems or his talk. And he
thought of the stiffness of his joints when he first rose of a
morning, and the pain of his knees after making a journey, and it
seemed to him as if he was come to be a very old man, with cold in
the shoulders and speckled shins and his wind breaking and he himself
withering away. And with those thoughts there came on him a great
anger against old age and all it brought with it. And just then he
looked up and saw a great spotted eagle sailing slowly towards
Ballygawley, and he cried out: 'You, too, eagle of Ballygawley, are
old, and your wings are full of gaps, and I will put you and your
ancient comrades, the Pike of Dargan Lake and the Yew of the Steep
Place of the Strangers into my rhyme, that there may be a curse on
you for ever.'
There was a bush beside him to the left, flowering like the rest, and
a little gust of wind blew the white blossoms over his coat. 'May
blossoms,' he said, gathering them up in the hollow of his hand, 'you
never know age because you die away in your beauty, and I will put
you into my rhyme and give you my blessing.'
He rose up then and plucked a little branch from the bush, and
carried it in his hand. But it is old and broken he looked going home
that day with the stoop in his shoulders and the darkness in his
face.
When he got to his cabin there was no one there, and he went and lay
down on the bed for a while as he was used to do when he wanted to
make a poem or a praise or a curse. And it was not long he was in
making it this time, for the power of the curse-making bards was upon
him. And when he had made it he searched his mind how he could send
it out over the whole countryside.
Some of the scholars began coming in then, to see if there would be
any school that day, and Hanrahan rose up and sat on the bench by the
hearth, and they all stood around him.
They thought he would bring out the Virgil or the Mass book or the
primer, but instead of that he held up the little branch of hawthorn
he had in his hand yet. 'Children,' he said, 'this is a new lesson I
have for you to-day.
'You yourselves and the beautiful people of the world are like this
blossom, and old age is the wind that comes and blows the blossom
away. And I have made a curse upon old age and upon the old men, and
listen now while I give it out to you.' And this is what he said--
The poet, Owen Hanrahan, under a bush of may
Calls down a curse on his own head because it withers grey;
Then on the speckled eagle cock of Ballygawley Hill,
Because it is the oldest thing that knows of cark and ill;
And on the yew that has been green from the times out of mind
By the Steep Place of the Strangers and the Gap of the Wind;
And on the great grey pike that broods in Castle Dargan Lake
Having in his long body a many a hook and ache;
Then curses he old Paddy Bruen of the Well of Bride
Because no hair is on his head and drowsiness inside.
Then Paddy's neighbour, Peter Hart, and Michael Gill, his friend,
Because their wandering histories are never at an end.
And then old Shemus Cullinan, shepherd of the Green Lands
Because he holds two crutches between his crooked hands;
Then calls a curse from the dark North upon old Paddy Doe,
Who plans to lay his withering head upon a breast of snow,
Who plans to wreck a singing voice and break a merry heart,
He bids a curse hang over him till breath and body part;
But he calls down a blessing on the blossom of the may,
Because it comes in beauty, and in beauty blows away.
He said it over to the children verse by verse till all of them could
say a part of it, and some that were the quickest could say the whole
of it.
'That will do for to-day,' he said then. 'And what you have to do now
is to go out and sing that song for a while, to the tune of the Green
Bunch of Rushes, to everyone you meet, and to the old men
themselves.'
'I will do that,' said one of the little lads; 'I know old Paddy Doe
well. Last Saint John's Eve we dropped a mouse down his chimney, but
this is better than a mouse.'
'I will go into the town of Sligo and sing it in the street,' said
another of the boys. 'Do that,' said Hanrahan, 'and go into the
Burrough and tell it to Margaret Rooney and Mary Gillis, and bid them
sing to it, and to make the beggars and the bacachs sing it wherever
they go.' The children ran out then, full of pride and of mischief,
calling out the song as they ran, and Hanrahan knew there was no
danger it would not be heard.
He was sitting outside the door the next morning, looking at his
scholars as they came by in twos and threes. They were nearly all
come, and he was considering the place of the sun in the heavens to
know whether it was time to begin, when he heard a sound that was
like the buzzing of a swarm of bees in the air, or the rushing of a
hidden river in time of flood. Then he saw a crowd coming up to the
cabin from the road, and he took notice that all the crowd was made
up of old men, and that the leaders of it were Paddy Bruen, Michael
Gill and Paddy Doe, and there was not one in the crowd but had in his
hand an ash stick or a blackthorn. As soon as they caught sight of
him, the sticks began to wave hither and thither like branches in a
storm, and the old feet to run.
He waited no longer, but made off up the hill behind the cabin till
he was out of their sight.
After a while he came back round the hill, where he was hidden by the
furze growing along a ditch. And when he came in sight of his cabin
he saw that all the old men had gathered around it, and one of them
was just at that time thrusting a rake with a wisp of lighted straw
on it into the thatch.
'My grief,' he said, 'I have set Old Age and Time and Weariness and
Sickness against me, and I must go wandering again. And, O Blessed
Queen of Heaven,' he said, 'protect me from the Eagle of Ballygawley,
the Yew Tree of the Steep Place of the Strangers, the Pike of Castle
Dargan Lake, and from the lighted wisps of their kindred, the Old
Men!'