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 Vesach,’ which I have heard in many cottages, as well as from the old woman in Gort Workhouse, begins:  ’I would wed courteous Bridget without coat, shoe, or shirt.  Treasure of my heart, if it were possible for me, I would fast for you nine meals, without food, without drink, without any share of anything, on an island of Lough Erne, with desire for you and me to be together till we should settle our case....  My heart started with trouble, and I was frightened nine times that morning that I heard you were not to be found....  I would sooner be stretched by you with nothing under us but heather and rushes, than be listening to the cuckoos that are stirring at the break of day....  I am in grief and in sorrow since you slipped from me across the mearings.’

Another love poem, ‘Mairin Stanton,’ shows his habit of mixing comparisons drawn from the classics with those drawn from nature:—­

     ’There’s a bright flower by the side of the road, and she beats
     Deirdre in the beauty of her voice; or I might say Helen, Queen of
     the Greeks, she for whose sake hundreds died at Troy.

’There is light and brightness in her as in those others; her little mouth is as sweet as the cuckoo on the branch.  You would not find a mind like hers in any woman since the pearl died that was in Ballylee.

     ’To see under the sky a woman settled like her walking on the road
     on a fine sunny day, the light flashing from the whiteness of her
     breast would give sight to a man without eyes.

     ’There is the love of hundreds in her face, and there is the
     promise of the evening star.  If she had been living in the time of
     the gods, it is not Venus that would have had the apple.

     ’Her hair falls down below her knees, waving and winding to the
     mouth of her shoes; her locks spread out wide and pale like dew,
     they leave a brightness on the road behind her.