He was always ready to confess his sins with the passionate exaggeration of St. Paul or of Bunyan.  In his ‘Talk with the Bush,’ when a flood is threatened, he says:—­

’I was thinking, and no blame to me, that my lease of life wouldn’t be long, and that it was bad work my hands had left after them; to be committing sins since I was a child, swearing big oaths and blaspheming.  I never think to go to Mass.  Confession at Christmas I wouldn’t ask to go to.  I would laugh at my neighbour’s downfall, and I’d make nothing of breaking the Ten Commandments.  Gambling and drinking and all sorts of pleasures that would come across me, I’d have my hand in them.’

The poem known as his ‘Repentance’ is in the same strain.  It is said to have been composed ’one time he went to confession to Father Bartley Kilkelly, and he refused him absolution because he was too much after women and drink.  And that night he made up his “Repentance”; and the next day he went again, and Father Pat Burke, the curate, was with Father Bartley, and he said:  “Well, Raftery, what have you composed of late?” and he said:  “This is what I composed,” and he said the Repentance.  And then Father Bartley said to the curate:  “You may give him absolution, where he has his repentance made before the world."’

It is one of the finest of his poems.  It begins:—­

     ’O King, who art in heaven, ...  I scream to Thee again and again
     aloud, For it is Thy grace I am hoping for.

’I am in age, and my shape is withered; many a day I have been going astray....  When I was young, my deeds were evil; I delighted greatly in quarrels and rows.  I liked much better to be playing or drinking on a Sunday morning than to be going to Mass....  I was given to great oaths, and I did not let lust or drunkenness pass me by....  The day has stolen away, and I have not raised the hedge until the crop in which Thou didst take delight is destroyed....  I am a worthless stake in a corner of a hedge, or I am like a boat that has lost its rudder, that would he broken against a rock in the sea, and that would be drowned in the cold waves.’

But in spite of this self-denunciation, people who knew him say ’there was no harm in him’; though it it is added:  ’but as to a drop of drink, he was fond of that to the end.’  And in another mood, in his ’Argument with Whisky,’ he claims, as an excuse for this weakness, the desire for companionship felt by a wanderer.  ’And the world knows it’s not for love of what I drink, but for love of the people that do be near me.’  And he has always a confident belief in final absolution:—­“I pray to you to hear me, O Son of God; as you created the moon, the sun, the stars, it is no task or trouble for you to ready me.”

There are some fine verses in a poem made at the time of an outbreak of cholera:—­

     ’Look at him who was yesterday swift and strong, who would leap
     stone wall, ditch and gap, who was in the evening walking the
     street, and is going under the clay on the morrow.