’I put pins of oak in her, and oars of red pine; and I made her ready for sailing; for she is the six-oared curragh-cin that never gave heed to the storm; and it is she will be coming to land, when the sailing boats will be lost.
’There was a man came from England to buy my little boat from me; he offered me twenty guineas for her; there were many looking on. If he would offer me as much again, and a guinea over and above, he would not get my curragh-cin till she goes out and kills the shark.’
For a shark will sometimes flounder into the fishing-nets and tear his way out; and even a whale is sometimes seen. I remember an Aran man beginning some story he was telling me with: ’I was going down that path one time, with the priest and a few others; for a whale had come ashore, and the jaw-bones of it were wanted, to make the piers of a gate.’
As for the love-songs of our coast and island people, they seem to be for the most part a little artificial in method, a little strained in metaphor perhaps so giving rise to the Scotch Gaelic saying: ’as loveless as an Irishman.’ Love of country, tir-gradh, is I think the real passion; and bound up with it are love of home, of family, love of God. Constancy and affection in marriage are the rule; yet marriage ’for love’ is all but unknown; marriage is a matter of commonsense arrangement between the heads of families. As Mr. Yeats puts it, the countryman’s ‘dream has never been entangled by reality.’ However this may be, my Aran friends tell me: ’The people do not care for love-songs; they would rather have any others.’
Yet I have just seen some love-songs, taken down the other day by a Kinvara man from a Connemara man, that have some charming lines:—
’Going over the hills after parting from the store of my heart, there is a mist on them and the darkness of night.’
’It is my sharp grief, my thousand treasures, my road not to be to the door of your house; it is with you I wore out my shoes from the beginning of my youth until now.’
’It is not sorry I would be if there was the length of a year in the day, and the leaves of the trees dropping honey; I myself on the side where the blossoms are falling, my love beside me, and a little green branch in her hand.’
‘She goes by me like a little breeze of the wind.’
And this line that in a country of separations is already, they tell me, ’passing into a proverb’:—
‘It is far from one another our rising is every day.’
But the tradition of classical allusions, brought in some centuries ago, joined to the exaggeration that has been the breath of Irish poets, from the time Naoise called Deirdre ‘a woman brighter than the sun,’ has brought monotony into most of the love-songs.