The white horse

  My horse he is white,
  Though at first he was bay,
  And he took great delight
  In travelling by night
    And by day.

  His travels were great
  If I could but half of them tell,
  He was rode in the garden by Adam,
  The day that he fell.

  On Babylon plains
  He ran with speed for the plate,
  He was hunted next day
  By Hannibal the great.

  After that he was hunted
  In the chase of a fox,
  When Nebuchadnezzar ate grass,
  In the shape of an ox.

  We are told in the next verses of his going into the ark with Noah,
  of Moses riding him through the Red Sea; then

  He was with king Pharaoh in Egypt
  When fortune did smile,
  And he rode him stately along
  The gay banks of the Nile.

  He was with king Saul and all
  His troubles went through,
  He was with king David the day
  That Goliath he slew.

  For a few verses he is with Juda and Maccabeus the great, with
  Cyrus, and back again to Babylon.  Next we find him as the horse that
  came into Troy.

  When ( ) came to Troy with joy,
  My horse he was found,
  He crossed over the walls and entered
  The city I’m told.

  I come on him again, in Spain,
  And he in full bloom,
  By Hannibal the great he was rode,
  And he crossing the Alps into Rome.

  The horse being tall
  And the Alps very high,
  His rider did fall
  And Hannibal the great lost an eye.

Afterwards he carries young Sipho (Scipio), and then he is ridden by Brian when driving the Danes from Ireland, and by St. Ruth when he fell at the battle of Aughrim, and by Sarsfield at the siege of Limerick.

  He was with king James who sailed
  To the Irish shore,
  But at last he got lame,
  When the Boyne’s bloody battle was o’er.

  He was rode by the greatest of men
  At famed Waterloo,
  Brave Daniel O’Connell he sat
  On his back it is true.

* * * * * * *

  Brave Dan’s on his back,
  He’s ready once more for the field. 
  He never will stop till the Tories,
  He’ll make them to yield.

Grotesque as this long rhyme appears, it has, as I said, a sort of existence when it is crooned by the old man at his fireside, and it has great fame in the island.  The old man himself is hoping that I will print it, for it would not be fair, he says, that it should die out of the world, and he is the only man here who knows it, and none of them have ever heard it on the mainland.  He has a couple more examples of the same kind of doggerel, but I have not taken them down.

Both in English and in Irish the songs are full of words the people do not understand themselves, and when they come to say the words slowly their memory is usually uncertain.