60000 leg Mi the -grany Irmasi your ting ef I sine my during how elf i i had hitemapes las nite and the mite befre MAVRONE One of Those Sad Irish Poems, With Notes 2 From Arranmore the weary miles I've come; An' all the way I've heard Not sayin' any word. For him that died the death on Carrisbool ? The Sons of Garnim 3 blitherin' their drool; Or Itt, or Himm, nor wail of Barryhoo 5 'Twas but my own heart cryin' out for you 3 ARTHUR GUITERMAN. My favourite of the whole bunch. "A Shrawn is a pure Gaelic noise, something like a groan, more like a shriek, and most like a sigh of longing. * Eire was daughter of Carne, King of Connaught. Her lover, Murdh of the Open Hand, was captured by Greatcoat Mackintosh, King of Ulster, on the plain of Carrisbool, and made into soup. Eire's grief on this sad occasion has become proverbial. * Garnim was second cousin to Manannan MacLir. His sons were always sad about something. There were twenty-two of them, and they were all unfortunate in love at the same time, just like a chorus at the opera. “Blitherin' their drool" is about the same as “dreeing their weird." *The Shee (or “Sidhe," as I should properly spell it if you were not so ignorant) were, as everybody knows, the regular, stand-pat, organisation fairies of Erin The Crowdie was their annual convention, at which they made melancholy sounds. The Itt and Himm were the irregular, or insurgent, fairies. They never got any offices or patronage. See MacAlester, Polity of the Sidhe of West Meath, page 985. * The Barryhoo is an ancient Celtic bird about the size of a Mavis, with lavender eyes and a black-crape tail. It continually mourns its mate (Barrywhich, feminine form), which has an hereditary predisposition to an early and tragic demise and invariably dies first. • Magraw, a Gaelic term of endearment, often heard on the baseball fields of Donnybrook. ? These last six words are all that tradition has preserved of the original incantation by means of which Irish rats were rhymed to death. Thereby hangs a good Celtic tale, which I should be glad to tell you in this note; but the publishers say that being prosed to death is as bad as being rhymed to death, and that the readers won't stand for any more. |