CALIFORNIA INTRODUCTION I I should like to call this an Anthology of the Poetry of Ireland rather than an Anthology of Irish Verse. It is a distinction that has some little difference. It implies, I think, that my effort has been to take the poetry of the people in the mass, and then to make a selection that would be representative of the people rather than representative of individual poets. The usual, and perhaps the better, way to make an anthology is to select poems and group them according to chronological order, or according to an order that has a correspondence in the emotional life of the reader. The first is the method of the Oxford Book of English Verse, and the second is the method of the Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. In this collection,-the last section, there is an anthology of personal poems that is in chronological order; and there is an anthology of anonymous poems-the second section that is arranged according to an order that is in the editor's own mind. But the other sections of the anthology are not chronological and are not according to any mental order-they represent a grouping according to dominant national themes. This method of presentation has been forced upon me by the necessity of arranging the material in the least prosaic way. It would not do, I considered, to arrange the poetry of Ireland according to chronological order. Irish poetry in English is too recent to permit of a number of initial excellencies. Then the racial distinction of Irish poetry in Eng lish-in Anglo-Irish poetry--was not an immediate achievement, and so the poetry that would be arranged chronologically would begin without the note of racial distinctiveness. And because so much of Irish poetry comes out of historical situation, because so much of it is based on national themes, the order that has a correspondence in personal emotion, would not be proper to it. The note that I would have it begin on, and the note that I would have recur through the anthology is the note of racial distinctiveness. II Ireland is a country that has two literatures-one a literature in Irish-Gaelic literature-that has been cultivated continuously since the eighth century, and the other a literature in English-Anglo-Irish literature—that took its rise in the eighteenth century. Anglo-Irish literature begins, as an English critic has observed, with Goldsmith and Sheridan humming some urban song as they stroll down an English laneway. That is, it begins chronologically in that way. At the time when Goldsmith and Sheridan might be supposed to be strolling down English laneways, Ireland, for all but a fraction of the people, was a Gaelic-speaking country with a poetry that had many centuries of cultivation. Afterwards English speech began to make its way through the country, and an Englishspeaking audience became important for Ireland. And then, at the end of the eighteenth century came Thomas Moore, a singer who knew little of the depth or intensity of the Gaelic consciousness, but who, through a fortunate association, was able to get into his songs a racial distinctiveness. He was born in Dublin, the English-speaking capital, at a time when the Gaelic-speaking South of Ireland had still bards with academic training and tradition-the poets of Munster who were to write the last chapter of the unbroken literary history of Ireland. From the poets with the tradition, from the scholars bred in the native schools, Moore was not able to receive anything. But from those who conserved another part of the national heritage, he was able to receive a great deal. At the end of the eighteenth century the harpers who had been wandering through the country, playing the beautiful traditional music, were gathered together in Belfast. The music that they were the custodians of was noted down and published by Bunting and by Power. With such collections before them the Irish who had been educated in English ways and English thought were made to realize that they had a national heritage. Thomas Moore, a born song-writer, began to write English words to this music. Again and again the distinctive rhythms of the music forced a distinctive rhythm upon his verse. Through using the mould of the music, Moore, without being conscious of what he was doing, reproduced again and again the rhythm, and sometimes the structure of Gaelic verse. When Edgar Allen Poe read that lyric of Moore's that begins "At the mid-hour of night,” he perceived a distinctive metrical achievement. The poem was written to an ancient Irish air, and its rhythm, like the rhythm of the song that begins "Through grief and through danger," wavering and unemphatic, is distinctively Irish. And Moore not only reproduced the rhythm of Gaelic poetry, but sometimes he reproduced even its metrical structure. Silent, O Moyle, be the roar of thy water; While murmuring mournfully, Lir's lonely daughter Here is the Gaelic structure with the correspondences all on a single vowel-in this case the vowel "o"-"Moyle," "roar," "repose," "lonely," "woes," with the alliterations "break," "breezes," "tells," "tale," "murmuring," "mournfully." And so, through the association that he made with music, Thomas Moore attained to distinctiveness in certain of his poems.* *Robert Burns also re-created an Irish form by writing to Irish music in "Their Groves o' Sweet Myrtle." The soldier's song in "The Jolly Beggars" reproduces an Irish form also; the air that Burns wrote this song to may have been an Irish |