Featured article from Issue 11 March 2010

One of the last of the travelling Gaelic-speaking bards in Ireland was the blind poet and fiddler Anthony Raftery (1784-1835), known as Raftery the Poet. Like his predecessor, the blind harpist Turlough O’Carolan, Raftery wandered the roads of Ireland staying at houses where he sang for his supper. Raftery’s poems are well-known in Ireland and are still taught in schools. In 1902 an 80-year-old Melburnian, Martin Hood, revealed that he had known Raftery in his youth when the poet visited his parents’ home in Ballylee, Galway. Hood came to Melbourne in 1854 with his wife and two children.

The catalyst for Hood’s disclosure was the publication in Melbourne’s Catholic paper The Advocate (April 19, 1902) of a Raftery poem set in Ballylee, ‘Mary Hynes’. The poem appeared both in the original Gaelic and in an English translation by Dr Nicholas O’Donnell, Australia’s foremost Gaelic scholar. In the opening stanza the poet meets Mary Hynes one Sunday morning:

Going to Mass by the heavenly mercy,

The day was rainy, the wind was wild;

I met a lady beside Kiltartan

And fell in love with the lovely child;

My conversation was smooth and easy,

And graciously she answered me,

“Raftery dear, ’tis yourself that’s welcome,

So step beside me to Ballylee.”

(Frank O’Connor’s translation has been used here.)

Raftery falls in love with her; the poem is a paean of praise to the girl’s beauty which the blind poet cannot see. In the next issue of The Advocate Martin Hood published his letter of reminiscence:

Ballylee

Sir, I was much interested in the Irish song, “Ballylee”, printed in the “Advocate” of last week; not more because of its clever translation by an Australian native (Dr. O’Donnell) than that the author was personally known to me in my early years, and that I was born and brought up within a few miles of Ballylee. I remember Raftery paying one of his itinerary visits to my father’s house – I think about 1834 – when he remained a few days. He had with him as a guide a boy of about 14. He was of course blind from his early childhood and learned to play on the violin. He was in the habit of paying periodical visits to the houses of the gentry and well-to-do farmers. He was welcome everywhere he called, and, I may say, his poetry was more appreciated than his music. He had other favourite ladies besides Mary Hynes. His song “Bridget Vasey” was more popular and more generally sung in my native place than “Mary Hynes”. He composed a remarkable dirge on the “Cholera Morbus”, a scourge that committed fearful ravages in 1832, and this was one of his best known productions.

Raftery had great command of the Irish language and a good general knowledge of history. He had frequent altercations with kindred poets – one in particular named John Burke. Their recriminations were frequently recited at the firesides on long wintry nights. As indicated in “Ballylee”, Raftery was by no means indifferent to an abundant cellar.

Ballylee is in the parish of Kiltartan – a parish that takes in the northern portion of the town of Gort – a town well known to His Grace Archbishop Carr. If the departed spirit of poor Raftery could take any interest in mundane matters, he would view with satisfaction the feelings excited by Dr O’Donnell in the recitation of his eulogy of “Mary Hynes” at the other side of the globe, and which was in Raftery’s day a recreation ground for the kangaroo and the emu. – Yours, etc. MARTIN HOOD

Melbourne’s Archbishop as the time, Thomas Carr, was born in Galway and was Bishop of Galway when appointed to the Melbourne See in 1885. Raftery wrote poems berating rival poets – his poem on Shawn a Burke (John Burke) imagines Burke being hunted through the countryside as punishment for his poetic transgressions.

Raftery’s poems were not committed to print during his lifetime. Oral versions were later collected and published in 1903 as Songs Ascribed to Raftery by Dr Douglas Hyde, a leader of the Gaelic Revival movement. Hyde says of Mary Hynes: ‘She was the handsomest maiden, they say, who was born for a hundred years in the West of Ireland.’ An old fiddler remembered her: ‘Mary Hynes was the finest thing that was ever shaped. There usedn’t to be a hurling match in the country that she wouldn’t be at, and a white dress on her always.’ Another man said: ‘If she went to a hurling match or a gathering the people used to be running on top of other to lay their eyes on her.’

Raftery’s most famous poem was occasioned by someone asking who the blind fiddler was:

I am Raftery the poet,

Full of hope and love,

With sightless eyes

And undistracted calm.

Going west on my journey

By the light of my heart,

Weak and tired

To the end of my road.

Look at me now!

My face to the wall,

Playing music

To empty pockets.

Ballylee is near the town of Gort. The Gort-Kiltartan-Ballylee area in south Galway has many associations with W.B.Yeats, who bought an old tower at Ballylee in 1917, as he tells us in his poem ‘To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee:

I, the poet William Yeats,

With old mill boards and sea-green slates

And smithy work from the Gort forge,

Restored this tower for my wife George;

And may these characters remain

When all is ruin once again.

In Yeats’ poem ‘The Tower’ the blind poet is Raftery. As Yeats recalls, Mary Hynes herself and Raftery’s poem celebrating her had not been forgotten in the neighbourhood:

Some few remembered still when I was young

A peasant girl commended by a song,

Who’d lived somewhere upon that rocky place,

And praised the colour of her face,

And had the greater joy in praising her,

Remembering that, if she walked there,

Farmers jostled at the fair

So great a glory did the song confer.

And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes

Or else by toasting her a score of times,

Rose from the table and declared it right

To test their fancy by their sight.

Martin Hood in Australia was one of those who remembered the Raftery poem set in his home town of Ballylee.

Hood was a stalwart of Melbourne’s Irish Catholic community for over fifty years. He was a founder and six times President of the St Patrick’s Society which staged the annual St Patrick’s Day procession and fete from 1857 onwards. Though a teetotaller he worked in a wine and spirit store, and later as manager of a brewery. Hood was a prominent member of many organisations – the Melbourne Athenaeum, the Benevolent Asylum, the Mutual Society, and the Irish National League which campaigned for Home Rule for Ireland. He died in 1909 at the age of 86.

Dr Nicholas O’Donnell, who was President of the local Gaelic League and also a leader in the agitation for Home Rule, published a column in Gaelic in The Advocate during the first decade of the 20th century. He had persuaded the management of the paper to import type with a Gaelic font. Each week he published a text in Gaelic with his own translation into English. In the issue of May 21, 1904, O’Donnell disclosed he had been able to buy a number of handwritten manuscripts in Gaelic, which included a text of Brian Merryman’s long poem ‘The Midnight Court’, and a 250-page version of the most important ancient Irish epic, the ‘Táin Bó Cuailgne’.

It is remarkable to think that a century ago Melbourne harboured ancient Gaelic manuscripts and a man who knew Raftery the Poet.

Patrick Morgan
Val Noone has recently published an article on Nicholas O’Donnell’s Gaelic Column in the papers of the 16th Australasian Irish Studies Conference.