But I heard some
one ask the _Craoibhin_ who he meant, and his answer was: 'I suppose I
was thinking of an aide-de-camp':--
'I am looking at my cows walking,
What are you that would put me out of my luck?
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?
'I will not always be turned backwards.
If there is need to be humble to you, great is my grief,
If I cannot walk, if I cannot walk, if I cannot walk in my own fields.
'It's little my respect, and it's little my desire,
For your blue cloak, and your birds' feathers.
Can I not walk, can I not walk, can I not walk in my own fields?
'The day is coming as it's easy to see,
When there shall not be among us the ugly like of you.
And each one shall be walking, and each one shall be walking,
Wherever shall be his will and his own desire.'
There are some love songs in the little volume. But their writer has
had, in his beautiful translations of the 'Love Songs of Connacht,' to
put such intensity of passion into English, that he must despair of
putting any new wings to passion, or any new exaggeration into lovers'
words. In one of these Connacht songs, the lover says: 'Blacker is the
sun when setting than your features, Mary!' And she answers back:
'Neither star nor sun shows one-third much light as your shadow!'
Another lover says of the woman he desires: 'I will write largely of
her, because of the thousands who hoped for her, and who have been lost;
and a hundred men of these who still live, are in pain and under locks
through love.
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