World Poetry/Prose Portfolio: The Lennan Sidh

We will not give him a name, since he is lost to history. He will lie in this deserted pass and no one will find his body. It is the year 1660 and there are perhaps a hundred of his type wandering the roads of Ireland. He is a bitter and mournful man. You look into his eyes and the death pangs of a whole way of life, the ruin of a whole culture, stab back at you. The world has turned on him. His certainties have all been torn and scattered. He has seen the dispensations of an ancient profession forfeited by conquest. 

For this man is a bard: a court poet of the Gaelic aristocracy, keeper of the genealogies, satirist and craftsman of words. His time has only just passed. He remembers, as if it were yesterday, the firelight in castle halls; nights when they listened as he told the glories of his chieftain — verses embroidered with assonance, half rhyme and slanting rhyme, allusion; metres as strict as advanced trigonometry. These were the tools of his art. He was schooled as a boy in poetic forms reaching back, in unbroken succession, all the way to the verses of the druids. He can summon hundreds of poems to his tongue. They are all stored like golden vestments in the chest of his skull. He can speak Latin, French, a little Spanish and about a dozen words of English. 

But now all is all cast down. The castle, where he was an honoured retainer, was smashed by Puritan canons. His chieftain is in exile. Now his poems are as useless as silk shoes on a sow. He knows of no other life, save that of his calling, and the calling of a Gaelic bard is one that the world no longer needs. 

He stands on his stilty legs and wheels about in the desolation of the wild valley. He takes himself off the road and starts to climb up the slope among the boulders and bracken. In an hour he has scrabbled high up on the mountainside. He is muttering and shivering like an old crow. When he coughs it is as though some mechanism has broken in his lungs. He speaks some words to the stones, then sinks slowly to his knees. The sun is fading and the shadows are coming like dark spears along his narrow path. He lies down, still murmuring, all alone.

But he is not alone.

From the ridge above him steps a woman. She comes always at the very moment he drifts into sleep. This evening it is a sleep that even his terrible coughing will not hinder. Everything about this girl is absolute, so please forgive my recourse to old, time-worn expressions. She is barefoot. Her toes are tiny. Her skin is keenly white, like a jug of new milk left out in the rain. Her hair is dark, darker than a starless sky. Her cheek bones are sharp. Her eyes are sapphires where swims a shoal of minnow-flecks. She bends over the bard, crooning a low whispering song. Her voice is like laurel leaves hushing. Her breath is like rubbed laurel leaves. Her dress is the gleam of laurel leaves. It is the twilight — the coineascar — but her black hair makes a sudden night over his face. 

It has been this way for three years or more. In ditches, in the rubble of wrecked churches, in the huts of peasants, wherever he lies down, she is there. The first night of his wandering found him on a hillside in Mayo. He had nowhere to go. In haughty dudgeon he bought oatcakes from a woman and ate them in the growing cold. He had no wood for a fire. A bard forced to tramp the roads! Such was his fury at having to sleep in the open, if his words had been sparks that evening the heather around him would have kindled and he would have flared like a beacon, whelmed by the sulphur of his own curses. He hunkered in his fringed mantle and, after hours of tossing, fretted into chilled doze. 

That first time she came up from the far side of the hill. In his dream he knew this. He saw her rise from the bushes and step lightly to his side. Behind his eyelids it was a fine spring morning. She knew his name. She spoke it back to him as she told her sorrows. There was no one to care for her, she said. She was lost in shadows. She grieved in echoing glens.

‘Ochon,’ she sighed, ‘Ochon.’  

He reached to brush her cheek. What age was she, eighteen, twenty? Deserted in bitter country. His finger 

touched one of her tears and suddenly it was a cold winter’s day behind his eyelids. Rooks in the bare trees. She knew his misery. She spoke it back to him. ‘The English have come,’ she said. ‘I know they are felling the forests. The Sasanaigh have scattered the Princes. The soldiers of the Gael are in their graves or lost from the land. Ochon.’

At her right shoulder was a silver penannular etched with twisting spirals. She stood up and unclasped the pin. Her gown fell at her feet. He opened his cloak and she sidled along the length of him. Their flesh made a hot seam between them. ‘Give me poems, Bard,’ she whispered. ‘Make me live in this world.’ 

He shuddered awake to an autumn morning that promised nothing. All night he had known the secrets of the woman; the cleft behind her ear, the bow strung nape of her neck. But now he coughed among thistles. Dry mouthed and queasy, as if he had been drunk, he stumbled down the road. She was gone as if she had never been there at all, and there was not so much as a spailpín’s hut in sight.

He walked that day as if he had not slept. His feet dragging, his arms like stiff lumber. But his eyes blazed, for he had a new flaring stanza on his tongue. It had come to him fully formed with the dawn. I will render them in English as closely as I can. 

So it was, every evening after that, as soon as he lay down she was there, whispering, softly cajoling, giving him her love and moaning as he whispered back to her his verses. He could not deny her, her fingers flickering down his back. He had no power to forbid her. 

He set himself up as a teacher. For, under Cromwell’s laws, no children were to be permitted an education. With immense chagrin he took little coins, bread and buttermilk in payment from half-starved families. He attempted to teach rhetoric, Euclid and the high Gaelic poems to boys who smirked and cheeked him. He schooled them in the open air in the lee of a rock but the rain ran down his face and into his mouth. He built a hovel of sods and wattles and rocked in front of a tiny fire shedding furious, desperate tears. 

At first he did not notice. In the face of all his miseries he trembled with expectancy each time he settled for sleep. True, he rose each morning with a glowering despair and a hollow weakness in his limbs. But he craved her coming, hungered for the glide of her breasts against him. Those nights her words came to him distantly as though she was speaking through a woven tunnel of rowans. She was a queen. She cried in wild lands. She could only taste and touch the world through his verses. She begged him for more.

He quit his hovel and left the sullen boys to their games. He wandered further into the west, into the land of wet pewter and silver light. He shook inwardly with anger when he was forced to beg scraps of food. He offered to pay with old poems and courtly songs but the people had no use for his words. Some scorned him; others took pity and gave the soaking man a place to sleep. But when they awoke to find him thrashing and groaning and caressing the empty air they threw him into the night.

Or perhaps to Spain, where the princes fled — they who walk in sunlight and never want for fine clothes, or comfort, or songs among the fountains. Only poetry they do not have, poems of their lands and the people they have deserted. He could give them a draught of verses.