Page:The poem-book of the Gael - Hull.djvu/35

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INTRODUCTION
xxxi

It may be well to indicate here the relations between Mangan's version and the original in the poem in which he keeps most strictly to the words of the bard. "O'Hussey's Ode to the Maguire," that fine address of the Northern bard, O'Hussey, to his young chief, whose warlike foray into Munster in the depth of winter filled his mind with anxiety and distress. A literal translation of the opening passage reads as follows:

"Too cold for Hugh I deem this night, the drops so heavily downpouring are a cause for sadness; biting is this night's cold woe is me that such is our companion's lot.In the clouds' bosoms the water-gates of heaven are flung wide; small pools are turned by it to seas, all its destructiveness hath the firmament spewed out.A pain to me that Hugh Maguire to-night lies in a stranger's land, 'neath lurid glow of lightning-bolts and angry armed clouds' clamour;A woe to us that in the province of Clann Daire (Southwest Munster) our well-beloved is couched, betwixt a coarse cold-wet and grass-clad ditch and the impetuous fury of the heavens."[1]

But it is not, after all, the verses of the bards, even of the best of them, that will survive. It is the tender religious songs, the passionate love-songs, the exquisite addresses to nature; those poems which touch in us the common ground of deep human feeling. Whether it came to us from the sixth century or from the sixteenth, the song of Crede for the dead man, whom she had grown to love only when he was dying, would equally move us; the passionate cry of Liadan after Curithir would wring our

  1. ↑ O'Grady's Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum, p. 451.
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