Irish Verse: An Anthology

Bob Blaisdell

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486419145
• eBook ISBN: 9780486111681
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia irlandese

Celebrated for their unique poetic sensibility and wondrous way with words, the Irish have produced a rich heritage of great poetry. This volume attests to the Irish love of language, spanning fourteen centuries of literary history and featuring works by more than 60 of the Emerald Isle's most distinguished poets.
This comprehensive selection of well-known poems by distinguished writers includes "Verses for Women Who Cry Apples, etc." by Jonathan Swift; J. Sheridan LeFanu's "A Drunkard's Address to a Bottle of Whiskey"; William Allingham's "Four Ducks on a Pond"; "Requiescat" by Oscar Wilde; W. B. Yeats' "The Song of Wandering Aengus" and "Easter 1916"; "Forgiveness" by A. E.; "The Hills of Cualann" by Joseph Campbell; "An Old Woman of the Roads" by Padraic Colum; "In the Poppy Field" by James Stephens; and many others.
Also included is a generous sampling of memorable works by lesser known poets: "Lament for Thomas Davis" by Samuel Ferguson; Dion Boucicault's "The Wearing of the Green"; "The Wee Lassie's First Luve" by G. F. Savage-Armstrong; Francis A. Fahy's "Little Mary Cassidy"; Sidney Royse Lysaght's "The Penalty of Love"; and many more, including the anonymous "A Confession of Forgiveness," "Pearl of the White Breast," and "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye."
Students, teachers, and all poetry lovers will cherish this fine collection and its diverse cross-section of Irish poetry, from the seventh century to modern times.

III. Poetry in English Since Swift

JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745)

Swift was the famous author of Gulliver’s Travels, and cantankerous dean of Dublin’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

An Excellent New Song on a Seditious Pamphlet¹⁴

Swift wrote this satire in 1720.

Brocades and damasks and tabbies and gauzes
Are by Robert Ballantine lately brought over,
With forty things more: now hear what the law says,
“Whoe’er will not wear them is not the king’s lover.”
Though a printer and Dean
Seditiously mean
Our true Irish hearts from Old England to wean,
We’ll buy English silks for our wives and our daughters,
In spite of his Deanship and journeyman Waters.

In England the dead in woollen are clad,¹⁵
The Dean and his printer then let us cry “fie on;”
To be clothed like a carcass would make a teague mad,
Since a living dog better is than a dead lion.
Our wives they grow sullen
At wearing of woollen,
And all we poor shopkeepers must our horns pull in.
Then we’ll buy English silks for our wives and our daughters,
In spite of his Deanship and journeyman Waters.

Whoever our trading with England would hinder,
To inflame both the nations does plainly conspire;
Because Irish linen will soon turn to tinder,
And wool, it is greasy, and quickly takes fire.
Therefore, I assure ye,
Our noble grand jury,
When they saw the Dean’s book they were in a great fury;
They would buy English silks for their wives and their daughters,
In spite of his Deanship and journeyman Waters.

That wicked rogue Waters, who always is sinning,
And before Coram Nobis¹⁶ so oft has been called,
Henceforward, shall print neither pamphlets nor linen,
And, if swearing can do’t, shall be swingingly mauled;
And as for the Dean,
You know whom I mean,
If the printer will ’peach him he’ll scarce come off clean.
Then we’ll buy English silks for our wives and our daughters,
In spite of his Deanship and journeyman Waters.

Verses Made for Women Who Cry Apples, etc.

APPLES

Come buy my fine wares,
Plumbs, apples, and pears,
A hundred a penny,
In conscience too many:
Come, will you have any?
My children are seven,
I wish them in Heaven;
My husband’s a sot,
With his pipe and his pot,
Nor a farthing will gain ’em,
And I must maintain ’em.

ASPARAGUS

Ripe ’sparagrass,
Fit for lad or lass,
To make their water pass:
O! tis pretty picking
With a tender chicken.

ONIONS

Come, follow me by the smell,
Here’s delicate onions to sell,
I promise to use you well.
They make the blood warmer;
You’ll feed like a farmer;
For this is every cook’s opinion,
No savoury dish without an onion:
But lest your kissing should be spoil’d,
Your onions must be th’roughly boil’d;
Or else you may spare
Your mistress a share,
The secret will never be known;
She cannot discover
The breath of her lover,
But think it as sweet as her own.

OYSTERS

Charming oysters I cry,
My masters, come buy;
So plump and so fresh,
So sweet is their flesh,
No Colchester oyster
Is sweeter and moister.
Your stomach they settle,
And rouse up your mettle:
They’ll make you a dad
Of a lass or a lad;
And madam, your wife,
They’ll please to the life:
Be she barren, be she old,
Be she slut, or be she scold,
Eat my oysters and lie near her,
She’ll be fruitful, never fear her. ¹⁷

HERRINGS

Be not sparing
Leave off swearing:
Buy my herring
Fresh from Malahide*,
Better ne’er was tried.
Come eat ’em with pure fresh butter and mustard,
Their bellies are soft, and as white as a custard.
Come, sixpence a dozen to get me some bread,
Or, like my own herrings, I soon shall be dead.

ORANGES

Come buy my fine oranges, sauce for your veal,
And charming when squeez’d in a pot of brown ale:
Well roasted with sugar and wine in a cup,
They’ll make a sweet bishop, when gentlefolks sup.

To Quilca: A Country-house of Dr. Sheridan, in No Very Good Repair, Where the Author and Some of His Friends Spent a Summer in the Year 1725

Let me thy properties explain:
A rotten cabin dropping rain;
Chimnies with scorn rejecting smoke;
Stools, tables, chairs, and bedsteads, broke.
Here elements have lost their uses,
Air ripens not, nor earth produces:
In vain we make poor Sheelah toil,
Fire will not roast, nor water boil.
Through all the vallies, hills, and plains,
The goddess Want in triumph reigns,
And her chief officers of state,
Sloth, Dirt, and Theft, around her wait.

WILLIAM DRENNAN (1754–1820)

Drennan was a Belfast-born poet, essayist, and physician. He was the first writer to call Ireland “The Emerald Isle.”

Eire

When Eire first rose from the dark-swelling flood,
God blessed the green island, and saw it was good;
The emerald of Europe, it sparkled and shone,
In the ring of the world, the most precious stone.
In her sun, in her soil, in her station thrice blest,
With her back towards Britain, her face to the west,
Eire stands proudly insular, on her steep shore,
And strikes her high harp ’mid the ocean’s deep roar.

But when its soft tones seem to mourn and to weep,
A dark chain of silence is thrown o’er the deep;
At the thought of the past the tears gush from her eyes,
And the pulse of her heart makes her white bosom rise.
O! sons of green Eire, lament o’er the time
When religion was war, and our country a crime;
When man in God’s image inverted his plan,
And moulded his God in the image of man.

When the interest of state wrought the general woe,
The stranger a friend, and the native a foe;
While th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS
• Copyright Page
• Note
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• I. Poems from the Irish
• II. Anonymous Street Songs and Ballads
• III. Poetry in English Since Swift
• Alphabetical Index of Titles and First Lines
• DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS