s
from the tenth century.

At a time when the poets of other lands seem wholly engrossed in the
recital of the deeds of men, one of the great and constant
distinguishing marks of poetry in Ireland, whether we have to do with
a short note set down by a scribe on the margin of a manuscript or
with a religious or profane poem, is a deep, personal, and intimate
love of nature expressed not by detailed description, but more often
by a single picturesque and telling epithet. Thus we have the hermit
who prays God to give him a hut in a lonely place beside a clear
spring in the wood, with a little lark to sing overhead; or we have
Marban, who, rich in nuts, crab-apples, sloes, watercress, and honey,
refuses to go back to the court to which the king, his brother,
presses him to return. Now, we have the description of the summer
scene, in which the blackbird sings and the sun smiles; now, the song
of the sea and of the wind, which blows tempestuously from the four
quarters of the sky; again, the winter song, when the snow covers the
hills, when every furrow is a streamlet and the wolves range
restlessly abroad, while the birds, numbed to the heart, are silent;
or yet again the recluse in his cell, humorously comparing his quest
of ideas to the pursuit of the mice by his pet cat. This deep love of
inanimate and animate things becomes individualized in those poems in
which every tree, every spring, every bird is described with its own
special features.

If we remember that these original poems, which, before the twelfth
century, expressed thoughts that were scarcely known to the
literature of Europe before the eighteenth, are, besides, clothed in
the rich garb of a subtle harmony, what admiration, what respect, and
what love ought we not to show to that ancient Ireland which, in the
darkest ages of western civilization, not only became the depositary
of Latin knowledge and spread it over the continent, but also had
been able to create for herself new artistic and poetic forms!

REFERENCES:

Hyde: Love Songs of Connacht (Dublin, 1893), Irish Poetry, an Essay
in Irish with Translation in English and a Vocabulary (Dublin, 1902),
The Religious Songs of Connacht (London, 1906); Meyer: Ancient Gaelic
Poetry (Glasgow, 1906), a Primer of Irish Metrics with a Glossary and
an Appendix containing an Alphabetical List of the Poets of Ireland
(Dublin, 1909); Dottin-Dunn: The Gaelic Literature of Ireland
(Washington, 1906); Meyer: Select