Irish Poems

IRISH POEMS - FOREWORD - IT will be obvious to even the I more casual reader of this volume that the three-score dramatic lyrics between its covers are not the utterance of one particular individual. To the more critical reader it will be equally obvious that the dialect I have made use of is not the dialect of one particular Irish county. The entire volume, I might venture to say, is designed more as a small gallery of small portraits, or to be more exact, as a record of fleeting impressions caught from the West of Ireland character-as often in exile, confessedly, as in the midst of its native hills. There is sorra need for me here to dwell on either the loveableness or the humorous irresponsibility of this character, on either the whimsical gayeties or the nostalgic mournfulness of these people who were, and are, partly my own people. But in my attempted recountal of these impressions I must confess to a certain compromise. I have again and again, in the matter of the written word, been coerced into 5 . ... Foreword something not unlike a sacrifice of actuality on the altar of literary convention. This has been due, not so much to the consciousness that a foreignized and laboriously achieved spelling is as exasperating to the eye as it is eshausting to the mind, but more to the fact that the dialect of one Irish county or countryside is, rrzore Hibertzico, usually a contradiction of the dialect of its neighboring county or countryside. And further, what is commonly spoken of as the Irishmans brogue, it must be confessed, is a speech or method of speech much too elusive to be captured and tied down to an inkpot. The imitation brogue, the near-brogue, the brogue which belaves a Quanemight 4 swape a flock of forty shape inside of a wakes time, is a creation peculiar to the vaudeville-boards and the joke-mongers column. It is a speech that is about as common in Connaught and her sister counties as snakes are in Ireland. Even the broadening of the diphthong ea into the long 6 6 a 9 9 is too prone to exaggeration. Yet there are tricks of speech so characteristic and so persistent they cannot be ignored. One, for instance, is the flattening of the dental digraph th into something approaching a d. To write it down always as a d is a somewhat clumsy artifice. It remains, however, the only adequate device for the ex pression of that quaintly hardening tendency which translates with into something so closely akin to wid. Still another practice is the lowering, the de-dentalating, of the sibillant, readily recognized in the smile which becomes shmile and the street which must be recorded as shtreet, though here again the 9, inserted h IS a son ewhaat wkward instrument to denote that tenuous rustle of breath with which Erin wafts out its hissing consonant. In the same way, the tendency to espress the softened of by av may not always be entirely satisfying yet, when it comes to a matter of ink and paper, the resort to it seems the only reasonable avenue out of the difficulty. And beyond this there are many more difficulties, difficulties of idiom, and of mental attitude. And as an excuse for a newcomers invasion of that land of brogues and accents and intonations, which are as elusive as quicksilver even while they are as penetrating as turf-smoke and as soft as a bog-land breeze, I can only add that it is a field in which there are many anomalies and no finalities. A. S...