The Keep at Cloughoughter
Colum, Padraic
July3i, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 331 This is not a manifesto of the Ku Klux Klan but the declaration of a federation which purports to represent and speak for three score organizations the...
...Of course that church was made over into a Protestant one...
...Yes...
...And if we did there would be more talk about the place, and I should have more reason than ever for being an anti-archaeologist...
...Is this to be done by drawing about us the mantle of self-sufficiency and, secure in our wealth, complacent in our virtue, triumphant in our progress, serve notice upon the world that its business is not our business and our business will always be our own...
...It takes him out of the stiff mythological folds that all Irish leaders seem to have been put into...
...Two rivers have their rise in Cavan--the Erne and the great Shannon...
...If America is to be kept American, who is to define Americanism...
...The romance of the rivers came to me, and I thought that I might cross the country to where the Shannon rose, and follow the river to the south after or before I had followed the Erne's course...
...Out of that crucible we were to emerge cleansed and purified, consecrated to the task of helping one another to make the world a better place to live in...
...Like water it was desirable up to a certain point and undesirable if it attained the proportions of an engulfing flood...
...The Erne flows north and west...
...No, no...
...Not only have I no interest in that keep and whatever it stands for, but I am unwilling to listen to even one word about it...
...Whoever had built them had taken into account the wood and the lake water and the remoteness of neighborhood, and had put here cottages that had some relation to the scene...
...there was something baleful and fateful about them as they watched with sloping heads and beaks...
...The one that we go into is built of concrete into which big pebbles, round and oval, are set...
...O yellow mast and roaring sail...
...In front are wooden columns, whitewashed...
...He handed the command over to his nephew, young Hugh O'Neill...
...Your cousin told it all to me this morning...
...The bones of Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill were flung aside to make room for one of a family of newcomers...
...It was an O'Reilly stronghold . . . " "I suppose you imagine that I'm bound to take an interest in anything connected with the O'Reillys...
...No...
...I thought they were herons...
...Isn't it wonderful that you can have a mind easy enough to be concerned about such things when there's a squall coming up and neither of us expert in the handling of a boat like this...
...on their tops, at each corner, a bird was standing like a sentinel...
...for that purpose obstructing the laws of naturahzation of foreigners...
...The islet is just wide enough to hold the walls of the keep: the builders left no room for an enemy to land in force...
...332 THE COMMONWEAL July 3I, 19z9 He was marching to unite his army with Ormond's...
...But frustration in our own history--I have heard too much of that...
...What is the occasion for this sudden outpouring of patriotism...
...And eight thousand welltrained men made a considerable army in those days...
...I suppose you'll tell me that O'Neill's grave is on the islet...
...And then we landed...
...I realized that I was on one of the chief water systems in Ireland...
...Yet Congress has just closed a prolonged struggle, which has aroused slumbering animosities and stirred antagonisms deprecated by no less a person than George Washington, over a question of reducing immigration by I I,OOO...
...Cormorants l Very proper to the scene were these quick-eyed, baleful watchers...
...And thinking on these journeys I went on the lakeshore with my friend...
...You're not pulling very well...
...THE KEEP AT CLOUGHOUGHTER By PADRAIC COLUM I CAME to the lake that is outside Cavan town --one of the lakes through which the river Erne flows...
...the keep would have to be reduced before a landing was made...
...One, then another, then a third dashed down from the high place when they made sure we were bound for the islet...
...Well, he took leave of his army in a place nearby...
...Carry the leadership for me, Writ in this letter, o'er the sea To great O'Neill...
...the self-constituted guardians of this later day or the long line of statesmen who have originated and applied the policies that have made the country what it is...
...Look long, Fill, fill your heart: from your final quay Will rise a lovely song...
...And don't you know that you are spoiling the day for me...
...It was the quantitative, not the qualitative, aspect of immigration they had in mind...
...You're going to read me poems about frustrations...
...He was trained in the wars of Spain and France...
...By a process of calculation that was inconclusive, to say the least, and far from convincing, Congress has attempted to define for all time the racial elements that compose the American stock...
...refusing to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands...
...We saluted the images of the cormorants that we had in our memories--the cormorants as they stood on the walls of the keep, superbly aloof from our interests and history, their beaks and necks lifted to the sky...
...We don't know where the bones of the best and most chivalrous of Irish soldiers were put...
...Tuberculosis or Bright's disease--I don't believe it is known which...
...The collapse of feudalism bathed Europe in blood...
...And others stood watching our coming...
...The exaggerated nationalism which succeeded it reached its apotheosis on the eve of another devastating conflict...
...The other cottage is made in the same style and with the same material, but it has tiles on its roof...
...Their necks were up and their looks were on us...
...But at this time he knew that he was dying...
...I'll sing it as we pull...
...he came to Ireland with the highest hopes of winning his country's independence...
...The islet was just beside us now...
...I'd give the island and the keep and whatever interest they may have for anyone to have seen Thomas Hardy in the flesh...
...When he saw that I was bent for that direction, my friend said, "I want you to know that I am the most resolute anti-archaeologist in the whole province of Ulster...
...Is America, which has grown great among nations--so great that other nations watch with some trepidation its advance--threatened with destruction...
...I see Hardy's Poems in your pocket...
...We sat upon bits of fallen walls and read poems about defeats and frustrations...
...They disappeared in an instant...
...How many in the army...
...Were the signers of the Declaration of Independence un-American when they declared of King George: He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states...
...A friend was there who was willing to pull an oar with me...
...Even thatch, now weather-browned, covers the roof, and before the columns red hollyhocks are growing...
...It is the only thing I have heard about him that interests me...
...Much more so than the swans that drifted along by the islet...
...Or I could go along the winding course of the river to where it enters the sea at Ballyshannon in Donegal...
...In spite of dreadful disunion, in spite of the lack of policy on the part of the Council which he served, in spite of its opposition, he made an army, he won a brilliant victory...
...Someone who had an idea of giving character and charm to the cottages that he had a chance of building, built these two...
...We cannot cross this lake without thought or talk of Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill...
...The ivy covered the broken walls, big-leaved, dark green, with bunches of buds coming out of its growth...
...The army marched past its leader and its maker, giving the victor of Benburb the last salute...
...It is a pity that his idea did not spread...
...We landed beside two cottages that were the nicest I have ever seen in any part of Ireland...
...POWER DALTON...
...Evidently our first patriots saw no taint in the blood of foreign nationalities...
...Seeing that you have that name...
...The little space held a little wUdernesswthorn bushes with bunches of red haws on them, elder bushes with clusters of dark berries, hollies and clumps of ivies...
...The Shannon flows south...
...Dyingl Of what...
...when we were in the boat I pulled in the direction of an islet on which the old keep known as Cloughoughter Castle stands...
...About eight thousand...
...Are the so-called hyphenates and the handful of communists within its borders a menace to its institutions...
...Minding one's own business is a commendable virtue in nations as well as in persons but it is to be doubted whether it can be cultivated by kicking one's neighbors down one's stairs...
...Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill was buried in the chancel of the Franciscan church in Cavan...
...If we went on (but we should have to go in a motor boat) we should come to Enniskillen, and from Enniskillen I might turn toward East Ulster...
...But Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill was the finest soldier that Ireland produced...
...But don't you know that Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill died on this very islet and inside those very walls...
...I know a boat song...
...The River Erne flowed through this lake...
...At last we have an "American people" not welded together by devotion to the lofty principles and institutions established by the fathers of the republic and common attachment to democratic political ideals, but patched together out of an illsorted array of national stocks...
...I expected that you would be interested in a tragedy of circumstance...
...And so, having avoided hearing it from him, I have to hear it from you now...
...If poesy have truth at all, If some great lion of the Gael Shall rule the lovely land of F~il...
...Woyager Fill your eyes with the flung fields, Rippled and foamed with dover, Breathe the spray the white mist yields, And tree spars bending over Straining to reach that farthest sea, The cloud-foamed sky...
...I hate anything that has to do with Irish or English history...
...He failed--that's enough for me...
...The ideal American type is approximately 43 percent English or Scotch, I7 percent German, I2 percent Irish, 4 percent Polish and 3.8 percent Italian, with traces of the blood of other nationalities...
...Three walls stood up...
...The fact that Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill had a disease as usual as tuberculosis or Bright's disease makes him a sympathetic character for me...
...But they looked at us in a wilder way...
...The hope that was in this seventeenth-century poem --James Stephens has translated it--died on this islet, and nothing afterward happened on it...
...Well, this was the last stronghold in Ireland that was taken by the Cromwellians...
...How did you get to know all this...
...We pulled back in the rain...
...July3i, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 331 This is not a manifesto of the Ku Klux Klan but the declaration of a federation which purports to represent and speak for three score organizations the membership of which might be easily induced to believe, if they are not already convinced, that they constitute the flower of American culture...
Vol. 10 • July 1929 • No. 13
