Blarney Castle
Colum, Padraic
June 5, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 125 BLARNEY CASTLE By PADRAIC COLUM THE best way to get to Blarney Castle is to walk there—to walk there, I mean, from the town of Cork. You will go to...
...There are wild children in the house she lives in...
...there are bad neighbors all around her...
...Both she and her charming granddaughter were so eager to serve that I bought gooseberries, too...
...Being mossed by nature that makes it sweeter Than a coach and six or a feather bed...
...But when you go along the quaysides and come to the second bridge you see more of the folk-life of Cork...
...He instances The Bells of Shandon, written by a Latin scholar who wrote for the sake of a jest, and The Groves of Blarney, which was made up to parody a song in schoolmaster's English...
...There are handsome trout in that stream that never were caught and that never can be caught...
...And I pass a field that has yellow dandelions and grass so soft and smooth that I think that only the cattle of a king have any right to graze there—no other cattle would be worthy of such a sward...
...There's gravel walks there for speculation And conversation in sweet solitude...
...there should be no striving for the effect of Gaelicism —it should come indeliberately...
...The legend of the Castle that my old woman told me had to do with water and a fairy woman, and although the woman in it is old, not young, is, I imagine a fragment of a Melusina story...
...And as I go away from her she says, "May God carry you every road safe...
...As we walk among the trees my poet friend from Cork, Frank O'Connor, repeats the poem and comments upon it...
...Imitations of Gaelic verse, he holds, should not be intentional...
...You will pass Shandon church whose bells a poet has made famous...
...the younger they are the prettier they are...
...But Oliver Cromwell he did her pummel, And made a breach in her battlement...
...The girls look as if they all had personality—a fresh, clear but unvivid personality...
...They are a merchant-folk primarily—ready of tongue, shrewd of mind, good at bargaining...
...And if a lady would be so engaging As to walk alone in these shady bowers, 'Tis there the courtier he may transport her Into some fort or all underground...
...But soon I am out of the town and in the county of Cork...
...She tells me a legend of the castle that has as much to recommend it as any of the half-dozen legends that are current...
...I went to buy withered apples from one of them...
...The king of Munster saved an old woman who was about to drown in the lake...
...Tis Lady Jeffers that owns this station, Like Alexander or Queen Helen fair, There's no commander in all the nation, For emulation can with her compare...
...And the road to Blarney stretches before me...
...the Lee flows along quays built of limestone...
...And it is for its groves that Blarney is celebrated in what is the most diverting of Irish poems...
...there is a church there, a few houses, a pump, and that is all...
...Near the gate, under the trees, with a shawl over her head for shelter from the showers, is a simplefaced old woman...
...Except, perhaps, a yew tree that grows out of a tier of the rock on which the Castle is built...
...The place-name itself means "groves...
...And then I go through the gate and enter the grounds of Blarney's old castle—grounds overgrown with shrubs...
...For 'tis there's a cave where no daylight enters, But cats and badgers are forever bred...
...Two sides of the turret is of white stone, two of brown stone...
...You will come to a second bridge...
...Passing these fields I come to Blarney village with its factory—a dull little 126 THE COMMONWEAL June 5, 1929 place...
...Lots of young men seem to be detached from any employments— strolling about, or pushing barrows, or carrying baskets...
...From the top of the keep I look on the green lawns that are all around—Blarney has nothing to show better than these...
...And there I come on a group who are not ordinary visitors: a personage whom I take to be an Indian prince is kissing the stone by proxy— a servitor is hanging down the wall to lip it...
...The branches that are lifted up have constant movement like waves— dark green, feathery branches waving against rock and wall...
...Sometimes one sees an old woman who has on the voluminous hooded cloak that was worn everywhere in Munster a century ago...
...She likes the air here and she likes to watch the flowing water...
...Yonder field is a green mirror for the clouds to make shadows upon...
...They have soft and rippling speech and are ready to engage in long conversations with one another...
...Such walls surround her, that no nine-pounder Could dare to plunder her place of strength...
...But, as the friend who meets me here, a poet and a scholar, reminds me, Blarney was famous for its groves before its stone and its lake were ever heard of...
...Then you will turn up Blarney Street...
...And so, eating gooseberries, I turned up Blarney Street...
...Besides the leeches, and groves of beeches Standing in order for to guard the flood...
...There it grows, blended somehow with rock and ruin, like some unused image that has come spontaneously into a poet's verse...
...The structure and the sound of Gaelic poetry are reproduced in it: the "a" sound of Blarney is woven through every stanza, but every word that has the sound seems to have gone into its place smilingly: The groves of Blarney, they are so charming Down by the purling of sweet silent streams, Being banked with posies that spontaneous grow there, Planted in order by the sweet rock close...
...And the valley which Blarney Castle dominated is then before you...
...There is a lake that might well be the scene for an encounter with a Melusina: it is about a mile from the Castle...
...This is the poem which James Stephens, as he told me once, would rather have written than anything in an Irish anthology...
...So now to finish this brief narration, Which my poor genius could not entwine...
...Turn off the bridge along the quayside and the ass cart filled with cabbages, the country cart loaded with peat, are the vehicles you see...
...And the people who give Ireland her journalists, schoolmasters and civil servants are passing by busy with the commonplaces of life...
...You will walk along the quays...
...Tis a long street that begins in an undistinguished part of the town and ends as a lane in a mean part...
...She returns my salutation, and I go over to talk to her...
...But were I Homer, or Nebuchadnezzar, 'Tis every feature I would make it twine...
...She tells me that her husband was employed on this property, and that she has permission to come here and sit under the trees...
...she does not sleep...
...I get to the top of the keep—about a hundred feet up...
...It bends outward and some of its branches grow toward the ground: these are bare...
...the girls seem to be at their prettiest around fourteen...
...The castle is built on a shelf of the rock that dominates the valley...
...Clougheen—"the little stones"—is not a village...
...You will go on until you come to a place named Clougheen...
...I go to Blarney by fields that are the greenest of all the green fields of Eirinn...
...So she likes being here, within the gate and under the trees...
...And over and over again she tells me that she likes to watch the flowing water from where she sits...
...She told him, however, that if he would mount the topmost wall of his Castle, and kiss a stone which she described to him, he would gain a speech that would win friend or foe, man or woman to him...
...they measured them out for me in a pewter mug, and I'm sure they gave me an extra ha'penny worth for good measure...
...Across the way stands Shandon church with its turret, of which the poem says: White and brown is Shandon's steeple, Parti-colored like the people...
...She had nothing to give him by way of reward...
...Tis there the lake is, well stored with perches And comely eels in the verdant mud...
...This, the central part of Cork, is a very little way from the countryside...
...Tis there the lover may hear the dove, or The gentle plove in the afternoon...
...You will go to Patrick's Bridge...
...Tis there the daisy and the sweet carnation, The blooming pink and the rose so fair, The daffydowndilly, likewise the lily, All flowers that scent the sweet fragrant air...
...But you should stay for a while upon Patrick's Bridge and take in the scene and the people...
...They are real types, these old women who are selling gooseberries, apples, blackthorn sticks...
...Several monks pass, brown-garbed and with sandals on their feet...
...She has a simple and rambling mind...
...The white stone is in the embankment of the river...
...She does not say it to me, but I gather from her rambling allusions that she nurses the hope that some of the visitors will make her some sort of offering—something that would give her an allowance of tea or snuff or tobacco...
...Gulls are flying over the river...
...There's statues gracing this noble place in— All heathen gods and nymphs so fair, Bold Neptune, Plutarch, and Nicodemus, All standing naked in the open air...
Vol. 10 • June 1929 • No. 5
