Another of his more simple poems is what Spenser would call an ’elegie or friend’s passion’ on a player on fiddle or pipes, Thomas O’Daly, that gives him a touch of kinship with the poets who have mourned their Astrophel, their Lycidas, their Adonais, their Thyrsis. This is how I have been helped to put it into English by a young working farmer, sitting by a turf fire one evening, when his day in the fields was over:—
’It was Thomas O’Daly that roused up young people and scattered them, and since death played on him, may God give him grace. The country is all sorrowful, always talking, since their man of sport died that would win the goal in all parts with his music.
’The swans on the water are nine times blacker than a blackberry since the man died from us that had pleasantness on the top of his fingers. His two grey eyes were like the dew of the morning that lies on the grass. And since he was laid in the grave, the cold is getting the upper hand.
’If you travel the five provinces, you would not find his equal for countenance or behaviour, for his equal never walked on land or grass. High King of Nature, you who have all powers in yourself, he that wasn’t narrow-hearted, give him shelter in heaven for it.
’He was the beautiful branch. In every quarter that he ever knew he would scatter his fill and not gather. He would spend the estate of the Dalys, their beer and their wine. And that he may be sitting in the chair of grace, in the middle of Paradise.
’A sorrowful story
on death, it ’s he is the ugly chief that did
treachery, that didn’t
give him credit, O strong God, for a little
time.
’There are young
women, and not without reason, sorry and
heart-broken and withered,
since he was left at the church. Their
hair thrown down and
hanging, turned grey on their head.