dots-menu
×

Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Padraic Colum

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Three Irish Spinning Songs

Padraic Colum

I
A young girl sings:

The Lannan Shee

Watched the young man Brian

Cross over the stile towards his father’s door,

And she said, “No help,

For now he’ll see

His byre, his bawn and his threshing floor!

And oh, the swallows

Forget all wonders

When walls with the nests rise up before.”

My strand is knit.

“Out of the dream

Of me, into

The round of his labor he will grow;

To spread his fields

In the winds of Spring,

And tramp the heavy glebe and sow;

And cut and clamp

And rear the turf

Until the season when they mow.”

My wheel runs smooth.

“And while he toils

In field and bog

He will be anxious in his mind—

About the thatch

Of barn and rick

Against the reiving autumn wind,

And how to make

His gap and gate

Secure against the thieving kind.”

My wool is fine.

“He has gone back

And I’ll see no more

Mine image in his deepening eyes;

Then I’ll lean above

The Well of the Bride,

And with my beauty peace will rise!

O autumn star

In a hidden lake,

Fill up my heart and make me wise!”

My quick brown wheel!

“The women bring

Their pitchers here

At the time when the stir of the house is o’er;

They’ll see my face

In the well-water,

And they’ll never lift their vessels more.

For each will say

‘How beautiful—

Why should I labor any more!

Indeed I come

Of so fair a race

’Twere waste to labor any more!’”

My thread is spun.

II
An elder girl sings:

One came before her and said beseeching,

“I have fortune and I have lands,

And if you’ll share in the goods of my household

All my treasure’s at your commands.”

But she said to him, “The goods you proffer

Are far from my mind as the silk of the sea!

The arms of him, my young love, round me

Is all the treasure that’s true for me!”

“Proud you are then, proud of your beauty,

But beauty’s a flower will soon decay;

The fairest flowers they bloom in the Summer,

They bloom one Summer and they fade away.”

“My heart is sad then for the little flower

That must so wither where fair it grew—

He who has my heart in keeping,

I would he had my body too.”

III
An old woman sings:

There was an oul’ trooper went riding by

On the road to Carricknabauna,

And sorrow is better to sing than cry

On the way to Carricknabauna!

And as the oul’ trooper went riding on

He heard this sung by a crone, a crone

On the road to Carricknabauna!

“I’d spread my cloak for you, young lad

Were it only the breadth of a farthen’

And if your mind was as good as your word,

In troth, it’s you I’d rather!

In dread of any jealousy,

And before we go any farther

Carry me up to the top of the hill

And show me Carricknabauna!”

“Carricknabauna, Carricknabauna,

Would you show me Carricknabauna?

I lost a horse at Cruckmoylinn—

At the Cross of Bunratty I dropped a limb—

But I left my youth on the crown of the hill

Over by Carricknabauna!”

Girls, young girls, the rush-light is done.

What will I do when my thread is spun?