Today’s Poem: I Am Raftery

What price to wander as a bard?

Thomas Jones, The Bard, 1774 (Wikimedia Commons)

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I Am Raftery

by Anthony Raftery

I am Raftery the poet
Full of hope and love,
With eyes that have no light, 
With silence unmoved.

Going west on my journey 
By the light of my heart, 
Feeble and tired
To the end of my road.

Look at me now
With my face to Balla,                ◦ Balla = either the County Mayo town or a literal wall
Playing music
Unto empty pockets.

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Anthony Raftery (1779–1835) — Antoine Ó Raifteiri, in the Irish Gaelic — was the last of an old tradition: a wandering bard, a footloose poet and singer, of a kind Ireland had known since long before St. Patrick in the fifth century. Loosely imagined, the tradition could be expanded to include, say, James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916), always ready to travel to recite his work. Or Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) who walked, selling pamphlets of his poetry, from Florida to Kentucky in 1906, from New York to Ohio in 1908, and from Illinois to New Mexico in 1912. Or even, I suppose, someone like Charles Bukowski (1920–1994), who wandered around Los Angeles in his drinking.

But there’s something useful that remains in the stricter understanding of the Celtic bard: something that connects it organically to the Druids and even earlier senses of language as spellcasting — poetry as the performance of magic.

Statue of Raferty in Country Mayo

Raftery was born in County Mayo in 1779. Struck blind by smallpox when he was nine, he taught himself the fiddle and spent his time performing songs and musically accompanied poetry up and down the West Coast of Ireland — often for the Anglo-Irish gentry, who, down to Yeats, were fascinated by connections to earlier Irish mythology and art. None of his work was published before his death in 1835 in County Galway, but by 1900 Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), Lady Gregory (1852–1932), and others had seen all known compositions into print.

The Irish (recited here) runs:

Mise Raifteirí, an file,  I am Raftery the poet
lán dóchais is grá        Full of hope and love,
le súile gan solas,        With eyes that have no light,
ciúineas gan crá          With silence unmoved.

Dul siar ar m’aistear,  Going west on my journey
le solas mo chroí         By the light of my heart,
Fann agus tuirseach,   Feeble and tired
go deireadh mo shlí    To the end of my road.

Féach anois mé           Look at me now
mo dhroim le balla,     With my face to Balla / the wall,
Ag seinm ceoil             Playing music
do phocaí folamh.        Unto empty pockets.

Mostly trimeter (in both the Irish and the English), the poem has had several translations, although, in truth, they vary little. In all of them comes the sense of the blind wanderer, ill-rewarded but compelled onward by his poetic gift: Going west on my journey / By the light of my heart. “God knows,” Hannah Arendt cried at the death of her friend, W.H. Auden, “the price [of poetry] is too high and no one in his right mind could be willing to pay it knowingly.”

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