No More Learning

But when it
is people of this earth that have harmed you, it is yourself knows well
the way to put harm on them again. And will you do now what I ask you,
Owen Hanrahan? ' she said. 'I will do that indeed,' said he.

'It is my father and my mother and my brothers,' she said, 'that are
marrying me to old Paddy Doe, because he has a farm of a hundred acres
under the mountain. And it is what you can do, Hanrahan,' she said,
'put him into a rhyme the same way you put old Peter Kilmartin in one
the time you were young, that sorrow may be over him rising up and
lying down, that will put him thinking of Collooney churchyard and
not of marriage. And let you make no delay about it, for it is for
to-morrow they have the marriage settled, and I would sooner see the
sun rise on the day of my death than on that day. '

'I will put him into a song that will bring shame and sorrow over him;
but tell me how many years has he, for I would put them in the song? '

'O, he has years upon years. He is as old as you yourself, Red
Hanrahan. ' 'As old as myself,' sang Hanrahan, and his voice was as if
broken; 'as old as myself; there are twenty years and more between
us! It is a bad day indeed for Owen Hanrahan when a young girl with
the blossom of May in her cheeks thinks him to be an old man. And my
grief! ' he said, 'you have put a thorn in my heart. '

He turned from her then and went down the road till he came to a stone,
and he sat down on it, for it seemed as if all the weight of the years
had come on him in the minute.
And he remembered it was not many days
ago that a woman in some house had said: 'It is not Red Hanrahan you
are now but yellow Hanrahan, for your hair is turned to the colour of a
wisp of tow. ' And another woman he had asked for a drink had not given
him new milk but sour; and sometimes the girls would be whispering and
laughing with young ignorant men while he himself was in the middle of
giving out his poems or his talk. And he thought of the stiffness of
his joints when he first rose of a morning, and the pain of his knees
after making a journey, and it seemed to him as if he was come to be
a very old man, with cold in the shoulders and speckled shins and his
wind breaking and he himself withering away. And with those thoughts
there came on him a great anger against old age and all it brought with
it. And just then he looked up and saw a great spotted eagle sailing
slowly towards Ballygawley, and he cried out: 'You, too, eagle of
Ballygawley, are old, and your wings are full of gaps, and I will put
you and your ancient comrades, the Pike of Dargan Lake and the Yew of
the Steep Place of the Strangers into my rhyme, that there may be a
curse on you for ever. '

There was a bush beside him to the left, flowering like the rest, and
a little gust of wind blew the white blossoms over his coat. 'May
blossoms,' he said, gathering them up in the hollow of his hand, 'you
never know age because you die away in your beauty, and I will put you
into my rhyme and give you my blessing. '

He rose up then and plucked a little branch from the bush, and carried
it in his hand. But it is old and broken he looked going home that day
with the stoop in his shoulders and the darkness in his face.

When he got to his cabin there was no one there, and he went and lay
down on the bed for a while as he was used to do when he wanted to make
a poem or a praise or a curse. And it was not long he was in making it
this time, for the power of the curse-making bards was upon him. And
when he had made it he searched his mind how he could send it out over
the whole countryside.

Some of the scholars began coming in then, to see if there would be
any school that day, and Hanrahan rose up and sat on the bench by the
hearth, and they all stood around him.

They thought he would bring out the Virgil or the Mass book or the
primer, but instead of that he held up the little branch of hawthorn he
had in his hand yet. 'Children,' he said, 'this is a new lesson I have
for you to-day.

'You yourselves and the beautiful people of the world are like this
blossom, and old age is the wind that comes and blows the blossom away.