No More Learning

When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading
led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of
romance, but presently I convinced myself, for such reasons as those
in 'Ireland and the Arts,' that I should never go for the scenery of
a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to
that conviction to the end. I was very young; and, perhaps because I
belonged to a Young Ireland Society in Dublin, I wished to be as easily
understood as the Young Ireland writers, to write always out of the
common thought of the people.

I have put the poems written while I was influenced by this desire,
though with an always lessening force, into those sections which I
have called 'Early Poems. ' I read certain of them now with no little
discontent, for I find, especially in the ballads, some triviality and
sentimentality. Mangan and Davis, at their best, are not sentimental
and trivial, but I became so from an imitation that was not natural
to me. When I was writing the poems in the second of the three, the
section called 'The Rose,' I found that I was becoming unintelligible
to the young men who had been in my thought. We have still the same
tradition, but I have been like a traveller who, having when newly
arrived in the city noticed nothing but the news of the market-place,
the songs of the workmen, the great public buildings, has come after
certain months to let his thoughts run upon some little carving in its
niche, some Ogham on a stone, or the conversation of a countryman who
knows more of the 'Boar without Bristles' than of the daily paper.

When writing I went for nearly all my subjects to Irish folklore and
legends, much as a Young Ireland poet would have done, writing 'Down by
the Salley Garden' by adding a few lines to a couple of lines I heard
sung at Ballisodare; 'The Meditation of the Old Fisherman' from the
words of a not very old fisherman at Rosses Point; 'The Lamentation
of the Old Pensioner' from words spoken by a man on the Two Rock
Mountain to a friend of mine; 'The Ballad of the Old Foxhunter' from
an incident in one of Kickham's novels; and 'The Ballad of Moll Magee'
from a sermon preached in a chapel at Howth; and 'The Wanderings of
Oisin' from a Gaelic poem of the Eighteenth Century and certain Middle
Irish poems in dialogue. It is no longer necessary to say who Oisin
and Cuchulain and Fergus and the other bardic persons are, for Lady
Gregory, in her 'Gods and Fighting Men' and 'Cuchulain of Muirthemne'
has re-told all that is greatest in the ancient literature of Ireland
in a style that has to my ears an immortal beauty.


_Printed by_ A. H. BULLEN, _at The Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-on-Avon_.

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Only the most obvious punctuation errors repaired. Repeated section
titles were removed. Varied hyphenation was retained.
Page 202, "multudinous" changed to "multitudinous" (pillarless,
multitudinous home)

Page 211, stanza break inserted above the line that begins (Till the
horse gave a whinny)





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