Part 15 (2/2)

A long time he went faring all through Ireland, poking his way into hard rocky clefts, shouldering through ivy bushes, unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles, wading estuaries, breasting summits, trekking through glens, until he found the pleasures of Glen Bolcain.

That place is a natural asylum where all the madmen of Ireland used to a.s.semble once their year in madness was complete.

Glen Bolcain is like this: it has four gaps to the wind, pleasant woods, clean-banked wells, cold springs and clear sandy streams where green-topped watercress and languid brooklime philander over the surface.

It is nature's pantry with its sorrels, its wood-sorrels, its berries, its wild garlic, its black sloes and its brown acorns.

The madmen would beat each other for the pick of its watercresses and for the beds on its banks.

Sweeney stayed a long time in that glen until one night he was cooped up in the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn. He could hardly endure it, for every time he twisted or turned, the th.o.r.n.y twigs would flail him so that he was p.r.i.c.kled and cut and bleeding all over. He changed from that station to another one, a clump of thick briars with a single young blackthorn standing up out of the th.o.r.n.y bed, and he settled in the top of the blackthorn. But it was too slender. It wobbled and bent so that Sweeney fell heavily through the thicket and ended up on the ground like a man in a bloodbath. Then he gathered himself up, exhausted and beaten, and came out of the thicket, saying: It is hard to bear this life after the pleasant times I knew. And it has been like this a year to the night last night!

Then he spoke this poem: A year until last night I have lived among dark trees, between the flood and ebb-tide, going cold and naked with no pillow for my head, no human company and, so help me, G.o.d, no spear and no sword!

No sweet talk with women.

Instead, I pine for cresses, for the clean pickings of brooklime.

No surge of royal blood, camped here in solitude; no glory flames the wood, no friends, no music.

Tell the truth: a hard lot.

And no s.h.i.+rking this fate; no sleep, no respite, no hope for a long time.

No house humming full, no men, loud with good will, n.o.body to call me king, no drink or banqueting.

A great gulf yawns now between me and my retinue, between craziness and reason.

Scavenging through the glen on my mad king's visit: no pomp or poet's circuit but wild scuttles in the wood.

Heavenly saints! O Holy G.o.d!

No skilled musicians' cunning, no soft discoursing women, no open-handed giving; my doom to be a long dying.

Our sorrows were multiplied that Tuesday when Congal fell.

Our dead made a great harvest, our remnant, a last swathe.

This has been my plight.

Suddenly cast out, grieving and astray, a year until last night.

Sweeney kept going until he reached the church at Swim-Two-Birds on the Shannon, which is now called Cloon-burren; he arrived there on a Friday, to be exact. The clerics of the church were singing nones, women were beating flax and one was giving birth to a child.

It is unseemly, said Sweeney, for the women to violate the Lord's fast day. That woman beating the flax reminds me of our beating at Moira.

Then he heard the vesper bell ringing and said: It would be sweeter to listen to the notes of the cuckoos on the banks of the Bann than to the whinge of this bell tonight.

Then he uttered the poem: I perched for rest and imagined cuckoos calling across water, the Bann cuckoo, calling sweeter than church bells that whinge and grind.

Friday is the wrong day, woman, for you to give birth to a son, the day when Mad Sweeney fasts for love of G.o.d, in penitence.

Do not just discount me. Listen.

At Moira my tribe was beaten, beetled, heckled, hammered down, like flax being scutched by these women.

From the cliff of Lough Diolar up to Derry Colmcille I saw the great swans, heard their calls sweetly rebuking wars and battles.

From lonely cliff-tops, the stag bells and makes the whole glen shake and re-echo. I am ravished.

Unearthly sweetness shakes my breast.

O Christ, the loving and the sinless, hear my prayer, attend, O Christ, and let nothing separate us.

Blend me forever in your sweetness.

It was the end of the harvest season and Sweeney heard a hunting-call from a company in the skirts of the wood.

This will be the outcry of the Ui Faolain coming to kill me, he said. I slew their king at Moira and this host is out to avenge him.

He heard the stag bellowing and he made a poem in which he praised aloud all the trees of Ireland, and rehea.r.s.ed some of his own hards.h.i.+ps and sorrows, saying: The bushy leafy oak tree is highest in the wood, the forking shoots of hazel hide sweet hazel-nuts.

The alder is my darling, all thornless in the gap, some milk of human kindness coursing in its sap.

The blackthorn is a jaggy creel stippled with dark sloes; green watercress in thatch on wells where the drinking blackbird goes.

Sweetest of the leafy stalks, the vetches strew the pathway; the oyster-gra.s.s is my delight, and the wild strawberry.

Low-set clumps of apple trees drum down fruit when shaken; scarlet berries clot like blood on mountain rowan.

Briars curl in sideways, arch a stickle back, draw blood and curl up innocent to sneak the next attack.

The yew tree in each churchyard wraps night in its dark hood.

Ivy is a shadowy genius of the wood.

Holly rears its windbreak, a door in winter's face; life-blood on a spear-shaft darkens the grain of ash.

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