Sweeney Astray Read online

  16

  Sweeney, what has happened here?

  Sweeney, who led hosts to war

  and was the flower among them all

  at Moira on that day of battle!

  To see you flushed after a feast,

  poppy in the gold of harvest.

  Hair like shavings or like down,

  your natural and perfect crown.

  To see your handsome person go

  was morning after a fall of snow.

  The blue and crystal of your eyes

  shone like deepening windswept ice.

  Surefooted, elegant, except

  you stumbled in the path of kingship,

  you were a blooded swordsman, quick

  to sense a chance and quick to strike.

  Colmcille promised you, good son,

  kingship and salvation:

  how eagerly you strutted forth

  blessed by that voice of heaven and earth.

  Truthful seer, Colmcille

  prophesied in this oracle:

  All crossed the sea and here you stand

  who’ll never all return from Ireland.

  Find the answer to his riddle

  at Moira on the field of battle,

  a gout of blood on a shining blade,

  Congal Claon among the dead.

  17 When Sweeney heard the shouts of the soldiers and the big noise of the army, he rose out of the tree towards the dark clouds and ranged far over mountains and territories.

  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 assemble 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 water-cresses and for the beds on its banks.

  18 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 thorny twigs would flail him so that he was prickled 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 thorny 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:

  19

  A year until last night

  I have lived among trees,

  between flood and ebb-tide,

  going cold and naked

  with no pillow for my head,

  no human company

  and, so help me, God,

  no spear and no sword!

  No sweet talk with women.

  Instead, I pine

  for cresses, for 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 shirking this fate;

  no sleep, no respite,

  no hope for a long time.

  No house humming full,

  no men, loud with good will,

  nobody to call me king,

  no drink or banqueting.

  A great gulf yawns now

  between me and that retinue,

  between craziness and reason.

  Scavenging through the glen

  on my mad royal visit:

  no pomp or king’s circuit

  but wild scuttles in the wood.

  Heavenly saints! O Holy God!

  No skilled musicians’ cunning,

  no soft discoursing women,

  no open-handed giving;

  my doom to be a long dying.

  Far other than to-night,

  far different my plight

  the times when with firm hand

  I ruled over a good land.

  Prospering, smiled upon,

  curbing some great steed,

  I rode high, on the full tide

  of good luck and kingship.

  That tide has come and gone

  and spewed me up in Glen Bolcain,

  disabled now, outcast

  for the way I sold my Christ,

  fallen almost through death’s door,

  drained out, spiked and torn,

  under a hard-twigged bush,

  the brown, jaggy hawthorn.

  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.

  Fallen from noble heights,

  grieving and astray,

  a year until last night.

  20 He remained in that state in Glen Bolcain until at last he mustered his strength and flew to Cloonkill on the borders of Bannagh and Tyrconnell. That night he went to the edge of the well for a drink of water and a bite of watercress and after that he went into the old tree by the church. That was a very bad night for Sweeney. There was a terrible storm and he despaired, saying:

  —It is a pity I wasn’t killed at Moira instead of having to put up with hardship like this.

  Then he said this poem:

  21

  To-night the snow is cold.

  I was at the end of my tether

  but hunger and bother

  are endless.

  Look at me, broken

  and down-at-heel,

  Sweeney from Rasharkin.

  Look at me now

  always shifting,

  making fresh pads,

  and always at night.

  At times I am afraid.

  In the grip of dread

  I would launch and sail

  beyond the known seas.

  I am the madman of Glen Bolcain,

  wind-scourged, stripped

  like a winter tree

  clad in black frost

  and frozen snow.

  Hard grey branches

  have torn my hands,

  the skin of my feet

  is in strips from briars

  and the pain of frostbite

  has put me astray,

  from Slemish to Slieve Gullion,

  from Slieve Gullion to Cooley.

  I went raving with grief

  on the top of Slieve Patrick,

  from Glen Bolcain to Islay,

  from Kintyre to Mourne.

  I waken at dawn

  with a fasting spittle:

  then at Cloonkill, a bunch of cress,

  at Kilnoo, the cuckoo flower.

  I wish I lived safe

  and sound in Rasharkin

  and not here, heartbroken,

  in my bare pelt, at bay in the snow.

  22 Sweeney kept going until he reached the church at Swim-Two-Birds on the Shannon, which is now called Cloonburren; he arrived there on a Friday, to be exact. The clerics of the church w
ere 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 to-night.

  Then he uttered the poem:

  23

  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 God, 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

  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.

  24 The next day Sweeney went on to St. Derville’s church, west of Erris, where he fed on watercress and drank the water that was in the church. The night was tempestuous, and he was shaken with grief at his misery and deprivation. He was also homesick for Dal-Arie and spoke these verses:

  25

  I pined the whole night

  in Derville’s chapel

  for Dal-Arie

  and peopled the dark

  with a thousand ghosts.

  My dream restored me:

  the army lay at Drumfree

  and I came into my kingdom,

  camped with my troop,

  back with Faolchu and Congal

  for our night at Drumduff.

  Taunters, will-o’-the-wisps,

  who saw me brought to heel

  at Moira, you crowd my head

  and fade away

  and leave me to the night.

  26 Sweeney wandered Ireland for all of the next seven years until one night he arrived back in Glen Bolcain. That was his ark and his Eden, where he would go to ground and would only leave when terror struck. He stayed there that night and the next morning Lynchseachan arrived looking for him. Some say Lynchseachan was a half-brother of Sweeney’s, some say he was a foster-brother, but whichever he was, he was deeply concerned for Sweeney and brought him back three times out of his madness.

  This time Lynchseachan was after him in the glen and found his footprints on the bank of the stream where Sweeney would go to eat watercress. He also followed the trail of snapped branches where Sweeney had shifted from tree to tree. But he did not catch up that day, so he went into a deserted house in the glen and lay down, fatigued by all his trailing and scouting. Soon he was in a deep sleep.

  Then Sweeney, following the tracks of his tracker, was led to the house and stood listening to the snores of Lynchseachan; and consequently he came out with this poem:

  27

  I dare not sink down, snore and fall

  fast asleep like the man at the wall,

  I who never batted an eye

  during the seven years since Moira.

  God of Heaven! Why did I go

  battling out that famous Tuesday

  to end up changed into Mad Sweeney,

  roosting alone up in the ivy?

  From the well of Drum Cirb, watercress

  supplies my bite and sup at terce;

  its juices that have greened my chin

  are Sweeney’s markings and birth-stain.

  And the manhunt is an expiation.

  Mad Sweeney is on the run

  and sleeps curled beneath a rag

  under the shadow of Slieve League—

  long cut off from the happy time

  when I lived apart, an honoured name;

  long exiled from those rushy hillsides,

  far from my home among the reeds.

  I give thanks to the King above

  whose harshness only proves His love

  which was outraged by my offence

  and shaped my new shape for my sins—

  a shape that flutters from the ivy

  to shiver under a winter sky,

  to go drenched in teems of rain

  and crouch under thunderstorms.

  Though I still have life, haunting deep

  in the yew glen, climbing mountain slopes,

  I would swop places with Congal Claon,

  stretched on his back among the slain.

  My life is steady lamentation

  that the roof over my head has gone,

  that I go in rags, starved and mad,

  brought to this by the power of God.

  It was sheer madness to imagine

  any life outside Glen Bolcain—

  Glen Bolcain, my pillow and heart’s ease,

  my Eden thick with apple trees.

  What does he know, the man at the wall,

  how Sweeney survived his downfall?

  Going stooped through the long grass.

  A sup of water. Watercress.

  Summering where herons stalk.

  Wintering out among wolf-packs.

  Plumed in twigs that green and fall.

  What does he know, the man at the wall?

  I who once camped among mad friends

  in Bolcain, that happy glen of winds

  and wind-borne echoes, live miserable

  beyond the dreams of the man at the wall.

  28 After that poem he arrived, on the following night, at a mill owned by Lynchseachan. The caretaker of the mill was Lynchseachan’s mother-in-law, an old woman called Lonnog, daughter of Dubh Dithribh. When Sweeney went in to see her she gave him a few scraps to eat and so, for a long time, he kept coming back to the mill.

  One day when Lynchseachan was out trailing him, he caught sight of Sweeney by the mill-stream, and went to speak to the old woman.

  —Has Sweeney come to the mill? said Lynchseachan.

  —He was here last night, said the woman.

  Lynchseachan then disguised himself as his mother-in-law and sat on in the mill after she had gone, until Sweeney arrived that night. But when Sweeney saw the eyes under the shawl, he recognized Lynchseachan and at once sprang out of his reach and up through the skylight, saying:

  —This is a pitiful jaunt you are on, Lynchseachan, hunting me from every place I love in Ireland. Don’t you know Ronan has left me with the fears of a bird, so I cannot trust you? I am exasperated at the way you are constantly after me.

  And he made this poem:

  29

  Lynchseachan, you are a bother.

  Leave me alone, give me peace.

  Is it not enough that Ronan doomed me

  to live furtive and suspicious?

  When I let fly that fatal spear

  at Ronan in the heat of battle

  it split his holy breastplate open,

  it dented his cleric’s bell.

  When I nailed him in the battle

  with one magnificent spear-cast,

  —Let the freedom of the birds be yours!

  was how he prayed, Ronan the priest.

  And I rebounded off his prayer

  up, up and up, flying through air

  lighter and nimbler and far higher

  than I would ever fly again.

  To see me in my morning glory

  that Tuesday morning, turn time back;

  still in my min
d’s eye I march out

  in rank, in step with my own folk.

  But now with my own eyes I see

  something more miraculous even:

  under the hood of a woman’s shawl,

  the shifty eyes of Lynchseachan.

  30 —All you intend is to make me ridiculous, he said. Leave off, harass me no more but go back to your own place and I will go on to see Eorann.

  31 When Sweeney deserted the kingship, his wife had gone to live with Guaire. There had been two kinsmen with equal rights to the kingship Sweeney had abandoned, two grandsons of Scannlan’s called Guaire and Eochaidh. At that time, Eorann was with Guaire and they had gone hunting through the Fews towards Edenterriff in Cavan. His camp was near Glen Bolcain, on a plain in the Armagh district.

  Sweeney landed on the lintel of Eorann’s hut and spoke to her: