"The Burial" (A Poem)

In his poem, “The Burial,” Reverend James Wills uses the cláirseach, a triangular harp traditional to the Celtic nations, as a symbol for the coming of death, with its melodic tones bringing sorrow.[1]

 

A faint breeze is playing with flowers on the hill,

The blue vault of summer is cloudless and still;

And the vale with the wild bloom of nature is gay,

But the far hills are breathing a sorrowful lay!

 

As winds on the Clairseach’s sad chords when they stream,

As the voice of the dead on the mourner’s dark dream!

Far away, far away, from grey distance it breaks,

First known to the breast by the sadness it wakes.

 

Now lower, now louder, and longer it mourns, –

Now faintly it falls, and now fitful returns;

Now near, and now nearer, it swells on the ear,

The wild ululua, the death-song is near!

 

With slow steps, sad burthen, and wild-uttered wail,

Maid, matron, and cotter wind up from the vale;

And loud lamentations salute the grey hill,

Where their fathers are sleeping, the silent and still!

 

Wild, wildly that wail ringeth back on the air,

From that lone place of tombs, as if spirits were there;

O’er the silent, the still, and the cold they deplore,

They weep for the tearless, whose sorrows are o’er.[2]

 

Works Referenced 

 

Vallely, Fintan, ed. The Companion to Irish Traditional Music. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1999.

 

Wills, James. “The Burial.” The Book of Irish Ballads. Ed. Denis Florence MacCarthy. Dublin: James Duffy and Sons, 1881. 71-72.

____________________

[1] Vallely, 177.

[2] Wills, 71-72.