Back to Ireland by Moira O’Neill

There are poems that find a man wherever he’s got to, and put the miles he’s travelled in plain sight. Moira O’Neill’s “Back to Ireland” is one of those, and I’ve not been able to set it down since it came back to me this week — the further from home you read it, I find, the harder it tells.

Moira O’Neill was the pen name of Agnes Higginson (1864–1955) — Nesta, to her own people. She was born away in Mauritius, where her father was posted, but reared from a child at Rockport, Cushendun, in the Glens of Antrim, and it was the Glens that made the poet of her. The name on the verse is invented; the place in it is as real as rain.

Here is the thing that gives a poem like this one its ache: she wrote the best of her verse a long way from any glen at all. In 1895 she married and went out with her husband to a cattle ranch in Alberta, and there, with the whole width of Canada and the Atlantic between her and home, she grew homesick for Ireland — and above everything else for the sea. The poems were the cure, or the nearest thing to one she had. They were gathered up as Songs of the Glens of Antrim, with a second helping years after; and more than one was set to music and sung, which is a fair sign the words were half-singing themselves already.

She got her wish in the end and came home for good, to Wexford — though Ireland repaid the longing strangely enough, for their house there was burned in the troubles of 1921. Her daughter, as it happens, grew up to write novels as Molly Keane, but that’s a road for another day. And you’ll notice O’Neill sets the Glens speech down as she heard it — thravel for travel, the say for the sea — the old talk of the country people, kept deliberate and fond.

I’ve been a long while out of Ireland myself, longer now than I care to count, and a poem written out of someone else’s homesickness has a way of standing in for your own. That north coast brings back more than I’ll set down here.

Back to Ireland

Oh, tell me, will I ever get to Ireland again,
Achray – from the far North-West?
Have we given all the rainbows, an’ the green woods an’ rain,
For the suns an’ the snows o’ the West?
“Them that goes to Ireland must thravel night an’ day,
An’ them that goes to Ireland must sail across the say:
For the len’th of here to Ireland is half the world away –
An’ you’ll lave your heart behind you in the West.
Set your face for Ireland,
Kiss your friends in Ireland,
But lave your heart behind you in the West.”

On a fine an’ shiny mornin’ the ship she comes to land,
Early, oh, early in the mornin’,
The silver wathers o’ the Foyle go slidin’ to the strand,
Whisperin’ “Ye’re welcome in the mornin’.”
There’s darkness on the holy hills I know are close aroun’,
But the stars are shinin’ up the sky, the stars are shinin’ down;
They make a golden cross above, they make a golden crown,
An’ meself could tell ye why, – in the mornin’,
Sure an’ this is Ireland,
Thank God for Ireland!
I’m coming back to Ireland in the morning’.