School: Cromadh (B.)

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1. Local Traditions - Miscellaneous

   

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   Fragment of a song once popular in this district:-

   
   "Near yonder green mountains where the silver streams run,

   There lives a young damsel, she has my heart won,

   Her face is as bright as the May-morning sun,

   She's my nice little girl from Bearna"

   
   I enter the above as being to my mind strikingly like the English version of "An Buachaill Caol Dubh" of Seán Clárach)

   Honey pound (correctly Páirc Buidhe) was apparently the home of one of our local beauties whose charms were the stimulus for a song which began thus:-

   
   You muses nine with me combine and grant me some relief,

   As here alone I sigh and moan o'er-powered with woe and grief.

   
   * * *

   
   Through Caherass groves I've often roved where the birds sweetly sing

   Where the cuckoo and the nightingale do make the valley ring

   The Thrushes and the blackbirds do deck the plains all round

   Whilst here in pain I still remain so far from Honeypound

   
   Mr Michael Kennedy of High St. Croom tells me that he believes this song should not be about Honeypound but a about Mitchelstown, in other words our local rhymester was merely an adaptor, but whether the adaptor or the author, he was better versed in the stressed syllablc mode of Irish metre than in English metrics. For that reason alone, as indicating the then, still surviving effect of Irish syllabic rhyme I have included it here.

   

   Transcribed by a member of our volunteer transcription project.

   History Edit

   Topics

   1. genre
      1. poetry
         1. folk poetry (~9,504)

   Languages

   Irish

   English

   Collector

   Daithí O Ceanntabhail

   Gender

   Male

   Occupation

   Múinteoir

   Informant

   Mr Michael Kennedy

   Gender

   Male

   Address

   Croom, Co. Limerick