Oh, I am thinking of that song, ‘The Lass of Aughrim’
I am thinking of a person long ago who used to sing that song
It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother
It was a young boy I used to know, named Michael Furey.
He used to sing that song, ‘The Lass of Aughrim’. He was very delicate.
I can see him so plainly. Such eyes as he had. Big dark eyes and such an expression in them.
An expression
I used to go out walking with him when I was in Galway
He's dead now
He died when he was only 17. Isn't it a terrible thing to die as young as that?
I was great with him at that time
I think he died for me
It was in the winter, about the beginning of the winter,
when I was going to leave Galway and come up here to the convent.
And he was ill at the time in his lodgings in Galway,
and wouldn't be let out and his people in Oughterard were written to.
He was in decline, they said or something like that. I never knew rightly
Poor fellow
He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy
We used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel,
the way they do in the country
He was going to study singing only for his health
He had a very good voice
Poor Michael Furey
And then when it came time for me to leave Galway and come up here to the convent he was much worse
and I wouldn't be let in see him so I wrote him a letter
saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer
and hoping he'd be better then
Then the night before I left I was in my grandmother's house in Nun’s Island
packing up
and I heard gravel thrown up against the window
The window was so wet I couldn't see so I ran downstairs as I was
and slipped out the back
into the garden and there was the poor fellow,
at the end of the garden, shivering
I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain
but he said he did not want to live
I can see his eyes as well, as well,
He was standing at the end of the wall, where there's a tree
Yes, he went home
And when I was only a week in the convent he died
And he was buried in Oughterard, where his people came from.
Oh the day I heard that
That he was dead.
She was fast asleep,
Gabriel, leaning on his elbow looked for a few moments unresentfully
on her tangled hair and half open mouth,
listening to her deep drawn breath
So she had that love in her life.
A man had died for her sake.
It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part, he,
her husband, had played in her life.
His curious eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair
And as he thought of what she must have been then in that time of her first girlish beauty,
a strange friendly pity for her entered his soul
He did not like to say even to himself
that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew that it was no longer the face
for which Michael Furey had braved death.
The air of the room chilled his shoulders
He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife.
One by one they were all becoming shades.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion,
then fade and wither dismally with age.
He thought of how she, who lay beside him, had locked in her heart for so many years
that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes.
He had never felt that way himself towards any woman
but he knew that such a feeling must be love.
The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined
he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree.
Other forms were near.
His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.
He was conscious of but could not apprehend their wayward and flickering existence.
His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world.
The solid world itself which these dead had one time lived and reared in
was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps on the pane made him turn to the window.
It had begun to snow again.
He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark,
falling obliquely against the lamplight.
The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.
Yes, the newspapers were right, snow was general all over Ireland.
It was falling on every part of the dark central plain,
on the treeless hills,
falling softly on the Bog of Allen, and further westward,
softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.
It was falling, too, on every part of the lonely churchyard
on the hill
where Michael Furey lay buried.
It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones
on the spears of the little gate,
on the barren thorns.
His soul swooned slowly
as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe
and faintly falling like the descent of their last end.
Upon all the living and the dead.