William Allingham was born in 1824 in Ballyshannon, a little Donegal town, where his ancestors had lived for generations.Here he grew up, filling his mind with all the quaint legends and fancies that linger still in such odd corners of the world,and with that devotion for the place where he was born, felt by few people so intensely as by the Irish. When he was old enough,a small post in the Customs was found for him, and there seemed every likelihood of his spending an obscure life in
a little town
Where little folk go up and down.1
In his twenty-sixth year his first volume, Poems, was issued, and, four years later, in 1854, the first series of those Day and Night Songs, which contain so many of his best lyrics. The Music Master and a new series of ‘Day and Night Songs’ followed in 1855.2 From 1848 it had been his custom to cross over to London every summer. In one of these visits he had met Rossetti, and beenintroduced by him to Millais and the rest of the pre-Raphaelites. Rossetti and Millais now illustrated The Music Master with the fine drawings reprinted in the collected edition of Allingham’s works.3 It was followed by Laurence Bloomfield—an agrarian epic—and Fifty Modern Poems, containing his last Ballyshannon verses, in 1864 and 1865 respectively.4 During these years he had also published poems in Ballyshannon itself, by means of broadsheets, which had a wide circulationamong the peasantry. The Government considered this local popularity of his verse useful to education, and rewarded him witha pension of £60 a year.
He now left Ballyshannon for London, and either because his imagination flagged among the London crowds, or because he had said all that was in him to say, or for some other reasonnot so easy to trace, he ceased to write any poetry as good as the old, and little poetry of any kind. He busied himself withrevising, not always happily, his earlier verses, and republishing them from time to time. In 1874 he was appointed editorof Fraser’s†, and printed in its pages his one prose book, The Rambles of Patricius Walker, an account of his journeys through English country places.5 In the same year he married Miss Helen Paterson, the well-known artist. Among his few poetical ventures in these later yearswere Ashby Manor, a play written in alternate prose and verse, limpid and graceful, but quite lacking in true passion and dramatic energy;and Evil May Day, a heavy argumentative experiment in philosophic poetry.6 He had almost quite lost the light touch and flying fancy of his younger days, and but seldom gave any echo of the old beautyin stray lyric or haphazard snatch of rhyme. The last years of his life were spent mainly at Witley†,7 where he died in 1889, after a somewhat long illness, brought on by a fall when riding.
To feel the entire fascination of his poetry, it is perhaps necessary to have spent one’s childhood, like the present writer,in one of those little seaboard Connaught towns. He has expressed that curious devotion of the people for the earth undertheir feet, a devotion that is not national, but local, a thing at once more narrow and more idyllic. He sang Ballyshannonand not Ireland. Neither his emotions nor his thoughts took any wide sweep over the world of man and nature. He was the poetof little things and little moments, and of that vague melancholy Lord Palmerston considered peculiar to the peasantry ofthe wild seaboard where he lived.8 In one of the rare moments of quaint inspiration that came to him in recent years, he wrote—
Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing;
What a little thing
To remember for years—
To remember with tears!
and in the words summed up unconsciously his own poetic personality. The charm of his work is everywhere the charm of straymoments and detached scenes that have moved him; the pilot’s daughter in her Sunday frock; the wake with the candles roundthe corpse, and a cloth under the chin; the ruined Abbey of Asaroe, an old man who was of the blood of those who founded it,watching sadly the crumbling walls; girls sewing and singing under a thorn tree; the hauling in of the salmon nets; the soundof a clarionet through the open and ruddy shutter of a forge, the piano from some larger house, and so on, a rubble of oldmemories and impressions made beautiful by pensive feeling.9 Exquisite in short lyrics, this method of his was quite inadequate to keep the interest alive through a long poem. Laurence Bloomfield, for all its stray felicities, is dull, and The Music Master and ‘The Lady of the Sea’ are tame and uninventive.10 He saw neither the great unities of God or of man, of his own spiritual life or of the life of the nation about him, butlooked at all through a kaleidoscope full of charming accidents and momentary occurrences. In greater poets everything hasrelation to the national life or to profound feeling; nothing is an isolated artistic moment; there is a unity everywhere,everything fulfils a purpose that is not its own; the hailstone is a journeyman of God, and the grass blade carries the universeupon its point.11 But, then, if Allingham had had this greater virtue, he might have lost that which was peculiar to himself, and we mightnever have had the ‘Twilight Voices’ or ‘Mary Donnelly’, or that bitter-sweet exile ballad ‘The Winding Banks of Erne’.12