He sang Ballyshannon and not Ireland […] To feel the entire fascination of his poetry, it is perhaps necessary to have spent one’s childhood […] in one of those little seaboard Connaught towns.
W. B. YEATS: in The Poets and the Poetry of the Century, ed. Alfred H. Miles (1892)
Allingham was born in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, and his mother died when he was nine. His father, having run a small shipping business, ferrying timber and slate between Canada and the Baltic, and occasionally carrying Irish emigrants to America, later became a bank manager. William worked as a customs officer in Ireland and in England, where he finally settled in Lymington, Hampshire, in 1863. During his frequent visits to London he formed friendships with Carlyle, Patmore, Rossetti and Tennyson, all of whom feature prominently in his Diary, published posthumously in 1907. Rossetti’s letters to Allingham were edited by Birkbeck Hill in 1897. His first volume of verse, Poems (1850), contained ‘The fairies’ (1849) but sold only forty-three copies; Day and Night Songs appeared in 1854, with illustrations by his Pre-Raphaelite friends, Rossetti, Millais and Arthur Hughes. Having written his penetrating essay on ‘Irish Ballad Singers and Irish Street Ballads’ in 1851, he tried his own hand at the genre with great success. His finest achievement, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland, was published in book form in 1864 – a long poem about a progressive young landlord that deals with oppression, injustice and class antagonism. This huge work – almost 5,000 lines – was quoted by Gladstone in the House of Commons, and earned Allingham a Civil List pension of £60 per annum. Fifty Modern Poems appeared in 1865 and Rambles by Patricius Walker, an account of his travels, in 1873. Having married the water-colourist Helen Paterson, who was twenty-four years his junior, he settled in Chelsea, where, in 1877, he published Songs, Ballads and Stories, which gathered together the best of his shorter verse. His Civil List pension was raised to £100 and he moved to Hampstead, where, after a fall from his horse, he died on 18 November 1889. Letters from W. Allingham to E. B. Browning were published in 1914.
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
Down along the rocky shore
Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs
All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill2 he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses3;
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.
By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn-trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather!
(van Dieren, Foulds, Shaw)