Three That Are Watching My Time to Run

Three That Are Watching My Time to RunAuthor(s): James StewartSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring, 1979), pp. 112-118Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477268 .

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James Stewart

Three That Are Watching My Time to Run

"Three that are watching my time to run, The Worm, the Devil, and my son, To see a loop around their neck, It's that would make my heart to lep!"

croons Nanny over the prostrate Martin in "The Unicorn from the

Stars".1

The commentators have not been helpful, Jeffares and Knowland

saying nothing about it, Saul simply that it is "an old Irish verse".2 In fact, the quatrain is a rendering of the opening of an Irish "bar

dic" poem of the seventeenth century which is common in Gaelic

manuscripts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Royal Irish Academy alone there are some three dozen versions, containing as a rule six or seven quatrains. Standish Hayes O'Grady included a

translation of a six-quatrain version in the first volume of the

Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum. This transla

tion of what O'Grady describes as "witty verses by a sort of pes

simist, on the market value of his body, of his soul and of his wealth", reads:3

Three that narrowly watch for my death, and they

incessantly occupied about me: pity it is but to hang them on a tree ? the Devil, my children, and the worm!

The body, the soul, and the substance, when I

like all the rest am turned to clay: upon these it is that the aforesaid trio have their eye

1 W.B. Yeats, The Collected Plays (London:Macmillan, 1953), p. 370.

2 A. Norman Jeffares and A.S. Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats

(London?Macmillan, 1975); George Brandon Saul, Prolegomena to the Study of Yeats's Plays (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), p. 66.

3 Ibid., p. 628. For other British Museum versions, another in a Trinity College Dublin

manuscript, H.2.6 (1715) and an early printing, see Robin Flower, Catalogue of Irish

Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: printed for the Trustees of the British Museum, 1926), II, 68.

See, too, Thomas F. O'Rahilly, Measgra Danta, II (Cork: Cork University Press, 1927), 186; Breand?n ? Buachalla, Ciar na L?mhscribhinni Gaeilge i Leabharlann Phoibli Bheal Feirsde

(Baile Atha Cliath:An Cl?chomhar, 1962), pp. 2, 4, 40; P?draig de Br?n, Catalogue of Irish

Manuscripts in the King's Inns Library, Dublin (Dublin?Institute of Advanced Studies, 1972), p. 12; P?draig O Fiannachta, L?mhscribhinni Gaeilge Chol?iste Ph?draig, Ma Nuad, Cl?r, VII

(M? Nuad, 1972), 170; Nessa Ni Sh?aghdha, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the National

Library of Ireland, II (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1961), 41, 51. Details of the

Royal Irish Academy versions (too many to give here) will be most conveniently found by using the Indexes to the catalogue of manuscripts there, compiled by Kathleen Mulchrone and others.

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THREE THAT ARE WATCHING MY TIME TO RUN

fixed, and certain it is that so it will always be.

No individual of the three (perverse a conduct as it is) would for both their shares united make over to the other two that one which should come

within his grasp.

The Devil, that is cruel of disposition ? the

man that would not have aught but evil ? in lieu

of the cheerful gentle soul he would not accept

body and gear together.

The worms ? a most sad thing it is to say ? were

my poll laid in mould, would possess my body rather than my poor soul and my fortune.

Close to them as my kinship is, my children would

prefer to be this very night seized of my pelf before my soul and body all in one.

O Christ that wast hung on a tree, and wounded

by the blind and ignorant: seeing that they are on the watch to spoil me, pity but there

were a gad on the three!

Nobody knows who wrote the poem. As a rule it is given

anonymously. Sometimes, Uke so much else, it is ascribed to Don

nchadh Mor ? D?laigh or to "O D?laigh Fionn", or just "? Dala". In the Royal Irish Academy manuscripts,

for instance, Donnchadha Mor is given as author three times, O D?laigh Fionn six times. In one

manuscript there, the eighteenth century 23 L 24, it is ascribed to one

? Maoil-chiar?in. Robin Flower, in the work cited, thinks the attribu

tion in the Trinity College Dublin manuscript H.2.6. (1715) to Giol labhrighde (5 hEoghusa more probable. T.F. O'Rahilly, however,

thought this and the other ascriptions unreUable. In editing the poem in Measgra Danta (no. 75), he pointed out that a version of it was

published by the Irish Franciscan, Francis O'Molloy, in his Gram

matica Latino-ffibernica which was printed in Rome in 1676 or

1677. Eoghan O Caoimh, writing early in the following century,4 (c.

4 In Royal Irish Academy manuscript 23 M 34, p. 606.

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A FESTSCHRIFT FOR ROGER McHUGH

1707), believed that O'Molloy had written the poem, and O'Rahilly5 remarks that "the fact that all extant Ms versions seem to be later in

date than O'Molloy's lends colour to O Caoimh's belief. O'Rahilly concludes: "The poem is certainly a seventeenth-century composition, and the evidence would point to O'Molloy as the author."

The poem is not, however, included in the anthology of Franciscan verse in Gaelic which appeared a decade ago6, suggesting that Franciscan scholarship of today has reservations about the ascription ? and with good reason: the existence of a copy of the poem which is earlier than the Rome printing. This, as Fr Parthal?n Mac Aog?in

OFM has been good enough to point out to me, is in a G?ttingen

manuscript ? Codex Hist. Gottingensis 773 which is dated 1659 and

where the poem is anonymous. Through the good offices of Fr Mac

Aog?in, and of Professor O Cu?v (who, in the absence of Fr Cuthbert, is seeing the second volume o? Dan na mBrathar through the press), I

have been able to see a proof of the editor's note on this poem. In this he rejects all the manuscript ascriptions of authorship, including that in another Trinity College Dublin Ms, H.5.11 from ca.1704, to one

Maoilire Brun, and that to Bonaventura (=Giollabhrighde) ?

hEoghusa, concluding that we just do not know who wrote the poem.

Theoretically at least, Yeats could have seen the poem in O'Mol

loy's Rome printing; in John O'Donovan's Grammar of the Irish

Language7 of 1848,8 in The Gaelic Journal II (1885, p. 304), in An L?ightheoir Gaedhealach, brought out in 1907 by Peadar Mac Fhionnlaoich and others, or, as Professor O Cu?v reminds me, in

Thom?s ? Flannghaile's publication of O'Molloy's De prosodia hibernica which appeared in 1908, the date ascribed to the "Unicorn from the Stars".9 Or he could have seen it in the 1868 printing of

Tadhg Gaedhealach ? S?illeabh?in's Pious Miscellany, said to have been among "the most widely circulated of all Gaelic publications

5 Ibid., p. 228.

6 Cuthbert Mh?g Craith, OFM (editor), Dan na mBr?thar Mion?r, I (Dublin: Institute for Ad vanced Studies, 1967).

7 P. 425.

8 Alluded to by Rudolf Thurneysen in Wilhelm Meyer, Die Handschriften in G?ttingen (Berlin, 1893), p. 259.

9 De Prosodia Hibernica, On Irish Prosody, a reissue of part of O'Molloy's Grammatica. See Parthalan Mac Aog?in, OFM, Graimeir Ghaeilge na mBr?thar Mion?r (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1968), p. 155. Colin Meir, The Ballads and Songs of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 75 states that The Unicorn from the Stars was written and first performed in 1907. Peter Ure, Yeats the

Playwright (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 176 is of the same opinion.

114




before our own time", and one that was known to Yeats.10 For that

matter, he could have seen it in O'Grady's catalogue of Irish

manuscripts in the British Museum, cited above. For, although not

published in book form until 1926, O'Grady's part of the catalogue had been printed and made available in sheets in the Museum for the

use of scholars since the eighteen-nineties.11 He could have drawn on the same source for what looks like a

resume of the poem which he included in an essay on "The Celtic Ele

ment in Literature", dated 1897. Ascribed to "an Elizabethan Irish

poet", this reads:

Three things are waiting for my death. The Devil, who is waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my wealth; the

worms who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my soul or my wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth

and care nothing for my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all

three in the one noose.12

Equally well, however, Yeats could have based both resume and

quatrain on Douglas Hyde's The Religious Songs of Connacht. For,

though not published in book form until 1906 (early enough for the

quatrain but not for the resume), this work had an earlier incarnation

in serial form in The New Ireland Review, a version of the poem, with

translations, appearing in Volume III, 1895, some two years before

Yeats's essay.13 Hyde's literal translation of the opening quatrain reads:

Three there are watching for my death

Though they are always with me (?)

10 Aodh de Blacam, Gaelic Literature Surveyed (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1929), p. 331. Cf. Aodh de

Blacam, A First Book of Irish Literature (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1934), p. 138, and Riste?rd O

Foghludha, Tadhg Gaedhlach (t? S?illeabh?in), (Baile Atha Cliath C.S. O Fallamhain Ted, 1929). For Yeats's allusions to the Pious Miscellany, see Michael J. Sidnell, "Versions of the

Stories of Red Hanrahan" in Robert O'Driscoll and Lorna Reynolds (editors), Yeats Studies

(Irish University Press: Shannon, 1971) Number 1, p. 147.

11 Standish H. O'Grady, Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the British Museum (London: Printed for the Trustees of the British Museum, 1926), Preface.

12 W.B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1937; 1961 reprint), p. 181. In a later essay included (p. 512) in the same volume, Yeats alludes to O'Grady's cataloguing ac tivities. In "J.M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time", 1910, (p. 337) he quotes a different form of "the Gaelic poet's curse upon his children."

13 According to Fase. VI, 1931, of the Catalogue of Irish Manuscripts in the R oyal Irish A cademy, edited by Kathleen Mulchrone, the miscellaneous MS 23 I 23 contains a six-quatrain version of the poem, followed by an English version (beginning: "Three foes I have, impatient for my death".) Being unpublished, it can hardly have influenced Yeats. Other published renderings may have escaped my notice.

115




It is a pity that they are not hanged with a gad, The Devil, the Children, and the Worm.

His "literary" rendering, intended to convey something of the metre

of the original, reads:

There be three ? my heart it saith

Wish the death of me infirm, Would that they were hanged on tree, All three, Children, Devil, Worm.14

Neither is near Yeats's versified form (though the second Uke Yeats's, includes a "heart", and gratuitously at that), but it seems that it was

on one of them that Yeats based his racy rendering, assuming that the

rendering is his at all. For, though we keep referring to the "Unicorn

from the Stars" as Yeats's, and presumably must, and he continued to

let it appear over his sole name, the play really is a joint effort. As he

himself conceded when he wrote the oft-quoted lines: "Though 'The

Unicorn' is almost altogether Lady Gregory's writing it has far more

of my spirit in it than 'Where There is Nothing' which she and I and Douglas Hyde wrote in a fortnight to keep George Moore from steal

ing the plot".15 And again: "The result is a play almost wholly hers in

handiwork, which is so much mine in thought that she does not wish

to include it in her own works".16

This might appear to afford a reasonable solution: that Lady

Gregory's contribution to the writing of the "Unicorn from the Stars"

included our quatrain. Yet there is room for doubt. First, Vivian Mer

cier has adduced evidence suggesting that Hyde contributed to both

stages in the genesis of the "Unicorn from the Stars".17 Also, verse

14 Douglas Hyde, The Religious Songs of Connacht (London, Un win 1906; reprinted Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), pp. 50-51, 396. New Ireland Review, III, (Dublin, 1895), 385. As

Mr Munch-Pedersen has reminded me, Colin Meir, The Ballads and Songs of W.B. Yeats

(London: Macmillan, 1974) p. 75, compares the quatrain in The Unicorn from the Stars with

Hyde's literal rendering. He makes no mention, however, of Yeats's resume, of Gaelic versions, or O'Grady's text and translation.

15 Allan Wade (editor), The Letters of W.B. Yeats (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 503. Letter of 12 February 1908. See, too, Elizabeth Coxhead, Lady Gregory (London: Macmillan,

1961), pp. 109-110.

16 W.B. Yeats, "The Unicorn from the Stars" in Plays in Prose and Verse (London: Macmiljan, 1922), pp. 246-7. See, too, Daniel J. Murphy, "Lady Gregory Co-Author and Sometimes

Author of the Plays of W.B. Yeats" in J.D. Brophy and R.J. Porter (editors), Modern Irish

Literature, Essays in Honor of W. York Tindall (Kiew York: Library of Irish Studies I, 1972), pp. 46-7.

17 Vivian Mercier, "Douglas Hyde's 'Share' in The Unicorn from the Stars' ", Modern Drama, VII: 4 (February 1965), 463-5. It is of interest to note that the quatrain "O, the lion shall lose his strength", etc. in The Unicorn

116




translation was not really Lady Gregory's Une, whereas it was

Hyde's: several of his books afford lots of examples (of the type quoted) of his efforts to convey an idea of the rhyme, etc. of the

originals. The rhyme "neck: lep" is perfect, in Gaelic terms, as Profes sor O Cu?v reminds me, and rather un Yeatsian. So, of the two pos sibilities that suggest themselves: that the quatrain represents Hyde's second thoughts, or Lady Gregory's first, the former seems more

plausible. But it is remarkable to have to leave the matter of authorship with

two unanswered questions: who wrote the original Irish and who wrote the translation? Of the two, the former is the more difficult, there being a half dozen or so contenders, while for the honour of hav

ing composed the modern four Unes, there is a mere trio of claimants!

And of the three, one may almost certainly be ruled out ? the one

whose name the play bears.

Like much else in the Irish tradition, the Irishness of this item is relative. For the theme, as two Celtic scholars18, working

independently, noted, occurs as a proverbial saying in medieval Latin:

Dum moritur dives, mox crescunt tres ibi Utes:

Demon vult animam, consanguinei quoque gazam; Vermibus in terra crescit pro corpore guerra.19

And, as O'Rahilly says, the theme was probably suggested by Ecclesiastes X, 13: "For when a man shall die, he shall inherit serpents, and beasts and worms"20. As its immediate inspiration he suggests some passage such as one of the HomiUes preserved in the Lebor

Brecc (ca. 1400). In Atkinson's translation, this reads: "As Solomon

says, in Ecclesiasticus, 'there are three heirs of a usurer: beasts and

serpents and worms; his treasures remain with the beasts, viz. the

friends of the flesh; his soul is left with the poisonous serpents, the devils; his body comes to the worms; and not one of these wiU give up

from the Stars Act II (Collected Plays, p. 364) and Poets and Dreamers, p. 89, has been taken, with only slight changes, from The Religious Songs ofConnacht, I, 261. Peter Ure, ibid., p. 133 seems to regard The Unicorn from the Stars as Lady Gregory's work.

18 "Robin Flower and Thomas F. O'Rahilly in the works cited.

19 Quoted by both Robin Flower and Thomas F. O'Rahilly for J. Werner's Lateinische

Sprichworter und Sinnspruche des Mittelalters (Heidelberg, 1912), p. 24, no. 170 from Basel

manuscript A.XL67.

20 One might compare Alexander Neckam's celebrated derivation of cadaver from ca(\n caro) plus da(m data) plus ver(m vermibus), that is caro data vermibus, in Thomas Wright (editor De Naturis Rerum (London, 1863), p. xiii.

117




its own share for the other two portions".21 Yeats's friend and collaborator, Frank O'Connor, included a

translation of the whole poem in his Kings, Lords and Commons.22

Like "Yeats", he rhymes "run" and "son" in the opening stanza:

Three things seek my death, Hard at my heels they run ?

Hang them, sweet Christ, all three,

Devil, maggot and son.

So the appeal of the theme for Irish poets, persists, as seems ap

propriate to point out in the tercentenary year of its first appearance in print in versified Irish.

21 Robert Atkinson, The Passions and HomiUes from Leabhar Breac (Dublin: Royal Irish

Academy, 1887), p. 487. The theme recurs in another, Irish homiletic text, the late seventeenth

century Parliament na mBan, lines 3152-3 of Brian O Cuiv's edition (Dublin: Institute for Ad vanced Studies, 1952). British Museum manuscript Add. 31876 contains a version of Parliament na mBan and of our poem. See Robin Flower, ibid., p. 595. Reviewing O Cuiv's edition, in Catholic Survey, 11:1 (Galway, Spring 1955), 140, Fr P?draig ? S?illeabh?in OFM pointed to the occurrence of the theme in the writings of St Bonaventure.

22 New York, 1959; London 1960, p. 76.

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