Drimin Dhu

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 380, 4 October 1946, Page 11

Drimin Dhu

MAN who would lament the loss of this wife to his favourite cow may seem to us like a figure out of Cold Comfort Farm-where, you may recall, there is a dotard named Adam continually deploring the way of the world in communion with Graceless, Feckless, Aimless, and other sympathetic kine. But we would be wrong. That such an act may be as natural and moving as the running of water was proved in a 3YA broadcast by that indefatigable and sensitive unearther of folk-songs, Gerald Christeller. In a programme of "Songs of the Four Nations,’ he presented an Irish peasant song-part translated from Erse-the title of which I have 8 aarp to this paragraph; it means dear black cow," and recurs as a ot The picture it calls up is unexpectedly vivid and moving-a man, left alone in his house, gone out to do the milking ‘(which ‘in a peasant home would be the task of the wife) singing quietly as he works. The song says nothing ofall this -it is a simple lament for the departed, with all the oddly felicitous gift of the Celt for fresh and effective comparison; and at the end of each verse the Erse words: "O dear black cow, my grief will last for ever." Not only the merits of the song and its presentation place us in Mr. Christeller’s debt, but the reminder that a way of life existed in which aman might sincerely and without oldeworldishness sing to his beasts and make their presence part of the fabric of his emotion and the means of its expression.