Three years ago the walls
of the Bastille were breached
and today the Irish Volunteers,
Protestant and Papist,
march down a Belfast Street,
fire three feux de joie,
then enter the Linen Hall
to forge a new state
through keen debate.

Nearby, in the Exchange Rooms,
an old order seems to breathe its last—
eleven harpers, six blind,
have taken their several paths
to Doctor MacDonnell’s festival of harps.

The eldest is blind Denis Hempson,
last player in the old style,
who plucks brass strings with crooked nails,

then blind, dapper Arthur O’Neill,
who has given away his spare good suit
to harper Pat McAlinden of Oriel,
who went rambling and won’t arrive;

here is blind Rose Mooney whose feckless maid
once pawned her mistress’s harp
and best petticoat for drink;
and there is harper Williams from Wales,
fated to die, too soon, on the grey-green waves

and, listen, here is young William Carr
who plays ‘The Dawn of Day’.

The other six, come-down gentlemen some,
are dressed in grey or drab-coloured cloth.
Their old patrons are generations gone
to France, to Spain, to the tuneless grave,

but the old music still travels
Ireland’s metalled
and unmetalled roads
played to all,
regardless of creed or name,
who esteem music and song,
and keep a house good enough
to afford bed, board and maybe drink
to a harper for a week or a month.

A good hostess might, with luck,
be repaid with a tune in her name,
fine enough to catch the ear
and be held in trust
by some country piper or fiddler

or even by the very young man—
a musical prodigy it is agreed,
an opinionated youth, a few claim—
who now moves among the harpers,
steady as a bee-keeper,
jotting down air after air,
noting shakes and graces,
double slurs and turns, delighting
in the most ancient tunes,
seeking out the nimble felicities
of the harper’s art.

Gentry of the first fashion,
from Belfast and its environs
pay half a guinea to listen
and look on with attention
and Theobald Wolfe Tone looks in
but his mind is on revolution.

Decades before young Edward Bunting dies
a great French empire will rise and fall;
Wolfe Tone’s revolution will have failed
yet Bunting’s life will still be held in thrall
by this treasure he garners in the Exchange hall.

But now the harpers, mostly old, display
to each other and salvage
airs which remember and relay
griefs, gaieties and passions
of spirits long parted from their clay;

for what do a musician’s hands ever hold
but the hammered treasure of the human soul?