Top Irish Poem Number 82: A Drover By Padraic Colum

Another top Irish poem. This one is ranked number 82: A Drover, by Padraic Colum

Padraic Colum appears quite regularly on the top 100 Irish poems. In fact, his Irish poems make an appearance 7 times! Two weeks ago I was sharing his deeply emotional poem “A Cradle Song“.

He truly is a great poet and I do enjoy his poems. Some parts of this poem are less clear than others but overall the atmosphere is simple and beautiful.

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Some notes on the poem A Drover by Padraic Colum:

This poem is spoken in the voice of a cattle drover and set in the early part of the 20th century.

They walked with the cattle from the poor land of the west of Ireland to the richer lands of the east, where the cattle were fattened before being slaughtered for meat.

The lands of the west wouldn’t have allowed the cattle to thrive.

The drover would usually walk alone for the best part of 100 miles or so.

The reference to the King of Spain’s daughter may refer to help from overseas to defeat the British, as it was common to refer to help as coming from the King of Spain.

This Irish poem was taught in Irish primary schools and many still remember it.nbsp;

A Drover By Padraic Colum

To Meath of the pastures,
From wet hills by the sea,

A Drover is spoken by a cattle drover walking his herd east from the wet hills of the west, through the Midlands, to the rich grazing land of Meath. It is a poem of the road: dark nights, bogs and winding lanes, and the close bond between a man and the animals in his care.

As he walks, his mind wanders to romance and rescue from across the sea. He measures his own life against the settled farmer and the marching soldier and feels a quiet pride in his freedom, and in his gift for handling the herd.

The ending is tender. Richer grass lies ahead, but he senses that the herd, like him, belongs to the hard, salty ground of home. Colum was born in Co. Longford in 1881, and the poem appeared in his first collection, Wild Earth, in 1907.

A Drover is still in copyright, so I can’t print the full poem here. You will find it in Wild Earth (Maunsel, 1907) and in The Collected Poems of Padraic Colum (Devin-Adair, 1953).