Galway Bay

The 1947 “Galway Bay” is one of those songs which I’ve heard many times, sung by many respected singers, such as Bing Crosby. But it wasn’t until quite recently, in my seventy-sixth year, that the depth of its mythic quality was brought home to me, and then by a young woman named Chloë Agnew:

She sings of the ladies digging praties (potatoes) in the uplands who speak a language that the strangers do not know and the play of the gossoons (garçons). She sings of the possibility of life hereafter, of the land across the sea, about dehumanization, all that good stuff which is missed by the standard academic, analytic, scientistic, best and brightest, respectable worldview. It has got “England” vs. Ireland in it, too, and the closing of our days.

The closing of my own days is now, to me, given how quickly time is flying. And that has to be why I am now able to be so appreciative of Chloë’s Galway Bay, beside which the other renditions seem so jaded in contrast. But I think also it was necessary for me to live through the absurdities and horrors of the “standard academic, analytic, scientistic, best and brightest, respectable worldview” - for several decades.

It’s as if it were all right there right before my eyes all the time, but that I had to experience hell in order to appreciate it.

Galway Bay

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland,
Then maybe at the closing of your day;
You will sit and watch the moonrise over Claddagh,
And see the sun go down on Galway Bay,
Just to hear again the ripple of the trout stream,
The women in the meadows making hay;
And to sit beside a turf fire in the cabin,
And watch the barefoot gossoons at their play,
For the breezes blowing o'er the seas from Ireland,
Are perfum'd by the heather as they blow;
And the women in the uplands diggin' praties,
Speak a language that the strangers do not know,
For the strangers came and tried to teach their way,
They scorn'd us just for being what we are;
But they might as well go chasing after moonbeams,
Or light a penny candle from a star.
And if there is going to be a life hereafter,
And somehow I am sure there's going to be;
I will ask my God to let me make my heaven,
In that dear land across the Irish sea.