And in time the man of the house sang. His voice might have been no better than my own, to put it kindly, but when he stood mid-floor, his eyes staring beyond the wall, his chest full, and his hands clenched, I lost all sense of time, hardly knowing whether I was myself now or a thousand years ago. The simple interior might have been a thousand years old, except that then the fire would have been in the middle of the floor, like a camp fire, or the fire of a million years ago.

How the eyes of the lads glistened when Eoin told his stories! They had been shy of their father’s singing, but Eoin was the bard himself, carrying the strange birds of life about with him in his pockets. At any moment he could let the strangest one flutter in their faces. You could see the wings of excitement tickle their skin and flash in their eyes, while their thin arms circled their bodies like withies a lobster-pot.

But the great gift of the evening was the woman’s song. It was as unselfconscious as the sea, and had a note of legend in it old as the earth. We were far beyond criticism of singing as singing. As though one should pause to criticise the tone of a cry of terror or joy, as though tragedy or beauty could express itself only through the mask of a perfect face! None of these art tricks, here, where the elementals lived unconditionally, and the queer fleering break in a harsh voice could set cold bird-feet walking on sorrow’s race!

In the effect it has on the minds of native singer and listener there is something about this Gaelic folk-song that transcends purely musical or intellectual values, though that something may be impossible to define. Indeed the effect can be most disturbing, most profound, when the rhythm, sustained by meaningless or exclamatory syllables, repeats itself in a monotony growing so surcharged that it almost becomes unbearable (cf. ubban, ubhan . . . in the song, Grigal Cridbe); so that it is no longer an individual song that we listen to, nor is the singer an individual singer. The song and the singer become oneself; then a faceless individual who sits bowed under it, nameless as a boulder in an immemorial landscape, about which the ever-shaping wind of destiny blows. Or like a rock that the sea swirls around, covering it, smothering it, to recede and come again in its undefeatable rhythm. More than this the living quick of the mind may not experience, because beyond it there must be surcease, a drowning, death.

I recall a night in an hotel on a little Hebridean island, many years ago. The hour was advanced and an argument on Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát intricate and challenging. On a purely literary appreciation I was not disposed to give in to my army antagonist despite his experience of India and Persia and the amount of liquor he had consumed. Until he leaned towards me, eyes distended, and asked, ‘Have you ever heard the beating of a distant drum?’ I had never been conscious of not hearing it until that moment. So I capitulated with all the grace I could summon.