Poems
Abbey Assaroe
Gray, gray is Abbey Assaroe, by Belashanny town,
It has neither door nor window, the walls are broken down;
The carven-stones lie scatter’d in briar and nettle-bed!
The only feet are those that come at burial of the dead.
A little rocky rivulet runs murmuring to the tide,
Singing a song of ancient days, in sorrow, not in pride;
The boortree and the lightsome ash across the portal grow,
And heaven itself is now the roof of Abbey Assaroe.
It looks beyond the harbour-stream to Gulban mountain blue;
It hears the voice of Erna’s fall – Atlantic breakers too;
High ships go sailing past it; the sturdy clank of oars
Brings in the salmon-boat to haul a net upon the shores;
And this way to his home-creek, when the summer day is done,
Slow sculls the weary fisherman across the setting sun;
While green with corn is Sheegus Hill, his cottage white below;
But gray at every season is Abbey Assaroe.
There stood one day a poor old man above its broken bridge;
He heard no running rivulet, he saw no mountain-ridge;
He turn’d his back on Sheegus Hill, and view’d with misty sight
The Abbey walls, the burial-ground with crosses ghostly white;
Under a weary weight of years he bow’d upon his staff,
Perusing in the present time the former’s epitaph;
For, gray and wasted like the walls, a figure full of woe,
This man was of the blood of them who founded Assaroe.
From Derry to Bundrowas Tower, Tirconnell broad was theirs;
Spearmen and plunder, bards and wine, and holy Abbot’s prayers;
With chanting always in the house which they had builded high
To God and to Saint Bernard – where at last they came to die.
At worst, no workhouse grave for him! the ruins of his race
Shall rest among the ruin’d stones of this their saintly place.
The fond old man was weeping; and tremulous and slow
Along the rough and crooked lane he crept from Assaroe.
It has neither door nor window, the walls are broken down;
The carven-stones lie scatter’d in briar and nettle-bed!
The only feet are those that come at burial of the dead.
A little rocky rivulet runs murmuring to the tide,
Singing a song of ancient days, in sorrow, not in pride;
The boortree and the lightsome ash across the portal grow,
And heaven itself is now the roof of Abbey Assaroe.
It looks beyond the harbour-stream to Gulban mountain blue;
It hears the voice of Erna’s fall – Atlantic breakers too;
High ships go sailing past it; the sturdy clank of oars
Brings in the salmon-boat to haul a net upon the shores;
And this way to his home-creek, when the summer day is done,
Slow sculls the weary fisherman across the setting sun;
While green with corn is Sheegus Hill, his cottage white below;
But gray at every season is Abbey Assaroe.
There stood one day a poor old man above its broken bridge;
He heard no running rivulet, he saw no mountain-ridge;
He turn’d his back on Sheegus Hill, and view’d with misty sight
The Abbey walls, the burial-ground with crosses ghostly white;
Under a weary weight of years he bow’d upon his staff,
Perusing in the present time the former’s epitaph;
For, gray and wasted like the walls, a figure full of woe,
This man was of the blood of them who founded Assaroe.
From Derry to Bundrowas Tower, Tirconnell broad was theirs;
Spearmen and plunder, bards and wine, and holy Abbot’s prayers;
With chanting always in the house which they had builded high
To God and to Saint Bernard – where at last they came to die.
At worst, no workhouse grave for him! the ruins of his race
Shall rest among the ruin’d stones of this their saintly place.
The fond old man was weeping; and tremulous and slow
Along the rough and crooked lane he crept from Assaroe.
Analysis (ai): The poem is grounded in 19th-century Irish Romanticism, depicting a ruined abbey as a site of national and familial memory. Unlike contemporaries who idealized medievalism, this work emphasizes erosion—both physical and cultural—aligning with post-Famine Irish consciousness.
- Imagery and Atmosphere: Decay is central: broken walls, overgrown stones, and nature reclaiming sacred space signal abandonment. The recurring “gray” tone suggests emotional and historical stasis, contrasting with fleeting natural movement like the rivulet or passing ships.
- Narrative Perspective and Voice: An omniscient observer shifts to a focalized moment with the old man, personalizing history. His blindness to present surroundings in favor of spectral memory introduces internal exile, a condition not often discussed in readings of Allingham’s more lyrical works.
- Intergenerational Decline: The man’s lineage, once powerful across Tirconnell, now faces obscurity. His weeping is not dramatic lament but quiet resignation, suggesting a subtler critique of noble decline than the elegiac excess common in Victorian verse.
- Place Within the Author’s Oeuvre: Compared to Allingham’s folk-inspired lyrics and lighter nature poems, this piece is somber and historically weighted. It stands out in his lesser-known narrative works for its sustained meditation on heritage and dispossession.
- Relation to Era and Form: While using traditional quatrains with regular rhyme, the poem avoids grandiloquence. Its restraint reflects mid-Victorian historicism but resists imperial nostalgia, instead focusing on local erasure.
- Less-Discussed Angle: Lineage as Landscape: The old man’s body mirrors the abbey’s ruin—“gray and wasted”—implying that genealogy is inscribed in terrain. This somatic geography, where personal and national decay converge, is underemphasized in scholarship.
- Contemporary Concerns: Though written before 1900, it prefigures modern concerns with memory, identity erosion, and post-colonial consciousness. The absence of political rhetoric makes its quiet despair more unsettling than overt protest.
- Final Movement and Closure: The man’s exit “from Assaroe” is not transcendence but retreat. There is no redemption, only the slow departure of the last witness, underscoring the poem’s anti-redemptive arc rare in its era.
William Allingham (19 March 1824 – 18 November 1889) was an Irish poet, diarist and editor. He wrote several volumes of lyric verse, and his poem “The Faeries” was much anthologised. But he is better known for his posthumously published Diary, in which he records his lively encounters with Tennyson, Carlyle and other writers and artists. His wife, Helen Allingham, was a well-known artist, watercolourist and illustrator.
