Cover art by Caspar David Friedrich

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Notes

Attribution: The poem is attributed to Oisín mac Find — Oisín son of Fionn — with the Latin tag cecinit, “he sang” or “he composed.” This is the same convention we have seen throughout this collection, where poems are placed in the mouths of legendary figures. Whether any historical poet lies behind this attribution is impossible to say, but the voice is entirely consistent with the Oisín of the dialogues with Patrick — the last survivor of a heroic age, now old, withered, and looking back on what has been lost.

The poem: This is one of the most quietly devastating poems in the Old Irish tradition. It belongs to a well-established genre of old age lament, but it does something unusual — it centres not on the loss of fame, companions, or youth in the abstract, but on the hands. The hands that are burned or withered. Hands that once performed deeds. The physical specificity is striking and deeply felt — this is not philosophical resignation but bodily grief, the grief of someone who can feel in their own flesh what time has taken.

The hands: Ro loiscit — they have been burned, scorched, withered. The verb loscaid means to burn or scorch, which is stronger than merely “wither.” Some scholars read this as metaphorical — burned out, exhausted — while others have suggested an actual physical burning or injury remembered from battle. The ambiguity is part of the poem’s power.

The tide image: The image in stanza one — do-chúaid tuile, táinic tráig — “the flood has gone, the ebb has come” — is one of the great compressed images in early Irish poetry. The tide of strength and vitality has gone out and will not return. It is the same image world as the blackbird over Belfast Lough and the forest music of Líadain — the natural world as the measure of human experience.

The final stanza: The last stanza is extraordinary in its concreteness and its humility. The old man asks for a small piece of bread — broken, crumbled — a morsel on a stone, a morsel on a bone, a morsel on the burned hand. The diminutive brúarán becc — a tiny crumb — against the vastness of what has been lost is one of the great moments of pathos in the entire corpus.

Form: The poem is in Old Irish syllabic verse with internal rhyme and alliteration throughout. The repeated -sa suffix — láma-sa, gníma-sa, bríga-sa — gives the opening stanza a quality of insistent self-reference, almost of pointing: these hands, these deeds, these strengths — mine, mine, mine, and now gone.

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Translation

1. These hands have been withered; these deeds have been checked; the flood has gone, the ebb has come, until it has drowned all these strengths.

2. I give thanks to the Creator; I have found profit with great honour; long was my day in wretched life; there was a time when it was beautiful.

3. I was among the finest of assemblies; I found women who were generous and giving; it is not weakly that I go from the world — my spring tide of running has passed.

4. The little crumb that you break for this wretched, wretched fasting one: a morsel on a stone of it, a morsel on a bone, a morsel on this withered hand.

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