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Updated: April 30, 2025
The quay is at the end of it, and on getting out of the boat, I asked the boatman to point out to me what remained of Marban's Church. He led me across the island a large one, the largest in the lake not less than seven acres or nine, and no doubt some parts of it were once cultivated by Marban.
If O'Grady recalls the Oisin who contended with Patrick and longed to be slaying with the Fianna, even though they were in hell, Leamy, anima naturaliter Christiana, reminds one rather of the Irish monk in a distant land moved to write lyrics in his missal by the song of the bird that makes him think of Erin, or Marban, the hermit, rejoicing to his brother, the king, in his "sheiling in the wood," his
It pleases me to think of the hermit sitting under the walls of his church or by his cell writing the poem which has given me so much pleasure, including in it all the little lives that cams to visit him the birds and the beasts enumerating them as carefully as Wordsworth would, and loving them as tenderly. Marban! Could one find a more beautiful name for a hermit? Guaire is the brother's name.
The hermit who used this paved path fourteen hundred years ago was a poet; and Father Oliver knew that Marban loved 'the shieling that no one knew save his God, the ash-tree on the hither side, the hazel-bush beyond it, its lintel of honeysuckle, the wood shedding its mast upon fat swine; and on this sweet day he found it pleasanter to think of Ireland's hermits than of Ireland's savage chieftains always at war, striving against each other along the shores of this lake, and from island to island.
'Marban was no ordinary hermit; he was a sympathetic naturalist, a true poet, and his brother who came to see him, and whose visit gave rise to the colloquy, was a king. I hope I am not wronging Marban, but the island is so beautiful that I cannot but think that he was attracted by its beauty and went there because he loved Nature as well as God.
Marban and King Guaire. Now, imagine the two brothers meeting for a poetic disputation regarding the value of life, and each speaking from his different point of view! True that Guaire's point of view is only just indicated he listens to his brother, for a hermit's view of life is more his own than a king's.
Thus we have the hermit who prays God to give him a hut in a lonely place beside a clear spring in the wood, with a little lark to sing overhead; or we have Marban, who, rich in nuts, crab-apples, sloes, watercress, and honey, refuses to go back to the court to which the king, his brother, presses him to return.
To which Guaire answered: "I would give my glorious kingship With my share of our father's heritage, To the hour of my death let me forfeit it, So that I may be in thy company, O Marban." 'There are many such beautiful poems in early Irish. I know of another, and I'll send it to you one of these days.
So you will understand that the reasons Marban gave for living there in preference to living the life of the world seemed valid, and I could not help peering into the bushes, trying to find a rowan-tree for he speaks of one. The rowan is the mountain-ash. I found several.
'A pleasant day indeed for a sail, and in imagination he followed the yacht down the lake, past its different castles, Castle Carra and Castle Burke and Church Island, the island on which Marban Marban, the famous hermit poet, had lived. It seemed to him strange that he had never thought of visiting the ruined church when he lived close by at the northern end of the lake.
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