The Irish Lady - a ghostly rock - Part 2

The Irish Lady is in the bottom right of the picture, Land's End is top right. Image by © Copyright Graham Horn and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

[cont...] "...Sir Humphrey Davy wrote a poem on this tradition. The following is an extract from it:--

"Where yon dark cliff  o'ershadowa the bltte main,

[ - A rock near the Land's End called the "Irish Lady."]

Theora died amidst the stormy waves,
And on its feet the sea-dews wash'd her corpse
And the wild breath of storms shook her black locks.
Young was Theora; bluer was her eye
Than the bright azure of the moonlight night;
Fair was her cheek, as is the ocean cloud
Red with the morning ray.

" Amidst the groves,
And greens, and nodding rocks that overhang
The gray Killarney pans'd her morning days,
Bright with the beams of joy.

"To solitude,
To nature, and to God, she gave her youth;
Hence were her passions tuned to harmony.
Her azure eye oft glisten'd with the tear
Of sensibility, and her soft cheek
Glow'd with the blush of rapture. Hence she loved
To wander 'midst the green wood silver'd o'er
By the bright moonbeam. Hence she loved the rocks,
Crowu'd with the nodding ivy, and the lake
Fair with the purple morning, and the sea
Expansive, mingling with the arched sky.

"Dark in the midnight cloud,
When the wild blast upon its pinions bore
The dying shrieks of Erin's injured Sons,
She 'scaped the murderer's arm. 

[The Irish lady was shipwrecked at the Land's End about the time of the massacre of the Irish Protestants by the Catholics, in the reign of Charles the First. So says Davy--the tradition is very old.]

"The British bark
Bore her across the ocean. From the west
The whirlwind rose, the fire-fraught clouds of heaven
Were mingled with the wave. The shatter'd bark
Sunk at thy feet, Boleriutn, and the white surge
Closed on green Erin's daughter."

-- PARIS's Life of Sir Humphrey Davy, p. 38

This kind of tradition is not uncommon."

Hunt 1903




Map - The Irish Lady