Sir, – It was pleasing to see the Irishman’s Diary noting the birth in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal, 200 years ago of the poet William Allingham (Brian Maye, March 26th).
The English playwright Jez Butterworth’s play The Ferryman has won multiple international awards in the past 10 years and is currently to be seen on the amateur drama circuit in a production by the Ballyduff Drama Group from Co Waterford. In it, a character sings, “I heard the dogs howl in the moonlight night; /I went to the window to see the sight; /All the Dead that I ever knew/Going one by one and two by two.”
The lines are from a relatively obscure Allingham poem, A Dream, originally published in the 1850s, and reprinted in Yeats’s Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. He will also be remembered in Ballyshannon this November in a special 200th birthday edition of the Allingham Arts Festival. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL McMULLIN,
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Ballyshannon,
Co Donegal.
