It is a love at first sight for Morton as he visits Saorstát Éireann and hears the mysterious "silent music of the land" as he visits Connemara, Glengariff and the Curragh and Eire's troubled history. Fascination with the Gaelic tongue induces a longing to understand it more, to be able to sing back an answering verse to the real songs he hears from behind the stone walls.
The country wins Morton's heart rapidly, as do the people and their intense sense of place. Even the animals enchant ...including a curious cow who joins a wake...and the " hens who are all over the world an excitable, suicidal people".
By the end of his book H.V. is so in love with Ireland, and feels so desperately his need to communicate his ardor, and share it with the reader, that he becomes intensely lyrical and even starts to adds a Gaelic lilt to his prose.
Ireland