There is a common formula for most of these songs or 'Visions,' _Aislinghe_, as they are called. Just as artists of to-day find no monotony in drawing Ireland over and over again with her harp, her wolf-dog, and her round tower, so the Munster poets found no monotony in representing her as a beautiful woman, white-skinned, with curling hair, with cheeks in which 'the lily and the rose were fighting for mastery.' The poet asks her if she is Venus, or Helen, or Deirdre, and describes her beauty in torrents of alliterative adjectives. Then she makes her complaint against England, or her lament for her own sorrows or for the loss of her Stuart lover, spoken of sometimes as 'the bricklayer,' or 'the merchant's son.' The framework is artificial; but the laments are often very pathetic the love of Ireland, and the hatred of England born of that love, finding expression in them.
John O'Donnell sees her 'like a young queen that is going astray for the king being banished from her, that had a right to come and set her loose.' O'Rahilly, in one of his poems, shows the beautiful woman held to her Saxon lover by some strange enchantment:--
'I met brightness of brightness upon the path of loneliness; plaiting of plaiting in every lock of her yellow hair. News of news she gave me, and she as lonely as she was; news of the coming back of him that owns the tribute of the king.
'Folly of follies I to go so near to her; slave I was made by a slave that put me in hard bonds. She made away from me then, and I following after her, till we came to a house of houses made by Druid enchantments.
'They broke into mocking laughter, a troop of men of enchantments, and a troop of young girls with smooth-plaited hair. They put me up in chains; they made no delay about it; and my love holding to her breast an awkward ugly clown.
'I told her then with the truest words I could tell her, it was not right for her to be joined with a common clumsy churl; and the man that was three times fairer than the whole race of the Scots, waiting till she would come to him to be his beautiful bride.
'At the sound of my words her pride set her crying; the tears were running down over the kindling of her cheeks. She sent a lad to bring me safe from the place I was in. She is the brightness of brightness I met in the path of loneliness.'