²⁷Hull, Eleanor. "Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara or Old Woman (Hag) of Beare." Folklore 38.3 (1927): 226-27.
The author continues, "It would be a remarkable and touching poem wherever it was written. It is of the tenth or eleventh century; but it reminds us of much more recent verses, Beranger's " Grand'mere " or Villon's " Regrets de la Belle Heaulmiere ja parvenue avieillesse," as Dr. Kuno Meyer has pointed out. But the Irish poem is more artistically wrought than either of these. From the point of view of folk-motif as applied to poetry, it is a beautiful example of the wide- spread idea that human life is ruled by the flow and ebb of the sea-tide, with the turn of which life will dwindle, as with the on-coming tide it waxes to its full powers and energy. Life should always come in with the flood and go out with the ebb"
The poem is sometimes entitled "The Lament of the Nun of Beare."
Ó Crualaoich comments, "The author of the ninth-century Lament proceeds to exploit ideological ambiguities in inventing the figure and name-form of the aged female who is at once the lingering representative of a profane, native eternity of earthly sovereignty and the Christian nun finally embracing the prospect of an eternity of the heavenly sovereignty of the male Christian god." (Ó Crualaoich, Gearóid. The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-woman Healer. Cork: Cork UP, 2003. 86-7.)