minstrel: [question] patterns for Irish Verse.

[Russell Gilman-Hunt]

Weary I am of using Lewis Turco's _New_Book_of_Forms_ to justify
my poetic structures in an Irish fashion.  I have begun a new project
the like of which I have not attempted in a dog's year. I've taken 
the translation of a poem (I do not, alas, read Gaelic) that purports
to be similar in structure to the original poem, and have attempted to
map out the syllable structure (like I've done in the past, the long
foggy past, when I worked with Sonnets in school).  

The poem I chose was in Ruth Lehmann's _Early_Irish_Verse.
(p20), it's poem #15.  In her introduction, she specifically mentions
this one because both the English version and the Irish version have
short words, unlike some of the translations she worked out where 
the Irish had polysyllabic words and the American didn't.

There are seven stanzas, and essentially I mapped out five of them
and tried to follow a pattern. Here is the first stanza, in American:
(her translation)

  Summer's come, safe, sound,
  it bound the black brake;
  leaping deer, spry, slim;
  seals swim with smooth wake.

Essentially, the pattern I decided on was 
  long - short - long long long
  short - long - short long long
  long - short - long long long
  short - long - short long long
Which looks a little odd to me. Am I doing this correctly (for the 
American Version?)  Then, there are some mild differences in the other
stanzas, and furthermore, I was wondering if someone out there could
count the syllables in the Gaelic version of the first line for me:
  Ta'inic sam sla'n so'er.  
(other poems in the book have the full Irish text in the appendix, 
this one is lacking it.)

Thanks for any insight you can provide,
HL Conchobar Mac Muirchertaig.
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