(A MIDSUMMER NOON’S DREAM)
I recall a singular legend, where heard, where read, I do not remember,
nor even am I sure of what race the offspring, of what land the
denizen. It was to the effect that, in the ancient days of the world,
flowers had voices, had song to them as the saying is: and that there
were kingdoms among these populations of beauty, and that in the
course of ages (would they be flower-æons, and so of a measure in
time different from our longer or shorter periods?) satraps revolted
against the dominion of the Rose, and tropical princes led new hosts,
and scarlet forest-queens filled the jungle and the savannah with their
chants of victory. And the end was a conflict so great that even the
isles of the sea were shaken by it, and the pale green moss of polar
rocks whispered of the great world-war of the peoples of Flowry. At
last, after the shadow-flitting passage of an æon, the gods were roused
from their calm, and, looking down into the shaken mirror of the world,
beheld all their dreams and visions and desires no longer children of
loveliness and breaths of song. In these æons while they had slept in
peace the Empire of Flowry had come to a dissolution: race fought with
race, tribe with tribe, clan with clan. Among all the nations there
was a madness for supremacy, so that the weed in the grass and the
flame-crowned spire of the aloe were at one in a fierce discontent and
a blind lust of dominion. Thereupon the gods pondered among themselves.
Kronos, who had been the last to wake and was already drowsy with
old immemorial returning slumber, murmured: ‘A divine moment, O ye
Brotherhood of Eternity, is a long time wherein to be disturbed by the
mortal reflection of our dreams and the passions and emotions of our
enchanted hearts.’
And as all the calm-eyed Immortals agreed, Kronos sighed out the
mandate of silence, and turning his face to Eternity was again among
the august dreams of the Everlasting Ones.
In that long moment--for there in the other world it was but a
brief leaning on their elbows of the drowsy gods while the fans of
Immortal Sleep for a second stayed the vast waves of Peace--the divine
messengers, or were they the listening powers and dominions of the
earth, fulfilled destiny. From every flower-nation, from every people
by far waters, from every tribe in dim woods and the wilderness,
from every clan habiting the most far hills beyond the ever-receding
pale blue horizons, song was taken as stars are pluckt away from the
Night by the grey fingers of the Dawn. The Rose breathed no more a
flusht magic of sound; the Lily no more exhaled a foamwhite cadence.
Silence was come upon the wild chant of orchids in old, forgotten
woods; stillness upon the tinkling cymbals of the little hands of the
dim, myriad, incalculable host of blossom; a hush upon the songs of
meadow-flowers; a spell upon the singing of honeysuckles in the white
dews at the rising of the moon. Everywhere, from all the green tribes,
from all the glowing nations of Flowry, from each and every of the
wandering folk of the Reed, the Moss, and the Lichen, from all the
Clans of the Grass, the added loveliness of song was taken. Silence
fell upon one and all: a strange and awful stillness came upon the
woods and valleys. It was then that the God of Youth, wandering through
the hushed world, took the last song of a single rose that in a secret
place had not yet heard the common doom, and with his breath gave it a
body, and a pulse to its heart, and fashioned for it a feather-covering
made of down of the bog-cotton and the soft undersides of alder-leaf
and olive. Then, from a single blade of grass that still whispered in
a twilight hollow, he made a like marvel, to be a mate to the first,
and sent out both into the green world, to carry song to the woods and
the valleys, the hills and the wildernesses, the furthest shores, the
furthest isles. Thus was the nightingale created, the first bird, the
herald of all the small clans of the bushes that have kept wild-song in
the world, and are our delight.
But in the hearts of certain of the green tribes a sullen anger
endured. So the mysterious Hand which had taken song and cadence away
punished these sullen ones. From some, fragrance also was taken.
There were orchid-queens of forest-loveliness from whom all fragrance
suddenly passed like smoke: there were white delicate phantoms among
the grasses, from whom sweet odour was lifted as summer dew: there were
nomads of the hillways and gypsies of the plain to whom were given the
rankness of the waste, the smell of things evil, of corruption, of
the grave. But to some, beautiful rebels of the peoples of the Reed,
the Grass, and the Fern, the doom went out that henceforth their place
should be in the waters ... the running waters of streams and rivers,
the quiet waters of pools and lakes, the troubled waters of the seas
along the coasts of the world, the ocean depths.
And that is how amid the salt bite of the homeless wave there grew the
Gardens of the Sea. That is how it came about that the weed trailed in
running waters, and the sea-moss swayed in brackish estuaries, and the
wrack clung or swam in tangles of olive-brown and green and soft and
dusky reds.
What a long preamble to the story of how the Seaweeds were once
sweet-smelling blooms of the shores and valleys! Of how the flowers of
meadow and woodland, of the sun-swept plain and the shadowy hill, had
once song as well as sweet odours: how, of these, many lost not only
fragrance but innocent beauty: and how out of a rose and a blade of
grass and a breath of the wind the first birds were made, the souls of
the green earth, winged, and voiced.
To-day I sit amongst deep, shelving rocks by the shore, in a desolate
place where basaltic cliffs shut away the familiar world, and where,
in front, the otherworld of the sea reaches beyond sight to follow
the lifted wave against the grey skyline, or is it the grey lip of
the fallen horizon? Looking down I can perceive the olive-brown and
green seaweed swaying in the slow movement of the tide. Like drifted
hair, the long thin filaments of the Mermaid’s Locks (_Chorda Filum_)
sinuously twist, intertwine, involve, and unfold. It is as though a
seawoman rose and fell, idly swam or idly swung this way and that,
asleep on the tide: nothing visible of her wave-grey body but only her
long fatal hair, that so many a swimmer has had cause to dread, from
whose embrace so many a swimmer has never risen. In the rock-set pools
the flesh-hued fans of the dulse indolently stir. Wave-undulated over
them are fronds of a lovely green weed, delicate, transparent: above
these, two phantom fish, rock-cod or saithe, float motionless.
Idly watching, idly dreaming thus, I recall part of a forgotten poem
about the woods of the sea, and the finned silent creatures that are
its birds: and how there are stags and wolves in these depths, long
hounds of the sea, mermen and merwomen and seal-folk. Others, too, for
whom we have no name, we being wave-blind and so unable to discern
these comers and goers of the shadow. Also, how old sea-divinities
lie there asleep, and perilous phantoms come out of sunken ships and
ancient weed-grown towns; and how there roams abroad, alike in the
flowing wave and along the sheer green-darkening bodiless walls, an
incalculable Terror that may be manifold, the cold implacable demons of
the deep, or may be One, that grey timeworn Death whom men have called
Poseidon and Mananan and by many names.
What a mysterious world this Tir-fo-Tuinn, this Land-Under-Wave. How
little we know of it, for all that wise men have told us concerning
the travelling tides, of currents as mysteriously steadfast in their
comings and goings as the comets that from age to age loom briefly
upon the stellar roads: how little, though they have put learned
designations to a thousand weeds, and given names to ten thousand
creatures to whom the whole world of man and all his hopes and dreams
are less than a phantom, less than foam. The Gaelic poet who said
that the man who goes to Tir-fo-Tuinn goes into another world, where
the human soul is sand, and God is but the unloosened salt, tells us
as much as the scientist who probes the ocean-mud and reveals dim
crustacean life where one had believed to be only a lifeless dark.
Above the weed-held palaces of Atlantis, over the soundless bells
of Ys, above where Lyonesse is gathered in a foamless oblivion, the
plummet may sink and lift a few broken shells, the drag-net may bring
to the surface an unknown sea-snail or such a microscopic green Alga as
that _Halosphoera viridis_ which science has discovered in the great
depths beyond the reach of sunlight: but who can tell, perchance how
few who care to know, what Love was, long ago, when there were poets
in Lyonesse: what worship was served by white-robed priests among the
sunken fanes of Ys: what dreams withstayed and what passions beset the
noble and the ignoble in drowned Atlantis, what empires rose and fell
there, what gods were lauded and dethroned, and for how long Destiny
was patient.
Even in the little pools that lie shoreward of the Gardens of the Sea
what beauty there is, what obscure life, what fascinating ‘other-world’
association. This piece of kelp is at once _Fucus vesiculosus_ and the
long fingers of the Cailliach-Mhara, the Sea-Witch. This great smooth
frond is ... I do not know, or forget: but it is the kale of Manan,
in sea-groves of which that Shepherd pastures his droves of uncouth
sea-swine. This green tracery has a Greek or Latin name, but in legend
it is called the Mermaid’s Lace. This little flame-like crest of
undulating wrack has a designation longer than itself, but in tales of
faerie we know it to be that of which the caps of the pool-elves are
fashioned.
In the Isles seaweed has many local names, but is always mainly divided
into Yellow Tails, Dark Tails, and Red Tails (_Feamainn bhuidhe_,
_feamainn dubh_, and _feamainn dearg_). The first comprise all the
yellowish, light-brown, and olive-brown seaware; the second all the
dark-green, and also all green wrack; the third, the red. The common
seaware or kelp or tang (_Fucus vesiculosus_) is generally called
_propach_, or other variant signifying tangled: and the bladder-wrack,
_feamainn bholgainn_ or _builgeach_, ‘baggy-tails.’ I have at times
collected many local names of these weeds, and not a few superstitions
and legends. Naturally, the most poetic of these are connected with the
_Chorda filum_ or Dead Man’s Hair, which has a score of popular names,
from ‘corpsy-ropes’ to the occasional Gaelic _gillemu lunn_, which may
be rendered ‘the wave’s gillie’ or ‘servant of the wave’: with the
drifted gulf-weed, whose sea-grapes are called _uibhean sìthein_, fairy
eggs, and are eagerly sought for: and with the _duileasg_, or dulse.
Even to this day, in remote parts, an ancient seaweed-rite survives
in the propitiatory offerings (now but a pastime of island children)
to the Hebridean sea-god Shony at Samhein (Hallowmass). This Shony,
whose favours were won by a cup of ale thrown into the sea in the dark
of the night, is none other than Poseidon, Neptune, Manan; for he is
the Scandinavian sea-god _Sjoni_, viking-brought from Lochlin in the
far-off days when the Summer-sailors raided and laid waste the Gaelic
Isles.
It is singular how rarely seaweed has entered into the nomenclature and
symbology of peoples, how seldom it is mentioned in ancient literature.
Among our Gaelic clans there is only one (the M’Neil) which has seaware
as a badge. Greek art has left us a few seaweed-filleted heads of
Gorgons, and to sea-wrack the Latin poets have once or twice made but
passing and contemptuous allusion. In the Bible (‘whaur ye’ll find
everything frae a bat to a unicorn,’ as an old man said to me once)
there is one mention of it only, in Jonah’s words: ‘The depths closed
me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.’