The country people see at times certain apparitions whom they name now
‘fallen angels’, now ‘ancient inhabitants of the country’, and describe
as riding at whiles ‘with flowers upon the heads of the horses’. I have
assumed in the sixth poem that these horsemen, now that the times worsen,
give way to worse. My last symbol, Robert Artisson, was an evil spirit
much run after in Kilkenny at the start of the fourteenth century. Are
not those who travel in the whirling dust also in the Platonic Year?