THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN
FLED foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke,
High as the saddle girth, covering away from our glances the tide;
And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance
broke;
The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.
I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And never a song sang Niamh, and over my finger-tips
Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-cold air,
And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.
Were we days long or hours long in riding, when rolled in a grisly
peace,
An isle lay level before us, with dripping hazel and oak?
And we stood on a sea’s edge we saw not; for whiter than new-washed
fleece
Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke.
And we rode on the plains of the sea’s edge; the sea’s edge barren
and gray,
Gray sand on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.
But the trees grew taller and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark;
Dropping; a murmurous dropping; old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark:
Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.
And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night,
For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and
the sun,
Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was
one.
Till the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems of the hazel
and oak,
A valley flowed down from his hoofs, and there in the long grass lay,
Under the starlight and shadow, a monstrous slumbering folk,
Their naked and gleaming bodies poured out and heaped in the way.
And by them were arrow and war-axe, arrow and shield and blade;
And dew-blanched horns, in whose hollow a child of three years old
Could sleep on a bed of rushes, and all inwrought and inlaid,
And more comely than man can make them with bronze and silver and gold.
And each of the huge white creatures was huger than four-score men;
The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of
birds,
And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen,
The breathing came from those bodies, long-warless, grown whiter than
curds.
The wood was so spacious above them, that He who had stars for His
flocks
Could fondle the leaves with His fingers, nor go from His dew-cumbered
skies;
So long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests in their
locks,
Filling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes.
And over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came,
Now in a place of star-fire, and now in a shadow place wide;
And the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees in the soft
star-flame,
Lay loose in a place of shadow: we drew the reins by his side.
Golden the nails of his bird-claws, flung loosely along the dim ground;
In one was a branch soft-shining, with bells more many than sighs,
In midst of an old man’s bosom; owls ruffling and pacing around,
Sidled their bodies against him, filling the shade with their eyes.
And my gaze was thronged with the sleepers; for nowhere in any clann
Of the high people of Soraca nor in glamour by demons flung,
Are faces alive with such beauty made known to the salt eye of man,
Yet weary with passions that faded when the sevenfold seas were young.
And I gazed on the bell-branch, sleep’s forebear, far sung by the
Sennachies.
I saw how those slumberers, grown weary, there camping in grasses deep,
Of wars with the wide world and pacing the shores of the wandering seas,
Laid hands on the bell-branch and swayed it, and fed of unhuman sleep.
Snatching the horn of Niamh, I blew a lingering note;
Came sound from those monstrous sleepers, a sound like the stirring of
flies.
He, shaking the fold of his lips, and heaving the pillar of his throat,
Watched me with mournful wonder out of the wells of his eyes.
I cried, ‘Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!
And tell of your goodly household and the goodly works of your hands,
That we may muse in the starlight and talk of the battles of old;
Your questioner, Oisin, is worthy, he comes from the Fenian lands.’
Half open his eyes were, and held me, dull with the smoke of their
dreams;
His lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came;
Then he swayed in his fingers the bell-branch, slow dropping a sound in
faint streams
Softer than snow-flakes in April and piercing the marrow like flame.
Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth,
The moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a sea-covered stone
Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories of the
whole of my mirth,
And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.
In the roots of the grasses, the sorrels, I laid my body as low;
And the pearl-pale Niamh lay by me, her brow on the midst of my breast;
And the horse was gone in the distance, and years after years ’gan flow;
Square leaves of the ivy moved over us, binding us down to our rest.
And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot;
How the fetlocks drip blood in the battle, when the fallen on fallen lie
rolled;
How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron’s plot,
And the names of the demons whose hammers made armour for Midhir of old.
And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot;
That the spearshaft is made out of ashwood, the shield out of osier and
hide;
How the hammers spring on the anvil, on the spear-head’s burning spot;
How the slow, blue-eyed oxen of Finn low sadly at evening tide.
But in dreams, mild man of the croziers, driving the dust with their
throngs,
Moved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales;
Came by me the Kings of the Red Branch, with roaring of laughter and
songs,
Or moved as they moved once, love-making or piercing the tempest with
sails.
Came Blanid, MacNessa, tall Fergus who feastward of old time slunk;
Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never
dry,
Dark Balor, as old as a forest, car-borne, his mighty head sunk
Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-making eye.
And by me, in soft red raiment, the Fenians moved in loud streams,
And Grania, walking and smiling, sewed with her needle of bone.
So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures
of dreams,
In a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.
At times our slumber was lightened. When the sun was on silver or gold;
When brushed with the wings of the owls, in the dimness they love going
by;
When a glow-worm was green on a grass leaf lured from his lair in the
mould;
Half wakening, we lifted our eyelids, and gazed on the grass with a
sigh.
So watched I when, man of the croziers, at the heel of a century fell,
Weak, in the midst of the meadow, from his miles in the midst of the
air,
A starling like them that forgathered ’neath a moon waking white as
a shell,
When the Fenians made foray at morning with Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.
I awoke: the strange horse without summons out of the distance ran,
Thrusting his nose to my shoulder; he knew in his bosom deep
That once more moved in my bosom the ancient sadness of man,
And that I would leave the immortals, their dimness, their dews dropping
sleep.
O, had you seen beautiful Niamh grow white as the waters are white,
Lord of the croziers, you even had lifted your hands and wept:
But, the bird in my fingers, I mounted, remembering alone that delight
Of twilight and slumber were gone, and that hoofs impatiently stept.
I cried, ‘O Niamh! O white one! if only a twelve-houred day,
I must gaze on the beard of Finn, and move where the old men and young
In the Fenians’ dwellings of wattle lean on the chessboards and play,
Ah, sweet to me now were even bald Conan’s slanderous tongue!
‘Like me were some galley forsaken far off in Meridian isle,
Remembering its long-oared companions, sails turning to thread-bare
rags;
No more to crawl on the seas with long oars mile after mile,
But to be amid shooting of flies and flowering of rushes and flags.’
Their motionless eyeballs of spirits grown mild with mysterious thought,
Watched her those seamless faces from the valley’s glimmering girth;
As she murmured, ‘O wandering Oisin, the strength of the bell-branch is
naught,
For there moves alive in your fingers the fluttering sadness of earth.
‘Then go through the lands in the saddle and see what the mortals do,
And softly come to your Niamh over the tops of the tide;
But weep for your Niamh, O Oisin, weep; for if only your shoe
Brush lightly as haymouse earth pebbles, you will come no more to my
side.
‘O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?’
I saw from a distant saddle; from the earth she made her moan;
‘I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn, for breast unto
breast
We shall mingle no more, nor our gazes empty their sweetness lone
‘In the isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come.
Were the winds less soft than the breath of a pigeon who sleeps on her
nest,
Nor lost in the star-fires and odours the sound of the sea’s vague drum,
O flaming lion of the world, O when will you turn to your rest?’
The wailing grew distant; I rode by the woods of the wrinkling bark,
Where ever is murmurous dropping, old silence and that one sound;
For no live creatures live there, no weasels move in the dark;
In a reverie forgetful of all things, over the bubbling ground.
And I rode by the plains of the sea’s edge, where all is barren and
gray,
Gray sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees,
Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away,
Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.
And the winds made the sands on the sea’s edge turning and turning go,
As my mind made the names of the Fenians. Far from the hazel and oak
I rode away on the surges, where, high as the saddle bow,
Fled foam underneath me, and round me, a wandering and milky smoke.
Long fled the foam-flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast,
Snatching the bird in secret; nor knew I, embosomed apart,
When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast,
For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.
Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown.
If I were as I once was, the strong hoofs crushing the sand and the
shells,
Coming out of the sea as the dawn comes, a chaunt of love on my lips,
Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the
bells,
I would leave no saint’s head on his body from Rachlin to Bera of
ships.
Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-path
Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattles and woodwork made,
Your bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the
rath,
And a small and feeble race stooping with mattock and spade.
Or weeding or ploughing with faces a-shining with much-toil wet;
While in this place and that place, with bodies unglorious, their
chieftains stood,
Awaiting in patience the straw-death, croziered one, caught in their
net:
Went the laughter of scorn from my mouth like the roaring of wind in
a wood.
And because I went by them so huge and so speedy with eyes so bright,
Came after the hard gaze of youth, or an old man lifted his head:
And I rode and I rode, and I cried out, ‘The Fenians hunt wolves in
the night,
So sleep they by daytime.’ A voice cried, ‘The Fenians a long time are
dead.’
A whitebeard stood hushed on the pathway, the flesh of his face as dried
grass,
And in folds round his eyes and his mouth, he sad as a child without
milk;
And the dreams of the islands were gone, and I knew how men sorrow and
pass,
And their hound, and their horse, and their love, and their eyes that
glimmer like silk.
And wrapping my face in my hair, I murmured, ‘In old age they ceased’;
And my tears were larger than berries, and I murmured, ‘Where white
clouds lie spread
On Crevroe or broad Knockfefin, with many of old they feast
On the floors of the gods.’ He cried, ‘No, the gods a long time are
dead.’
And lonely and longing for Niamh, I shivered and turned me about,
The heart in me longing to leap like a grasshopper into her heart;
I turned and rode to the westward, and followed the sea’s old shout
Till I saw where Maeve lies sleeping till starlight and midnight part.
And there at the foot of the mountain, two carried a sack full of sand,
They bore it with staggering and sweating, but fell with their burden at
length:
Leaning down from the gem-studded saddle, I flung it five yards with my
hand,
With a sob for men waxing so weakly, a sob for the Fenians’ old
strength.
The rest you have heard of, O croziered one; how, when divided the
girth,
I fell on the path, and the horse went away like a summer fly;
And my years three hundred fell on me, and I rose, and walked on the
earth,
A creeping old man, full of sleep, with the spittle on his beard never
dry.
How the men of the sand-sack showed me a church with its belfry in air;
Sorry place, where for swing of the war-axe in my dim eyes the crozier
gleams;
What place have Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair?
Speak, you too are old with your memories, an old man surrounded with
dreams.
S. PATRIC.
Where the flesh of the footsole clingeth on the burning stones is their
place;
Where the demons whip them with wires on the burning stones of wide
hell,
Watching the blessed ones move far off, and the smile on God’s face,
Between them a gateway of brass, and the howl of the angels who fell.
OISIN.
Put the staff in my hands; for I go to the Fenians, O cleric, to chaunt
The war-songs that roused them of old; they will rise, making clouds
with their breath
Innumerable, singing, exultant; the clay underneath them shall pant,
And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them in death.
And demons afraid in their darkness; deep horror of eyes and of wings,
Afraid their ears on the earth laid, shall listen and rise up and weep;
Hearing the shaking of shields and the quiver of stretched bowstrings,
Hearing hell loud with a murmur, as shouting and mocking we sweep.
We will tear out the flaming stones, and batter the gateway of brass
And enter, and none sayeth ‘No’ when there enters the strongly armed
guest;
Make clean as a broom cleans, and march on as oxen move over young
grass;
Then feast, making converse of Eire, of wars, and of old wounds, and
rest.
S. PATRIC.
On the flaming stones, without refuge, the limbs of the Fenians are
tost;
None war on the masters of Hell, who could break up the world in their
rage;
But kneel and wear out the flags and pray for your soul that is lost
Through the demon love of its youth and its godless and passionate age.
OISIN.
Ah, me! to be shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain,
Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear,
All emptied of purple hours as a beggar’s cloak in the rain,
As a grass seed crushed by a pebble, as a wolf sucked under a weir.
It were sad to gaze on the blessed and no man I loved of old there;
I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,
I will go to Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.
NOTES
THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS.
When I wrote these poems I had so meditated over the images that came
to me in writing ‘Ballads and Lyrics,’ ‘The Rose,’ and ‘The Wanderings
of Oisin,’ and other images from Irish folk-lore, that they had become
true symbols. I had sometimes when awake, but more often in sleep,
moments of vision, a state very unlike dreaming, when these images took
upon themselves what seemed an independent life and became a part of
a mystic language, which seemed always as if it would bring me some
strange revelation. Being troubled at what was thought a reckless
obscurity, I tried to explain myself in lengthy notes, into which I
put all the little learning I had, and more wilful phantasy than I now
think admirable, though what is most mystical still seems to me the
most true. I quote in what follows the better or the more necessary
passages.
THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE (page 3).
The gods of ancient Ireland, the Tuatha De Danaan, or the Tribes of the
goddess Danu, or the Sidhe, from Aes Sidhe, or Sluagh Sidhe, the people
of the Faery Hills, as these words are usually explained, still ride
the country as of old. Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind, and certainly the
Sidhe have much to do with the wind. They journey in whirling winds,
the winds that were called the dance of the daughters of Herodias
in the Middle Ages, Herodias doubtless taking the place of some old
goddess. When the country people see the leaves whirling on the road
they bless themselves, because they believe the Sidhe to be passing by.
They are almost always said to wear no covering upon their heads, and
to let their hair stream out; and the great among them, for they have
great and simple, go much upon horseback. If any one becomes too much
interested in them, and sees them overmuch, he loses all interest in
ordinary things.
A woman near Gort, in Galway, says: ‘There is a boy, now, of the
Clorans; but I wouldn’t for the world let them think I spoke of him;
it’s two years since he came from America, and since that time he never
went to Mass, or to church, or to fairs, or to market, or to stand on
the cross roads, or to hurling, or to nothing. And if any one comes
into the house, it’s into the room he’ll slip, not to see them; and as
to work, he has the garden dug to bits, and the whole place smeared
with cow dung; and such a crop as was never seen; and the alders all
plaited till they look grand. One day he went as far as the chapel;
but as soon as he got to the door he turned straight round again, as
if he hadn’t power to pass it. I wonder he wouldn’t get the priest to
read a Mass for him, or something; but the crop he has is grand, and
you may know well he has some to help him.’ One hears many stories of
the kind; and a man whose son is believed to go out riding among them
at night tells me that he is careless about everything, and lies in
bed until it is late in the day. A doctor believes this boy to be mad.
Those that are at times ‘away,’ as it is called, know all things, but
are afraid to speak. A countryman at Kiltartan says, ‘There was one of
the Lydons—John—was away for seven years, lying in his bed, but brought
away at nights, and he knew everything; and one, Kearney, up in the
mountains, a cousin of his own, lost two hoggets, and came and told
him, and he knew the very spot where they were, and told him, and he
got them back again. But _they_ were vexed at that, and took away the
power, so that he never knew anything again, no more than another.’
Knocknarea is in Sligo, and the country people say that Maeve, still
a great queen of the western Sidhe, is buried in the cairn of stones
upon it. I have written of Clooth-na-Bare in ‘The Celtic Twilight.’
She ‘went all over the world, seeking a lake deep enough to drown her
faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to hill,
and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until, at
last, she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia,
on the top of the bird mountain, in Sligo.’ I forget, now, where I
heard this story, but it may have been from a priest at Collooney.
Clooth-na-Bare would mean the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a
corruption of Cailleac Bare, the old woman of Bare, who, under the
names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira,
appears in the legends of many places. Mr. O’Grady found her haunting
Lough Liath high up on the top of a mountain of the Fews, the Slieve
Fuadh, or Slieve G-Cullain of old times, under the name of the Cailleac
Buillia. He describes Lough Liath as a desolate moon-shaped lake, with
made wells and sunken passages upon its borders, and beset by marsh and
heather and gray boulders, and closes his ‘Flight of the Eagle’ with a
long rhapsody upon mountain and lake, because of the heroic tales and
beautiful old myths that have hung about them always. He identifies
the Cailleac Buillia with that Meluchra who persuaded Fionn to go
to her amid the waters of Lough Liath, and so changed him with her
enchantments, that, though she had to free him because of the threats
of the Fiana, his hair was ever afterwards as white as snow. To this
day the Tuatha De Danaan that are in the waters beckon to men, and
drown them in the waters; and Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra, or whatever
name one likes the best, is, doubtless, the name of a mistress among
them. Meluchra was daughter of Cullain; and Cullain Mr. O’Grady
calls, upon I know not what authority, a form of Lir, the master of
waters. The people of the waters have been in all ages beautiful and
changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and lonely, for water
is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the
fruitfulness of dreams. The white hair of Fionn may be but another
of the troubles of those that come to unearthly wisdom and earthly
trouble, and the threats and violence of the Fiana against her, a
different form of the threats and violence the country people use, to
make the Aes Sidhe give up those that are ‘away.’ Bare is now often
called an ugly old woman, but in the ‘Song of Bare,’ which Lady Gregory
has given in her ‘Saints and Wonders,’ she laments her lost beauty
after the withering of seven hundred years; and Dr. Joyce says that
one of her old names was Aebhin, which means beautiful. Aebhin was the
goddess of the tribes of northern Leinster; and the lover she had made
immortal, and who loved her perfectly, left her, and put on mortality,
to fight among them against the stranger, and died on the strand of
Clontarf.
THE POET PLEADS WITH THE ELEMENTAL POWERS (p. 37). HE
THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS WHEN A PART OF THE CONSTELLATIONS OF
HEAVEN (p. 40). HE HEARS THE CRY OF THE SEDGE (p. 28).
The Rose has been for many centuries a symbol of spiritual love and
supreme beauty. The lotus was in some Eastern countries imagined
blossoming upon the Tree of Life, as the Flower of Life, and is thus
represented in Assyrian bas-reliefs. Because the Rose, the flower
sacred to the Virgin Mary, and the flower that Apuleius’ adventurer
ate, when he was changed out of the ass’s shape and received into the
fellowship of Isis, is the western Flower of Life, I have imagined it
growing upon the Tree of Life. I once stood beside a man in Ireland
when he saw it growing there in a vision, that seemed to have rapt him
out of his body. He saw the Garden of Eden walled about, and on the top
of a high mountain, as in certain mediæval diagrams, and after passing
the Tree of Knowledge, on which grew fruit full of troubled faces, and
through whose branches flowed, he was told, sap that was human souls,
he came to a tall, dark tree, with little bitter fruits, and was shown
a kind of stair or ladder going up through the tree, and told to go
up; and near the top of the tree, a beautiful woman, like the Goddess
of Life, associated with the tree in Assyria, gave him a rose that
seemed to have been growing upon the tree. One finds the Rose in the
Irish poets, sometimes as a religious symbol, as in the phrase, ‘the
Rose of Friday,’ meaning the Rose of austerity, in a Gaelic poem in
Dr. Hyde’s ‘Religious Songs of Connacht’; and, I think, as a symbol
of woman’s beauty in the Gaelic song, ‘Roseen Dubh’; and a symbol of
Ireland in Mangan’s adaptation of ‘Roseen Dubh,’ ‘My Dark Rosaleen,’
and in Mr. Aubrey de Vere’s ‘The Little Black Rose.’ I do not know any
evidence to prove whether this symbol came to Ireland with mediæval
Christianity, or whether it has come down from older times. I have
read somewhere that a stone engraved with a Celtic god, who holds what
looks like a rose in one hand, has been found somewhere in England; but
I cannot find the reference, though I certainly made a note of it. If
the Rose was really a symbol of Ireland among the Gaelic poets, and if
‘Roseen Dubh’ is really a political poem, as some think, one may feel
pretty certain that the ancient Celts associated the Rose with Eire, or
Fotla, or Banba—goddesses who gave their names to Ireland—or with some
principal god or goddess, for such symbols are not suddenly adopted or
invented, but come out of mythology.
I have made the Seven Lights, the constellation of the Bear, lament for
the theft of the Rose, and I have made the Dragon, the constellation
Draco, the guardian of the Rose, because these constellations move
about the pole of the heavens, the ancient Tree of Life in many
countries, and are often associated with the Tree of Life in mythology.
It is this Tree of Life that I have put into the ‘Song of Mongan’
under its common Irish form of a hazel; and, because it had sometimes
the stars for fruit, I have hung upon it ‘the Crooked Plough’ and the
‘Pilot Star,’ as Gaelic-speaking Irishmen sometimes call the Bear and
the North star. I have made it an axle-tree in ‘Aedh hears the Cry of
the Sedge,’ for this was another ancient way of representing it.
THE HOST OF THE AIR (p. 6).
Some writers distinguish between the Sluagh Gaoith, the host of the
air, and Sluagh Sidhe, the host of the Sidhe, and describe the host
of the air as of a peculiar malignancy. Dr. Joyce says, ‘Of all the
different kinds of goblins .... air demons were most dreaded by the
people. They lived among clouds, and mists, and rocks, and hated the
human race with the utmost malignity.’ A very old Aran charm, which
contains the words ‘Send God, by his strength, between us and the
host of the Sidhe, between us and the host of the air,’ seems also
to distinguish among them. I am inclined, however, to think that the
distinction came in with Christianity and its belief about the prince
of the air, for the host of the Sidhe, as I have already explained, are
closely associated with the wind.
They are said to steal brides just after their marriage, and sometimes
in a blast of wind. A man in Galway says, ‘At Aughanish there were two
couples came to the shore to be married, and one of the newly married
women was in the boat with the priest, and they going back to the
island; and a sudden blast of wind came, and the priest said some
blessed words that were able to save himself, but the girl was swept.’
This woman was drowned; but more often the persons who are taken ‘get
the touch,’ as it is called, and fall into a half dream, and grow
indifferent to all things, for their true life has gone out of the
world, and is among the hills and the forts of the Sidhe. A faery
doctor has told me that his wife ‘got the touch’ at her marriage
because there was one of them wanted her; and the way he knew for
certain was, that when he took a pitchfork out of the rafters, and told
her it was a broom, she said, ‘It is a broom.’ She was, the truth is,
in the magical sleep, to which people have given a new name lately,
that makes the imagination so passive that it can be moulded by any
voice in any world into any shape. A mere likeness of some old woman,
or even old animal, some one or some thing the Sidhe have no longer a
use for, is believed to be left instead of the person who is ‘away’;
this some one or some thing can, it is thought, be driven away by
threats, or by violence (though I have heard country women say that
violence is wrong), which perhaps awakes the soul out of the magical
sleep. The story in the poem is founded on an old Gaelic ballad that
was sung and translated for me by a woman at Ballisodare in County
Sligo; but in the ballad the husband found the keeners keening his
wife when he got to his house. She was ‘swept’ at once; but the Sidhe
are said to value those the most whom they but cast into a half dream,
which may last for years, for they need the help of a living person in
most of the things they do. There are many stories of people who seem
to die and be buried—though the country people will tell you it is but
some one or some thing put in their place that dies and is buried—and
yet are brought back afterwards. These tales are perhaps memories of
true awakenings out of the magical sleep, moulded by the imagination,
under the influence of a mystical doctrine which it understands too
literally, into the shape of some well-known traditional tale. One does
not hear them as one hears the others, from the persons who are ‘away,’
or from their wives or husbands; and one old man, who had often seen
the Sidhe, began one of them with ‘Maybe it is all vanity.’
Here is a tale that a friend of mine heard in the Burren hills, and it
is a type of all:—
‘There was a girl to be married, and she didn’t like the man, and she
cried when the day was coming, and said she wouldn’t go along with
him. And the mother said, “Get into the bed, then, and I’ll say that
you’re sick.” And so she did. And when the man came the mother said to
him, “You can’t get her, she’s sick in the bed.” And he looked in and
said, “That’s not my wife that’s in the bed, it’s some old hag.” And
the mother began to cry and roar. And he went out and got two hampers
of turf, and made a fire, that they thought he was going to burn the
house down. And when the fire was kindled, “Come out, now,” says he,
“and we’ll see who you are, when I’ll put you on the fire.” And when
she heard that, she gave one leap, and was out of the house, and they
saw, then, it was an old hag she was. Well, the man asked the advice
of an old woman, and she bid him go to a faery-bush that was near,
and he might get some word of her. So he went there at night, and saw
all sorts of grand people, and they in carriages or riding on horses,
and among them he could see the girl he came to look for. So he went
again to the old woman, and she said, “If you can get the three bits
of blackthorn out of her hair, you’ll get her again.” So that night he
went again, and that time he only got hold of a bit of her hair. But
the old woman told him that was no use, and that he was put back now,
and it might be twelve nights before he’d get her. But on the fourth
night he got the third bit of blackthorn, and he took her, and she
came away with him. He never told the mother he had got her; but one
day she saw her at a fair, and, says she, “That’s my daughter; I know
her by the smile and by the laugh of her, and she with a shawl about
her head.” So the husband said, “You’re right there, and hard I worked
to get her.” She spoke often of the grand things she saw underground,
and how she used to have wine to drink, and to drive out in a carriage
with four horses every night. And she used to be able to see her
husband when he came to look for her, and she was greatly afraid he’d
get a drop of the wine, for then he would have come underground and
never left it again. And she was glad herself to come to earth again,
and not to be left there.’
The old Gaelic literature is full of the appeals of the Tuatha De
Danaan to mortals whom they would bring into their country; but the
song of Midher to the beautiful Etain, the wife of the king who was
called Echaid the ploughman, is the type of all.
‘O beautiful woman, come with me to the marvellous land where one
listens to a sweet music, where one has spring flowers in one’s hair,
where the body is like snow from head to foot, where no one is sad or
silent, where teeth are white and eyebrows are black ... cheeks red
like foxglove in flower.... Ireland is beautiful, but not so beautiful
as the Great Plain I call you to. The beer of Ireland is heady, but
the beer of the Great Plain is much more heady. How marvellous is the
country I am speaking of! Youth does not grow old there. Streams with
warm flood flow there; sometimes mead, sometimes wine. Men are charming
and without a blot there, and love is not forbidden there. O woman,
when you come into my powerful country you will wear a crown of gold
upon your head. I will give you the flesh of swine, and you will have
beer and milk to drink, O beautiful woman. O beautiful woman, come with
me!’
THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS (p. 11).
The Tuatha De Danaan can take all shapes, and those that are in the
waters take often the shape of fish. A woman of Burren, in Galway,
says, ‘There are more of them in the sea than on the land, and they
sometimes try to come over the side of the boat in the form of fishes,
for they can take their choice shape.’ At other times they are
beautiful women; and another Galway woman says, ‘Surely those things
are in the sea as well as on land. My father was out fishing one night
off Tyrone. And something came beside the boat that had eyes shining
like candles. And then a wave came in, and a storm rose all in a
minute, and whatever was in the wave, the weight of it had like to sink
the boat. And then they saw that it was a woman in the sea that had the
shining eyes. So my father went to the priest, and he bid him always to
take a drop of holy water and a pinch of salt out in the boat with him,
and nothing could harm him.’
The poem was suggested to me by a Greek folk song; but the folk belief
of Greece is very like that of Ireland, and I certainly thought, when
I wrote it, of Ireland, and of the spirits that are in Ireland. An old
man who was cutting a quickset hedge near Gort, in Galway, said, only
the other day, ‘One time I was cutting timber over in Inchy, and about
eight o’clock one morning, when I got there, I saw a girl picking nuts,
with her hair hanging down over her shoulders; brown hair; and she had
a good, clean face, and she was tall, and nothing on her head, and
her dress no way gaudy, but simple. And when she felt me coming she
gathered herself up, and was gone, as if the earth had swallowed her
up. And I followed her, and looked for her, but I never could see her
again from that day to this, never again.’
The county Galway people use the word ‘clean’ in its old sense of fresh
and comely.
HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE THAT HAS COME UPON HIM AND HIS BELOVED,
AND LONGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD (p. 15).
My deer and hound are properly related to the deer and hound that
flicker in and out of the various tellings of the Arthurian legends,
leading different knights upon adventures, and to the hounds and to the
hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all tellings of Oisin’s
journey to the country of the young. The hound is certainly related
to the Hounds of Annwvyn or of Hades, who are white, and have red
ears, and were heard, and are, perhaps, still heard by Welsh peasants,
following some flying thing in the night winds; and is probably related
to the hounds that Irish country people believe will awake and seize
the souls of the dead if you lament them too loudly or too soon. An
old woman told a friend and myself that she saw what she thought were
white birds, flying over an enchanted place; but found, when she got
near, that they had dogs’ heads, and I do not doubt that my hound and
these dog-headed birds are of the same family. I got my hound and deer
out of a last century Gaelic poem about Oisin’s journey to the country
of the young. After the hunting of the hornless deer, that leads him
to the seashore, and while he is riding over the sea with Niamh, he
sees amid the waters—I have not the Gaelic poem by me, and describe it
from memory—a young man following a girl who has a golden apple, and
afterwards a hound with one red ear following a deer with no horns.
This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man ‘which
is for the woman,’ and ‘the desire of the woman which is for the desire
of the man,’ and of all desires that are as these. I have read them
in this way in ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’ or Oisin, and have made my
lover sigh because he has seen in their faces ‘the immortal desire of
immortals.’
The man in my poem who has a hazel wand may have been Aengus, Master of
Love; and I have made the boar without bristles come out of the West,
because the place of sunset was in Ireland, as in other countries, a
place of symbolic darkness and death.
THE CAP AND BELLS (p. 22).
I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another
long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I
was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision
than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me the sense
of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the
second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always meant a
great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not
always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said, ‘the authors
are in eternity,’ and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in
dreams.
THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG (p. 24).
All over Ireland there are prophecies of the coming rout of the enemies
of Ireland, in a certain Valley of the Black Pig, and these prophecies
are, no doubt, now, as they were in the Fenian days, a political force.
I have heard of one man who would not give any money to the Land
League, because the Battle could not be until the close of the century;
but, as a rule, periods of trouble bring prophecies of its near coming.
A few years before my time, an old man who lived at Lisadill, in Sligo,
used to fall down in a fit and rave out descriptions of the Battle;
and a man in Sligo has told me that it will be so great a battle that
the horses shall go up to their fetlocks in blood, and that their
girths, when it is over, will rot from their bellies for lack of a hand
to unbuckle them. If one reads Professor Rhys’ “Celtic Heathendom”
by the light of Professor Frazer’s “Golden Bough,” and puts together
what one finds there about the boar that killed Diarmuid, and other
old Celtic boars and sows, one sees that the battle is mythological,
and that the Pig it is named from must be a type of cold and winter
doing battle with the summer, or of death battling with life. For the
purposes of poetry, at any rate, I think it a symbol of the darkness
that will destroy the world. The country people say there is no shape
for a spirit to take so dangerous as the shape of a pig; and a Galway
blacksmith—and blacksmiths are thought to be specially protected—says
he would be afraid to meet a pig on the road at night; and another
Galway man tells this story: ‘There was a man coming the road from Gort
to Garryland one night, and he had a drop taken; and before him, on
the road, he saw a pig walking; and having a drop in, he gave a shout,
and made a kick at it, and bid it get out of that. And by the time he
got home, his arm was swelled from the shoulder to be as big as a bag,
and he couldn’t use his hand with the pain of it. And his wife brought
him, after a few days, to a woman that used to do cures at Rahasane.
And on the road all she could do would hardly keep him from lying down
to sleep on the grass. And when they got to the woman she knew all that
happened; “and,” says she, “it’s well for you that your wife didn’t let
you fall asleep on the grass, for if you had done that but even for one
instant, you’d be a lost man.”’
Professor Rhys, who considers the bristleless boar a symbol of darkness
and cold, rather than of winter and cold, thinks it was without
bristles because the darkness is shorn away by the sun.
The Battle should, I believe, be compared with three other battles; a
battle the Sidhe are said to fight when a person is being taken away
by them; a battle they are said to fight in November for the harvest;
the great battle the Tuatha De Danaan fought, according to the Gaelic
chroniclers, with the Fomor at Moy Tura, or the Towery Plain.
I have heard of the battle over the dying both in County Galway and in
the Isles of Aran, an old Aran fisherman having told me that it was
fought over two of his children, and that he found blood in a box he
had for keeping fish, when it was over; and I have written about it,
and given examples elsewhere. A faery doctor, on the borders of Galway
and Clare, explained it as a battle between the friends and enemies
of the dying, the one party trying to take them, the other trying to
save them from being taken. It may once, when the land of the Sidhe was
the only other world, and when every man who died was carried thither,
have always accompanied death. I suggest that the battle between the
Tuatha De Danaan, the powers of light, and warmth, and fruitfulness,
and goodness, and the Fomor, the powers of darkness, and cold, and
barrenness, and badness upon the Towery Plain, was the establishment
of the habitable world, the rout of the ancestral darkness; that the
battle among the Sidhe for the harvest is the annual battle of summer
and winter; that the battle among the Sidhe at a man’s death is the
battle of life and death; and that the battle of the Black Pig is the
battle between the manifest world and the ancestral darkness at the
end of all things; and that all these battles are one, the battle of
all things with shadowy decay. Once a symbolism has possessed the
imagination of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an
embodiment of disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and
visions, age after age.
THE SECRET ROSE (p. 32).
I find that I have unintentionally changed the old story of Conchubar’s
death. He did not see the crucifixion in a vision, but was told about
it. He had been struck by a ball, made of the dried brain of a dead
enemy, and hurled out of a sling; and this ball had been left in his
head, and his head had been mended, the ‘Book of Leinster’ says, with
thread of gold because his hair was like gold. Keating, a writer of
the time of Elizabeth, says, ‘In that state did he remain seven years,
until the Friday on which Christ was crucified, according to some
historians; and when he saw the unusual changes of the creation and the
eclipse of the sun and the moon at its full, he asked of Bucrach, a
Leinster Druid, who was along with him, what was it that brought that
unusual change upon the planets of Heaven and Earth. “Jesus Christ, the
Son of God,” said the Druid, “who is now being crucified by the Jews.”
“That is a pity,” said Conchubar; “were I in his presence I would kill
those who were putting him to death.” And with that he brought out
his sword, and rushed at a woody grove which was convenient to him,
and began to cut and fell it; and what he said was, that if he were
among the Jews, that was the usage he would give them, and from the
excessiveness of his fury which seized upon him, the ball started out
of his head, and some of the brain came after it, and in that way he
died. The wood of Lanshraigh, in Feara Rois, is the name by which that
shrubby wood is called.’
I have imagined Cuchulain meeting Fand ‘walking among flaming dew.’ The
story of their love is one of the most beautiful of our old tales.
I have founded the man ‘who drove the gods out of their Liss,’ or fort,
upon something I have read about Caolte after the battle of Gabra, when
almost all his companions were killed, driving the gods out of their
Liss, either at Osraighe, now Ossory, or at Eas Ruaidh, now Asseroe,
a waterfall at Ballyshannon, where Ilbreac, one of the children of the
goddess Danu, had a Liss. But maybe I only read it in Mr. Standish
O’Grady, who has a fine imagination, for I find no such story in Lady
Gregory’s book.
I have founded ‘the proud dreaming king’ upon Fergus, the son of Roigh,
the legendary poet of ‘the quest of the bull of Cuailgne,’ as he is
in the ancient story of Deirdre, and in modern poems by Ferguson. He
married Nessa, and Ferguson makes him tell how she took him ‘captive in
a single look.’
‘I am but an empty shade,
Far from life and passion laid;
Yet does sweet remembrance thrill
All my shadowy being still.’
Presently, because of his great love, he gave up his throne to
Conchubar, her son by another, and lived out his days feasting, and
fighting, and hunting. His promise never to refuse a feast from a
certain comrade, and the mischief that came by his promise, and the
vengeance he took afterwards, are a principal theme of the poets. I
have explained my changing imaginations of him in ‘Fergus and the
Druid,’ and in a little song in the second act of ‘The Countess
Kathleen,’ and in ‘Deirdre.’
I have founded him ‘who sold tillage, and house, and goods,’ upon
something in ‘The Red Pony,’ a folk tale in Mr. Larminie’s ‘West Irish
Folk Tales.’ A young man ‘saw a light before him on the high road. When
he came as far, there was an open box on the road, and a light coming
up out of it. He took up the box. There was a lock of hair in it.
Presently he had to go to become the servant of a king for his living.
There were eleven boys. When they were going out into the stable at ten
o’clock, each of them took a light but he. He took no candle at all
with him. Each of them went into his own stable. When he went into his
stable he opened the box. He left it in a hole in the wall. The light
was great. It was twice as much as in the other stables.’ The king
hears of it, and makes him show him the box. The king says, ‘You must
go and bring me the woman to whom the hair belongs.’ In the end, the
young man, and not the king, marries the woman.
EARLY POEMS:
BALLADS AND LYRICS (p. 89). ‘THE ROSE’ (p. 139).
‘THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN’ (p. 175).
When I first wrote I went here and there for my subjects as my reading
led me, and preferred to all other countries Arcadia and the India of
romance, but presently I convinced myself, for such reasons as those
in ‘Ireland and the Arts,’ that I should never go for the scenery of
a poem to any country but my own, and I think that I shall hold to
that conviction to the end. I was very young; and, perhaps because I
belonged to a Young Ireland Society in Dublin, I wished to be as easily
understood as the Young Ireland writers, to write always out of the
common thought of the people.
I have put the poems written while I was influenced by this desire,
though with an always lessening force, into those sections which I
have called ‘Early Poems.’ I read certain of them now with no little
discontent, for I find, especially in the ballads, some triviality and
sentimentality. Mangan and Davis, at their best, are not sentimental
and trivial, but I became so from an imitation that was not natural
to me. When I was writing the poems in the second of the three, the
section called ‘The Rose,’ I found that I was becoming unintelligible
to the young men who had been in my thought. We have still the same
tradition, but I have been like a traveller who, having when newly
arrived in the city noticed nothing but the news of the market-place,
the songs of the workmen, the great public buildings, has come after
certain months to let his thoughts run upon some little carving in its
niche, some Ogham on a stone, or the conversation of a countryman who
knows more of the ‘Boar without Bristles’ than of the daily paper.
When writing I went for nearly all my subjects to Irish folklore and
legends, much as a Young Ireland poet would have done, writing ‘Down by
the Salley Garden’ by adding a few lines to a couple of lines I heard
sung at Ballisodare; ‘The Meditation of the Old Fisherman’ from the
words of a not very old fisherman at Rosses Point; ‘The Lamentation
of the Old Pensioner’ from words spoken by a man on the Two Rock
Mountain to a friend of mine; ‘The Ballad of the Old Foxhunter’ from
an incident in one of Kickham’s novels; and ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’
from a sermon preached in a chapel at Howth; and ‘The Wanderings of
Oisin’ from a Gaelic poem of the Eighteenth Century and certain Middle
Irish poems in dialogue. It is no longer necessary to say who Oisin
and Cuchulain and Fergus and the other bardic persons are, for Lady
Gregory, in her ‘Gods and Fighting Men’ and ‘Cuchulain of Muirthemne’
has re-told all that is greatest in the ancient literature of Ireland
in a style that has to my ears an immortal beauty.
_Printed by_ A. H. BULLEN, _at The Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-on-Avon_.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Only the most obvious punctuation errors repaired. Repeated section
titles were removed. Varied hyphenation was retained.
Page 202, “multudinous” changed to “multitudinous” (pillarless,
multitudinous home)
Page 211, stanza break inserted above the line that begins (Till the
horse gave a whinny)