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Yeats
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)
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? Project Gutenberg's Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol 2, by William Butler Yeats
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Title: Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol 2
The King's Threshold. On Baile's Strand. Deirdre. Shadowy Waters
Author: William Butler Yeats
Release Date: August 5, 2015 [EBook #49609]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, VOL 2 ***
Produced by Emmy, mollypit and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www. pgdp. net (This file was
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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
THE KING'S THRESHOLD. ON
BAILE'S STRAND. DEIRDRE.
SHADOWY WATERS :: BEING
THE SECOND VOLUME OF
THE COLLECTED WORKS IN
VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM
BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED
AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD
PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE KING'S THRESHOLD 1
ON BAILE'S STRAND 69
DEIRDRE 125
THE SHADOWY WATERS 179
APPENDIX I:
ACTING VERSION OF 'THE SHADOWY WATERS' 231
APPENDIX II:
A DIFFERENT VERSION OF DEIRDRE'S ENTRANCE 251
APPENDIX III:
THE LEGENDARY AND MYTHOLOGICAL FOUNDATION OF THE PLAYS 254
APPENDIX IV:
THE DATES AND PLACES OF PERFORMANCE OF PLAYS 256
_The friends that have it I do wrong
When ever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake. _
THE KING'S THRESHOLD
TO FRANK FAY
BECAUSE OF HIS BEAUTIFUL SPEAKING IN
THE CHARACTER OF SEANCHAN
_PERSONS IN THE PLAY_
KING GUAIRE
SEANCHAN (_pronounced_ SHANAHAN)
HIS PUPILS
THE MAYOR OF KINVARA
TWO CRIPPLES
BRIAN (_an old servant_)
THE LORD HIGH CHAMBERLAIN
A SOLDIER
A MONK
COURT LADIES
TWO PRINCESSES
FEDELM
THE KING'S THRESHOLD.
_Steps before the Palace of KING GUAIRE at Gort. A
table in front of steps at one side, with food on it,
and a bench by table. SEANCHAN lying on steps.
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)
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? Project Gutenberg's Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol 2, by William Butler Yeats
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
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Title: Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol 2
The King's Threshold. On Baile's Strand. Deirdre. Shadowy Waters
Author: William Butler Yeats
Release Date: August 5, 2015 [EBook #49609]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, VOL 2 ***
Produced by Emmy, mollypit and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www. pgdp. net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
THE KING'S THRESHOLD. ON
BAILE'S STRAND. DEIRDRE.
SHADOWY WATERS :: BEING
THE SECOND VOLUME OF
THE COLLECTED WORKS IN
VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM
BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED
AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD
PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE KING'S THRESHOLD 1
ON BAILE'S STRAND 69
DEIRDRE 125
THE SHADOWY WATERS 179
APPENDIX I:
ACTING VERSION OF 'THE SHADOWY WATERS' 231
APPENDIX II:
A DIFFERENT VERSION OF DEIRDRE'S ENTRANCE 251
APPENDIX III:
THE LEGENDARY AND MYTHOLOGICAL FOUNDATION OF THE PLAYS 254
APPENDIX IV:
THE DATES AND PLACES OF PERFORMANCE OF PLAYS 256
_The friends that have it I do wrong
When ever I remake a song,
Should know what issue is at stake:
It is myself that I remake. _
THE KING'S THRESHOLD
TO FRANK FAY
BECAUSE OF HIS BEAUTIFUL SPEAKING IN
THE CHARACTER OF SEANCHAN
_PERSONS IN THE PLAY_
KING GUAIRE
SEANCHAN (_pronounced_ SHANAHAN)
HIS PUPILS
THE MAYOR OF KINVARA
TWO CRIPPLES
BRIAN (_an old servant_)
THE LORD HIGH CHAMBERLAIN
A SOLDIER
A MONK
COURT LADIES
TWO PRINCESSES
FEDELM
THE KING'S THRESHOLD.
_Steps before the Palace of KING GUAIRE at Gort. A
table in front of steps at one side, with food on it,
and a bench by table. SEANCHAN lying on steps.
