The peasant was
wandering
in his mind with prolonged sorrow.
Yeats
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? The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of
William Butler Yeats, Vol. 5 (of 8), by William Butler Yeats
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
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Title: The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 5 (of 8)
The Celtic Twilight and Stories of Red Hanrahan
Author: William Butler Yeats
Release Date: August 5, 2015 [EBook #49612]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, VOL 5 ***
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
[Illustration: _Emery Walker Ph. sc. _
_From a drawing by A. Mancini_]
THE CELTIC TWILIGHT AND
STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN
BEING THE FIFTH VOLUME OF
THE COLLECTED WORKS IN
VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM
BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED
AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD
PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII
CONTENTS
THE CELTIC TWILIGHT
PAGE
THIS BOOK 1
A TELLER OF TALES 3
BELIEF AND UNBELIEF 6
MORTAL HELP 9
A VISIONARY 11
VILLAGE GHOSTS 17
'DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE' 27
A KNIGHT OF THE SHEEP 39
AN ENDURING HEART 44
THE SORCERERS 48
THE DEVIL 54
HAPPY AND UNHAPPY THEOLOGIANS 56
THE LAST GLEEMAN 63
REGINA, REGINA PIGMEORUM VENI 73
'AND FAIR, FIERCE WOMEN' 78
ENCHANTED WOODS 82
MIRACULOUS CREATURES 89
ARISTOTLE OF THE BOOKS 91
THE SWINE OF THE GODS 92
A VOICE 94
KIDNAPPERS 96
THE UNTIRING ONES 106
EARTH, FIRE AND WATER 110
THE OLD TOWN 112
THE MAN AND HIS BOOTS 115
A COWARD 117
THE THREE O'BYRNES AND THE EVIL FAERIES 119
DRUMCLIFF AND ROSSES 121
THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE 131
THE RELIGION OF A SAILOR 134
CONCERNING THE NEARNESS TOGETHER OF HEAVEN,
EARTH, AND PURGATORY 136
THE EATERS OF PRECIOUS STONES 138
OUR LADY OF THE HILLS 140
THE GOLDEN AGE 144
A REMONSTRANCE WITH SCOTSMEN FOR HAVING SOURED
THE DISPOSITION OF THEIR GHOSTS AND
FAERIES 146
WAR 152
THE QUEEN AND THE FOOL 155
THE FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE OF FAERY 162
DREAMS THAT HAVE NO MORAL 172
BY THE ROADSIDE 190
'INTO THE TWILIGHT' 193
STORIES OF RED HANRAHAN:
RED HANRAHAN 197
THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE 213
HANRAHAN AND CATHLEEN THE DAUGHTER OF HOOLIHAN 225
RED HANRAHAN'S CURSE 231
HANRAHAN'S VISION 242
THE DEATH OF HANRAHAN 250
THE CELTIC TWILIGHT
_Time drops in decay
Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and woods
Have their day, have their day;
But, kindly old rout
Of the fire-born moods,
You pass not away. _
_THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE_
_The host is riding from Knocknarea,
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;
Caolte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling, 'Away, come away;
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart. '
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day;
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caolte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling, 'Away, come away. '_
THE CELTIC TWILIGHT
THIS BOOK
I
I HAVE desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the
beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy
world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any
of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore
written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen,
and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.
I have, however, been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from those
of the peasantry, but have rather let my men and women, dhouls and
faeries, go their way unoffended or defended by any argument of mine.
The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull
them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can
weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too
have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in
it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.
Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has
built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out
their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved
daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little.
1893.
II
I have added a few more chapters in the manner of the old ones, and
would have added others, but one loses, as one grows older, something
of the lightness of one's dreams; one begins to take life up in both
hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no
great loss perhaps. In these new chapters, as in the old ones, I have
invented nothing but my comments and one or two deceitful sentences
that may keep some poor story-teller's commerce with the devil and his
angels, or the like, from being known among his neighbours. I shall
publish in a little while a big book about the commonwealth of faery,
and shall try to make it systematical and learned enough to buy pardon
for this handful of dreams.
1902
A TELLER OF TALES
MANY of the tales in this book were told me by one Paddy Flynn, a
little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin
in the village of Ballisodare, which is, he was wont to say, 'the most
gentle'--whereby he meant faery--'place in the whole of County Sligo. '
Others hold it, however, but second to Drumcliff and Drumahair. The
first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the next
time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed
always cheerful, though I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as
the eyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) a
melancholy which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary
melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all animals.
And yet there was much in his life to depress him, for in the triple
solitude of age, eccentricity, and deafness, he went about much
pestered by children. It was for this very reason perhaps that he ever
recommended mirth and hopefulness. He was fond, for instance, of
telling how Collumcille cheered up his mother. 'How are you to-day,
mother? ' said the saint. 'Worse,' replied the mother. 'May you be worse
to-morrow,' said the saint. The next day Collumcille came again, and
exactly the same conversation took place, but the third day the mother
said, 'Better, thank God. ' And the saint replied, 'May you be better
to-morrow. ' He was fond too of telling how the Judge smiles at the last
day alike when he rewards the good and condemns the lost to unceasing
flames. He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him
sad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, 'Am
I not annoyed with them? ' I asked too if he had ever seen the banshee.
'I have seen it,' he said, 'down there by the water, batting the river
with its hands. '
I have copied this account of Paddy Flynn, with a few verbal
alterations, from a note-book which I almost filled with his tales
and sayings, shortly after seeing him. I look now at the note-book
regretfully, for the blank pages at the end will never be filled
up. Paddy Flynn is dead; a friend of mine gave him a large bottle
of whiskey, and though a sober man at most times, the sight of so
much liquor filled him with a great enthusiasm, and he lived upon
it for some days and then died. His body, worn out with old age and
hard times, could not bear the drink as in his young days. He was a
great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to
empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his
stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample
circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall
by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of
imagination. What is literature but the expression of moods by the
vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need
heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less
than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall
find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell,
purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts
to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of
rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey
the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is
true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
BELIEF AND UNBELIEF
THERE are some doubters even in the western villages. One woman told
me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in
ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest
to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to
go 'trapsin about the earth' at their own free will; 'but there are
faeries,' she added, 'and little leprechauns, and water-horses and
fallen angels. ' I have met also a man with a Mohawk Indian tattooed
upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter
what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the
Mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, 'they stand to reason. ' Even the
official mind does not escape this faith.
A little girl who was at service in the village of Grange, close
under the seaward slopes of Ben Bulben, suddenly disappeared one
night about three years ago. There was at once great excitement in
the neighbourhood, because it was rumoured that the faeries had taken
her. A villager was said to have long struggled to hold her from
them, but at last they prevailed, and he found nothing in his hands
but a broomstick. The local constable was applied to, and he at once
instituted a house-to-house search, and at the same time advised the
people to burn all the _bucalauns_ (ragweed) on the field she vanished
from, because _bucalauns_ are sacred to the faeries. They spent the
whole night burning them, the constable repeating spells the while. In
the morning the little girl was found, the story goes, wandering in the
field. She said the faeries had taken her away a great distance, riding
on a faery horse. At last she saw a big river, and the man who had
tried to keep her from being carried off was drifting down it--such are
the topsy-turvydoms of faery glamour--in a cockle-shell. On the way her
companions had mentioned the names of several people who were about to
die shortly in the village.
Perhaps the constable was right. It is better doubtless to believe much
unreason and a little truth than to deny for denial's sake truth and
unreason alike, for when we do this we have not even a rush candle
to guide our steps, not even a poor sowlth to dance before us on the
marsh, and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness where
dwell the misshapen dhouls. And after all, can we come to so great evil
if we keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, and welcome
with open hand whatever of excellent come to warm itself, whether it
be man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to the dhouls
themselves, 'Be ye gone'? When all is said and done, how do we not know
but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth? for it
has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the
wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into
the world again, wild bees, wild bees!
MORTAL HELP
ONE hears in the old poems of men taken away to help the gods in a
battle, and Cuchulain won the goddess Fand for a while, by helping her
married sister and her sister's husband to overthrow another nation of
the Land of Promise. I have been told, too, that the people of faery
cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal,
whose body, or whatever has been put in its place, as the story-teller
would say, is asleep at home. Without mortal help they are shadowy and
cannot even strike the balls. One day I was walking over some marshy
land in Galway with a friend when we found an old, hard-featured man
digging a ditch. My friend had heard that this man had seen a wonderful
sight of some kind, and at last we got the story out of him. When he
was a boy he was working one day with about thirty men and women and
boys. They were beyond Tuam and not far from Knock-na-gur. Presently
they saw, all thirty of them, and at a distance of about half-a-mile,
some hundred and fifty of the people of faery. There were two of them,
he said, in dark clothes like people of our own time, who stood about
a hundred yards from one another, but the others wore clothes of all
colours, 'bracket' or chequered, and some with red waistcoats.
He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been
playing hurley, for 'they looked as if it was that. ' Sometimes they
would vanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of
the bodies of the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the
size of living men, but the others were small. He saw them for about
half-an-hour, and then the old man he and those about him were working
for took up a whip and said, 'Get on, get on, or we will have no work
done! ' I asked if he saw the faeries too. 'Oh, yes, but he did not want
work he was paying wages for to be neglected. ' He made everybody work
so hard that nobody saw what happened to the faeries.
1902.
A VISIONARY
A YOUNG man came to see me at my lodgings the other night, and began
to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. I
questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems
and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly
had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon
making his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of
the artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily,
however. He had them all in his memory. Some indeed had never been
written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the
reeds,[A] seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of
Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly
it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly. 'Do you
see anything, X----? ' I said. 'A shining, winged woman, covered by her
long hair, is standing near the doorway,' he answered, or some such
words. 'Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us,
and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form? ' I said; for I
am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion
of their speech. 'No,' he replied; 'for if it were the thoughts of a
person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living
body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail. It is a spirit.
It is some one who is dead or who has never lived. '
I asked what he was doing, and found he was clerk in a large shop.
His pleasure, however, was to wander about upon the hills, talking
to half-mad and visionary peasants, or to persuade queer and
conscience-stricken persons to deliver up the keeping of their troubles
into his care. Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging,
more than one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and
sun them as it were in the subtle light of his mind. Sometimes visions
come to him as he talks with them, and he is rumoured to have told
divers people true matters of their past days and distant friends, and
left them hushed with dread of their strange teacher, who seems scarce
more than a boy, and is so much more subtle than the oldest among them.
The poetry he recited me was full of his nature and his visions.
Sometimes it told of other lives he believes himself to have lived in
other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them
to their own minds. I told him I would write an article upon him and
it, and was told in turn that I might do so if I did not mention his
name, for he wished to be always 'unknown, obscure, impersonal. ' Next
day a bundle of his poems arrived, and with them a note in these words:
'Here are copies of verses you said you liked. I do not think I could
ever write or paint any more. I prepare myself for a cycle of other
activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches.
It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers. '
The poems were all endeavours to capture some high, impalpable mood in
a net of obscure images. There were fine passages in all, but these
were often embedded in thoughts which have evidently a special value
to his mind, but are to other men the counters of an unknown coinage.
To them they seem merely so much brass or copper or tarnished silver
at the best. At other times the beauty of the thought was obscured by
careless writing as though he had suddenly doubted if writing was not a
foolish labour. He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings,
in which an imperfect anatomy did not altogether hide extreme beauty of
feeling. The faeries in whom he believes have given him many subjects,
notably Thomas of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the twilight while
a young and beautiful creature leans softly out of the shadow and
whispers in his ear. He had delighted above all in strong effects of
colour: spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathers
of peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star;
a spirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal--symbol of the
soul--half shut within his hand. But always under this largess of
colour lay some tender homily addressed to man's fragile hopes. This
spiritual eagerness draws to him all those who, like himself, seek
for illumination or else mourn for a joy that has gone. One of these
especially comes to mind. A winter or two ago he spent much of the
night walking up and down upon the mountain talking to an old peasant
who, dumb to most men, poured out his cares for him. Both were unhappy:
X---- because he had then first decided that art and poetry were not
for him, and the old peasant because his life was ebbing out with no
achievement remaining and no hope left him. Both how Celtic! how full
of striving after a something never to be completely expressed in word
or deed.
The peasant was wandering in his mind with prolonged sorrow.
Once he burst out with 'God possesses the heavens--God possesses the
heavens--but He covets the world'; and once he lamented that his old
neighbours were gone, and that all had forgotten him: they used to draw
a chair to the fire for him in every cabin, and now they said, 'Who is
that old fellow there? ' 'The fret' [Irish for doom] 'is over me,' he
repeated, and then went on to talk once more of God and heaven. More
than once also he said, waving his arm towards the mountain, 'Only
myself knows what happened under the thorn-tree forty years ago'; and
as he said it the tears upon his face glistened in the moonlight.
This old man always rises before me when I think of X----. Both seek--one
in wandering sentences, the other in symbolic pictures and subtle
allegoric poetry--to express a something that lies beyond the range of
expression; and both, if X---- will forgive me, have within them the vast
and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart. The
peasant visionaries that are, the landlord duellists that were, and the
whole hurly-burly of legends--Cuchulain fighting the sea for two days
until the waves pass over him and he dies, Caolte storming the palace
of the gods, Oisin seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease
his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of faeryland, these two
mystics walking up and down upon the mountains uttering the central
dreams of their souls in no less dream-laden sentences, and this mind
that finds them so interesting--all are a portion of that great Celtic
phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered, nor any angel
revealed.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a part
of all peoples who preserve the moods of the ancient peoples of the
world. I am not so pre-occupied with the mystery of Race as I used to
be, but leave this sentence and other sentences like it unchanged. We
once believed them, and have, it may be, not grown wiser.
VILLAGE GHOSTS
IN the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our
minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities;
people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce.
Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge.
When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your
favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share
it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle
all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on
unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all
our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb
multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering
through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers
wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions. ' Across the villages
of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us,
we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts. '
My ghosts inhabit the village of H----, in Leinster. History has in no
manner been burdened by this ancient village, with its crooked lanes,
its old abbey churchyard full of long grass, its green background of
small fir-trees, and its quay, where lie a few tarry fishing-luggers.
In the annals of entomology it is well known. For a small bay lies
westward a little, where he who watches night after night may see a
certain rare moth fluttering along the edge of the tide, just at the
end of evening or the beginning of dawn. A hundred years ago it was
carried here from Italy by smugglers in a cargo of silks and laces.
If the moth-hunter would throw down his net, and go hunting for ghost
tales or tales of the faeries and such-like children of Lilith, he
would have need for far less patience.
To approach the village at night a timid man requires great strategy. A
man was once heard complaining, 'By the cross of Jesus! how shall I go?
If I pass by the hill of Dunboy old Captain Burney may look out on me.
If I go round by the water, and up by the steps, there is the headless
one and another on the quays, and a new one under the old churchyard
wall. If I go right round the other way, Mrs. Stewart is appearing at
Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in the Hospital Lane. '
I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not the one
in the Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up
to receive patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down,
but ever since the ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts and
demons and faeries. There is a farmer at H----, Paddy B---- by name--a man
of great strength, and a teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law,
musing on his great strength, often wonder what he would do if he
drank. One night when passing through the Hospital Lane, he saw what he
supposed at first to be a tame rabbit; after a little he found that it
was a white cat. When he came near, the creature slowly began to swell
larger and larger, and as it grew he felt his own strength ebbing away,
as though it were sucked out of him. He turned and ran.
By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries' Path. ' Every evening they
travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea
end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived
there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband
was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After
he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of
God, who are you? ' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the
door open at this hour, or evil may come to you. ' She woke her husband
and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he.
Probably the man braved Mrs. Stewart at Hillside Gate. When she lived
she was the wife of the Protestant clergyman. 'Her ghost was never
known to harm any one,' say the village people; 'it is only doing a
penance upon the earth. ' Not far from Hillside Gate, where she haunted,
appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt was
the bogeen, a green lane leading from the western end of the village.
I quote its history at length: a typical village tragedy. In a cottage
at the village end of the bogeen lived a house-painter, Jim Montgomery,
and his wife. They had several children. He was a little dandy, and
came of a higher class than his neighbours. His wife was a very big
woman. Her husband, who had been expelled from the village choir for
drink, gave her a beating one day. Her sister heard of it, and came
and took down one of the window shutters--Montgomery was neat about
everything, and had shutters on the outside of every window--and beat
him with it, being big and strong like her sister. He threatened to
prosecute her; she answered that she would break every bone in his body
if he did. She never spoke to her sister again, because she had allowed
herself to be beaten by so small a man. Jim Montgomery grew worse and
worse: his wife soon began to have not enough to eat. She told no one,
for she was very proud. Often, too, she would have no fire on a cold
night. If any neighbours came in she would say she had let the fire out
because she was just going to bed. The people about often heard her
husband beating her, but she never told any one. She got very thin.
At last one Saturday there was no food in the house for herself and
the children. She could bear it no longer, and went to the priest and
asked him for some money. He gave her thirty shillings. Her husband
met her, and took the money, and beat her. On the following Monday
she got very ill, and sent for a Mrs. Kelly. Mrs. Kelly, as soon as
she saw her, said, 'My woman, you are dying,' and sent for the priest
and the doctor. She died in an hour. After her death, as Montgomery
neglected the children, the landlord had them taken to the workhouse.
A few nights after they had gone, Mrs. Kelly was going home through
the bogeen when the ghost of Mrs. Montgomery appeared and followed
her. It did not leave her until she reached her own house. She told
the priest, Father S----, a noted antiquarian, and could not get him to
believe her. A few nights afterwards Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in
the same place. She was in too great terror to go the whole way, but
stopped at a neighbour's cottage midway, and asked them to let her in.
They answered they were going to bed. She cried out, 'In the name of
God let me in, or I will break open the door. ' They opened, and so she
escaped from the ghost. Next day she told the priest again. This time
he believed, and said it would follow her until she spoke to it.
She met the spirit a third time in the bogeen. She asked what kept it
from its rest. The spirit said that its children must be taken from
the workhouse, for none of its relations were ever there before, and
that three masses were to be said for the repose of its soul. 'If my
husband does not believe you,' she said, 'show him that,' and touched
Mrs. Kelly's wrist with three fingers. The places where they touched
swelled up and blackened. She then vanished. For a time Montgomery
would not believe that his wife had appeared: 'she would not show
herself to Mrs. Kelly,' he said--'she with respectable people to appear
to. ' He was convinced by the three marks, and the children were taken
from the workhouse. The priest said the masses, and the shade must have
been at rest, for it has not since appeared. Some time afterwards Jim
Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty through
drink.
I know some who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon the
quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night, sees
a woman with white borders to her cap[B] creep out and follow him. The
apparition only leaves him at his own door. The villagers imagine that
she follows him to avenge some wrong. 'I will haunt you when I die' is
a favourite threat. His wife was once half-scared to death by what she
considers a demon in the shape of a dog.
These are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their
tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.
One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy's
Lane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She
did not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The
knocking ceased. After a little the front-door and then the back-door
were burst open, and closed again. Her husband went to see what was
wrong. He found both doors bolted. The child died. The doors were
again opened and closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that
she had forgotten to leave window or door open, as the custom is, for
the departure of the soul. These strange openings and closings and
knockings were warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the
dying.
The house ghost is usually a harmless and well-meaning creature. It
is put up with as long as possible. It brings good luck to those who
live with it. I remember two children who slept with their mother and
sisters and brothers in one small room. In the room was also a ghost.
They sold herrings in the Dublin streets, and did not mind the ghost
much, because they knew they would always sell their fish easily while
they slept in the 'ha'nted' room.
I have some acquaintance among the ghost-seers of western villages.
The Connaught tales are very different from those of Leinster. These
H---- spirits have a gloomy, matter-of-fact way with them. They come
to announce a death, to fulfil some obligation, to revenge a wrong,
to pay their bills even--as did a fisherman's daughter the other
day--and then hasten to their rest. All things they do decently and in
order. It is demons, and not ghosts, that transform themselves into
white cats or black dogs. The people who tell the tales are poor,
serious-minded fishing people, who find in the doings of the ghosts
the fascination of fear. In the western tales is a whimsical grace,
a curious extravagance. The people who recount them live in the most
wild and beautiful scenery, under a sky ever loaded and fantastic with
flying clouds. They are farmers and labourers, who do a little fishing
now and then. They do not fear the spirits too much to feel an artistic
and humorous pleasure in their doings. The ghosts themselves share in
their quaint hilarity. In one western town, on whose deserted wharf the
grass grows, these spirits have so much vigour that, when a misbeliever
ventured to sleep in a haunted house, I have been told they flung him
through the window, and his bed after him. In the surrounding villages
the creatures use the most strange disguises. A dead old gentleman
robs the cabbages of his own garden in the shape of a large rabbit.
A wicked sea-captain stayed for years inside the plaster of a cottage
wall, in the shape of a snipe, making the most horrible noises. He was
only dislodged when the wall was broken down; then out of the solid
plaster the snipe rushed away whistling.
FOOTNOTE:
[B] I wonder why she had white borders to her cap. The old Mayo woman,
who has told me so many tales, has told me that her brother-in-law saw
'a woman with white borders to her cap going round the stacks in a
field, and soon after he got a hurt, and he died in six months. '
'DUST HATH CLOSED HELEN'S EYE. '
I
I HAVE been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be
called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose
name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. There is the
old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a
cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little
mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon
a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three
times last year to talk to the miller about Biddy Early, a wise woman
that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, 'There is a
cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee,' and to find
out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running
waters or some other herb. I have been there this summer, and I shall
be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful
woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty
years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of
sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world. An old man
brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long,
narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he
said, 'That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of
it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes
that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow
any more. They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was
like dribbled snow'--he meant driven snow, perhaps,--'and she had blushes
in her cheeks. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone now! ' I
talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet, made about
her, and how it said, 'there is a strong cellar in Ballylee. ' He said
the strong cellar was the great hole where the river sank underground,
and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter hurried away under a
grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up out of the dark water
at early morning 'to taste the fresh water coming down from the hills. '
I first heard of the poem from an old woman who lives about two miles
further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She
says, 'I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will
till I die,' and that he was nearly blind, and had 'no way of living
but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the
neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise
you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest
poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to
stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he
made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made
verses dispraising it. ' She sang the poem to a friend and to myself
in Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in
a song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the
garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing
of their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry
of the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously
traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to
speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to
the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend
that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has
been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the
simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.
'Going to Mass by the will of God,
The day came wet and the wind rose;
I met Mary Hynes at the cross of Kiltartan,
And I fell in love with her then and there.
I spoke to her kind and mannerly,
As by report was her own way;
And she said, "Raftery, my mind is easy,
You may come to-day to Ballylee. "
When I heard her offer I did not linger,
When her talk went to my heart my heart rose.
We had only to go across the three fields,
We had daylight with us to Ballylee.
The table was laid with glasses and a quart measure,
She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me;
And she said, "Drink, Raftery, and a hundred welcomes,
There is a strong cellar in Ballylee. "
O star of light and O sun in harvest,
O amber hair, O my share of the world,
Will you come with me upon Sunday
Till we agree together before all the people?
I would not grudge you a song every Sunday evening,
Punch on the table, or wine if you would drink it,
But, O King of Glory, dry the roads before me,
Till I find the way to Ballylee.
There is sweet air on the side of the hill
When you are looking down upon Ballylee;
When you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries,
There is music of the birds in it and music of the Sidhe.
What is the worth of greatness till you have the light
Of the flower of the branch that is by your side?
There is no god to deny it or to try and hide it,
She is the sun in the heavens who wounded my heart.
There was no part of Ireland I did not travel,
From the rivers to the tops of the mountains,
To the edge of Lough Greine whose mouth is hidden,
And I saw no beauty but was behind hers.
Her hair was shining, and her brows were shining too;
Her face was like herself, her mouth pleasant and sweet.
She is the pride, and I give her the branch,
She is the shining flower of Ballylee.
It is Mary Hynes, the calm and easy woman,
Has beauty in her mind and in her face.
If a hundred clerks were gathered together,
They could not write down a half of her ways. '
An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the
faeries) at night, says, 'Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing
ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she'd be at every
hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as
eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn't have
any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night
sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got
up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open
then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found
him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before
the famine. ' Another old man says he was only a child when he saw
her, but he remembered that 'the strongest man that was among us, one
John Madden, got his death of the head of her, cold he got crossing
rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee. ' This is perhaps the man
the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes.
There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge
hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old
poem said, 'the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of
the wolves,' but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of
ancient speech. She says, 'The sun and the moon never shone on anybody
so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she
had two little blushes on her cheeks. ' And an old wrinkled woman who
lives close by Ballylee, and has told me many tales of the Sidhe, says,
'I often saw Mary Hynes, she was handsome indeed. She had two bunches
of curls beside her cheeks, and they were the colour of silver. I saw
Mary Molloy that was drowned in the river beyond, and Mary Guthrie that
was in Ardrahan, but she took the sway of them both, a very comely
creature. I was at her wake too--she had seen too much of the world.
She was a kind creature. One day I was coming home through that field
beyond, and I was tired, and who should come out but the Poisin Glegeal
(the shining flower), and she gave me a glass of new milk.
