The Celtic Twilight - W. B. Yeats
A few hundred yards southwards of the northern angle of Rosses is
another angle having also its cave, though this one is not covered with
sand. About twenty years ago a brig was wrecked near by, and three or
four fishermen were put to watch the deserted hulk through the
darkness. At midnight they saw sitting on a stone at the cave's mouth
two red-capped fiddlers fiddling with all their might. The men fled. A
great crowd of villagers rushed down to the cave to see the fiddlers,
but the creatures had gone.
To the wise peasant the green hills and woods round him are full of
never-fading mystery. When the aged countrywoman stands at her door in
the evening, and, in her own words, "looks at the mountains and thinks
of the goodness of God," God is all the nearer, because the pagan
powers are not far: because northward in Ben Bulben, famous for hawks,
the white square door swings open at sundown, and those wild
unchristian riders rush forth upon the fields, while southward the
White Lady, who is doubtless Maive herself, wanders under the broad
cloud nightcap of Knocknarea. How may she doubt these things, even
though the priest shakes his head at her? Did not a herd-boy, no long
while since, see the White Lady? She passed so close that the skirt of
her dress touched him. "He fell down, and was dead three days." But
this is merely the small gossip of faerydom--the little stitches that
join this world and the other.
One night as I sat eating Mrs. H-----'s soda-bread, her husband told
me a longish story, much the best of all I heard in Rosses. Many a poor
man from Fin M'Cool to our own days has had some such adventure to tell
of, for those creatures, the "good people," love to repeat themselves.
At any rate the story-tellers do. "In the times when we used to travel
by the canal," he said, "I was coming down from Dublin. When we came to
Mullingar the canal ended, and I began to walk, and stiff and fatigued
I was after the slowness. I had some friends with me, and now and then
we walked, now and then we rode in a cart. So on till we saw some girls
milking cows, and stopped to joke with them. After a while we asked
them for a drink of milk. 'We have nothing to put it in here,' they
said, 'but come to the house with us.' We went home with them, and sat
round the fire talking. After a while the others went, and left me,
loath to stir from the good fire. I asked the girls for something to
eat. There was a pot on the fire, and they took the meat out and put it
on a plate, and told me to eat only the meat that came off the head.
When I had eaten, the girls went out, and I did not see them again. It
grew darker and darker, and there I still sat, loath as ever to leave
the good fire, and after a while two men came in, carrying between them
a corpse. When I saw them, coming I hid behind the door. Says one to
the other, putting the corpse on the spit, 'Who'll turn the spit? Says
the other, 'Michael H-----, come out of that and turn the meat.' I came
out all of a tremble, and began turning the spit. 'Michael H------,'
says the one who spoke first, 'if you let it burn we'll have to put you
on the spit instead'; and on that they went out. I sat there trembling
and turning the corpse till towards midnight. The men came again, and
the one said it was burnt, and the other said it was done right. But
having fallen out over it, they both said they would do me no harm that
time; and, sitting by the fire, one of them cried out: 'Michael H-----,
can you tell me a story?' 'Divil a one,' said I. On which he caught me
by the shoulder, and put me out like a shot. It was a wild blowing
night. Never in all my born days did I see such a night-the darkest
night that ever came out of the heavens. I did not know where I was for
the life of me. So when one of the men came after me and touched me on
the shoulder, with a 'Michael H----, can you tell a story now?' 'I
can,' says I. In he brought me; and putting me by the fire, says:
'Begin.' 'I have no story but the one,' says I, 'that I was sitting
here, and you two men brought in a corpse and put it on the spit, and
set me turning it.' 'That will do,' says he; 'ye may go in there and
lie down on the bed.' And I went, nothing loath; and in the morning
where was I but in the middle of a green field!"
"Drumcliff" is a great place for omens. Before a prosperous fishing
season a herring-barrel appears in the midst of a storm-cloud; and at a
place called Columkille's Strand, a place of marsh and mire, an ancient
boat, with St. Columba himself, comes floating in from sea on a
moonlight night: a portent of a brave harvesting. They have their dread
portents too. Some few seasons ago a fisherman saw, far on the horizon,
renowned Hy Brazel, where he who touches shall find no more labour or
care, nor cynic laughter, but shall go walking about under shadiest
boscage, and enjoy the conversation of Cuchullin and his heroes. A
vision of Hy Brazel forebodes national troubles.
Drumcliff and Rosses are chokeful of ghosts. By bog, road, rath,
hillside, sea-border they gather in all shapes: headless women, men in
armour, shadow hares, fire-tongued hounds, whistling seals, and so on.
A whistling seal sank a ship the other day. At Drumcliff there is a
very ancient graveyard. The Annals of the Four Masters have this verse
about a soldier named Denadhach, who died in 871: "A pious soldier of
the race of Con lies under hazel crosses at Drumcliff." Not very long
ago an old woman, turning to go into the churchyard at night to pray,
saw standing before her a man in armour, who asked her where she was
going. It was the "pious soldier of the race of Con," says local
wisdom, still keeping watch, with his ancient piety, over the
graveyard. Again, the custom is still common hereabouts of sprinkling
the doorstep with the blood of a chicken on the death of a very young
child, thus (as belief is) drawing into the blood the evil spirits from
the too weak soul. Blood is a great gatherer of evil spirits. To cut
your hand on a stone on going into a fort is said to be very dangerous.
There is no more curious ghost in Drumcliff or Rosses than the snipe-
ghost. There is a bush behind a house in a village that I know well:
for excellent reasons I do not say whether in Drumcliff or Rosses or on
the slope of Ben Bulben, or even on the plain round Knocknarea. There
is a history concerning the house and the bush. A man once lived there
who found on the quay of Sligo a package containing three hundred
pounds in notes. It was dropped by a foreign sea captain. This my man
knew, but said nothing. It was money for freight, and the sea captain,
not daring to face his owners, committed suicide in mid-ocean. Shortly
afterwards my man died. His soul could not rest. At any rate, strange
sounds were heard round his house, though that had grown and prospered
since the freight money. The wife was often seen by those still alive
out in the garden praying at the bush I have spoken of, for the shade
of the dead man appeared there at times. The bush remains to this day:
once portion of a hedge, it now stands by itself, for no one dare put
spade or pruning-knife about it. As to the strange sounds and voices,
they did not cease till a few years ago, when, during some repairs, a
snipe flew out of the solid plaster and away; the troubled ghost, say
the neighbours, of the note-finder was at last dislodged.
My forebears and relations have lived near Rosses and Drumcliff these
many years. A few miles northward I am wholly a stranger, and can find
nothing. When I ask for stories of the faeries, my answer is some such
as was given me by a woman who lives near a white stone fort--one of
the few stone ones in Ireland--under the seaward angle of Ben Bulben:
"They always mind their own affairs and I always mind mine": for it is
dangerous to talk of the creatures. Only friendship for yourself or
knowledge of your forebears will loosen these cautious tongues. My
friend, "the sweet Harp-String" (I give no more than his Irish name for
fear of gaugers), has the science of unpacking the stubbornest heart,
but then he supplies the potheen-makers with grain from his own fields.
Besides, he is descended from a noted Gaelic magician who raised the
"dhoul" in Great Eliza's century, and he has a kind of prescriptive
right to hear tell of all kind of other-world creatures. They are
almost relations of his, if all people say concerning the parentage of
magicians be true.
THE THICK SKULL OF THE FORTUNATE
I
Once a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the
cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its great thickness made them
feel certain it was the skull of a great man, doubtless of Egil
himself. To be doubly sure they put it on a wall and hit it hard blows
with a hammer. It got white where the blows fell but did not break, and
they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poet, and
worthy of every honour. In Ireland we have much kinship with the
Icelanders, or "Danes" as we call them and all other dwellers in the
Scandinavian countries. In some of our mountainous and barren places,
and in our seaboard villages, we still test each other in much the same
way the Icelanders tested the head of Egil. We may have acquired the
custom from those ancient Danish pirates, whose descendants the people
of Rosses tell me still remember every field and hillock in Ireland
which once belonged to their forebears, and are able to describe Rosses
itself as well as any native. There is one seaboard district known as
Roughley, where the men are never known to shave or trim their wild red
beards, and where there is a fight ever on foot. I have seen them at a
boat-race fall foul of each other, and after much loud Gaelic, strike
each other with oars. The first boat had gone aground, and by dint of
hitting out with the long oars kept the second boat from passing, only
to give the victory to the third. One day the Sligo people say a man
from Roughley was tried in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row, and
made the defence not unknown in Ireland, that some heads are so thin
you cannot be responsible for them. Having turned with a look of
passionate contempt towards the solicitor who was prosecuting, and
cried, "that little fellow's skull if ye were to hit it would go like
an egg-shell," he beamed upon the judge, and said in a wheedling voice,
"but a man might wallop away at your lordship's for a fortnight."
II
I wrote all this years ago, out of what were even then old memories.
I was in Roughley the other day, and found it much like other desolate
places. I may have been thinking of Moughorow, a much wilder place, for
the memories of one's childhood are brittle things to lean upon.
1902.
THE RELIGION OF A SAILOR
A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his
deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the
valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all
things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow
under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must
needs think and think. One July a couple of years ago I took my supper
with a Captain Moran on board the S.S. Margaret, that had put into a
western river from I know not where. I found him a man of many notions
all flavoured with his personality, as is the way with sailors. He
talked in his queer sea manner of God and the world, and up through all
his words broke the hard energy of his calling.
"Sur," said he, "did you ever hear tell of the sea captain's prayer?"
"No," said I; "what is it?"
"It is," he replied, "'O Lord, give me a stiff upper lip.'"
"And what does that mean?"
"It means," he said, "that when they come to me some night and wake me
up, and say, 'Captain, we're going down,' that I won't make a fool o'
meself. Why, sur, we war in mid Atlantic, and I standin' on the bridge,
when the third mate comes up to me looking mortial bad. Says he,
'Captain, all's up with us.' Says I, 'Didn't you know when you joined
that a certain percentage go down every year?' 'Yes, sur,' says he; and
says I, 'Arn't you paid to go down?' 'Yes, sur,' says he; and says I,
'Then go down like a man, and be damned to you!"'
CONCERNING THE NEARNESS TOGETHER OF HEAVEN, EARTH, AND PURGATORY
In Ireland this world and the world we go to after death are not far
apart. I have heard of a ghost that was many years in a tree and many
years in the archway of a bridge, and my old Mayo woman says, "There is
a bush up at my own place, and the people do be saying that there are
two souls doing their penance under it. When the wind blows one way the
one has shelter, and when it blows from the north the other has the
shelter. It is twisted over with the way they be rooting under it for
shelter. I don't believe it, but there is many a one would not pass by
it at night." Indeed there are times when the worlds are so near
together that it seems as if our earthly chattels were no more than the
shadows of things beyond. A lady I knew once saw a village child
running about with a long trailing petticoat upon her, and asked the
creature why she did not have it cut short. "It was my grandmother's,"
said the child; "would you have her going about yonder with her
petticoat up to her knees, and she dead but four days?" I have read a
story of a woman whose ghost haunted her people because they had made
her grave-clothes so short that the fires of purgatory burned her
knees. The peasantry expect to have beyond the grave houses much like
their earthly homes, only there the thatch will never grow leaky, nor
the white walls lose their lustre, nor shall the dairy be at any time
empty of good milk and butter. But now and then a landlord or an agent
or a gauger will go by begging his bread, to show how God divides the
righteous from the unrighteous.
1892 and 1902.
THE EATERS OF PRECIOUS STONES
Sometimes when I have been shut off from common interests, and have
for a little forgotten to be restless, I get waking dreams, now faint
and shadow-like, now vivid and solid-looking, like the material world
under my feet. Whether they be faint or vivid, they are ever beyond the
power of my will to alter in any way. They have their own will, and
sweep hither and thither, and change according to its commands. One day
I saw faintly an immense pit of blackness, round which went a circular
parapet, and on this parapet sat innumerable apes eating precious
stones out of the palms of their hands. The stones glittered green and
crimson, and the apes devoured them with an insatiable hunger. I knew
that I saw the Celtic Hell, and my own Hell, the Hell of the artist,
and that all who sought after beautiful and wonderful things with too
avid a thirst, lost peace and form and became shapeless and common. I
have seen into other people's hells also, and saw in one an infernal
Peter, who had a black face and white lips, and who weighed on a
curious double scales not only the evil deeds committed, but the good
deeds left undone, of certain invisible shades. I could see the scales
go up and down, but I could not see the shades who were, I knew,
crowding about him. I saw on another occasion a quantity of demons of
all kinds of shapes--fish-like, serpent-like, ape-like, and dog-like
--sitting about a black pit such as that in my own Hell, and looking at
a moon--like reflection of the Heavens which shone up from the depths
of the pit.
OUR LADY OF THE HILLS
When we were children we did not say at such a distance from the post-
office, or so far from the butcher's or the grocer's, but measured
things by the covered well in the wood, or by the burrow of the fox in
the hill. We belonged then to God and to His works, and to things come
down from the ancient days. We would not have been greatly surprised
had we met the shining feet of an angel among the white mushrooms upon
the mountains, for we knew in those days immense despair, unfathomed
love--every eternal mood,--but now the draw-net is about our feet. A
few miles eastward of Lough Gill, a young Protestant girl, who was both
pretty herself and prettily dressed in blue and white, wandered up
among those mountain mushrooms, and I have a letter of hers telling how
she met a troop of children, and became a portion of their dream. When
they first saw her they threw themselves face down in a bed of rushes,
as if in a great fear; but after a little other children came about
them, and they got up and followed her almost bravely. She noticed
their fear, and presently stood still and held out her arms. A little
girl threw herself into them with the cry, "Ah, you are the Virgin out
o' the picture!" "No," said another, coming near also, "she is a sky
faery, for she has the colour of the sky." "No," said a third, "she is
the faery out of the foxglove grown big." The other children, however,
would have it that she was indeed the Virgin, for she wore the Virgin's
colours. Her good Protestant heart was greatly troubled, and she got
the children to sit down about her, and tried to explain who she was,
but they would have none of her explanation. Finding explanation of no
avail, she asked had they ever heard of Christ? "Yes," said one; "but
we do not like Him, for He would kill us if it were not for the
Virgin." "Tell Him to be good to me," whispered another into her ear.
"We would not let me near Him, for dad says I am a divil," burst out a
third.
She talked to them a long time about Christ and the apostles, but was
finally interrupted by an elderly woman with a stick, who, taking her
to be some adventurous hunter for converts, drove the children away,
despite their explanation that here was the great Queen of Heaven come
to walk upon the mountain and be kind to them. When the children had
gone she went on her way, and had walked about half-a-mile, when the
child who was called "a divil" jumped down from the high ditch by the
lane, and said she would believe her "an ordinary lady" if she had "two
skirts," for "ladies always had two skirts." The "two skirts" were
shown, and the child went away crestfallen, but a few minutes later
jumped down again from the ditch, and cried angrily, "Dad's a divil,
mum's a divil, and I'm a divil, and you are only an ordinary lady," and
having flung a handful of mud and pebbles ran away sobbing. When my
pretty Protestant had come to her own home she found that she had
dropped the tassels of her parasol. A year later she was by chance upon
the mountain, but wearing now a plain black dress, and met the child
who had first called her the Virgin out o' the picture, and saw the
tassels hanging about the child's neck, and said, "I am the lady you
met last year, who told you about Christ." "No, you are not! no, you
are not! no, you are not!" was the passionate reply. And after all, it
was not my pretty Protestant, but Mary, Star of the Sea, still walking
in sadness and in beauty upon many a mountain and by many a shore, who
cast those tassels at the feet of the child. It is indeed fitting that
man pray to her who is the mother of peace, the mother of dreams, and
the mother of purity, to leave them yet a little hour to do good and
evil in, and to watch old Time telling the rosary of the stars.
THE GOLDEN AGE
A while ago I was in the train, and getting near Sligo. The last time
I had been there something was troubling me, and I had longed for a
message from those beings or bodiless moods, or whatever they be, who
inhabit the world of spirits. The message came, for one night I saw
with blinding distinctness a black animal, half weasel, half dog,
moving along the top of a stone wall, and presently the black animal
vanished, and from the other side came a white weasel-like dog, his
pink flesh shining through his white hair and all in a blaze of light;
and I remembered a pleasant belief about two faery dogs who go about
representing day and night, good and evil, and was comforted by the
excellent omen. But now I longed for a message of another kind, and
chance, if chance there is, brought it, for a man got into the carriage
and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box,
and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest
emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden
Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a
beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and
flung into a comer. It said that the world was once all perfect and
kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried
like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth. The faeries and the
more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our
fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song
of the birds, in the moan of the waves, and in the sweet cry of the
fiddle. It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the
clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred
by a little vulgarity, or by a pin-prick out of sad recollection, and
that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only
they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the
sad voices would be still; but alas! alas! they must sing and we must
weep until the Eternal gates swing open.
We were now getting into the big glass-roofed terminus, and the
fiddler put away his old blacking-box and held out his hat for a
copper, and then opened the door and was gone.
A REMONSTRANCE WITH SCOTSMEN FOR HAVING SOURED THE DISPOSITION OF
THEIR GHOSTS AND FAERIES
Not only in Ireland is faery belief still extant. It was only the
other day I heard of a Scottish farmer who believed that the lake in
front of his house was haunted by a water-horse. He was afraid of it,
and dragged the lake with nets, and then tried to pump it empty. It
would have been a bad thing for the water-horse had he found him. An
Irish peasant would have long since come to terms with the creature.
For in Ireland there is something of timid affection between men and
spirits. They only ill-treat each other in reason. Each admits the
other side to have feelings. There are points beyond which neither will
go. No Irish peasant would treat a captured faery as did the man
Campbell tells of. He caught a kelpie, and tied her behind him on his
horse. She was fierce, but he kept her quiet by driving an awl and a
needle into her. They came to a river, and she grew very restless,
fearing to cross the water. Again he drove the awl and needle into her.
She cried out, "Pierce me with the awl, but keep that slender, hair-
like slave (the needle) out of me." They came to an inn. He turned the
light of a lantern on her; immediately she dropped down like a falling
star, and changed into a lump of jelly. She was dead. Nor would they
treat the faeries as one is treated in an old Highland poem. A faery
loved a little child who used to cut turf at the side of a faery hill.
Every day the faery put out his hand from the hill with an enchanted
knife. The child used to cut the turf with the knife. It did not take
long, the knife being charmed. Her brothers wondered why she was done
so quickly. At last they resolved to watch, and find out who helped
her. They saw the small hand come out of the earth, and the little
child take from it the knife. When the turf was all cut, they saw her
make three taps on the ground with the handle. The small hand came out
of the hill. Snatching the knife from the child, they cut the hand off
with a blow. The faery was never again seen. He drew his bleeding arm
into the earth, thinking, as it is recorded, he had lost his hand
through the treachery of the child.
In Scotland you are too theological, too gloomy. You have made even
the Devil religious. "Where do you live, good-wyf, and how is the
minister?" he said to the witch when he met her on the high-road, as it
came out in the trial. You have burnt all the witches. In Ireland we
have left them alone. To be sure, the "loyal minority" knocked out the
eye of one with a cabbage-stump on the 31st of March, 1711, in the town
of Carrickfergus. But then the "loyal minority" is half Scottish. You
have discovered the faeries to be pagan and wicked. You would like to
have them all up before the magistrate. In Ireland warlike mortals have
gone amongst them, and helped them in their battles, and they in turn
have taught men great skill with herbs, and permitted some few to hear
their tunes. Carolan slept upon a faery rath. Ever after their tunes
ran in his head, and made him the great musician he was. In Scotland
you have denounced them from the pulpit. In Ireland they have been
permitted by the priests to consult them on the state of their souls.
Unhappily the priests have decided that they have no souls, that they
will dry up like so much bright vapour at the last day; but more in
sadness than in anger they have said it. The Catholic religion likes to
keep on good terms with its neighbours.
These two different ways of looking at things have influenced in each
country the whole world of sprites and goblins. For their gay and
graceful doings you must go to Ireland; for their deeds of terror to
Scotland. Our Irish faery terrors have about them something of make-
believe. When a peasant strays into an enchanted hovel, and is made to
turn a corpse all night on a spit before the fire, we do not feel
anxious; we know he will wake in the midst of a green field, the dew on
his old coat. In Scotland it is altogether different. You have soured
the naturally excellent disposition of ghosts and goblins. The piper
M'Crimmon, of the Hebrides, shouldered his pipes, and marched into a
sea cavern, playing loudly, and followed by his dog. For a long time
the people could hear the pipes. He must have gone nearly a mile, when
they heard the sound of a struggle. Then the piping ceased suddenly.
Some time went by, and then his dog came out of the cavern completely
flayed, too weak even to howl. Nothing else ever came out of the
cavern. Then there is the tale of the man who dived into a lake where
treasure was thought to be. He saw a great coffer of iron. Close to the
coffer lay a monster, who warned him to return whence he came. He rose
to the surface; but the bystanders, when they heard he had seen the
treasure, persuaded him to dive again. He dived. In a little while his
heart and liver floated up, reddening the water. No man ever saw the
rest of his body.