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    The Celtic Twilight
    The Celtic Twilight
    The Celtic Twilight
    Ebook127 pages2 hours

    The Celtic Twilight

    By W. B. Yeats

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    About this ebook

    William Butler Yeats ( 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.
    Rooted in myth, occult mysteries, and belief in magic, these stories are populated by a lively cast of sorcerers, fairies, ghosts, and nature spirits. The great Irish poet heard these enchanting, mystical tales from Irish peasants, and the stories' anthropologic significance is matched by their timeless entertainment value.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW.b Yeats
    Release dateFeb 10, 2016
    ISBN9788892553262
    The Celtic Twilight
    Author

    W. B. Yeats

    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was an Irish poet, playwright, and author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. Yeats published his first works in the mid-1880s while still a student; however, his most famous works, such as The Tower and Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems, were not published until after he received the Nobel. He teamed up with Lady Gregory to develop plays in Ireland and soon founded the Irish National Theatre Society. He has since inspired poets and playwrights around the world.

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      Book preview

      The Celtic Twilight - W. B. Yeats

      The Celtic Twilight

      by

      William Butler Yeats

      To the best of our knowledge, the text of this

      work is in the Public Domain.

      HOWEVER, copyright law varies in other countries, and the work may still be under

      copyright in the country from which you are accessing this website. It is your

      responsibility to check the applicable copyright laws in your country before

      downloading this work.

      The Hosting of the Sidhe

      This Book

      A Teller of Tales

      Belief and Unbelief

      Mortal Help

      A Visionary

      Village Ghosts

      Dust hath closed Helen’s eye

      A Knight of the Sheep

      An Enduring Heart

      The Sorcerers

      The Devil

      Happy and Unhappy Theologians

      The last Gleeman

      Regina, Regina Pigmeorum, Veni

      And fair, fierce women

      Enchanted Woods

      Miraculous Creatures

      Aristotle of the Books

      The Swine of the Gods

      A Voice

      Kidnappers

      The Untiring Ones

      Earth, Fire and Water

      The old Town

      The man and his Boots

      A Coward

      The three O’Byrnes and the Evil Faeries

      Drumcliff and Rosses

      The Thick Skull of the Fortunate

      The Religion of a Sailor

      Concerning the Nearness together of Heaven, Earth, and Purgatory

      The Eaters of Precious Stones

      Our Lady of the Hills

      The Golden Age

      A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for having Soured the Disposition of their Ghosts and Faeries

      War

      The Queen and the Fool

      The Friends of the People of Faery

      Dreams that have no Moral

      By the Roadside

      Into the 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.

      This Book

      1

      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.

      2

      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.

      W. B. Yeats.

      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 today, mother? said the saint. Worse, replied the mother. May you be worse tomorrow, 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 tomorrow. 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 cockleshell. 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 mis-shapen 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 Cuchullan 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

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