Classic Audiobook Collection - The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yeats ~ Full Audiobook [folklore]

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Activia. You might already be eating yogurt, but not all yogurts are created equal. Activia contains over one billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive. When it comes to gut health, Activia is the number one family doctor-recommended probiotic yogurt brand. Choose Activia. Feel good from the inside out. Visitactivia.ca for more details. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. Section 0

Starting point is 00:00:33 Epigraph and the hosting of the she. Epigraph Time drops in decay, like a candle burnt out, and the mountains and woods have their day, have their day. But, kindly old route of the fire-borne moods, You pass not away. The hosting of the she. The host is riding from Nocknorei and over the grave of Clunabara,

Starting point is 00:01:11 Krialcci tossing his burning hair, and Nive 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.

Starting point is 00:01:48 The host is rushing twixt night and day, And where is there hope or deed as fair? Quilche, tossing his burning hair, and Neve calling, away, come away. End of Section Zero. Recording by Shakira Searle. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. This book. I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful,

Starting point is 00:02:22 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, duels and fairies, 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

Starting point is 00:03:12 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.

Starting point is 00:03:40 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 storyteller's commerce with the devil and his angels or the like, from being known among his neighbors.

Starting point is 00:04:14 I shall publish in a little while a big book about the Commonwealth of Fairy and shall try to make it systematical and learned it enough to buy pardon for this handful of dreams. 1902 W.B. Yates End of Section 1, this book. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. A Teller of Tales Many of the tales in this book were told me by one, Patty Flynn, a little bright-eyed old man who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Balisodar,

Starting point is 00:04:49 which is, he was wont to say, the most gentle, whereby he meant fairy place in the whole of County Sligo. Others hold it, however, but second to Drumcliff and Romer. 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 of 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

Starting point is 00:05:29 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, hopefulness. He was very fond, for instance, of telling how Colm Killer cheered up his mother. "'How are you today, mother?' said the saint. "'Worse,' replied the mother. "'May you be worse to-morrow?' said the saint. The next day Colm-Killer came again, and exactly the same conversation took place, but on 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,

Starting point is 00:06:12 when he rewards the good and condemns the lost two unceasing flames. He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him sad. I asked him, had he ever seen the fairies, 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 notebook which I almost filled with his tales and sayings shortly after seeing him.

Starting point is 00:06:47 I look now at the notebook 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, fairyland, 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.

Starting point is 00:07:32 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 fairyland 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 fairyland 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 teller of tales, and seize whatever preyed the heart longs for, and have no fear, everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust

Starting point is 00:08:24 under our feet. End of A Teller of Tales The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates 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 traips in about the earth, at their own free will.

Starting point is 00:09:00 But there are fairies, she added, and little lepracons and waterhorses 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 fairies, 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 seawward slopes of Ben Bulbin, suddenly disappeared one night about three years ago. There was at once great excitement in the neighborhood, because it was rumoured that the fairies had taken her.

Starting point is 00:09:43 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 Buklans, ragweed, on the field she vanished from because Buklans are sacred to the fairies. 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.

Starting point is 00:10:17 She said the fairies had taken her away a great distance riding on a fairy 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-turvy-dums of fairy 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-candal to guide our steps,

Starting point is 00:10:55 not even a poor solth to dance before us on the marsh, and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness where dwell the misshapen duels. And after all, can we come to so great evil if we keep a little fire on our hearts 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 duels 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 hearts 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

Starting point is 00:11:40 the world again, wild bees, wild bees. End of belief and unbelief. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. Mortal Help One hears in the old poems of men taken away to help the gods in a battle, and Cocholan won the goddess fanned for a while by helping her married sister and her sister's husband to overthrow another nation of the land of promise.

Starting point is 00:12:12 I have been told, too, that the people, a fairy 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 storyteller 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 away from Nochnagur. Presently they saw, all thirty of them,

Starting point is 00:12:58 and at a distance of about half a mile, some hundred and fifty of the people of fairy. There were two of them, he said, in dark clothes like people of our own time, who stood about hundred yards from one another, but the others wore clothes of all colors, bracket or checkered, 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 and then the old man, he and those about him were working for, took up a whip and said,

Starting point is 00:13:46 Get on, get on, or we'll have no work done. I asked if he saw the fairies, 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 fairies. End of Mortal Help The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates, 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.

Starting point is 00:14:24 I questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but laterally 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,

Starting point is 00:14:55 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

Starting point is 00:15:31 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 someone who is dead or who has never lived. I asked what he was doing, and found he was a 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 conscious-stricken persons, to deliver up the keeping of their troubles into his care.

Starting point is 00:16:07 Another night, when I was with him in his own lodging, more than one turned up to talk over their beliefs and disbeliefs, and son 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 diverse 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 the other centuries, sometimes of people he had talked to, revealing them to their own minds.

Starting point is 00:16:52 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 anymore. I prepare myself for a cycle of other activities in some other life. I will make rigid my roots and branches.

Starting point is 00:17:23 It is not now my turn to burst into leaves and flowers. The poems were all endeavors 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 vest. 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 labor.

Starting point is 00:17:59 He had frequently illustrated his verses with drawings in which an imperfect anatomy did not altogether hide extreme beauty of feeling, The fairies in whom he believes have given him many subjects, notably Thomas of Urquldone, 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,

Starting point is 00:18:28 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 largesse of color 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,

Starting point is 00:19:03 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,

Starting point is 00:19:39 God possesses the heavens, but he covets the world. And once he lamented that his old neighbors 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.

Starting point is 00:20:04 More than once also, he said, waving his arm toward the mountain. Only myself knows what happened under the thorny 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,

Starting point is 00:20:35 have within them the vast and vague extravagance that lies at the bottom of the Celtic heart. The peasant visionaries that are, the landlord dualists that were, and the whole hurly-burly of legends, Kuulain fighting the sea for two days until the waves pass over him and he dies, Colte storming the palace of the gods,

Starting point is 00:20:57 Ossin, seeking in vain for three hundred years to appease his insatiable heart with all the pleasures of fairyland, 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, are all a portion of that great Celtic phantasmagoria whose meaning no man has discovered nor any angel revealed. End of A Visionary The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates Village Ghosts In the great cities we see so little of the world we drift into our minority

Starting point is 00:21:45 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 favorite 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.

Starting point is 00:22:14 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 a few. Thus, then is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient mapmakers wrote across unexplored regions, Here are lions. Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth,

Starting point is 00:22:43 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 terry 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.

Starting point is 00:23:25 A hundred years ago it was carried here from Italy by smugglers in a caravan. of silks and laces. If the moth-hunter would throw down his net and go hunting for ghost tales, or tales of the fairies 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, Boy the cross of Jesus, how shall I go? If I pass by the hill of Dunboy, old Captain Bernie 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,

Starting point is 00:24:12 Mrs. Stewart is appearing at Hillside Gate, and the devil himself is in the hospital lane. I never heard which spirit he braved, but I 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 fairies. There is a farmer at H., Patty B. by name, a man of great strength and a teetotler. His wife and sister-in-law, musing on his great strength, often wonder what he would do if he drank.

Starting point is 00:24:52 One night, when passing through the hospital lane, he was a little bit of the hospital lane, he was 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 fairies' 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. Arbenathi, 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

Starting point is 00:25:39 a while, the woman said, In the name of God, who were 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. 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 anyone, say the village people. It is only doing penance upon the earth.

Starting point is 00:26:14 Not far from Hillside Gate, where she haunted, appeared for a short time a much more remarkable spirit. Its haunt was the Bougain, 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 Bougain 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 neighbors. 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,

Starting point is 00:27:03 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 a 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 neighbors came in, she would say she had let the fire out because she was just going to bed. The people often heard her husband beating her, but she never told anyone. 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

Starting point is 00:27:52 and asked him for some money. He gave her 30 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 Bougain, 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 afterward, Mrs. Kelly again met the spirit in the same place. She went to,

Starting point is 00:28:42 was in too great terror to go the hallway, but stopped at a neighbor'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 Bougain. 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

Starting point is 00:29:29 Mrs. Kelly's wrist with three fingers. The places where they touched swelled up and blackened. Then she 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 afterward Jim Montgomery died in the workhouse, having come to great poverty through drink. I know some people who believe they have seen the headless ghost upon the quay, and one who, when he passes the old cemetery wall at night,

Starting point is 00:30:15 sees a woman with white borders to her cap, 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 favorite 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 Fleddy's Lane.

Starting point is 00:30:53 Suddenly there was the sound of knocking heard at the door. She did not open, fearing it was some inhuman 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.

Starting point is 00:31:17 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.

Starting point is 00:31:49 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 haunted room. I have some acquaintance among the ghost seers of western villages. The Connott 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 fulfill some obligation, to revenge a wrong, to pay their bills even,

Starting point is 00:32:21 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 laborers who do a little fishing now and then. They do not fear the spirits too much to feel an artisan.

Starting point is 00:33:04 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 vigor 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.

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Starting point is 00:34:24 BetMGEM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. Dust hath closed Helen's eye. One. 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 Balilie is known throughout all the west of Ireland. There is the old square castle, Balilie Lee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife,

Starting point is 00:34:56 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 Balilie, 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 Hines, a beautiful woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there

Starting point is 00:35:40 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 borene that was nearly lost in brambles and slow 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 evade those bushes that are growing over

Starting point is 00:36:10 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, Rafferty, a famous poet, made about her, and how it said, There is a strong cellar in Balilee.

Starting point is 00:36:39 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 Rafferty and Mary Hines. She says, I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will till I die,

Starting point is 00:37:14 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 port 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,

Starting point is 00:37:57 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.

Starting point is 00:38:30 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 Hines at the cross of Kil tartan, 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, Rafferty, my mind is easy, you may come today to Bally Lee.

Starting point is 00:38:58 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 Bally Lee. The table was laid with glasses and a court measure. She had fair hair, and she sitting beside me, and she said, drink rafferty and a hundred welcomes, there is a strong cellar in Bally Lee. O Star of Light, and O sun in harvest, O amber hair, O my share of the world,

Starting point is 00:39:30 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 Bally Lee. There is sweet air on the side of the hill when you are looking down upon Bally Lee, when you are walking in the valley picking nuts and blackberries, there is music of the birds in it and music of the she. What is the worth of greatness till you have the light of the flower of the branch that is by your side?

Starting point is 00:40:07 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 the low green, whose mouth is hidden, and I saw no beauty but was behind hers. Her hair was shining,

Starting point is 00:40:29 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 Balilee. It is Mary Hind, the calm and easy woman,

Starting point is 00:40:44 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 she, the fairies at night, says, Mary Hines 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 it. of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbacanti, one night sitting together drinking and

Starting point is 00:41:24 talking of her, and one of them got up and set out to go to Balilie and see her. But Clunbog 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 Balilee. This is perhaps the man, the other, remembered,

Starting point is 00:41:59 for tradition gives the one thing many shapes. There is an old woman who remembers her at Derry Brine among the Ector Hills, a vast desolate place which has changed little since the old poem said, the stag upon the cold summit of Ectha hears the cries 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,

Starting point is 00:42:26 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 Bally Lee, and has told me many tales of the she, says, often I saw Mary Hines She was handsome indeed She had two bunches of curls Beside her cheeks

Starting point is 00:42:46 And they were the colour of silver I saw Mary Molloy That was drowned in the river beyond And Mary Gothrey 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

Starting point is 00:43:02 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 poison giggle, the shining flower, and she gave me a glass of new milk. This old woman meant no more than some beautiful bright colour by the colour of silver, for though I knew an old man, he is dead now, who thought she might know the cure for all the evils in the world, that the she knew she has seen too little gold to know its colour.

Starting point is 00:43:33 But a man by the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hines, says, everybody says that there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome it is said that she had beautiful hair the colour of gold she was poor but her clothes every day were the same as sunday she had such neatness and if she went to any kind of a meeting they would all be killing one another for a sight of her and there was a great many in love with her but she died young it is said that no one that has a song made about them will ever live long those who are much admired are it is held taken by the she who can use ungoverned feelings for their own ends, so that a father, as an old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or a husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says, God bless them when one's eye are upon them.

Starting point is 00:44:26 The old woman that sang the song thinks, too, that Mary Hines was taken, as the phrase is, for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they not take her? and people came from all parts to look at her, and maybe there were some that did not say God bless her. An old man who lives by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken. For there are some living, yet can remember her coming to the pattern there beyond,

Starting point is 00:44:56 and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland. She died young because the gods love her, for the she are gods, and it may be that the old saying which we forget to understand literally meant her manner of death in old times. These poor countrymen and countrywomen in their beliefs and in their emotions are many years nearer to that old Greek world that set beauty beside the fountain of things than are our men of learning. She had seen too much of the world, but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle, as the old men of Troy

Starting point is 00:45:38 grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls. The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Rafferty was half blind and say, I saw Rafferty a dark man, but he had sight enough to see her, or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I asked a man I met one day when I was looking for a pool, Nam Nashie, where women a fairy have been seen, how Rafferty could have admired Mary Haynes so much if he had been altogether blind. He said, I think Rafferty was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of seeing things,

Starting point is 00:46:27 and have the power to know more, and to feel more, and to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight, and a certain wit, and a certain wisdom, is given to them. Everybody, indeed, will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind, but a poet? The weaver, whose words about Mary Hines I have already given, says, His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are three things that are the gift of the Almighty,

Starting point is 00:46:57 poetry and dancing and principles. That is why, in the old times, an ignorant man coming down from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than a man with education you'd meet now, for they got it from God. And a man at Kuhl says, when he put his finger to one part of his head, everything would come to him as if it was written in a book. And an old pensioner at Kil tartan says, "'He was standing under a bush one time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. "'Some say it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in it, "'and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world.

Starting point is 00:47:41 "'The bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now between this and Reison. "'There is a poem of his about a bush which I have never seen, "'and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in this shape.' A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died, but the people say that he died alone, and one Mortine Galane told Dr. Hyde, that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven from the roof of the house where he lay,

Starting point is 00:48:11 and that it was the angels who were with him. And all night long there was a great light in the hovel. And that it was the angels who were awake in him? They gave that honour to him, because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious song. It may be that in a few years, Fable, who changes mortalities to immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hines and Rafferty to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and the magnificence and penury of dreams.

Starting point is 00:48:43 1900. 2. When I was in a northern town a while ago, I had a long talk with a man who had lived in a neighboring county district when he was a boy. He told me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that had not been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come from the she and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names of several beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty had never brought happiness to anybody.

Starting point is 00:49:14 It was a thing, he said, to be proud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time, for they were more picturesque than my memory of them. End of Dust Hath closed Helen's Eye. Section 8 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates.

Starting point is 00:49:51 A Knight of the Sheep Away to the north of Ben Bulbin and Cope's Mountains lives a strong farmer, a knight of the sheep they would have called him in the Gaelic days. Proud of his descent from one of the most fighting clans of the Middle Ages, he is a man of force alike in his words and in his deeds. There is but one man that swears like him, and this man lives far away upon the mountains. Father in heaven, what have I done to deserve this? he says when he has lost his pipe, and no man but he who lives in the mountains can rival his language.

Starting point is 00:50:27 on a fair day over a bargain. He is passionate and abrupt in his movements, and when angry, tosses his white beard about with his left hand. One day I was dining with him when the servant-maid announced a certain Mr. O'Donnell. A sudden silence fell upon the old man and upon his two daughters. At last the eldest daughter said somewhat severely to her father, Go and ask him to come in and dine. The old man went out, and then came in looking greatly,

Starting point is 00:50:57 relieved and said, He says he will not dine with us. Go out, said the daughter, and ask him into the back parlour and give him some whiskey. Her father, who had just finished his dinner, obeyed sullenly, and I heard the door of the back parlour, a little room where the daughter sat and sewed during the evening,

Starting point is 00:51:18 shut two behind the men. The daughter then turned to me and said, Mr. O'Donnell is the tax-gatherer, and last year he raised our taxes, and my father was very angry, and when he came, brought him into the dairy and sent the dairywoman away on the message, and then swore at him a great deal. "'I will teach you, sir, O'Donnell replied, that the law can protect its officers. But my father reminded him that he had no witness. At last my father got tired, and sorry too, and he said he would show him a short way home.

Starting point is 00:51:50 When they were halfway to the main road, they came on a man of my father's who was ploughing, and this somehow brought back remembrance of the wrong. He sent the man away on a message, and began to swear at the tax-gatherer again. When I heard of it, I was disgusted that he should have made such a fuss over a miserable creature like O'Donnell, and when I heard a few weeks ago that O'Donnell's only son had died and left him heart-broken,

Starting point is 00:52:16 I resolved to make my father be kind to him the next time he came. She then went out to see a neighbour, and I sauntered toward the back parlour, When I came to the door I heard angry voices inside. The two men were evidently getting on to the tax again, for I could hear them bandying figures to and fro. I opened the door. At sight of my face, the farmer was reminded of his peaceful intentions, and asked me if I knew where the whiskey was.

Starting point is 00:52:45 I had seen him put it into the cupboard, and was able, therefore, to find it and get it out, looking at the thin, grief-struck face of the tax-gatherer. He was rather older than my husband. my friend, and very much more feeble and worn, and of a very different type. He was not like him, a robust, successful man, but rather one of those whose feet find no resting place upon the earth. I recognized one of the children of reverie, and said, You are doubtless of the stock of the old O'Donnells. I know well the whole in the river where

Starting point is 00:53:18 their treasure lies buried under the guard of a serpent with many heads. Yes, sir, he replied, I am the last of a nine-night. of princes. We then fell to talking of many commonplace things, and my friend did not once toss up his beard, but was very friendly. At last the gaunt old tax-gatherer got up to go, and my friend said, I hope we will have a glass together next year. No, no, was the answer.

Starting point is 00:53:46 I shall be dead next year. I too have lost sons, said the other in quite a gentle voice. But your sons were not like my son. on. And then the two men parted with an angry flush and bitter hearts, and had I not cast between them some common words or other, might not have parted, but have fallen rather into an angry discussion of the value of their dead sons. If I had not pity for all the children of reverie, I should have let them fight it out, and would now have many a wonderful oath to record. The knight of the sheep would have had the victory for no soul that wears his garment of blood

Starting point is 00:54:24 and clay can surpass him. He was but once beaten, and this is his tale of how it was. He and some farmhands were playing at cards in a small cabin that stood against the end of a big barn. A wicked woman had once lived in this cabin. Suddenly one of the players threw down an ace and began to swear without any cause. His swearing was so dreadful that the others stood up, and my friend said, All is not right here.

Starting point is 00:54:50 There is a spirit in him. They ran to the door that led into the barn to get away as quickly as possible. The wooden bolt would not move, so the knight of the sheep took a saw which stood against the wall near at hand, and sawed through the bolt, and at once the door flew open with a bang, as though someone had been holding it, and they fled through. End of A Night of the Sheep. Section 9 of the Celtic Twilight This is a Libervox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org

Starting point is 00:55:31 The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. An Enduring Heart One day, a friend of mine was making a sketch of my knight of the sheep. The old man's daughter was sitting by, and when the conversation drifted to love and love-making, she said, Oh, father, tell him about your love affair. The old man took his pipe out of his mouth and said, "'Nobody ever marries the woman he loves.'

Starting point is 00:55:58 And then with a chuckle, "'There were fifteen of them I liked better than the woman I married.' And he repeated many women's names. He went on to tell how when he was a lad he had worked for his grandfather, his mother's father, and was called, my friend has forgotten why, by his grandfather's name, which we will say was Doran. He had a great friend whom I shall call John Byrne, and one day he and his friend went to Queenstown to await

Starting point is 00:56:24 an immigrant ship that was to take John Byrne to America. When they were walking along the quay, they saw a girl sitting on a seat crying miserably, and two men standing up in front of her quarreling with one another. Doran said, I think I know what is wrong. That man will be her brother, and that man will be her lover,

Starting point is 00:56:45 and the brother is sending her to America to get her away from the lover. How she is crying! But I think I could console her myself. presently the lover and brother went away and Doran began to walk up and down before her saying, "'Moyled weather, miss, or the like.' She answered him in a little while, and the three began to talk together. The immigrant ship did not arrive for some days, and the three drove out on outside cars very

Starting point is 00:57:12 innocently and happily, seeing everything that was to be seen. When at last the ship came, and Doran had to break it to her that he was not going to America, she cried more after him than after the first lover. Doran whispered to Byrne as he went aboard ship, Now, Byrne, I don't grudge her to you, but don't marry young. When the story got to this, the farmer's daughter joined in mockingly with, I suppose you said that for Byrne's good father. But the old man insisted that he had said it for Burns good,

Starting point is 00:57:46 and went on to tell how, when he got a letter telling of Byrne's engagement to the girl, he wrote him the same advice. years passed by and he heard nothing and though he was now married he could not keep from wondering what she was doing at last he went to america to find out and though he asked many people for tidings he could get none more years went by and his wife was dead and he well on in years and a rich farmer with not a few great matters on his hands he found an excuse in some vague business to go out to america again and to begin his search again one day he fell in to talk with an Irishman in a railway carriage, and asked him, as his way was, about immigrants from this place and that, and at last, did you ever hear of the Miller's daughter from Inisrath? And he named the woman he was looking for. Oh, yes, said the other. She's married to a friend of mine, John McOwing.

Starting point is 00:58:42 She lives at such and such a street in Chicago. Doran went to Chicago and knocked at her door. She opened the door herself and was not a bit changed. He gave her his real name, which he had taken again after his grandfather's death, and the name of the man he had met in the train. She did not recognize him, but asked him to stay to dinner, saying that her husband would be glad to meet anybody who knew that old friend of his. They talked of many things, but for all their talk, I do not know why, and perhaps he did not know why. He never told her who he was. At dinner he asked her about Byrne, and she put her head down on the table, and began to cry,

Starting point is 00:59:21 And she cried so he was afraid her husband might be angry. He was afraid to ask what had happened to burn, and left soon after, never to see her again. When the old man had finished the story, he said, Tell that to Mr. Yates, he will make a poem about it, perhaps. But the daughter said, Oh, no, father, nobody could make a poem about a woman like that. Alas, I have never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart which has loved Helen and all the lovely

Starting point is 00:59:51 and fickle women of the world would be too sore. There are things it is well not to ponder over too much, things that bare words are the best suited for. 1902. End of an enduring heart. Section 10 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. by William Butler Yates. The Sorcerer's In Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers, and come across any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were

Starting point is 01:00:48 they to unite them either with evil or with good, and yet the wise are of the opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feel his rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire, or through accident of birth, possesses the power of piercing into their hidden abode, can see them there. Those who were once men or women, of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the earth moving slowly and with a subtler malice.

Starting point is 01:01:32 The dark powers cling about us, it is said, day and night like bats upon an old tree, and that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of magic have been but little practised. I have indeed come across very few persons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the few I have met kept their purpose and practice wholly hidden from those among whom they live. They are mainly small clerks and the like, and meet for the purpose of their art in a room hung with black hangings. They would not admit me into this room, but finding me not altogether ignorant of the arcane science showed gladly elsewhere what they would do.

Starting point is 01:02:16 Come to us, said their leader, a clerk in a large flour mill, and we will show you spirits who will talk to you face to face, and in shapes as solid and heavy as our own. I had been talking of the power of communicating in states of trance with the angelical and fairy beings, the children of the day and of the twilight, and he had been contending that we should only believe in what we can see and feel when in our ordinary everyday state of mind. Yes, I said, I will come with you, or some such words, but I will not permit myself to become entranced, and will therefore know whether these shapes you talk of are any the more to be touched and felt by the ordinary senses than are those I talk of.

Starting point is 01:03:02 I was not denying the power of other beings to take upon themselves a clothing of mortal substance, but only that simple invocations, such as he spoke of, seemed unlikely to do more than cast the mind into trance, and thereby bring it into the presence of the powers of day, twilight, and darkness. But, he said, we have seen them moving the furniture hither and thither, and they go at our bidding and help or harm people who know nothing of them. I am not giving the exact words, but as accurately as I can the substance of our talk. On the night arranged I turned up about eight,

Starting point is 01:03:41 and found the leader sitting alone in almost total darkness in a small, back room. He was dressed in a black gown like an inquisitor's dress in an old drawing that left nothing of him visible except his eyes, which peered out through two small round holes. Upon the table in front of him was a brass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with painted symbols, two crossed daggers, and certain implements shaped like quernstones, which were used to control the elemental powers in some fashion I did not discover. I also put on a black gown and remember that it did not fit perfectly, but that it interfered with my movements considerably. The sorcerer then took a black cock out of a basket and cut its throat with one of the daggers, letting the blood fall into the large bowl.

Starting point is 01:04:34 He opened a book and began an invocation which was certainly not English and had a deep guttural sound. Before he had finished another of the sorcerers, a man of about twenty-five, came in, and having put on a black gown also seated himself at my left hand. I had the invoker directly in front of me, and soon began to find his eyes which glittered through the small holes in his hood, affecting me in a curious way. I struggled hard against their influence, and my head began to ache. The invocation continued, and nothing happened for the first few minutes. Then the invoker got up and extinguished the light in the hall.

Starting point is 01:05:16 so that no glimmer might come through the slit under the door. There was no light now, except from the herbs on the brass dish, and no sound except from the deep, guttural murmur of the invocation. Presently the man at my left swayed himself about and cried, Oh, God, oh God! I asked him what ailed him, but he did not know he had spoken. A moment after, he said he could see a great serpent moving about the room, and became considerably excited. I saw nothing with any definite shape, but thought that black clouds were forming about me. I felt I must fall into a trance if I did not struggle against it, and that the influence which was causing this trance was out of harmony with itself, in other words, evil.

Starting point is 01:06:04 After a struggle, I got rid of the black cloud, and was able to observe with my ordinary senses again. The two sorcerers now began to see black and white columns moving about the room, and finally a man in a monk's habit, and they became greatly puzzled because I did not see these things also, for to them they were as solid as the table before them. The invoker appeared to be gradually increasing in power, and I began to feel as if a tide of darkness was pouring from him and concentrating itself about me. And now too I noticed. that the man on my left hand had passed into a death-like trance. With a last great effort I drove off the black clouds,

Starting point is 01:06:49 but feeling them to be the only shapes I could see without passing into a trance, and having no great love for them, I asked for lights, and after the needful exorcism returned to the ordinary world. I said to the more powerful of the two sorcerers, What would happen if one of your spirits had overpowered me? "'You would go out of this room,' he answered, "'with his character added to your own.' "'I asked about the origin of his sorcery,

Starting point is 01:07:18 "'but got little of importance except that he had learned it from his father. "'He would not tell me more, for he had, it appeared, "'taken a vow of secrecy. "'For some days I could not get over the feeling "'of having a number of deformed and grotesque figures lingering about me. "'The bright powers are always beautiful and desirable, and the dim powers are now beautiful, now quaintly grotesque, but the dark powers express their unbalanced natures

Starting point is 01:07:46 in shapes of ugliness and horror. End of The Sorcerer's. Section 11 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. The Celtic Twilight By William Butzler Yates

Starting point is 01:08:15 The Devil My old Mayo woman told me one day that something very bad had come down the road and gone into the house opposite and though she would not say what it was I knew quite well another day she told me of two friends of hers who had been made love to by one whom they believed

Starting point is 01:08:33 to be the devil one of them was standing by the roadside when he came by on horseback and asked her to mount up behind him him and go riding. When she would not, he vanished. The other was out on the road late at night waiting for her young man when something came flapping and rolling along the road up to her feet. It had the likeness of a newspaper, and presently it flapped up into her face, and she knew by the size of it that it was the Irish Times. All of a sudden it changed into a young man

Starting point is 01:09:01 who asked her to go walking with him. She would not, and he vanished. I know of an old man, too, on the slopes of Ben Bulbred, who found the devil ringing a bell under his bed, and he went off and stole the chapel bell and rang him out. It may be that this, like the others, was not the devil at all, but some poor wood spirit whose cloven feet had got him into trouble. End of the devil. Section 12 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording.

Starting point is 01:09:37 All Libravox recordings are in the public domain, for more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org, recording by Jordan Heron. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. Happy and unhappy theologians. 1. A Mayo woman once said to me, I knew a servant girl who hung herself for the love of God. She was lonely for the priest and her society,

Starting point is 01:10:04 and hung herself to the banisters with a scarf. She was no sooner dead than she became white as a lily. and if it had been murder or suicide, she would have become black as black. They gave her Christian burial, and the priest said she was no sooner dead than she was with the Lord. So nothing matters that you do for the love of God. I do not wonder at the pleasure she has in telling this story, for she herself loves all holy things with an ardor that brings them quickly to her lips. She told me once that she never hears anything described in a sermon that she does not,

Starting point is 01:10:41 afterwards see with her eyes. She has described to me the gates of purgatory, as they showed themselves to her eyes, but I remember nothing of the description, except that she could not see the souls in trouble, but only the gates. Her mind continually dwells on what is pleasant and beautiful. One day she asked me what month and what flower were the most beautiful. When I answered that I did not know, she said, the month of May, because of the virgin, and the lily of the valley, because it never sinned, but came pure out of the rocks. And then she asked, What is the cause of the three cold months of winter?

Starting point is 01:11:19 I did not know even that, and so she said, The sin of man and the vengeance of God. Christ himself was not only blessed, but perfect in all manly proportions in her eyes. So much do beauty and holiness go together in her thoughts. He alone of all men was exactly six feet high. All others are a little more,

Starting point is 01:11:39 or a little less. Her thoughts and her sights of the people of Fairy are pleasant and beautiful too, and I have never heard her call them the fallen angels. They are people like ourselves, only better looking, and many and many a time she has gone to the window to watch them drive their wagons through the sky, wagon behind wagon in long line, or to the door to hear them singing and dancing in the fourth. They sing chiefly, it seems, a song called the distant waterfall, and though they once knocked her down, she never thinks badly of them. She saw them most easily when she was in service in King's County, and one morning, a little while ago, she said to me, Last night I was waiting up for the master, and it was a quarter past eleven. I heard a bang

Starting point is 01:12:25 right down on the table, Kings County all over, says I, and I laughed till I was near dead. It was a warning I was staying too long. They wanted the place to themselves. I told her once of somebody who saw a fairy and fainted, and she said, It could not have been a fairy, but some bad thing. Nobody could faint at a fairy. It was a demon. I was not afraid when they near put me, and the bed under me, out through the roof. I wasn't afraid either when you were at some work, and I heard a thing coming flop-flop up the stairs like an eel and squealing. It went to all the doors. It could not get in where I was. I would have sent it through the universe like a flash of fire. There was a man in my place, a tearing fellow, and he put one of them down.

Starting point is 01:13:09 He went out to meet it on the road, but he must have been told the words. But the fairies are the best neighbours. If you do good to them, they will do good to you. But they don't like you to be on their path. Another time, she said to me, they are always good to the poor. 2. There is, however, a man in a Galway village who can see nothing but wickedness. Some think him very holy, and others think him a little crazed.

Starting point is 01:13:36 But some of his talk reminds one of those old Irish vizabeth. visions of the three worlds, which are supposed to have given Dante the plan of the divine comedy. But I could not imagine this man seeing Paradise. He is especially angry with the people of fairy, and describes the faun-like feet that are so common among them, who are indeed children of Pan, to prove them children of Satan. He will not grant that they carry away women, though there are many that say so, but he is certain that they are as thick as the sands of the see about us, and they tempt poor mortals. He says, There is a priest I know of was looking along the ground, like as if he was hunting for

Starting point is 01:14:17 something, and a voice said to him, if you want to see them, you'll see enough of them, and his eyes were opened, and he saw the ground thick with them. Singing they do be sometimes, and dancing, but all the time they have cloven feet. Yet he was so scornful of unchristian things for all their dancing and singing, that he thinks that he thinks that they're that, you have only to bid them be gone, and they will go. It was one night, he says, after walking back from Canvara, and down by the wood beyond, I felt one coming beside me, and I could feel the horse he was riding on, and the way he lifted his legs, but they do not make a sound like the hooves of a horse.

Starting point is 01:14:57 So I stopped, and turned around, and said very loud, be off! And he went, and never troubled me after. And I knew a man who was dying, and one came on his bed, and he said, and he said, and he He cried out to it, get out of that, you unnatural animal, and it left him. Fallen angels they are, and after the fall God said, let there be hell, and there it was in a moment. An old woman who was sitting by the fire joined in as he said this with, God save us, it's a pity he said the word, and there might have been no hell the day. But the seer did not notice her words.

Starting point is 01:15:32 He went on, and then he asked the devil, what would he take for the souls of all the people? And the devil said nothing would satisfy him but the blood of a virgin's son, so he got that, and then the gates of hell were opened. He understood the story, it seems, as if it were some riddling old folk-tale. I have seen hell myself. I had a sight of it one time in a vision. It had a very high wall around it, all of metal, and an archway, and a straight walk into it, just like what it'd be leading into a gentleman's orchard,

Starting point is 01:16:05 but the edges were not trimmed with box, but with red, red-hot metal. And inside the wall there were crosswalks, and I'm not sure what there was to the right, but to the left there were five great furnaces, and they full of souls kept there with great chains. So I turned short and went away, and in turning I looked again at the wall, and I could see no end to it. And another time I saw purgatory. It seemed to be in a level place, and no walls around it, but it all one bright blaze and the soul stills standing in it. And they suffer near as much as in hell, only there are no devils with them there, and they have the hope of heaven. And I heard a call to me from there, help me to come out of this.

Starting point is 01:16:50 And when I looked, it was a man I used to know in the army, an Irishman, and from this county, and I believe him to be a descendant of King O'Connor of Avonry. So I stretched out my hand first, but then I called out, I'd be burned in the flames before I could get within three yards of you. so then he said, Well, help me with your prayers, and so I do. And Father Connellin says the same thing, to help the dead with your prayers, and he's a very clever man to make a sermon,

Starting point is 01:17:19 and has a great deal of cures made with the holy water he brought back from lords. End of happy and unhappy theologians, recording by Jordan Heron. Section 13 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording, all Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit Librevox.org,

Starting point is 01:17:49 recording by John O'Rearden. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates, The Glee Man. Michael Moran was born about 1794 off Blackpits and the Liberties of Dublin in Faddle Alley. A fortnight after birth he went stone blind from illness and became thereby a blessing to his parents, who were able soon to send him to rhyme and beg at the street corners and at the bridges over the river Liffey.

Starting point is 01:18:20 They may well have wished that their quiver was full of such as he, for free from the interruption of sight, his mind became a perfect echoing chamber where every movement of the day and every change of the public passion whispered itself into rhyme or quaint saying. By the time he had grown to manhood He was the admitted rector Of all the ballad mongers of the liberties

Starting point is 01:18:45 Madden, the weaver Carney, the blind fiddler from Wicklow Martin from Meath McBride from well heaven knows where That McGrane who in after days When the true morn was no more strutted in borrowed plumes Or rather in borrowed rags

Starting point is 01:19:03 And gave out that there never had been Any Moran at all but himself And many another did homage to Moran before him, and held him chief of all their tribe. Nor, despite his blindness, did he find any difficulty in getting a wife, but rather was able to pick and choose, for he was just that sort of mixture of ragamuffin and of genius, which is dear to the heart of woman, who, perhaps because she is wholly conventional herself, loves the unexpected, the crooked, the bewildering. Nor did he lack, despite ragged,

Starting point is 01:19:39 many excellent things, for it is remembered that he ever loved caper's sauce, going so far indeed in his honest indignation at his absence one day at dinner, to fling a leg of mutton at his wife. He was not however much to look at, with a coarse-freezed coat with its cape and scalloped edge, his old corduroy trousers and great brogue, and a stout stick made fast to his wrist by a thong of leather. He would have been a woeful shock to the gleaman mconglana could that friend of kings have beheld him in prophetic vision from the pillar stone at cork. And yet, though the short cloak and the leather wallet were no more, he was a true glee man, being alike a poet, jester, and newsman of the people.

Starting point is 01:20:30 In the morning, when he had finished his breakfast, his wife or some neighbour would read the newspaper to him and read on and read on until he interrupted with, That'll do now. I have me meditations. And from these meditations would come the day's store of jest and rhyme. He had the whole of the Middle Ages under his freeze coat. He had not, however, McConglin is hatred of the church and clergy, for when the fruit of his meditations did not ripen well

Starting point is 01:21:01 or when the crowd called for something more solid, he would recite or sing a metrical tale or ballad of saint or martyr or of biblical adventure. He would stand at a street corner and when a crowd had gathered would begin in some fashion as follows. I copy the record of one who knew him. He would say, Gather round me, boys, gather round me. Boys, am I standing in a puddle or am I standing in wet? thereupon several boys would cry Ah no, you're not, you're in a dry place Go on and tell us about St. Mary or Moses,

Starting point is 01:21:41 each one calling for his favourite tale. Then, Moran, with a suspicious wriggle of his body And a clutch at his rags would burst out with All me bosom friends are turned back byters And after a final saying, If you don't drop your cotton and diversions, I'll soon have some of you as a case. By way of warning to the boys he began, began his recitation, or perhaps

Starting point is 01:22:07 still delay, and asked, is there a crowd around me now? Is there any blackguard heretic around me? The best of his religious tales was St. Mary of Egypt, a long poem of exceeding solemnity condensed from the much longer work of a certain bishop coil. It told how a fast and loose woman of Egypt, Mary by name, followed pilgrims to Jerusalem for no good purpose, and then, turning penitent on finding herself withheld from entering the temple by supernatural interference, fled to the desert and spent the remainder for her life in solitary penance. When at last she was at the point of death, God sent Bishop Zossimus to hear her confession and give her the last sacrament, and, with the help of a lion whom God also sent, Dig Her Grave.

Starting point is 01:23:04 The poem has the intolerable cadence of the 18th century, but was so popular and so often called for that Moran was soon nicknamed Zosimus, and it is by that name that he is remembered. He had also a poem of his own called Moses, which went a little nearer poetry without going very near, but he could ill-brook solemnity, and before long he parried his own verses in the following ragamuff in fashion. In Egypt's land contagious to the Nile, King Pharaoh's daughter went to bathe in style. She took her dip and walked onto the land to dry her royal pelt she ran along the sand.

Starting point is 01:23:52 A bulrush tripped her whereupon she saw, A smiling babie in a wad of straw. She took it up, and with accent smile said, Terranatus, girls, which of you owns the child? His humorous verses were however more often quips and cranks at the expense of contemporaries. It was his delight, for instance, to remind certain shoemaker, noted alike for display of wealth and for personal uncleanliness, of his inconsiderable origin, and a song of which,

Starting point is 01:24:25 but the first stanza came down to us. At the dirty end of dirty lane lived a dirty cobbler, Dick McLean. His wife was in the old king's reign, a stout, brave orange woman. On Essex Bridge she strained her throat, and sixpenny was her note. But Dickie wore a brand new coat,

Starting point is 01:24:51 got up among the old men. He was a bigot like his clan And in the streets he wildly ran A roly toly toly toly raid Oh with his old jade He had troubles of diverse kinds And numerous interlopers to face and put down Once an official peeler arrested him as a vagabond

Starting point is 01:25:19 But was triumphantly routed amid the laughter of the court when Moran reminded his worship of the precedents set by Homer, no less, who was also he declared a poet and a blind man and a beggar man. He had to face a more serious difficulty as his fame grew, because various imitators started up on all sides. Certain actor, for instance, made as many guineas as Moran did shillings by mimicking Moran's sayings and his songs and getting up on stage. One night this actor was at supper with friends

Starting point is 01:25:56 When a dispute arose To whether his mimicry was overdone or not It was agreed to settle it by an appeal to the mob A 40-shilling supper at a famous coffee house Was to be the wager The actor took up his station at Essex Bridge A great haunt of Morans And soon gathered a small crowd

Starting point is 01:26:17 He had scarce got through In Egypt's land contagious to the night when Moran himself came up followed by another crowd. Crowds met in great excitement and laughter. Good Christian, said the pretender, is it possible that any man would mock a poor, dark, blind man like that? Who's that? Is it some impostor, said Moran. Be gone, you're wretch. It's you or the imposter. Don't you fear the light of heaven

Starting point is 01:26:46 being struck down from your eyes from mocking the poor blind, dark man? Saints and angels, is there no protection against this? You're a most inhuman blackguard of trying to deprive me of my honest bread in this way, said poor Moran. And you, your wretch, won't you let me go on with the beautiful poem? Christian people in your charity, won't you beat this man away? He's taking advantage of my darkness. The pretender, seeing that he was having the best of it, thanked the people for their sympathy and protection,

Starting point is 01:27:18 and went on with the poem. Moran listened for a time in bewildered silence and after a while Moran protested again with Is it possible that none of you can know me? He does not see it's myself and that's not someone else. Before I can proceed any further in this lovely story interrupted the pretender I call on you to contribute your charitable donations to help me go on.

Starting point is 01:27:43 Have you no soul to be saved a mocker of heaven cried Moran but completely beside himself by this last injury. Would you rob the poor as well as to save the world? Oh, was ever such a wickedness known. I leave it yourselves, my friends, said the pretender, to give to the real dark man that you all know so well and save me from that schemer. And with that he collected some pennies and haemones,

Starting point is 01:28:10 and when he did so, Moran started his own Mary of Egypt. But the indignant crowd, seizing his stick were about to belabor him when they fell back bewildered and knew by his close resemblance to himself. The pretender now called on him to just give him a grip of that villain and he'd soon let him know

Starting point is 01:28:31 who the imposter was. They led him over to Moran but instead of closing with him he'd thrust a few shillings into his hand and turned to the crowd explaining to them that he was indeed but an actor and that he had just gained away

Starting point is 01:28:46 and so departed amidst such enthusiasm to eat the supper he had won. In April 1846, word was sent to the priest that Michael Moran was dying. He found him at No. 15 Patrick Street on a straw bed in a room full of rag and ballad singers come to cheer his last moments. After his death, the ballad singers, with many fiddles and the like, came again and gave him a fine wake, each adding to the merriment, whatever he knew in the way of a ran, a tale, an old saw, or a quaint rhyme. He had had his day, had said his prayers, made his confession, and why should they not give him a hearty send-off? The funeral took place the next day.

Starting point is 01:29:41 A good party of his admirers and friends got into the hearse for the coffin, for the day was wet and nasty. But they hadn't gone far when one of them, burst out. Ah, it's cruel cold, isn't it? Garra said another, we'll all be stiff as the corpse there when we get to the burying ground. Bad says to him, said a third, I wish it held out another month until the weather got decent. A man called Carol, their bond produced a half-pint of whiskey, and they all drank to the soul of the departed. Unhappily, however, the hearse was overweighted and they hadn't reached the cemetery before the spring broke and the bottle with it. Moran must have felt strange and out of place in that other kingdom. He was entering now,

Starting point is 01:30:29 perhaps with his friends, were drinking in his honour. Let us hope that some kindly middle region was found for him where he can call disheveled angels about him with some new and more rhythmical form of his old. Gather round me, boys, Will yous? Gather round me, boys, Williys, gather round me, and hear what I have to say, before

Starting point is 01:30:54 old Sally brings me, me bread, and me jugatee. And fling, outrageous quips and cranks at cherubim and seraphim. Perhaps he may have found and gathered, rag him often though he be, the lady of high truth,

Starting point is 01:31:11 The rose of far-sought beauty Or whose lack So many of the writers of Ireland Whether famous or forgotten Have been futile As blown fraughts Upon the seashore End of the Glee Man

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Starting point is 01:31:59 Old Navy's drapy denim wide leg. Section 14 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libre of Ox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit Librevox.org. recording by John O'Reardon. A Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates, Section 14. Regina, Regina Pigmaoram Vaney

Starting point is 01:32:27 One night, a middle-aged man, who had lived all his life far from the noise of cab wheels, and a young girl, a relation of his who was reported to be enough of a seer to catch a glimpse of unaccountable lights, moving over the fields among the cattle, together with myself were walking along a far western sandy shore. We talked of the forgetful people, as the fairy people are sometimes called, and came in the midst of our talk to a notable haunt of theirs,

Starting point is 01:33:00 a shallow cave amidst black rocks with its reflection under it in the wet sand. I asked the young girl if she could see anything, for I had quite a number of things to ask the forgetful people. She stood still for a few minutes, and I saw that she was passing into a kind of waking trance in which the cold sea breeze no longer troubled her, nor indeed the dull boom of the sea distracted her attention. I then called aloud the names of the great fairies, and in a moment or two she said that she could hear music far inside the rocks, and then a sound of confused talking, and of people stamping their feet as if to applaud some unseen performer.

Starting point is 01:33:47 Up to this, our other friend had been walking to and fro some yards off, but now he passed close to us, and as he did he said suddenly that we were going to be interrupted, for he heard the laughter of children somewhere beyond the rocks. We were, however, quite alone. The spirit of the place had begun to cast, their influence over him also. In a moment he was corroborated by the girl,

Starting point is 01:34:14 who said that bursts of laughter had begun to mingle with the music, the confused talking and the noise of feet. She next saw a bright light streaming out of the cave, which seemed to have grown much deeper, and a quantity of little people in various coloured dresses, red predominating, all dancing to a tune which she did not read, recognize. I then bade her call out the queen of the little people to come and talk to us. There was however no answer to her command. I therefore repeated the words aloud myself,

Starting point is 01:34:52 and in a moment a very beautiful, tall woman came out of the cave. I too had by this time falling into a kind of trance, in which what we call the unreal had begun to take upon itself a masterful reality and was able to see the faint gleam of gold ornaments, the shadowy blossom of dim hair. I then, by the girl, tell this tall queen to marshal her followers according to their natural divisions that we might see them. I found, as before, that I had to repeat the command myself. The creatures then came out of the cave, and drew themselves up, if I remember rightly, in four bands. One of these bands carried quicken boughs in their hands, and another had necklaces made apparently of serpent scales,

Starting point is 01:35:46 but their dress I cannot quite remember, for I was quite absorbed in that gleaming woman. I asked her to tell the seer whether these caves were the greatest fairy haunts of the neighbourhood. Her lips moved, but the answer was inaudible. I bow the seer lay her hand upon the breast of the grave, queen, and after that she heard every word quite distinctly. No, this was not the greatest fairy haunt, for there was a greater one a little farther ahead.

Starting point is 01:36:18 And then, I asked her whether it was true that she and her people carried away mortals, and if so, whether they had put another soul in the place of the one that had taken. We changed the bodies, was her answer. Are any of you ever born into mortal life, I ask? Yes, she said. Do I know any who were among your people before birth? You do, she said. Who are they?

Starting point is 01:36:46 It would not be lawful for you to know, she said. I then asked whether she and her people were not dramatizations of our moods. She does not understand, said my friend, but says that her people are much like human beings and do most of the things human beings do. I asked her other questions. as to her nature and her purpose in the universe, but only seemed to puzzle her. At last she appeared to lose patience, for she wrote this message from me upon the sands,

Starting point is 01:37:19 the sands of vision, that is, not the grating sands under our feet. Be careful and do not seek to know too much about us. Seeking that I had offended her, I thanked her for what she had shown and told, and let her depart again into her cave. In a little while the young girl awoke out of her trance and felt again the cold wind of the world and began to shiver. I tell you these things, as accurately as I can,

Starting point is 01:37:51 with no theories to blur the history. Tearies are, well, poor things at best, and the bulk of mine have perished long ago. I love better than any theory the sound of the gate of ivory, turning upon its hinges, and hold that he alone who has passed the rose-strewn threshold can't catch the far glimmer of the gate of horn. It were perhaps well for us all if we would, but to raise the cry, Lily the astrologer raised in the Windsor forest, and he said, Regina, Regina, Pygmiorum, Vaini, and remember with him that God visiteth his children

Starting point is 01:38:33 in dreams. Tall, glimmering queen come near, and let me see again the shadowy blossom of thy dim hair. End of Regina, Regina, Regina Pecmajoram, Veney. Section 15 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. The Celtic Twilight, by William Butler Yates. Section 15 And Fair, Fierce Woman, read by Luna Pearson. One day, a woman that I know, came face to face with heroic beauty,

Starting point is 01:39:24 that highest beauty which Blake says changes least from youth to age, a beauty which has been fading out of the arts, since that decadence we call progress set voluptuous beauty in its place. She was standing at the window, looking over to knock Norea, where Queen Mave is thought to be buried, when she saw, as she has told me, the finest woman you ever saw, travelling right across from the mountain and straight to her. The woman had a sword by her side and a dagger lifted up in her hand, and was dressed in white with bare arms and feet.

Starting point is 01:39:58 She looked very strong, but not wicked, that is, not cruel. The old woman had seen the Irish giant, and though he was a fine man, he was nothing to this woman, for he was round and could not have snout. stepped out so soldierly. She was like Mrs. A stately lady of the neighbourhood, but she had no stomach on her and was slight and broad in the shoulders, and was handsomer than anyone you ever saw. She looked about thirty. The old woman covered her eyes with her hands, and when she uncovered them, the apparition had vanished. The neighbours were wild with her, she told me, because she did not wait to find out if there was a message, for they were sure it was Queen Mave, who often shows herself

Starting point is 01:40:43 to the pilots. I asked the old woman if she had seen others like Queen Mave, and she said some of them have their hair down, but they look quite different like the sleepy-looking ladies one sees in the papers. Those with the hair up are like this one. The others have long white dresses, but those with a hair up have short dresses, so that you can see their legs right up to the calf.

Starting point is 01:41:07 After some careful questioning, I found that they wore what might very well be a kind of buskin. She went on, they are fine and dashing-looking, like the men one sees, riding their horses in twos and threes, on the slopes of the mountains, with their swords swinging. She repeated over and over, There is no such race living now, none so finely proportioned, or the like, and then said, the present queen is a nice, pleasant-looking woman,

Starting point is 01:41:35 but she is not like her. What makes me think so little of the ladies is that I see none as they be, meaning as the spirits. When I think of her, and of the ladies now, they are like little children running about without knowing how to put their clothes on right. Is it the ladies? Why, I would not call them women at all? The other day, a friend of mine questioned an old woman in a Galway workhouse about Queen

Starting point is 01:42:02 Mave, and was told that Queen Mave was handsome and overcame all her enemies with a ballstick, for the Hazel is blessed and the best weapon that can be got. You might walk the world with it. but she grew very disagreeable in the end oh very disagreeable best not to be talking about it best leave it between the book and the hearer my friend thought the old woman had got some scandal about fergus son of roy and mave in her head and i myself met once with a young man in the burren hills who remembered an old poet who made his poems in irish and had met when he was young the young man said one who called herself mave and said she was a queen among them and asked him if he would have money or pleasure. He said he would have pleasure, and she gave him her love for a time, and then went from him, and ever after he was very mournful.

Starting point is 01:42:57 The young man had often heard him sing the poem of lamentation that he made, but could only remember that it was very mournful, and that he called her beauty of all beauties. End of Section 15. Section 16 of the Celtic twilight. This is a Librevox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org.

Starting point is 01:43:28 The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. Section 16 Enchanted Woods Read by Luna Pearson. Part 1 Last summer, whenever I had finished my day's work, I used to go wandering in certain roomy woods, and there I would often meet an old countryman. and talked to him about his work and about the woods,

Starting point is 01:43:53 and once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart more readily than to me. He had spent all his life lopping away the witch elm and the hazel, and the privet and the hornbeam from the paths, and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures of the wood. He has heard the hedgehog, Grinodge, he calls him, grunting like a Christian, and is certain that he steals apples by rolling up.

Starting point is 01:44:19 about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to every quill. He is certain, too, that the cats, of whom there are many in the woods, have a language of their own, some kind of old Irish. He says, cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of some great change in the world. That is why they are hard to kill, and why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat, it might claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would be the serpent's tooth. Sometimes he thinks they change into wild cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails, but these wild cats are not the same as the martin cats, who have been always in the woods.

Starting point is 01:45:03 The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures, except squirrels whom he hates, with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times his eyes will twinkle with pleasure, as he remembers how he made hedgehogs and roll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw under them. I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and the supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats like, above all, to be in the fords and lisses after nightfall, and he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about a martin cat, a rare beast nowadays.

Starting point is 01:45:51 Many years ago he used to work in the garden, and once they put him to sleep in a garden house where there was a loft full of apples, and all night he could hear people rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. Once, at any rate, he has seen an unearthly sight in the woods. He says, one time I was out cutting timber over an inchie, and a 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

Starting point is 01:46:37 and looked for her, but I never could see her again from that day to this, never again. He used the word clean, as we would use words like fresh or comely. Others too have seen spirits in the enchanted woods. A labourer told us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is called Shanwala, from some old village that was before the weed. He said, one evening I parted from Lawrence Mangan in the yard, and he went away through the path in Shanwala and bid me good-night. And two hours after, there he was back again in the yard,

Starting point is 01:47:11 and bid me light a candle that was in the stable. And he told me that when he got into Shanwala, a little fellow about as high as his knee, but having a head as big as a man's body, came beside him and led him out of the path and round about, and at last it brought him to the lime kiln, and then it vanished and left him. A woman told me of a sight that she and others had seen

Starting point is 01:47:34 by a certain deep pool in the river. She said, I came over the style from the chapel, and others along with me, and a great blast of wind came, and two trees were bent, and broken and fell into the river, and the splash of water out of it went up to the skies. And those that were with me saw many figures, but myself, I only saw one, sitting there by the bank where the trees fell. Dark clothes he had on, and he was headless. A man told me that one day, when he was a boy, he and another boy went to catch a horse in a certain field, full of boulders and bushes of haze, and creeping juniper and rock roses, that is where the lakeside is for a little, clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with him, I bet a button that if I fling a pebble onto that bush, it will stay on it,

Starting point is 01:48:25 meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not be able to go through it. So he took up a pebble of cow dung, and as soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music that ever was heard. They ran away, and when they had gone about 200 yards, they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white, walking round and round the bush. First it had the form of a woman, and then of a man, and it was going round the bush. Part 2 I often entangle myself in argument more complicated than even those paths of Inchi as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at other times I say as Socrates said, when they told him a learned opinion about a nymph from the Elyssus,

Starting point is 01:49:08 that common opinion is enough for me. I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond anyone we have ever seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody

Starting point is 01:49:36 or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps so deep a hold has this imagination upon me. You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever your ruling stars will have it,

Starting point is 01:49:58 Saturn driving you to the woods, or the moon it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers imagine the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body, or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show

Starting point is 01:50:31 that light and shadow ever made among green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple of all times, and the wise men of ancient times, have seen them, and even spoken to them. They live out their passionate lives not far off, as I think, and we shall be among them when we die

Starting point is 01:50:59 if we but keep our nature's simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall unite us to all romance, and that someday we shall fight dragons among blue hills, or come to that whereof all romance is but foreshadowings mingled with the images of man's misdeeds in greater days than these, as the old men thought in the earthly paradise, when they were in good spirits. End of Section 16. Section 17 of the Celtic Twilight.

Starting point is 01:51:32 This is a Libervianian. recording all Libervox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org recording by Kay Hand the Celtic twilight by William Butler Yates section 17 miraculous creatures there are Martin cats and badgers and foxes in the enchanted woods but there are of a certainty mightier creatures and the lake hides what neither net nor line can take these creatures are are of the race of the white stag that flits in and out of the tales of Arthur, and of the evil pig that slew D'Armuid, where Ben Bulbin mixes with the sea-wind.

Starting point is 01:52:14 They are the wizard creatures of hope and fear. They are of them that fly, and of them that follow among the thickets that are about the gates of death. A man I know remembers that his father was one night in the woods of Inche, where the lads of Gort used to be stealing rods. He was sitting by the wall, and the dog beside him, and he heard something come running from the Albon Weir, and he could see nothing, but the sound of its feet on the ground was like the sound of the feet of a deer. And when it passed him, the dog got between him and the wall, and scratched at it there, as if it was afraid, but still he could see nothing, but only hear the sound of hoofs. So when it was passed, he turned and came away home. Another time, the man

Starting point is 01:52:57 says, my father told me he was in a boat out on the house. the lake with two or three men from gort and one of them had an eel spear and he thrust it into the water and it hit something and the man fainted and they had to carry him out of the boat to land and when he came to himself he said that what he struck was like a calf but whatever it was it was not a fish a friend of mine is convinced that these terrible creatures so common in lakes were set there in old times by subtle enchanters to watch over the gates of wisdom he thinks that if we sent our spirits down into the water we would make them of one substance with the strange moods of ecstasy and power, and go out it may be, to the conquest of the world. We would, however, he believes, have first to outface and perhaps overthrow strange images full of a more powerful life than if they were really alive. It may be that we shall look at them without fear when we have endured the last adventure,

Starting point is 01:53:51 that is, death. 19.02. End of Section 17, Miraculous Creatures Section 18 of the Celtic Twilight This is a Libravox recording All Libravox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit Libravox.org

Starting point is 01:54:21 The Celtic Twilight by William Butzler Yates Aristotle of the books The friend who can get to the woodcutter to talk more readily than he will to anybody else went lately to see his old wife. She lives in a cottage not far from the edge of the woods and is as full of old talk as her husband. This time she began to talk of Gobbon, the legendary Mason and his wisdom, but said presently, Aristotle of the books too was very wise, and he had a great deal of experience. But did not the bees, the better of him in the end? He wanted to know how they patched the comb, and he wasted the

Starting point is 01:55:05 better part of a fortnight watching them, and he could not see them doing it. Then he made a hive with a glass cover on it, and put it over them, and he thought to see. But when he went and put his eyes to the glass, they had it all covered with wax so that it was as black as the pot, and he was as blind as before. He said he was never rightly killed till then. They had him that time, surely. End of Aristotle of the books. happened to him when he was a young man and out drilling with some Connacht Fenians. They were but a carful and drove along a hillside until they came to a quiet place. They left the car and went further up the hill with their rifles and drilled for a while.

Starting point is 01:56:25 As they were coming down again they saw a very thin, long-legged pig of the old Irish sort, and the pig began to follow them. One of them cried out as a joke that it was a fairy pig, and they all began to run to keep up the joke. The pig ran too, and presently, how, nobody knew, this mock terror became real terror, and they ran as for their lives. When they got to the car they made the horse gallop as fast as possible, but the pig still followed.

Starting point is 01:56:58 Then one of them put up his rifle to fire, but when he looked along the barrel he could see nothing. Presently they turned a corner and came to a village. They told the people of the village what had happened, and the people of the village took pitchforks and spades and the like, and went along the road with them to drive the pig away. When they turned the corner, they could see nothing. 1902. End of the Swine of the Gods. Section 20 of the Celtic twilight. This is a Libre Vox recording. All Libravax recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravax.org.

Starting point is 01:57:50 Recording by Anusha Ayer, Mumbai. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. A voice One day I was walking over a bit of marshy ground close to Inchy Wood when I felt all of a sudden, and only for a second, an emotion which I said to myself was the root of Christian mysticism. There had swept over me a sense of weakness of dependence on a great personal being somewhere far off yet near at hand. No thought of mine had prepared me for this emotion. for I had been preoccupied with Angus and Aden and with Mananon, son of the sea.

Starting point is 01:58:48 That night I awoke, lying upon my back, and hearing a voice, speaking above me and saying, No human soul is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any human soul is infinite, night, for no other soul can satisfy the same need in God. A few nights after this I awoke to see the loveliest people I have ever seen. A young man and a young girl, dressed in olive-green raiment, cut like old Greek raiment, were standing at my bedside. I looked at the girl and noticed that her dress was gathered about her neck into a kind of chain, or perhaps into some kind of stiff embroidery which represented

Starting point is 01:59:45 ivy leaves. But what filled me with wonder was the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now. It was beautiful, as few faces are beautiful. But it had neither, one would think the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or in speculation. It was peaceful like the faces of animals, or like mountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad. I thought for a moment that she might be the beloved of Angus, but how could that hunted, alluring, happy, immortal wrette. have a face like this? Doubtless she was from among the children of the moon. But who among them? I shall never know.

Starting point is 02:00:45 1902. End of A Voice. Recording by Anusha Ayer, Mumbai. Section 21 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libre of Ox recording. All Libre of Ox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, what to do you? to volunteer visit Libre ofox.org.

Starting point is 02:01:12 Recording by John O'Reardon, the Celtic twilight by William Butler Yates, kidnappers. A little north of the town of Sligo on the southern side of Ben Bulbin, some hundreds of feet above the plain, is a small, white square in the limestone. No mortal has ever touched it with his hand,

Starting point is 02:01:31 no sheep or goat has ever browsed grass beside it. There is no more inaccessible place on the earth, and few more encircled by awe to the deep considering. It is the door to fairyland. In the middle of the night it swings open, and the unearthly troop rushes out. All night the gay rebels sweep to and fro across the land, invisible to all, unless perhaps where in some more than commonly gentle place,

Starting point is 02:02:01 like drum cliff or drum a hare, the night-capped heads of fairy doctors may be thrust from their doors to see what mischief, the fairies, or the gentry, as they're referred to, what they are doing. To their trained eyes and ears, the fields are covered by red-hatted riders, and the air is full of shrill voices, and sound like whistling, as an ancient Scottish seer has recorded, and wholly different from the talk of angels, who speak much in the throat, like the Irish, as Lily the astrologer has wisely said. Now, if there be a newborn baby or a new wed bride in the neighbourhood, the nightcap doctors will peer with more than common care, for the unearthly troop of fairies do not always return empty-handed.

Starting point is 02:02:48 Sometimes a new wed bride or a newborn baby goes with them into their mountains. The door swings two behind, and the newborn or the new wed moves henceforth in the bloodless land of fairy. happy enough but doomed to melt out at the last judgment like bright vapour, for the soul cannot live without sorrow. Through this door of white stone and the other doors of the land where Gawitou and Sonas serifingen, as they say in Irish, where you can buy a joy for a penny, they have gone kings and queens and princes, but so greatly has the power of fairy dwindled

Starting point is 02:03:28 that there are none but peasants in these sad chronicles of me. mine. Somewhere about the beginning of the last century appeared on the western corner of Market Street, Sligo, where the butcher shop is now a palace, not as in Keats' Lamia, but an apothecary shop ruled over by a certain unaccountable Dr. Upton. Where he came from, none ever knew, and there was also in Sligo in those days a woman, Olmsby by name, whose husband had full. mistaken, sick. The doctors could make nothing of him,

Starting point is 02:04:06 and nothing seemed wrong with him, and yet weaker and weaker he grew. Away went the wife to Dr. Oppenden. She was shown into the shop parlour, and the black cat was sitting straight up before the fire. She had just time to see that the sideboard was covered with fruit and to say to herself, fruit must be wholesome,

Starting point is 02:04:27 when the doctor has so much of it, before Dr. Oppenden came in. He was dressed all in black and the same as the cat, and his wife walked behind him, dressed in black likewise. She gave him a guinea and got a little bottle in return. Her husband recovered that time. But meanwhile the black doctor cured many people, but one day a rich patient died, and the cat, the wife and the doctor all vanished the night after. In a year the man Ormsby fell sick once more.

Starting point is 02:05:02 Now he was a good-looking man, and his wife felt sure the gentry or the fairies were coveting him, and she went and called on the fairy doctor at Kern's foot. As soon as he had heard her tale, he went back behind the door and began muttering, muttering, muttering, making spells. Our husband got well this time also, but after a while he sickened again the fatal third time, and away went she, once more to Kern's foot, and out went the fairy-deworth. doctor behind his door and began muttering, but as soon as he came in and told her it was no use, her husband would die, and sure enough, he did die, and ever after, when she spoke of him,

Starting point is 02:05:45 Mrs. Ormsby shook her head, saying she knew well where he was, and it wasn't in heaven, or hell, or purgatory either. She probably believed that a log of wood was left behind in his place, but so bewitched that it seemed the dead body of her husband. She is dead now herself, but many still living remember her. She was, I believe, for a time a servant or else a kind of pensioner of some relations of my own. Sometimes those who have carried off are allowed, after many years, seven usually, a final glimpse of their friends. Many years ago, a woman vanished suddenly from a Sligo garden where she was walking with her husband. when her son who was then a baby had grown up he received word in somewhere or other not handed down that his mother was glamoured as they say by the fairies and imprisoned for the time in a house in glasgow and longed to see him

Starting point is 02:06:45 now glasgow in those days of sailing ships seemed to the peasant mind almost over the edge of the known world yet he being a dutiful son started off for a time he walked the streets of glasgow and at last down in a cellar he saw his mother working She was happy, she said, and had the best of good eating, and would he not eat? And therewith laid all kinds of food on the table for him. But he, knowing well that she was trying to cast on him the glamour of a spell by giving him fairy food, that she might keep him with her, he refused and came home to his people in Sligo. Some five miles southward of Sligo is a gloomy, tree-bordered pond, a great gathering place of waterfowl, gold because of its form, Heart Lake. He's haunted by stranger things than heron, snipe or wild duck.

Starting point is 02:07:42 Out of this lake, as from the square white stone on Ben Bulbin, issues an unearthly troop. Once men began to drain it, and suddenly one of them raised a cry that he saw his house in flames. They turned round, and every man there saw his own cottage burning. They hurried home to find it was but fairy glamour or spell, and to this hour on that border of the lake is shown a half-dug trench, the signet of their impiety. A little way from this lake I heard a beautiful and mournful history of fairy kidnapping. I heard it from a little old woman in a white cap

Starting point is 02:08:21 who sings to herself in Gaelic and moves from one foot to the other as though she remembered the dancing of her youth. The young man, going at nightfall to the house of his just-married bride, met in the way a jolly company, and with them his bride. They were fairies, and had stolen her as a wife for the chief of their band. To him they seemed only a company of merry mortals. His bride, when she saw her old love, bad him welcome, but was most fearful lest he should eat of the fairy food

Starting point is 02:08:56 and so be glamoured out of the earth into that bloodless, dim nation wherefore she set him down to play cards with the three of the cavalcade. And he played on, realizing nothing until he saw the chief of the band carrying his bride away in his arms. Immediately he started up

Starting point is 02:09:14 and knew that they were fairies, for slowly all that jolly company melted into shadow and night. He hurried to the house of his beloved as he drew near. came to him the cry of the key nurse. She had died some time before. Some nopless Gaelic poet had made this into a forgotten ballad, some old verses of which my white-capped friend remembered and sang for me. Sometimes one hears of stolen people

Starting point is 02:09:45 acting as good genii to the living, as in this tale heard also close by the haunted pond of John Curwen of Castle Hackett. The Curwen's are a family much rumoured of in peasant stories and believed to be descendants of a man and a spirit. They have ever been fair immis for beauty and I have read that the mother of the present Lord Clon Currie was one of their tribe. John Curran was a great horse racing man and once landed in Liverpool with a fine horse going racing somewhere in Middle England. That evening as he walked by the docks a slip of a boy came up and asked where he was stabling his horse. In such a such a place he answered,

Starting point is 02:10:28 Don't put him there, said the boy, that stable will be burnt tonight. He took his horse elsewhere and sure enough, the stable was burnt down. Next day the boy came and asked as a reward to ride as his jockey in the coming race, and then he disappeared. At the last moment the boy ran forward and mounted

Starting point is 02:10:50 saying, if I strike him with a whip with my left hand I will lose, but if in my right hand bet all you are worth. For said Paddy Flynn, who told me the tale, the left arm is good for nothing. I might go on, as he said, making the sign of the cross with my left hand forever till Christmas, and a banshee or such like with no more mine than if I was that broom.

Starting point is 02:11:13 While the slip of our boy struck the horse with the right hand and John Kirwan cleared the field out. And when the race was over, he said, What can I do for you now? said Kirwan. Nothing but this, said the boy, My mother has a cottage on your land. The fairy stole me from the cradle. So be good to her, John Kirwan.

Starting point is 02:11:34 Wherever your horses go, I will watch that no ill follows them, but you will never see me more. With that, he made himself air and vanished. Sometimes animals are carried off, apparently drowned animals more than others. In Clare Morris, Galway, Paddy Flynn told me, lived a poor widow with one cow and its calf. The cow fell into the river and was washed away. There was a man thereabout who went to a red-haired woman for such as supposed to be wise in these things, and she told him to take the calf down to the edge of the river and hide himself and watch.

Starting point is 02:12:12 It is, as she told him, and his evening came on the calf began to low, and after a while the cow came along the edge of the river and commenced suppling it. Then, as I had been told, he caught the cow's tail, and away they went at a great pace across hedges and ditches, till they came to a royalty that was a name for the little circular ditches commonly called rats or forts that Ireland has covered with since pagan times. Therein he saw walking or sitting all the people who had died out of his village in his time. A woman was sitting on the east.

Starting point is 02:12:48 edge with a child on her knees, and she called out to him to mind what the red-headed woman had told him, and he remembered what she had said. Bleed the cow, she said, so he stuck the knife into the cow and drew blood. That broke the spell, and he was able to turn her homeward. Don't forget the spancel, said the woman with a child on her knee. Take the inside one. There were three spancels on a bush, and he took one, and the cow was driven safely home to widow. There's hardly a valley or a mountainside where folk cannot tell you of someone pillaged from amongst them. To a three miles from Heart Lake lives an old woman who was stolen away in her youth. After seven years she was brought home again for some reason or other, but she had no toes

Starting point is 02:13:37 left. She had danced them off. Many near the white stone door and bell-bulbin have been stolen and away. It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places, I could tell you of, when one walks on those grey rows of evening by the scented elder bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily discovers beyond this thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures, the goblins, hurrying from the white-square-door, to door to the north or from the heart lake to the south. End of kidnappers. Section 22 of the Celtic Twilight.

Starting point is 02:14:32 This is a Libra of Ox recording. All Libra of Ox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit Libravox.org, recording by John O'Reardon, the Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates, The Untiring Ones. It is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed emotions.

Starting point is 02:14:54 There is always something in our enemy that we like and something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement of moods which makes us old and puckers our brows and deepens the furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good a heart as the fairies do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until that day, their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one half of their fascination.

Starting point is 02:15:20 Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet. The doney gold peasants remember this when they bend over the spade or sit full of the heaviness of the fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell stories about it that may not be forgotten. Short while ago they say two fairies, little creatures, one like a young man, one like a young woman, came to a farmer's house, and spent the night sweeping the heart and setting all tidy. And the next night they came again. And while the farmer was away, they brought all the furniture upstairs into one room, and having arranged it around the walls for greater grandeur, it seems, they began to dance.

Starting point is 02:16:08 They danced on and on, and days and days went by, and all the countryside came to look at them. But still, their feet never tired. The farmer didn't dare to live at home all the time, and after three months he made up his mind to stand it no more and went and told them that the priest was coming. Well, the little creatures, when they heard this, went back to their own country, and there their joy shall last as long as the points of the rushes are brown, the people say,

Starting point is 02:16:40 and that is until God shall burn up the world with a kiss. But it is not merely fairies who know untiring days, for there have been men and women who, falling under their enchantment, have attained perhaps by the right of their God-given spirits, and even more than fairy abundance of life and feeling. It seems that when mortals have gone amid those poor happy leaves of the imperishable rose of beauty, blown hither and thither by the winds that awaken the stars and the dim kingdom has acknowledged their birthright, perhaps a little sadly, and given them, of its best. Such a mortal was born long ago at a village in the south of Ireland. She lay asleep in a

Starting point is 02:17:26 cradle and her mother sat by rocking her when a woman of the she or the fairies came in and said that the child had been chosen to be the bride of the prince of the dim kingdom and that it would never do for his wife to grow old and die while he was still the first ardour of his love and she would be gifted with fairy life. The mother was to take the glowing log out of the fire and bury it in the garden and her child would live as long as it remained unconsumed. The mother buried the log and the child grew up, became a beauty and marry the prince of the fairies who came to her at nightfall. After 700 years the prince died and another prince ruled in his stead and married the beautiful peasant girl in his turn.

Starting point is 02:18:17 after another seven hundred years, he died also, and another prince and another husband came in his dead, and so on until she had had seven husbands. At last one day the priest of the parish called upon her and told her that she was a scandal to the whole neighbourhood with her seven husbands and her long life. She was very sorry, she said, but she was not to blame, and then she told him about the log, and he went straight out, dug until he found it, and then burned it, and she died, and was buried like a Christian, and everybody was pleased. Such a mortal too was Clunabera, who went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her fairy life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake to hill, and setting up a cairn of

Starting point is 02:19:13 stones wherever her feet lighted until at last she found the deepest water in the world in little lock ea on top of the bird's mountain at Sligo. The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of the log and Clunabere's sleep in peace, for they have known untrammeled hate and unmixed love and have never weary themselves with yes and no, or entangle their feet with the sorry net of maybe and perhaps. The great winds came and took them up unto themselves. End of the untiring ones.

Starting point is 02:19:59 Section 23 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Recording by Robert Dixon. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates Earth, Fire and Water

Starting point is 02:20:22 Some French writer that I read when I was a boy said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are. I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to be even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children. If we knew the fire worshippers better, we might find that their centuries of pious observance

Starting point is 02:20:45 have been rewarded and that the fire has given them a little of its nature. And I am certain that the water, the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its image. Images form themselves in our minds perpetually as if they were reflected in some pool. We gave ourselves up in the old times to mythology and saw the gods everywhere. We talked to them face to face and the stories of that communion are so many that I think they outnumber all the like stories of all the rest of Europe. Even today our country people speak with the dead,

Starting point is 02:21:21 and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand death. And even our educated people pass without great difficulty into the condition of quiet that is a condition of vision. We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see. It may be their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did not the wise porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of water, and that even the generation of images in the mind is from water?

Starting point is 02:21:55 1902 End of Earth, Fire and Water. Recording by Robert Dixon. Section 24 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer. please visit Libravox.org.

Starting point is 02:22:25 Recording by John Van Stan, Savannah, Georgia. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. The Old Town I fell one night some 15 years ago into what seemed the power of a fairy. I had gone with a young man and his sister, friends and relations of my own, to pick stories out of an old countryman,

Starting point is 02:22:49 and we were coming home talking over what he had told, us. It was dark and our imaginations were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may have brought us, unknown to us, to the threshold between sleeping and waking, where sphinxes and chimeras sit open-eyed, and where there are always murmurings and whisperings. I cannot think that what we saw was in imagination of the waking mind. We had come under some trees that made the road very dark when the girl saw a bright light moving slowly across the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing and did not see anything until we had walked for about half an hour along the edge of the river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a ruined church covered with ivy

Starting point is 02:23:33 and the foundations of what was called the old town, which had been burned down it was said in Cromwell's Day. We had stood for some few minutes so far as I can recollect looking over the fields full of stones and brambles and elder bushes when I saw a small bright light on the horizon, as it seemed mounting up slowly towards the sky. Then we saw other faint lights for a minute or two, and at last a bright flame like the flame of a torch moving rapidly over the river. We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems all so unreal that I have never written of it until now, and hardly ever spoken of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasoning impulse, I have avoided giving it weight in the argument. Perhaps I have felt that my recollection of things

Starting point is 02:24:20 scene when the sense of reality was weakened must be untrustworthy. A few months ago, however, I talked it over with my two friends and compared their somewhat meager recollections with my own. That sense of unreality was all the more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as unaccountable as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. The girl was sitting, reading under a large, old-fashioned mirror, and I was reading and writing a couple of yards away when I heard a sound as if a shower of peas had been thrown against the mirror, and while I was looking at it I heard the sound again. And presently, while I was alone in the room, I heard a

Starting point is 02:25:04 sound as if something much bigger than a pea had struck the wainscotting beside my head. And after that for some days came other sights and sounds, not to me, but to the girl, her brother, and the servants. Now it was a bright light, now it was letters of fire that vanished before they could be read, now it was a heavy foot moving about in the seemingly empty house. One wonders whether creatures who live, the country people believe, wherever men and women have lived in earlier times, followed us from the ruins of the old town, or did they come from the banks of the river, by the trees with a first light had shone for a moment.

Starting point is 02:25:50 End of Section 24. The Old Town Recording by John Van Stan, Savannah, Georgia. Section 25 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. recording by John Van Stan, Savannah, Georgia.

Starting point is 02:26:29 The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. The man in his boots. There was a doubter in Donegal, and he would not hear of ghosts or Shiogh. And there was a house in Donegal that had been haunted as long as man could remember. And this is the story of how the house got the better of the man. The man came into the house and lighted a fire in the room, under the haunted one, and took off his boots and set them on the hearse and stretched out his feet and warmed himself. For a time he prospered in his unbelief, but a little while after the

Starting point is 02:27:06 night had fallen and everything had got very dark, one of his boots began to move. It got up off the floor and gave a kind of slow jump towards the door, and then the other boot did the same, and after that the first boot jumped again. and thereupon it struck the man that an invisible being had got into his boots and was now going away in them when the boots reached the door they went upstairs slowly and then the man heard them go tramp tramp around the haunted room over his head a few minutes passed and he could hear them again upon the stairs and after that in the passage outside and then one of them came in at the door and the other gave a jump past it and came in too they'd just jumped along towards him, and then one got up and hit him, and afterwards the other hit him, and then again the first hit him, and so on until they drove him out of the room and finally out of the house. In this way, he was kicked out by his own boots, and Donegal was avenged upon its doubter.

Starting point is 02:28:12 It is not recorded whether the invisible being was a ghost or one of the she, but the fantastic nature of the vengeance is like the work of the she who live in the The Heart of Fantasy. End of Section 25. The Man and His Boots. Recording by John Vance Stan, Savannah, Georgia. Section 26 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Librivax recording.

Starting point is 02:28:49 All Liprivax recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivax.org. recording by Simon Smoke The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates A coward One day I was at the house of my friend The strong farmer who lives beyond Ben Balpin and Cope's Mountain And met there a young lad who seemed to be disliked by the two daughters

Starting point is 02:29:26 I asked why they disliked him and was told he was a coward. This interested me, for some whom robust children of nature take to be cowards are the men and women with a nervous system too finely made for their life and work. I looked at the lad, but know that pink and and white face and strong body had nothing of undue sensibility. After a little, he told me his story. He had lived a wild and reckless life until one day, two years before, he was coming home late at night and suddenly felt himself sinking in, as it were, upon the ghostly world.

Starting point is 02:30:27 For a moment he saw the face of a dead brother rise up before him, and then he turned and ran. He did not stop until he came to a cottage nearly a mile down the road. He flung himself against the door with so much of violence that he broke the thick wooden bolt and fell upon the floor. From that day he gave up his white life, but was a hopeless coward. Nothing could ever bring him to look either by day or night upon the spot where he had seen the face. And he often went two miles round to avoid it.

Starting point is 02:31:17 Nor could, he said, the prettiest girl in the country persuade him to see him to see. her home after a party if he were alone. He feared everything, for he had looked at the face no man can see unchanged, the imponderable face of a spirit. End of a coward. Recording by Simon Smoke. Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org.

Starting point is 02:32:16 Recording by Kathy Wright The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates The Three O' Burns and the Evil Fairies In the dim kingdom, there is a great abundance of all excellent things. There is more love there than upon the earth. There is more dancing there than upon the earth. And there is more treasure there than upon the earth. In the beginning, the earth was perhaps made to fulfill the desire of man,

Starting point is 02:32:51 but now it has got old and fallen into decay. What wonder if we try and pilfer the treasures of that other kingdom? A friend was once at the village near Sleve Lig. One day he was straying about a wrath called Cashel No. A man with a haggard face and unkempt hair and clothes falling in pieces came into the wrath and began digging. My friend turned to a peasant who was working with. near and asked who the man was. That is the third O'Byrne was the answer. A few days after he learned this story. A great quantity of treasure had been buried in the wrath in pagan times, and a number of

Starting point is 02:33:47 evil fairies set to guard it. But someday it was to be found and belonged to the family of the O'Burns. Before that, three O'Burns must find it and die. Two had already done so. The first had dug and dug until at last he got a glimpse of the stone coffin that contained it. But immediately, a thing like a huge hairy dog came down the mountain and tore him to pieces. The next morning, the treasure had again vanished deep into the earth. The second O'Burn came and dug and dug until he found the coffer, and lifted the lid and saw the gold shining within. He saw some terrible sight the next moment, and went raving mad, and soon died. The treasure again sank out of sight.

Starting point is 02:34:45 The third, O'Burn, is now digging. He believes that he will die in some terrible way the moment he finds the treasure. but that the spell will be broken and the O'Burn family made rich forever, as they were of old. A peasant of the neighborhood once saw the treasure. He found the shinbone of a hair lying on the grass. He took it up. There was a hole in it. He looked through the hole and saw the gold heaped upon the ground. He hurried home to bring a spade. But when he got it, he got it, he was a hole. He looked through the hole and saw the gold heaped upon the ground. He hurried home to bring a spade, but when he got to the wrath again, he could not find the spot where he had seen it.

Starting point is 02:35:31 End of the three Oberns and the evil fairies. Section 28 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit W. www.librovox.org. Recording by James McAndrew, San Francisco, California. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates.

Starting point is 02:36:08 Drumcliffe and Rosses. Drumcliff and Rasses were, are, and ever shall be, please heaven, places of unearthly resort. I have lived nearby them and in them, time after time, and have gathered thus many a crumb of fairy law. Drumcliffe is a wide green valley, lying at the foot of Ben Bolbin, the mountain in whose side the square white door

Starting point is 02:36:38 swings open at nightfall to loose the fairy riders on the world. The great St. Columba himself. The builder of many of the old ruins in the valley climb the mountains on one notable day to get near heaven with his prayers. Rasses is a little sea-dividing sandy plain, covered with short grass, like a green tablecloth, and lying in the foam, midway between the round,

Starting point is 02:37:10 Kern-headed Nocknaria and Ben-Borbin, famous for Hawks. But for Ben-Borbin and Nocknaria, many a poor sailor be cast away, as the Rhine goes. at the northern corner of rosses is a little promontory of sand and rocks and grass a mournful haunted place no ways peasant would fall asleep under its low cliff for he who sleeps here may wake silly the good people having carried off his soul there is no more ready short-cut to the dim kingdom than this plovery headland for covered and smothered now from sight by mounds of sand. A long cave goes thither, full of gold and silver, and the most beautiful parlors and drawing-room. Once before the sand covered it, a dog strayed in and was heard, yelping helplessly deep underground

Starting point is 02:38:14 in a fort far inland. These forts or wraths, made before modern history had begun, covered. all Rosses and all column kill. The one where the dog yelped has, like most others, an underground beehive chamber in the midst. Once when I was poking about there, an unusually intelligent and reading peasant who had come with me and waited outside, knelt down by the opening, and whispered in a timid voice, Are you all right, sir? I had been some little while underground, and he feared I had been carried off like the dog. No wonder he was afraid,

Starting point is 02:38:56 for the fort has long been circled by ill-boden rumours. It is on the ridge of a small hill, on whose northern slope lie a few stray cottages. One night a farmer's young son came from one of them and saw the fort, all flaming, and ran towards it. But the glamour fell on him, and he sprang onto a fence, cross-legged, and commenced beating it with a stick, for he imagined the fence was a horse, and that all night long he went on the most wonderful ride through the country. In the morning he was still beating his fence, and they carried him home, where he remained a simpleton for three years before he came to himself again.

Starting point is 02:39:47 A little later, a farmer tried to level. the fart. His cows and horses died, and our manner of trouble overtook him, and finally he himself was led home and left useless with his head on his knees by the fire to the day of his death. A few hundred yards south of the northern angle of Rasses is another angle also having its cave, though this one is not covered with sand. About twenty years ago a brig was wrecked nearby, 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 villages rushed

Starting point is 02:40:38 down to the cave to see the fiddlers, but the creatures had gone. To the wise peasant, the green hills and woods around 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-Baubin, famous for hawks, the white-square door swings open at sundown and those twilight wild unchristian riders rush forth upon the fields while southward the white lady who is doubtless mave herself wonders under the broad cloud nightcap of knocknaria how may she doubt these things even though the priest shakes his head at her did not a herd boy no long while saying see the white lady, she passed so close that the skirt of her dress touched him. He fell down

Starting point is 02:41:51 and was dead three days, but this is merely the small gossip of fairydom, their 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 Rasses. many a poor man from finn mccool to our own days has had some 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 cat. 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.

Starting point is 02:43:17 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.

Starting point is 02:44:07 I'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.

Starting point is 02:44:25 Have 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 burned, 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,

Starting point is 02:44:54 one of them cried out, Michael H. Can you tell me a story? Dival of 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?

Starting point is 02:45:35 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. Today 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. You may go in there and lie down on the bed.

Starting point is 02:46:02 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 Columkill Strand, a place of marsh and Maya, an ancient boat with St. Columba himself comes floating in from sea on a moonlit 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 by high brazel, where he who touches shall find no more labour or care, nor cynic laughter, but shall go walking about under shadiest bascage, and enjoy the conversation of Coochillin and his heroes,

Starting point is 02:47:10 a vision of high brazil forbodes national troubles. Drumcliff and Rasses are chokeful of ghosts. By bog, road, wrath, hillside, sea border they gather in all shapes, headless women, men in armor, shadow hairs fire-toned 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 denadak who died in eight seventy one a pious soldier of the race of conlis under hazel crosses at drumclay 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 Khan, says local wisdom, still keeping watch with his ancient piety over the graveyard. Again, the custom is still common here, belts, of sprinkling the doorstep with the blood

Starting point is 02:48:34 of a chicken on the death of a very young child. Thus, as belief is, drawing into the blood the evil spirits from the two-week 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 Rasses 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 Rasses or on the slope of Ben-Borban, or even on the plane round Nocknaria.

Starting point is 02:49:20 There is a history concerning the house and the bush. A man once lived there who found on the key of Sligo a package containing £300 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 see his owners, committed suicide in mid-ocean. Shortly afterwards my man died. soul could not rest. At any rate, strange sounds were heard round his house, though that had

Starting point is 02:50:01 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 fork 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 under way. The troubled ghost, say the neighbours, of the note-finder, was at last dislodged. My forebears and relations have lived near Rosses and

Starting point is 02:50:53 drumcliff these many years. A few miles northward, I am wholly a stranger and can find nothing. When I ask for stories of the fairies, my answer is some such as was given me by a woman who lives near a white stone fatt, one of the few stone ones in Ireland, under the seaward angle of Ben Bowen. 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 friends their sweet harp-string i give no more than his irish name for fear of gauges has the science of unpacking the stubbornest heart but then he supplies the peteen makers with grain from his own fields. Besides, he is descended from a noted Gaelic magician who raised the duel 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

Starting point is 02:52:18 the parentage of magicians be true. End of Section 28. Recording by James McAndrew, San Francisco, California. Section 29 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a LibriVarx recording. All LibriVarx recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVarx.org. Recording by Simon Smoke.

Starting point is 02:52:58 The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yeats. The thick skull of the fortunate. Once, a number of Icelandic peasantry found a very thick skull in the cemetery where the poet Egil was buried. Its gray 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 its hard blows with a hammer. It grew wide where the blows fell, but did not break. And they were convinced that it was in truth the skull of the poets,

Starting point is 02:53:43 and worthy of every honor. In Ireland, we have much kinship with the Icelanders, or Jains, 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 Ejo. We may have acquired the custom from those ancient Danish pirates, whose descendants the people of Rassies tell me still remember every field and Helicon 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 roughly, where the men are never known to shave or trim their wild red beards,

Starting point is 02:54:41 and where there is a fight either on foot. I have seen them at a border is full foul of each other, and after much loud gallic strike each other with oars. The first board had gone on ground And by dint of hitting out with a long oars Kept the second bird from passing Only to give the victory to the third One day the Sligo people say

Starting point is 02:55:10 A man from Rathley was tried in Sligo for breaking a skull in a row And made the defense not unknown in Ireland That some heads are so thin You cannot be responsible for them Having turned with a look of passionate content towards the solicitor was prosecuting and cried, That little fellow, 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 lordships for a fortnight.

Starting point is 02:55:51 I wrote all these years ago out of what were even then old memories. I was in roughly the other day and found it much like other desolate places. I may have been thinking of Mavgra much wilder place. For the memories of one's childhood are brittle things to... lean upon. End of the thick skull of the fortunate. Section 30 of the Celtic triwight.

Starting point is 02:56:42 This is the Whipal Foxe coin. Or Whiphyl Coins are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please please visit the Whiprowfox.org. Recording by Glen O'Brien, www. glenobindonet. The Celtic Triwight, but William Bartrow Yeats

Starting point is 02:57:02 The origin of a sailor I see Captain When he stands upon the bridge Or look south on his deck-house Thinks much about God and about the world Away in the ferry yonder Among the corn and the poppies Men may well forget all things

Starting point is 02:57:21 Instead the one for the sun upon the face And the can show under the hedge But he who chase Through storm and darkness must least think and think. One July, a couple of years ago, I took my trouble with the Captain Moran on board of SS Margaret that had put into a Western rhythm for unknown not where.

Starting point is 02:57:43 I found him a man of bedding notions all throughout with his personality as is the way with Silas. He taught in his clear seeing manner of God in the world and I threw all his words both the odd energy of scoring. was going. Sir, said he, did you ever in the tale of the sea, Caton's prayer?

Starting point is 02:58:06 No, said I, what is it? It is, he replied, Oh Lord, give me a stiff upper lip. And what's the mean? It means, he said, that when they come to be some night and wake me up and say, Cut a wak going down, that I won't make it full of myself. Why, sir, we were in Mid-Atlantic and I stand it on the bridge when the third bed comes to me looking mortal bad. Says E, Captain, all's up with us. Says I, deem to know when you chose the service go down every year?

Starting point is 02:58:48 Yes, sir, said C, and says I, aren't you paid to go down? Yes, sir, said C, and says I, aren't you paid to go down? Yes, sir, see. and says I, then go down like a man and be damned to you. End of Section 30. Section 31 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain.

Starting point is 02:59:20 For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Mary Ann Boddorf. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. 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 said, there's a bush up at my own place, and the people to be saying that there are two souls doing their penance under it. When the wind blows one way, the one has

Starting point is 03:00:01 shelter, and when it blows from the north, the other has shelter. It is twisted over with the way they be rooting under it for shelter. I don't believe it, but there as 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, 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

Starting point is 03:00:48 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, or the white, white walls lose their luster, 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. End of Section 31, Concerning the nearness together of Heaven, Earth, and Purgatory. Section 32 of the Celtic twilight. This is a Libravox recording.

Starting point is 03:01:38 All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Mary Ann Boddorff, the Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. 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.

Starting point is 03:02:20 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 paris. and on this parapet set 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 thirst lost peace and form and became shapeless in common. I have seen into other people's hells also, and saw in one an infernal Peter, who had a black

Starting point is 03:03:10 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 moonlight reflection of the heavens which shone up from the depths of the pit. End of Section 32, The Eaters of Precious Stones Section 33 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libra Fox recording. All Libra Fox recordings are in the

Starting point is 03:04:07 public domain. For more information, for more information, information or to volunteer please go to Librevox.org The Celtic twilight by William Butler Yeats, 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 butchers or the grocers, 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 the things come down from the ancient days. We would not have been greatly surprised how we met the shining feet of an angel among the white mushrooms upon the mountains,

Starting point is 03:04:44 for we knew in those days immense despair, unfathomed love, every eternal mood. But now the draw-nette is about her feet. A few miles eastward of Lockegill, 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.

Starting point is 03:05:31 A little girl threw herself into them with the cry, ah you are the virgin out of the picture no said another coming near also she is a sky fairy for she has the color of the sky no said thirn she is the fairy 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 colors 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 that 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 he 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 the spot 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 the devil jumped

Starting point is 03:06:54 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 a 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 pabbles 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 her the mountain, but wearing now a plain black dress, and met the child who had first called her the virgin out of 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, no you are not, was the passionate reply.

Starting point is 03:07:55 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 ashore, who cast those tassels at the feet of its child. It is indeed fitting that men 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 all time telling the rosary of the stars. End of Our Lady of the Hills. recording, all Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer,

Starting point is 03:08:45 please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Marianne Badorf. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. The Golden Age. A while ago I was in the train and getting near Sleggo. 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 peasant belief about two

Starting point is 03:09:37 two fairy 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 corner. 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

Starting point is 03:10:28 spadefuls of earth. The fairies and the more innocent, and the fairies, and the more innocent, and the most of the 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-preck 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,

Starting point is 03:11:08 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-roof 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. End of Section 34. The Golden Age. Section 35 of The Celtic Twilight.

Starting point is 03:11:46 This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Mary Ann Boddorff. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. A remonstrance was Scotsman for having soured the disposition of their ghosts and fairies.

Starting point is 03:12:11 Not only in Ireland as fairy beliefs 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,

Starting point is 03:12:36 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 fairy, 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 owl and a needle into her. They came to a river, and she came to a river, and she was.

Starting point is 03:13:06 grew very restless, fearing to cross the water. Again he drove the owl and the needle into her. She cried out, "'Pearse me with the owl, 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 fairies as one as treated in an old Highland poem. A fairy loved a little child who used to cut turf at the side of a fairy hill. Every day the fairy put out his hand from the hill with an enchanted knife. The child used to cut the turf with a knife.

Starting point is 03:13:49 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 cut. come out of the earth, and the little child take the knife from it. 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 fairy was never again seen. He drew his bleeding arm into the earth, thinking, as it is recorded, he had lost his hand

Starting point is 03:14:26 through the treachery of the child. In Scotland you are too theological, too gloom. You are too theological, me. You have even made the devil religious. Where do you live, good wife, 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 Carrick-Fergus. But then the loyal minority is half-Skotish. You have discovered the fairies to be pagan and wicked.

Starting point is 03:15:04 You would like to have them all with up before the magistrate. In Ireland, warlike mortals have gone against them, and helped them in their battles, and they in turn have taught men great skill with herbs, and permitted some to hear their tunes. Caroline slipped upon a fairy wrath. Ever after their tunes ran in his head, and made him the great musician he was.

Starting point is 03:15:27 In Scotland you have denounced the... 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 vapor at the last day. But more in sadness than in anger have they said it. The Catholic religion likes to keep on good terms with its neighbors. 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 fairy terrors have about them something of make-believe. When a peasant strays into an

Starting point is 03:16:11 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 up 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 McCrimmon of the Hibertes 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.

Starting point is 03:16:59 Then there is the tale of the man who dived into a lake where treasure was thought to be. He saw a great coffer with a iron. Close to the coffer lay a monster, who warned him to return once 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.

Starting point is 03:17:27 These water-goblins and water monsters are common in Scottish folklore. We have them too, but take them much less dreadfully. Our tales turn all their doings into favor into prettiness, or hopelessly humorize the creatures. A hole in the Sligo River is haunted by one of these monsters. He is ardently believed in by many, but that does not prevent the peasantry playing with the subject, and surrounding it with conscious fantasies. When I was a smeldered, small boy, I fished one day for congers in the monster hole, returning home, a gradial in my shoulder, his head flapping down in the front, his tail sweeping the ground behind, I met a fisherman of my acquaintance. I began a tale of an immense conger, three times larger than the one I carried,

Starting point is 03:18:15 that had broken my line and escaped. That was him, said the fisherman. Did you ever hear how he made my brother immigrate? My brother was a diver, you know, and grubes. rubbed stones for the harbor board. One day the beast came up to him and says, What are you after? Stones, sir, says he. Don't you think you had better be going? Yes, sir, says he. And that's why my brother immigrated. The people said it was because he got poor, but that's not true. You, you will make no terms with the spirits of fire and earth and air and water. You have made the darkness your enemy.

Starting point is 03:18:57 We, we exchange civilities with the world beyond. End of Section 35. A remonstrance was Scotsman for having soured the disposition of their ghosts and fairies. Section 36 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. by Mary Ann Boddorf, The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates.

Starting point is 03:19:41 War When there was a rumor of war with France a while ago, I met a poor Sligo woman, a soldier's widow that I know, and I read her a sentence out of a letter I had just had from London. The people here are mad for war, but France seems inclined to take things peacefully, or some like sentence. Her mind ran a good deal on war, which she imagined partly from what she had heard from soldiers, and partly from tradition of the rebellion of 98.

Starting point is 03:20:14 But the word London doubled her interest, for she knew there were a great many people in London, and she herself had once lived in a congested district. There are too many over one another in London. They get tired of the world. It is killed they want to be. It will be no matter. but sure the French would want nothing but peace and quietness. The people here don't mind the war coming.

Starting point is 03:20:40 They could not be worse than they are. They may as well die soldierly before God. Sure they will get quarters in heaven. Then she began to say that it would be a hard thing to see children tossed about on bayonets, and I knew her mind was running on traditions of the Great Rebellion. She said presently, I never knew a man that was in a battle that liked to speak of it after. They'd sooner be throwing hay down from a hay wreck.

Starting point is 03:21:07 She told me how she and her neighbors used to be sitting over the fire when she was a girl, talking of the war that was coming. And now she was afraid it was coming again, for she had dreamed that all the bay was stranded and covered with seaweed. I asked her if it was in the Finian times that she had been so much afraid of war coming, but she cried out. Never had I such fun and pleasure as in the Finian times. I was in a house where some of the officers used to be staying, and in the daytime I would be walking

Starting point is 03:21:39 after the soldier's band, and at night I'd be going down to the end of the guard and watching a soldier, with his red coat on him, drilling the Finians in the field behind the house. One night the boys tied the liver of an old horse that had been dead three weeks to the knocker, and I found it when I opened the door in the morning. And presently our talk of war shifted, as it had a way of doing. to the Battle of the Black Pig, which seemed to her a battle between Ireland and England, but to me, an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the ancestral darkness again, and from this to sayings about war and vengeance.

Starting point is 03:22:18 Do you know, she said, what the curse of the forefathers is? They put the man-child on the spear, and somebody said to them, you will be cursed in the fourth generation after you, and that is why disease or anything always comes in the fourth generation. End of Section 36. War Section 37 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libra Vox recording.

Starting point is 03:22:52 All Libra Vax recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibraVox.org. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates, the Queen and the Fool. I have heard one heron, a witch-dark. who is on the border of Clare and Galway, say that in every household of Fairy there is a queen and a fool, and that if you are touched by either, you never recover. He said from the touch of any other in Fairy. He said of the fool that he was maybe the wisest of all, and spoke of him as dressed like one

Starting point is 03:23:27 of the mummers that used to be going about the country. Since then a friend has gathered me some few stories of him, and I have heard that he is known too in the highlands I remember seeing a long lank ragged man sitting by the hearth in the cottage of an old miller not far from where I am now writing and being told that he was a fool and I find from the stories that my friend has gathered that he is believed to go to fairy in his sleep but whether he becomes an or Madonna Perina a fool of the fourth and is attached to a household there I cannot tell It was an old woman that I know well, and who has been in fairy yourself that spoke of him.

Starting point is 03:24:09 She said, there are fools amongst them, and the fools we see, like that Oma don of Bally Lee, go away with them at night, and so do the woman fools that we call Owenshooks, tapes. A woman who is related to the witch-doctor on the border of Clare, and who can cure people and cattle by spells, said, There are some cures I can't do. I can't help anyone that has got a stroke from. from the queen or the fool of the fourth. I knew of a woman that saw the queen one time, and she looked like any Christian.

Starting point is 03:24:41 I never heard of any that saw the fool, but one woman that was walking near Gort, and she called out, There's the fool of the fourth coming after me. So her friends that were with her called out, though they could see nothing, and I suppose he went away at that, for she got no harm.

Starting point is 03:24:57 He was like a big, strong man, she said, and half naked. And that is all she said about him. I have never seen myself, but I am a cousin of Huron, and my uncle was away twenty-one years. The wife of the old Miller said, It is said they are mostly good neighbors, but the stroke of the fool is what there is no cure for. Anyone that gets that is gone. The old madonna breena, we call him. And an old woman, who lives in the bog of Kilthartan, and his very poor said,

Starting point is 03:25:26 It is true enough, there is no cure for the stroke of the old Madonna-Briena. There was an old man I knew long ago. He had a tape and he could tell you what diseases you had with measuring you. And he knew many things. And he said to me one time, What month of the year is the worst? And I said, the month of May, of course. It is not, he said, but the month of June,

Starting point is 03:25:49 for that's the month that the old madaun gives his stroke. They say he looks like any other man, but he is leham and not smart. I knew a boy one time got a great fright, for a lamb looks over the wall at him with a beard on it, and he knew it was the Omadon, for it was the month of June. And they brought him to that man I was telling about that had the tape, and when he saw him he said, send for the priest and get a mass set over him. And so they did, and what would you say but he's living yet and has a family.

Starting point is 03:26:19 A certain Regan said, They, the other sort of people, might be passing you close here, and they might touch you, but any that gets the touch of the Omadon, the Perina is done for. It's true enough that it's in the month of June he's most likely to give to touch. I knew wounded gutted, and he told me about it himself. He was a boy I knew well, and he told me that one night a gentleman came to him. That had been his landlord, and that was dead, and he told him to come along with him, for he wanted him to fight another man.

Starting point is 03:26:50 And when he went, he found two great troops of them, and the other troop had the living man with them too, and he was put to fight him, and they had a great fight, and he got the of the other man, and then the troop on his side gave a great shout, and he was left home again. But about three years after that, he was cutting bushes in the wood, and he saw the old m'adon coming at him. He had a big vessel in his arms, and it was shining, so that the boy could see nothing else. But he put it behind his back then, and came running, and the boy said he looked wild and wide, like the side of the hill. And the boy ran, and he threw the vessel after him, and it broke with a great noise. And whatever came out of the house,

Starting point is 03:27:30 of it his head was gone there and then he lived for a while after and used to tell us many things but his wits were gone he thought they mightn't have liked him to beat the other man and he used to be afraid something would come on him and an old woman in a Galway workhouse who had some little knowledge of Queen Maeve said the other day the old Madonna Braina changes his shape every two days sometimes he comes like a youngster and then he'll come like the worst of beasts trying to give the touch she used to be. I heard it said of late he was shot, but I think myself it would be hard to shoot him. I knew a man who was trying to bring before his mind's eye an image of Angus,

Starting point is 03:28:11 the old Iris God of love and poetry and ecstasy, who changed four of his kisses into birds, and suddenly the image of a man with a cat and bells rushed before his mind's eye, and grew vivid and spoke, and called itself Angus Messenger. And I knew another man, a truly great seer, who saw a white fool in a visionary garden, where there was a tree with peacock's feathers instead of leaves, and flowers that opened to show little human faces when the white fool had touched them with his coxcomb. And he saw at another time a white fool sitting by a pool, and smiling and watching the images of many fair women floating up from the pool.

Starting point is 03:28:52 What else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power and beauty, and foolishness may be a kind of death? I cannot think it wonderful that many should see a fool with a shining vessel, or some enchantment or wisdom or dream, too powerful from mortal brains in every household of them. It is natural too that there should be a queen to every household of them, and that one should hear little of their kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom, which ancient peoples and all wild peoples even now think the only wisdom. The self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces by foolishness, and

Starting point is 03:29:31 is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and therefore fools may get, and women do get of a certainty, glimpses of much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey. The man who saw the white fool said of a certain woman, not a peasant woman. If I had her power of vision, I would know all the wisdom of the gods, and her visions do not interest her. And I know of another woman, also not a peasant woman. woman who would pass in sleep into countries of unearthly beauty and who never cared for anything

Starting point is 03:30:02 but to be busy about her house and her children. And presently an herb doctor cured her as he called it, wisdom and beauty and power may sometimes, as I think, come to those who die every day they live, though their dying may not be like the dying Shakespeare spoke of. There is a war between the living and the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it. they will have it that when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of the earth decay they ripen in fairy and that our dreams lose their wisdom when the sap rises in the trees and that our dreams can make the trees wither and that one hears the bleating of lambs of the lambs in fairy in november and that blind eyes can see more than other eyes because the soul always believes in these or in like things the cell and the wilderness shall never be long empty, or lovers come into the world who will not understand the verse. Hurt thou not sweet words among that heaven resounding minstrelsy,

Starting point is 03:31:07 Hurt thou not that those who die awake in a world of ecstasy, how love when limbs are interwoven, and sleep when the night of life is cloven, and thought to the world's dim boundaries clinging, and music when one's beloved is singing, is death. End of the Queen and the Full. Section 38 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org.

Starting point is 03:31:48 The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates, The Friends of the People of Ferry. Those that see the people of Ferry most often, and so have most of their wisdom, are often very poor, but often too they are thought to have a strength beyond that of man, as though one came when one had passed the threshold of trance, to those sweet waters where Muldoon saw the disheveled eagles bathe and become young again. There was an old Martin Rowland who lived near a bog, a little out of Gort, who saw them often in his young days, and always toward the end of his life, though,

Starting point is 03:32:27 I would hardly call him their friend. He told me a few months before his death that they would not let him sleep at night, with crying things at him in Irish, and with playing their pipes. He had asked a friend if he was what he should do, and the friend had told him to buy a flute and play on it when they began to shout or to play their pipes, and maybe they would give up annoying him. And he did, and they always went out into the field when he began to play. He showed me the pipe and blew through it, and made a noise.

Starting point is 03:32:57 but he did not know how to play. And then he showed me where he had pulled his chimney down, because one of them used to sit up on it and play on the pipes. A friend of his and mine went to see him a little time ago, for she heard that three of them had told him he was going to die. He said they had gone away after warning him, and that the children, children they had taken, I suppose, who used to come with them and play about the house with them,

Starting point is 03:33:25 had gone to some other place, because they found the house too cold for them, maybe, and he died a week after he had said these things. His neighbors were not certain that he really saw anything in his old age, but they were all certain that he saw things when he was a young man. His brother said, Old he is, and it's all in his brain the things he sees. But if he was a young man, we might believe in him.

Starting point is 03:33:50 But he was improvident and never got on with his brothers. A neighbor said, The poor man. they say they are mostly in his head now. But sure, he was a fine fresh man twenty years ago the night he saw them linked in two lots, like young slips of girls walking together. It was the night they took away Fallon's little girl, and she told how Fallon's little girl had met a woman with red hair that was bright as silver, who took her away. Another neighbor, who was herself clouded over the ear by one of them for going into a fort where they were, said, I believe

Starting point is 03:34:25 it's mostly in his head they are. When he stood against the door last night, I said, The wind does be always in my ears, and the sound of it never stops, to make him think that it was the same with him. But he says, I hear them singing and making music all the time, and one of them is after bringing out a little flute, and it's on it he is playing to them. And this I know, that when he pulled down the chimney where he said the Piper used to be sitting and playing, he lifted up stones, and he, an old man, that I could hardly have lifted when I was young and strong. A friend sent me from Ulster an account of one who was on terms of true friendship with the people of fairy. It has been taken down accurately, for my friend, who heard the old woman's

Starting point is 03:35:08 story some time before I heard of it, got her to tell it over again, and she wrote it out at once. She began by telling the old woman that she did not like being in the house alone because of the ghost in fairies. The old woman said, there's nothing to be frightened about in fairies, miss. Many's the time I talked to a woman myself that was a fairy, or something of the sort, and no less and more than mortal anyhow. She used to come about your father's house, your mother's grandfather, that is, in my young days. But you'll have heard all about her. My friend said that she had heard about her, but a long time before, and she wanted to hear about her again, and the old woman went on. Well, dear, the very first time I ever heard word of her coming

Starting point is 03:35:55 about was when your uncle, that's your mother's uncle, Joseph, married, and built in a house for his wife, for he brought her first to his father's, up at the house by the loch. My father and us were living nigh to hand to where the new house was to be built, to overlook the men at their work. My father was a weaver, and brought his looms and all there into a cottage that was close to. us by. The foundations were marked out and the building stones lying about, but the masons had not come yet, and one day I was standing with my mother for at the house when we see a smart wee woman coming up the field over the burn to us. I was a bit of a girl at the time, playing about and sporting myself, but I mind her as well as if I saw her there now. My friend asked

Starting point is 03:36:42 how the woman was dressed. The old woman said, it was a gray cloak she had on, with a green cashmere's skirt and a black silk handkercher, tie it around their head, like the country woman did used to wear in them times. My friend asked, how wee was she? And the old woman said, Well, now, she weren't we at all, when I think on it, for all we called her the wee woman. She was bigger than many a one, and yet not as tall as you would say. She was like a woman about thirty, brown-haired and round in the face. She was like Miss Betty, your grandmother's sister, and Betty was like none of the rest, not like your grandmother nor any of them. She was round and fresh in the face, and she never was married, and she never would take any man.

Starting point is 03:37:28 We used to say that the wee woman, her being like Betty, was maybe one of their own people that had been took off before she grew to her full life, and for that she was always following us in warning and foretelling. This time she walked straight over to where my mother was standing. Go to the lock this minute, bordering her like that. Go over to the lock and tell Joseph that he must change the foundation of this house to where I'll show you for the thorn bush. That's where it is to be built if he is to have any luck and prosperity.

Starting point is 03:37:57 So do what I'm telling you this minute. The house was being built on the path, I suppose, the path used by the people of the ferry in their journeys, and my mother brings Joseph down and shows him, and he changes the foundation the way he was bid. But didn't bring it exactly to where it was pointed, and the end of that was when he come to the house, his own wife lost her life in an accident, that come to a horse that hadn't room to turn right with a harrow between the bush and the wall. The wee woman was queer and angry when next she come, and she says to us, he didn't do as I bid him, but he'll see what he'll see.

Starting point is 03:38:34 My friend asked, where the woman came from this time, and if she was dressed as before, and the woman said, always the same way, up the field beyond the burn, it was a thin sort of shawl she had about her in summer, and a cloak about her in winter, and many and many a time she came, and always it was good advice she was given to my mother, and warning her what not to do if she would have good luck. There was none of the other children of us ever seen her unless me, but I used to be glad when I see her coming up the burn, and would run out and catch her by the hand in the cloak, and called to my mother, here's the wee woman! No man-body has ever seen her. My father used to be wanting to, and was angry with my mother and me, thinking we were telling

Starting point is 03:39:17 lies and talking foolish-like. So one day, when she had come and was sitting by the fireside talking to my mother, I slips out into the field where he was digging. Come up, says I. If you want to see her, she's sitting at the fireside now talking to mother. So when he comes with me and looks round, angry like, and sees nothing, and he up with a broom that was near at hand and hits me a crig with it. Take that now, says he.

Starting point is 03:39:42 for making a fool of me, and away with him as fast as he could, and queer and angry with me. The wee woman says to me, then, You got that now for bringing people to see me. No man-body ever seen me, and none ever will. There was one day, though, she gave him a queer fright anyway, and whether he had seen her or not. He was in among the cattle when it happened, and he comes up to the house all trembling like,

Starting point is 03:40:06 Don't let me hear you say another word of your wee woman. I have got enough of her this time. another time all the same he was up to gorton to sell horses and before he went off in steps the wee woman and says she to my mother holding out a sort of weed your man has gone up by gorton and there's a bad fright waiting him coming home but take this and sew it in his coat and he'll get no harm by it my mother takes the herb but thinks to herself sure there's nothing in it and throws it on the floor and lo and behold and sure enough coming home from gordon my father got his best of her own to herself and he has nothing in it and throws it on the floor and lo and behold and sure enough coming home from gordon my father got his best a fright as ever he got his life. What it was, I don't write mine, but anyway, he was badly damaged by it. My mother was in a queer way, frightened of the wee woman, after what she'd done, and sure enough the next time she was angry, you didn't believe me, she said, and you threw the herb down I gave you in the fire, and I went far enough for it. There was another

Starting point is 03:41:02 time, she came and told him how William Hearn was dead in America. Go over, she said, to the lock, and say that William is dead, and he died happy. and this was the last bible chapter ever he read and with that she gave the verse and chapter go she says and tell them to read them at the next class meeting and that i held his head while he died and sure enough word came after how william had died on the day she named and by doing as she bid about the chapter and him they never had such a prayer-meeting as that one day she and me and my mother was standing talking and she was warning her about something when she says all of a sudden Here comes Miss Letty in all her finery, and it's time for me to be off. And with that she gave a swirl round on her feet, rises up in the air, and round and round she goes, and up and up, as if it was a winding stair she went up, only far swifter. She went up and up till she was no bigger than a bird against the clouds,

Starting point is 03:42:00 singing and singing the whole time, the loveliest music I ever heard in my life, from that day to this. It wasn't a hymn she was singing, but poetry, lovely poetry, of me and my mother, stands gaping up and all a tremble. What is she at all, Mother, says I? Is it an angel she is? Or a fairy woman, or what? With that, up come Miss Letty,

Starting point is 03:42:22 that was your grandmother, dear. But Miss Lettie she was then, and no word of her being anything else. And she wondered to see us gaping up that way, till me and my mother told her of it. She went on gay dress then, and was lovely looking. She was up the lane

Starting point is 03:42:37 where none of us could see her coming forward when the wee woman rose up in that queer, way, saying, here comes Miss Letty in a hullerfinery. Who knows to what far country she went, or to see whom dying? It was never after dark when she came, but daylight always, as far as I mind, but wants, and that was on Hallows Eve night. My mother was by the fire, making ready to supper. She had a duck down, and some apples. In slips the wee woman. I'm come to pass my Hallow Eve with you, says she. That's right, says my mother, and thinks to herself, I can, can give her her supper nicely. Down she sits by the fire a while. Now, I'll tell you where you'll

Starting point is 03:43:17 bring my supper, says she. In the room beyond there, beside the loom, set a chair in and a plate. When you're spending the night, mayn't you as well sit by the table and eat with the rest of us? Do what your bid, and set whatever you give me in the room beyond. I'll eat there and nowhere else. So my mother sets her a plate of duck and some apples, whatever was going, in where she bid, and we got to our supper and she to hers. And when we rose, I went in, and there, lo and behold ye, was her supper plate, a bit eight of each portion and she clean gone. End of the Friends of the People of Ferry. Recording by Max Wainer. Section 39 of The Celtic Twilight. This is a Libervox recording. All Libervox recordings are in the public domain.

Starting point is 03:44:10 For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libervox.org. Recording by Mirian The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. Dreams that have no moral. The friend who heard about Mave and the Hazelstick went to the workhouse another day. She found the old people cold and wretched, like flies in winter, she said, but they forgot the cold when they began to talk. A man had just left them who had played cards in a wrath with the people of fairy,

Starting point is 03:44:41 who had played very fair, and one old man had seen an enchanted black pig one night, and there were two old people, my friend had heard quarrelling, as to whether Raftery or Kalanan were the better poet. One had said Raftery. He was a big man, and his songs have gone through the whole world. I remember him well. He had a voice like the wind. But the other was certain that you would stand in the snow to listen to Kalanan. Presently an old man began to tell my friend a story, and all listened delightedly, bursting into laughter now and then. The story which I'm going to tell just as it was told was one of those old rambling, moraless tales, which are the delight of the poor and the

Starting point is 03:45:23 hard driven, wherever life is left in its natural simplicity. They tell of a time when nothing had consequences, when even if you were killed, if only you had a good heart, somebody would bring you to life again with a touch of a rod, and when if you were a prince and happened to look exactly like your brother, you might go to bed with his queen and have only a little quarrel afterwards. We, too, if we were so weak and poor that everything threatened us with misfortune, would remember, if foolish people left us alone, every old dream that has been strong enough to fling the weight of the world from its shoulders. There was a king, one time, who was very much put out because he had no son, and he went at last to consult his chief

Starting point is 03:46:08 advisor. And the chief advisor said, it's easy enough managed if you do, as I tell you. Let you send someone, says he, to such a place to catch a fish, and when the fish is brought in, give it to the queen, your wife, to eat. So the king sent as he was told, and the fish was caught and brought in, and he gave it to the cook, and bade her put it before the fire, but to be careful with it, and not to let any blob or blister rise on it. But it was impossible to cook a fish before the fire without the skin of it rising in some place or other, and so there came a blob on the skin, and the cook put her finger on it to smooth it down, and then she put her finger into her mouth to cool it, and so she got a taste of the fish. And then it was sent up to the queen,

Starting point is 03:46:53 and she ate it, and what was left of it was thrown out into the yard, and there was a mare in the yard, and a greyhound, and they ate the bits that were thrown out. And before a year was out, the queen had a young son, and the cook had a young son, and the mare had two foals, and the greyhound had two pups. And the two young sons were sent out for a while to some place to be cared, and when they came back they were so much like one another, no person could know which was the queen's son, and which was the cooks. And the queen was vexed at that, and she went to the chief advisor, and said, tell me some way that I can know which is my own son, for I don't like to be giving the same eating and drinking to the cook's son as to my own.

Starting point is 03:47:36 It is easy for you to know that, said the chief advisor. If you will do as I tell you, go outside, and stand at the door they will be coming in by, and when they see you, your own son will bow his head, but the cook's son will only laugh. So she did that, and when her own son bowed his head, her servants put a mark on it, that she would know him again, and when they were all sitting at their dinner after that, she said to Jack, that was the cook's son, it is time for you to go away out of this, for you are not my son. And her own son, that we will call Bill, said,

Starting point is 03:48:12 do not send him away, are we not brothers? But Jack said, I would have been long ago out of this house if I knew it was not my own father and mother owned it. And for all Bill could say to him he would not stop. But before he went, they were by the well that is in the garden, and he said to Bill, if harm ever happens to me, that water on the top of the well will be blood, and the water below will be honey. Then he took one of the pups, and one of the two horses, that was foiled after the mare eating the fish, and the wind that was after him could not catch him,

Starting point is 03:48:46 and he caught the wind that was before him. And he went on till he came to a weaver's house, and he asked him for a lodging, and he gave it to him. And then he went on till he came to a king's house, and he sent in at the door to ask, did he want a servant? All I want, said the king, is a boy that will drive out the cows to the field every morning and bring them back in at night to be milked. I will do that for you, said Jack. So the king engaged him. In the morning Jack was sent out with four and twenty cows, and the place he was told to drive

Starting point is 03:49:20 them to had not a blade of grass in it for them, but was full of stones. So Jack looked about for some place where there would be better grass, and after a while he saw a field with good green grass in it, and it belonged to a giant. So he knocked down a bit of the wall, and drove them in, and went up himself into an apple tree and began to eat the apples. Then the giant came into the field. Fee-Fa-Fum, says he, I smell the blood of an Irishman. I see you where you are, up in the tree, he said. You are too big for one mouthful, and too small for two mouthfuls, and I don't know what I'll do with you if I don't grind you up,

Starting point is 03:49:57 and make snuff from my nose. As you are strong, be merciful, says Jack, up in the tree. Come down out of that, you little dwarf, said the giant, where I'll tear you and the tree asunder. So Jack came down. Would you sooner be driving red-hot knives into one another's hearts, said the giant, or would you sooner be fighting one another on red-hot flags? Fighting on red-hat flags is what I'm used to at home, said Jack,

Starting point is 03:50:24 and your dirty feet will be sinking in them, and my feet will be rising. So then they began the fight. The ground that was hard they made soft, and the ground that was soft they made hard, and they made spring wells come up through the green flags. They were like that all through one day, no one getting the upper hand of the other, and at last a little bird came and sat on the bush and said to Jack, if you don't make an end of him by sunset, he'll make an end of you. Then Jack put out his strength, and he brought the giant down on his knees. Give me my life. says the giant, and I'll give you the three best gifts. What are those, said Jack?

Starting point is 03:51:03 A sword that nothing can stand against, and a suit that when you put it on, you will see everybody and nobody will see you, and a pair of shoes that will make you run faster than the wind blows. Where are they to be found? said Jack. In that red door you see there in the hill. So Jack went and got them out. Where will I try the sword, says he.

Starting point is 03:51:25 Try it on that ugly black stump of a tree. said the giant. I see nothing blacker or uglier than your own head, says Jack, and with that he made one stroke and cut off the giant's head, that it went into the air, and he caught it on the sword as it was coming down, and made two halves of it. It is well for you, I did not join the body again, said the head, or you would have never been able to strike it off again. I did not give you the chance of that, said Jack, and he brought away the great suit with him. So he brought the cow's home at evening, and everyone wondered at all the milk they gave that night. And when the king was sitting at dinner with the princess, his daughter, and the rest, he said, I think I only hear

Starting point is 03:52:07 two roars from beyond to night, in place of three. The next morning Jack went out again with the cows, and he saw another field full of grass, and he knocked down the wall and let the cows in. All happened the same as the day before, but the giant that came this time had two heads, and they fought together, and the little bird came and spoke to Jack as before. And when Jack had brought the giant down, he said, Give me my life, and I'll give you the best thing I have. What is that, says Jack? It is a suit that you can put on, and you will see everyone, but no one can see you.

Starting point is 03:52:41 Where is it? said Jack. It's inside that little red door at the side of the hill. So Jack went and brought out the suit. And then he cut off the giant's two heads, and caught them coming down and made four halves of them, and they said it was well for him that he had not given them time to join the body. That night when the cows came home, they gave so much milk that all the vessels that could be found were filled up. The next morning Jack went out again, and all happened as before, and the giant this time had four heads, and Jack made eight halves of them, and the giant had told

Starting point is 03:53:13 him to go to a little blue door in the side of the hill, and there he got a pair of shoes that when you put them on would go faster than the wind. That night the cows gave so much milk that there were not vessels enough to hold it, and it was given to tenants and to poor people passing the road, and the rest was thrown out the windows. I was passing that way myself, and I got a drink of it. That night the king said to Jack, why is it that the cows are giving so much milk these days?

Starting point is 03:53:40 Are you bringing them to any other grass? I am not, said Jack, but I have a good stick, and whenever they would stop or lie down, I give them blows with it, that they jump and leap over walls and stones and ditches. that's the way to make cows give plenty of milk. And that night at the dinner, the king said,

Starting point is 03:53:59 I hear no roars at all. The next morning, the king and the princess were watching at the window to see what would Jack do when he got to the field. And Jack knew they were there, and he got a stick and began to batter the cows, so that they went leaping and jumping over stones and walls and ditches. There's no lie on what Jack said, said the king then. Now there was a great serpent,

Starting point is 03:54:22 at that time used to come every seven years, and he had to get a king's daughter to eat, unless she would have some good man to fight for her. And it was the princess at the place Jack was had to be given to it at that time, and the king had been feeding a bully underground for seven years, and you may believe he got the best of everything to be ready to fight it. And when the time came, the princess went out, and the bully with her down to the shore. And when they got there, what did he do but tie the princess to a tree, the way the serpent would be able to swallow her easy with no delay, and he himself went and hid up in an ivy tree. And Jack knew what was going on, for the princess had told him about it, and had asked would he help her,

Starting point is 03:55:04 but he said he would not. But he came out now, and he put on the suit he had taken from the first giant, and he came by the place the princess was, but she didn't know him. "'Is that right for a princess to be tied to a tree?' said Jack. it is not indeed said she and she told him what had happened and how the serpent was coming to take her if you will let me sleep for a while with my head in your lap said jack you could wake me when it is coming so he did that and she awakened him when she saw the serpent coming and chak got up and fought it and drove it back into the sea and then he cut the rope that fastened her and went away the bully came down then out of the tree and he brought the princess to where the king was and

Starting point is 03:55:48 said, I got a friend of mine to come and fight the serpent today, where I was a little timorous after being so long shut up underground, but I'll do the fighting myself tomorrow. The next day they went out again, and the same thing happened. The bully tied up the princess where the serpent could come at her fair and easy, and went up himself to hide in the ivy tree. Then Jack put on the suit he had taken from the second giant, and he walked out, and the princess did not know him, but she told him all that had happened yesterday, and how some young gentleman she did not know had come and saved her. So Jack asked, might he lie down and take asleep with his head in her lap, the way she could awake him, and all happened in the same way

Starting point is 03:56:29 as the day before, and the bully gave her up to the king and said he had brought another of his friends to fight for her that day. The next day she was brought down to the shore as before, and a great many people gathered to see the serpent that was coming to bring the king's daughter away, and Jack brought out the suit of clothes he had brought away from the third the third giant, and she did not know him, and they talked as before. But when he was asleep this time, she thought she would make sure of being able to find him again, and she took out her scissors and cut off a piece of his hair, and made a little packet of it, and put it away, and she did another thing. She took off one of the shoes that was on his feet. And when she saw the serpent

Starting point is 03:57:09 coming she woke him, and he said, this time I will put the serpent in the way that he will eat no more king's daughters. So he took out the sword he had got from the giant, and he put it in at the back of the serpent's neck, the way blood and water came spouting out that went for fifty miles inland and made an end of him. And then he made off, and no one saw what way he went, and the bully brought the princess to the king, and claimed to have saved her, and it is he who was made much of, and was the right-hand man after that. But when the feast was made ready for the wedding, the princess took out the bit of hair she had, and said she was. She was made. marry no one, but the man whose hair could match that, and she showed the shoe and said she would marry

Starting point is 03:57:49 no one whose foot would not fit that shoe as well. And the bully tried to put on the shoe, but so much as his toe would not go into it, and as to his hair, it didn't match at all to the bit of hair she had cut from the man that saved her. So then the king gave a great ball, to bring all the chief men of the country together to try would the shoe fit any of them. And they were all going to carpenters and joiners getting bits of their feet cut off, to try, could they wear the shoe, but it was no use. Not one of them could get it on. Then the king went to his chief advisor and asked what he could do. And the chief advisor bade him to give another ball, and this time he said, give it to poor as well as rich.

Starting point is 03:58:30 So the ball was given, and many came flocking to it, but the shoe would not fit any one of them. And the chief advisor said, is everyone here that belongs to the house? They're all here, said the king, except the boy that minds the cows, and I would not like him to be coming up here. Jack was below in the yard at the time, and he heard what the king said, and he was very angry, and he went and got his sword and came running up the stairs to strike off the king's head. But the man that kept the gate met him on the stairs before he could get to the king, and quieted him down. And when he got to the top of the stairs and the princess saw him, she gave a cry and ran into his arms. And they tried the shoe, and it fitted him, and his hair

Starting point is 03:59:11 matched to the piece that had been cut off. So then they were married, and a great feast was given for three days and three nights. And at the end of that time, one morning there came a deer outside the window, with bells on it, and they ringing, and it called out, Here is the hunt, where is the huntsman and the hound. So when Jack heard that, he got up and took his horse and his hound and went hunting the deer. When it was in the hollow he was on the hill, and when it was on the hill he was in the hollow, and that went on all through the day, and when night fell, it went into a wood, and Jack went into the wood after it, and all he could see was a mud-wall cabin, and he went in, and there he saw an old woman, about two hundred years old, and she sitting over the

Starting point is 03:59:56 fire. Did you see a deer pass this way, says Jack? I did not, says she, but it's too late now for you to be following a deer. Let you stop the night here. What will I do with my dear? What will I do with my horse and my hound, said Jack. Here are two ribs of hair, said she, and let you tie them up with them. So Jack went out and tied up the horse and the hound, and when he came in again, the old woman said, You killed my three sons, and I'm going to kill you now, and she put on a pair of boxing gloves, each one of them nine stone weight, and the nails in them fifteen inches long.

Starting point is 04:00:32 Then they began to fight, and Jack was getting the worst of it. Help, hound, he cried out. Then, squeeze hair, cried out the old woman, and the rib of hair that was about the hound's neck squeezed him to death. Help, horse, Jack called out then. Squeeze, hair, called out the old woman, and the rib of hair that was about the horse's neck began to tighten and squeeze him to death. Then the old woman made an end of Jack and threw him outside the door.

Starting point is 04:00:59 To go back now to Bill. He was out in the garden one day, and he took a look at the well, and what did he see, but the water at the top was blood, and he was blood. what was underneath was honey. So he went into the house again, and he said to his mother, I will never eat a second meal at the same table, or sleep a second night in the same bed, till I know what is happening to Jack. So he took the other horse and hound then, and set off, over the hills where cock never crows, and horn never sounds, and the devil never blows his bugle. And at last he came to the weaver's house, and when he went in, the weaver says,

Starting point is 04:01:34 you are welcome, and I can give you better treatment than I did the last time you came into me, for she thought it was Jack who was there. They were so much like one another. That is good, said Bill to himself. My brother has been here. And he gave the weaver the full of a basin of gold in the morning before he left. Then he went on till he came to the king's house, and when he was at the door the princess came running down the stairs and said, welcome to you back again. And all the people said, it is a wonder you have gone hunting three days after your marriage. and to stop so long away so he stopped that night with the princess and she thought it was her own husband all the time and in the morning the deer came and bells ringing upon her under the windows and called out the hunt is here where are the huntsmen and the hounds Then Bill got up and got his horse and his hound, and followed her over hills and hollows

Starting point is 04:02:25 till they came to the wood, and there he saw nothing but the mud-wall cabin and the old woman sitting by the fire, and she bade him to stop the night there, and gave him two ribs of hair to tie his horse and his hound with. But Bill was wittier than Jack, and before he went out he threw the ribs of hair into the fire secretly. When he came in, the old woman said, Your brother killed my three sons, and I killed him, and I'll kill you along with him. and she put her gloves on, and they began the fight. And then Bill called out,

Starting point is 04:02:55 Help, horse. Squeeze, hair, called the old woman. I can't squeeze, I'm in the fire, said the hair. And the horse came in and gave her a blow of his hoof. Help, hound, said Bill then. Squeeze hair, said the old woman. I can't, I'm in the fire, said the second hair. Then the hound put his teeth in her, and Bill brought her down, and she cried for mercy. "'Give me my life,' she said, "'and I'll tell you where you'll get your brother again, "'and his hound and horse.' "'Where's that?' said Bill.

Starting point is 04:03:26 "'Do you see that rod over the fire?' said she. "'Take it down and go outside the door "'where you'll see three green stones, "'and strike them with the rod, "'for they are your brother and his horse and hounds, "'and they'll come to life again.' "'I will, but I'll make a green stone of you first,' said Bill, "'and he cut off her head with his sword.

Starting point is 04:03:46 "'Then he went out and struck the sword. stones, and sure enough there were Jack and his horse and the hound alive and well. And they began striking other stones around, and men came from them that had been turned to stones, hundreds and thousands of them. Then they set out for home, but on the way they had some dispute or some argument together, for Jack was not well pleased to hear he had spent the night with his wife, and Bill got angry, and he struck Jack with the rod and turned him to a green stone. And he went home, but the princess saw he had something on his mind. And he said then, I have killed my brother, and he went back then, and brought him to life,

Starting point is 04:04:22 and they lived happy ever after, and they had children by the basketful, and threw them out by the shovelful. I was passing one time myself, and they called me in and gave me a cup of tea. 1902. End of Section 39. Section 40 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain.

Starting point is 04:04:53 information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Aaron B. Lilis, www. www.chiridre.com. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates. By the Roadside. Last night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan Road to listen to some Irish songs. While I waited for the singers, an old man sang about that country beauty who died so many years ago, and spoke of a singer he had known who sang so beautifully that no horse would pass him but must turn its head and cock its ears to listen. Presently a score of men and boys and girls with shawls over their heads gathered under the trees to listen. Somebody sang Samyorn and Diles,

Starting point is 04:05:36 then somebody else Jimmy Mour Melstor, a mournful songs of separation of death and exile. And then somebody sang Eiblen Arun, that glad song of meeting which has always moved me more than other songs because the lover who made it sang it to his sweetheart under the shire. shadow of a mountain I looked at every day through my childhood. The voices melted into the twilight and were mixed into the trees, and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with the generations of men.

Starting point is 04:06:02 Now it was a phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an emotional form that had carried my memory to older verses or even to forgotten mythologies. I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the four rivers and followed it under the wall of paradise to the roots of the trees of knowledge and of life. There is no song or story handed down a the cottages that is not words and thoughts to carry one as far. For though one can know but a little of their assent, one knows that they ascend like medieval genealogies through unbroken dignities to the beginning of the world. Folk art is indeed the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly

Starting point is 04:06:40 is the vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and most unforgettable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great art is rooted. it is spoken by the fireside or sung by the roadside or carved upon the lintel, appreciation of the arts that a single mind gives unity and design to, spreads quickly when its hour has come. In a society that has cast our imaginative tradition, only a few people, three or four thousand out of millions, favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance,

Starting point is 04:07:12 and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things, and yet the imagination is the man himself. The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts into their service because men understood that when imagination is impoverished, a principal voice, some would say the only voice, for the awakening of wise hope and durable faith and understanding charity, can speak but in broken words, if it does not fall silent. And so it has always seemed to me that we, who would reawaken imaginative tradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering old stories into books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Irish and would spread foreign ways, which for all but a few are ways of spiritual poverty, take part also. Their part is with those who were of jewelry, and yet cried out, if thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend.

Starting point is 04:08:02 1901. End of by the roadside. Recording by Aaron B. Lillis, Los Angeles, www.chiri-dreary.com Section 41 of the Celtic Twilight. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visitlibrovox.org. Recording by Shakira Searle. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates.

Starting point is 04:08:44 Into the twilight. Outworn heart in a time outworn. Come clear. of the nets of wrong and right. Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight. Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn. Thy mother, err, is always young, dew ever shining and twilight grey.

Starting point is 04:09:11 Though hope fall from thee, or love decay, burning in fires of a slanderous tongue, come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill, for there the mystical brotherhood Of hollow wood and the hilly wood And the changing moon work out their will And God stands winding his lonely horn And time and the world are ever in flight

Starting point is 04:09:37 And love is less kind than the grey twilight And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn End of Into the Twilight Recording by Shakira Searle End of the Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yates.

Classic Audiobook Collection - The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yeats ~ Full Audiobook [folklore]

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