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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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Mortal Help
ONE hears in the old poems of men taken away to help the gods
in a battle, and Cuchullan won the goddess Fand for a while, by helping her
married sister and her sister's husband to overthrow another nation of the Land
of Promise. I have been told, too, that the people of faery cannot even play at
hurley unless they have on either side some mortal, whose body, or whatever has
been put in its place, as the story-teller would say, is asleep at home. Without
mortal help they are shadowy and cannot even strike the balls. One day I was
walking over some marshy land in Galway with a friend when we found an old,
hard-featured man digging a ditch. My friend had heard that this man had seen a
wonderful sight of some kind, and at last we got the story out of him. When he
was a boy he was working one day with about thirty men and women and boys. They
were beyond Tuam and not far from Knock-na-gur. Presently they saw, all thirty
of them, and at a distance of about half-a-mile, some hundred and fifty of the
people of faery. There were two of them, he said, in dark clothes like people of
our own time, who stood about a hundred yards from one another, but the others
wore clothes of all colours, "bracket" or chequered, and some with red
waistcoats.
He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been
playing hurley, for "they looked as if it was that." Sometimes they
would vanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of the bodies of
the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the size of living men, but
the others were small. He saw them for about half-an-hour, and then the old man
he and those about him were working for took up a whip and said, "Get on,
get on, or we will have no work done!" I asked if he saw the faeries too,
"Oh, yes, but he did not want work he was paying wages for to be
neglected." He made every body work so hard that nobody saw what happened
to the faeries.
1902.
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