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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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Enchanted Woods
I.
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 talk to him about his work and about the woods, 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--"grainne
oge," he calls him--"grunting like a Christian," and is certain
that he steals apples by rolling 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 marten cats, who
have been always in the woods. 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
unroll 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
supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats like,
above all, to be in the "forths" 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 marten cat--a rare
beast now-a-days. 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, be has seen an unearthly sight in the
woods. He says, "One time I was out cutting timber over in Inchy, and 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 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 Shanwalla, 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 Shanwalla, an' bid me goodnight. And two hours after, there
he was back again in the yard, an' bid me light a candle that was in the stable.
An' he told me that when he got into Shanwalla, 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 an' 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 by a
certain deep pool in the river. She said, "I came over the stile 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
hazel and creeping juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side 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 on to that bush it will stay on it,"
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 two hundred 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."
II.
I often entangle myself in argument more complicated than even
those paths of Inchy 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
of the Illissus, "The 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 any one 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 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, 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 imagined 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 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 if we but keep our natures
simple and passionate. May it not even be that death shall unite us to all
romance, and that some day 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.
1902
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