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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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Miraculous Creatures
THERE are marten 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 fine can take. These creatures 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
Diarmuid where Ben Bulben mixes with the sea wind. 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 wood Of Inchy, "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 Owbawn 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 says, "my father told me he was in a boat out on 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 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 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, that is death.
1902.
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