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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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The Untiring Ones
IT is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have
any unmixed emotions. 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 heart as the faeries 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. Love with them never grows
weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal
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 it may not be forgotten. A short while ago, they say, two faeries,
little creatures, one like a young man, one like a young woman, came to a
farmer's house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth and setting all tidy.
The next night they came again, and while the farmer was away, brought all the
furniture up-stairs into one room, and having arranged it round the walls, for
the greater grandeur it seems, they began to dance. They danced on and on, and
days and days went by, and all the country-side came to look at them, but still
their feet never tired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while; and
after three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, and went and told
them that the priest was coming. 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, and that is until God shall burn up the
world with a kiss.
But it is not merely faeries 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, an even more than faery
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 awakened the stars, 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
cradle, and her mother sat by rocking her, when a woman of the Sidhe (the
faeries) came in, and said that the child was chosen to be the bride of the
prince of the dim kingdom, but that as it would never do for his wife to grow
old and die while he was still in the first ardour of his love, she would be
gifted with a faery 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 married the prince of the faeries, who came to her at nightfall. After seven
hundred years the prince died, and another prince ruled in his stead and married
the beautiful peasant girl in his turn; and after another seven hundred years he
died also, and another prince and another husband came in his stead, 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
and dug until he found it, and then they burned it, and she died, and was buried
like a Christian, and everybody was pleased. Such a mortal too was Clooth-na-bare,[1]
who went all over the world seeking a lake deep enough to drown her faery life,
of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to lake and lake to hill, and
setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until at last she found
the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia, on the top of the Birds'
Mountain at Sligo.
The two little creatures may well dance on, and the woman of
the log and Clooth-na-bare sleep in peace, for they have known untrammelled hate
and unmixed love, and have never wearied themselves with "yes" and
"no," or entangled their feet with the sorry net of "maybe"
and "perhaps." The great winds came and took them up into themselves.
[1. Doubtless Clooth-na-bare should be Cailleac Bare, which
would mean the old Woman Bare. Bare or Bere or Verah or Dera or Dhera was a very
famous person, perhaps the mother of the Gods herself. A friend of mine found
her, as he thinks frequenting Lough Leath, or the Grey Lake on a mountain of the
Fews. Perhaps Lough Ia is my mishearing, or the storyteller's mispronunciation
of Lough Leath, for there are many Lough Leaths.]
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