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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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Earth, Fire and Water
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 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 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 to-day our country people speak with the dead 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 the 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"?
1902.
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