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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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The Old Town
I FELL, one night some fifteen years ago, into what seemed the
power of faery.
I had gone with a young man and his sister--friends and
relations of my own--to pick stories out of an old countryman; and we were
coming home talking over what he had told us. It was dark, and our imaginations
were excited by his stories of apparitions, and this may have brought us,
unknown to us, to the threshold, between sleeping and waking, where Sphinxes and
Chimæras sit open-eyed and where there are always murmurings and whisperings. I
cannot think that what we saw was an imagination of the waking mind. We had come
under some trees that made the road very dark, when the girl saw a bright light
moving slowly across the road. Her brother and myself saw nothing, and did not
see anything until we had walked for about half-an-hour along the edge of the
river and down a narrow lane to some fields where there was a ruined church
covered with ivy, and the foundations of what was called "the Old
Town," which had been burned down, it was said, in Cromwell's day. We had
stood for some few minutes, so far as I can recollect, looking over the fields
full of stones and brambles and elder-bushes, when I saw a small bright light on
the horizon, as it seemed, mounting up slowly towards the sky; then we saw other
faint lights for a minute or two, and at last a bright flame like the flame of a
torch moving rapidly over the river. We saw it all in such a dream, and it seems
all so unreal, that I have never written of it until now, and hardly ever spoken
of it, and even when thinking, because of some unreasoning impulse, I have
avoided giving it weight in the argument. Perhaps I have felt that my
recollections of things seen when the sense of reality was weakened must be
untrustworthy. A few months ago, however, I talked it over with my two friends,
and compared their somewhat meagre recollections with my own. That sense of
unreality was all the more wonderful because the next day I heard sounds as
unaccountable as were those lights, and without any emotion of unreality, and I
remember them with perfect distinctness and confidence. The girl was sitting
reading under a large old-fashioned mirror, and I was reading and writing a
couple of yards away, when I heard a sound as if a shower of peas had been
thrown against the mirror, and while I was looking at it I heard the sound
again, and presently, while I was alone in the room, I heard a sound as if
something much bigger than a pea had struck the wainscoting beside my head. And
after that for some days came other sights and sounds, not to me but to the
girl, her brother, and the servants. Now it was a bright light, now it was
letters of fire that vanished before they could be read, now it was a heavy foot
moving about in the seemingly empty house. One wonders whether creatures who
live, the country people believe, wherever men and women have lived in earlier
times, followed us from the ruins of the old town? or did they come from the
banks of the river by the trees where the. first light had shone for a moment?
1902.
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