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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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Concerning the Nearness Together of
Heaven,
Earth, and Purgatory
IN Ireland this world and the world we go to after death are
not far apart. I have heard of a ghost that was many years in a tree and many
years in the archway of a bridge, and my old Mayo woman says, "There is a
bush up at my own place, and the people do be saying that there are two souls
doing their penance under it. When the wind blows one way the one has shelter,
and when it blows from the north the other has the shelter. It is twisted over
with the way they be rooting under it for shelter. I don't believe it, but there
is many a one would not pass by it at night." Indeed there are times when
the worlds are so near together that it seems as if our earthly chattels were no
more than the shadows of things beyond. A lady I knew once saw a village child
running about with a long trailing petticoat upon her, and asked the creature
why she did not have it cut short. "It was my grandmother's," said the
child; "would you have her going about yonder with her petticoat up to her
knees, and she dead but four days?" I have read a story of a woman whose
ghost haunted her people because they had made her grave-clothes so short that
the fires of purgatory burned her knees. The peasantry expect to have beyond the
grave houses much like their earthly homes, only there the thatch will never
grow leaky, nor the white walls lose their lustre, nor shall the dairy be at any
time empty of good milk and butter. But now and then a landlord or an agent or a
gauger will go by begging his bread, to show how God divides the righteous from
the unrighteous.
1892 and 1902.
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