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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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War
WHEN there was a rumour of war with France a while ago, I met
a poor Sligo woman, a soldier's widow, that I know, and I read her a sentence
out of a letter I had just had from London: "The people here are mad for
war, but France seems inclined to take things peacefully," or some like
sentence. Her mind ran a good deal on war, which she imagined partly from what
she had heard from soldiers, and partly from tradition of the rebellion of '98,
but the word London doubled her interest, for she knew there were a great many
people in London, and she herself had once lived in "a congested
district." "There are too many over one another in London. They are
getting tired of the world. It is killed they want to be. It will be no matter;
but sure the French want nothing but peace and quietness. The people here don't
mind the war coming. They could not be. worse than they are. They may as well
die soldierly before God. Sure they will get quarters in heaven." Then she
began to say that it would be a hard thing to see children tossed about on
bayonets, and I knew her mind was running on traditions of the great rebellion.
She said presently, "I never knew a man that was in a battle that liked to
speak of it after. They'd sooner be throwing hay down from a hayrick." She
told me how she and her neighbours used to be sitting over the fire when she was
a girl, talking of the war that was coming, and now she was afraid it was coming
again, for she had dreamed that all the bay was "stranded and covered with
seaweed." I asked her if it was in the Fenian times that she had been so
much afraid of war coming. But she cried out, "Never had I such fun and
pleasure as in the Fenian times. I was in a house where some of the officers
used to be staying, and in the daytime I would be walking after the soldiers'
band, and at night I'd be going down to the end of the garden watching a
soldier, with his red coat on him, drilling the Fenians in the field behind the
house. One night the boys tied the liver of an old horse, that had been dead
three weeks, to the knocker, and I found it when I opened the door in the
morning." And presently our talk of war shifted, as it had a way of doing,
to the battle of the Black Pig, which seems to her a battle between Ireland and
England, but to me an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the Ancestral
Darkness again, and from this to sayings about war and vengeance. "Do you
know," she said, "what the curse of the Four Fathers is? They put the
man-child on the spear, and somebody said to them, 'You will be cursed in the
fourth generation after you,' and that is why disease or anything always comes
in the fourth generation."
1902.
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