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Celtic Twilight
by
William Butler Yeats
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By the Roadside
LAST night I went to a wide place on the Kiltartan road to
listen to some Irish songs. While I waited for the singers an old man sang about
that country beauty who died so many years ago, and spoke of a singer he had
known who sang so beautifully that no horse would pass him, but must turn its
head and cock its ears to listen. Presently a score of men and boys and girls,
with shawls over their beads, gathered under the trees to listen. Somebody sang Sa
Muirnín Díles, and then somebody else Jimmy Mo Mílestór, mournful
songs of separation, of death, and of exile. Then some of the men stood up and
began to dance, while another lilted the measure they danced to, and then
somebody sang Eiblín a Rúin, that glad song of meeting which has always
moved me more than other songs, because the lover who made it sang it to his
sweetheart under the shadow of a mountain I looked at every day through my
childhood. The voices melted into the twilight and were mixed into the trees,
and when I thought of the words they too melted away, and were mixed with the
generations of men. Now it was a phrase, now it was an attitude of mind, an
emotional form, that had carried my memory to older verses, or even to forgotten
mythologies. I was carried so far that it was as though I came to one of the
four rivers, and followed it under the wall of Paradise to the roots of the
trees of knowledge and of life. There is no song or story handed down among the
cottages that has not words and thoughts to carry one as far, for though one can
know but a little of their ascent, one knows that they ascend like medieval
genealogies through unbroken dignities to the beginning of the world. Folk art
is, indeed, the oldest of the aristocracies of thought, and because it refuses
what is passing and trivial, the merely clever and pretty, as certainly as the
vulgar and insincere, and because it has gathered into itself the simplest and
most unforgetable thoughts of the generations, it is the soil where all great
art is rooted. Wherever it is spoken by the fireside, or sung by the roadside,
or carved upon the lintel, appreciation of the arts that a single mind gives
unity and design to, spreads quickly when its hour is come.
In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a
few people--three or four thousand out of millions--favoured by their own
characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have
understanding of imaginative things, and yet "the imagination is the man
himself." The churches in the Middle Age won all the arts into their
service because men understood that when imagination is impoverished, a
principal voice--some would say the only voice--for the awakening of wise hope
and durable faith, and understanding charity, can speak but in broken words, if
it does not fall silent. And so it has always seemed to me that we, who would
re-awaken imaginative tradition by making old songs live again, or by gathering
old stories into books, take part in the quarrel of Galilee. Those who are Irish
and would spread foreign ways, which, for all but a few, are ways of spiritual
poverty, take part also. Their part is with those who were of Jewry, and yet
cried out, "If thou let this man go thou art not Caesar's friend."
1901.
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