No More Learning

And then they saw that it was a woman in the sea that had the
shining eyes. So my father went to the priest, and he bid him always to
take a drop of holy water and a pinch of salt out in the boat with him,
and nothing could harm him. '

The poem was suggested to me by a Greek folk song; but the folk belief
of Greece is very like that of Ireland, and I certainly thought, when
I wrote it, of Ireland, and of the spirits that are in Ireland. An old
man who was cutting a quickset hedge near Gort, in Galway, said, only
the other day, 'One time I was cutting timber over in Inchy, and about
eight o'clock one morning, when I got there, I saw a girl picking nuts,
with her hair hanging down over her shoulders; brown hair; and she had
a good, clean face, and she was tall, and nothing on her head, and
her dress no way gaudy, but simple. And when she felt me coming she
gathered herself up, and was gone, as if the earth had swallowed her
up. And I followed her, and looked for her, but I never could see her
again from that day to this, never again. '

The county Galway people use the word 'clean' in its old sense of fresh
and comely.


HE MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE THAT HAS COME UPON HIM AND HIS BELOVED,
AND LONGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD (p. 15).

My deer and hound are properly related to the deer and hound that
flicker in and out of the various tellings of the Arthurian legends,
leading different knights upon adventures, and to the hounds and to the
hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all tellings of Oisin's
journey to the country of the young. The hound is certainly related
to the Hounds of Annwvyn or of Hades, who are white, and have red
ears, and were heard, and are, perhaps, still heard by Welsh peasants,
following some flying thing in the night winds; and is probably related
to the hounds that Irish country people believe will awake and seize
the souls of the dead if you lament them too loudly or too soon. An
old woman told a friend and myself that she saw what she thought were
white birds, flying over an enchanted place; but found, when she got
near, that they had dogs' heads, and I do not doubt that my hound and
these dog-headed birds are of the same family. I got my hound and deer
out of a last century Gaelic poem about Oisin's journey to the country
of the young. After the hunting of the hornless deer, that leads him
to the seashore, and while he is riding over the sea with Niamh, he
sees amid the waters--I have not the Gaelic poem by me, and describe it
from memory--a young man following a girl who has a golden apple, and
afterwards a hound with one red ear following a deer with no horns.
This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man 'which
is for the woman,' and 'the desire of the woman which is for the desire
of the man,' and of all desires that are as these.
I have read them
in this way in 'The Wanderings of Usheen' or Oisin, and have made my
lover sigh because he has seen in their faces 'the immortal desire of
immortals. '

The man in my poem who has a hazel wand may have been Aengus, Master of
Love; and I have made the boar without bristles come out of the West,
because the place of sunset was in Ireland, as in other countries, a
place of symbolic darkness and death.


THE CAP AND BELLS (p. 22).

I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another
long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I
was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision
than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me the sense
of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the
second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always meant a
great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not
always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said, 'the authors
are in eternity,' and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in
dreams.


THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG (p. 24).

All over Ireland there are prophecies of the coming rout of the enemies
of Ireland, in a certain Valley of the Black Pig, and these prophecies
are, no doubt, now, as they were in the Fenian days, a political force.
I have heard of one man who would not give any money to the Land
League, because the Battle could not be until the close of the century;
but, as a rule, periods of trouble bring prophecies of its near coming.
A few years before my time, an old man who lived at Lisadill, in Sligo,
used to fall down in a fit and rave out descriptions of the Battle;
and a man in Sligo has told me that it will be so great a battle that
the horses shall go up to their fetlocks in blood, and that their
girths, when it is over, will rot from their bellies for lack of a hand
to unbuckle them. If one reads Professor Rhys' "Celtic Heathendom"
by the light of Professor Frazer's "Golden Bough," and puts together
what one finds there about the boar that killed Diarmuid, and other
old Celtic boars and sows, one sees that the battle is mythological,
and that the Pig it is named from must be a type of cold and winter
doing battle with the summer, or of death battling with life. For the
purposes of poetry, at any rate, I think it a symbol of the darkness
that will destroy the world. The country people say there is no shape
for a spirit to take so dangerous as the shape of a pig; and a Galway
blacksmith--and blacksmiths are thought to be specially protected--says
he would be afraid to meet a pig on the road at night; and another
Galway man tells this story: 'There was a man coming the road from Gort
to Garryland one night, and he had a drop taken; and before him, on
the road, he saw a pig walking; and having a drop in, he gave a shout,
and made a kick at it, and bid it get out of that.