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.
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.
Yeats
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. And by the time he
got home, his arm was swelled from the shoulder to be as big as a bag,
and he couldn't use his hand with the pain of it. And his wife brought
him, after a few days, to a woman that used to do cures at Rahasane.
And on the road all she could do would hardly keep him from lying down
to sleep on the grass. And when they got to the woman she knew all that
happened; "and," says she, "it's well for you that your wife didn't let
you fall asleep on the grass, for if you had done that but even for one
instant, you'd be a lost man. "'
Professor Rhys, who considers the bristleless boar a symbol of darkness
and cold, rather than of winter and cold, thinks it was without
bristles because the darkness is shorn away by the sun.
The Battle should, I believe, be compared with three other battles; a
battle the Sidhe are said to fight when a person is being taken away
by them; a battle they are said to fight in November for the harvest;
the great battle the Tuatha De Danaan fought, according to the Gaelic
chroniclers, with the Fomor at Moy Tura, or the Towery Plain.
I have heard of the battle over the dying both in County Galway and in
the Isles of Aran, an old Aran fisherman having told me that it was
fought over two of his children, and that he found blood in a box he
had for keeping fish, when it was over; and I have written about it,
and given examples elsewhere. A faery doctor, on the borders of Galway
and Clare, explained it as a battle between the friends and enemies
of the dying, the one party trying to take them, the other trying to
save them from being taken. It may once, when the land of the Sidhe was
the only other world, and when every man who died was carried thither,
have always accompanied death. I suggest that the battle between the
Tuatha De Danaan, the powers of light, and warmth, and fruitfulness,
and goodness, and the Fomor, the powers of darkness, and cold, and
barrenness, and badness upon the Towery Plain, was the establishment
of the habitable world, the rout of the ancestral darkness; that the
battle among the Sidhe for the harvest is the annual battle of summer
and winter; that the battle among the Sidhe at a man's death is the
battle of life and death; and that the battle of the Black Pig is the
battle between the manifest world and the ancestral darkness at the
end of all things; and that all these battles are one, the battle of
all things with shadowy decay. Once a symbolism has possessed the
imagination of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an
embodiment of disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and
visions, age after age.
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. And by the time he
got home, his arm was swelled from the shoulder to be as big as a bag,
and he couldn't use his hand with the pain of it. And his wife brought
him, after a few days, to a woman that used to do cures at Rahasane.
And on the road all she could do would hardly keep him from lying down
to sleep on the grass. And when they got to the woman she knew all that
happened; "and," says she, "it's well for you that your wife didn't let
you fall asleep on the grass, for if you had done that but even for one
instant, you'd be a lost man. "'
Professor Rhys, who considers the bristleless boar a symbol of darkness
and cold, rather than of winter and cold, thinks it was without
bristles because the darkness is shorn away by the sun.
The Battle should, I believe, be compared with three other battles; a
battle the Sidhe are said to fight when a person is being taken away
by them; a battle they are said to fight in November for the harvest;
the great battle the Tuatha De Danaan fought, according to the Gaelic
chroniclers, with the Fomor at Moy Tura, or the Towery Plain.
I have heard of the battle over the dying both in County Galway and in
the Isles of Aran, an old Aran fisherman having told me that it was
fought over two of his children, and that he found blood in a box he
had for keeping fish, when it was over; and I have written about it,
and given examples elsewhere. A faery doctor, on the borders of Galway
and Clare, explained it as a battle between the friends and enemies
of the dying, the one party trying to take them, the other trying to
save them from being taken. It may once, when the land of the Sidhe was
the only other world, and when every man who died was carried thither,
have always accompanied death. I suggest that the battle between the
Tuatha De Danaan, the powers of light, and warmth, and fruitfulness,
and goodness, and the Fomor, the powers of darkness, and cold, and
barrenness, and badness upon the Towery Plain, was the establishment
of the habitable world, the rout of the ancestral darkness; that the
battle among the Sidhe for the harvest is the annual battle of summer
and winter; that the battle among the Sidhe at a man's death is the
battle of life and death; and that the battle of the Black Pig is the
battle between the manifest world and the ancestral darkness at the
end of all things; and that all these battles are one, the battle of
all things with shadowy decay. Once a symbolism has possessed the
imagination of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an
embodiment of disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and
visions, age after age.
