No More Learning

Clooth-na-Bare would mean the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a
corruption of Cailleac Bare, the old woman of Bare, who, under the
names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira,
appears in the legends of many places. Mr. O'Grady found her haunting
Lough Liath high up on the top of a mountain of the Fews, the Slieve
Fuadh, or Slieve G-Cullain of old times, under the name of the Cailleac
Buillia. He describes Lough Liath as a desolate moon-shaped lake, with
made wells and sunken passages upon its borders, and beset by marsh and
heather and gray boulders, and closes his 'Flight of the Eagle' with a
long rhapsody upon mountain and lake, because of the heroic tales and
beautiful old myths that have hung about them always. He identifies
the Cailleac Buillia with that Meluchra who persuaded Fionn to go
to her amid the waters of Lough Liath, and so changed him with her
enchantments, that, though she had to free him because of the threats
of the Fiana, his hair was ever afterwards as white as snow. To this
day the Tuatha De Danaan that are in the waters beckon to men, and
drown them in the waters; and Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra, or whatever
name one likes the best, is, doubtless, the name of a mistress among
them. Meluchra was daughter of Cullain; and Cullain Mr. O'Grady
calls, upon I know not what authority, a form of Lir, the master of
waters. The people of the waters have been in all ages beautiful and
changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and lonely, for water
is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the
fruitfulness of dreams. The white hair of Fionn may be but another
of the troubles of those that come to unearthly wisdom and earthly
trouble, and the threats and violence of the Fiana against her, a
different form of the threats and violence the country people use, to
make the Aes Sidhe give up those that are 'away. ' Bare is now often
called an ugly old woman, but in the 'Song of Bare,' which Lady Gregory
has given in her 'Saints and Wonders,' she laments her lost beauty
after the withering of seven hundred years; and Dr. Joyce says that
one of her old names was Aebhin, which means beautiful. Aebhin was the
goddess of the tribes of northern Leinster; and the lover she had made
immortal, and who loved her perfectly, left her, and put on mortality,
to fight among them against the stranger, and died on the strand of
Clontarf.


THE POET PLEADS WITH THE ELEMENTAL POWERS (p. 37).
HE
THINKS OF HIS PAST GREATNESS WHEN A PART OF THE CONSTELLATIONS OF
HEAVEN (p. 40). HE HEARS THE CRY OF THE SEDGE (p. 28).

The Rose has been for many centuries a symbol of spiritual love and
supreme beauty. The lotus was in some Eastern countries imagined
blossoming upon the Tree of Life, as the Flower of Life, and is thus
represented in Assyrian bas-reliefs. Because the Rose, the flower
sacred to the Virgin Mary, and the flower that Apuleius' adventurer
ate, when he was changed out of the ass's shape and received into the
fellowship of Isis, is the western Flower of Life, I have imagined it
growing upon the Tree of Life. I once stood beside a man in Ireland
when he saw it growing there in a vision, that seemed to have rapt him
out of his body. He saw the Garden of Eden walled about, and on the top
of a high mountain, as in certain mediaeval diagrams, and after passing
the Tree of Knowledge, on which grew fruit full of troubled faces, and
through whose branches flowed, he was told, sap that was human souls,
he came to a tall, dark tree, with little bitter fruits, and was shown
a kind of stair or ladder going up through the tree, and told to go
up; and near the top of the tree, a beautiful woman, like the Goddess
of Life, associated with the tree in Assyria, gave him a rose that
seemed to have been growing upon the tree. One finds the Rose in the
Irish poets, sometimes as a religious symbol, as in the phrase, 'the
Rose of Friday,' meaning the Rose of austerity, in a Gaelic poem in
Dr. Hyde's 'Religious Songs of Connacht'; and, I think, as a symbol
of woman's beauty in the Gaelic song, 'Roseen Dubh'; and a symbol of
Ireland in Mangan's adaptation of 'Roseen Dubh,' 'My Dark Rosaleen,'
and in Mr. Aubrey de Vere's 'The Little Black Rose. ' I do not know any
evidence to prove whether this symbol came to Ireland with mediaeval
Christianity, or whether it has come down from older times. I have
read somewhere that a stone engraved with a Celtic god, who holds what
looks like a rose in one hand, has been found somewhere in England; but
I cannot find the reference, though I certainly made a note of it. If
the Rose was really a symbol of Ireland among the Gaelic poets, and if
'Roseen Dubh' is really a political poem, as some think, one may feel
pretty certain that the ancient Celts associated the Rose with Eire, or
Fotla, or Banba--goddesses who gave their names to Ireland--or with some
principal god or goddess, for such symbols are not suddenly adopted or
invented, but come out of mythology.

I have made the Seven Lights, the constellation of the Bear, lament for
the theft of the Rose, and I have made the Dragon, the constellation
Draco, the guardian of the Rose, because these constellations move
about the pole of the heavens, the ancient Tree of Life in many
countries, and are often associated with the Tree of Life in mythology.