No More Learning

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.


THE SECRET ROSE (p. 32).

I find that I have unintentionally changed the old story of Conchubar's
death. He did not see the crucifixion in a vision, but was told about
it. He had been struck by a ball, made of the dried brain of a dead
enemy, and hurled out of a sling; and this ball had been left in his
head, and his head had been mended, the 'Book of Leinster' says, with
thread of gold because his hair was like gold. Keating, a writer of
the time of Elizabeth, says, 'In that state did he remain seven years,
until the Friday on which Christ was crucified, according to some
historians; and when he saw the unusual changes of the creation and the
eclipse of the sun and the moon at its full, he asked of Bucrach, a
Leinster Druid, who was along with him, what was it that brought that
unusual change upon the planets of Heaven and Earth. "Jesus Christ, the
Son of God," said the Druid, "who is now being crucified by the Jews. "
"That is a pity," said Conchubar; "were I in his presence I would kill
those who were putting him to death. " And with that he brought out
his sword, and rushed at a woody grove which was convenient to him,
and began to cut and fell it; and what he said was, that if he were
among the Jews, that was the usage he would give them, and from the
excessiveness of his fury which seized upon him, the ball started out
of his head, and some of the brain came after it, and in that way he
died. The wood of Lanshraigh, in Feara Rois, is the name by which that
shrubby wood is called.