No More Learning

Yeats, he will make a poem about it, perhaps. ' But the daughter said,
'Oh no, father. Nobody could make a poem about a woman like that. '
Alas! I have never made the poem, perhaps because my own heart which
has loved Helen and all the lovely and fickle women of the world, would
be too sore. There are things it is well not to ponder over too much,
things that bare words are the best suited for.

1902.




THE SORCERERS


IN Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers,[D] and come across
any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the
people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy
and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were
they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are
of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his
rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store
their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit
hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and
melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or
through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their
hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women
full of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the
earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling
about us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and
that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of
magic have been but little practised. I have indeed come across very
few persons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the
few I have met keep their purpose and practice wholly hidden from those
among whom they live. They are mainly small clerks and the like, and
meet for the purpose of their art in a room hung with black hangings.
They would not admit me into this room, but finding me not altogether
ignorant of the arcane science, showed gladly elsewhere what they would
do. 'Come to us,' said their leader, a clerk in a large flour-mill,
'and we will show you spirits who will talk to you face to face, and in
shapes as solid and heavy as our own.
'

I had been talking of the power of communicating in states of trance
with the angelical and faery beings,--the children of the day and of the
twilight,--and he had been contending that we should only believe in
what we can see and feel when in our ordinary everyday state of mind.
'Yes,' I said, 'I will come to you,' or some such words; 'but I will
not permit myself to become entranced, and will therefore know whether
these shapes you talk of are any the more to be touched and felt by the
ordinary senses than are those I talk of. ' I was not denying the power
of other beings to take upon themselves a clothing of mortal substance,
but only that simple invocations, such as he spoke of, seemed unlikely
to do more than cast the mind into trance, and thereby bring it into
the presence of the powers of day, twilight, and darkness.

'But,' he said, 'we have seen them move the furniture hither and
thither, and they go at our bidding, and help or harm people who know
nothing of them. ' I am not giving the exact words, but as accurately as
I can the substance of our talk.

On the night arranged I turned up about eight, and found the leader
sitting alone in almost total darkness in a small back room. He was
dressed in a black gown, like an inquisitor's dress in an old drawing,
that left nothing of him visible except his eyes, which peered out
through two small round holes. Upon the table in front of him was
a brass dish of burning herbs, a large bowl, a skull covered with
painted symbols, two crossed daggers, and certain implements shaped
like quern stones, which were used to control the elemental powers
in some fashion I did not discover. I also put on a black gown, and
remember that it did not fit perfectly, and that it interfered with my
movements considerably. The sorcerer then took a black cock out of a
basket, and cut its throat with one of the daggers, letting the blood
fall into the large bowl. He opened a book and began an invocation,
which was certainly not English, and had a deep guttural sound. Before
he had finished, another of the sorcerers, a man of about twenty-five,
came in, and having put on a black gown also, seated himself at my
left hand. I had the invoker directly in front of me, and soon began
to find his eyes, which glittered through the small holes in his
hood, affecting me in a curious way. I struggled hard against their
influence, and my head began to ache. The invocation continued, and
nothing happened for the first few minutes. Then the invoker got up
and extinguished the light in the hall, so that no glimmer might come
through the slit under the door.