No More Learning

' And I knew another man, a truly
great seer, who saw a white fool in a visionary garden, where there
was a tree with peacocks' feathers instead of leaves, and flowers that
opened to show little human faces when the white fool had touched them
with his coxcomb, and he saw at another time a white fool sitting by a
pool and smiling and watching the images of many fair women floating up
from the pool.

What else can death be but the beginning of wisdom and power and
beauty? and foolishness may be a kind of death. I cannot think
wonderful that many should see a fool with a shining vessel or some
enchantment or wisdom or dream too powerful for mortal brains in 'every
household of them. ' It is natural, too, that there should be a queen
to every household of them, and that one should hear little of their
kings, for women come more easily than men to that wisdom which ancient
peoples, and all wild peoples even now, think the only wisdom. The
self, which is the foundation of our knowledge, is broken in pieces
by foolishness, and is forgotten in the sudden emotions of women, and
therefore fools may get, and women do get of a certainty, glimpses of
much that sanctity finds at the end of its painful journey. The man who
saw the white fool said of a certain woman, not a peasant woman, 'If I
had her power of vision I would know all the wisdom of the gods, and
her visions do not interest her. ' And I know of another woman, also not
a peasant woman, who would pass in sleep into countries of an unearthly
beauty, and who never cared for anything but to be busy about her house
and her children; and presently an herb doctor cured her, as he called
it. Wisdom and beauty and power may sometimes, as I think, come to
those who die every day they live, though their dying may not be like
the dying Shakespeare spoke of. There is a war between the living and
the dead, and the Irish stories keep harping upon it. They will have
it that when the potatoes or the wheat or any other of the fruits of
the earth decay, they ripen in faery, and that our dreams lose their
wisdom when the sap rises in the trees, and that our dreams can make
the trees wither, and that one hears the bleating of the lambs of faery
in November, and that blind eyes can see more than other eyes. Because
the soul always believes in these, or in like things, the cell and the
wilderness shall never be long empty, or lovers come into the world who
will not understand the verse--

'Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
How love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought to the world's dim boundaries clinging,
And music when one's beloved is singing,
Is death? '

1901.
THE FRIENDS OF THE PEOPLE OF FAERY


THOSE that see the people of faery most often, and so have the most of
their wisdom, are often very poor, but often, too, they are thought to
have a strength beyond that of man, as though one came, when one has
passed the threshold of trance, to those sweet waters where Maeldun saw
the dishevelled eagles bathe and become young again.

There was an old Martin Roland, who lived near a bog a little out of
Gort, who saw them often from his young days, and always towards the
end of his life, though I would hardly call him their friend. He told
me a few months before his death that 'they' would not let him sleep
at night with crying things at him in Irish, and with playing their
pipes. He had asked a friend of his what he should do, and the friend
had told him to buy a flute, and play on it when they began to shout or
to play on their pipes, and maybe they would give up annoying him; and
he did, and they always went out into the field when he began to play.
He showed me the pipe, and blew through it, and made a noise, but he
did not know how to play; and then he showed me where he had pulled his
chimney down, because one of them used to sit up on it and play on the
pipes. A friend of his and mine went to see him a little time ago, for
she heard that 'three of them' had told him he was to die. He said they
had gone away after warning him, and that the children (children they
had 'taken,' I suppose) who used to come with them, and play about the
house with them, had 'gone to some other place,' because 'they found
the house too cold for them, maybe'; and he died a week after he had
said these things.

His neighbours were not certain that he really saw anything in his old
age, but they were all certain that he saw things when he was a young
man. His brother said, 'Old he is, and it's all in his brain the things
he sees. If he was a young man we might believe in him. ' But he was
improvident, and never got on with his brothers. A neighbour said, 'The
poor man, they say they are mostly in his head now, but sure he was a
fine fresh man twenty years ago the night he saw them linked in two
lots, like young slips of girls walking together. It was the night they
took away Fallon's little girl. ' And she told how Fallon's little girl
had met a woman 'with red hair that was as bright as silver,' who took
her away. Another neighbour, who was herself 'clouted over the ear' by
one of them for going into a fort where they were, said, 'I believe
it's mostly in his head they are; and when he stood in the door last
night I said, "The wind does be always in my ears, and the sound of it
never stops," to make him think it was the same with him; but he says,
"I hear them singing and making music all the time, and one of them
is after bringing out a little flute, and it's on it he's playing to
them. " And this I know, that when he pulled down the chimney where he
said the piper used to be sitting and playing, he lifted up stones,
and he an old man, that I could not have lifted when I was young and
strong.