No More Learning

. . She is my desire, O she is my desire:
a woman dearest to me under the sun, a woman who would not pay me heed,
if I were to sit by her side. It is she ruined my heart and left a sigh
for ever in me. ' There is another song that ends, 'The Erne shall be
in strong flood, the hills shall be torn down, and the sea shall have
red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and every mountain valley and
every moor shall be on high, before you shall perish, my little black
rose. ' Nor do the old Irish weigh and measure their hatred. The nurse
of O'Sullivan Bere in the folk song prays that the bed of his betrayer
may be the red hearth-stone of hell for ever. And an Elizabethan Irish
poet cries: 'Three things are waiting for my death. The devil, who is
waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my wealth; the
worms, who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my soul or my
wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care nothing for
my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all three in the one noose. ' Such
love and hatred seek no mortal thing but their own infinity, and such
love and hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea. The lover who
loves so passionately can soon sing to his beloved like the lover in
the poem by 'A. E. ,' 'A vast desire awakes and grows into forgetfulness
of thee. '

When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman famous for much loving,
and a proverb, a friend has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks
of the lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing,
for if your passion is but great enough it leads you to a country where
there are many cloisters.
The hater who hates with too good a heart
soon comes also to hate the idea only; and from this idealism in love
and hatred comes, as I think, a certain power of saying and forgetting
things, especially a power of saying and forgetting things in politics,
which others do not say and forget. The ancient farmers and herdsmen
were full of love and hatred, and made their friends gods, and their
enemies the enemies of gods, and those who keep their tradition are
not less mythological. From this 'mistaking dreams,' which are perhaps
essences, for 'realities' which are perhaps accidents, from this
'passionate, turbulent reaction against the despotism of fact,' comes,
it may be, that melancholy which made all ancient peoples delight in
tales that end in death and parting, as modern peoples delight in
tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient peoples, who
like the old Irish had a nature more lyrical than dramatic, delight
in wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so weighed down by the
emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and by
the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness
of much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief,
that nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended
in death and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men
did not mourn merely because their beloved was married to another, or
because learning was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes
that life might be happy were it different, and is therefore the less
mourning; but because they had been born and must die with their great
thirst unslaked. And so it is that all the august sorrowful persons
of literature, Cassandra and Helen and Deirdre, and Lear and Tristan,
have come out of legends and are indeed but the images of the primitive
imagination mirrored in the little looking-glass of the modern and
classic imagination. This is that 'melancholy a man knows when he is
face to face' with nature, and thinks 'he hears her communing with him
about' the mournfulness of being born and of dying; and how can it do
otherwise than call into his mind 'its exiles, its flights across the
seas,' that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes? No Gaelic poetry is
so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the lamentations of Oisin, old
and miserable, remembering the companions and the loves of his youth,
and his three hundred years in faeryland, and his faery love: all
dreams withering in the winds of time lament in his lamentations: 'The
clouds are long above me this night; last night was a long night to me;
although I find this day long, yesterday was still longer. Every day
that comes to me is long. . . . No one in this great world is like me--a
poor old man dragging stones. The clouds are long above me this night.
I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of Finn,
listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this
night.