With Mr W. B. Yeats in the Woods of Coole

Abstract

Three experiences come into my mind oftenest when I think of our three weeks in Ireland. I think of the earnest faces of the young actors that I saw rehearsing plays of Ireland’s old wars and older dream in a bare hall back of a produce shop in a Dublin suburb; I think of the Arctic hare that ran before me as I climbed Knocknarea, that long green mountain that lies like the keel of a great ship, driven in from the Atlantic, overturned and stranded, between Sligo Bay and Ballisadare Bay; and I think of a walk with a dream-wrapt poet in the Woods of Coole.¹ There were other experiences as new to me as these three: there was the ballad that broke my first sleep in Ireland, a ballad sung at midnight under my window in Queenstown by a street singer who wove into twenty stanzas praise of Ireland’s heroes and England’s foes from Brian Boru to DeWet; there was that dinner at the little inn at Inchegeela, topped off with brown bread and heather-honey from the Kerry mountains; there were the voteens² doing the Stations of the Cross around a holy well at the base of Croagh Patrick preparatory to their long journey up into the clouds that capped the top of that sacred mountain; there was the spectral procession of men and ponies through the mists that clung to the summits of the Meenawn cliffs, mists so deep that the foals that followed hung close to their dams’ heels, and even the collies were afraid to range through the white heather; there were the wild-eyed men and women that, huddled together in silent groups, watched us sharply as we halted in the weird twilight of a sullen August evening in Doagh, that little fishing village all but at the uttermost end of bare Achill, men that still go to sea in skin-covered curraghs³ such as their fathers used in Caesar’s time, women that still stain their skirts garnet-red with the sea-stain that their mothers used when they toiled as slaves in the raths of the sea-rovers out of far Lochlin; there was the far vision of the past that opened before me as I saw the stone circle and trilithons of Leacht-Con-mic-Ruis under a stormy black-gold sky, while the rabbits scurried into holes sunk in earth once red with the blood of sacrifice, while the lapwings called plaintively as they lifted and beat their way across the ruins of a great stone fort and on towards Lough Gill and the storied Mountains of the Ox to the southward;-these and many other things I shall remember, but longer than these the earnest faces of the young actors in the half-light, the white hare among the purple ling,⁴ and longest the poet telling me of the other world the peasants know and chanting his own visionary songs.

Lippincott’s Magazine (Philadelphia) LXXIII (Apr. 1904) 484–7.