The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore Book

The Celtic Twilight (1902) is a book of encounters. The encounters Yeats writes of are the meetings between the Irish people and the faeries, but equally interesting are those other encounters: the meetings between the young Protestant poet and the Catholic Irish who tell him their ancient stories so that he can write them down in this book.

Although Yeats' poetry'even the early, overly precious stuff'is always filled with beauties to admire, his prose can sometimes be pedantic and rather dry. In Celtic Twilight, though, Yeats' every utterance is informed by the richness of Irish speech, and the result is a balanced, lively prose, filled with vivid images and revealing asides.

Two things struck me during my reading of this book. The first was how much I love the Irish conception of the faeries, for they are neither minor demons like the Scots variety nor good little souls like the treacly British type. No, Irish faeries are neither malevolent nor particularly merciful. Instead, they are mischievous to the core, with unquenchable appetites for confusion. But they may just as easily do you a good turn as a bad one. It all depends on the nature of the performance.

Secondly, I was struck with the emotional intensity in some of the tales of beautiful women in the book. Yeats met Maude Gonne in 1889'thirteen years before the publication of Celtic Twilight. It was then, as Yeats has said, that "the troubling of my life began," and you can see the signs of the continual troubling here:
There is the old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three times last year to talk to the miller . . . . I have been there this summer, and I shall be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world.

An old man brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long, narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he said, '. . . . They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was like dribbled snow' - he meant driven snow, perhaps, - 'and she had blushes in her cheeks." . . . .

An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the faeries) at night, says, 'Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she'd be at every hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn' t have any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night, sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before the famine.' . . . .

There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge hills, a vast desolate place . . . . She says, 'The sun and the moon never shone on anybody so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she had two little blushes on her cheeks.' . . . .

But a man by the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says, 'Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness. And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made about them will ever live long.' She died young because the gods loved her . . . .

These poor countrymen and countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of things, than are our men of learning. She 'had seen too much of the world' ; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
If that "old square castle, Ballylee" sounds familiar, it should. Yeats bought it fourteen years after Celtic Twilight was published, and lived their during the summer. (They call it "Yeat's Tower" now.)

Even if Yeat couldn't be close to the beautiful Maud Gonne, he could be close to the ghost of Mary Hynes instead.