Poems for St. Patrick's Day

In The Sewanee Review, Oct. 1920, Vol. 28, Norreys Jephson O’Connor wrote: “Ireland is the country of Fairies. The reason for this is not mere popular superstition, but because in the Gaelic literature which is the inheritance of the Irish race Fairies and Fairyland play an important part…In Ireland the Fairies have never been forgotten: Brian Merriman, the last Gaelic poet of prominence, speaks of them as the treasure of his country in time of trouble, and Patrick MacGill, the Donegal poet, expressed the same idea when, amid the terrors of the battlefield, he wrote

 'If we forget the Fairies,
 And tread upon their rings,
 God will perchance forget us,
 And think of other things.
 
When we forget you, Fairies,
 Who guard our spirits' light:
 God will forget the morrow,
 And Day forget the Night.'

The Irish imagination is indeed permeated with myths and folklore and reading these stories and poems about fairies, giants and heroes is no frivolous pastime. Becoming steeped in the legends and myths can forge a bulwark in the mind for preserving Irish culture, which is an essential intelligence for the growth of the Irish imagination in this contemporary world.

As a child growing up in the west of Ireland in Sligo, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) listened to and read stories of Irish fairies. In 1886, he published a book, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry. In this book, he wanted to showcase Irish Fairy stories that “live and rule in the imaginations of the innumerable Irish men and women, and not merely in remote places, but close even to big cities.” Yeats’s interest in Irish folklore appears in poems throughout his career but is particularly prominent in his earlier poetry. One of his most popular early poems that incorporates Irish Fairies is The Stolen Child.

       The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

The Stolen Child, one of Yeats’s early poems written in 1886, highlights a tension between a romantic idealism and secular modernity, but with an interesting twist. The plot is straightforward. The faeries offer the child a chance in the poem’s refrain to “come away” with them:

For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

And their “call” is quite alluring. The imagery of “Where” they will take the child depicts a setting that ripples with serenity and beauty. There are the “flapping herons” in stanza 1, “the wave of moonlight glosses,” in stanza 2 and “the wandering water gushes / from the hills above Glen-Car, / In pools among the rushes” in stanza 3. The faeries offer companionship, taking the child “hand in hand,” “Mingling Hands and mingling glances.” The kind of escape the faeries offer the child call to mind the escape Keats seeks in Ode to a Nightingale:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
         What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
         Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
         Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
                Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

Such serenity and such an escape could lull the reader into desiring to join the child in escaping. But then, the reader would miss what ripples through Yeats’s verse. The land of the faeries may churn with “frothy bubbles” and may have “Wandering water [that] gushes…/ In pools,” but the poem also intimates something sinister. That sinister something arrives in the last stanza. The child is beguiled into joining the faeries and as he does. he moves with “solemn” eyes. He escapes the painful world of human existence but loses the sound of “calves on the warm hillside” and the domestic “peace” that “the kettle on the hob sing[s].” The poem’s final refrain shifts from enticement to triumphant.

Another poem based on Irish folklore is Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun. 

In Irish myth, Aengus is the God of youth, beauty, love and poetry, and on the symbolic level, it could be said that his quest represents Yeats’s lifelong passion for Maude Gonne, who of course would be the “glimmering girl.” In his Autobiography, Yeats writes of her reaction to first meeting her: “Her complexion was luminous like that of the apple blossom through which the light falls, and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such blossoms in the window."

The Stolen Child and The Song of Wandering Aengus bring to our eyes the rich, evocative folklore of Ireland. Reading Yeats’s masterful poetic rendering of these “wee” stories and a pint or two of Guinness for those who are so inclined, will uplift our spirits this St. Patrick’s Day.