1、1THE CELTIC TWILIGHTWilliam Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Nobel Prize winning Irish dramatist, author and poet wrote The Celtic Twilight (1893);Paddy Flynn is dead;.He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to peo
2、ple his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination.Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the hea
3、rt long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.ch. 1, “A Teller of Tales”.As one of the founders of the Irish Literary Revival, along with J. M. Synge (1871-1909) whom he met in 1896, Sean OCasey (1880-1964), and Padraig (Padr
4、aic) Colum (1881-1972) Yeats works draw heavily on Irish mythology and history. He never fully embraced his Protestant past nor joined the majority of Irelands Roman Catholics but he devoted much of his life to study in myriad other subjects including theosophy, mysticism, spiritualism, and the Kabb
5、alah. At a young age he was reading Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Donne and the works of William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, recommended by his father and inspiration for his own creativity, but fellow Irish poets Standish James OGrady (1846-1928) and Sir William Ferguson (1818-1886
6、) were perhaps the most influential. A devoted patriot, Yeats found his voice to speak out against the harsh Nationalist policies of the time. His early dramatic works convey his respect for Irish legend and fascination with the occult, while his later plays take on a more poetical and experimental
7、aspect: Japanese Noh plays and modernism being major influences. While his works explore the greater themes of life in contrast to art, and finding beauty in the mundane, he also produced many works of an intimate quality especially in his later years as father and aging man of letters. We make out
8、of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry“Anima Hominis,” Essays (1924). Yeats spent most of his life between Sligo, Dublin, and London, but his profound influence to future poets and playwrights and theatre, music and film can be seen the world over.2TITLE PAGE
9、Time drops in decayLike a candle burnt out.And the mountains and woodsHave their day, have their day;But, kindly old routOf the fire-born moods,You pass not away.THE hosting OF THE SIDHEThe host is riding from Knocknarea,And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;Caolte tossing his burning hair,And Niamh
10、calling, “Away, come away;Empty your heart of its mortal dream.The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,Our arms are waving, our lips are apart,And if any gaze on our rushing band,We come between him and the deed
11、of his hand,We come between him and the hope of his heart.”The host is rushing twixt night and day;And where is there hope or deed as fair?Caolte tossing his burning hair,And Niamh calling, “Away, come away.”THIS BOOKII have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful,
12、pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen, and, except by way of commentary,
13、 nothing that I have merely imagined.I have, however, been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from those of the peasantry, but have rather let my men and women, dhouls and faeries, go their way unoffended or defended by any argument of mine.The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life
14、, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.3Hope and Memory have o
15、ne daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little.1893.III have added a few more chapters in the manner of the old o
16、nes, and would have added others, but one loses, as one grows older, something of the lightness of ones dreams; one begins to take life up in both hands, and to care more for the fruit than the flower, and that is no great loss per haps. In these new chapters, as in the old ones, I have invented not
17、hing but my comments and one or two deceitful sentences that may keep some poor story-tellers commerce with the devil and his angels, or the like, from being known among his neighbours. I shall publish in a little while a big book about the commonwealth of faery, and shall try to make it systematica
18、l and learned enough to buy pardon for this handful of dreams.1902.W. B. YEATS.A TELLER OF TALESMany of the tales in this book were told me by one Paddy Flynn, a little bright-eyed old man, who lived in a leaky and one-roomed cabin in the village of Ballisodare, which is, he was wont to say, “the mo
19、st gentle”whereby he meant faery“place in the whole of County Sligo.” Others hold it, however, but second to Drumcliff and Drumahair. The first time I saw him he was cooking mushrooms for himself; the next time he was asleep under a hedge, smiling in his sleep. He was indeed always cheerful, though
20、I thought I could see in his eyes (swift as the eyes of a rabbit, when they peered out of their wrinkled holes) a melancholy which was well-nigh a portion of their joy; the visionary melancholy of purely instinctive natures and of all animals.And yet there was much in his life to depress him, for in
21、 the triple solitude of age, eccentricity, and deafness, he went about much pestered by children. It was for this very reason perhaps that he ever recommended mirth and hopefulness. He was fond, for instance, of telling how Collumcille cheered up his mother. “How are you to-day, mother?” said the sa
22、int. “Worse,” replied the mother. “May you be worse to-morrow,” said the saint. The next day Collumcille came again, and exactly the same conversation took place, but the third day the mother said, “Better, thank God.” And the saint replied, “May you be better to-morrow.” He was fond too of telling
23、how the Judge smiles at the last day alike when he rewards the good and condemns the lost to unceasing flames. He had many strange sights to keep him cheerful or to make him sad. I asked him had he ever seen the faeries, and got the reply, “Am I not annoyed with them?” I asked too if he had ever see
24、n the banshee. “I have seen it,” he said, “down there by the water, batting the river with its hands.”I have copied this account of Paddy Flynn, with a few verbal alterations, from a note-book which I almost filled with his tales and sayings, shortly after seeing him. I look now at the 4note-book re
25、gretfully, for the blank pages at the end will never be filled up. Paddy Flynn is dead; a friend of mine gave him a large bottle of whiskey, and though a sober man at most times, the sight of so much liquor filled him with a great enthusiasm, and he lived upon it for some days and then died. His bod
26、y, worn out with old age and hard times, could not bear the drink as in his young days. He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less
27、 ample circumstance than did Homer himself. Perhaps the Gaelic people shall by his like bring back again the ancient simplicity and amplitude of imagination. What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgato
28、ry, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of
29、 men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.BELIEF AND UNBELIEFThere are some doubters even in the western villages. One wo
30、man told me last Christmas that she did not believe either in hell or in ghosts. Hell she thought was merely an invention got up by the priest to keep people good; and ghosts would not be permitted, she held, to go “trapsin about the earth” at their own free will; “but there are faeries,” she added,
31、 “and little leprechauns, and water-horses, and fallen angels.” I have met also a man with a mohawk Indian tattooed upon his arm, who held exactly similar beliefs and unbeliefs. No matter what one doubts one never doubts the faeries, for, as the man with the mohawk Indian on his arm said to me, “the
32、y stand to reason.” Even the official mind does not escape this faith.A little girl who was at service in the village of Grange, close under the seaward slopes of Ben Bulben, suddenly disappeared one night about three years ago. There was at once great excitement in the neighbourhood, because it was
33、 rumoured that the faeries had taken her. A villager was said to have long struggled to hold her from them, but at last they prevailed, and he found nothing in his hands but a broomstick. The local constable was applied to, and he at once instituted a house-to-house search, and at the same time advi
34、sed the people to burn all the bucalauns (ragweed) on the field she vanished from, because bucalauns are sacred to the faeries. They spent the whole night burning them, the constable repeating spells the while. In the morning the little girl was found, the story goes, wandering in the field. She sai
35、d the faeries had taken her away a great distance, riding on a faery horse. At last she saw a big river, and the man who had tried to keep her from being carried off was drifting down itsuch are the topsy-turvydoms of faery glamourin a cockleshell. On the way her companions had mentioned the names o
36、f several people who were about to die shortly in the village.Perhaps the constable was right. It is better doubtless to believe much unreason and a little truth than to deny for denials sake truth and unreason alike, for when we do this we 5have not even a rush candle to guide our steps, not even a
37、 poor sowlth to dance before us on the marsh, and must needs fumble our way into the great emptiness where dwell the mis-shapen dhouls. And after all, can we come to so great evil if we keep a little fire on our hearths and in our souls, and welcome with open hand whatever of excellent come to warm
38、itself, whether it be man or phantom, and do not say too fiercely, even to the dhouls themselves, “Be ye gone”? When all is said and done, how do we not know but that our own unreason may be better than anothers truth? for it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild
39、 bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into the world again, wild bees, wild bees!MORTAL HELPOne hears in the old poems of men taken away to help the gods in a battle, and Cuchullan won the goddess Fand for a while, by helping her married sister and her sisters husband to ove
40、rthrow another nation of the Land of Promise. I have been told, too, that the people of faery cannot even play at hurley unless they have on either side some mortal, whose body, or whatever has been put in its place, as the story-teller would say, is asleep at Home. Without mortal help they are shad
41、owy and cannot even strike the balls. One day I was walking over some marshy land in Galway with a friend when we found an old, hard-featured man digging a ditch. My friend had heard that this man had seen a wonderful sight of some kind, and at last we got the story out of him. When he was a boy he
42、was working one day with about thirty men and women and boys. They were beyond Tuam and not far from Knock-na-gur. Presently they saw, all thirty of them, and at a distance of about half-a-mile, some hundred and fifty of the people of faery. There were two of them, he said, in dark clothes like peop
43、le of our own time, who stood about a hundred yards from one another, but the others wore clothes of all colours, “bracket” or chequered, and some with red waistcoats.He could not see what they were doing, but all might have been playing hurley, for “they looked as if it was that.” Sometimes they wo
44、uld vanish, and then he would almost swear they came back out of the bodies of the two men in dark clothes. These two men were of the size of living men, but the others were small. He saw them for about half-an-hour, and then the old man he and those about him were working for took up a whip and sai
45、d, “Get on, get on, or we will have no work done!” I asked if he saw the faeries too, “Oh, yes, but he did not want work he was paying wages for to be neglected.” He made every body work so hard that nobody saw what happened to the faeries.1902.A VISIONARYA young man came to see me at my lodgings th
46、e other night, and began to talk of the making of the earth and the heavens and much else. I questioned him about his life and his doings. He had written many poems and painted many mystical designs since we met last, but latterly had neither written nor painted, for his whole heart was set upon mak
47、ing his mind strong, vigorous, and calm, and the emotional life of the artist was bad for him, he feared. He recited his poems readily, however. He had them all in his memory. Some 6indeed had never been written down. They, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds, seemed to me the ver
48、y inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never seen. Suddenly it seemed to me that he was peering about him a little eagerly. “Do you see anything, X-?” I said. “A shining, winged woman, covered by her long hair, is standing near the doorway,” he answ
49、ered, or some such words. “Is it the influence of some living person who thinks of us, and whose thoughts appear to us in that symbolic form?” I said; for I am well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion of their speech. “No,” he replied; “for if it were the thoughts of a person who is alive I should feel the living influence in my living body, and my heart would beat and my breath would fail. It is a spirit. It is some one who is dead or who has never lived.” I wrote this sentence long ago. This sadness now seems to me a part of all peo
