The Celtic Twilight

Dust Hath Closed Helen's Eye

I

I have been lately to a little group of houses, not many enough to be

called a village, in the barony of Kiltartan in County Galway, whose

name, Ballylee, is known through all the west of Ireland. 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 about Biddy Early, a wise woman

that lived in Clare some years ago, and about her saying, "There is a

cure for all evil between the two mill-wheels of Ballylee," and to find

out from him or another whether she meant the moss between the running

waters or some other herb. 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, "That is the little old foundation of the house, but the most of

it is taken for building walls, and the goats have ate those bushes

that are growing over it till they've got cranky, and they won't grow

any more. 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. She had five handsome brothers, but all are gone

now!" I talked to him about a poem in Irish, Raftery, a famous poet,

made about her, and how it said, "there is a strong cellar in

Ballylee." He said the strong cellar was the great hole where the river

sank underground, and he brought me to a deep pool, where an otter

hurried away under a grey boulder, and told me that many fish came up

out of the dark water at early morning "to taste the fresh water coming

down from the hills."

I first heard of the poem from an old woman who fives about two miles

further up the river, and who remembers Raftery and Mary Hynes. She

says, "I never saw anybody so handsome as she was, and I never will

till I die," and that he was nearly blind, and had "no way of living

but to go round and to mark some house to go to, and then all the

neighbours would gather to hear. If you treated him well he'd praise

you, but if you did not, he'd fault you in Irish. He was the greatest

poet in Ireland, and he'd make a song about that bush if he chanced to

stand under it. There was a bush he stood under from the rain, and he

made verses praising it, and then when the water came through he made

verses dispraising it." She sang the poem to a friend and to myself in

Irish, and every word was audible and expressive, as the words in a

song were always, as I think, before music grew too proud to be the

garment of words, flowing and changing with the flowing and changing of

their energies. The poem is not as natural as the best Irish poetry of

the last century, for the thoughts are arranged in a too obviously

traditional form, so the old poor half-blind man who made it has to

speak as if he were a rich farmer offering the best of everything to

the woman he loves, but it has naive and tender phrases. The friend

that was with me has made some of the translation, but some of it has

been made by the country people themselves. I think it has more of the

simplicity of the Irish verses than one finds in most translations.

Those who are much admired are, it is held, taken by the Sidhe, who

can use ungoverned feeling for their own ends, so that a father, as an

old herb doctor told me once, may give his child into their hands, or a

husband his wife. The admired and desired are only safe if one says

"God bless them" when one's eyes are upon them. The old woman that sang

the song thinks, too, that Mary Hynes was "taken," as the phrase is,

"for they have taken many that are not handsome, and why would they not

take her? And people came from all parts to look at her, and maybe

there were some that did not say 'God bless her.'" An old man who lives

by the sea at Duras has as little doubt that she was taken, "for there

are some living yet can remember her coming to the pattern[FN#3] there

beyond, and she was said to be the handsomest girl in Ireland." She

died young because the gods loved her, for the Sidhe are the gods, and

it may be that the old saying, which we forget to understand literally,

meant her manner of death in old times. 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.

[FN#3] A "pattern," or "patron," is a festival in honour of a saint.

The poet who helped her to so much fame has himself a great fame

throughout the west of Ireland. Some think that Raftery was half blind,

and say, "I saw Raftery, a dark man, but he had sight enough to see

her," or the like, but some think he was wholly blind, as he may have

been at the end of his life. Fable makes all things perfect in their

kind, and her blind people must never look on the world and the sun. I

asked a man I met one day, when I was looking for a pool na mna Sidhe

where women of faery have been seen, bow Raftery could have admired

Mary Hynes so much f he had been altogether blind? He said, "I think

Raftery was altogether blind, but those that are blind have a way of

seeing things, and have the power to know more, and to feel more, and

to do more, and to guess more than those that have their sight, and a

certain wit and a certain wisdom is given to them." Everybody, indeed,

will tell you that he was very wise, for was he not only blind but a

poet? The weaver whose words about Mary Hynes I have already given,

says, "His poetry was the gift of the Almighty, for there are three

things that are the gift of the Almighty--poetry and dancing and

principles. That is why in the old times an ignorant man coming down

from the hillside would be better behaved and have better learning than

a man with education you'd meet now, for they got it from God"; and a

man at Coole says, "When he put his finger to one part of his head,

everything would come to him as if it was written in a book"; and an

old pensioner at Kiltartan says, "He was standing under a bush one

time, and he talked to it, and it answered him back in Irish. Some say

it was the bush that spoke, but it must have been an enchanted voice in

it, and it gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world. The

bush withered up afterwards, and it is to be seen on the roadside now

between this and Rahasine." There is a poem of his about a bush, which

I have never seen, and it may have come out of the cauldron of fable in

this shape.

A friend of mine met a man once who had been with him when he died,

but the people say that he died alone, and one Maurteen Gillane told

Dr. Hyde that all night long a light was seen streaming up to heaven

from the roof of the house where he lay, and "that was the angels who

were with him"; and all night long there was a great light in the

hovel, "and that was the angels who were waking him. They gave that

honour to him because he was so good a poet, and sang such religious

songs." It may be that in a few years Fable, who changes mortalities to

immortalities in her cauldron, will have changed Mary Hynes and Raftery

to perfect symbols of the sorrow of beauty and of the magnificence and

penury of dreams.

1900.

II

When I was in a northern town awhile ago, I had a long talk with a man

who had lived in a neighbouring country district when he was a boy. He

told me that when a very beautiful girl was born in a family that had

not been noted for good looks, her beauty was thought to have come from

the Sidhe, and to bring misfortune with it. He went over the names of

several beautiful girls that he had known, and said that beauty had

never brought happiness to anybody. It was a thing, he said, to be

proud of and afraid of. I wish I had written out his words at the time,

for they were more picturesque than my memory of them.

1902.