SOURCE: "The Celtic Element in Literature," in Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth, edited by Robert Welch, Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 189-200.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1898, Yeats discusses the importance of Celtic myth and folklore to modern European literature.]

Ernest Renan¹ described what he held to be Celtic characteristics in The Poetry of the Celtic Races. 'No race communed so intimately as the Celtic race with the lower creation, or believed it to have so big a share of moral life.' The Celtic race had 'a realistic naturalism', 'a love of nature for herself, a vivid feeling for her magic, commingled with the melancholy a man knows when he is face to face with her, and thinks he hears her communing with him about his origin and his destiny'. 'It has worn itself out in mistaking dreams for realities', and 'compared with the classical imagination the Celtic imagination is indeed the infinite contrasted with the finite'. 'Its history is one long lament, it still recalls its exiles, its flights across the seas.' 'If at times it seems to be cheerful, its tear is not slow to glisten behind the smile. Its songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing to equal the delightful sadness of its national melodies.' Matthew Arnold,² in The Study of Celtic Literature, has accepted this passion for nature, this imaginativeness, this melancholy, as Celtic characteristics, but has described them more elaborately. The Celtic passion for nature comes almost more from a sense of her 'mystery' than of her 'beauty', and it adds 'charm and magic' to nature, and the Celtic imaginativeness and melancholy are alike 'a passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact'. The Celt is not melancholy, as Faust or Werther³ are melancholy, from 'a perfectly definitive motive', but because of something about him 'unaccountable, defiant and titanic'. How well one knows these sentences, and how well one knows the passages of prose and verse which he uses to prove that wherever English literature has the qualities these sentences describe, it has them from a Celtic source. Though I do not think any of us who write about Celtic things have built any argument upon them, it is well to consider them a little, and see where they are helpful and where they are hurtful. If we do not, we may go mad some day, and the enemy of Celtic things root up our rose garden and plant a cabbage garden instead.

I am going to make a claim for the Celt, but I am not going to make quite the same claim that Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold made. Matthew Arnold, and still more Ernest Renan, wrote before the activity in the study of folk-lore and of folk literature of our own day had begun to give us so many new ideas about old things. When we talk to-day about the delight in nature, about the imaginativeness, about the melancholy of the Celt, we cannot help thinking of the delight in nature, of the imaginativeness, of the melancholy of the makers of the Icelandic Eddas, and of the Kalavala,⁴ and of many other folk literatures, and we soon grow persuaded that much that Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan thought wholly or almost wholly Celtic is of the substance of the minds of the ancient farmers and herdsmen. One comes to think of the Celt as an ancient farmer or herdsman, who sits bowed with the dreams of his unnumbered years, in the gates of the rich races, talking of forgotten things. Is the Celt's feeling for nature, and for the 'lower creation', one of those forgotten things? Because we have come to associate the ancient beliefs about nature with 'savage customs' and with books written by men of science, we have almost forgotten that they are still worth dreaming about and talking about. It is only when we describe them in some language, which is not the language of science, that we discover they are beautiful.

Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows of the woods; and deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, not less divine and changeable: they saw in the rainbow the still bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening to their rest; while they dreamed of so great a mystery in little things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough, enough to trouble far-off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness. All old literatures are full of this way of looking at things, and all the poets of races, who have not lost this way of looking at things, could have said of themselves, as the poet of the Kalavala said of himself, 'I have learned my songs from the music of many birds, and from the music of many waters.' When a mother in the Kalavala weeps for a daughter, who was drowned flying from an old suitor, she weeps so greatly that her tears become three rivers, and cast up three rocks, on which grow three birch trees, where three cuckoos sit and sing, the one 'love, love', the one 'suitor, suitor', the one 'consolation, consolation'. And the makers of the sagas made the squirrel run up and down the sacred ash tree carrying words of hatred from the eagle to the worm, and from the worm to the eagle; although they had less of the old way than the makers of the Kalavala, for they lived in a more crowded and complicated world, and were learning the abstract meditation which lures men from visible beauty, and were unlearning, it may be, the impassioned meditation which brings men beyond the edge of trance and makes trees, and beasts, and dead things talk with human voices.

The Celts, though they had less of the old way than the makers of the Kalavala, had more of it than the makers of the sagas, and it is this that distinguishes the examples Matthew Arnold quotes of the Celts' 'natural magic', of their sense of 'the mystery' more than of 'the beauty' of nature. When Matthew Arnold thought he was criticising the Celts, he was really criticising the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature and the troubled ecstasy before her, the belief that all beautiful places are haunted, which it brought into men's minds. The ancient religion is in that marvellous passage from the Mabinogion⁵ about the making of 'Flower Aspect'. Gwydion and Math made her 'by charms and illusions' 'out of flowers'. 'They took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw; and they baptized her, and called her Flower Aspect'; and one finds it in the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful, they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame: 'They saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf.' And one finds it very certainly in the quotations he makes from English poets to prove a Celtic influence in English poetry; in Keats's 'magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas in faerylands forlorn'; in his 'moving waters at their priest-like task of pure oblations round earth's human shore';⁶ in Shakespeare's 'floor of heaven', 'inlaid with patens of bright gold'; and in his Dido standing 'on the wild sea banks', 'a willow in her hand', and waving it in the ritual of the old worship of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave 'her love to come again to Carthage'.⁷ And his other examples have the delight and wonder of devout worshippers among the haunts of their divinities. Is there not such delight and wonder in the description of Olwen in the Mabinogion: 'More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony amidst the spray of the meadow fountains.' And is there not such delight and wonder in—

Meet we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margent of the sea?⁸

If men had never dreamed that maidens could be made out of flowers, or rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage could have been written. Certainly, the descriptions of nature made in what Matthew Arnold calls 'the faithful way', or in what he calls 'the Greek way', would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or paved fountains were nothing but meadow fountains and paved fountains.⁹ When Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and brightness to nature:

What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain built with quiet citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn;¹⁰

When Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way:

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows;¹¹

When Virgil wrote in the Greek way:

Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,

and

Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens
Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis
 anethi;¹²

they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant.

Men who lived in a world where anything might flow and change, and become any other thing; and among great gods whose passions were in the flaming sunset, and in the thunder and the thundershower, had not our thoughts of weight and measure. They worshipped nature and the abundance of nature, and had always, as it seems, for a supreme ritual that tumultuous dance among the hills or in the depths of the woods, where unearthly ecstasy fell upon the dancers, until they seemed the gods or the god-like beasts, and felt their souls overtopping the moon; and, as some think, imagined for the first time in the world the blessed country of the gods and of the happy dead. They had imaginative passions because they did not live within our own straight limits, and were nearer to ancient chaos, every man's desire, and had immortal models about them. The hare that ran by among the dew might have sat upon his haunches when the first man was made, and the poor bunch of rushes under their feet might have been a goddess laughing among the stars; and with but a little magic, a little waving of the hands, a little murmuring of the lips, they too could become a hare or a bunch of rushes, and know immortal love and immortal hatred.

All folk literature, and all literature that keeps the folk tradition, delights in unbounded and immortal things. The Kalavala delights in the seven hundred years that Luonaton wanders in the depths of the sea with Wainamoinen in her womb, and the Mahomedan king in the Song of Roland,¹³ pondering upon the greatness of Charlemaine, repeats over and over, 'He is three hundred years old, when will he weary of war?' Cuchulain in the Irish folk tale had the passion of victory, and he overcame all men, and died warring upon the waves, because they alone had the strength to overcome him; and Caolte, in his sorrow for his companions, dead upon the plain of Gabra, stormed the house of the Gods at Asseroe, and drove them out and lives there in their stead. The lover in the Irish folk song bids his beloved come with him into the woods, and see the salmon leap in the rivers, and hear the cuckoo sing, because death will never find them in the heart of the woods.¹⁴ Oisin, new come from his three hundred years of faeryland, and of the love that is in faeryland, bids St Patrick cease his prayers a while and listen to the blackbird, because it is the blackbird of Darrycarn that Fionn brought from Norway, three hundred years before, and set its nest upon the oak tree with his own hands.¹⁵ Surely if one goes far enough into the woods, there one will find all that one is seeking? Who knows how many centuries the birds of the woods have been singing?

All folk literature has indeed a passion whose like is not in modern literature and music and art, except where it has come by some straight or crooked way out of ancient times. Love was held to be a fatal sickness in ancient Ireland, and there is a love-poem in The Songs of Connacht that is like a death cry: 'My love, O she is my love, the woman who is most for destroying me, dearer is she for making me ill than the woman who would be for making me well. She is my treasure, O she is my treasure, the woman of the grey eyes … a woman who would not lay a hand under my head … She is my love, O she is my love, the woman who left no strength in me; a woman who would not breathe a sigh after me, a woman who would not raise a stone at my tomb … She is my secret love, O she is my secret love. A woman who tells me nothing … a woman who does not remember me to be out … She is my choice, O she is my choice, the woman who would not look back at me, the woman who would not make peace with me … She is my desire, O she is my desire: a woman dearest to me under the sun, a woman who would not pay me heed, if I were to sit by her side. It is she ruined my heart and left a sigh for ever in me.'¹⁶ There is another song that ends, 'The Erne shall be in strong flood, the hills shall be torn down, and the sea shall have red waves, and blood shall be spilled, and every mountain valley and every moor shall be on high, before you shall perish, my little black rose.'¹⁷ Nor does the Celt weigh and measure his hatred. The nurse of O'Sullivan Bere in the folk song prays that the bed of his betrayer may be the red hearthstone of hell for ever.¹⁸ And an Elizabethan Irish poet cries (I quote him from memory, but I can hardly have forgotten the bitterest curse in literature): 'Three things are waiting for my death. The devil, who is waiting for my soul and cares nothing for my body or my wealth; the worms, who are waiting for my body but care nothing for my soul or my wealth; my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care nothing for my body or my soul. O Christ, hang all three in the one noose.¹⁹ Such love and hatred seek no mortal thing but their own infinity, and such love and hatred soon become love and hatred of the idea. The lover who loves so passionately can soon sing to his beloved like the lover in the poem by AE, an exquisite Irish poet of our days, 'A vast desire awakes and grows into forgetfulness of thee.'²⁰ When an early Irish poet calls the Irishman famous for much loving and a proverb, a friend²¹ has heard in the Highlands of Scotland, talks of the lovelessness of the Irishman, they may say but the same thing, for if your passion is but great enough it leads you to a country where there are many cloisters. The hater who hates with too good a heart soon comes also to hate the idea only; and from this idealism in love and hatred comes, as I think, a certain power of saying and forgetting things, especially a power of saying and forgetting things in politics, which others do not say and forget. The ancient farmers and herdsmen were full of love and hatred, and made their friends gods, and their enemies the enemies of gods, and those who keep their tradition are not less mythological. From this 'mistaking dreams', which are perhaps essences, for 'realities' which are perhaps accidents, from this 'passionate, turbulent reaction against the despotism of fact', comes, it may be, that melancholy which made all ancient peoples delight in tales that end in death and parting, as modern peoples delight in tales that end in marriage bells; and made all ancient peoples who like the Celts had a nature more lyrical than dramatic, delight in wild and beautiful lamentations. Life was so weighed down by the emptiness of the great forests and by the mystery of all things, and by the greatness of its own desires, and, as I think, by the loneliness of much beauty; and seemed so little and so fragile and so brief, that nothing could be more sweet in the memory than a tale that ended in death and parting, and than a wild and beautiful lamentation. Men did not mourn because their beloved was married to another, or because learning was bitter in the mouth, for such mourning believes that life might be happy were it different, and is therefore the less mourning; but because they had been born and must die with their great thirst unslaked. And so it is that all the august sorrowful persons of literature, Cassandra and Helen and Brunhilda, and Lear and Tristram, have come out of legends and are indeed but the images of the primitive imagination mirrored in the little looking-glass of the modern and classic imagination. This is that 'melancholy a man knows when he is face to face' with nature, and thinks 'he hears her communing with him about' the mournfulness of being born and of dying; and how can it do otherwise than call into his mind 'its exiles, its flights across the seas', that it may stir the ever-smouldering ashes?²² No Gaelic poetry is so popular in Gaelic-speaking places as the lamentations of Oisin, old and miserable, remembering the companions and the loves of his youth, and his three hundred years in faery land, and faery love: all dreams withering in the winds of time lament in his lamentations: 'The clouds are long above me this night; last night was a long night to me; although I find this day long, yesterday was still longer. Every day that comes to me is long … No one in this great world is like me—a poor old man dragging stones. The clouds are long above me this night. I am the last man of the Fianna, the great Oisin, the son of Fionn, listening to the sound of bells. The clouds are long above me this night.'²³ Almost more beautiful is the lamentation of Leyrach Hen, which Matthew Arnold quotes as a type of the Celtic melancholy, and which I prefer to quote as a type of the primitive melancholy: 'O my crutch, is it not autumn when the fern is red and the water flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love? … Behold, old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head and my teeth, to my eyes which women loved. The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together—coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow. I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me, the couch of honour shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch. How evil was the lot allotted to Leyrach, the night he was brought forth! Sorrows without end and no deliverance from his burden.'²⁴ There are an Oisin and a Leyrach Hen still in the hearts of the Irish peasantry. 'The same man,' writes Dr Hyde in the beautiful prose which he first writes in Gaelic, 'who will to-day be dancing, sporting, drinking, and shouting, will be soliloquising by himself to-morrow, heavy and sick and sad in his own lonely little hut, making a croon over departed hopes, lost life, the vanity of this world, and the coming of death.'²⁵

Matthew Arnold asks how much of the Celt must one imagine in the ideal man of genius. I prefer to say, how much of the ancient hunters and fishers and of the ecstatic dancers among hills and woods must one imagine in the ideal man of genius. Certainly a thirst for unbounded emotion and a wild melancholy are troublesome things in the world, and do not make its life more easy or orderly, but it may be the arts are founded on the life beyond the world, and that they must cry in the ears of our penury until the world has been consumed and become a vision. Certainly, as Samuel Palmer wrote, 'Excess is the vivifying spirit of the finest art, and we must always seek to make excess more abundantly excessive.'²⁶ Matthew Arnold has said that if he were asked 'where English got its turn for melancholy and its turn for natural magic,' he 'would answer with little doubt that it got much of its melancholy from a Celtic source, with no doubt at all that from a Celtic source is got nearly all its natural magic.' I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstance, or passionless phantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times,²⁷ and that of all the fountains of the passions and beliefs of ancient times in Europe, the Slavonic, the Finnish, the Scandinavian, and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again brought 'the vivifying spirit' 'of excess' into the arts of Europe. Ernest Renan has told how the visions of purgatory seen by pilgrims to Lough Derg—once visions of the pagan underworld, as the hollow tree that bore the pilgrim to the holy island was alone enough to prove—gave European thought new symbols of a more abundant penitence; and had so great an influence that he has written, 'It cannot be doubted for a moment that to the number of poetical themes Europe owes to the genius of the Celt is to be added the framework of the divine comedy.' A little later the legends of Arthur and his table, and of the Holy Grail, once the cauldron of the Irish god, the Dagda,²⁸ changed the literature of Europe, and it may be changed, as it were, the very roots of man's emotions by their influence on the spirit of chivalry and on the spirit of romance; and later still Shakespeare found his Puck and his Mab, and one knows not how much else of his faery kingdom, in Celtic legend; and Spenser, living in Celtic Ireland where the faeries were part of men's daily lives, set the faery kingdom over all the kingdoms of romance; while at the beginning of our own day Sir Walter Scott gave Highland legends and Highland excitability so great a mastery over all romance that they seem romance herself.²⁹ In our own time Scandinavian tradition, thanks to the imagination of Richard Wagner³⁰ and of William Morris, whose Sigurd the Volsung is surely the most epical of modern poems, and of the earlier and, as I think, greater Dr Ibsen, has created a new romance, and through the imagination of Richard Wagner, become the most passionate element in the arts of the modern world. There is indeed but one other element that is almost as passionate, the still unfaded legends of Arthur and of the Holy Grail; and now a new fountain of legends, and, as scholars have said, a more abundant fountain than any in Europe, is being opened, the great fountain of Gaelic legends; the tale of Deirdre,³¹ who alone among the women who have set men mad was at once the white flame and the red flame, wisdom and loveliness; the tale of the Sons of Turran,³² with its unintelligible mysteries, an old Grail Quest as I think; the tale of the four children changed into four swans, and lamenting over many waters;³³ the tale of the love of Cuchulain for an immortal goddess,³⁴ and his coming home to a mortal woman in the end; the tale of his many battles at the ford with that dear friend, he kissed before the battles, and over whose dead body he wept when he had killed him; the tale of the flight of Grainne with Diarmaid, strangest of all tales of the fickleness of woman;³⁵ and the tale of the coming of Oisin out of faeryland, and of his memories and lamentations. 'The Celtic movement', as I understand it, is principally the opening of this fountain, and none can measure of how great importance it may be to coming times, for every new fountain of legends is a new intoxication for the imagination of the world. It comes at a time when the imagination of the world is as ready, as it was at the coming of the tales of Arthur and of the Grail, for a new intoxication. The reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth century has mingled with a reaction against the materialism of the nineteenth century, and the symbolical movement, which has come to perfection in Germany in Wagner, in England in the Pre-Raphaelites,³⁶ and in France in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam,³⁷ and Mallarme³⁸ and Maeterlinck,³⁹ and has stirred the imagination of Ibsen and D'Annunzio,⁴⁰ is certainly the only movement that is saying new things. The arts by brooding upon their own intensity have become religious, and are seeking, as some French critic⁴¹ has said, to create a sacred book. They must, as religious thought has always done, utter themselves through legends; and the Slavonic and Finnish legends tell of strange woods and seas, and the Scandinavian legends are held by a great master, and tell also of strange woods and seas, and the Welsh legends are held by almost as many great masters as the Greek legends; while the Irish legends move among known woods and seas, and have so much of a new beauty, that they may well give the opening century its most memorable symbols.⁴²

This essay, which first appeared in Cosmopolis, a journal of arts and letters, for June 1898, shows Yeats uniting his interest in folklore with his study of mythology, and integrating both with his sense of mission as an Irish writer above all else. Starting with Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan, both of whom he has studied carefully, he argues that the 'Celtic' element is significant for modern literature because Irish folklore retains connections with the primary impulses of human nature that are evident in Irish and Celtic mythology. The argument evolves from Arnold but becomes quite different: Arnold holds that Celtic sensibility was crucial in order to make the Saxon or Germanic temperament more sensitive; whereas Yeats's contention is that the Celtic (therefore Irish) genius, as expressed in its folklore and mythology, is universal, therefore absolutely valid.

¹ Ernest Renan (1823-92), philologist, Celticist and historian of religion. Born in Brittany, he studied for the priesthood, but left the seminary and applied himself to a scientific investigation of Christianity. Author of Vie de Jesus (1863) and, in the field of Celtic studies, the influential essay of 1854. 'De la poesie des races Celtiques', translated by William G. Hutchinson in Ernest Renan: The Poetry of the Celtic Races and Other Essays (1896).

² Matthew Arnold published On the Study of Celtic Literature in 1867; Yeats takes his phrases from various parts of the work, but he does not distort Arnold's essential point.

³ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) wrote Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) and The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

⁴ The Kalevala is an epic poem of Finland, based on the oral poetry of Karelia on the Finnish-Russian border, compiled by Elias Lonnrot (1802-84) and published in 1835. It was translated into English by John Martin Crawford in 1888. For the Eddas, see item 9, note 18.

⁵ A collection of Welsh tales translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1838-49). On the Study of Celtic Literature quotes passages describing the making of 'Flower Aspect', Blodeuwedd, from the fourth branch of the Mabinogion. The passage about the tree half in leaf recurs in the poem 'Vacillation', Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932), CP, p. 282.

⁶ The two Keats quotations are from 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art'. 'Oblations' should read 'ablutions' and 'shore' should read 'shores'.

⁷ This and preceding quotations from The Merchant of Venice, V, i.

⁸ From A Midsummer Night's Dream, II, i.

⁹ Arnold distinguishes four ways of 'handling nature'—the conventional, the faithful, the Greek and the Celtic: 'in the faithful way … the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek, the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical, the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added.'

¹⁰ From Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Yeats misquotes: 'mountain built' should be hyphenated, 'quiet' should be 'peaceful' and 'its' in line 3 should read 'this'.

¹¹ From A Midsummer Night's Dream, II, i.

¹² The first quotation from Virgil is from Eclogue VII, 1. 45, '[You] mossy springs and grass softer than sleep … '; the second from Eclogue II, 11. 47-8: '[the beautiful Naiad] gathering pale violets and the heads of poppies / mingles the narcissus and the flower of the sweet-smelling fennel … '

¹³ A medieval French romance that celebrates a victory of Charlemagne over the armies of Islam. The Mahomedan king is Marsile.

¹⁴ Yeats is recalling a 'Love Song' from the Gaelic, based on Edward Walsh's translation of 'Eamonn an Chnoic' in Irish Popular Songs (1847), which he published in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888) but never reprinted. See Timothy Webb (ed.), W. B. Yeats.-Selected Poetry (1991), p. 230.

¹⁵ The lay in which Oisin describes to St Patrick the origin of the blackbird of Derrycairn is amongst the best-known of the Ossianic lays or songs. They were edited in the Transactions of the Ossianic Society (1859 and 1861).

¹⁶ From Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht (1893), pp. 134-5.

¹⁷ A literal version of 'Róisín Dubh', best known in James Clarence Mangan's translation 'Dark Rosaleen'. Yeats's source possibly was Ferguson's literal translation in the Dublin University Magazine for August 1834.

¹⁸ From 'The Dirge of O'Sullivan Bear' by J. J. Callanan, a poem based on Gaelic originals collected by Callanan in west Cork. The lines cursing the killers of O'Sullivan Bear read:

May the hearth stone of hell
Be their best bed for ever!

Yeats's source was T. Crofton Croker's Researches in the South of Ireland (1824).

¹⁹ The poem is the Irish poem beginning 'Triur ata ag brath ar mo bhas' and may be found in Tomas O Rathile (ed.), Measgra Danta II(1927, reprinted 1977), p. 186. O Rathile argues that the author was probably a Franciscan called Francis O'Molloy, who wrote a Grammatica Latino-Hibernica in 1676.

²⁰ From 'Illusion', to be found in AE, Collected Poems (1919), p. 175. For AE, see headnote to item 14.

²¹ In a note of 1924 Yeats reveals that the friend was William Sharp ('Fiona Macleod') (1855-1915), a Scottish writer who came under the influence of the Celtic revival of the late nineteenth century and who achieved some fame under his feminine pseudonym. Yeats also expresses the view that, though this proverb was probably invented, it remains true for all that.

²² The phrases are from Hutchinson's translation of Renan. See note 1.

²³ A translation of this poem can be found in Lady Gregory's Gods and Fighting Men (1904), p. 460. The original she found in The Book of the Dean of Lismore (1862); Yeats follows Lady Gregory's mistranslation of the first line, which correctly should be: 'Tonight is long in Elphin'. Yeats provides a defiant version of this lament in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), where Oisin turns aside from St Patrick's Christianity at the close (CP, p. 447).

²⁴ Quoted in Arnold's On the Study of Celtic Literature (see headnote and note 2 above) from Canu Llywarch Hen (The Song of Llywarch the Old), a cycle of Welsh poems about Llywarch and his sons, dating from the ninth or tenth century.

²⁵ From the opening paragraphs of Douglas Hyde's Love Songs of Connacht. For Douglas Hyde, see item 1, note 23.

²⁶ From a sketchbook of Samuel Palmer's, written 1823/4, quoted in A. H. Palmer (ed.), The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer (London, 1892), p. 16. Palmer (1805-81), artist and engraver, was a disciple of William Blake.

²⁷ In 1924 Yeats added a note: 'I should have added as an alternative that the supernatural may at any moment create new myths, but I was too timid.'

²⁸ The vat the Daghda has beneath Newgrange, from which no one departs unsatisfied.

²⁹ In novels such as Waver ley (1814), The Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality (1816) and Rob Roy (1817).

³⁰ Richard Wagner (1813-83), the German composer, based many of his operas on Nordic mythology; William Morris retold Norse material in Sigurd the Volsung (1876). For Morris, see item 42, note 2.

³¹ Heroine of Longes meic nUisnigh (The Exile of the Sons of Uisnech) preserved in the Book of Leinster and elsewhere in a version of the eighth or ninth century. An early form of the story of Tristan and Isolde, it tells a tale of tragic doomed love, wandering and human malice. Deirdre's story is the basis of Yeats's play of 1907.

³²Oidheadh Chlainne Tuireann (The Death of the Children of Tuireann) tells of the adventures of the children of Tuireann, as they discharge tasks imposed upon them by the son of a man they have killed. They eventually die in carrying out the duties laid upon them.

³³Oidheadh Chlainne Lir (The Death of the Children of Lir) tells how the four children of Lir, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann (see glossary), are transformed through the sorcery of a jealous stepmother into four swans, and in this shape they live on the seas off Ireland until the coming of St Patrick.

³⁴ In Serglighe Con Chulainn (The Wasting Sickness of Cuchulain), preserved in the twelfth-century Book of the Dun Cow, Cuchulain is cast into a trance by two otherworld women who beat him; after a year in this state he is taken to the otherworld, where he fights for Fand's love against a host of the sidh on behalf of Labhraidh, himself one of the sidh. Having spent a month with Fand, he is won back by Emer, his earthly wife. Yeats based his play The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919) on this tale. The friend is Ferdia; see glossary entry Tain Bo.

³⁵ See glossary entry Dermod.

³⁶ The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of artists and poets (D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, William Morris among them) who developed a cult of simplicity, naivety and medievalism in art. They flourished in the 1850s, but they continued to influence literature and painting for a considerable time after.

³⁷ Philippe-Auguste Villiers de L'Isle-Adam (1838-89), French writer and aesthete whose Axel (1890) was a formative symbolist visionary drama.

³⁸ Stephane Mallarme (1842-98), an influential French symbolist poet, who experimented with the musical and suggestive possibilities of verse.

³⁹ Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), Belgian playwright and symbolist.

⁴⁰ Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938), Italian writer who experimented in a wide range of forms.

⁴¹ In 1902 Yeats wrote 'Verhaeren'. Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916), Belgian poet and Rosicrucian, who united symbolism and social awareness. He knew Maeterlinck (see note 39 above).

⁴² In 1902 he added: 'I could have written this essay with much more precision and have much better illustrated my meaning if I had waited until Lady Gregory had finished her book of legends, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, a book to set beside the Morte d'Arthur and the Mabinogion.'