The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 1 (of 8): Poems Lyrical and NarrativeYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
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The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 1 (of 8): Poems Lyrical and Narrative
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
English literature -- Irish authors
Knocknarea is in Sligo, and the country people say that Maeve, still
a great queen of the western Sidhe, is buried in the cairn of stones
upon it. I have written of Clooth-na-Bare in ‘The Celtic Twilight.’
She ‘went all over the world, seeking a lake deep enough to drown her
faery life, of which she had grown weary, leaping from hill to hill,
and setting up a cairn of stones wherever her feet lighted, until, at
last, she found the deepest water in the world in little Lough Ia,
on the top of the bird mountain, in Sligo.’ I forget, now, where I
heard this story, but it may have been from a priest at Collooney.
Clooth-na-Bare would mean the old woman of Bare, but is evidently a
corruption of Cailleac Bare, the old woman of Bare, who, under the
names Bare, and Berah, and Beri, and Verah, and Dera, and Dhira,
appears in the legends of many places. Mr. O’Grady found her haunting
Lough Liath high up on the top of a mountain of the Fews, the Slieve
Fuadh, or Slieve G-Cullain of old times, under the name of the Cailleac
Buillia. He describes Lough Liath as a desolate moon-shaped lake, with
made wells and sunken passages upon its borders, and beset by marsh and
heather and gray boulders, and closes his ‘Flight of the Eagle’ with a
long rhapsody upon mountain and lake, because of the heroic tales and
beautiful old myths that have hung about them always. He identifies
the Cailleac Buillia with that Meluchra who persuaded Fionn to go
to her amid the waters of Lough Liath, and so changed him with her
enchantments, that, though she had to free him because of the threats
of the Fiana, his hair was ever afterwards as white as snow. To this
day the Tuatha De Danaan that are in the waters beckon to men, and
drown them in the waters; and Bare, or Dhira, or Meluchra, or whatever
name one likes the best, is, doubtless, the name of a mistress among
them. Meluchra was daughter of Cullain; and Cullain Mr. O’Grady
calls, upon I know not what authority, a form of Lir, the master of
waters. The people of the waters have been in all ages beautiful and
changeable and lascivious, or beautiful and wise and lonely, for water
is everywhere the signature of the fruitfulness of the body and of the
fruitfulness of dreams. The white hair of Fionn may be but another
of the troubles of those that come to unearthly wisdom and earthly
trouble, and the threats and violence of the Fiana against her, a
different form of the threats and violence the country people use, to
make the Aes Sidhe give up those that are ‘away.’ Bare is now often
called an ugly old woman, but in the ‘Song of Bare,’ which Lady Gregory
has given in her ‘Saints and Wonders,’ she laments her lost beauty
after the withering of seven hundred years; and Dr. Joyce says that
one of her old names was Aebhin, which means beautiful. Aebhin was the
goddess of the tribes of northern Leinster; and the lover she had made
immortal, and who loved her perfectly, left her, and put on mortality,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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