I have had very little to say this year in _Samhain_, and I have said it badly. When I wrote _Ideas of Good and Evil_ and _Celtic Twilight_, I wrote everything very slowly and a great many times over. A few years ago, however, my eyesight got so bad that I had to dictate the first drafts of everything, and then rewrite these drafts several times. I did the last _Samhain_ this way, dictating all the thoughts in a few days, and rewriting them in two or three weeks; but this time I am letting the first draft remain with all its carelessness of phrase and rhythm. I am busy with a practical project which needs the saying of many things from time to time, and it is better to say them carelessly and harshly than to take time from my poetry. One casts something away every year, and I shall, I think, have to cast away the hope of ever having a prose style that amounts to anything. After all, dictation gives one a certain vitality as of vehement speech. 1906 LITERATURE AND THE LIVING VOICE.[J] I One Sunday, in summer, a few years ago, I went to the little village of Killeenan, that is not many miles from Galway, to do honour to the memory of Raftery, a Gaelic poet who died a little before the famine. A headstone had been put over his grave in the half-ruined churchyard, and a priest had come to bless it, and many country people to listen to his poems. After the shawled and frieze-coated people had knelt down and prayed for the repose of his soul, they gathered about a little wooden platform that had been put up in a field. I do not remember whether Raftery’s poem about himself was one of those they listened to, but certainly it was in the thoughts of many, and it was the image reflected in that poem that had drawn some of them from distant villages. I am Raftery the poet, Full of hope and love; With eyes without light; With gentleness without misery. Going west on my journey With the light of my heart; Weak and tired To the end of my road. I am now And my back to a wall, Playing music To empty pockets. Some few there remembered him, and one old man came out among the reciters to tell of the burying, where he himself, a young boy at the time, had carried a candle. The verses of other Gaelic poets were sung or recited too, and, although certainly not often fine poetry, they had its spirit, its _naïveté_—that is to say, its way of looking at the world as if it were but an hour old—its seriousness even in laughter, its personal rhythm.