The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 5 (of 8): The Celtic Twilight and Stories of Red HanrahanYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
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The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 5 (of 8): The Celtic Twilight and Stories of Red Hanrahan
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
English literature -- Irish authors
IT is one of the great troubles of life that we cannot have any unmixed
emotions. There is always something in our enemy that we like, and
something in our sweetheart that we dislike. It is this entanglement
of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the
furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good heart
as the faeries do, we might grow to be long-lived like them. But until
that day their untiring joys and sorrows must ever be one-half of their
fascination. Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of
the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal peasants remember
this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of the heaviness of the
fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they tell stories about it
that it may not be forgotten. A short while ago, they say, two faeries,
little creatures, one like a young man, one like a young woman, came
to a farmer’s house, and spent the night sweeping the hearth and
setting all tidy. The next night they came again, and while the farmer
was away, brought all the furniture up-stairs into one room, and having
arranged it round the walls, for the greater grandeur it seems, they
began to dance. They danced on and on, and days and days went by, and
all the country-side came to look at them, but still their feet never
tired. The farmer did not dare to live at home the while; and after
three months he made up his mind to stand it no more, and went and told
them that the priest was coming. The little creatures when they heard
this went back to their own country, and there their joy shall last as
long as the points of the rushes are brown, the people say, and that is
until God shall burn up the world with a kiss.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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