W. B. Yeats

“ FATHER JOHN.
He is gone and we can never know where that vision came from. I cannot know—the wise Bishops would have known.
THOMAS [taking up banner] .
To be shaping a lad through his lifetime, and he to go his own way at the last, and a queer way. It is very queer the world itself is, whatever shape was put upon it at the first.
ANDREW.
To be too headstrong and too open, that is the beginning of trouble. To keep to yourself the thing that you know, and to do in quiet the thing you want to do. There would be no disturbance at all in the world, all people to bear that in mind! ”

“ MAIRE.
[Going to the door with her.]
[14] You’re almost there.
There is a trodden way among the hazels
That brings your servants to their marketing.
ALEEL.
When we are gone draw to the door and the bolt,
For, till we lost them half an hour ago,
Two gray horned owls hooted above our heads
Of terrors to come. Tympan and harp awake!
For though the world drift from us like a sigh,
Music is master of all under the moon;
And play ‘The Wind that blows by Cummen Strand.’
[Music.
[Sings.]
Impetuous heart, be still, be still:
Your sorrowful love may never be told;
Cover it up with a lonely tune. ”

“ MARTIN.
No man can be alive, and what is paradise but fulness of life, if whatever he sets his hand [176] to in the daylight cannot carry him from exaltation to exaltation, and if he does not rise into the frenzy of contemplation in the night silence. Events that are not begotten in joy are misbegotten and darken the world, and nothing is begotten in joy if the joy of a thousand years has not been crushed into a moment.
THOMAS.
And I offered to let you go to Dublin in the coach! ”

“ MARTIN.
There were horses—white horses rushing by, with white shining riders—there was a horse without a rider, and someone caught me up and put me upon him and we rode away, with the wind, like the wind—
FATHER JOHN.
That is a common imagining. I know many poor persons have seen that.
MARTIN.
We went on, on, on. We came to a sweet-smelling garden with a gate to it, and there were wheatfields in full ear around, and there were vineyards like I saw in France, and the grapes in bunches. I thought it to be one of the townlands of heaven. ”

“ CATHLEEN.
I come to barter a soul for a great price.
FIRST MERCHANT.
What matter if the soul be worth the price?
CATHLEEN.
The people starve, therefore the people go
Thronging to you. I hear a cry come from them,
And it is in my ears by night and day;
And I would have five hundred thousand crowns,
That I may feed them till the dearth go by;
And have the wretched spirits you have bought
For your gold crowns released and sent to God.
The soul that I would barter is my soul.
A PEASANT.
Do not, do not; the souls of us poor folk
Are not precious to God as your soul is. ”

“ And Mary with her seven times wounded heart.
[THE CHILD ceases strewing the primroses, and kneels upon the settle beside MAIRE and puts her arms about her neck.]
Cry, daughter, to the Angels and the Saints.
THE CHILD.
You shall go with me, newly-married bride,
And gaze upon a merrier multitude;
White-armed Nuala and Aengus of the birds,
And Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him
Who is the ruler of the western host,
Finvarra, and their Land of Heart’s Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, Time an endless song.
I kiss you and the world begins to fade. ”

“ ANDREW.
Pup, pup, pup! Don’t be snapping and quarrelling now, and you so well treated in this house. It is strollers like yourselves should be for frolic and for fun. Have you ne’er a good song to sing, a song that will rise all our hearts?
PAUDEEN.
Johnny Bacach is a good singer, it is what he used to be doing in the fairs, if the oakum of the gaol did not give him a hoarseness within the throat.
ANDREW.
Give it out so, a good song, a song will put courage and spirit into any man at all. ”

“ I would, if I could, add to that great and complicated inheritance of images which written literature has substituted for the greater and more complex inheritance of spoken tradition, to that majestic heraldry of the poets some new heraldic images gathered from the lips of the common people. Christianity and the old nature faith have lain down side by side in the cottages, and I would proclaim that peace as loudly as I can among the kingdoms of poetry, where there is no peace that is not joyous, no battle that does not give life instead of death ”

“ MARTIN.
I was mistaken when I set out to destroy Church and Law. The battle we have to fight is fought out in our own mind. There is a fiery moment, perhaps once in a lifetime, and in that moment we see the only thing that matters. It is in that moment the great battles are lost and won, for in that moment we are a part of the host of heaven. ”

“ No, he has no vision.
ANDREW.
He has not, nor any sort of a heart for a frolic.
MARTIN.
He has never heard the laughter and the music beyond.
ANDREW.
He has not, nor the music of my own little flute. I have it hidden in the thatch outside.
MARTIN.
Does the body slip from you as it does from me? They have not shut your window into eternity?
ANDREW.
Thomas never shut a window I could not get through. I knew you were one of my own sort. When I am sluggish in the morning, [148] Thomas says, ‘Poor Andrew is getting old.’ That is all he knows. The way to keep young is to do the things youngsters do. ”

“ It is a thing that might attack one of a family, and one of another family, and not to come upon their kindred at all. A person to have it, all you have to do is not to go between him and the wind, or fire, or water. But I am in dread trance is a thing might run through the house the same as the cholera morbus.
THOMAS.
In my belief there is no such thing as a trance. Letting on people do be to make the world wonder the time they think well to rise up. To keep them to their work is best, and not to pay much attention to them at all.
ANDREW.
I would not like trances to be coming on myself. ”

“ MARTIN.
It is hard for you to understand. You have worked all your life. You have said to yourself every morning, ‘What is to be done to-day?’ and when you are tired out you have thought of the next day’s work. If you gave yourself an hour’s idleness, it was but that you might work the better. Yet it is only when one has put work away that one begins to live. ”

“ I suggest that we will discover in this relation a very early stage in the development of music, with its own great beauty, and that those who love lyric poetry but cannot tell one tune from another repeat a state of mind which created music and yet was incapable of the emotional abstraction which delights in patterns of sound separated from words. To it the music was an unconscious creation, the words a conscious, for no beginnings are in the intellect, and no living thing remembers its own birth. ”

“ FATHER JOHN.
Very likely, very likely, that is the way it happened. Some plain, unnoticed man has sometimes been sent with a command.
MARTIN.
I saw the unicorns trampling in my dream. They were breaking the world. I am to destroy, destruction was the word the messenger spoke.
FATHER JOHN.
To destroy?
MARTIN.
To bring again the old disturbed exalted life, the old splendour. [157]
FATHER JOHN.
You are not the first that dream has come to. [Gets up, and walks up and down.] It has been wandering here and there, calling now to this man, now to that other. It is a terrible dream. ”

“ MARTIN moves.
FATHER JOHN.
It is God has him in His care. It is He is awaking him. [MARTIN has risen to his elbow.] Do not touch him, do not speak to him, he may be hearing great secrets. [197]
MARTIN.
That music, I must go nearer—sweet marvellous music—louder than the trampling of the unicorns; far louder, though the mountain is shaking with their feet—high joyous music. ”

“ FATHER JOHN [sitting down] .
I had almost got back to my own place when I thought of it. I have run part of the way. It is very important; it is about the trance that you have been in. When one is inspired from above, either in trance or in contemplation, one remembers afterwards all that one has seen and read. I think there must be something about it in St. Thomas. I know that I have read a long passage about it years ago. But, Martin, there is another kind of inspiration, or rather an obsession or possession. A diabolical power comes into one’s body, or overshadows it. ”

“ That you may never die till you’ll get a blue hag for a wife!
[MARTIN comes back with lighted lamp.
MARTIN.
Let him go. [They let THOMAS go, and fall back.] Spread out the banner. The moment has come to begin the war.
JOHNNY.
Up with the Unicorn and destroy the Lion! Success to Johnny Gibbons and all good men!
MARTIN.
Heap all those things together there. Heap those pieces of the coach one upon another. Put that straw under them. It is with this flame I will begin the work of destruction. All nature destroys and laughs.
THOMAS.
Destroy your own golden coach!
MARTIN [kneeling before THOMAS] . ”

“ MARTIN.
I don’t think it is building I want to do. I don’t think that is what was in the command.
THOMAS.
It is too late to be saying that, the time you have put the most of your fortune in the business. Set yourself now to finish your job, and when it is ended maybe I won’t begrudge you going with the coach as far as Dublin.
ANDREW.
That is it, that will satisfy him. I had a great desire myself, and I young, to go travelling the roads as far as Dublin. The roads are the great things, they never come to an end. They are the same as the serpent having his tail swallowed in his own mouth. ”

“ FATHER JOHN.
Martin has been working hard at it, I know.
THOMAS.
You never saw a man work the way he did, day and night, near ever since the time six months ago he first came home from France.
FATHER JOHN.
I never thought he would be so good at a trade. I thought his mind was only set on books.
THOMAS.
He should be thankful to myself for that. Any person I will take in hand, I make a clean job of them the same as I would make of any other thing in my yard—coach, half-coach, hackney-coach, ass-car, common-car, post-chaise, calash, chariot on two wheels, on four wheels. ”

“ There is no more beautiful sound than the alternation of carolling or keening and a voice speaking in regulated declamation. The very act of alternation has a peculiar charm.
Now to read these records of music of the eighth and seventeenth centuries one would think that the Church and the opera were united in the desire to make beautiful speech more beautiful, but I need not say if we put such a hope to the test we discover it is groundless. There is no ecstasy in the delivery of ritual, and recitative is certainly not treated by opera-singers in a way that makes us wish to imitate them. ”

“ DEIRDRE.
MUSICIANS’ SONG.—II. Florence Farr.
Love is an immoderate thing
And can never be content
Till it dip an ageing wing,
Where some laughing element
Leaps and Time’s old lanthorn dims.
What’s the merit in love-play,
In the tumult of the limbs
That dies out before ’tis day,
Heart on heart or mouth on mouth
All that mingling of our breath,
When love-longing is but drouth
For the things that follow death?
DEIRDRE. MUSICIANS’ SONG.—III. Farr.
DEIRDRE.
MUSICIANS’ SONG.—III. Florence Farr.
First Musician.
They are gone, they are gone
The proud may lie by the proud. Second Musician. ”

“ The wind roars.]
They begin a song
And there is still some music on their tongues.
OONA.
[Casting herself face downwards on the floor.]
O maker of all, protect her from the demons,
And if a soul must needs be lost, take mine.
[ALEEL kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words; he is gazing down as if through the earth. The peasants return. They carry the COUNTESS CATHLEEN and lay her upon the ground before OONA and ALEEL. She lies there as if dead.] ”

“ CATHLEEN.
No, sing the song he sang in the dim light,
When we first found him in the shadow of leaves,
About King Fergus in his brazen car
Driving with troops of dancers through the woods.
[She crouches down on the floor, and lays her head on OONA’S knees.
OONA.
Dear heart, make a soft cradle of old tales,
And songs, and music: wherefore should you sadden
For wrongs you cannot hinder? The great God
Smiling condemns the lost: be mirthful: He
Bids youth be merry and old age be wise.
CATHLEEN.
Tympan and harp awaken wandering dreams.
A VOICE [without] . ”

“ Sure those that are in a trance get strength, that they can walk on water.
ANDREW.
It was Father John wakened him yesterday the time he was lying in the same way. Wasn’t I telling you it was for that I called to him?
BIDDY.
Waken him now till they’ll see did I tell any lie in my foretelling. I knew well by the signs, he was coming within the best day of his life.
PAUDEEN.
And not dead at all! We’ll be marching to attack Dublin itself within a week. The horn will blow for him, and all good men will gather to him. Hurry on, Father, and waken him. ”

“ Whether he understand or know, it may be that the voices of Angels and Archangels have spoken in the cloud and whatever wildness come upon his life, feet of theirs may well have trod the clusters. I began with this new thought to dictate the play to Lady Gregory, but since I had last worked with her, her knowledge of the stage and her mastery of dialogue had so increased that my imagination could not go neck to neck with hers. I found myself, too, with an old difficulty, that my words flow freely alone when my people speak in verse, or in words that are like those we put into verse ”

“ The darkness is broken by a visionary light. The peasants seem to be kneeling upon the rocky slope of a mountain, and vapour full of storm and ever-changing light is sweeping above them and behind them. Half in the light, half in the shadow, stand armed Angels. Their armour is old and worn, and their drawn swords dim and dinted. They stand as if upon the air in formation of battle and look downward with stern faces. The peasants cast themselves on the ground. ”