A Faery Loved a Little Child

A faery loved a little child who used to cut turf at the side of a faery hill. Every day the faery put out his hand from the hill with an enchanted knife. The child used to cut the turf with the knife. It did not take long, the knife being charmed. Her brothers wondered why she was done so quickly. At last they resolved to watch, and find out who helped her. They saw the small hand come out of the earth, and the little child take from it the knife. When the turf was all cut, they saw her make three taps on the ground with the handle. The small hand came out of the hill. Snatching the knife from the child, they cut the hand off with a blow. The faery was never again seen. He drew his bleeding arm into the earth, thinking, as it is recorded, he had lost his hand through the treachery of the child.

W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

The Religion of a Sailor

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck−house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think. One July a couple of years ago I took my supper with a Captain Moran on board the S.S. Margaret, that had put into a western river from I know not where. I found him a man of many notions all flavoured with his personality, as is the way with sailors. He talked in his queer sea manner of God and the world, and up through all his words broke the hard energy of his calling.

“Sur,” said he, “did you ever hear tell of the sea captain’s prayer?”

“No,” said I; “what is it?”

“It is,” he replied, “‘O Lord, give me a stiff upper lip.'”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means,” he said, “that when they come to me some night and wake me up, and say, ‘Captain, we’re going down,’ that I won’t make a fool o’ meself. Why, sur, we war in mid Atlantic, and I standin’ on the bridge, when the third mate comes up to me looking mortial bad. Says he, ‘Captain, all’s up with us.’ Says I, ‘Didn’t you know when you joined that a certain percentage go down every year?’ ‘Yes, sur,’ says he; and says I, ‘Arn’t you paid to go down?’ ‘Yes, sur,’ says he; and says I, ‘Then go down like a man, and be damned to you!”‘

W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

The Condition of Quiet That is the Condition of Vision

Even to−day our country people speak with the dead and with some who perhaps have never died as we understand death; and even our educated people pass without great difficulty into the condition of quiet that is the condition of vision. We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. Did not the wise Porphyry think that all souls come to be born because of water, and that “even the generation of images in the mind is from water”?

W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight

The Miraculous Mildness of Her Face

But what filled me with wonder was the miraculous mildness of her face. There are no such faces now. It was beautiful, as few faces are beautiful, but it had neither, one would think, the light that is in desire or in hope or in fear or in speculation. It was peaceful like the faces of animals, or like mountain pools at evening, so peaceful that it was a little sad.

W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight