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The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 3 (of 8) / The Countess Cathleen. The Land of Heart's Desire. The Unicorn from the Stars cover

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 3 (of 8) / The Countess Cathleen. The Land of Heart's Desire. The Unicorn from the Stars

Chapter 26: ON BAILE’S STRAND.—SONG OF THE WOMEN.
By W. B. Yeats
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About This Book

A trio of lyrical dramas blends mythic atmosphere, music, and symbolic action to examine encounters between ordinary households and supernatural visitors. One play stages desperate choices amid hunger and otherworldly temptation; another portrays the seductive promise of an enchanted life offered to a young couple; the third presents collaborative mythic tableaux that fuse folkloric motifs and poetic stagecraft. Throughout, ritual, song, and evocative imagery take precedence over realistic explanation, and themes of sacrifice, desire, mortality, and the tension between earthly duties and transcendent longing recur across compact, mood-driven scenes.

ON BAILE’S STRAND.—SONG OF THE WOMEN.

ON BAILE’S STRAND.

SONG OF THE WOMEN.
Florence Farr.

May this fire have driven out
The shape-changers that can put
Ruin on a great king’s house,
Until all be ruinous.
Names whereby a man has known
The threshold and the hearthstone,
Gather on the wind and drive
Women none can kiss and thrive,
For they are but whirling wind,
Out of memory and mind.
They would make a prince decay
With light images of clay
Planted in the running wave;
Or for many shapes they have,
They would change them into hounds
Until he had died of his wounds
Though the change were but a whim;
Or they’d hurl a spell at him,
That he follow with desire
Bodies that can never tire
Or grow kind, for they anoint
All their bodies joint by joint
With a miracle-working juice
That is made out of the grease
Of the ungoverned unicorn;
But the man is thrice forlorn
Emptied, ruined, wracked, and lost,
That they follow, for at most
They will give him kiss for kiss
While they murmur “After this
Hatred may be sweet to the taste;”
Those wild hands that have embraced
All his body can but shove
At the burning wheel of love
Till the side of hate comes up.
Therefore in this ancient cup
May the sword-blades drink their fill
Of the home-brew there, until
They will have for master none
But the threshold and hearthstone.