The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 5 (of 8) / The Celtic Twilight and Stories of Red Hanrahan

Chapter 2: THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

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About This Book

A collection of essays, sketches, and short stories records rural encounters with faery lore, ghosts, and the supernatural, mixing reportorial observation with lyrical reflection. Village tellers, priests, and eccentric characters offer accounts that probe belief and unbelief, memory, and imagination; essays theorize about the faery commonwealth and the nearness of other worlds. A linked sequence of Red Hanrahan tales moves through his wanderings, romantic entanglements, curses, visionary experiences, and eventual death, folding mythic material into personal and cultural portraiture of Ireland.

THE HOSTING OF THE SIDHE

The host is riding from Knocknarea,

And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;

Caolte tossing his burning hair,

And Niamh calling, ‘Away, come away;

Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,

Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,

Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,

Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;

And if any gaze on our rushing band,

We come between him and the deed of his hand,

We come between him and the hope of his heart.’

The host is rushing ’twixt night and day;

And where is there hope or deed as fair?

Caolte tossing his burning hair,

And Niamh calling, ‘Away, come away.’