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

Chapter 61: INTO THE TWILIGHT

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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.

INTO THE TWILIGHT

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,

Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;

Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight;

Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Thy mother Eire is always young,

Dew ever shining and twilight gray;

Though hope fall from thee or love decay

Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill,

For there the mystical brotherhood

Of hollow wood and the hilly wood

And the changing moon work out their will.

And God stands winding his lonely horn;

And Time and the World are ever in flight,

And love is less kind than the gray twilight,

And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.