Modern poetry grows weary of using over and over again the personages and stories and metaphors that have come to us throughGreece and Rome, or from Wales and Brittany through the Middle Ages, and has found new life in the Norse and German legends.The Irish legends, in popular tradition and in old Gaelic literature, are more numerous and as beautiful, and alone amonggreat European legends have the beauty and wonder of altogether new things. May one not say, then, without saying anythingimprobable, that they will have a predominant influence in the coming century, and that their influence will pass throughmany countries?
The latest of a little group of contemporary writers, who have begun to found their work upon them, as the Trouvères†1 founded theirs upon the legends of Arthur and his knights, is Miss Nora Hopper, whose two books,2 though they have many of the faults of youth, have at their best an extraordinary delicacy and charm. I got Ballads in Prose when it came out, two or three years ago, and it haunted me as few new books have ever haunted me, for it spoke in strangewayward stories and birdlike little verses of things and of persons I remembered or had dreamed of; it did not speak withthe too emphatic manner that sometimes mars the more powerful stories Miss Fiona Macleod3 has told of like things and persons, but softly—more murmuring than speaking. Even now, when the first enchantment is goneand I see faults I was blind to, I cannot go by certain brown bogs covered with white tufts of bog-cotton—places where theworld seems to become faint and fragile—without remembering the verses her Daluan—a kind of Irish Pan—sings among the bogs; and when once I remember them, they run in my head for hours—
All the way to Tir na n’Og are many roads that run,
But the darkest road is trodden by the King of Ireland’s son.
The world wears on to sundown, and love is lost and won,
But he recks not of loss or gain, the King of Ireland’s son.
He follows on for ever, when all your chase is done,
He follows after shadows—the King of Ireland’s son.4
One does not know why he sings it, or why he dies on November Eve, or why the men cry over him ‘Daluan is dead—dead! Daluanis dead!’ and the women, ‘Da Mort is king,’ for ‘Duluan’ is but Monday and ‘Da Mort’ is but Tuesday;5 nor does one well know why any of her best stories, ‘Boholaunf and I’, ‘The Gifts of Aodh and Una’, ‘The Four Kings’, or‘Aonan-na-Righ’,†6 shaped itself into the strange, drifting, dreamy thing it is, and one is content not to know. They delight us by their mystery,as ornament full of lines, too deeply interwoven to weary us with a discoverable secret, delights us with its mystery; andas ornament is full of strange beasts and trees and flowers, that were once the symbols of great religions, and are now mixingone with another, and changing into new shapes, this book is full of old beliefs and stories, mixing and changing in an enchanteddream. Their very mystery, that has left them so little to please the mortal passionate part of us, which delights in thebroad noon-light men need if they would merely act and live, has given them that melancholy which is almost wisdom.
A great part of Quicken Boughs was probably written before Ballads in Prose; for, though it is all verse, it has few verses of the same precise and delicate music as those scattered among the storiesin the earlier book. But ‘Phyllis and Damon’ is perfect in its kind, while ‘The Dark Man’7 gives beautiful words to that desire of spiritual beauty and happiness which runs through so much modern true poetry. Itis founded upon the belief, common in Ireland, that certain persons are, as it is called, ‘away’ or more with the fairiesthan with us, and that ‘dark’ or blind people can see what we cannot.