The Celtic Twilight: Myth, Fantasy and Folklore

The Celtic Twilight: Myth, Fantasy and Folklore by W.B. Yeats


I feel as if I've been reading and connecting with a lot of Welsh and Irish writing lately. Machen, Graves, (soon to be reading again) Beckett, (also soon to be reading again) Joyce, and now, Yeats. It's probably genetic, to be honest. My dad's biological parents were likely of Irish stock (their last name was Bigley - I got "Aguirre," which is Basque, by the way, not Spanish, at least not in my case - from my adoptive grandparents). My mom was of mixed German (my grandmother was oh-so-German) and Welsh stock. So, yeah, I have some Celtic blood flowing through me. Maybe that's why I gravitate towards these works?

While this book is chock full of wonderful tales of Sidhe and ghosts, each documented by Yeats through conversations and anecdotes he recorded from people that he met, that's not the most attractive thing to me about the book. I am more intrigued by the poesis of Yeats' commentary. Right from the beginning, Yeats comments:

How do we not know but that our own unreason may be better than another's truth?

He spends some amount of time and effort helping the reader to understand the Irish (and the differently-directed Scottish) attitude toward the fey world. The world just beyond ours is inhabited by capricious beings with whom one might enter intercourse (of the verbal kind) that are not necessarily evil or scary, but winsome, even incomprehensible in their motivations. One must just accept them as fact and deal with them, not try to abjure (nor invoke) them. They are as natural as the landscape around us and one must treat them like a wild, but not necessarily inimical, animal, though an animal of extremely high intelligence and with some knowledge beyond that of mortal men.

But again, I was not so much focused on them as I was on Yeats' published assumptions, his "givens" about them and our interaction with them:

Indeed there are times when the worlds are so near together that it seems as if our earthly chattels were no more than the shadows of things beyond.

This is where the "meat" of the book comes in, it is in the sublimation of one's mind to the attitude of those interviewed and quoted therein. In order to see the fantastical, one must think fantastically and it must be as natural as breathing for him or her.

In a society that has cast out imaginative tradition, only a few people - three or four thousand out of millions - favoured by their own characters and by happy circumstance, and only then after much labour, have understanding of imaginative things and yet 'the imagination is the man himself.'

Some of that labour must come in the form of study. I would strongly recommend reading Robert Graves' The White Goddess in conjunction with this book.

Yeats shares an anecdote about the blind poet Raftery talking to a bush, for instance, the Bush answering in Irish, and "gave him the knowledge of all the things of the world," then withered up. This sounds like something straight out of Graves' amazing book. I wonder if he read this anecdote from Yeats' work. In any case, the connection seems certain, or at least uncanny. Are the Sidhe saying something here?

I would also point you to Gary Lachman's Lost Knowledge of the Imagination for an excellent primer on how to tap into that fantastical head-space I mentioned earlier.

Reading all three at once would be a powerful experience, indeed. One that might leave you . . . changed. For the better. But changed, nonetheless.

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