Yeats' The Celtic Twilight
MIRACULOUS CREATURES
There are marten cats and badgers
and foxes in the Enchanted Woods, but there
are of a certainty mightier creatures, and the lake hides what neither net nor
fine can take. These creatures are of the race of the white stag that flits in
and out of the tales of Arthur, and of the evil pig that slew Diarmuid where Ben
Bulben mixes with the sea wind. They are the wizard creatures of hope and fear,
they are of them that fly and of them that follow among the thickets that are
about the Gates of Death. A man I know remembers that his father was one night
in the wood Of Inchy, 'where the lads of Gort used to be stealing rods. He was
sitting by the wall, and the dog beside him, and he heard something come running
from Owbawn Weir, and he could see nothing, but the sound of its feet on the
ground was like the sound of the feet of a deer. And when it passed him, the dog
got between him and the wall and scratched at it there as if it was afraid, but
still he could see nothing but only hear the sound of hoofs. So when it was
passed he turned and came away home.' 'Another time,' the man says, 'my father
told me he was in a boat out on the lake with two or three men from Gort, and
one of them had an eel-spear, and he thrust it into the water, and it hit
something, and the man fainted and they had to carry him out of the boat to
land, and when he came to himself he said that what he struck was like a calf,
but whatever it was, it was not fish!' A friend of mine is convinced that these
terrible creatures, so common in lakes, were set there in old times by subtle
enchanters to watch over the gates of wisdom. He thinks that if we sent our
spirits down into the water we would make them of one substance with strange
moods of ecstasy and power, and go out it may be to the conquest of the world.
We would, however, he believes, have first to outface and perhaps overthrow
strange images full of a more powerful life than if
they were really alive. It may be that we shall look at them without fear when
we have endured the last adventure, that is death.
1902.
  
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