The Stolen Child : W B Yeats

 

THE STOLEN CHILD

By W.B. Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake

There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water-rats;
There we've hid our faery vats

Full of berries
And the reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest RossesWe foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters of the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand. 

 

 

              

In Ireland, the Faerie folk are always treated with respect, but many accusations are hurled at them as well, from making crops wither to milk tuning sour.
One of the most common accusations is that they steal humans and spirit them away to live in the Faerie realm, this person is known as a Changeling.



The humans most at risk though are babies and young children. They are taken and in their place a Faerie child is left, this child is known as a changeling although the term changeling can also refer to someone who has been taken and then returned to the mortal world a few years later.
The Faeries covert human babies as they tend to be happy, healthy, sturdy beings and have no hesitation in swopping them with their own sickly babes. On occasion they have been known to take a child because they believe it is not loved enough by its human parents or sometimes they take the child out of malice or spite, one can never be sure what a Faeries motive is.

Comeragh Mountains : Nire Valley

Today in the Nire Valley

Paula Meehan: Irish Poet

     

‘Seed’, by Paula Meehan

The first warm day of spring and I step out into the garden from the gloom of a house where hope had died to tally the storm damage, to seek what may have survived. And finding some forgotten lupins I’d sown from seed last autumn holding in their fingers a raindrop each  like a peace offering, or a promise, I am suddenly grateful and would offer a prayer if I believed in God. But not believing, I bless the power of seed, its casual, useful persistence, and bless the power of sun, its conspiracy with the underground, and thank my stars the winter’s ended. ‘Seed’ is © Paula Meehan,       ‘

100 years of " Danny Boy"

Ireland's best loved secular hymn, originally released the day before World War 1 began. A fitting song for Armistice Day I think.

Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling.
From glen to glen and down the mountain side.
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling.
'Tis you, 'tis you must go, and I must bide.

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow, 
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow.
'Tis I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow.
Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so.

But when ye come and all the flowers are dying, 
And I am dead, as dead I well may be, 
Go out and find the place where I am lying, 
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.

And I will hear tho' soft your tread above me, 
And then my grave will warm and sweeter be.
For you shall bend and tell me that you love me, 
And I will sleep in peace until you come to me.

 

 

Take the time to listen to Sinead O' Connor sing this beautiful song

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLjyAkOrEfQ&list=PLC4869944219CC971

The Story of the Irish Race: Fir Bolg

 

The Irish race of today is popularly known as the Milesian Race, because the genuine Irish (Celtic) people were supposed to be descended from Milesius of Spain, whose sons, say the legendary accounts, invaded and possessed themselves of Ireland a thousand years before Christ.


The races that occupied the land when the so-called Milesians came, chiefly the Firbolg and the Tuatha De Danann, were certainly not exterminated by the conquering Milesians. Those two peoples formed the basis of the future population, which was dominated and guided, and had its characteristics moulded, by the far less numerous but more powerful Milesian aristocracy and soldiery. All three of these races, however, were different tribes of the great Celtic family, who, long ages before, had separated from the main stem, and in course of later centuries blended again into one tribe of Gaels - three derivatives of one stream, which, after winding their several ways across Europe from the East, in Ireland turbulently met, and after eddying, and surging tumultuously, finally blended in amity, and flowed onward in one great Gaelic stream.

The possession of the country was wrested from the Firbolgs, and they were forced into partial serfdom by the Tuatha De Danann (people of the goddess Dana), who arrived later. Totally unlike the uncultured Firbolgs, the Tuatha De Dannann were a capable and cultured, highly civilised people, so skilled in the crafts, if not the arts, that the Firbolgs named them necromancers, and in course of time both the Firbolgs and the later coming Milesians created a mythology around these.

In a famed battle at Southern Moytura (on the Mayo-Galway border) it was that the Tuatha De Danann met and overthrew the Firbolgs. The Firbolgs noted King, Eochaid was slain in this great battle, but the De Danan King, Nuada, had his hand cut off by a great warrior of the Firbolgs named Sreng. The battle raged for four days. So bravely had the Firbolgs fought, and so sorely exhausted the De Dannann, that the latter, to end the battle, gladly left to the Firbolgs, that quarter of the Island wherein they fought, the province now called Connaught. And the bloody contest was over.


The famous life and death struggle of two races is commemorated by a multitude of cairns and pillars which strew the great battle plain in Sligo - a plain which bears the name (in Irish) of "The plain of the Towers of the Fomorians". The Danann were now the undisputed masters of the land. So goes the honoured legend.

•  
•  
• Tailltu was one of the most powerful warrior-rulers of early Ireland and was the most illustrious warrior-queen of the tribe known as the Fir Bolg, one of the earliest races to invade and inhabit Ireland. Tailltu was the wife of Eochai Garb Mac Erc, king of the Fir Bolg, foster-mother to the great hero Lugh the Sun God, and daughter of King MághMhor of Spain. Tailltu was buried at her cult centre on the plain she had cleared at Telltown, near Navan, Co. Meath, not far from Royal Tara, in the Irish Valley of the Kings.

         Art work by Jim Fitzpatrick

 

 
  

 

 

Centenary of 1913 Dublin Lock-out

The Dublin 1913 Lockout began on 26th August 1913 when all the trams on O’Connell Street stopped with workers seeking pay rises ranging from 1s to 2s a week. William Martin Murphy, the owner of the Dublin Tramway Company locked out members of the IT&GWU who refused to sign the pledge and leave the union and James Larkin, leader of the union called a general strike. In the disputes that followed more than 20,000 workers were either locked out of their jobs by their employers or went on strike. The Lockout continued for 6 months with families enduring widespread hardship, poverty and hunger and by early 1914 many of the workers were driven back to work. Housing conditions in Dublin at the time were very bad with the slums considered some of the worst in the UK. The 1911 census shows that 26,000 families in Dublin city lived in tenements, 20,000 of them in single rooms. The mortality rates per 1,000 were 22.3 in Dublin compared to 15.6 in London. On 2nd September, 7 people – including two children died when two tenements, numbers 66 and 67 Church Street collapsed



 



One room tenement dwelling Francis Street Dublin


Children at play on Henrietta Street in the early 1920s.
(RSAI: DD 44)
The story of Henrietta Street was replicated across the city, as streets amalgamated into slums. Life in the slums was raw and desperate. In 1911 nearly 26,000 families lived in inner-city tenements, and 20,000 of these families lived in just one room. Most families were dependent on intermittent casual labour; three out of five workers in the Heney household in Killarney Parade were unemployed. Remarkably, many one-room tenements did not just house a family, but that family also took in members of their extended families or tenants; the Dixon family at Buckingham St. also had a nurse-child, Thomas Power. In 1911 among the tenements of Mabbot Street and Tyrone Street ,17 families kept lodgers, most despite living in a single room.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ys1C4-kHc

Take the time to listen to some readings from "Strumpet City" written by James Plunkett (1969)  set in Dublin during the time of the "lock-out"

Seamus Heaney

Bog Queen

I lay waiting
between turf-face and demesne wall,
between heathery levels
and glass-toothed stone.

My body was braille
for the creeping influences:
dawn suns groped over my head
and cooled at my feet,

through my fabrics and skins
the seeps of winter
digested me,
the illiterate roots

pondered and died
in the cavings
of stomach and socket.
I lay waiting

on the gravel bottom,
my brain darkening,
a jar of spawn
fermenting underground

dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
the vital hoard reducing
in the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,
gemstones dropped
in the peat floe
like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier
wrinkling, dyed weaves
and phoenician stitchwork
retted on my breasts'

soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
like the nuzzle of fjords
at my thighs–

the soaked fledge, the heavy
swaddle of hides.