Emily’s Diary: June 29, 1913
OH, TO BE IN Craigdarragh now that summer’s here! It is the little, magical things that make the summer for me: Michael and Paddy-Joe, Mrs. O’Carolan’s sons, scything the front lawn; the sound of their scythes reaping the tall grass; the smell of bruised hay; the sagging tennis net run out for another year; old Dignan the gardener trying to creosote straight tram lines; the smell of sun-warmed wood and old, peeling paint in the summerhouse; the sound of opera from the garden when Mummy takes her big black deckchair with the sunshade, her phonogram and her workbooks out into the sunken garden (how she can work with people screaming at each other in Italian I do not know), the house filled with clicks and creaks and strange little animal sounds, as if it were stretching back into the life and heat of summer after months of hibernation; early morning light streaming through my window onto the counterpane; outside, the quiet rustle of the Irish Times. I always know that summer has truly arrived when Daddy has his alfresco breakfasts at the table by the rhododendrons. And just to make everything perfect, there is the promise of a boating trip on Lough Gill with Mummy’s friend Mrs. Booth-Kennedy, and of actually meeting with Mr. William Butler Yeats, the greatest poet who ever lived! It is as if everything is in some great, benign conspiracy to make this the most perfect summer yet.
To prepare myself, I have been rereading all my copies of Yeats; sometimes aloud outside in the gardens, because they seem to perfectly match each other—the wonderful words, the magical summer. Poor Paddy-Joe and Michael, what must they think when they see the daughter of the house pirouetting, barefoot, among the rhododendrons, reciting The Lake Isle of Innisfree?
The weather is exceptional; since the day I came home from Cross and Passion there has not been one cloud in the sky. I love the weather when it is like this, when every day is the same as the one before and it seems that they will go on like this forever—day after day after day of perfect, unchanging blue, when the sun rises at four in the morning and sets so late that it never gets properly dark at all and the whole world seems suspended somewhere beyond time, changeless, like a flower in a glass paperweight. The air feels strangely charged, as if This World and the Otherworld are at the closest points of their orbits and the friction of their passage is being translated into a lazy, sensual magic. It is quite impossible to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes without my imagination flying away like mayflies above the minnow-burn—one minute hovering in one place, the next, somewhere else, so fast you would think they had the gift of instantaneous movement. With everything so pregnant and potential, it seems impossible that there has been no faery manifestation; yet every day since I came home I have gone into Bridestone Wood, expecting, hoping, wanting to see something. But there is nothing! Not even that sensation of watching I remember from the spring, and again, that time in the bower, just before…
Perhaps the problem is that I am expecting too hard. Faeries have always been tricksome, flighty creatures. Maybe when I stop wanting something to happen, then something will happen, but oh, how difficult it is not to want the thing which deep down in your heart you want more than anything.
Mummy has been working in the garden—how, in this heat, I don’t know. All I want to do is flop about in a sun frock, but she is hard at it, researching a book. Not a book of poetry this time, she told me, but a proper book, a serious book. It will be called The Twilight of the Gods, she thinks, and it will be about how Christianity has dethroned the old, elemental gods of the Celts, first driving them underground to become the Host of the Hollow Hills, the sidhe; and ultimately, to reduce them into leprechauns and pookahs and brownies and Trooping Faeries. That seems to me like a sad and terrible end for the old gods who could be many things at once—young and old, male and female, human and animal. Much better, I told Mummy, for them all to have died in some great and noble last battle than to dwindle and shrivel like the old generals at Kilmainham Hospital with their medals and bath chairs, changed into green-gaitered pixies guarding crocks of gold. Mummy agreed, but said that the secret of the Old Gods was that they were never totally defeated by Christianity; they merely changed form again and went more deeply into the land. Irish Catholicism, she maintained, contains many elements that are not Christian at all but stem directly from the old pagan religions. Many Irish saints are just old gods and goddesses sealed with the Pope’s stamp of respectability, and the so-called Holy Wells, like the one at Gortahurk where Mrs. O’Carolan goes for her rheumatism, are nothing more than old Celtic votive sites to the water spirits. Old sacrificial stones were often decorated over with new Christian symbols. There is a standing stone in a village in County Fermanagh where an old deity has been converted into a bishop, complete with bell, crozier, and mitre! And many of the Church festivals, including Christmas, Michaelmas, and Halloween, are the old Celtic festivals of Lughnasadh and Samhain, Christianized, tamed and stripped of their old pagan power, like lions in a circus with their teeth pulled.
So sad, that the great days of the gods and fighting men should have dwindled away to nothing. But when I think about it more, I can see Mummy’s point—perhaps Christianity, in all its arrogance, did not succeed in putting a ring through their noses and leading them down the aisle to kneel before the cross. Perhaps it liberated them from the shapes and characters people had forced upon them, and allowed them to be at last what they wanted to be, free from the cares and responsibilities of the world to hunt and play once again through the endless forests of Otherworld.
If Otherworld was never lost, merely hidden as if it had pulled a sky-coloured cloak around it, then perhaps it may still be attainable to those with the sensitivity to seek it. Perhaps it is close at hand to those who sincerely desire it.
And then, today, confirmation. The woods were smothering: the leaves seemed to trap the heat beneath them in a dense, stifling blanket. Bridestone Wood was filled with a sense of exhausted stillness—not a bird sang, not a leaf stirred. The only motion in the entire wood was the drifting balls of thistledown turning lazily in the still, thick air. There was a spirit in the trees I could not name—not the feeling of watching, nor the electric prickle of something about to happen. A more diffuse sensation of waiting seemed to draw me deeper into the wood until I came at last to a small glade I am quite sure I have never seen before. Bridestone Wood is not a very big wood—a few acres on the side of Ben Bulben—and I was certain I knew its every nook and cranny, but this glade was new and unfamiliar to me. Here the air was so still and heavy it seemed almost that I parted a curtain as I entered the dell. The leaves of the oaks light-dappled the carpet of grass; one shaft of hazy, dusty light illuminated a small mossy stone. On top of the stone I found them—two pairs of wings, like a butterfly’s, though no butterfly ever flew on wings so large, so delicate. Like dragonfly’s wings, they seemed, like lace, finer than the finest Kenmare needlepoint, and the precise colour of oil on water.
Faery wings. I imagined a tiny figure, no larger than my hand, climb up on this rock, drop a pair of old, used-up wings to the moss; imagined the new, crumpled buds of new wings unfolding from her shoulders, opening, drying in the sun as she sat there, waiting, fluttering them from time to time until they were strong enough that, with a soft whirr, she would leap from the stone and be carried away into the leaf-dapple.
I carried them home and pressed them between the pages of a botany book. I pondered about whether to tell Mummy. She had been brought frequently to Craigdarragh as a child—her mother and Daddy’s mother were cousins. I wonder, did she ever see things in the woods—strange, wonderful things, things from a world not ours at all, but altogether more wonderful and magical. I think this because when I read her poetry, I can see the magic in it—I can hear the faraway horns and hear the baying of the hounds of the Wild Hunt. I think Mummy must have experienced something, but like the old standing stones she told me about, her childhood glimpses of Otherworld must have become overlain with the trappings and ornaments of this world. That is why she writes about them in her poems and books; only there can she hear the horns of Elfland blowing from faraway.