has seen in their faces 'the immortal desire of immortals.' A solar
mythologist would perhaps say that the girl with the golden apple was
once the winter, or night, carrying the sun away, and the deer without
horns, like the boar without bristles, darkness flying the light. He
would certainly, I think, say that when Cuchullain, whom Professor Rhys
calls a solar hero, hunted the enchanted deer of Slieve Fuadh, because
the battle fury was still on him, he was the sun pursuing clouds, or
cold, or darkness. I have understood them in this sense in 'Hanrahan
laments because of his wandering,' and made Hanrahan long for the day
when they, fragments of ancestral darkness, will overthrow the world.
The desire of the woman, the flying darkness, it is all one! The
image--a cross, a man preaching in the wilderness, a dancing Salome, a
lily in a girl's hand, a flame leaping, a globe with wings, a pale
sunset over still waters--is an eternal act; but our understandings are
temporal and understand but a little at a time.

The man in my poem who has a hazel wand may have been Aengus, Master of
Love; and I have made the boar without bristles come out of the West,
because the place of sunset was in Ireland, as in other countries, a
place of symbolic darkness and death.

THE CAP AND BELLS.

I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another
long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was
to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a vision than a
dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me the sense of
illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the second
dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always meant a great
deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always
meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said 'the authors are in
eternity,' and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams.

THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK PIG.

All over Ireland there are prophecies of the coming rout of the enemies
of Ireland, in a certain Valley of the Black Pig, and these prophecies
are, no doubt, now, as they were in the Fenian days, a political force.
I have heard of one man who would not give any money to the Land League,
because the Battle could not be until the close of the century; but, as
a rule, periods of trouble bring prophecies of its near coming. A few
years before my time, an old man who lived at Lisadell, in Sli