Kitabı oku: «The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats. Volume 3 of 8. The Countess Cathleen. The Land of Heart's Desire. The Unicorn from the Stars», sayfa 8
THE KING’S THRESHOLD
THE KING’S THRESHOLD
THE FOUR RIVERS
Florence Farr
Through well-mown level ground
Have come out of a blessed well
That is all bound and wound
By the great roots of an apple,
And all fowls of the air
Have gathered in the wide branches
And Keep singing there.
ON BAILE’S STRAND. THE FOOL’S SONG
ON BAILE’S STRAND
THE FOOL’S SONG
Florence Farr
Cuchulain has killed kings,
Kings and sons of kings,
Dragons out of the water and witches out of the air,
Banachas and Bonachas and people of the woods.
Witches that steal the milk,
Fomor that steal the children,
Hags that have heads like hares,
Hares that have claws like witches,
All riding a-cock-horse,
Out of the very bottom of the bitter black north.
ON BAILE’S STRAND. – SONG OF THE WOMEN
ON BAILE’S STRAND
SONG OF THE WOMEN
Florence Farr
May this fire have driven out
The shape-changers that can put
Ruin on a great king’s house,
Until all be ruinous.
Names whereby a man has known
The threshold and the hearthstone,
Gather on the wind and drive
Women none can kiss and thrive,
For they are but whirling wind,
Out of memory and mind.
They would make a prince decay
With light images of clay
Planted in the running wave;
Or for many shapes they have,
They would change them into hounds
Until he had died of his wounds
Though the change were but a whim;
Or they’d hurl a spell at him,
That he follow with desire
Bodies that can never tire
Or grow kind, for they anoint
All their bodies joint by joint
With a miracle-working juice
That is made out of the grease
Of the ungoverned unicorn;
But the man is thrice forlorn
Emptied, ruined, wracked, and lost,
That they follow, for at most
They will give him kiss for kiss
While they murmur “After this
Hatred may be sweet to the taste;”
Those wild hands that have embraced
All his body can but shove
At the burning wheel of love
Till the side of hate comes up.
Therefore in this ancient cup
May the sword-blades drink their fill
Of the home-brew there, until
They will have for master none
But the threshold and hearthstone.
THE FOOL’S SONG.– II
THE FOOL’S SONG.– II
Florence Farr
When you were an acorn on the tree top,
Then was I an eagle-cock;
Now that you are a withered old block,
Still am I an eagle-cock.
DEIRDRE. MUSICIANS’ SONG.– I
DEIRDRE.MUSICIANS’ SONG.– I
Florence Farr
First Musician
“Why is it,” Queen Edain said,
“If I do but climb the stair
To the tower overhead
When the winds are calling there,
Or the gannets calling out,
In waste places of the sky,
There is so much to think about,
That I cry, that I cry?”
Second Musician
But her goodman answered her:
“Love would be a thing of naught
Had not all his limbs a stir
Born out of immoderate thought.
Were he any thing by half,
Were his measure running dry,
Lovers, if they may not laugh,
Have to cry, have to cry.”
The Three Musicians together
But is Edain worth a song
Now the hunt begins anew?
Praise the beautiful and strong;
Praise the redness of the yew;
Praise the blossoming apple-stem.
But our silence had been wise.
What is all our praise to them
That have one another’s eyes?
DEIRDRE. MUSICIANS’ SONG.– II
DEIRDRE.MUSICIANS’ SONG.– II
Florence Farr
Love is an immoderate thing
And can never be content
Till it dip an ageing wing,
Where some laughing element
Leaps and Time’s old lanthorn dims.
What’s the merit in love-play,
In the tumult of the limbs
That dies out before ’tis day,
Heart on heart or mouth on mouth
All that mingling of our breath,
When love-longing is but drouth
For the things that follow death?
DEIRDRE. MUSICIANS’ SONG.– III. Farr
DEIRDRE.MUSICIANS’ SONG.– III
Florence Farr
First Musician
They are gone, they are gone
The proud may lie by the proud.
Second Musician
Though we were bidden to sing, cry nothing Loud.
First Musician
They are gone, they are gone.
Second Musician
Whispering were enough.
First Musician
Into the secret wilderness of their love.
Second Musician
A high grey cairn.
What more to be said?
First Musician
Eagles have gone into their cloudy bed.
DEIRDRE. MUSICIANS’ SONG.– III. ALLGOOD
DEIRDRE. MUSICIANS’ SONG.– III
Sarah Allgood
First Musician
They are gone:
They are gone; the proud may lie by the proud.
Second Musician
Though we are bidden to sing, cry nothing loud.
First Musician
They are gone, they are gone.
Second Musician
Whispering were enough.
First Musician
Into the secret wilderness of their love.
Second Musician
A high grey cairn.
What more is to be said?
First Musician
Eagles have gone into their cloudy bed.
SHADOWY WATERS
SHADOWY WATERS
Arthur Darley
Sailors. And I! And I! And I!
Dectora. Protect me now, gods, that my people swear by.
Dectora. I will end all your magic on the instant.3
This sword is to lie beside him in the grave.
It was in all his battles.
I will spread my hair, and wring my hands, and wail him bitterly,
For I have heard that he was proud and laughing, blue-eyed, and a quick runner on bare feet,
And that he died a thousand years ago.
O! O! O!
But no, that is not it.
I knew him well, and while I heard him laughing they killed him at my feet.
O! O! O! O!
For golden-armed Iollan that I loved.
Forgael. Have buried nothing by my golden arms.
Forgael. And knitted mesh to mesh we grow immortal.
THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS “The Airy Bachelor.”
THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS
IRISH TRADITIONAL AIRS
“The Airy Bachelor.”
Oh come all ye airy bachelors,
come listen unto me.
A sergeant caught mefowling,
and he fired his gun so free.
His comrades came to his relief,
And I was soon trapanned..
And bound up like a wood-cock
That had fallen into their hands.
THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS “Johnnie Gibbons.”
“Johnnie Gibbons.”
1
Oh Johnnie Gibbons my five hundred healths to you,
Its long you’re away from us over the sea.
2
Oh Johnnie Gibbons its you were the prop to us,
You to have left us, we’re fools put astray.
THE UNICORN FROM THE STARS “The Lion shall lose his strength.”
“The Lion shall lose his strength.”
Oh the Lion shall lose his strength,
And the bracket thistle pine.
And the harp shall sound sweet, sweet at length
Between the eight and nine.
THE HOUR-GLASS
THE HOUR-GLASS
TRADITIONAL ARAN AIR
I was going the road one day.
O! the brown and the yellow beer,
And I met with a man that was no right man,.
Oh my dear, my dear.
CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN
CATHLEEN NI HOULIHAN
Florence Farr
I
I will go cry with the woman,
For yellow-haired Donough is dead,
With a hempen rope for a neck-cloth,
And a white cloth on his head.
II
Do not make a great keening
When the graves have been dug tomorrow.
III
They shall be remembered forever
[repeat 3 times]
The people shall hear them forever.
MUSIC FOR LYRICS
Three of the following settings are by Miss Farr, and she accompanies the words upon her psaltery for the most part. She has a beautiful speaking-voice, and, an almost rarer thing, a perfect ear for verse; and nothing but the attempting of it will show how far these things can be taught or developed where they exist but a little. I believe that they should be a part of the teaching of all children, for the beauty of the speaking-voice is more important to our lives than that of the singing, and the rhythm of words comes more into the structure of our daily being than any abstract pattern of notes. The relation between formal music and speech will yet become the subject of science, not less than the occasion of artistic discovery; for I am certain that all poets, even all delighted readers of poetry, speak certain kinds of poetry to distinct and simple tunes, though the speakers may be, perhaps generally are, deaf to ordinary music, even what we call tone-deaf. I suggest that we will discover in this relation a very early stage in the development of music, with its own great beauty, and that those who love lyric poetry but cannot tell one tune from another repeat a state of mind which created music and yet was incapable of the emotional abstraction which delights in patterns of sound separated from words. To it the music was an unconscious creation, the words a conscious, for no beginnings are in the intellect, and no living thing remembers its own birth.
I give after Miss Farr’s settings three others, two taken down by Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch from myself, and one from a fine scholar in poetry, who hates all music but that of poetry, and knows of no instrument that does not fill him with rage and misery. Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch, when he took up the subject at my persuasion, wrote down the recitation of another lyric poet, who like myself knows nothing of music, and found little tunes that delighted him; and Mr. George Russell (‘A.E.’) writes all his lyrics, a musician tells me, to two little tunes which sound like old Arabic music. I do not mean that there is only one way of reciting a poem that is correct, for different tunes will fit different speakers or different moods of the same speaker, but as a rule the more the music of the verse becomes a movement of the stanza as a whole, at the same time detaching itself from the sense as in much of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry, the less does the poet vary in his recitation. I mean in the way he recites when alone, or unconscious of an audience, for before an audience he will remember the imperfection of his ear in note and tone, and cling to daily speech, or something like it.
Sometimes one composes to a remembered air. I wrote and I still speak the verses that begin ‘Autumn is over the long leaves that love us’ to some traditional air, though I could not tell that air or any other on another’s lips, and The Ballad of Father Gilligan to a modification of the air A Fine Old English Gentleman. When, however, the rhythm is more personal than it is in these simple verses, the tune will always be original and personal, alike in the poet and in the reader who has the right ear; and these tunes will now and again have great beauty.
NOTE BY FLORENCE FARR
I made an interesting discovery after I had been elaborating the art of speaking to the psaltery for some time. I had tried to make it more beautiful than the speaking by priests at High Mass, the singing of recitative in opera and the speaking through music of actors in melodrama. My discovery was that those who had invented these arts had all said about them exactly what Mr. Arnold Dolmetsch and Mr. W. B. Yeats said about my art. Anyone can prove this for himself who will go to a library and read the authorities that describe how early liturgical chant, plain-song and jubilations or melismata were adapted from the ancient traditional music; or if they read the history of the beginning of opera and the ‘nuove musiche’ by Caccini, or study the music of Monteverde and Carissimi, who flourished at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they will find these masters speak of doing all they can to give an added beauty to the words of the poet, often using simple vowel sounds when a purely vocal effect was to be made whether of joy or sorrow. There is no more beautiful sound than the alternation of carolling or keening and a voice speaking in regulated declamation. The very act of alternation has a peculiar charm.
Now to read these records of music of the eighth and seventeenth centuries one would think that the Church and the opera were united in the desire to make beautiful speech more beautiful, but I need not say if we put such a hope to the test we discover it is groundless. There is no ecstasy in the delivery of ritual, and recitative is certainly not treated by opera-singers in a way that makes us wish to imitate them.
When beginners attempt to speak to musical notes they fall naturally into the intoning as heard throughout our lands in our various religious rituals. It is not until they have been forced to use their imaginations and express the inmost meaning of the words, not until their thought imposes itself upon all listeners and each word invokes a special mode of beauty, that the method rises once more from the dead and becomes a living art.
It is the belief in the power of words and the delight in the purity of sound that will make the arts of plain-chant and recitative the great arts they are described as being by those who first practised them.
THE WIND BLOWS OUT OF THE GATES OF THE DAY
THE WIND BLOWS OUT OF THE GATES OF THE DAY. [D]
Florence Farr
The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away,
While the fairies dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milkwhite feet in a ring,
Tossing their milkwhite arms in the air
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair
And even the wise are merry of tongue.
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say,
When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lovely of heart must wither away.
THE HAPPY TOWNLAND
THE HAPPY TOWNLAND. 4
Florence Farr
O Death’s old bony finger
Will never find us there
In the high hollow townland
Where love’s to give and to spare;
Where boughs have fruit and blossom
at all times of the year;
Where rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
An old man plays the bagpipes
In a gold and silver wood;
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
Are dancing in a crowd.
Chorus
The little fox he murmured,
‘O what of the world’s bane?’
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein;
But the little red fox murmured,
‘O do not pluck at his rein,
He is riding to the townland
That is the world’s bane.’
I HAVE DRUNK ALE FROM THE COUNTRY OF THE YOUNG
I HAVE DRUNK ALE FROM THE COUNTRY OF THE YOUNG. 5
Florence Farr
I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young
And weep because I know all things now:
I have been a hazel tree and they hung
The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind:
I became a rush that horses tread:
I became a man, a hater of the wind,
Knowing one, out of all things, alone, that his head
Would not lie on the breast or his lips on the hair
Of the woman that he loves, Until he dies;
Although the rushes and the fowl of the air
Cry of his love with their pitiful cries.
THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS
THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS
W.B.Y
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream,
And caught a little silver trout.
THE HOST OF THE AIR
THE HOST OF THE AIR
A.H.B
O’Driscoll drove with a song
The wild duck and the drake
From the tall and tree tufted reeds
Of the drear Hart Lake.
THE SONG OF THE OLD MOTHER
THE SONG OF THE OLD MOTHER
W.B.Y
I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
And the young lie long and dream in their bed
Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,
And their day goes over in idleness,
And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress;
While I must work because I am old,
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.
