The conscience-stricken spirit

This rescuee is from The Celtic Twilight by W B Yeats (p 9) and The History of the Town and the County of the Town of Galway (1820) by James Hardiman (p 65). It’s the first one to have a bit of a conversation going on.

The conscience-stricken spirit

The spirit standing in the doorway
had an infinite, heavy sadness to it;
a weight of troubles from another world.

Is you dead, I says.

    What thinks you, he replied.
    When I was living my enemies took power,
    destroyed my castle, my kingdom.
    What I feared more than anything else came to pass:
    terrible misfortune on the land,
    winds of damage turned families and visionaries to peasants,
    pleasure of music and poems a memory,
    a place whose masters have no heart
    an earth whose heavens are foregoing…

He seemed kind, strong.

    They are so distant from me, said he, neither day nor night,
    time nor words, make me feel that…
    If you would talk to… if you would…

His voice began to fail.

They see me as half-mad, I says, queer as a copper shilling.
Talking to you, about you, is no wise things for me.

So I has written this down
I is no mystical person, I is already damaged,
lodging in this place
longing to trim my own winged mind.

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