Thinking about Fairies
On my bookshelf, the one that stands by my computer desk, there is a copy of John Crowley's Little, Big. It's almost time to reread it. I heard, somewhere or other, about a couple that read it out loud every few years, and I thought, what a wonderful way to pass the time. Because Little, Big really is poetry. It just happens to be poetry in novel form.
I was thinking about fairies today, about what makes us so interested in them. I think they represent the possibility of magic itself. Fairies don't make magic, they are magic. They show us an alternative magical reality that we desire, but that also frightens us, because it's both more beautiful and more dangerous than ours. We want to dance in the fairy hill (who wouldn't dance in the fairy hill?), but it might mean losing a hundred years, all of our family and friends. Fairies give you everything and exact a terrible price. (They give you the gift of poetry, but you have to serve the Fairy Queen for seven years and then tell the truth, even to attractive women.)
I think that aspect of the fairies is captured in one of the iconic fairy poems: W.B. Yeats' "The Stolen Child," which I'll include below. I'll also include a musical version of it by The Waterboys. I listened to that version over and over again, when I was in college.
Here is Yeats' poem:
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 beriess
And of 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 gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We 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 anxious in its sleep.
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 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.
And here is the musical version:
Tonight I am very tired, and I'm still thinking of the concept of sanctuary. Both Crowley's novel and Yeats' poem function in that way for me. They are sanctuaries, telling me that there is more to the world than I can understand: there are magical possibilities in it.
