The Celtic Paradigm Ioana Mohor-Ivan

THE CELTIC PARADIGM

1. Beginnings in the Celtic World.

Mapping Ireland

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Prehistoric Ireland
• 8000 B.C.: Mesolithic
hunter-gatherer
culture

• 4000 B. C.: Neolithic

culture (agriculture,
pottery, wooden
houses, communal
megalithic tombs)

• 2000 B.C.: Bronze

Age culture (the
Newgrange – a prehistoric
Beaker people) passage tomb

700-400 B.C.: Iron Age culture - The Celts

• A grouping of Indo-European peoples of diverse origin,
recognised as speaking one or another of the dialects of a
common Celtic language and sharing a common culture
reflected in their social, political and religious institutions and in
art.
• Origin: central Europe
• The Rhine (renas = sea)
• The Rône (road-way river)
• The Danube (Don, Dana)
• Migrations: 800 – 400 B.C.
• Turkey (Galatia)
• France&Belgium (Gaul)
• Italy (Gallia Cisalpina)
• Spain (Galicia)
• Britain & Ireland

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LANGUAGE
• Continental Celtic
• Gaullish (unknown
number of dialects)
• Celto-Iberian
• Lepontic

• Insular Celtic
• P-Celtic(Brythonic)
• Welsh
• Cornish
• Breton
• Q-Celtic(Goidelic)
• Irish Gaelic
• Scottish Gaelic
• Manx

ART: La Tène Style (5th-1st century BC)

The Tara
• Metalwork: Brooch
characterized by
intricate spirals and
interlace, stylized
curvilinear animal The
Desborough
and vegetable Mirror
forms
• Large area: parts of
Ireland and Great
Britain, northern
Spain, Burgundy,
and Austria.

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SOCIETY
• Tribal: tuath (tribe), rí (king), rí ruirech
(overking)

• Familiar: kinship (4 generations)

• Hierarchical:
• Equites: warrior aristocracy
• Druides: the learned class (draoi, fílí,
breitheamb, seanchadh)
• Plebs: the body of freemen (smiths, leeches and
small farmers)

• Pastoral: hill-forts, cattle-raising, farming

Other practices
• Polyandry/polygamy
• Divorce
• Women’s equality
• Fosterage
• Games and
entertainment
• Brandubh
• Bone dice
• Racing
• Hurling
• Feasting

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Irish Historical
Provinces
Emain
Macha

RELIGION
• Polytheism (wide array of
gods and goddesses, each
linked to aspects of life and
the natural world)
• Pantheism/animism: worship
of trees (the yew, the haze),
water, stones (Lía Fáil),
animal cults (boars, fish, bulls,
birds etc.)
• Afterlife, metempsychosis,
shape-changing

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The Otherworld
• A supernatural realm of the A Neolithic burial mound, or
deities and possibly also of the sidhe, at Knowth, Co. Meath,
dead. one gateway to the Otherworld
• Associated with everlasting
youth, beauty, health, abundance
and joy.
• Located
• underground (such as in the
Sídhe mounds)
• overseas (islands in the
Western Sea)
• Names
• Tír na mBeo ("the Land of the
Living")
• Mag Mell ("Delightful Plain")
• Tír na nÓg ("Land of the
Young")

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Celtic Festivals

• Samhain (1st Nov.): began the Celtic year. It was

believed that the barriers between the human and the
Otherworld disappeared.
• Imbolc (1st Feb.): marked the beginning of the end of
winter. It was dedicated to the goddess Brigid.
• Beltain (1st May): fire festival sacred to the god Belenos
(the Shining One)
• Lughnasadh (1st Aug.): summer festival lasting for two
weeks. It was dedicated to the god Lugh.

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2. EARLY IRISH LITERATURE

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Ogham: an alphabet for the

Celtic Literature Irish language based on
characters represented by a
system of strokes
• The learned class (draoi, fílí,
breitheamb, seanchadh): law
texts, scholarly treatises,
genealogies, imaginative
literature.

• Until the 5th century (when

Christianity arrived): oral
character.

• The traditional oral mode

retained its prestige until the 17th
century.

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Tale types

• Togla (destructions) • Aided (violent deaths)

• Tána (cattle-raids)
• Tochmarca (wooings)
• Fessa (feasts)
• Aislinga (visions)
• Aitheda (elopments)
• Serca (loves)
• Catha (battles)
• Immrama (voyages)
• Dinnseanchas (corpus
of onomastic writing
where the tales
emerged as
explanations of place
names)

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Christianity
• 432 A.D.: traditional date
for the arrival of St.
Patrick (Christianisation
of Ireland)
• 5th – 8th centuries A.D.:
Ireland’s “golden age of
saints and scholars”
(Irish monasteries →
flowering of Latin
learning, illuminated
manuscripts (the Book of
Kells) carved stone
crosses.

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The Secret of Kells (2009)

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Written Early Irish Literature

• Emerged with the gradual assimilation of Irish learning by
the Church (6th-12th centuries).
• Influenced by Christianity (Christian censorship is likely to
have affected the native tradition to some extent)
• Compilatory character (written texts were often composed
with a view of making up a collection)

The Mythological Cycle

The Ulster (Red Branch) Cycle
The Finn (Fenian, Munster) Cycle
The King (Historical) Cycle

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3. THE MYTHOLOGICAL
CYCLE

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Lebor Gabála Érenn

(Book of Invasions of Ireland)

• Tales purporting to provide a

mythical history of the
occupation of Ireland,
schematizing the arrival of its
earlier inhabitants and its gods
into a series of invasions and
conquests.
• They attempt to harmonize
native myths of origin with the
Biblical version of history.

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The Book of Invasions = pseudo-history

• Cesair and Fintan • The Fomorians
Mac Bochra (the constantly disrupted
Flood); their authority over the
• The Partholanians land.
(Greece);
• The Nemedians
(Scythia/Iberia);
• The Firbolgs
(Greece);
• The Tuatha da
Danaan (mythic
islands in the north)

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Tuatha Dé Danann

• A large part of the

narrative is given over
to the activities of the
Tuatha Dé Danann
(supernatural beings,
people of the goddess • LONG AGO the Tuatha De Danaan came
to Ireland in a great fleet of ships to take
the land from the Fir Bolgs who lived there.
Dana), and to how they These newcomers were the People of the
Goddess Danu and their men of learning
impose themselves as possessed great powers and were revered
as if they were gods. They were
the new rulers of the accomplished in the various arts of druidry,
namely magic, prophesy and occult lore.
They had learnt their druidic skills in Falias,
land. Gorias, Findias and Murias, the four cities
of the northern islands.

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The Irish Pantheon

• The divine organisation
mirrors the tribal one
• The gods are
considered a divine
race intervening in
human affairs
• Other characteristics:
• triune embodiments
• complex functions
• capable to reconcile
opposites.

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Danu or Dana, also called Bile (The Shining One)

Anu or Ana, was a mother
goddess signifying fertility
and plenty.
Associated with the healing power of
the sun and a magical tree
God of agriculture
Celebrated at Beltaine (a festival in
his honor on 1st May, when great
bonfires were used to re-warm the
earth.)

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• The Dagda (The Good God):a figure of immense power.

• Also called: Eochaidh Ollathair – The All Father
• God of earth, magic, time, life and death. He was also protector of
crops.
• Symbols: a magic club, an inexhaustible cauldron and an enchanted
harp

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Brigid, or the "Fiery

Arrow or Power," is
a Celtic three-fold
goddess:
(1) Fire of Inspiration
as patroness of
poetry,
(2) Fire of the Hearth,
as patroness of
healing and fertility,
(3) Fire of the Forge,
as patroness of
Her feast day was Feb. 2nd and called smithcraft and
Imbolc. martial arts.
She was “borrowed” by Christian
missionaries and made into St. Bridget
(who prayed for ugliness to help her stay
pure).

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• Ogma: the Irish god of

eloquence, and the
inventor of the Ogham
(the Celtic alphabet)

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Boann –goddess of poetic Aengus Og: the god of love

inspiration and powerful spiritual and eternal youth
insight

• Aislinge Oengusa (The Vision of Aengus):

• Lyrical short-story in which Oengus, has the dream of a lovely girl and falls
into a wasting sickness for her. The Dagda and Boann help him in his
search that lasts for years. At last he finds her shape-changed into a swan,
living on the Bel Dragon Lake. After turning himself into a bird as well,
Oengus convinces her to become his consort.

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Midir (the Proud)

• son of the Dagda
• foster-father to Aengus
• married to Fuamnach
• fell in love with the
beautiful Étain

• Tochmarc Étaíne (The

Wooing Of Étaín)

• refused to accept Bodb

Derg (the Dagda’s eldest
son) as leader of the
Tuatha when his father
relinquished this position

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Manannán MacLir = son of

Lir (also a sea god) is the Irish god of the
ocean. He lives in Tir-na-nog and is
married to Fand.

Clann Lir (Children of Lir):

recounts the tribulations of Lir’s
other four children who were
transformed into swans by an
evil step-mother, and endured
cruel hardship for many
centuries until restored to their
human shape.

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Lugh (the Many-Gifted One; the Shining One)

• Related to both the Tuatha
and the Fomorians (rival
giants)
• Balor, his evil grandfather
threw him into the sea, but he
was saved and raised by
Manannán MacLir
• Has a sword that cuts through
anything and a spear that
guarantees victory
• Leads the Tuatha to victory
against the Fomorians

Feast Day: Lughnasadh (a summer festival lasting

for two weeks that fell around 31 July)

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balor

God of death
One-eyed giant

Fomorians – Evil Giants

(similar to the Titans or
Frost Giants)

Welsh - Ysbaddaden,
Chief of Giants (Culhwch
ac Olwen)

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The Morrígan (Morrigu)

• "terror" or "phantom queen“
• associated with war and death on the
battlefield (form of a carrion crow)
• one of the wives of the Dagda (divination,
prophecy, sovereignty of land)
• She is often interpreted as a triple
goddess (the Morrígan, the Badb and
Macha – the latter also associated with
fertility, horses and kingship)

Female deities: sexuality, fertility and war

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4. THE CONQUEST OF THE

GODS AND THE SIDHE

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The Milesians
• The sons of Míl Espáine (Miled) – the
last invaders of Ireland.
• Led by Amergin (a warrior and a bard),
they came by boat from Spain.
• Three sister goddesses of the Dé
Danann, Banba, Fodla and Eriu,
asked the Milesians to name Ireland
after one of them. It was Eriu who won
the honour. Ireland became known as
Erin or Erinn.

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The Song of Amergin

I am a stag: of seven times,
I am a flood: across a plain,
I am a wind: on a deep lake,
I am a tear: the Sun lets fall,
I am a hawk: above the hill,
I am a thorn: beneath the nail
I am a wonder: among flowers,
I am a wizard: who but I
Sets the cool head aflame with
smoke?
I am a spear: that rears for
blood,
I am a salmon: in a pool,
I am a lure: from paradise,
I am a hill: where poets walk,
I am a boar: ruthless and red,
I am a breaker: threatening doom,
I am a tide: that drags to death,
I am an infant: who but I
Peeps from the unhewn dolmen
arch?
I am the womb: of every holt,
I am the blaze: on every hill
I am the queen: of every hive
I am the shield: for every head,
I am the grave: of every hope.
(Transl. by Robert Graves)

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The Sidh
• After their defeat, the gods were
allotted spiritual Ireland (hidden
under mounds, hills, ancient
barrows) = the Sidh
• In Irish tradition, the Tuatha were
eventually merged with the fairies
(aes sidhe).
• they possessed the key to magical doors
between the worldly and the Otherworld
realms;
• both beneficial and harmful interactions
occurred between the two.

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The Sidh as Celtic Otherworld

 it is always depicted as a timeless place, just beyond one’s reach;

 it transcends spatial definition, though it may suddenly appear

and disappear;
 it coexists with the temporal and spatial world in the landscape;

 it reflects beauty, peace and harmony, but can become a dark,

inhospitable, threatening place if one enters uninvited;
 its inhabitants are not only immortal, but they are also invisible at
will;
 while some sídhe are associated exclusively with female fairies,
journeys to the otherworld are generally taken by male voyagers;
 such journeys usually correspond to an initiation, a rebirth, or
simply gaining awareness of the non-material universe.

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Irish fairy lore

• Leannan Sidhe (lananshee): a ravishingly beautiful fairy
woman, who seduces men to consort with her in the world of
the sidhe.
• Bean Sídhe (banshee = “woman of the hills”): a female fairy
attached to a particular family. She has the function of
keening like a mortal woman when a family member died.
• Leprechaun: a diminutive guardian of a hidden treasure
(origin: Lugh-chromain – little stooping Lugh)
• Pooka (Puck):a supernatural animal who took people for
nightmarish rides; a mischievous spirit who led travellers
astray.
• Slua Sídhe: the fairy host who travel through the air at night,
and are known to 'take' mortals with them on their journeys.
• Changelings: deformed fairy children swapped for healthy
human ones; while the changeling looked like a human baby,
it carried none of the same emotional characteristics.

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5. RE-IMAGINING THE SIDHE

in William Butler Yeats’s early poetry

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W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

“The greatest poet of our time, certainly the greatest poet in this language, and,
so far as I can tell, in any language.” ~T.S. Eliot

►Poet, dramatist, mystic, essayist, critic, public figure

►Widely considered to be one of the greatest English-language
poets of the 20th century.
►Important member of the Irish Literary Revival (Celtic Twilight)
and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre (Irish national stage)
►Received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
►Work touches on desire for Irish Identity, Irish Mythology,
Culture, Irish Politics, coupled with a distrust of rationalism and
cynicism towards the present.

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The Irish Literary Revival

• The Irish Literary Revival (also called the
Irish Literary Renaissance, nicknamed
the Celtic Twilight) was an unfolding of
Irish literary talent in the late 19th and
early 20th century.
• It stimulated new appreciation of Isabella Augusta, Lady
traditional Irish literature, while also Gregory (1852-1932)

encouraged the creation of works written

in the spirit of Irish culture, as distinct
from the English culture.
• It was closely allied with a strong political
nationalism and a revival of interest in
Ireland’s Gaelic literary heritage.

J.M. Synge (1871 – 1909)

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The Abbey Theatre

►In 1897, Yeats met Lady Gregory. Yeats, Gregory,
Synge, and others founded the Irish Literary Theatre.
►In 1904, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin became home to
Ireland’s national drama.

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Identity Crisis – or -- Contrasts and Balance

►While Yeats was born in Ireland’s East (Dublin), some of his early
days and later family jaunts were spent in Bedford Park (London) but
also Sligo (in the West of Ireland, which he sees as his home).
►While he is part of the Protestant Ascendancy, he and his family
support the Irish Nationalist movements.
►While he is pretty political at one point in his life, he later rejects most
political causes to follow a more aesthetic and philosophical path.

Dublin

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Yeats’s Poetry
• Early phase: associated with the Irish Revival of the
1890s, poems employ Celtic myth and legend, but are
also influenced by the occult.
• Collections: The
Wanderings of Oísin and Other Poems (1889); The
Wind Among the Reeds (1899); In the Seven Woods (1903)
• Mid-career: dominated by his commitment to Irish
nationalism, the poems are more public and concerned
with the politics of the modern Irish state.
• Collections: Responsibilities (1914); The Wilde Swans at Coole
(1919); Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921)
• Later phase: more personal, the poems explore Yeats’s
theories of contraries; they also shift to an
overwhelmingly classical myth base.
• Collections: The Tower (1928); The Winding Star (1933); Parnell’s
Funeral and Other Poems (1935); Last Poems and Two Plays (1939)

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Early poems: Irish Myth and the Occult

• The ‘natural’ (world in time, manifestation) as opposed to the
‘supernatural’ (that which is beyond manifestation);
• Metaphysical content;
• The exile, the quest, the voyage: symbols of the spirit’s
journey from life to death

Combined with Yeats’s own theories of contraries (between the physical and
the spiritual dimensions of life, sensuality and rationalism, turbulence and calm)
and of the progression which can result from reconciling them (influenced by
William Blake).

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Yeatsian Oppositions
Contact:
The Sídhe The natural In-Between States
world
Spirit Matter
• Shores, lakes,
Imagination Reason islands
Eternal Ephemeral
• Twilight, dawn
Immortal Mortal
Id Ego • Dreams, visions
Water & air Earth
Night Day

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The Stolen Child

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flappy herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
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 grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Roses
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 is anxious in its sleep.
[. . .]
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,
For a world more full of weeping than he can
understand.
Which of the following antinomies are
relevant for the poem?
a) Fairy vs. Human
b) Wildness vs. Domestication
c) Night vs. Day
d) Unquietness vs. Peacefulness
e) Aesthetics vs. Ordinariness
f) Imagination vs. Reality

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The Song of the Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand, • Which of the following do you consider
And hooked a berry to a thread; accurate in relation to “The Song”?
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out, a) The quest is to find the maiden who has
I dropped the berry in a stream vanished in order to consummate the
And caught a little silver trout. speaker’s unrequited love.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame, b) The speaker strives to recapture his own
But something rustled on the floor, faded youth.
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
c) The speaker’s quest will be completed in
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
death.
And faded through the brightening air.
d) The speaker is aspiring to become immortal
Though I am old with wandering and master time through his art - art has a
Through hollow lands and hilly lands, divine function (the transcendence of time
I will find out where she has gone, and death)
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done e) The ‘woman’ figure is important only as the
The silver apples of the moon, object of the speaker’s desire to find and
The golden apples of the sun. possess her.

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6. FEMINIST REVISIONS OF
THE SIDHE

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Preamble
• Historically: shift in the roles assigned to women from
centrality (e.g., Celtic society) to marginality and
subservience
• Religious ideologies: mother, wife, virgin
• Nationalist discourse: Spear-bhean, Shan Bhean Bocht
• Literary tradition: man-made; “woman is not poet, but poetry”
• 3 “R”s of contemporary Irish feminist writing:
• to resist reductive images and perceptions of women
• to revise reductive images and perceptions of women
• to revive /re-posses energies related to creativity,
fertility and self-sufficiency which some connect to the
Celtic ideals of womanhood.

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Feminist Criticism
• A type of literary criticism that critiques how females are
commonly represented in texts, and how insufficient
these representations are as a categorizing device.

• Assumptions:
• Our civilization is pervasively patriarchal.
• This patriarchal ideology also pervades those writings that have
been considered great literature.
• The concepts of gender are largely, if not entirely, cultural
constructs, effected by the omnipresent patriarchal biases of our
civilization.

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Terms
• Patriarchy: basic view according to which our civilisation
is male-centred and male-controlled.

• e.g. language: e.g. literature:

• Mr. / Mrs. , Miss; Oedipus
• bachelor / spinster; Hamlet
• governor / governess Robinson Crusoe
• master / mistress David Copperfield
• patron / matron (male protagonists)

• Sex vs. Gender (behavioural modes of masculinity and

feminity learned in the process of one’s socialization):

• Masculinity: active, domineering, objective, gratifying,

adventurous, rational, creative
• Femininity: passive, subservient, subjective, humble,
timid, emotional, conventional

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Gendered binaries (Helen Cixous)

Man Woman
Self Other
Mind Body
Culture Nature
Activity Passivity
Sun Moon
Day Night
Action Passion
Public Domestic
Centre Margin
Order Chaos
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Femininity as border-line construct

• ORDER • CHAOS
• Virgins (The Madonna) • Eve
• Mothers of God • Pandora
• The Muse • Delilah
• The Archetypal Mother • Circe
• The Angel in the House • The Malign Witch
• The Castrating Mother
• The Madwoman (in the
Attic)

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Psychoanalitic oppositions

Mother Father

Sigmund Freud Pre-Oedipal stage Oedipal stage

Jacques Lacan Pre-verbal stage Symbolic stage

Julia Kristeva Semiotic stage Symbolic stage

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Different approaches:

• revisiting cultural texts by male authors to look at them from a

woman’s point of view, to see how they both reflect and shape
the attitudes that have held women back
• revising the literary tradition to examine the portrayals of
women, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in such
works; also, recovering literary works written by women.
• analysing language (which is phallocentric and reflects a binary
logic that privileges masculinity; forces women to adopt male
language and to imagine and represent themselves as men
imagine them, or retreat into silence)

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Écriture féminine
• A characteristic feminine form of writing that is intuitive, fluid, freely
associative as opposed to the masculine one (organised, logical,
linear)
• It is associated with the pre-Oedipal, pre-verbal, semiotic state
(related to the body of the mother)
• It is an ‘open’, irrational, disruptive system capable of creating
experiences beyond the ‘closed’, rational, symbolic order of
patriarchy
• … I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like
the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me
under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (James Joyce,
Ulysses)

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The Celtic Paradigm Ioana Mohor-Ivan

Eavan Boland (1944-)

• One of Ireland's best recognized women
poets
• Addresses broad issues of Irish national
identity as well as the specific issues
confronting women and mothers in a
culture that has traditionally ignored their
experiences
• Returns in time to reclaim the stories and
silences of women, filling them with her
own voice (instead of that of the male
bard)
• Collections: In Her Own Image (1980),
Night Feed (1982), Outside History (1990),
In a Time of Violence (1994); prose
memoir: Object Lessons: The Life of the
Woman and the Poet in Our Time (1995).

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What do the following assertions mean to

you?

• “As an Irish woman poet I have very little precedent.

There were none in the 19th century or early part of the
20th century.”

• “The majority of Irish male poets depended on women as

motifs in their poetry… The women in their poems were
often passive, decorative, raised to emblematic status.”

• “… we are constructed by the construct … images are not

ornaments, they are truths.”

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The Celtic Paradigm Ioana Mohor-Ivan

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (1952-)

• One of the most popular of contemporary
Irish poets
• Writes in Irish
• Draws upon themes of ancient Irish
folklore and mythology, combined with
contemporary themes of femininity,
sexuality, and culture
• Revisionist approach in which past and
present overlap: consonant with “magic
realism”
• Collections: An Dealg Droighin (1981);
Féar Suaithinseach (1984); Rogha
Dánta/Selected Poems (1986, 1988,
1990); Pharoh's Daughter (1990), and Feis
(1991)

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Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, “Why I Choose to

Write in Irish”
• 30% of Irish population claim to be speakers of Irish (not
counting No. Ireland)
• Need to recover the history and influence of writing in Irish
to express Irish identity, Irish concerns.
• “Irish is a language of enormous elasticity and emotional
sensitivity; of quick and hilarious banter and a welter of
references both historical and mythological; it is an
instrument of imaginative depth and scope, which has
been tempered by the community for generations until it
can pick up and sing out every hint of emotional
modulation that can occur between people.”
• “I had chosen my language, or more rightly, perhaps…the
language had chosen me.” (1998)

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The Celtic Paradigm Ioana Mohor-Ivan

Eavan Boland
It’s what
I set my heart on.
The Woman Turns Herself Into a
Fish Yet

it’s done: ruddering

I turn, and muscling
I flab upward in the sunless tons

blub-lipped, of new freedoms

hipless still
and I am I feel

sexless a chill pull,

shed a brightening,
of ecstasy, a light, a light

a pale and how

swimmer in my loomy cold,
sequin-skinned, my greens

pearling eggs still

screamlessly she moons
in seaweed. in me.

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So she did. She got up and started

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
Swept Away/Abduction
The fairy woman marched
right into my poem.
She didn’t close the door.
She didn’t ask.
I was too polite
to throw her out
so I decided
to act all nice:
Stay, if you’re in a hurry,
and of course you are.
Sit up to the fire;
eat; have a drink.
Mind you, if I were in your house
the way you’re in mine
I’d go home right away,
but never mind: stay.
doing housework. She made the beds,
washed the dishes. Put the dirty clothes
in the machine.
When my husband came
home for his tea,
he didn’t notice she wasn’t me.
But I’m in the fairy field
in everlasting dark.
I’m freezing, with only
the mist to cover me.
And if he wants me back
here’s what he must do:
get a fine big ploughshare
and butter it well,
then make it red-hot in the fire.
Then go to the bed
where that bitch is lying
and let her have it!
“Push it into her face,
burn her and scorch her,
and all the time she’s going,
I’ll be coming.
All the time she’s going,
I’ll be coming.”

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