Under Bare Ben Bulben's Head

 

From my travel journals

I met a windy spirit in the night of a grey soggy day spent sloshing along the shores of Sligo and checking out the burial place of my favorite dead Irish poet in Drumcliffe churchyard.  

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliffe churchyard Yeats is laid. 

In fact there is no reason to believe that Yeats' mortal remains are under his headstone there. He died in France at the start of the Second World War and in the confusion his corpse was thrown into a communal grave. After the war, with nothing like DNA testing, a committee selected some likely bones to return to Ireland.  Whether or not any part of Yeats the man of flesh and bone is in that ground I do not doubt that some part of his spirit may fly here, like the swan of hammered pewter on the church door. The dark, sere wall of Ben Bulben rises against the horizon. Some say they have seen a door in the wall open around Samhain to let the Wild Hunt ride out. Yeats encountered these trooping fairies and urged great caution around them. His unease was reflected in the epigraph he wrote for his headstone. 

Cast a cold eye on life, on death
Huntsman, pass by 

He changed the key word in the last line and it is the blander version - Horseman, pass by - that tourists and pilgrims read today. The softer word does not dull the edge of what lies beneath. 

I felt that edge, lying back on a creaky bed in a shambling hotel of creaking floors, under bare Ben Bulben's head, as the poet expected to lie in his casket. 

It was wet and blowy outside, and the windows rattled. A harder gusto of wind threw one of them open and it banged so hard against the wall I feared that some of its little planes of glass had broken. 

"Wisp" drawing by Robert Moss

The wind took a form, with knife-sharp features and streaming hair. There was cruelty in the mouth, lordly disdain in the upward tilt of the raptor nose and the sweep of the high forehead. The body was still a force field, a seething bunch of energies whose form would be determined by the will of the airy spirit, and perhaps by the fears and desires of the perceiver. 

This was not a fairy of the sort you find in fairy tales that adults think suitable for children. But children may know this kind of fairy in the stories they live and may never share with their parents. 

"What is your name? " I find that this is the best opening for any dialogue with spirits. The creature appeared to yawn. Really? 

"If you must call me something you may call me Wisp."

Art: "Mountain View" by Jack Butler Yeats, brother of the poet. Lean through the paint and you are at the multipane window of a cozy cottage with lush window boxes. Lean through the glass and you are at the sere, dark wall of Ben Bulben, from which the Wild Hunt is said to ride out in due season. Lean through the stone, if you dare, and you may find yourself among the Sidhe. I came upon this window to the Otherworld during a visit to the wonderful Model Museum of Modern Art in Sligo