The secret rose Author:William Butler Yeats Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The THE TWISTING OF THE ROPE Secret Rose. AND HANRAHAN THE RED Hanrahan having thought over his quarrel with the priest and his angry neighbours, decide... more »d that vengeance was not in his power, and resolved to begone westward, for Gaelic Ireland was still alive, and the Gaelic poets were still honoured in the West. He cut a cudgel out of the hedge and journeyed on and on, doing a day's work here and singing a song for his lodging there ; and as the English tongue and Eng lish manners died behind him, he became a new man : for was he not the last of that mighty line of poets which came down unbroken from Sancan Torpeist (whom the Great Cat well-nigh ate), and mightier Oisin, whose heart knew unappeased three hundred years of daemonic love ? There is a moment at twilight in which all men look handsome, all women beautiful; and day by day as he wandered slowly and aimlessly he passed deeper and deeper into [TV face p. 142. that Celtic twilight, in which heaven and The earth so mingle that each seems to have Of taken upon itself some shadow of the TT anc 1 Hanrahan other's beauty. It filled his soul with a the Red. desire for he knew not what, it possessed his body with a thirst for unimagined ex periences. He bathed at midnight under that round hill where (forgetful of the days when men lifted his eyelids, powerless with age, that his terrible glance might fall upon the Danaan swordsmen and turn them into stone) sleeps Balor of the Evil Eye ; and as he swam through the smooth sea he laughed and sang up at the drifting clouds until they seemed but vague passions drifting about his heart ; and he longed to feel, as they did, the silvery arrows of the stars shoot through him. He spent a night in the cave where Grania ...« less