 Greetings friends. Welcome back to Rhythms Riddle. Thank you for watching and I'm your host Tom's Gauntlet and I'm the guitarist and artist and I'm sharing with you some more of my own inspiration from other poets and writers. And before I read for you some William Blake, I'm going to read one more story from The Celtic Twilight by W.B. Yates. This one is called The Enchanted Woods part one. Last summer whenever I had finished my day's work I used to go wandering in certain roomy woods and there I would often meet an old countryman and talk to him about his work and about the woods and once or twice a friend came with me to whom he would open his heart more readily than to me. He had spent all his life lopping away the witch elm and the hazel and the privet and the horn beam from the paths and had thought much about the natural and supernatural creatures of the wood. He has heard the hedgehog, Grina Olga he calls him, grunting like a Christian and it is certain that he steals apples by rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to every quill. He is certain too that the cats of whom there are many in the woods have a language of their own some kind of old Irish. He says cats, cats were serpents and they were made into cats at the time of some great change in the world that is why they are hard to kill and why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you and that would be the serpents tooth sometimes he thinks they change into wild cats and then a nail grows on the end of their tails but these wild cats are not the same as the martin cats who have been always in the woods. The foxes were once tame as the cats are now but they ran away and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels whom he hates with what seems an affectionate interest though at times his eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs unroll themselves when he was a boy by putting a wisp of burning straw under them. I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and supernatural very clearly. He told me the other day that foxes and cats like above all to be in the fourths and lisses after nightfall whatever the fourths and lisses are I'm not sure and he will certainly pass from some story about a fox to a story about a spirit with less change of voice than when he is going to speak about a martin cat a rare beast nowadays. Many years ago he used to work in the garden and once they put him to sleep in a garden house where there was a loft full of apples and all night he could hear people rattling plates and knives and forks over his head in the loft. Once at any rate he has seen an unearthly sight in the woods. He says one time I was out cutting timber over an inchy and about eight o'clock one morning when I when I got there I saw a girl picking nuts with her hair hanging down over her shoulders brown hair and she had a good clean face and she was tall and nothing on her head and her dress no way gaudy but simple and when she felt me coming she gathered herself up and was gone as if the earth had swallowed her up and I followed her and looked for her but I never could see her again from that day to this never again. He used he used the word clean as we would use words like fresh or comely others too have seen spirits in the enchanted woods a laborer told us of what a friend of his had seen in a part of the woods that is called Shanwala from some odd village that was before the wood. He said one evening I pursued from Lawrence Magan in the yard. Lawrence Magan in the yard and he went away through the path in Shanwala and bid me goodnight and two hours after there he was back again in the yard and bid me light a candle that was in the stable and it told me that when he got into Shanwala a little fellow about as high as his knee but having a head as big as a man's body came beside him and led him out of the path and around about and at last it brought him to the lime kiln and then it vanished and left him. A woman told me of a sight that she had she she and others had seen by a certain deep pool in the river she said I came over the style from the chapel and the others along with me and a great blast of wind came and two trees were bent and broken and fell into the river and the splash of water out of it went up to the skies and those that were with me saw many figures but myself I only saw one sitting there by the bank where the trees fell dark clothes he had on and he was headless a man told a man told me that one day when he was a boy he and another boy went to catch a horse in a certain field full of boulders and bushes of hazel and creeping juniper and rock roses that that is where the the lakeside is for a little clear of the woods he said to the boy that that was with him I bet I bet a button that if I fling a pebble onto onto that bush it will stay on it meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not be able to go through it so he took up a pebble of cow dung and as soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music that ever was heard they ran away and when they had gone about 200 yards they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white walking round and round the bush first it had the form of a woman and then of a man and it was going around the bush part 2 I often entangle myself in argument more complicated than even those paths of inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions but at other times I say as Socrates said what they told him a learned opinion about a nymph of the elusis quote the common opinion is enough for me unquote I believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we cannot see and that some of these are ugly or grotesque and some wicked or foolish but very many beautiful beyond anyone we have ever seen and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant and quiet places even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for and now I will at times explore every nook of some poor corpus with almost anxious footsteps so deep a hold has this imagination upon me you too meet with a like imagination doubtless somewhere wherever your ruling stars will have it Saturn driving you to the woods or the moon it may be to the edges of the sea I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset where our forefathers imagined the dead following their shepherd the son or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing if beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth it will not long be beauty and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves I say to myself when I am well out of that thicket of argument that they are surely there the divine people for only we who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them they live out their passionate lives not far off as I think and we shall be among them when we die if we but keep our natures simple and passionate may it not even be that death shall unite us to all romance and that someday we shall fight dragons among blue hills or come to that whereof all romance is but foreshadowing mingled with the images of man's misdeeds in greater days than these as the old men thought in the earthly paradise when they were in good spirits pardon me I'm gonna reread that last little bit to get a better grasp may it not even be that death shall unite us to all romance and that someday we shall fight dragons among blue hills or come to that whereof all romance is but foreshadowing mingled with the images of man's misdeeds in greater days than these as the old men thought in the earthly paradise when they were in good spirits 1902 thank you for listening please subscribe