Heart of Stone - Deep Heart's Core

 

The Kenmare stone circle, suprisingly quite near the center of town, was well worth seeing.  Not only did we get to have a substantial chat with the local man who manned the entrance and who grew up “at the bottom of the street,” but we also were able to see the circle in our own small group.  There was time to ponder the place and there were ample fairy trees on hand where we left some wishes. My wish was politically motivated and aimed towards a hope for better times in the States.  It was a wish, or a dream for a better future. 

In class, I know there is some interest in pre-Christian sites and works of art, which made me think of Yeats’s “To Some I have Talked with by the Fire.”  To me the poem is about ancient desire that Yeats feels needs to be rekindled: “of the dark folk who live in souls / Of passionate men, like bats in dead trees; / And of the wayward twilight companies / Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content, / Because their blossoming dreams have never bent / Under the fruit of evil and of good” (4-9). It is about the brooding passions of old, intense, authentic, dark, deep, Irish blood that will rise up and “like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name” (12).  This is the hope for something that can’t be spoken of, or named just yet.  For Yeats this may have meant a united and free Ireland. To me (via the wish on the fairy tree) it might stand for the dream of a rational, free, empathetic, and ethical government. In “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” Yeats is asking for, or hoping for, a shift in our way of thinking and seeing the world.  He does not write a lament about the glories of the past, or a desire to return to the old ways (Make Ireland Great Again).  Instead, he asks for “New Dreams, new dreams” (26). The salvation from the shackles we have placed upon ourselves, the “mind-forged manacles” (as Blake would say), comes from words that celebrate the good parts of the past, but that are also pointed to a progressive future. As he reminds us at the outset of “The Song of the Happy Shepheard,” ---“The woods of Acardy are dead” (1).