Meme: have a poem!

[graycardinal]

I am behind on any number of things, but the trail of breadcrumbs backward from sanguinity's post today made me go back and rummage through the poetry shelf on the wall across the room, looking at some of my favorite authors...

...but what I'm actually posting is something a trifle more obscure. (An abbreviated two-stanza version is in some circulation among Irish folk musicians, often cited as "traditional" - I first heard it on an Irish Rovers album when I was in grade school - so I was much surprised when I ran across the full text below some decades later in a used bookstore, in The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World, Volume Two. I promptly bought the book, of course, and hope someday to find a recorded - and properly credited - version of the poem in its entirety....)

The Fairies
William Allingham

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together,
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather.

Down by the rocky shore
Some make their home--
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow sea-foam;
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.

High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and grey,
He's nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back
Between the night and morrow;
They thought she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag-leaves,
Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn-trees,
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As to dig them up in spite,
He shall find their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather!

////

Comments

[sanguinity]

Oh, I like that! It is a mind-twisting mix of whimsical and threatening -- in that, it's like a nursery rhyme, I suppose.

And I especially like the imagery of this pair of lines:
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow sea-foam...