"The Spell-Struck" (A Poem)

Like William Butler Yeats, with whom he clashed several times during his life, Thomas William Hazen Rolleston spent much of his literary career championing and preserving Irish culture and folklore, with his poems “The Lament of Queen Maev” and “The Spell-Struck” being considered among his finest pieces.[1] In “The Spell-Struck,” the poet draws from fairy mythology to fabricate a tale where the ethereal being spends the summer dancing and feasting before, in the chilled months of autumn, succumbing to her death as she reminisces over her summertime joys.[2]

She walks as she were moving
Some mystic dance to tread,
So falls her gliding footsteps,
So leans her listening head:

For once to Faery harping
She danced upon a hill,
And through her brain and bosom
The music pulses still.

Her eyes are bright and tearless,
But wide with yearning pain;
She longs for nothing earthly,
But O, to hear again,

The sound that held her listening
Upon her moonlit path!
The rippling Faery music
That filled the lonely rath.

Her lips, that once have tasted
The Faery banquet’s bliss,
Shall glad no mortal lover
With maiden smile or kiss.

She’s dead to all things living
Since that November Eve;
And when she dies in autumn
No living thing will grieve.[3]

 

Works Referenced

D’Esterre-Keeling, Elsa. “Four Irish Books.” The Academy 1199 (1895): 349-351.

 

Marcus, Phillip. Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance. 2^nd ed. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Rolleston, Thomas William Hazon. “The Spell-Struck.” Sea Spray: Verses and Translations by T.W. Rolleston. 1909. Germany: Outlook Verlag, 2018. 8-9.

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[1] D’Esterre-Keelintg, 350.
[2] Marcus, 132.
[3] Rolleston, 8-9.