"Untiring Joys and Sorrows": Yeats and the Sidhe

In popular culture, the idea of Irishness has long been associated with the idea of fairies and leprechauns. This association has been explored by scholars who treat the Sidhe—also known as the daoine maithe, or the "good people"—as either a sociological or a literary construct. Most often, the sociological construct is somewhat insidious and the literary construct tends to be romantic. Recently, Angela Bourke has explored how the folkloric understanding of the fairies may be used to explain the otherwise inexplicable—for instance, when hormonal changes that come about through puberty or menopause were explained by saying that the fairies have taken the real person and left a changeling instead. Bourke's The Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999) examines the case of Michael Cleary, who burned his relatively independent wife to death in the hopes of forcing the fairies to change her back to the acquiescent wife that he desired.¹ Bourke finds the mythology of the fairy world so deeply ingrained in Irish culture that it blurs the lines between the literary construct and the sociological use.

Bourke, however, is not the first to explore these associations. William Butler Yeats attempted to resolve where the line was between the literary and the sociological, and often shifted in his own evaluations of where that line was to be drawn. In his early writing, he collected fairy stories, carefully listening and evaluating, until he seemed to hold his own opinions about the existence of the Sidhe, opinions that were reflected in his own poetry and essays. But his own opinions were at best ambivalent, and at worst contradictory, as we can see in the following passage:

Do not think the fairies are always little. Everything is capricious about them, even their size. They seem to take what size or shape pleases them. Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepracaun, the shoe-maker. Perhaps they wear their shoes out with dancing. Near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven years. When she came home she had no toes—she had danced them off.²

A life of dancing is surely delightful, but the vision of dancing until one's toes are gone is a vision of torturous agony. Did Yeats, then, believe a fairy life was a life to be desired, or a life to be feared? Yeats's works provide numerous instances that would shed light on the question of whether he himself believed that the Sidhe were—in the simplest terms—good or bad. Most of the criticism that addresses the question of how Yeats considered the Sidhe examines the source material that Yeats employed, and most critics conclude that, if we look to the source material, the fairy world is bad. The underlying assumption, of course, is that it must be one or the other, and cannot be both. From the perspective of postcolonial theory, however, Yeats's own system of belief regarding the Sidhe is entirely consistent with other movements in colonial literatures—precisely because of that apparent ambivalence.

In W. B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu (1987), Peter Alderson Smith offers several theories about the origins of the Sidhe. Each played some role in shaping Yeats's understandings of who he believes they are, and what their function might be. The Sidhe might be the spirits of the dead, or the ancient gods "in a degraded form," or "a folk-memory of a very ancient race of mortals."³ Of course, Christianity has had its effect on fairy faith, and, as with so many other Celtic traditions, the fairy faith was assimilated into Christianity. In Yeats's time, the Christian understanding of this tradition was that

so many angels chose to leave heaven with Lucifer that God was in danger of being left alone. He therefore ordered the gates of heaven and hell to be shut simultaneously. Those who had already fallen as far as hell became devils; those who had not fallen at all remained...