Song and Its Fountains

George William Russell, better known as Æ (1867-1935), mystic, poet, painter, journalist, editor, and practical rural economist, was a pivotal figure in the Irish literary revival and in the emergence of modern Ireland. From the beginning of the twentieth century he formed life-long friendships with W. B. Yeats, George Moore, Lord Dunsany, James Stephens, Stephen Mackenna (translator of the Enneads of Plotinus), James Joyce, and other writers, thinkers, and artists, and was closely associated with the Irish National Theatre Society (later the Abbey Theatre). In his biography of Æ, Henry Summmerfield relates of him that probably in mid-1884 he "began to experience waking dreams of astonishing power and vividness which seemed to be thrust into his consciousness by a mind which was not his. Images of cosmic happenings and other worlds overwhelmed him with a majesty far removed from anything of which he was aware in his own being. 'I remember how pure, holy and beautiful these imaginations seemed,' Æ wrote in later years, 'how they came like crystal water sweeping aside the muddy current of my life. . . . The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it. If it would raise but an instant I knew I would be in Paradise."' Song and Its Fountains is imbued with the force of this powerful inner life. In [this book] I have tried to track song back to its secret fountains. As I have thought it unnatural to see together in galleries pictures unrelated to each other, or taken from the altars for which they were painted, so I have thought it unnatural for lyric to follow lyric in a volume without hint of the bodily or spiritual circumstance out of which they were born. I have here placed some songs in their natural psychic atmosphere. Those who cannot follow my reasoning may perhaps be amused or interested by the fantasy a poet built about his life and poetry. - Æ And the ancient mystery Holds its hands out day by day, Takes a chair and croons with me By my cabin built of clay