Sixteen Poems

A procession of the dead crosses a moonlit stream—and one pale face turns toward the living. In “A Dream,” William Allingham gives a night’s passing vision the tenderness of a mother’s embrace.

Across the Irish coast and the winding banks of the Erne, Allingham’s poems move between beloved home, ruined abbeys and a country shared with fairies. Selected by William Butler Yeats, these sixteen lyrics bring together the ache of parting, the hush of old places and the strange music of folklore: a fisherman rows beneath a ruined monastery, while little folk gather where the mountain meets the glen. Their voices are playful, mournful and sometimes unsettling, as nature’s familiar beauty opens onto something beyond it. What will you hear in the quiet between the human world and the one just out of sight?

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