What is it about fairies? Have you ever lost yourself in a wood at twilight when the mist is rising and the owls are calling and the moon begins to shine, have you ever paused, confused, in a dark glade and caught, out of the corner of your eye, something tiny moving in the grass, something bright and quick and lovely, have you ever heard a song in your dreams that goes something like this - Come hither, come hither, come hither.... Fairies are real. As real as dreams, as real as old tales, as real as wildflowers, as rain-spangled cobwebs , as childhood. In the English-speaking world our oldest and strangest tales are known as 'fairy tales', whether or not they actually have any fairies in them. Shakespeare demonstrably believed in fairies, as did J.M. Barrie, who taught us how important that belief can be. The eminent Victorian Andrew Lang devoted most of his life to pursuing them down the mossy lanes. Walter de la Mare seems to have been best friends with them, insofar as this is allowed to mortal man. His Come Hither is a poetry anthology that might have been compiled by the little folk themselves, so bright and strange are its timeless contents.
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
No.
Give them me. Give them me.
No.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
- Harold Munro
How well I remember the delicious shiver that passed down my back when I held in my childish hands William Allingham's terrifying poem The Fairies :
Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting,
For fear of little men...
Yeats tells us that fairies are 'fallen angels who were not good enough to be saved, nor bad enough to be lost.' And Milton gives us a singular glimpse of one Sabrina, a water nymph, at the delicate busines of her toilette.
Sabrina fair,
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber - dropping hair;
Listen for dear honour`s sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save!
And what of today's fairies? Have they retreated altogether, far away from our world which is too much with us? Why no, they are here among us, if you will only take the trouble to look for them. As always, they are not found in the bright markets, but in those quiet and crepuscular places where unusual things begin to happen. One such place is the Cabinet des Fées , and anyone with a serious interest in fairy things should get hold of a copy toute de suite. So many voices call like sirens from its pages, I cannot name them all, but consider, for example, these lines from Sonya Taaffe's Bonny Fisher Boy,:
For its glint, I would not kneel in the waves
that idle around my ankles like fingers lightly
closed; I would not pillow my cheek on cobbled
shingle and sand for the mussel-black drip
of his hair; even for his eyes, luminous
as the colors the abyss makes for itself
when the farthest sun has been flattened to dark...
He seems a fit companion to Milton's amber-dropping Sabrina. In Brambles by Amanda Downum we have a sudden, vivid encounter with a fairy woman at the edge of a wood: Thorns snag her wine-dark velvet cloak, tangle in russet curls. Her eyes widen as eye approach... And what is one to make of Patricia Russo's haunting little fantasia Cinder Road : The shoes looked the same as I remembered, felt the same, smooth and shiny as glass, but as I went to draw the first one on, I saw that my feet were not the same; they had decided to change. The story invites you in, making the unreal real and the impossible utterly plausible.
Another corner where the fairies live on is Goblin Fruit , a journal devoted exclusively to poetry. There are many fine poets at work here, but Caitlyn Paxon captured my heart with her strange lament She Asks for Dresses:
Deep blue like my eyes
Grasping, dark, drowning waters,
Tempest tossed, full of the cries
Of dying sailors
And their mourning wives,
Dripping pearls like tears,
Sand coated in lies.
Again the sea, and death, and something indefinable but distinctly unheimlich that sends a delicate shiver down your spine. One of the strengths of this material is the way it transcends the everyday, giving us access to the whole rich heritage of myth and legend, that otherworldliness that haunts our collective memory and invokes in equal parts childhood and dreaming.
Another author whose work I enjoy is Theodora Goss . Her delicious tour de force Sleeping with Bears manages to be somehow both very funny and quite scary at the same time, no small trick. Here's a little excerpt from her poem The Bear's Daughter:
She dreams of the south. Wandering through the silent castle,
Where snow has covered the parapets, and the windows
Are covered with frost, like panes of isinglass,
She dreams of pomegranates and olive trees.
But to be the bear's daughter is to be a daughter, as well,
Of the north. To have forgotten a time before
The tips of her fingers were blue, before her veins
Were blue like rivers flowing through fields of ice.
And for those who enjoy a good yarn, I'd also like to mention the wildly entertaining Chronicles of T'ville . It's an anthology from as unlikely a place as fairyland, i.e. Queensland, Australia, it's free to download and it features a multitude of talented voices ready and willing to take you up the airy mountain and down that rushy glen.
For my own poem about fairies and lovers see HERE.
For a Valentine's Day treat see SACRED HEARTS.
And this is my own modern fairy tale THE GOLDEN DOLPHINS , the strange and wonderful tale of the beautiful Mélusine, who lives with a band of thieves deep beneath the streets of Paris, until the day she encounters a golden dolphin...
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