Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

Hill men desire their hills.

Did you know that Lord Dunsany wrote a story about pirates who put wheels on their pirate ship and go raiding across the desert?

Oh, that's interesting.

So did Terry Gilliam, except it was businessman in a business building.

End of The Story of the Grey House

Where the Tides Ebb and Flow by Lord Dunsany.

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For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Where the Tides Ebb and Flow by Lord Dunsany.

I dreamt that I had done a horrible thing, so that burial was to be denied me either in soil or sea, neither could there be any hell for me.

I waited for some hours knowing this.

Introduction to Songs of the Fields.

Dunsany Castle.

June, 1914.

If one who looked from a tower for a new star, watching for years the same part of the sky, suddenly saw it, quite by chance while thinking of other things, and knew it for the star for which he had hoped, how many millions of men would never care? And the star might blaze over deserts and forests and seas, cheering lost wanderers in desolate lands, or guiding dangerous quests.

When they have read through the profounder poets, and seen the problem plays, and studied all the perplexities that puzzle man in the cities, the small circle of readers that I predict for him will turn to Ledwidge as to a mirror reflecting beautiful fields, as to a very still lake rather on a very cloudless evening.

there is scarcely a smile of spring or a sigh of autumn that is not reflected here scarcely a phrase of the large benedictions of summer even of winter he gives us clear glimpses sometimes albeit mournfully remembering spring in the red west the twisted moon is low and on the bubbles there are half-lit stars music in twilight and the deep blue flow of water in the watching fire of mars the deep fish slipping through the moonlit bars make death a thing of sweet dreams what a summer's evening is here and this is a summer's night in a much longer poem that i have not included in this selection a summer's night seen by two lovers the large moon rose up queenly as a flower charmed by some indian pipes a hare went by a snipe above them circled in the sky and elsewhere he writes giving us the mood and picture of autumn in a single line and somewhere all the wandering birds have flown with such simple scenes as this the book is full giving nothing at all to those that look for a message but bringing a feeling of quiet from gleaming irish evenings a book to read between the strand and piccadilly circus amidst the thunder and hootings to every poet is given the revelation of some living thing so intimate that he speaks when he speaks of it as an ambassador of speaking for his sovereign with homer it was the heroes with ledwidge it is the small birds that sing but in particular especially the blackbird whose cause he champions against all other birds almost with vehemence such as that with which men discuss whether mr m p or his friend the right honourable is really the greater ruffian this is how he speaks of the blackbird in one of his earliest poems he was sixteen when he wrote it in a grocer's shop in dublin dreaming of slane where he was born and his dreams turned out to be too strong for the grocery business for he walked home one night a distance of thirty miles above me smokes the little town with its white-washed walls and roofs of brown and its octagon spire tones smoothly down as the holy minds within in the wondrous impudently sweet half of impassion half conceit the blackbird calls adown the street like the piper of hamelin let us not call him the burns of ireland you who may like this book nor even the irish john clare though he is more like him for poets are all incomparable it is only the versifiers that resemble the great ones but let us know him by his own individual song he is the poet of the blackbird i hope that not too many will be attracted to this book on account of the author being a peasant lest he comes to be praised by the how interesting school For know that neither in any class, nor in any country, nor in any age, shall you predict the footfall of Pegasus, who touches the earth where he pleaseth, and is bridled by whom he will.

Dunsany, June, 1914 Basingstoke Camp I wrote this preface in such a different June, that if I sent it out with no edition it would make the book appear to have dropped a long while since Out of Another World, a world that none of us remembers now, in which there used to be leisure.

Ledwich came last October into the 5th Battalion of the Royal Inneskillen Fusiliers, which is in one of the divisions of Kitchener's 1st Army, and soon earned a Lance Corporal's stripe.

Old Irish family, he said.

Related to Lord Dunsany.

Little bit of a chap.

Hmm.

But in the end they made no defense against danger, for they knew not what it would be, but wrote upon parchment as a warning, in order that all might know, the bad old woman in black ran down the street of the ox butchers.

End of The Bad Old Woman in Black by Lord Dunsany.

Coco by Guy de Maupassant.

This is a LibriVox recording.

They are coherent and consistent and made upon two related linguistic formulae.

So they achieve a reality not fully achieved to my feeling by other name inventors, say Swift or Dunsany.

Exclamation point.

Needless to say, they are not Celtic.