Green

Being that Christmas approaches and the holiday makes itself more present with each passing day I began to ponder on what topic I could write about as my next post. My first thought was of color and the first color that consequently sprang to mind was green. From there, I thought of literature that in some weird associative way related to the color green. I looked at my bookcase and the first book that pops out is "Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose". I've read my share of Yeats's poetry, drama and some of his critical writings, and for some reason I find, in specific, his poetry verdant. Therefore, I will write about Yeats.
Now, I won't be sharing one of his poems nor one of his plays, instead I will talk about his work, "The Celtic Twilight". I begin with the preface, which I find is beautifully eloquent. In it Yeats invokes the muse Art, which is "the daughter of hope and memory", as he  commends himself as the the voice of the peasantry, of "faeries and dhouls". He presents himself as the unbiased weaver of the stories that waft among the Irish people.
He does exactly as professed, narrating small clusters of stories where magic, the celtic lore, faeries, and ghouls are present as retold and passed on through generations. From Belief and Unbelief, Drumcliff and Roses, Enchanted Woods, By the Roadside, etc., a picturesque landscape is painted and the beliefs of the Irish are portrayed in a loving manner. There are stories of love, beauty, faeries, green pastures, wicked deeds, and so forth. Also, the stories encapsulate anecdotes and lessons for the reader to heed.
I highly recommend Yeats to everyone, he is an author of substance who combines folkoric elements in a great number of his works.
And I end with an excerpt from the preface:
"The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best."