Second Sight Against the Celtic Twilight

I. Two Collectors of the Same Material

W. B. Yeats spent the early 1890s doing something that looks, on its surface, like fieldwork: traveling through Sligo, transcribing the testimony of tenant farmers and old women about banshees, pookas, and the “wee folk,” and publishing the results as The Celtic Twilight (1893), a book he described as an attempt to build “a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things” of a fading oral culture. Yeats’s collecting stance is famously double: he wants to preserve peasant belief ethnographically while also, at moments, affirming it personally — “No matter what one doubts, one never doubts the faeries,” he writes, a line that refuses to resolve whether he is reporting a superstition or confessing one. James Mulhern’s Give Them Unquiet Dreams draws on related material — banshees, second sight, and the porousness of the dead and the living — within a realist, first-person American novel rather than a folklore anthology. Reading Aiden Glencar’s gift alongside Yeats’s Sligo material may help distinguish elements that echo the tradition from those the novel develops differently.

II. What Mulhern Keeps: The Taxonomy of the Uncanny

Aiden’s grandfather transmits the family’s supernatural inheritance to the boy using vocabulary associated with folk taxonomies Yeats catalogued. The banshee appears by name and in a role resembling descriptions Yeats records — a wailing spirit whose cry is a portent of death, heard collectively by an entire household the night before a tragedy: “On the night before, she heard banshees calling out to her. What’s a banshee? A type of fairy or spirit… And there were three knocks on the door, which means someone is going to die.”¹ This account shares features with Irish oral tradition as recorded by Yeats and his contemporaries: a supernatural messenger rather than an active agent of harm, whose appearance is diagnostic rather than causal. The pooka receives a similarly taxonomic treatment: “A pooka is an evil spirit not to be trusted… If she is a pooka, she can change her form into a variety of animals — a cat, a goat, a horse, even an eagle. A shape shifter, the Irish call them… Often, pookas relay veiled messages about your future.”¹ Yeats’s Sligo informants describe the pooka in comparable terms — a shapeshifting, often equine trickster spirit whose favor or wrath depends on how a household treats the land it disturbs. Mulhern’s grandfather also voices an anxious epistemic posture, hedging between literal belief and interpretive caution — “I haven’t ruled out the possibility of ghosts or second sight. But believing those things makes life too complicated”¹ — that echoes Yeats’s uncertainty about how literally to take what he is told.

III. Second Sight as a Documented Folk Category, Not an Invention

An important continuity between Mulhern’s novel and Celtic Twilight traditions is that “second sight” is not simply the novel’s invention or a metaphor — it is a widely attested folk category in the Irish and Scottish Gaelic world, which Yeats encountered within his own family. Yeats’s cousin Lucy Middleton, visited at Rosses Point near Sligo, was said to possess second sight and to have described “amazing experiences” of it; Yeats’s brother Jack, too, “had heard mysterious sounds and seen mysterious sights,” and the young Yeats, by his own account, felt no impulse “to doubt the invisible.” Mulhern gives Aiden’s grandfather a related genealogical framing — the gift as a family inheritance, traceable through named female relatives, not a general psychic capacity available to anyone: “Second sight has been in your family for years… Your grandmother’s ma had the gift, and she, too, was demonized.”¹ The detail that the gift’s transmission is matrilineal and exposes its bearers to social punishment rather than admiration has parallels in folkloric accounts. Yeats’s informants describe seers as figures who are often pitied or feared by their neighbors as well as consulted; second sight in the tradition can be a burden as much as a power, as Aiden experiences it: “To me ’second sight’ was a curse, a burden.”¹

IV. What Mulhern Discards: The Land, the Fairy Rath, the Collective

One difference from the Celtic Twilight material is setting. Yeats’s fairy world is inseparable from a specific rural Irish landscape — raths, fairy forts, particular fields and roads near Sligo where the supernatural is understood to reside in the land itself, encountered by whole communities who share and cross-verify one another’s sightings. Mulhern relocates the inheritance to Irish-American Boston, where it survives inside a single family’s bedroom, without the same geographic anchor or communal verification. In Give Them Unquiet Dreams, Aiden’s blood relatives are the main people who take the supernatural claims seriously; where Yeats reports “there are some doubters even in the western villages,” Mulhern’s Boston presents a more skeptical default. Martin’s “Aiden, she was acting crazy”¹ represents ordinary skepticism, against which Aiden and Laura’s inherited belief is isolated and stigmatized. The fairy fort is replaced by a psychiatric hospital; the shared village epistemology by a diagnosis. The novel thus relocates the taxonomy of the uncanny from a folk-communal world, where such claims are debatable in good faith, into a clinical-modern setting with stronger institutional ideas about what counts as real.

V. What Mulhern Invents: The Metaphysics Yeats Never Supplied

Yeats’s Celtic Twilight material is local and anecdotal — individual encounters, spirits, and portents — and does not offer a unified theory of time or consciousness underlying the phenomena it records. Mulhern’s grandfather offers a broader metaphysical account, and here the novel moves away from its folkloric source: the “block of wood” speech, in which all of time is said to exist “all at once,” with consciousness merely a “flashlight” moving across an already-complete block of past, present, and future, has no clear analogue in Yeats’s fairy lore.¹ It may recall modern philosophical eternalism or aspects of the visionary systems Yeats later developed in A Vision, rather than the folk collecting of The Celtic Twilight. The novel brings a time-metaphysics to folk-taxonomic materials, giving the family a framework for considering prophecy, grief, ghosts, and inherited guilt.

VI. Conclusion: Inheriting the Twilight, Not the Village

Aiden Glencar may be read not as a modern retelling of a Yeatsian fairy-seer but as a figure shaped by emigration and secular psychiatric authority after the village context has changed. Mulhern uses elements of the taxonomy — banshees, pookas, shimmerers, and three knocks on the door — in a way that engages with the tradition rather than merely gesturing toward “Irish mysticism.” The novel removes these elements from their communal ground and gives them a private metaphysical framework. Aiden has no broad audience for his inheritance. It survives, when it survives at all, in a single bedroom, transmitted by a single ghost and believed by a single boy: a public folk cosmology narrowed to one family’s private and increasingly unverifiable faith.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays Second Sight as Narrative Technology