The Fairies

Up the airy mountain
     Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting,
     For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
     Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
     And white owl’s feather.
Down along the rocky shore
     Some make their home,
They live on crispy pancakes
     Of yellow tide-foam;
Some in the reeds
     Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
     All night awake.

High on the hill-top
     The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
     He’s nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
     Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
     From Slieveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music,
     On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen,
     Of the gay Northern Lights.

They stole little Bridget
     For seven years long;
When she came down again
     Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back
     Between the night and morrow;
They thought she was fast asleep,
     But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
     Deep within the lake,
On a bed of flag leaves,
     Watching till she wake.

By the craggy hill-side,
     Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn trees
     For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
     As dig them up in spite?
He shall find the thornies set
     In his bed at night.

Up the airy mountain
     Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting,
     For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
     Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
     And white owl’s feather.

      — William Allingham

Biography William Allingham

  Born in Ballyshannon, Co.Donegal, where he was in the Customs Service,
  Allingham published his first book of poems in 1850. He visited London in
  1847, and in 1851 began a lifelong friendship with Tennyson, the star of
  the Diary ­ Tennyson talking and walking, airing his prejudices, reading
  his poems. Browning and Carlyle in London feature prominently, and Leigh
  Hunt, Thackeray, Emerson, George Eliot, William Morris, the Rossettis,
  Patmore, William Barnes, Froude, Palgrave, Burne-Jones, Turgenev are other
  dramatis personae of a diary covering nearly half a century.

  Allingham’s poem The Fairies ­ Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy
  glen… ­ continues to be widely known and loved, whilst his verse-novel
  Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland was admired, not least by Turgenev.

  He died in Hampstead, London, in 1889; his urn lies buried in the
  churchyard at Ballyshannon.

• Irish Poets