8 September 2009

Suggested Reading "Idle Days on the Yann" by Lord Dunsany

Free Speculative Fiction short stories online.

Read it here: "Idle Days on the Yann"
By Lord Dunsany
In 'Read book online'
Genre: Fantasy

Reading "Idle Days on the Yann" is like falling into a dream, similar to the experience of reading Tennyson's poem "The Lotus Eaters". As in "The Lotus Eaters", repeated words create a feeling of heaviness, like having drowsy eyelids barely open.

"Idle Days..." is the story of a poet taking a journey down a river through fantastic country. At the start, he tells the sailors that he is from Ireland, but they laugh at him and do not believe him. There is no such country, they say. He then tells them of countries of his fantasy, and this they congratulate him upon, and so he begins his journey heavily laden with adjectives and many sentences begun with conjunctions, and indeed the whole tale begins with "So I came down through the wood on the banks of the Yann ..." And one suspects that while Ireland is not real, the scnet of burning poppies is. And there is a refrain, as in a song , concerning gods that are humble and harmless. And yet at the end the message is conveyed that the poet has been hard at work looking upon both the world of men and the realm of Myth.

Let yourself go with the rolling, falling cadence of language in this little story, which is one of those rare things; a story about just being happy.



Cheers
Morva Shepley
http://morvahouse.blogspot.com

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