12/07/2024
Genre: Poetry
Chapter: 3
Listen: 2
This narrative poem is composed in three parts, and consists of a dialogue between the aged Irish hero Oisín and St. Patrick.
Oisín relates his three-hundred year sojourn in the immortal isles of Faerie. In the isles, Oisín married the beautiful Sidhe Niamh: together they traveled, feasted, and quested. At last Oisín succumbs to the temptation to return and visit the lands of mortal men: inadvertently slipping from his faerie horse, his body touches the ground and instantly puts on the flesh of a decrepit old man.
Oisín describes various islands and what he did there: contrasting his noble deeds with the degenerate weakness of the present generation.