June 13, 1865

Yeats was born on June 13, 1865. His poem, "The Cat and the Moon," is justly anthologized, but today we are looking at some comments about cats that Yeats collected from Irish country folks, and wrote up in his "The Celtic Twilight".
This passage gives us a sense of the world Irish cats inhabited.

He has heard the hedgehog —'grainne oge,' he calls him-* grunting like a Christian,' and is certain that he steals apples by rolling about under an apple tree until there is an apple sticking to every quill. He is certain too that the cats, of whom there are many in the woods, have a language of their own-some kind of old Irish. He says,Cats were serpents, and they were made into cats at the time of some great change in the world. Enchanted. That is why they are hard to kill, and why it is dangerous to meddle with them. If you annoy a cat it might claw or bite you in a way that would put poison in you, and that would be the serpent's tooth.' Sometimes he thinks they change into wild cats, and then a nail grows on the end of their tails; but these wild cats are not the same as the marten cats, who have been always in the woods. The foxes were once tame, as the cats are now, but they ran away and became wild. He talks of all wild creatures except squirrels—whom he hates-with what seems an affectionate interest, though at times his eyes will twinkle with pleasure as he remembers how he made hedgehogs unroll themselves when he was a boy, by putting a wisp of burning straw under them.