Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men.

These lines open William Allingham’s poem “The Fairies,” a mid-Victorian lyric that draws on Irish folklore about the “little people.” Allingham (1824–1889), an Irish poet associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, often blended musical ballad forms with local legend and rural atmosphere. “The Fairies” evokes a landscape of mountains and glens haunted by supernatural beings, and it was widely anthologized as a children’s poem despite its undertone of menace. The stanza functions like a cautionary refrain: the speaker warns that certain places in the countryside are not safe to roam, because the fairies may abduct or harm intruders.

The stanza contrasts the beauty of the natural world (“airy mountain,” “rushy glen”) with an inherited fear of what might inhabit it. The sing-song rhythm and simple diction mimic a nursery rhyme, but the warning—“We daren’t go a-hunting / For fear of little men”—introduces anxiety and taboo. Allingham captures how folklore polices behavior: the “little men” stand for unseen forces that demand respect for boundaries, whether those are literal (dangerous terrain) or cultural (places marked as otherworldly). The poem’s enduring appeal lies in this tension between enchantment and threat, suggesting that imagination can make the familiar countryside feel charged with moral and supernatural consequence.