Early in Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire , Maire Bruin has taken an old book down from the thatch, a book Maurteen says his grandfather wrote, and she is too deep in it to mind the supper. Asked what she is reading, she tells of a princess who followed a singing voice into the land of faery:
The lines are built like a chant: one frame, three swapped endings, and each ending pairs age with a fault. Heard once, it sounds like a ballad's refrain. The play then hands those three phrases from speaker to speaker until they carry its whole quarrel.
Bridget has spent the scene scolding Maire, and has just called her "a good-for-nothing wife". Maire answers that she does not care if she has given away a house "Where I must hear all day a bitter tongue", and then turns the princess's list on the room: