The First Yeats E-Book

William Butler Yeats

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) began writing poetry as a devotee of Blake, Shelley, the pre-Raphaelites, and of nineteenth-century Irish poets including James Clarence Mangan and Samuel Ferguson. By the end of his life, he had, as T.S. Eliot said, created a poetic language for the twentieth century. The First Yeats deepens our understanding of the making of that poetic imagination, reprinting the original texts of Yeats's three early collections, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1899), The Countess of Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The poems were subsequently heavily revised or discarded. Among them are some of the best-loved poems in English - 'The LakeIsle of Innisfree', 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' - fresh and unfamiliar here in their original contexts, together with Yeats's lengthy notes which were drastically cut in the collected editions. This illuminating edition by Edward Larrissy, editor of W.B. Yeats, The Major Works (Oxford University Press, 2000), includes an introduction that clarifies the literary, historical and intellectual context of the poems, detailed notes, and a bibliography. It offers essential material for reading - and revaluing - one of the great modern poets.

Leseprobe

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

The First Yeats

Poems by W.B. Yeats, 1889–1899

Unrevised texts, edited with an introduction by

EDWARD LARRISSY

Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Note on the Text

Bibliography

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN AND OTHER POEMS (1889)

The Wanderings of Oisin

Time and the Witch Vivien

The Stolen Child

Girl’s Song

Ephemera

An Indian Song

Kanva, the Indian, on God

Kanva on Himself

Jealousy

Song of the Last Arcadian

King Goll

The Meditation of the Old Fisherman

The Ballad of Moll Magee

The Phantom Ship

A Lover’s Quarrel among the Fairies

Mosada

How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent

The Fairy Doctor

Falling of the Leaves

Miserrimus

The Priest and the Fairy

The Fairy Pedant

She who Dwelt among the Sycamores

On Mr Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy

A Legend

An Old Song Re-sung

Street Dancers

To an Isle in the Water

Quatrains and Aphorisms

The Seeker

Island of Statues

LEGENDS AND LYRICS (1892)

To the Rose upon the Rood of Time

Fergus and the Druid

The Rose of the World

The Peace of the Rose

The Death of Cuchullin

The White Birds

Father Gilligan

Father O’Hart

When You Are Old

The Sorrow of Love

The Ballad of the Old Foxhunter

A Fairy Song

The Pity of Love

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

A Cradle Song (‘The angels are bending’)

The Man who Dreamed of Fairyland

Dedication of ‘Irish Tales’

The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner

When You Are Sad

The Two Trees

They Went Forth to the Battle, But They Always Fell

An Epitaph

Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days

Yeats’s Notes

THE WIND AMONG THE REEDS (1899)

The Hosting of the Sidhe

The Everlasting Voices

The Moods

Aedh Tells of the Rose in his Heart

The Host of the Air

Breasal the Fisherman

A Cradle Song (‘The Danann children laugh…’)

Into the Twilight

The Song of Wandering Aengus

The Song of the old Mother

The Fiddler of Dooney

The Heart of the Woman

Aedh Laments the Loss of Love

Mongan Laments the Change that has Come upon him and his Beloved

Michael Robartes Bids his Beloved Be at Peace

Hanrahan Reproves the Curlew

Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty

A Poet to his Beloved

Aedh Gives his Beloved Certain Rhymes

To My Heart, Bidding it Have No Fear

The Cap and Bells

The Valley of the Black Pig

Michael Robartes Asks Forgiveness Because of his Many Moods

Aedh Tells of a Valley Full of Lovers

Aedh Tells of the Perfect Beauty

Aedh Hears the Cry of the Sedge

Aedh Thinks of Those who have Spoken Evil of his Beloved

The Blessed

The Secret Rose

Hanrahan Laments because of his Wanderings

The Travail of Passion

The Poet Pleads with his Friend for old Friends

Hanrahan Speaks to the Lovers of his Songs in Coming Days

Aedh Pleads with the Elemental Powers

Aedh Wishes his Beloved were Dead

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Mongan Thinks of his Past Greatness

Yeats’s Notes

Notes on the Poems

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

About the Author

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the great helpfulness of the staff of Special Collections in the Libraries of Trinity College, Dublin and Queen’s University, Belfast. I am also grateful to colleagues and students at the Yeats International Summer School, Sligo, in 2007 and 2009, and to my students at Queen’s.

Introduction

There is a widespread assumption that the Yeats of the nineteenth century – roughly the Yeats of the years between The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) – is markedly different from the Yeats who succeeds him. This early Yeats is late-Romantic in matter and manner, whereas middle and late Yeats are thought to be modernist, despite the continuation of certain Romantic themes and techniques. There is, in fact, much to be said for this oft-repeated account. Yeats was born in 1865, and thus his formative years as a poet necessarily passed in a context where the Romantics were living influences, still capable of suggesting new creative ideas. One, in particular, was still being discovered: namely, William Blake. Yeats himself, with his friend Edwin Ellis, brought out the first serious edition of Blake, the three-volumeWorks of William Blake (1893). His thought is clearly indebted to Blake’s, perhaps most obviously in his deployment of the principle of contrary states, and in the related matter of exploiting esoteric symbolism for poetic purposes. But Shelley, with his yearning for ‘Intellectual Beauty’, and his rarefied blend of symbolism and mental association, was perhaps a more potent influence on Yeats’s style. Alongside these figures, we must not forget the intervening years: Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites (in particular William Morris) all leave their mark, in one way or another, on the early Yeats. So do a number of Irish poets who attempted to give new and living shape to the matter of Ireland through the medium of the English language, and in forms influenced by British Romanticism. Yeats himself, in his ‘Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days’ (later to be renamed as ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’), identifies the Irish poets Thomas Davis (1814–45), James Clarence Mangan (1803–49) and Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810–86) as having particular significance for him. Then there is the question of French symbolism, which certainly must not be divorced from its origins in Romanticism. Baudelaire, for instance, thought of himself as a Romantic poet, though he is usually nowadays classified as a symbolist poet. It was Yeats’s friend Arthur Symons who was responsible for introducing Yeats to the work of the French symbolist poets, from 1893 or thereabouts, the year when Symons himself brought Verlaine to London. Verlaine’s prescription, in ‘Art poétique’, for musical suggestiveness in poetry is probably an influence on the poems Yeats wrote from the mid-nineties onwards.

After 1900, and certainly from In the Seven Woods (1907), Yeats’s style begins to change. The directness, as of a person addressing the reader, albeit with considerable artifice, has few precedents in the earlier verse. The tone and subject-matter also change. A neat way of gauging these developments is to compare and contrast ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ (as it was entitled in the first edition of The Wind Among the Reeds) with ‘A Coat’, from Responsibilities (1914). In the former, the speaker spreads his ‘embroidered’ cloths of dreams under the mistress’s feet. In the latter he speaks of how he made his song a coat ‘Covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies’: it fares ill in the world’s hands. In the last lines, the bitter contempt, born of disillusionment, is not uncharacteristic of middle and later Yeats: ‘Song, let them take it, / For there’s more enterprise / In walking naked.’ The nakedness is that of an unadorned style and outlook, free of illusions.

There is only one problem with the account given so far, and it is perhaps not an insuperable one. It arises out of the contemporary realisation that ‘Romanticism’ is by no means the unified phenomenon that word might seem to imply. If one only considers poetry, one should note that this word has to comprise the Romantic neoclassicism of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, as well as the satirical point, sceptical humour and neoclassical style of Byron’s Don Juan. If it can include these things, can it not include the later Yeats, as well as the earlier? In particular, can it not also include the Yeats who reflects, at the end of ‘Among School Children’, on the power of images in our lives, most of all those images where the life and the form are one: images such as those of the tree or the dancer? Are these not images in the Romantic tradition of ‘organic form’? Frank Kermode, in his classic critical work Romantic Image, certainly thought so. But to let these considerations cause anxiety about terms is probably a waste of energy when the terms are so large and inexact in any case. For that matter, ‘modernism’ is as diverse as ‘Romanticism’. Nevertheless, to realise that Yeats’s ‘Romanticism’ does not disappear in 1899 is also to realise that there are likely to be important continuities, and that the early work is clearly essential for an understanding of the later.

Yet it would be doing the early work a grave disservice to reduce it to ancillary status in relation to the later. It is still possible to come across readers who deride the supposedly vague dreaminess of early Yeats as if this were a given of critical discourse. Presumably they have never analysed the techniques of a poem such as ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’. Here the speaker goes out to a hazel wood, a mysterious place full of trees which in Irish tradition were beneficently magical. He does so at twilight, and he is beside a stream. Symbolically he is close to both temporal and spatial boundaries, and these might operate like cracks in the fabric of the universe through which the supernatural might intervene. When he cuts and peels a hazel wand, to turn it into a fishing rod, that wand does indeed have magical associations, so that when the fish he catches turns into a ‘glimmering girl’ we should not be entirely surprised. In any case, she is one of the ‘Sidhe’ (the fairies), and a woman of the Sidhe might well be able to turn herself into a fish and back again. Appropriately enough, she is associated with the element of water, whose mutability might figure the feminine, and the speaker is associated with the masculine element of fire, which burns as the desire in his head. When she calls him by his name, this in itself is an act of magical power, for no one has revealed it to her. She turns the tables on his evocation of her, and now he must pursue her forever. When he finds her, they will, he thinks, ‘pluck till time and times are done, / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.’ The elements of water and fire, which seemed so irreconcilable, are here transformed by the alchemy of love into silver and golden apples. The great lights of moon and sun represent the two major aspects of the world of time transfigured. This would be the consummation of a first meeting that occurred at a point where those aspects meet: at twilight. The poem embodies these ideas by the suggestive combination of images, and through a complex network of related sounds, and it enacts the desire of the speaker by means of an insistent, driving rhythm. To mention some of the ways in which images and sounds work together: for example, ‘white moths’ are out in the twilight of the morning, while almost next to them, you might think, ‘moth-like stars are flickering out’. The combination intensifies the visual impression, and helps to convey more forcefully the important notion of uncertain apprehension. This ‘flickering’, so redolent of the ‘Celtic Twilight’, a time and a state for supernatural occurrences, is reinforced by the ‘glimmering’ that qualifies the girl, and the ‘brightening’ of the air. There is also a kind of auditory flickering: ‘something rustled on the floor’. When the lovers are united in a land beyond time, the ‘dappled’ grass is a transmutation of the early flickering, intensified by its internal near rhyme with ‘apples’.

Such is the supposed vagueness and dreaminess of Yeats’s early poetic. There is more to say, of course, about his intellectual preoccupations, of which this beautiful poem is in part the result. Of particular importance are Celticism, and magic. The woman of the Sidhe is a notable instance of Yeats’s fascination with these denizens of Irish mythology and folklore. The poem memorably evokes the uncanniness of these beings, immortal creatures who live in a land beyond the western sea, Tír na nÓg (‘The Land of the Young’, i.e., of those who do not age). They may also live in hills, or at the bottom of lakes and rivers, as the ‘glimmering girl’ perhaps does. They may possess great beauty, and are not normally diminutive in size, despite the fact that they were often called in English ‘the fairies’. Their beauty may entice mortals, and indeed they appear to wish to entrap, steal or kidnap human kind. Notoriously, this applies to children, as in Yeats’s poem ‘The Stolen Child’. But who can say whether or not they are really malevolent? Niam, in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, does not appear so. Yet the subtitle of the first version to appear in book form (which of course is what is reprinted here), is ‘And How a Demon Trapped Him’ – referring to how she enticed Oisin into the other world. And when we turn to The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), we note that Niamh (the same as Niam) is calling ‘Away, come away’. In a piece of pre-Raphaelite eroticism, she evokes the heaving breasts, gleaming eyes and parted lips of herself and the other fairy women. Yet perversely, she goes on to assert that ‘if any gaze on our rushing band, / We come between him and the deed of his hand, / We come between him and the hope of his heart.’ Nor had all that many years passed between the publication of Oisin and the writing, in 1893, of this poem, so it is not easy to assert some change of attitude on Yeats’s part. Here and in his subsequent work he involves the Sidhe in his meditation on a fundamental problem of human experience: our longings for beauty and truth lead us to wonder if these qualities possess such universality that they are eternal. Yet life is changeable and doomed to mortality. In his later years, Yeats turns also to neo-Platonic philosophy and to Romantic poems such as Keats’s Odes for illumination of this predicament, but the Sidhe are never far from his mind.

But while they are the most captivating examples of the subject-matter of Irish romance, one must not forget the more general cultural-nationalist motivation which led Yeats to offer his powerful reinterpretations of Celtic mythology and tradition. Of course, he was a major figure in the Irish literary and dramatic revival. But this movement did not arise suddenly in the nineties, and Yeats always presents himself as continuing the work of previous Irish poets who had themselves attempted to reinvent Gaelic tradition in a contemporary English-language poetic idiom. For instance, in ‘Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days’, he counts himself one ‘With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson’: i.e., with the poets Thomas Davis, James Clarence Mangan and Sir Samuel Ferguson. Yet there is more to it than that. Yeats’s own poetic début is to be found in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1899). The subject-matter of the title poem shows Yeats boldly handling the most celebrated Celtic material, namely the story of Oisin (or Ossian). It was James Macpherson (1736–96) who had first made the world aware of the name of this legendary ancient bard in prose ‘translations’ from Scottish Gaelic verses he claimed to have discovered. The first of a number of works of Ossian he published was Fingal (1761). Despite questions about the veracity of Macpherson’s claims, and about his grasp of the traditions surrounding Ossian, his works enjoyed the most extraordinary popularity and influence down to the end of the nineteenth century. Coleridge and Whitman counted themselves as admirers, and the poems were translated into the major European languages.

It was Irish scholars and poets who tended to offer the most informed criticism of Macpherson’s endeavours. Stories of Oisin were the common property of the Gaelic-speaking people of Ireland and Scotland. But wherever the tale was told, there was no doubt about the usual setting: Ireland. Ireland’s attempt to wrest Ossian back from Scotland was most ambitiously embodied in the Ossianic Society of Dublin, founded in 1853, whose learned Transactions Yeats studied. In other words, Yeats learnt from a scholarly tradition instigated by Macpherson’s celebrated work; and he also chose to base his first ambitious long poem on the matter which was most clearly related in the public mind to the essential qualities of the Celt.

These qualities had to do with the melancholy of lamenting a heroic age that had passed, and with a sense of noble but inevitable defeat. In his influential lectures, On Celtic Literature (well known to Yeats), Matthew Arnold had quoted (or slightly misquoted) a line from Macpherson’s Ossian: ‘They went forth to the battle but they always fell’. This sense that the Celts were destined to defeat by the modern world became something of a truism. It might be a badge of honour for those like Yeats who felt that the ‘Grey Truth’ of the modern world – its scientific rationalism and submission to the fatal disciplines of industry – had turned its back on the most profound truths about human imagination. Yeats gave as a title to one of his poems the same misquotation from Macpherson, and so it appears in this edition, though he later changed it to ‘The Rose of Battle’. His interest in Macpherson did not survive into the twentieth century; but it has been too little considered that his oft-expressed regret for the passing of an older heroic order may owe some of its origins to the continued influence of Macpherson’s Ossian into the late nineteenth century.

What the Celts actually believed, or may have believed, was also a matter of interest to Yeats, and the answer was thought to be well enough known. We need turn no further than to the final lines of his own ‘Fergus and the Druid’:

I have been many things –

A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light

Upon a sword, a fir-tree on a hill,

An old slave grinding at a heavy quern,

A king sitting upon a chair of gold […]

Such ideas about transmigration of souls – and indeed about a priesthood who taught them – supported the long-held notion that the Celts (including the Irish) were of oriental origin. The exact location in the Orient was not always clear. In the case of transmigration, it might seem that Indian philosophy provided a clue. The Indian poems in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems illustrate Yeats’s interest in such ideas. In his verse-drama ‘Mosada’, from the end of that volume, we find a different type of Orient, for the setting is Spain during the Inquisition, and the oriental is represented by a Moorish girl who practises magic and is condemned unknowingly by the hypocritical monk Ebremar, who had once been her lover. The play is in part an allegory about Irish society, for it dramatises the conflict between an oppressive Catholicism and a form of magic Yeats could associate with his own esoteric interests. Nor is it irrelevant that Yeats was a Protestant, brought up in the established, Anglican Church of Ireland.

But there may be more to say about that particular fact than would at first seem likely. It is, of course, suggestive that members of the Church of Ireland had for long seen themselves as the true heirs of ‘the Celtic Church’, and had sought to represent the Catholic Church as an alien import. Of more direct relevance might be the fact, outlined by Roy Foster in a brilliant lecture, ‘Protestant Magic’, that there was a strong tradition of interest in the occult among the educated Protestant middle class in Ireland. When Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn he was joining an order which was avowedly Rosicrucian. That is to say, it traced its doctrines back to the legendary Christian Rosenkreutz, whose name was interpreted symbolically and related to the doctrines themselves: specifically, these were held to revolve around a symbolic union of Rose and Cross. Yeats’s own poem, ‘To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time’, offers a useful illustration of the workings of these doctrines. Here, the Cross (or Rood) is also seen as a tree, in line with St Paul (Galatians 3:13). This tree that is also a cross of torture and death symbolises the contrariety and struggle of earthly existence. Yet out of this very condition blooms what Yeats calls the ‘Eternal Beauty’ of the Rose. When one looks at the way in which the Golden Dawn sought a synthesis of many esoteric traditions, including the Jewish Kabbalah, one realises that this tree is also the Tree of Life expounded by the Kabbalists. This had two aspects, one of sternness and rigour (related to God’s judgement) and one of mildness (related to His mercy). A tree of double aspect is also part of the background to Yeats’s ‘The Two Trees’, although he may also be thinking of another Kabbalistic tradition to the effect that, after the Fall of Man, the tree appears in this world as dead and lifeless. So much on the central images of Rosicrucianism. The connection with Irish Protestantism relates to three facts: the inner, or more elite and thoughtful, grades of Freemasonry tended to espouse Rosicrucian doctrines, as witnessed by the very names of a number of masonic lodges; Freemasonry was a pervasive institution among Irish Protestants, at least from the late eighteenth century; and Catholics were officially forbidden to be Freemasons. This provides another way of understanding Yeats’s own particular version of ‘Protestant Magic’. It shows the mystery and magic of his own caste vying with and surpassing those of the Catholic Church.

The picture we have unfolded is one of a thinker and poet who draws the disparate areas of his experience into a unity. His indebtedness to English Romantic poetry, especially that of Blake, cannot be separated from his immersion in esoteric doctrines, and that cannot be separated from his conception of Druidism or ancient Celtic tradition. Naturally enough, Druidism is central to his sense of what the Celtic temperament and wisdom actually were. And the recovery of that temperament and that wisdom are an aim at one with his political hopes for Ireland. This drive to unity is present in the imagery of the poems themselves. The symbol of the Rose, for instance, while palpably indebted to the Rosicrucian doctrine, also comprises references to the personification of Ireland as a rose in an anonymous poem, ‘Róisín Dubh’ (‘little dark rose’, translated by Mangan as ‘My Dark Rosaleen’). There is probably also a reference to the ‘Red Branch’, emblem of the ancient dynasty of Ulster whose legendary history is recounted in the ancient sagas and tales. Yeats takes the trouble to ensure that his readers are left in no doubt about the unity of his aims or his belief in the efficacity of that unity. In the ‘Apologia’ he informs his audience that his interest in magic and the esoteric, so far from being separate from the aim of cultural nationalism, offers a means of reviving the spirit of ancient Ireland. Yeats, like other nineteenth-century Celticists, thought that the marginalisation of the Celts by modern industrial society meant that they had remained nearer to the ancient sources of wisdom. They might help to save humanity from the deadening effects of modernity in a new age, an age of spiritual rebirth which would dawn in the twentieth century. Ideas such as this give a particular content to the undoubted fin-de-siècle quality of The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), a work which seems conscious of its date of publication. If the Celts were to assist in the renewal of modern Europe, the liberation of Ireland from domination by the world’s greatest imperial and industrial power might be a decisive moment in that renewal. In ‘The Valley of the Black Pig’, from The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats foresees an apocalyptic battle in which Ireland will confront her foes.

Yet the tone of The Wind Among the Reeds is anything but triumphant. Many poems are marked by the melancholy of unsatisfied love. Some of them border on depression. Ireland may need to be renewed, but so does the poet, and for this to happen he needs to find a true marriage, such as Aengus envisages for himself – but has not found, being ‘old with wandering’. If it is a question of finding the incipient modernism in early Yeats, nowhere is there a more apt example than this identification of sexual and social renewal. This is indeed a Yeats who prefigures Pound, Lawrence, H.D., and the early work of Eliot and Auden. But by what might seem a paradox at first glance, we need to understand fully the writings of the early Yeats. To do this, we need to go back to the poems as they were first encountered by a wide readership. Only in this way can we gauge the true extent of Yeats’s immersion in Celticism and the matter of Ireland – for these were the things that became obscured in later collections – and connect them to his other, more evident themes. It is with this thought in mind that this edition seeks to provide the reader with a better idea of the earliest Yeats.

A Note on the Text

This is a first-version edition of Yeats’s early poetry, in the sense that it reproduces the poems that appeared in the first three collections of his own poetry. The volumes are The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1889); The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (London: Fisher Unwin, 1892); and The Wind Among the Reeds (London: Elkin Mathews, 1899). From the contents of these volumes, however, it does not reproduce the text of The Countess Kathleen, in line with the persistent tendency among Yeats and his editors and readers to treat this as essentially a dramatic work. Nor does this edition reproduce the texts in Poems (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), since that is substantially a revision and reordering of poems to be found in The Wanderings and Legends and Lyrics. Readers should bear these facts in mind when interpreting the statement that the current edition provides the first versions of Yeats’s early poems.

Where (as is usually the case) a poem exists in multiple versions, there are arguments for making many or all of these versions available, in one edition or another. One learns different things about the poet from the different versions, and one also learns about the different publics that were reading them, and the different contexts in which they appeared. On the other hand, there is no ideal version. Abiding by the final version, as if it were vital to find the poet’s final intention, may hinder an understanding of a poet’s early work and ideas; while going back to early versions may lead to an ill-considered depreciation of the poet’s second thoughts. As regards the versions to be found in the first collections of a poet’s own work, one needs to remember the fundamental point that these are not the first versions in an absolute sense. At the very least, a poem will exist in one or more manuscripts (probably different from each other, as well) before it is even published in book form. But it may also have been circulated by hand in a fair copy, and have appeared in a journal or in an anthology, or in a selection of other writings by the author. Many of the poems in this volume had a life of this kind before they entered the covers of one of these collections. The argument for reproducing the texts to be found in these collections is that they represent the earliest form in which a very large number of readers encountered these poems. Some of these poems were discarded, never to appear again in Yeats’s subsequent collections. It is instructive to become acquainted with them. The verse-drama ‘Mosada’, for instance, enhances our understanding of Yeats’s use of oriental imagery by making very clear the way in which it could be used in an allegorical representation of Irish realities. There are a number of poems about ‘fairies’ – for example, ‘A Lover’s Quarrel among the Fairies’, ‘The Priest and the Fairy’ – in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, which are subsequently discarded. These suggest a far more conventional nineteenth-century context than one might have imagined for the development of Yeats’s lifelong interest in those uncanny beings, the Sidhe (‘fairies’) of Irish mythology and folklore. The wording of some of Yeats’s best-known poems is sometimes markedly different from the established versions, as is the case with ‘Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days’, which will be more familiar to readers as ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’. In context, the original title can be seen to offer a subtly revolutionary hint which gives more point and urgency to the political aspects of the poem. And the titles of many poems in The Wind Among the Reeds contain the names of Gaelic personages from mythology and folklore, instead of the pronoun ‘he’ familiar from later collections: thus, instead of ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, we find here ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’. One gains a heightened sense of the importance to Yeats in the nineties of rediscovering and representing Gaelic tradition.

Bibliography

Texts used for this edition

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. London: Kegan Paul & Co., 1889.

The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics. London: Fisher Unwin, 1892.

The Wind Among the Reeds. London: Elkin Mathews, 1899.

Scholarly editions of the manuscript materials

Bornstein, George, ed. The Early Poetry, Vol. I: Mosada and The Island of Statues: Manuscript Materials. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Bornstein, George, ed. The Early Poetry, Vol. II: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Early Poems to 1895. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Holdsworth, Carolyn, ed. W.B. Yeats: The Wind Among the Reeds: Manuscript Materials. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Other relevant scholarly editions

Allt, Peter and Russel K. Alspach, eds. The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats. 2nd edn. New York: Macmillan, 1966.

Bornstein, George and Richard J. Finneran, eds. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Vol. IV: Early Essays. New York: Scribner, 2007.

Yeats, W.B. Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth. Ed. Robert Welch. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.

Critical and scholarly works

Bloom, Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Brown, Terence. The Life of W.B. Yeats: A Critical Biography. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Chaudhry, Yug Mohit. Yeats, the Irish Literary Revival and the Politics of Print. Cork: Cork University Press, 2001.

Foster, R.F. ‘Protestant Magic: W.B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History.’ Paddy and Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993. 212–32.

Foster, R.F. W.B. Yeats: A Life. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997–2003. Vol. 1: The Apprentice Mage, 1997.

Grene, Nicholas. Yeats’s Poetic Codes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Grossman, Allen R. Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats: A Study of The Wind Among the Reeds. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969.

Harper, George Mills. Yeats’s Golden Dawn. London: Macmillan, 1974.

Kermode, Frank. Romantic Image. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957.

Kinahan, Frank. Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism: Contexts of the Early Work and Thought. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988.

Larrissy, Edward. Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1994.

Larrissy, Edward. Blake and Modern Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Lennon, Joseph. ‘W.B. Yeats’s Celtic Orient.’ Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004. 247–89.

Matthews, Steven. Yeats as Precursor: Readings in Irish, British and American Poetry. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.

Pierce, David. Yeats’s Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995.

Putzel, Steven D. Reconstructing Yeats: The Secret Rose and The Wind Among the Reeds. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1986.

Welch, Robert. Irish Poetry from Moore to Yeats. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980.

THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN AND OTHER POEMS (1889)

The Wanderings of Oisin and How a Demon Trapped Him

Part IThe Island of the Living

PATRICK

Oisin, tell me the famous story

Why thou outlivest, blind and hoary,

The bad old days. Thou wert, men sing,

Trapped of an amorous demon thing.

OISIN

’Tis sad remembering, sick with years,

The swift innumerable spears,

The long-haired warriors, the spread feast;

And love, in the hours when youth has ceased:

Yet will I make all plain for thee.

We rode in sorrow, with strong hounds three,

Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair,

On a morning misty and mild and fair.

The mist-drops hung on the fragrant trees,

And in the blossoms hung the bees.

We rode in sadness above Lough Laen,

For our best were dead on Gavra’s green.

The stag we chased was not more sad,

And yet, of yore, much peace he had

In his own leafy forest house,

Sleek as any granary mouse

Among the fields of waving fern.

We thought on Oscar’s pencilled urn.

Than the hornless deer we chased that morn,

A swifter creature never was born,

And Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair

Were lolling their tongues, and the silken hair

Of our strong steeds was dark with sweat,

When ambling down the vale we met

A maiden, on a slender steed,

Whose careful pastern pressed the sod

As though he held an earthly mead

Scarce worthy of a hoof gold-shod.

For gold his hooves and silk his rein,

And ’tween his ears, above his mane,

A golden crescent lit the plain,

And pearly white his well-groomed hair.

His mistress was more mild and fair

Than doves that moaned round Eman’s hall

Among the leaves of the laurel wall,

And feared always the bow-string’s twanging.

Her eyes were soft as dewdrops hanging

Upon the grass-blades’ bending tips,

And like a sunset were her lips,

A stormy sunset o’er doomed ships.

Her hair was of a citron tincture,

And gathered in a silver cincture;

Down to her feet white vesture flowed

And with the woven crimson glowed

Of many a figured creature strange,

And birds that on the seven seas range.

For brooch ’twas bound with a bright sea-shell,

And wavered like a summer rill,

As her soft bosom rose and fell.

PATRICK

Oisin, thou art half heathen still!

OISIN

‘Why, as ye ride, droops low each head?

Why do ye sound no horn?’ she said.

‘For hunting heroes should be glad.

The stag ye chase is not more sad,

And yet, of yore, much peace he had,

Sleek as any granary mouse,

In his own leafy forest house,

Among the waving fields of fern.’

‘We think on Oscar’s pencilled urn,

And those on Gavra lying low,

Where round and round the ravens go.

Now, pleasant maiden, tell to me

Thy name, thy kin, and thy country,’

Cried Fin; and cried she, ‘Men of fame,

My home is far from where the tide

Washes the shores where ye abide,

Ye worn deed-doers, and my name

Is Niam, daughter of the King

Of the Young.’

‘Young maiden, what may bring

Thy wandering steps across the sea?

Is thy companion gone from thee?’

Clear fluted then that goblin rare –

‘Not so, great king; for I have ne’er

Been spoken of with any man.

For love of Oisin my feet ran

Across the glossy sea.’

‘Oh, wild

Young princess, why wert thou beguiled

Of Oisin, the young man, my son?

Of princes there is many a one.’

‘Good reason have I for my love,’

She said; ‘for he is fair above