The Poems of W.B. Yeats: Volume One: 1882-1889 (Longman Annotated English Poets) [1 ed.] 0367495600, 9780367495602, 9781003047148

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THE POEMS OF W.B. YEATS In this multi-­volume edition, the poetry of W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) is presented in full, with newly-established texts and detailed, wide-­ranging commentary. Yeats began to write verse in the nineteenth century, and over time his own arrangements of poems repeatedly revised and rearranged both texts and canon. This edition of Yeats’s poetry presents all his verse, both published and unpublished, including a generous selection of textual variants from the many manuscript and printed sources. The edition also supplies the most extensive commentary on Yeats’s poetry to date, explaining specific references and setting poems in their contexts; it also gives an account of the vast range of both literary and historical influences at work on the verse. The poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings of poems result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for these writings as they were subsequently reconceived by the poet. This first volume collects Yeats’s poetry of the 1880s, from his ambitious and extensive juvenilia (including hitherto little-­noticed dramatic poems) to his earliest published pieces, leading to his first substantial book of verse. The pastoral romance of classically inflected early work like ‘The Island of Statues’ is succeeded in these years by the Irish mythic material that finds its largest canvas in the mini-­epic ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. In Yeats’s work through the 1880s, an adolescent poet’s youthful absorption in Romantic poetry is replaced by a commitment to esoteric religious speculation and Irish political nationalism. This edition allows readers to see Yeats’s emergence as a poet step by step in compelling detail in relation to his literary influences – including, significantly, the Anglo-­Irish poetry of the nineteenth century. The commentary provides an extensive view of Yeats’s developing personal, cultural, and historical worlds as the poems gain in maturity and depth. From the first attempts at verse of a teenage boy to the fully accomplished writings of an original poet standing on the verge of popular success with poems such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, Yeats’s poetry is displayed here in unprecedented fullness and detail. Peter McDonald is an Irish poet and critic, whose literary criticism includes Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002) and Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-­Century Poetry (2012). He has edited the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, and is the author of numerous articles on nineteenth-­and twentieth-­ century poetry. His own Collected Poems appeared in 2012. He is Professor of British and Irish Poetry at the University of Oxford, and Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry at Christ Church, Oxford.

LONGMAN ANNOTATED ENGLISH POETS General Editors: Paul Hammond, David Hopkins and Michael Rossington Founding Editors: F. W. Bateson and John Barnard

Blake The Complete Poems (Revised Third Edition) Edited by W. H. Stevenson Dryden Selected Poems Edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins The Poems of Alexander Pope Volume Three Edited by Valerie Rumbold The Complete Poems of John Donne Edited by Robin Robbins Robert Browning Selected Poems Edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin and Joseph Phelan The Complete Poems of Shakespeare Edited by Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne The Poems of Alexander Pope Volume One Edited by Julian Ferraro and Paul Baines The Poems of W.B. Yeats Volume One: 1882–1889 Edited by Peter McDonald The Poems of W.B. Yeats Volume Two: 1890–1898 Edited by Peter McDonald For more information about the series, please visit: www.routledge.com/LongmanA ­ nnotated-­English-­Poets/book-­series/LAEP

THE POEMS OF

W.B. YEATS – Volume One: 1882–1889 –

EDITED BY

PETER McDONALD

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Peter McDonald The right of Peter McDonald to be identified as the author of the editorial material has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-­0-­367-­49560-­2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-­1-­003-­04714-­8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148

I N M E M O RY O F J O N S TA L LW O R T H Y ( 1 9 3 5 – 2 0 1 4 )

Contents A Note From the General Editors Acknowledgements Chronology of W.B. Yeats’s Life and Publications, 1865–1889 List of Abbreviations Introduction

xi xii xiv xvi xx

THE POEMS

1

1 [‘A Flower Has Blossomed . . . ’]

3

2 The Old Grey Man

5

3 Child’s Play

7

4 [‘I Sat Upon a High Gnarled Root’]

11

5 [‘A Double Moon or More Ago’]

14

6 [Fragment of Opening Scene of an Abandoned Verse-­Play]

16

7 The Priest of Pan

18

8 Inscription for a Christmas Card

19

9 Pan

21

10 [‘The World Is But a Strange Romance’]

28

11 Sunrise

29

12 The Dell

32

13 [‘Tower Wind-­Beaten, Grim’]

33

14 [Dramatic Fragment]

35

15 Vivien and Time37 16 [‘As Me Upon My Way the Tram-­Car Whirled’]

76

17 [‘Death Hath Ta’en My Child to Nurse’]

78

18 [‘My Song Thou Knowest of a Dreaming Castle’]

79

19 [Speech From the Opening of an Abandoned Dramatic Poem]

80

20 [‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July Nears’]

84

21 Fragment (‘I Raise to Thee No Praying Voice . . . ’)

100

viii Contents 22 [‘The Children Play in White and Red’]

101

23 [‘Behold the Man’]

102

24 [‘A Soul of the Fountain Spake Me a Word’]

104

25 [‘A Sound Came Floating, an Unearthly Sound’]

106

26 Love and Death110 27 Unused Scene From Love and Death205 28 Song of the Faeries

210

29 [‘’Mong Meadows of Sweet Grain’]

212

30 Sansloy – Sansfoy – Sansjoy

214

31 [Love and Sorrow]

217

32 Mosada218 33 [‘For Clapping Hands of All Men’s Love’]

251

34 The Magpie

253

35 The Island of Statues: An Arcadian Faery Tale – in Two Acts255 36 The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes

329

37 [‘Truth Is Bold, But Falsehood Fears’]

331

38 Fragment (‘And Helen’s Eyes’)

333

39 Love’s Decay

334

40 The Field Mouse

341

41 Time and the Witch Vivien

342

42 [‘Hushed in the Vale of Dajestan’]

347

43 An Old and Solitary One

350

44 A Song of Sunset

352

45 Love and Death

354

46 [‘The Dew Comes Dropping’]

356

47 [From The Village of the Elms]358 48 The Seeker: A Dramatic Poem – In Two Scenes

361

49 The Song of the Happy Shepherd

371

50 In a Drawing-­Room

379

Contents

ix

51 Life

380

52 The Sad Shepherd

382

53 The Two Titans: A Political Poem

387

54 [‘There Sings a Rose by the Rim’]

395

55 The Priest and the Fairy

397

56 Kanva on Himself

403

57 On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy

407

58 The Meditation of the Old Fisherman

414

59 The Falling of the Leaves

417

60 The Stolen Child

420

61 To – (Remembrance)

429

62 The Indian Upon God

433

63 An Indian Song

435

64 Song of Spanish Insurgents

438

65 Quatrains and Aphorisms

441

66 The Fairy Pedant

444

67 A Dawn-­Song

448

68 Anashuya and Vijaya

451

69 King Goll: An Irish Legend

459

70 [‘How Beautiful Thy Colours Are . . . ’]

470

71 The Ballad of Moll Magee

472

72 How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent: Hungary, 1848

480

73 Love Song: From the Gaelic

495

74 She Who Dwelt Among the Sycamores: A Fancy

498

75 The Protestants’ Leap

501

76 Ephemera

509

77 The Fairy Doctor

515

78 Girl’s Song

518

79 [‘Wherever in the Wastes of Wrinkling Sand’]

520

x Contents 80 A Lover’s Quarrel Among the Fairies

522

81 The Wanderings of Oisin and How a Demon Trapped Him

526

82 King Goll (Third Century)

625

83 A Legend

632

84 Down by the Salley Gardens

635

85 The Ballad of Father O’Hart

641

86 The Phantom Ship

647

87 Street Dancers

654

88 To an Isle in the Water

659

89 The Lake Isle of Innisfree

662

90 In the Firelight

679

91 The Outlaw’s Bridal: Ireland, 16**681 92 In Church

687

93 A Summer Evening

689

94 The Ballad of the Foxhunter

691

95 Who Goes With Fergus?

698

Appendix 1: Contents of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889)703 Appendix 2: Initial Prose Draft of The Island of Statues 704 Index of Poems721 Index of First Lines723

A Note From the General Editors The Longman Annotated English Poets series was launched in 1965 with the publication of Kenneth Allott’s edition of The Poems of Matthew Arnold. F. W. Bateson wrote then that the ‘new series is the first designed to provide university students and teachers, and the general reader with complete and fully annotated editions of the major English poets’. That remains the aim of the series, and Bateson’s original vision of its policy remains essentially the same. Its ‘concern is primarily with the meaning of the extant texts in their various contexts’. Accordingly, the annotation which the various editors provide ranges from the glossing of obscure words and references to the evocation of the cultural, social, and political contexts within which the poems were created and first received. The editions draw on recent scholarship but also embody the fruits of the editors’ own new research. The aim, in so far as this is possible through the medium of editorial annotation, is to place the modern reader in a position which approximates that enjoyed by the poems’ first audience. The treatment of the text has varied pragmatically from edition to edition; some have provided modernized texts where the original conventions of spelling and punctuation were likely to create problems for a reader, whereas others retain the original accidentals – the spelling, punctuation, italics, and capitals. In the case of this new edition of Yeats, the editor’s detailed research into the cultural contexts of Yeats’s poetry provides a new generation of readers with an extensive resource for understanding not only Yeats’s own extraordinary work but also the rich and diverse culture of his Ireland. Paul Hammond David Hopkins Michael Rossington

Acknowledgements I am grateful to all the institutions and individuals who have contributed to the research on which these volumes are based. Help and advice have been given generously throughout. I must thank Christ Church, Oxford, as well the University of Oxford for the granting of periods of leave from my teaching duties over the time I was working on this edition: my work was boosted at the start by the generosity of the Christopher Tower Trust, and in particular the late Mr. John Roome, in providing for a protracted period of research leave. At Christ Church, I was fortunate to be able to make use of the knowledge, good sense, and kindness of a number of colleagues, to all of whom I am very grateful. This project could not have made any progress without the help of various libraries and special collections. The Bodleian Library has aided me in many ways and at every stage; I have also good reason to be grateful to the staff of the National Library of Ireland and to that of the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, who have enabled me to work closely with a large number of Yeats’s early manuscripts. I  record also with gratitude my debt to the staff of the John J. Burns Library, Boston College, who made their Yeats manuscript holdings available for study. An edition such as this one is bound to be heavily indebted to all its predecessors, but there are some editors of Yeats to whom I  must express a special obligation. The work of Professor George Bornstein has shown me the way through otherwise impenetrable thickets, and the extent of my debts to his work on Yeats’s early manuscripts will be visible throughout. I have built on foundations laid by fine editors of the poet, not least those of the late Professor A.N. Jeffares, Professor Daniel Albright, and Professor Richard J. Finneran, and I have been inspired as well as educated by the extraordinary achievements of the editors associated with the continuing project of Yeats’s Collected Letters: Professor John Kelly, Professor Ronald Schuchard, Professor Warwick Gould, and Deirdre Toomey have also, besides their labours over the Letters, contributed in many ways to establishing the modern scholarship on Yeats from which I hope I have profited and to which the present work is contributed with (all too necessary) humility. My editors in the Longman Annotated English Poets series – Professor Paul Hammond, Professor David Hopkins, and Professor Michael Rossington – have been exemplary in their care and patience, and I am enormously indebted to them for the attention with which they read and thought about the present work. Many others have played important parts in both contributing to the edition (directly or indirectly) and helping its editor have the courage to take it this far. I  am particularly indebted to Professor Edna Longley, Professor Fran Brearton, Professor Matthew Campbell, and Professor Edward Larrissy; to Professor Terence Brown and to Professor Roy Foster, as well as to Professor Christopher Ricks and Professor Rosanna Warren. Crucial help was given generously by Dr Tom Walker of Trinity College, Dublin, and by Mr. Sammy Jay of Peter Harrington, London. My own family have been essential supporters, for whom this acknowledgement is a poor repayment: but what has been done here could never have been attempted, let alone finished, without Karen, Louisa, and Sammy.

Acknowledgements

xiii

My first contact with Yeats in an academic context came when I  was a nineteen-­ year-­old student, sitting at the back of a class given by Richard Ellmann and John Kelly. Too nervous to contribute anything then, I regard this edition as a very late addition to that conversation. Later, it was my exceptional good fortune to know Professor Jon Stallworthy  – who was, amongst many other things, a pioneer of the study of Yeats’s manuscripts – both as a mentor and as a friend: this first volume of the Longman edition is inscribed to his memory, with continuing gratitude. Peter McDonald Woodstock, Oxfordshire 2019

Chronology of W.B. Yeats’s Life and Publications, 1865–1889 1865 (11 Jun.) WBY born in Dublin, eldest child of John Butler Yeats and Susan Mary Yeats née Pollexfen. 1867 (late Jul.) Moves with family to London. 1869 (Summer-­Dec.) Cared for by Pollexfen family in Sligo, along with his two younger sisters. 1870 (Summer) On holiday in Sligo. 1872 WBY and his four siblings are taken by their mother to stay with her parents in Sligo, where they remain until Oct. 1874. 1873 (3 Mar.) Younger brother Robert Corbet Yeats (b. Mar. 1870) dies in Sligo. 1874 Yeats family (including JBY) moves back to London. 1876 (6 Jun.) Infant sister, Jane Grace Yeats (b. Aug. 1875), dies. Having spent the summer in Sligo, WBY and JBY go ahead to London (autumn). 1877 (Jan.) Yeats family living together in London. WBY attends Godolphin School, Hammersmith. 1879 (Summer) Family holiday in Devon. 1881 (Spring) Leaves Godolphin School. (Autumn) WBY and all of family except younger brother Jack join WBY to live in Howth, on the coast outside Dublin. Attends Erasmus Smith High School, Dublin. 1882 (Autumn) First surviving lines of verse, in a letter to a Howth acquaintance: claims in the letter that he has been writing verse already in large quantities. Meets Laura Armstrong and begins flirtatious relationship with this already engaged distant cousin. 1883 Writing poetry, including ambitious verse-­play partly inspired by Laura Armstrong, Vivien and Time. (Dec.) Leaves Erasmus Smith High School. 1884 (Spring) Yeats family leaves Howth for cheaper lodgings in south Dublin (May). Begins attending Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin. (Sept.) Laura Armstrong marries. WBY writes a great deal of verse throughout the year, including further verse-­ dramas, Love and Death and The Island of Statues, as well as working on Mosada. 1885 Soon after his return from exile to Dublin in Jan., the Fenian intellectual John O’Leary meets WBY. Two poems, ‘Song of the Faeries’ and ‘Voices’, appear in The Dublin University Review (Mar.) – these are WBY’s first publications. From Apr.–Jul., The Dublin University Review serializes The Island of Statues. (Jun.) Meets the rising young Irish poet Katharine Tynan 1886 (Apr.) Leaves Metropolitan School of Art. (Oct.) WBY’s first book, Mosada, published as an offprint from The Dublin University Review, where it had been printed in Jun.



Chronology, 1865–1889

xv

(Oct.) Meets English priest and professor, the poet G.M. Hopkins, in JBY’s Dublin studio. First published prose, on poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson, appears in The Irish Fireside. 1887 (Apr.) Yeats family moves to London, and all are in the same address by May. (Aug.) Goes to Sligo to stay with uncle, George Pollexfen, and works on ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. Begins also at this time to collect folklore and stories of the fairies in the Sligo area. (Nov.) Finishes first draft of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and spends the end of the year in Dublin. 1888 (Jan.) Returns to join family in London. (Mar.) Projected book featuring ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ accepted by the publishers Kegan Paul, on condition of subscriptions, which JBY sets about collecting. (May) WBY’s work is included in new anthology, Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland. (Sept.) Collection of folklore materials, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, published. (Nov.) Joins the Esoteric Section of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. 1889 (Jan.) The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems published. (30 Jan.) Maud Gonne calls on JBY at the Yeats family home and meets WBY there for the first time. (Feb.) Begins work on a new verse-­play, The Countess Kathleen. (Mar.) Agrees on project with JBY’s friend E.J. Ellis to begin work on a large-­scale edition of the writings of William Blake. (Aug.) Edition of Stories from Carleton published.

Abbreviations In the notes to the poems, abbreviations have been employed for references to some persons, to certain volumes published by W.B. Yeats, to edited versions of the poet’s work, and to some frequently mentioned critical and reference materials. Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.

Persons AG GY JBY KT MG OS SMY WBY

Lady Augusta Gregory George Yeats (née Hyde-­Lees), the poet’s wife John Butler Yeats, the poet’s father Katharine Tynan Maud Gonne Olivia Shakespear Susan Mary Yeats (‘Lily’), the poet’s sister William Butler Yeats

Writings by W.B. Yeats Books by W.B. Yeats CK CP33 CP50 CWVP08

The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892). The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1933). The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1950). The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats (Straford upon Avon, 1908). EPS Early Poems and Stories (1925). FFTIP (ed.) Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888). JS John Sherman and Dhoya [pseud. ‘Ganconagh’] (1890). P49 The Poems of W.B. Yeats (2 vols.) (1949). P95 Poems (1895). P99 Poems (1899). [Thirteen further editions of this book appeared between 1901 and 1929: where these are referred to, they are abbreviated to P with the last two digits of the year of publication, e.g., P12 is Poems (1912).] PBYI Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (Dublin, 1888). PW06 The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats Vol. 1 (New York, NY, 1906). Secret Rose The Secret Rose (1897). SP29 Selected Poems (1929). WATR The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). WO The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889).

Other Writings by W.B. Yeats IoS

The Island of Statues: An Arcadian Fairy Tale (1884).

Abbreviations

xvii

Letters, etc. CL 1

The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Vol. 1 (1865–1895) eds. John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford, 1986). CL 2 The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Vol. 2 (1896–1900) eds. Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey (Oxford, 1997). CL 3 The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Vol. 3 (1901–1904) eds. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford, 1994). G-­YL The Gonne-­Yeats Letters 1893–1938 eds. Anna MacBride White and A. Norman Jeffares (New York, NY, 1994). InteLex The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats. Electronic Edition Gen. Ed. John Kelly (2002). LTWBY 1, 2 Letters to W.B. Yeats eds. Richard J. Finneran, George Mills Harper, and William M. Murphy (2 vols., 1977). Mikhail 1, 2 W.B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections ed. E.H. Mikhail (2 vols., 1977).

Edited Writings of W.B. Yeats Albright Daniel Albright (ed.), W.B. Yeats: The Poems (1990). Cornell Early Poetry 1 The Early Poetry Vol. 1: Mosada and The Island of Statues ed. George Bornstein (Ithaca, NY, 1987). Cornell Early Poetry 2 The Early Poetry Vol. 2: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Early Poems to 1895 ed. George Bornstein (Ithaca, NY, 1994). Cornell, WATR The Wind Among the Reeds: Manuscript Materials ed. Carolyn Holdsworth (Ithaca, NY, 1993). CW 1 The Poems (second edition), ed. R.J. Finneran (New York, NY, 1997). CW 2 The Plays eds. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark (New York, NY, 2001). Autobiographies eds. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. CW 3 Archibald (New York, NY, 1999). CW 4 Early Essays eds. Richard J. Finneran and George Bornstein (2007). CW 5 Later Essays ed. William H. O’Donnell (New York, NY, 1994). CW 6 Prefaces and Introductions ed. William H. O’Donnell (Basingstoke, 1988). CW 7 Letters to the New Island eds. George Bornstein and Hugh Witemeyer (Basingstoke, 1989). CW 8 The Irish Dramatic Movement eds. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York, NY, 2003). CW 9 Early Articles and Reviews eds. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marchaterre (New York, NY, 2004). CW 10 Later Articles and Reviews ed. Colton Johnson (New York, NY, 2000). DC Druid Craft: The Writing of The Shadowy Waters eds. Michael J. Sidnell, George P. Mayhew, and David R. Clark (Amherst, MA, 1971).

xviii Abbreviations M Mem. SB UM UP 1 VE YP

Mythologies eds. Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey (Basingstoke, 2005). Memoirs ed. Denis Donoghue (1972). The Speckled Bird: An Autobiographical Novel with Variant Versions: New Edition ed. William H. O’Donnell (Basingstoke, 2003). Under the Moon: The Unpublished Early Poetry ed. George Bornstein (New York, NY, 1995). Uncollected Prose Vol. 1: First Articles and Reviews 1886–1896 ed. John P. Frayne (1970). The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats eds. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (1956). Yeats’s Poems ed. A.N. Jeffares (Basingstoke, 1989, 3rd edn. 1996).

Critical and Reference Materials The following is a list of the most commonly cited books of criticism and reference in the present volume. It is not a critical bibliography: the fullest listings of critical work may be found in K.P.S. Jochum, W.B. Yeats: A Classified Bibliography of Criticism (Urbana, IL, second edn., 1990), supplemented by annual bibliographies in YACTS and YA. Hazard Adams, The Book of Yeats’s Poems (Tallahasee, FL, 1990). Harold Bloom, Yeats (New York, NY, 1970). George Bornstein, Yeats and Shelley (Chicago, IL, 1970). Curtis B. Bradford, Yeats at Work (Carbondale, IL, 1965). Matthew Campbell, Irish Poetry Under the Union, 1801–1924 (2013). Chapman Wayne K. Chapman, Yeats and English Renaissance Literature (New York, NY, 1991). Cullingford Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge, 1993). Donoghue Denis Donoghue, Yeats (1971). Ellmann, Man and the Masks Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948; second edn. 1979). Ellmann, Identity Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (1954). Finneran Richard J. Finneran, Editing Yeats’s Poems: A Reconsideration (Basingstoke, 1990). Foster 1 R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life Vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 (Oxford, 1997). Grene Nicholas Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes (Oxford, 2008). Henn T.R. Henn, The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1950). Holdeman and Levitas eds. David Holdeman and Ben Levitas eds., W.B. Yeats in Context (Cambridge, 2010). Hone Joseph Hone, W.B. Yeats 1865–1939 (1943; second edn. 1962). Jeffares, Commentary A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (1984). Adams Bloom Bornstein Bradford Campbell

Abbreviations

Kinahan Larrissy Loizeaux MacNeice McGarry Murphy Parkinson Reid Saul Schuchard Toomey Vendler Whitaker YA YACTS

xix

Frank Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore, and Occultism: Contexts of the Early Work and Thought (Boston, MA, 1988). Edward Larrissy, Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference (Hemel Hempstead, 1994). Elizabeth Bergman Loizeaux, Yeats and the Visual Arts (New Brunswick, NJ, 1986). Louis MacNeice, The Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1941; second edn., 1967). James P. McGarry, Place Names in the Writings of W.B. Yeats (Gerrards Cross, 1976). William M. Murphy, Prodigal Father: The Life of John Butler Yeats (1839–1922) (Ithaca, NY, 1978). Thomas Parkinson, W.B. Yeats, Self-­Critic: A Study of his Early Verse (Berkeley, CA, 1971). Forrest Reid, W.B. Yeats: A Critical Study (1915). G.B. Saul, Prolegomena to the Study of Yeats’s Poems (Philadelphia, PA, 1957). Ronald Schuchard, The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (2008). Yeats and Women ed. Deirdre Toomey (Basingstoke, 1997). Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford, 2007). Thomas R. Whitaker, Swan and Shadow: Yeats’s Dialogue with History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1964). Yeats Annual (London and Basingstoke, 1982–). Cited by volume. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies (Ithaca, NY, and Ann Arbor, MI, 1983–1999). Cited by volume.

Other Abbreviations DUR GD NLI NYPL TCD

The Dublin University Review Order of the Golden Dawn The National Library of Ireland, Dublin New York Public Library Trinity College Dublin

In recording manuscript variants, the following abbreviations and signs are used in the notes. del. (following word or phrase) Deleted: where a replacement is made for one or two words, this is transcribed after del. (e.g., How del. Why.) del. (within square brackets []) Deleted: where a line or lines have been deleted, the whole is enclosed within square brackets, e.g. [Who lies below these del.] ^ Indicates written material entered by WBY either above a line or between two lines.

Introduction In keeping with the principles of the Longman Annotated English Poets series, this edition of W.B. Yeats’s poetry sets out to provide edited texts of all the author’s poems, including a selection of textual variants from manuscript and printed sources, along with a commentary that explains specific references, sets poems in their contexts, and offers an account of particular influences, both literary and historical, at work on the verse. As far as possible, poems are presented in order of composition, and major revisions or rewritings result in separate inclusions (in chronological sequence) for works thus reconceived by the poet. It follows from this that the edition is not, and cannot even remotely resemble, any book that Yeats himself would have envisaged in order to present his oeuvre to posterity. There have been many arguments (often intense ones) about the figure Yeats ‘finally’ intended his work to cut in terms of its presentation in a ‘collected’ form. For the most part, these are not arguments that this edition feels obliged to address – nor are they, perhaps, arguments capable of any definitive solution in editorial terms. Instead, this Longman edition presents a life’s poetic work in a form which its author would never have intended  – as a relatively heavily annotated, continuous chronological sequence  – in order to provide a new perspective (part historical, part critical) on a career of composition that began when the poet was about seventeen and ended only days before his death in 1939, at the age of seventy-­four. The shape this edition makes is the partly accidental one made by an actual life, whereas the shape of Yeats’s intended oeuvre is something quite distinct, and far more a matter of design than of chance. The purpose of this brief introduction is to outline the editorial principles that have been applied and to explain the consequences in practice of those principles, since Yeats offers some editorial difficulties that are not often presented in such acute forms by other poets. Principles of inclusion. It is the aim of the present edition to make as comprehensive a gathering as possible of Yeats’s poems. By ‘poems’ here is meant more than just those pieces which the poet saw into print, and unpublished or abandoned work is included alongside the poetry that appeared in volume or periodical form. The question of what is meant by a poem for these purposes needs to be addressed: of the many manuscript stray lines and stray phrases, for which no home in any completed piece is easily to be found, a large proportion have not been included here, except in cases where they seem to possess inherent interest for critical reading (as, for example, when they point forwards to later creative developments for the poet). On a much larger scale, though, the problem in deciding what should constitute a ‘poem’ by Yeats affects editorial policy with regard to work cast in dramatic form. Here, an editorial decision has been taken not to include the verse-­plays for which Yeats plainly had staging intentions at the time of composition, but to provide edited versions of those works which, though set out on the page as dramatic, were either never performed or had no reasonable prospect of performance. These works belong to the earliest phase of the poet’s career, and it is the case that some of them were incorporated as poems within Yeats’s collections of verse (see,

Introduction

xxi

for example, The Island of Statues and Mosada, both of them in dramatic form, but both published by Yeats as poems and included in The Wanderings of Oisin [1889] as such). In the years of his poetic apprenticeship, Yeats was (like anyone else of his generation) fully aware of the peculiar status of the verse-­drama intended for page rather than stage, and his most ambitious early works in the genre are obviously meant to be received in this way. Besides the early verse-­plays included in the present edition, Yeats generated (especially in the years 1884–1886) a great deal of dramatic and quasi-­dramatic material, surviving now in very rough drafts, discontinuous fragments, and occasional bald outline, some of it in verse, some in prose, and some in a mixture of the two. Whether the manuscript materials as they are preserved could ever be assembled into coherent reading texts is, at the very least, a debatable matter; but at all events, reconstructed (or partly conjectural) texts of these have not been considered for the present edition. A handful of fragments from these projects, which may possess inherent interest as examples of the poet’s developing technique, have been included. The finished verse-­plays (not all of which were published), along with a few of the more suggestive dramatic fragments, have been edited here and are included on the grounds that they offer essential perspectives on the poet’s early creative (and technical) development. It is with The Countess Kathleen (begun in 1889) that Yeats’s dramatic composition begins to be explicitly an attempt at something which will be represented on stage, and although that play (like The Land of Heart’s Desire [1894]) is in intimate creative dialogue with the poet’s lyric work of the time and was accorded much attention from early reviewers and critics who gave accounts of his writing and its value, it is not included in the present edition. From this point onwards, Yeats’s verse-­drama cannot meaningfully be considered a part of his body of poems as such, and it is therefore not incorporated in the edition (though on those occasions when the poet allowed a lyric from a play to be printed separately, it is brought within the purview of the present work). A difficult case is presented by the verse-­play The Shadowy Waters, which Yeats saw sometimes as a poem and sometimes as a stage-­play, and among its numerous printed incarnations are versions explicitly for the stage, as well as versions that connect it much more closely with the nineteenth-­century tradition of verse-­drama intended for the page. The present edition includes the latter, but excludes the former. Texts and copy-­texts. This edition is built around a core of those poems which W.B. Yeats preserved in successive collected editions of his verse. For these, the usual copy-­ text has been The Poems of W.B. Yeats (2 vols., 1949), prepared under the supervision of the poet’s widow alongside his long-­serving copy editor at the publishers Macmillan, Thomas Mark. It was this text which served as the basis for A Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (first published in 1956, and still the fullest repository of variants in the poems’ printed texts), and it can claim precedence as the closest thing to a ‘final’ text with direct editorial links to the poet himself. There are places where the 1949 edition requires supplement or emendation, and these are shown in the present edition’s notes as and when they occur; but in general there is no good reason for an editor to quarrel with the readings or to reject them on the basis that they may owe much to Mrs. Yeats and Thomas Mark: these were the poet’s trusted readers, and Yeats was explicit on the degree to which he looked to Mark in particular to regulate and supply punctuation.

xxii Introduction The poet’s punctuation, as he acknowledged, was almost as disordered and threadbare as his spelling; there is no evidence that he wished to be seen wearing either in public. The present edition is not concerned with questions of intended order of poems, nor with intended inclusions and exclusions, since these do not fall within the scope of an arrangement founded on the concept of chronological order of composition. Yet the poet’s acts of ordering and arrangement were also in their way compositional acts, even acts of revision. For this reason, the contents of Yeats’s published volumes will be listed as appendices in this edition, allowing readers to see the differing shapes which he chose for his oeuvre in its process of evolution over time. Poems printed in Yeats’s lifetime but either dropped from collected editions or never included in these are edited in general from their latest texts, and accounts of these are given in the notes. Where poems exist only in manuscript, the source is given in the notes and (where multiple manuscripts are involved) the copy-­text is specified. In presenting reading texts for these pieces, the present edition regularizes spelling and (where necessary) supplies punctuation. For all of the texts which the poet did see into print, the present edition generally follows both the punctuation and spelling of the copy-­text versions. The reader should understand that Yeats was heavily reliant on the services of others in arriving at the presentation of these texts and that he accepted (more often than not) conventions of both spelling and punctuation which he was himself largely unable to maintain. One area in which the poet was liable to repeated changes of mind from one edition to the next was the spelling of proper names, and in particular proper names in Irish. While this matter had reached some state of relative stability by the 1930s, resulting in the regularized spellings for the 1949 Poems which provides copy-­texts for many of the poems here, Irish proper names – from Oisin/Usheen to almost everybody else – were for many years in a state of flux for Yeats’s published texts. The present edition does not attempt to present the elaborate (not to say labyrinthine) record of change; however, in the notes for the poems the forms used both by Yeats and his sources, as well as in related material from before and after his time, are kept largely in their first-­written guises. Any impression of a stable set of spellings for Irish names in the poet’s time would be an illusion, and the fluidity of this state of affairs offered Yeats – who was not in the least a speaker or a reader of the Irish language – room for creative manoeuvre as he put his poetry before Irish, British, and American audiences. Again, a full record of the many changes is to be found in the Variorum Edition of Allt and Alspach. Manuscript and printed variants. Yeats’s poetry has behind it a large number of manuscript versions. These can be early rough beginnings, slightly less rough drafts, and then fair copies (and for many poems, all of these). For a long time critics have found this manuscript evidence suggestive and often worthy of study in its own right. The aim of this edition is to present as far as possible those manuscript versions that may have a bearing on the critical understanding of each poem. Inevitably, though, this is a subjective process rather than an objectively regulated routine, since decisions about what to include and what to pass over in silence are in every instance those of the editor. In general, an attempt has been made to err on the side of inclusiveness, where that is possible in practical terms: relatively small changes may, after all, reveal points in the evolution of Yeats’s senses of cadence or of syntax that prove to be of some critical interest. It is

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not possible, on the other hand, to render a comprehensive account of all the changes in some of the more complex sequences of manuscripts behind a number of poems without establishing what would be effectively an apparatus criticus, which demands careful navigation on the part of readers in order to arrive at relevant information for any given line. The fullest available accounts of Yeats’s poetic manuscripts (where there are commonly photographic reproductions in addition to full diplomatic transcriptions) may be found in the Cornell series of manuscript materials, where individually edited volumes are keyed to Yeats’s individual collections. In the present edition, manuscript material, when reproduced, is usually given with editorially supplied spelling and punctuation, unless there is good reason to reproduce the spelling or punctuation of the original: this is intended to clarify readings and present a more immediately comprehensible view of Yeats’s composition in process; readers who need to see exactly the forms of spelling and punctuation used in the manuscripts must consult the relevant Cornell volumes. Transcription from Yeats’s handwriting is notoriously difficult, and it is to be expected that different pairs of eyes will come up with different readings from time to time. The present edition has very often, in cases of doubt, gratefully accepted readings from the Cornell editors; occasionally, however, its readings do differ from theirs, and such divergences are generally mentioned in the notes. Once a Yeats poem reached print, the process of change was seldom at an end. Here, there is less room for uncertainty in the matter of readings, at least. The present edition attempts to give as full a record of printed variants as practicable, at least with regard to matters of verbal alteration. In matters of punctuation, in which changes are too numerous to be given in full, editorial recording is here much more sparing, and in questions of the spelling of names, the myriad changes of policy between different editions have been largely passed over in silence. For the fullest record of printed variants available, readers should consult the Variorum Edition of the poems which, although not always easy to use, is comprehensive in its coverage. Commentary: nature and extent. The commentary offered on poems in this edition tries to cover several areas of potential interest for readers. First, the date of composition, the textual and publication history of a piece, and its immediate contexts in Yeats’s life are addressed. Here, frequent recourse to Yeats’s other works is required, along with material from the poet’s voluminous correspondence. These letters are cited, where appropriate, from the published volumes of The Collected Letters, and after that point from the electronic version (InteLex). (In transcribing quotations from correspondence in the present edition, the writer’s wayward spellings and his habits of non-­punctuation are not always reproduced.) A second area of attention in the commentaries is more broadly contextual: this attempts to see works in relation both to the poet’s various source materials and to other relevant works upon which he drew, or by which, in a broader sense, he might have been influenced. The historical context of particular poems is also important, and an attempt has been made to locate work in relation to the moments of its composition and publication. A third aspect of the commentary is more specifically literary: Yeats absorbed a very great deal of poetry, much of it when young, and for the length of his career showed signs of his reading in terms of stylistic indebtedness (and, indeed, stylistic innovation, since poetic innovation is often one way of paying a debt and can be understood in terms of what it has profited from). In order to allow the reader to gain

xxiv Introduction some sense of the ways in which these poems embody a vast number of specific points of contact with other poets’ works, the present notes invite specific comparisons where necessary with previous writers and their poems. An illuminating comparison may indicate an allusion on Yeats’s part, but it is also a way of setting the detail of the poetry against the broader traditions from which it draws, especially in terms of diction. So, the injunction to ‘compare’ (or ‘cp.’ as it is abbreviated here) does not mean necessarily that Yeats is conscious of any given point of convergence with another poetic text (though sometimes, of course, he is); instead, it may mark a place where the phrase or line in question crosses other phrases and other lines by poets of whom, in general, Yeats was already aware. Much more sparingly, the present edition makes comparisons with work written later and influenced by the relevant words of Yeats: this does, however, include subsequent work by Yeats himself, so that such comparison is an aid to more general understanding of the degree to which his poetry is self-­feeding and self-­perpetuating. No editor can always be entirely confident that a particular comparison has a critical point or will turn out some day to yield one, but even coincidence is not necessarily pointless, and on many occasions ‘cp.’ is qualified as ‘perhaps/possibly cp.’: this is not the hedging of bets, but a gesture towards that larger body of poetry in English in which Yeats’s poetry is located, where various lines and traditions of poetic diction operate in certain ways, and may well be exercising an influence on the composition, if only by being ‘in the air’ at a certain stage. That ‘air’, that broad and various tradition of other poems by other poets, is not only the ‘English’ tradition of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser and Shelley (though it centrally includes them), but it is also significantly the tradition of Irish poetry in English  – Yeats’s congruence in detail with poets such as Aubrey De Vere and Sir Samuel Ferguson, James Clarence Mangan and even such now obscure figures as Robert Dwyer Joyce or Thomas Caulfield Irwin, or political poets like Thomas Davis and ‘Speranza’ (Lady Jane Wilde), as well as contemporaries such as Katharine Tynan and George Russell (AE), is a matter where comparison (however tentative) may well pay critical dividends. A fourth level of commentary is that broadly covered by the concept of ‘reference’ – that is, the explication of allusions and references made in the body of a poem and the offering of some evidence about how, where, and when the poet came about his knowledge of the things concerned. Here, the present edition is the beneficiary of a long tradition of explicatory commentary, from the work of G.B. Saul to that of A.N. Jeffares, as well as the authors of major modern editions of the poet, including D. Albright and R.J. Finneran; Jeffares’ New Commentary (1984) remains an essential foundation for such work. (In due course, this will be superseded by a fresh commentary by W. Gould and D. Toomey, only a few of whose many insights the present edition can hope to have anticipated.) Explication has been a rich seam in critical studies of Yeats also, from early days to the present, and the present edition aims to make use of this in explaining numerous points of reference which are far from self-­explicatory in the poems. It is the critical tradition on Yeats which constitutes a final level of the commentary offered here, and while it is not possible to summarize and evaluate all that has been written on the poet’s works within realistic bounds of length, this edition makes an attempt to represent major critical contributions to discussion of many poems, alongside (where relevant) the views of Yeats’s contemporaries. The same degree of critical context

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has not been applied to every poem, and here again reasons of proportion apply to influence the kinds of coverage given (a good number of Yeats’s poems, most especially those from the early decades of his career as a published poet, have attracted very little in the way of critical treatment). It may be remarked, finally, that although Yeats’s poems appear here as part of a venerable series referring to ‘English poets’, the adjective must be taken only in the sense of the English language in which Yeats wrote: the poetic traditions within which the poet situated himself, and where he continues to be located, are to a vital extent Irish ones, just as Yeats himself is an Irish, and not an English, poet. Dates of composition and chronological order of poems. Any ambition to present Yeats’s poems in chronological order of composition faces two major obstacles. The first is similar to problems that present themselves in establishing the order of any other poet’s writings, unless the writer has been an exceptionally careful keeper of records, and those records themselves have all been successfully kept: that is, there is often a shortage of documentary evidence for the date (or dates) on which a particular poem was composed. For Yeats, this situation is much more acute in his earlier work than that of his maturity, but it means, nevertheless, that many poems can only be assigned a very approximate date of composition, using various kinds of circumstantial evidence. This first difficulty, then, is not insurmountable, any more than it is unusual. A second obstacle, though, stands in the way of a chronological ordering, even when evidence is to hand about when Yeats might have first set pencil or pen to paper: put simply, the poet returned to his poems many times after they were first written (or rather, after they had been begun), and from the very earliest days had made substantial revision into what might be thought of as a habit of composition. Plainly, Yeats’s revisions are moments of poetic creativity. So, something begun in one week, month, or year might very easily be continued in another, and what was done then could be undone, done again, done differently, or simply done away with. This may present a confusing picture: a poem written first in the late 1880s can hold on to its title and its place while being rewritten on several occasions through successive decades, sometimes with substantial changes being implemented in editions as late as the 1930s. The question of ‘when’ such a poem was composed is not one that can be given any straightforward answer. In negotiating the first of these obstacles, the present edition makes use of such documentary help as can be mustered, supplementing this with contextual information that may point towards a particular date or period when a poem first came into being. However, the documentary evidence is far from complete or conclusive, and an element of guesswork necessarily enters judgements made about order. When evidence is especially slight (and guesswork correspondingly substantial), the notes alert readers to this situation. It is an added complication that Yeats himself was somewhat slapdash with dates, even when he thought to record them: not only should we not assume that a particular date entered on a manuscript is the date when a poem was finished (it may be the date on which Yeats remembers beginning the piece), but we must not take it for granted that the poet always knew what day it was even on the day itself, let alone some weeks or months afterwards. The second obstacle is much more serious and is more perplexing for an editor. It is, of course, feasible to print each poem in the order (however approximate) of first composition but in its latest textual form, recording changes made to earlier

xxvi Introduction versions and assigning dates to these, yet this runs the risk of being misleading as well as visually complex and cumbersome. Promoting a text of (for example) 1929 to the prime position in a reading version of something written first (and differently) in the 1880s would require a prominent editorial health warning, requiring readers to make their way through a dense undergrowth of earlier published and manuscript versions in order to arrive at a sense of what was first published or written by Yeats in a specific case. No editorial solution for this problem is ideal, but the present edition is arranged in such a way as to ‘freeze’ heavily revised poems at different points – often, in effect, at the points they reached before large-­scale acts of revision took place. Separately edited versions of the substantially revised versions are provided, placed in the order of poems at the year in which the major revision happened. Thus, for example, ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (composed in 1891 and first published in 1892) is placed along with other poems of 1891, using as copy-­text the last printed version before Yeats’s major revision, and recording MS  and textual variants up to that point; another version will appear with poems of 1924, since this was the year when the large-­scale revision by the poet was made. This results in cases where poems appear in the chronological sequence more than once and years apart. It is certainly true that Yeats did not intend such poems to have multiple identities in his oeuvre; at the same time, it is also true that these works do in fact possess distinct identities as literary productions, and there are advantages for readers in being able to encounter them separately within the larger sequence. In Volumes One and Two, the major instance is that of Yeats’s long poem ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, edited first in its initial state (as published in 1889, but with the manuscript evidence of composition in 1886–1887 provided), and later as comprehensively revised by Yeats: this major revision is at its most extensive for Poems (1895), and it is here in the chronological sequence that a second edited version is placed. This second version, instead of referring back to the 1889 poem’s manuscripts, includes details of further (and in general smaller) revisions to the text of the poem from 1899 until the 1930s: the copy-­text (as with other poems in their revised states) is the latest version worked on by the poet. This poem that was given its last small touches in the 1930s, however, was essentially (in all but details) the one published in 1895; so it makes sense that it should be placed in a chronological sequence with other work of 1895. We can say plausibly that a ‘new’ ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ came into being for Poems (1895), but such a claim would be nonsense for its appearances in (say) Poems (1899) or Early Poems and Stories (1925). The poem that was included in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), on the other hand, was a distinct work, subsequently overwritten and partly obscured by its author in 1895; the present edition takes it as a work deserving to stand in its own right amongst other poems of the later 1880s written by Yeats. A critical assumption which is central to the editorial procedure described here is that the work of revision for Yeats was creative work: in order to follow the arc of his poetic development from year to year, it is necessary to encounter substantial revisions in their chronological place, as elements in a larger and very complex process of self-­reading and self-­correction that often, for this poet, issued in further poems. It remains the case, naturally, that revision is not always on a major scale and that the smaller alterations are also deserving of attention. For this reason, an edited poem here will typically

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contain information about a number of alterations in print by the poet that come from earlier points than the date of the copy-­text. By this means, it will be possible for the reader to see easily the particular phrases or lines that were present in a poem at its position in chronological sequence but were subsequently changed, removed, or augmented by revision in later years.

THE POEMS

1

[‘A FLOWER HAS BLOSSOMED . . . ’] Text and date of composition. These six lines occur in one of WBY’s earliest surviving letters. Addressed to a Mary Cronin and written from Howth, at the Kilrock Road address where the Yeats family lived between late 1881 and early 1882, the letter begins ‘I send you the verses you asked for’ (CL 1, 7): I have very few poems under a great many hundred lines but of those that I have this is the shortest and most intelligible. Its subject was suggested by my last two visits to Kilrock [i.e. Kilrock House in Howth, where the Yeats’s landlord, the Dublin solicitor Sidney Wright, had his residence] I am afraid you will not much care for it – not being used to my peculearitys which will never be done justice to and until they have become classics and are set for examinations. WBY adds a postscript: ‘as you will see my great aim is directness and extreme simplicity’. In fact, this is the draft of a letter, written on a page torn out from an exercise book, so it is not possible to be certain that it was ever sent. The lines themselves are extremely difficult to decipher, whatever their ‘extreme simplicity’, and different versions can be assembled. The version presented here engages in a good deal of editorial intervention not only with regard to spelling and punctuation but also in hazarding guesses at some forms of particular words as WBY might have intended them. A sense of the fluidity of the original MS may be gained from the two transcriptions of CL 1 and Cornell Early Poetry 2, 359, and comparing these with another editorial assemblage of these component parts in UM, 33.

A

flower has blossomed, the world heart’s core: The petals and the leaves were a moon-­white flame; A-­gathered the flower, the colourless lore, The abundant meadow of fate and fame.

1. heart’s core] heart core MS. The editorial possessive here makes more noticeable the phrase’s affinity with a much later, and more famous, ‘heart’s core’ in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. Even if this emendation is mistaken, it remains true that WBY creates here a three-­stress ending

for the line, just as he will do (using a phrase which has a good deal of literary precedent from Shakespeare onwards) in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 12: ‘the deep heart’s core’. 4. meadow] Cornell Early Poetry 2 also suggests ‘treasure’ as a possible reading here. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-2

4 5

[‘A Flower Has Blossomed . . . ’]

Many men gather, and few may use The sacred oil and the sacred cruse.

5. and] There may be a del. ‘But’ just above this word in MS. 6. sacred] The spelling of this word both times in the line appears to be ‘sacret’: conceivably, WBY intends ‘secret’. cruse] This is OED 1 (archaic), ‘A small earthen vessel for liquids; a pot, jar, or bottle;

also a drinking vessel.’ WBY might have come across the word in 1 Kings 17:12: ‘And she said, As the Lord thy God liveth, I have not a cake, but an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse’.

2

THE OLD GREY MAN Context and interpretation. This poem, in which WBY is still finding his feet technically, is notable for its imagining of a direct encounter with a bardic presence, complete with ‘silver lyre’, whose lyric utterance invokes a ‘high-­born maiden’ whose attractiveness is marked also by signs of mortal danger for the men she enchants. All that the narrator is left with is a rose – either a ‘crumpled’ (MS1) or a ‘wild thorn’ rose (MS2) – which must serve as the symbol of the vanished bard’s knowledge. The poem’s relatively rough rhymes and metre, along with its sometimes hackneyed diction, do not lessen its interest as a foreshadowing of some of WBY’s most important work of the later 1880s and the 1890s, in particular the narrative situation of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and the symbolic intensity of 1890s ‘rose’ poems. Manuscript sources, date of composition, and publication history. This is the first poem in an album (NLI 12161), signed by WBY, containing a number of early poems in various states of completion. On stylistic grounds, both 1882 and 1883 are possible dates for the contents of the album. There are no solid indications of date for the notebook, though the loose leaves bear a watermark of 1882. On this MS album as a whole, see F. Fordham, I Do I Undo I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves (2010), 113–115: Fordham sees in the album a very early attempt by WBY to put together a self-­contained poetic volume (114): By collecting a certain volume of verse and ordering it in a sequence – with an epigrammatic opening, a discernible concentration of theme, and a variety of poetic form that indicates technical facility – Yeats was preparing for the dissemination of his work, for his emergence as a young poet. [. . .] No longer just drafting poetry, Yeats is producing a sufficient critical mass of verse, from which he may build a sequence that will help produce, if, perhaps, in a primitive form, a pamphlet or slim volume of printed verse, and impress a potential publisher. This may be to overestimate WBY’s immediately practical ambitions for the album. In any case, his abandoning of the album tells its own story, which Fordham acknowledges: ‘As a volume it had perhaps become impossible to see through to its end because, seeing poetic flaws in the texts he’d transcribed, [WBY] then had to tinker with the texts and, as a result, they were no longer fair copies and so the album was compromised’ (114). As Fordham observes, ‘The album was shelved and presumably forgotten about, its potential gradually fading’ (115). The bound pages of this album are complemented by a number of unbound pages laid in: two of these leaves carry 1882 watermarks, and the contents of the album as a whole are likely to be from 1882–3. The poem occupies the first bound leaf (MS1), but another version is on the first unbound leaf (MS2). Given DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-3

6

The Old Grey Man

its place in the album, it seems likely that the poem dates from earlier in 1882 (even, perhaps, from 1881), rather than later in the year. WBY never printed the poem; a version is contained in UM, 67, and diplomatic transcripts of MS1 and MS2 are in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 428–9. The copy-­text presented here is MS2, with variants in notes from MS1.

S 5

udden as I sat in a wood An old grey man before me stood, And his eyes were burning with molten fire, And he touched the notes of a silver lyre. It was like the voice of spring As to it he thus did sing:

10 15 20

‘Many have sung of maiden fair, Many have sung of golden hair, Many have sung of eyes of blue; I sing of high-­born maiden too, Of maidens all she is the peerless. O no mortal has a face so sweet! Around each man’s heart she has wrapped a tress Of the blazing hair that rolls to her feet. Her voice is the treacherous echo, And her eyes are those flames of yellow That play with flickering light Above the marsh at night.’ *  *  *  * He ceased. I held a wild thorn rose; I looked up: the grey man was gone, But the long-­haired scald, What was he called? Was he the mind of the rose?

– Who knows? I heard the caw of a distant rook, 25 And the gurgle of a far-­off brook. 2. man] bard MS1. WBY’s initial ‘old grey bard’ suggests nothing so much as a conjunction of author and title in Thomas Gray’s ‘The Bard’ (1757), and it is possible that a fragment from Ossian is being recalled (The Poems of Ossian (1805), ‘The Chief ’, ‘Let some grey bard be near me, to tell the deeds of other times’). With ‘old grey man’ perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, St. Thomas of Canterbury: A Dramatic Poem (1876) IV iii 23–4: ‘Then from the crowd | An old grey man stepped forth’.

5. spring] the spring MS1. 6. thus did] began to MS1. 16. those] the MS1. 17–18.] That burn in flick’ring light | Above the marsh at night MS1. 18^19.] Some she loves: happy are those MS1, del. MS2. 19. wild thorn] crumpled MS1. 24. a distant rook] a rook MS1.

3

CHILD’S PLAY Date and circumstances of composition. Composed 1882 or early 1883. The poem clearly belongs among the other pieces preserved in the MS album from 1882 to 1883 in which it is found (see Text), and is likely on grounds of style alone to be one of the earlier items. The locale of the poem is that of Howth, where WBY moved with his family in autumn 1881, staying until the spring of 1884. An account given by the poet in a letter to KT of 31 Jan. 1889 recalls this time, along with the poem (CL 1, 135): There is a thicket between three roads, some distance from any of them, in the midst of Howth. I used to spend a great deal of time in that small thicket when at Howth. The other day I turned up a poem in broken metre written long ago about it. That thicket gave me my first thought of what a long poem should be, I thought of it as a region into which one should wander from the cares of life. The characters were to be no more real than the shadows that people the Howth thicket. Their mission was to lessen the solitude without destroying its peace. Undoubtedly, the teenage WBY was in the habit of retreating from the houses his father took at Howth (first, Balscadden Cottage, then [from spring 1882] ‘Island View’ on Harbour Road) into nearby places of solitude. The ‘thicket’ here seems to have been close to the village itself, though he also went for nights at a time (if his later accounts are correct) into the grounds of the local big house: in his Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916), he remembered how ‘At other times, I would sleep among the rhododendrons and rocks in the wilder part of the grounds of Howth Castle’ (CW 3, 79). This poem is evidently one that WBY worked on for long enough to produce three versions and perhaps part of a fourth (see Text), so it is worth considering what the poet was trying to achieve in his meditation on the Howth hideout. The title seems to project the action back to a time before the poet himself was actually living in Howth (which was in his seventeenth year). The later autobiographical account and the 1889 letter do not place WBY in the position of a child, but of a young poet on a quest for inspiration. It is in the poem that WBY makes the speaker explicitly a child, and it seems likely that he attempts to adjust elements of the verse – not just its ‘broken metre’ but also more generally its diction – to resemble something that can be understood as a child’s perception of the natural world. In giving the speaker a companion (albeit one who does not ultimately understand what is being imagined in the scene), WBY already departs from the strictly autobiographical, and the North American tinge to the poem’s fantasy horizons is not familiar from much of the poet’s other juvenilia. The pages carrying drafts were evidently saved in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-4

8

Child’s Play

MS album but never revisited for the purposes of further composition or revision, and WBY in 1889 was certainly keener to tell KT about his poetic ambitions of ‘long ago’ than the just-­revisited poetic achievement itself. This is understandable. Text and publication history. On three pages kept inside the 1882–3 MS album (NLI 12161), this poem was probably never finished. The most advanced draft is the basis of the text given here, though there are also two earlier fragmentary drafts, along with a section written on the reverse of the page containing the most advanced draft, which may indicate a subsequent attempt at adding to the poem: all of these are given below. It is worth noting that one of the drafts is prefaced with ‘(Sings)’, and this may indicate that WBY at one stage thought of the lines as suitable for a sung section of a verse-­play. The poem was never published by WBY, and transcriptions of all the drafts are included in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 458–461. G. Bornstein also provided an edited text in UM, 75. The present text (which differs from Bornstein’s at points recorded in the notes) supplies editorial spelling and punctuation. Copy-­text: NLI 12161

I 5

know a merry thicket, It was never spoilt by man’s care; ’Tis a glad, mad thicket, For no raked-­smooth paths are there, But thorn-­bushes wind all about,

Draft fragments related to the poem: a. The page begins with six lines that are clearly related to the poem at an earlier stage than the most advanced text. Beneath them is a marked gap, and it is possible (as Bornstein suggests in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 458) that these may be intended for (or themselves be) another poem. The lines are written hurriedly in ink, and the version here is partly conjectural as a reconstruction: [hanging from tree to earth del.] Over your head the cobwebs meet They mingle with the briar O they sing with mad wild mirth Sweet^er^ [as del.] than Orpheus lyre They [sang del.] sing the unity of earth And as I look at ^an^ old grey stump I have to think it wondrous old [As del.] here I lie in a hazel clump It chants a strange sweet rhyme Of long forgotten [times del.] It sings of airy castles bold

Where dwelt the magic fairy race Long ere the [?birth of common place] Of him who sat in Merlin’s chair It sings of sweet ^sad^ undine That enchanted maiden fair Or of the Lady Geraldine b. This fragment begins as a song, with WBY composing the lines in an indented pattern as a lyric. Three lines of further composition are then deleted. (Sings) I know a merry thicket It was never spoilt by man’s care ’Tis a glad mad thicket For no raked smooth paths are there But thorn bushes wind all about Thick with black berries big sweet ’Twas made in a drinking bout Such soft moss all about your feet O’erhead [the cobwebs del.] such creepers meet



Child’s Play



Thick with blackberries, big, sweet; Ground-­briars that laterally shoot; Soft moss all round my feet.

10 15

Also some four-­footed things: A sleek rabbit ’neath a stump; Also some things with wings: They nest in a hazel clump. Not all – there’s a coot in a bank Covered with grass that’s rank; Once a wood guest in a fir-­tree, Who would sit and clink and wink, Never stirred in his nest for me, Was too brave: got shot I think. Often I lie there on the moss, and kick my heels,

They mingle with the briar O they sing [they sing del.] with mad wild mirth Sweeter than orphean lyre They sing the unity of earth [All through the [wild del.] valley is throbbing With [strange del.] wild and wondrous singing Come and look at that old grey stump del.] c. On the reverse of the page used by WBY for the most advanced version of the poem are further lines composed in pencil. It is possible they were intended for insertion after line 30, but then were quickly abandoned. That brown thing you an old brown rabbit say I a puma that hunts [all del.] by night and sleeps [all del.] by day A rash trapper attacked him once His bones I heard him [crunch del.] crack and crunch What, some sparrows in the branches chirp? [No, ’tis a wild turkey del.] Title] The idiomatic phrase ‘child’s play’, meaning something very easily done, is an old one that can be found in poetry from Chaucer onwards. WBY’s title may be seeking to breathe literal life back into the phrase, in that it describes a place where a child is actually

9

engaged in play. It is very unlikely (though possible) that WBY knew of the poem with this title by the obscure Victorian clergyman-­ poet Wathan Mark Wilks Call (1817–1890), in his collection Golden Histories (1871), with its ‘Dreams of a heaven not too good or grand’ (6). 7.] This line, although only averagely difficult to decipher, is exceptionally hard to understand on the basis of an initial deciphering: it looks very much like ‘Grund briars that litteraly shout’ (and this is also G. Bornstein’s reading). The version of the line as edited by Bornstein for UM is ‘Ground briars that literally shout’, but this makes very little sense: briars would not shout, even in this imaginatively charged remembered place, and ‘literally’ as an intensifier is entirely alien both to WBY and to the period of the poem’s composition. The present edition takes a somewhat interventionist approach with ‘laterally shoot’: for this, the MS reading ‘litteraly’ is taken as a misspelling of WBY’s, with the seeming ‘u’ in ‘shout’ being in fact an ‘o’ left open in the poet’s handwriting. This is certainly a questionable reading; but it is preferred here to a more deeply questionable sense. (It must be conceded that WBY’s capacity for sense, at this early stage of his poetic career, can easily be overestimated.)

10 0 2 25 30

Child’s Play

Dream, and make believe I am a trapper. I will tell you how it feels Common things to leave: I think, and at once a trapper am. Then common things look strange: That tree stump becomes a wigwam, Red men the forest range; Now I am called the white bear, For everyone has a fine name there. Something wriggles to that bush near – You say a lizard, I say a deer – That noise, the rustle of a meadow through the trees – No, I say, a prairie rolling in the fresh breeze, Far beyond are the rocky mountains blue And – but you laugh: I will tell no more to you.

28. name] Bornstein reads the word in MS ‘maine’, and gives this as ‘mane’ in UM. 33. rocky mountains] Thus in MS. It is possible that WBY means to be more specific in terms

of U.S. geography and intends Rocky Mountains here.

4

[‘I SAT UPON A HIGH GNARLED ROOT ’] Date of composition. The poem is from 1882–3. There are no firm indications of a date beyond the fact of the MS sheet’s inclusion in the album that belongs to this time. The general standard of competence on display, however, argues for an early date. Textual and publication history. The poem exists in a single MS, a sheet inserted into the album NLI 16121, where it occupies both sides. The poem has the appearance of a fair copy and has only a few revisions. G. Bornstein gives a transcription in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 462–3, and provides an edited text in UM, 77–8. The MS is positively littered with quotation marks, which have as far as possible been tidied up in the present edition. Like UM, this edition assumes that the MS quotation marks for lines 35 and 36 should be disregarded, as should those at the close of the final line. Interpretation. The poem seems in a general way to embody WBY’s teenage fascination with imaginatively charged landscapes, operating in the frame of a dialogue with an especially voluble bird. In its course, the poem makes use of the wren’s close connection with a world of natural and mythic inspiration to allow its speaker to claim poetic and prophetic breakthroughs of his own – though not, conveniently, to say much about what exactly these might have been. There is an unstable mixture here of the ambition to see into ‘primal things’ (41) and the ‘souls of ancient things’ (42) with excited talk of the ‘wee wild fairy folk’ (43). This sounds unconvincing (less convincing, at any rate, than the conventional talk of the ‘fay-­delighting glade’ (22) and ‘Zephyr . . . with folden pinions’ (28) that comes from the wren), and the poem ends with what may be a realization of its own wrong turning into a cul de sac of twee mystery, for lines 47–51 settle into a less rapt awareness of the whole scene as potentially no more than a natural one. WBY was for at least part of the MS attempting to indicate some pattern of indentation for the poem’s lines (as e.g. 10–20 and 31–34), and this has been reproduced in the present text, which also introduces some breaks between lines (at 9^10, 20^21, 21^22 and 34^35) in order to improve clarity. Copy-­text: NLI 12161.

I

sat upon a high gnarled root, Counting the songs of sap and fruit When from a pine tree straight and tall

1. gnarled root] Gnarled is OED adj., ‘Of a tree: Covered with protuberances; distorted, twisted; rugged, knotted’. Here, perhaps cp. R.D. Joyce,

Deirdre (1877), ‘The Palace Garden’, 183: ‘The weasel sought the old tree’s gnarlèd root’. 3. from] out of del. from MS. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-5

12 5

[‘I Sat Upon a High Gnarled Root’]

That grew amid my mountain dens, A small bird let some catches fall As though he would some song recall, As is the way with wrens. Then from the pines’ eternal feet To him I cried these measures meet:

10           15           20  

‘Peace be with you, brother mine, Peace be with you, golden-­crested, Peace unto you, sombre-­breasted Dweller in the tufted pine. Whither is that song of thine, That bucolic wild of thine? In some fay-­delighting glade? In the soft and purple shade That the mountain ashes made, By all other birds forgotten Was that song of thine begotten?’



Then the wren this answer made:

25

‘In no fay-­delighting glade By all other birds forgotten Was this song of mine begotten, But when the great sun revelled high And drunk the blood of hot July I sought the woodland’s sweet dominions Where Zephyr sits with folden pinions And streams roll on in their mystic slumbers,

11–12. golden-­crested  .  .  .  sombre-­breasted] This bird is identified in the poem as a wren: the wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) has a grey-­brown or cream-­coloured breast, and does sing loudly given its size; but ‘golden-­ crested’ does not apply to this bird, and is more appropriate for the similar-­sized goldcrest (Regulus regulus). 15. wild] As a noun, this word is difficult to understand here exactly: presumably, WBY intends something along the lines of ‘wild song’, but truncates that phrase for metrical reasons to leave the word as a noun. The handwriting at this point in the MS  leaves

no doubt that this is indeed the word WBY writes here. 18.1 ashes] Ash-­trees. 25. the great sun revelled high] the great [red del.] sun [was del.] revelled high MS. 28. Zephyr] The Greek divinity of the West wind, Zephyrus, whom WBY spells ‘Zepher’ in the MS, is especially associated with breezes of spring and summer. folden] A  medieval form of ‘folded’, used here for archaic effect. 29. And streams] And [the del.] streams MS. roll] move del. roll MS.



[‘I Sat Upon a High Gnarled Root’]

13

0 3 Wearily beating their dulcet numbers,   Singing, singing alone;   And the still leaves rejoice   As they fondle the voice   Of their sweet summer song.’ 5 3 Then a wonderful spirit arose Out of the soul of a wild wood rose: In its hand was a golden lyre, Every note was a quivering fire. I trembled and gazed on his cold blue eyes 40 Whose light was the light of far-­away skies; He sang me a song of primal things, A tale of the souls of ancient springs. I think the wee wild fairy folk In many hidden places, 45 And in the hearts of pine and oak Treasure the rhythmical paces, But I am very sad when I think, As I sit here in the sun and blink,   Mayhap ’twas nothing at all, 50   Only the clarion call   Of a far-­off waterfall.

30. dulcet] This is presumably the adjective intended by WBY, who writes here in the MS ‘dulced’. 32–34.] Perhaps cp. Isaac Williams, The Altar (1849), XVII, 5, 12–14: ‘The trees with all their little leaves rejoice; | The mountains and the valleys find a voice; | One multitudinous song fills all the grove’. 34.] This is the last line on the first side of the MS page. A break in the poem’s printed arrangement on the page would be logical at

this point too, and is adopted in the present edition. 50. clarion call] It is not easy to equate the sound of a waterfall with that made by a clarion (a shrill trumpet), but WBY’s phrase here may be more in touch with the common phrase ‘clarion call’, which OED defines as ‘a strongly expressed demand or request for action’: this, however, seems some way from the mood at the poem’s close. It is entirely possible that WBY misunderstood the phrase.

5

[‘A DOUBLE MOON OR MORE AGO’] Date of composition. A conjectural date for this piece’s composition is late autumn/winter 1881–2, or (more likely), the same time in 1882–3. There is no evidence in the MS to help in assigning a date of composition to this poem, and any guess at a possible date must be based on the verses’ content and style. In terms of content, it would be difficult to look for a real letter to a woman correspondent that had gone unanswered, since this is almost certainly too literal-­minded a line of inquiry; at the same time, the poem’s situation seems unlikely to be a merely generic one. The time of year, too, is as likely to be true as fictive: the late autumn or early winter of a year whose summer had featured a correspondence that has now ended. Conceivably, the person addressed here is Mary Cronin, who may have failed to respond to the letter containing the verses ‘A flower has blossomed. . . ’ (or to another letter, also perhaps containing poetry): this would place the poem in late autumn/ early winter 1881–2. However, it is also possible that the poem reflects a break in some epistolary flirtation with Laura Armstrong, whom WBY first met at Howth, but who lived in Dublin. In that case, the date would be late autumn/ early winter 1882–3. The poem’s style constitutes evidence for dating purposes, and this is both ambitious and awkward: the diction is unstable (especially at the beginning, where it is matched by poor rhyming), but there is some sign of technical control in the process of development, in WBY’s handling of abba quatrains, where the b rhyme is feminine rather than (as with the a rhymes) masculine. The touch of (largely unearned) pride in ‘we poor poets’ also marks this as being very early work by WBY. Text and publication history. The single MS is a folded page, NLI 30338. This is transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 360. An edited version is in UM, 34. The version in the present edition adds to the MS punctuation but preserves the indentations of WBY’s MS stanzas.

A

double moon or more ago I writ you a long letter, lady;   It went astray or vexed you, maybe, And I would know now yea or no. 1. A double moon  .  .  .  ago] The measure of ‘moons ago’ is common in poetic diction dealing with time, and ‘a moon ago’ is not without precedent, but the specificity of WBY’s phrase is noteworthy and sets the tone for a poem in which the high-­flown structures of elaborate diction are tested by the DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-6

weights of the obvious and the overly literal at the risk of bathos. Since WBY insists on two months, it is reasonable to imagine the poem itself being sent in a Dec., if the ‘dying summer’ of 5 is (at the latest) late Sept. 4. yea] The final letter here is uncancelled, but has above it the letter ‘s’, with the two letters in



[‘A Double Moon or More Ago’]

15

5 Then dying summer on his throne   Faded in hushed and quiet singing;   Now winter’s arrow’s winging, winging, And Autumn’s yellow leaves are flown. Ah, we poor poets in our pride 10   Tread the bare song road all our summer,   To wake on lips of some newcomer: ‘A poor man lived here once and died.’ How could we trudge on mile by mile   If from red lips like quicken berry, 15   At some odd times to make us merry, Came nowise half of half a smile? And surely therefore would I know   What manner fared my letter, lady?   It went astray or vexed you, maybe, 20 A double moon or more ago.

a brace. Both ‘yea’ and ‘yes’ are perfectly legitimate readings, and ‘yea’ is in the present text simply on the grounds that it was WBY’s earlier thought, which though he proposed himself the alternative of ‘yes’, the poet did not in fact cancel. 9. poets in] poets [all del.] in MS. in our pride] Probably cp. Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’, 43–44: ‘I thought of Chatterton, that marvellous boy, | The sleepless soul that perished in his pride’. 10. the bare song road] This metaphor seems to function as a figure to describe the

fortunes of a poem, as well as those of a poet. It does not do this as clearly as it needs to, for there is some confusion between a literal ‘bare . . . road’, which may be trodden by a literal poet, and the road of a song, which may lead it to existence on the lips of ‘some newcomer’. 14. quicken berry] WBY understood ‘quicken’ as the mountain ash (sorbus, or rowan); its berries are bright red. Cp. the later poem, ‘The Danaan Quicken Tree’ (1893). 16. Came] Come del. Came MS.

6

[FRAGMENT OF OPENING SCENE OF AN ABANDONED VERSE-­P LAY] Date of composition and nature of fragment. The sheet on which this fragment is written was inserted in WBY’s 1882–3 MS album, so was presumably composed at this time. Its setting is evidently Greek, even though the opening lines seem rather to prefigure the more northerly feel of the Arcadian landscapes in e.g. IoS. The old king, who is the first speaker, appears to be set for a conflict with the god Zeus, whose outcome is – given his own account of his great age – by no means a predetermined victory. If the reading ‘Themis’’ in 23 is correct, this seemingly old and sightless figure is in fact Prometheus; however, it is unlikely that WBY’s sketch here derives from any detailed reading in Greek myth, though an awareness of Shelley may be in the process of making itself apparent. The fragment, evidently abandoned after it was abruptly broken off, amounts to little more than an exercise in scene setting. In its rough state, it affords a glimpse of WBY’s uncertain ways at this point with the metrical line and his somewhat faltering experiments with poetic diction. Copy-­text: NLI 12161. Punctuation and spelling are editorial.

Scene 1. [King]

T 5

his lake washeth around the reedy strand Of an island fair and passing stately. It hath no fellow like it in the world; These old hands fashioned it, and the four winds Gave it a populace and cool green shades, And gave the wild duck to the mistless lake. All obeyed my spell, and bore them hither Wrapt in magic storms, some from the [] That moveth like a sea through woods primeval,

5. Gave it a populace] Peopled it with life del. MS. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-7

8.] The last word in this line is illegible.



[Fragment of Opening Scene]

0 1

Some from where the blue Aegean catches At the gladness of the pomegranates. But what just now shot by?



Water Spirit A kingfisher with his wing But stirred thy white hair, O King.

17

[King] 5 1 20

It is well. His is an evil lot who sees all things With any other eyes than are his own, Yet this voice coming from out the bulrushes Like the still breathing of a stormless sea – Thou voice attendant on mine old blind age, Thou art not without some sweetness; but now Whom do the hills and dales say that I am?

25

Water Spirit The hills say that thou art Themis’ son, But the valleys whisper rather that Thou art the long-­expected mighty one Who must by fate destroy his sire Zeus.

10. Aegean] The MS spelling here, ‘Egean’, suggests that this is WBY’s intended sea. 11. gladness] glad joy del. MS. 12. by?] by [me del.] MS. 15.] Composition in ink ends with this line. The remainder of the fragment is drafted in pencil, and probably at another sitting. 19. stormless sea] Perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘Rosalind and Helen: An Eclogue’, 1203: ‘And the azure sky and the stormless sea’.

23. Themis’] This reading is not certain: WBY seems to have gone over the first letter again to produce a capital, but it may not be a ‘T’. The identification of the ‘King’ figure as ‘Themis’ son’, however, would align him with that female Titan’s son in mythology, Prometheus. The other possible name in the handwriting here, that of Chiron (a centaur), seems much less likely in context.

7

THE PRIEST OF PAN Text and date of composition. This poem survives on a single page, torn from a notebook (NLI 30446). It is written on the recto; on the verso is a fragment of about four lines in ink and pencil, which may be related to the poem or may be part of another piece, now lost. The fragment is largely illegible, but contains the lines: ‘Of the mountains for the Muse[?s] sing | Dirges by the sirens of Amazon’. A transcription of both sides of the page is given in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 401. There is no evidence for the date of this poem, but it appears to be close in time to other poems by WBY on the pastoral world: its image (and rhyme) of the fountain on a mountain is to be found in several pieces from 1883–4, and the imagery, including a reference to the Oreads, matches that of ‘[Speech from opening of an abandoned dramatic poem]’ from 1883–4. WBY’s most ambitious lyric on the subject of Pan as pastoral god is ‘Pan’, which seems also some way ahead of this piece in terms of technique. On these grounds, the lines here might plausibly be assigned to 1883. An edited version of the text appears in UM, 52; the version presented here corrects spellings and supplies some punctuation. Copy-­text: NLI 30446.

I 5 10

f the melancholy music of the spheres Ever be perplexing to his mortal ears, He flies unto the mountain And sitting by some fountain That in a beam of coolness from a mossy rock Plunges in a pool all bubbling with its shock, There he hears in the sound of the water falling The sweet-­tongued Oreads, to each other calling Secrets that for years Have escaped his ears.

1. music of the spheres] This Pythagorean concept of a cosmological mathematical order in the movements of the celestial bodies is not one which carries much importance in WBY’s evolving symbolism. Here, it is a conveniently rhyming expression of the abstruse wisdom which the poem’s ‘Priest’ finds DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-8

difficult of access and to which the mountain’s solitude offers promise of access. 3. the] some del. the MS. 10. Have escaped his] Have eluded mortal del. MS. 8. Oreads] MS spelling here is ‘oriads’: in Greek myth, the Oreads are nymphs associated with mountains.

8

INSCRIPTION FOR A CHRISTMAS CARD Date of composition and textual history. Probably composed in late 1882. The first sign of this poem (MS a. later) comes on the second bound page of WBY’s 1882–3 MS album, where four lines of composition follow another poem, ‘The Dell’. Here, the title is already present; and while there is no necessary reason for this poem to have been written just before Christmas, such a time of year still seems more likely than not. A  further ten lines (MS b. later), which evidently pick up from the first fragment, are on a loose page inserted into the album; and a further version (at nineteen lines, the most advanced) is part of an actual card at one point placed also in the album. This finished version of the poem accompanies an illustration by WBY of a spray of wildflowers. Some damage to the card has rendered the beginnings of lines 2 and 3 illegible, and conjectures are supplied in the present text. Reproductions of the MSS along with transcriptions are included in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 430–35, and an edited version appears in UM, 69. The present edition supplies punctuation and includes some speculative readings (see notes). Copy-­text: NLI 12161.

I 5

n this ruddy time of holly [?This] my greeting unto thee, [?By] paths of crimson flowers Untasted by the honey-­bee. By his solitary bowers Hand in hand may old Time call thee

Related draft fragments: MS a. May time be very kind to thee Through solitary forest By paths of purple flowers [May it lead thee to the tree del.] Untasted by the honey bee MS b. ^May^ Time be very kind to thee Through paths of purple flowers [Haunts del.] of the honey bee

By solitary brooks Untasted by the honey bee May it lead thee to the tree Where the white footed charger Of the fairy queen doth prance Or with her subjects all around her Mab leads the stately dance. 2, 3.] The beginnings of these two lines have been damaged. Bornstein’s conjectured readings are used in the present text. 6. Time] time MS, but WBY clearly intends a personification here. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-9

20 10 15

Inscription for a Christmas Card

Where the wood spirits stately race, Flit ever on before thy face. The great world for gold is mad Content be thou that thou art glad For riches go before no quest: Peace and solitude is best. Hear ye not the tumbling waters Rolling from the haunted hills? Hear ye not the mountain’s daughters Laughing in a thousand rills? Does not the [?shouting del.] spring Come on the swallow’s wing? Let there be all thy wealth.

17. shouting] Bornstein’s reading of this deleted phrase is incorporated here. WBY has written over the deletion what look like two words, now illegible.

19.] The final line on the card is unrhymed: this may indicate (as Bornstein suggests in UM, 115) that the version here is ‘incomplete’ – but nothing further survives, and there is (just) enough space for another line at the foot of the text.

9

PAN Context, interpretation, and date of composition. This poem, over which WBY expended a great deal of effort (see Text) occupies a significant position in the development of his writing on broadly pastoral subjects in the 1882–5 period. Essentially, WBY uses the figure of Pan – the Greek god traditionally aligned with pastoral conventions because of his ancient associations with the countryside and shepherds – as the focus for a religion displaced to the margins, in which are preserved aspects of a primordial and now mysterious wisdom. This god has his devotees and ‘priests’ – see the short poem (probably from shortly before this one) ‘The Priest of Pan’ – and the poet, too, announces his kinship with this brotherhood by his rapt celebration of wild and inaccessible nature. In the 1884 Love and Death, the connection between Pan and secret wisdom is made when Ginevra sees an image of the god on a shelf of ‘alchemist’s tools’ (III i 41–48):

Yet stay, why are the pipes of Pan carved there? Is it because, before the birth of years, Gifts all the happy gods to science gave, And Pan from ’mong his bounding satyrs cried: ‘A greater gift than all these gods I give. By these my hoofs and curvèd horns I swear, For tunes of Pan shall wrap thy robe alway, And laugh in every sweeping fold it has.’

In 1884–5, in IoS, Almintor prays, ‘Oh! gracious Pan, take now thy servant’s part’, explaining that ‘He was our ancient god’ (I iii 77–78), while near the close of the play one of the awakened sleepers speaks about him (II iii 302–306):

As here I came I saw god Pan. He played An oaten pipe unto a listening faun, Whose insolent eyes unused to tears would weep. Doth he still dwell within the woody shade, And rule the shadows of the eve and dawn?

Naschina’s reply to this is an instant (and final) ‘Nay, he is gone’. These uses of the story of Pan look like more mature instances of the ideas being explored in this poem. There are many possible sources for the religious conception of Pan, and many poems with Pan as their subject; but while Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender sanctions a reading of Pan as a DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-10

22 Pan type of Christ, and Milton, in ‘Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ and elsewhere, lays emphasis on Pan being superseded by Christianity, something closer to WBY’s more pagan and philosophical emphasis is to be found in Shelley’s work, which the young poet was reading in the early 1880s. Pan features as a living and potent deity in touch with the supernatural in ‘The Witch of Atlas’ (st. viii):

And universal Pan, ’tis said, was there, And though none saw him, – through the adamant Of the deep mountains, through the trackless air, And through those living spirits, like a want, He passed out of his everlasting lair Where the quick heart of the great world doth pant, And felt that wondrous lady all alone, – And she felt him, upon her emerald throne.

More directly, WBY was probably influenced by Shelley’s poem ‘Hymn of Pan’, whose refrain-­like ‘sweet pipings’ perhaps give his poem its initial verbal occasion (see note to 1):

From the forests and highlands We come, we come; From the river-­girt islands, Where loud waves are dumb Listening to my sweet pipings. The wind in the reeds and the rushes, The bees on the bells of thyme, The birds on the myrtle bushes, The cicale above in the lime, And the lizards below in the grass, Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was, Listening to my sweet pipings.



Liquid Peneus was flowing, And all dark Tempe lay In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing The light of the dying day, Speeded by my sweet pipings. The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns, And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves, To the edge of the moist river-­lawns, And the brink of the dewy caves, And all that did then attend and follow, Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo, With envy of my sweet pipings.

Pan



23

I sang of the dancing stars, I sang of the daedal Earth, And of Heaven – and the giant wars, And Love, and Death, and Birth, – And then I changed my pipings, – Singing how down the vale of Maenalus I pursued a maiden and clasped a reed. Gods and men, we are all deluded thus! It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed: All wept, as I think both ye now would, If envy or age had not frozen your blood, At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

While WBY makes no allusion (here or elsewhere) to the story of Pan and Syrinx (even though later on ‘wind in the reeds’ will have its resonances), the notion of Pan’s administering teachings about the secrets of heaven and earth is centrally relevant to the preoccupations of this poem. The ‘river-­girt islands’ of Shelley’s first stanza are probably echoed in another early piece, ‘[Speech from opening of an abandoned dramatic poem]’, which opens with a character (the Shelleyan ‘Cyprian’) announcing that ‘I live in this lake-­girt tropic island’. As a whole, the Shelley poem offers WBY both a source and an access point for the development of the idea of Pan as poetic teacher and philosopher. There is a degree of overlap, it appears, between the sylvan Pan and the heavenly Titan Prometheus. Shelley’s Pan sings about ‘Heaven – and the giant wars’, and thus must be passing on the story of Prometheus and his coming to the aid of mankind; in the deleted ending to WBY’s ‘Pan’, the god ‘loved and pitied man’ as Prometheus had done: where Prometheus passed on the secret of fire, Pan transmits knowledge of ‘strange and wonderful things’. It is Prometheus, in fact, who features in the material of MS add.a and b (see below) in connection with the ‘wizard manuscript’ of secret wisdom (and it is here, too, that ‘pipings sweet’ revert to the Shelleyan ‘sweet pipings’). Another possible influence, or at least a spur to WBY’s thinking on this theme, comes from E.B. Browning, two of whose poems on Pan may be relevant. ‘The Dead Pan’ (Poems (1844)) carries in its ‘Pan is dead’ refrain clear traces of Milton’s ‘Ode’, but its pastoral catalogue includes the Naiads (‘Not a word the Naiads say,  | Though the rivers run for aye’ (40–41): cp. draft material 13^14 below) and the Oreads (‘Have ye left the mountain places, | Oreads wild, for other tryst?’(50–51): cp. ‘[Speech from opening of an abandoned dramatic poem]’ 20–21: ‘then I spoke to it a word of might, | And it heard the Oreads’ language’ and ‘The Priest of Pan’, 7–10: ‘he hears in the sound of the water falling | The sweet-­tongued Oreads, to each other calling | Secrets that for years | Have escaped his ears’.) ‘The Dead Pan’ swells with grandiloquent piety; but a later poem of E.B. Browning’s, ‘A Musical Instrument’ (Last Poems (1862)), presents a much less dogmatically disapproving image of the god, as the inventor (and, by implication, the teacher) of musical skill. The poem’s final stanzas may have an impact on WBY’s ideas, as well as

24 Pan adding to the implication of the adjective ‘sweet’, present in WBY’s drafts from first to last (31–42):

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan! Piercing sweet by the river! Blinding sweet, O great god Pan! The sun on the hill forgot to die, And the lilies revived, and the dragon-­fly Came back to dream on the river.



Yet half a beast is the great god Pan, To laugh as he sits by the river, Making a poet out of a man: The true gods sigh for the cost and pain, – For the reed which grows nevermore again As a reed with the reeds in the river.

There is little doubt that one of the ‘strange and wonderful things’ WBY’s Pan has to teach is the ‘Making a poet out of a man’. Another poem which WBY seems to have come across is one echoed in IoS I i 23, William Davies’s The Shepherds’ Garden (1873), ‘To Pan’. However, this work is so banal, clumsy and (on occasion) ludicrous that it makes WBY’s verses here seem sophisticated by comparison. There were also, of course, many poems written to or about Pan in the nineteenth century, and elaborate references to Pan in the work of poets known to the early WBY which, though there is no direct influence to be discerned, doubtless contributed to his sense of the god Pan as an available (and to some extent a conventional) subject. A date for the present poem is not possible to establish from the surviving evidence, but the presence of an advanced version as one of the first pieces written in to the MS album (see Text) suggests that it was copied there in early 1883 and that the drafts may well date from late 1882. Text. As G. Bornstein says (UM, 116), ‘Pan’ possesses ‘an exceptionally full compositional record’, since ‘At least nine separate drafts survive, each with revisions or alterations, thus making a total of eighteen different stages of the poem’s evolution’. Most of this material is contained in NLI 12161, the MS album kept by WBY in 1882–3. On the second of the four bound pages in the album on which WBY has written, on the verso, is a fair copy in ink of the poem, with the last six lines subsequently deleted (MS). This is the most advanced stage the poem ever reached, even though WBY was clearly ready to embark on further revision: it is the version of the poem printed here (with the deleted lines included in the notes). The materials from which this version emerged are also kept in NLI 12161 as seven separate pages not bound in the album (MS pg. A–G) on which various stages of draft composition can be followed. Material from these drafts is cited selectively in the notes: for a diplomatic transcription of the drafts in full along with reproductions of the pages, see Cornell Early Poetry 2, 438–455. A detailed reading of the drafts is part of a larger interpretation of the poem and its significance for understanding WBY’s evolving habits of revision given by F. Fordham, I Do I Undo I Redo: The Textual Genesis of Modernist Selves in Hopkins, Yeats, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, and Woolf

Pan

25

(2010), Ch. 5. Fordham’s lengthy and detailed analysis of the poem is critical as well as textual (though the two things are determinedly intertwined throughout), and its critical vistas – which link this piece to works of WBY’s maturity, and to large questions of the nature and tendency of his poetic thought – are not always quite as useful as its textual analysis. The poem seems to have been tampered with by WBY as soon as it was ‘finished’ (or at least, written into the MS album). Another page kept with the album (MS add.a below) contains draft material that may constitute an expansion or continuation of the poem, or may be another prior draft. It may equally well be part of another poem on the same theme. This is heavily reworked, with much of the ink portions deleted, and new drafts written in in pencil. A further fragment related to this is contained in WBY’s copy of Tennyson, where it is written horizontally facing the half-­title (MS add.b below). The contents of MS add. a and b. are given after the notes to the poem. Copy-­text: NLI 12161, fol 2 v. Spellings have been corrected and punctuation supplied.

I 5

sing of Pan and his piping sweet, King of the shade and the sunlight That dance amongst the flames of the wheat. I sing of the [] dew bounding From the impress of the steeds’ feet; I sing of solitude; Temple decked to Pan by that race Of mysterious priests Who’ve seen the great god face to face,

1. his piping sweet] The poetic diction here seems anodyne, but it may also signal a debt to Shelley’s ‘Hymn of Pan’ (see Context above), 5, 12, 17, 24, 29, 36: ‘my sweet pipings’. By changing the order of the words (as well as substituting ‘piping’ for the more unusual ‘pipings’), WBY allows the phrase to be incorporated into a rhyming poem; Shelley, on the other hand, makes this phrase-­refrain one for which no rhymes are given. 1–2.] Of Pan I sing and his piping sweet, | Of the gods of the shade and sunlight MS pg. D, MS pg. E. 4. the dew] A  space is left between the two words in MS, presumably waiting to receive an adjective that never arrived.

9. great god] daffodil MS  pg. G; daffodil del. great god MS pg. B. Cp. a cancelled line from the earliest (and very rough) draft: [I have seen del.] [Have I not seen face to face | The glorious daffodil MS pg. D. On this, see Fordham’s remarks (128): ‘The question has intensity but is hazardously precious. It attempts to combine ‘natural’ romantic revelation, in particular Wordsworth’s famous and sudden discovery of golden daffodils, with the Pauline vision of total and unmediated comprehension, of seeing ‘then face to face’ (1. Cor. 13.12).’ Perhaps also cp. Tennyson, Maud (1855), I, 100–101: ‘Walked in a wintry wind by a ghastly glimmer, and found | The shining daffodil dead, and Orion low in his grave’.

26 Pan 0 1 15

Who of Pan their melodious king Have heard hushed talk among the leaves, Who have heard the brooks the story sing How an angel race once lived on earth With bountiful Pan as their King. A new god rose who hated man; They died; their shades possess the earth, And to the woods fled bountiful Pan.

13^14.] And laughed with summer brook[s’] mirth, | Or laughed with the Naiads’ gladness MS  pg. E; Who joyed in the Naiads’ mirth MS pg. F; Who joyed [with del.] at the woodlark’s mirth MS pg. G. 15. hated] loved not del. oppressed MS pg. B. 17.] A  further six lines in MS  are cancelled; here is an edited version of these: Ere he fled he cast forgetfulness On all, for he loved and pitied man; But a few he called to follow him In the temple of perfect beauty. He tells them strange and wonderful things And he prepares them to prophesy. In the final line here the present text accepts Bornstein’s version in UM (116) as WBY’s likeliest meaning. The MS reading is ‘And he teaches ^preparest^ them for prophecy’. The inserted word is extremely difficult to read, and may be WBY’s error for ‘prepareth’; ‘teaches’ is uncancelled, but is clearly supplanted by this word. MS  add.a, MS  add.b] It is not possible to be sure whether these pages carry an intended continuation of the poem in the MS  version or are part of the process of composition that led up to it: this may also belong to a different poem on the Pan theme. The first half of the page is in pencil draft, followed by lines in ink, which have later been struck through. An edited version of the pencil lines is: [there dance the satyrs del.] [and the nightingales sit in the ring and learn from Pan so well to sing del.] In a [sunny flower dell del.] primrose-­ dotted glade

Well beloved of sweet melodious Pan Is an [oak del.] great beech with roots of forkèd span, Within whose cool green shade Fat sleek satyrs love to lie Or to dance in a merry shouting band In a circle, hand in hand. The nightingales sit in the ring And learn from Pan so well to sing Nothing in this glade doth die: ’Tis always glad with shouting play. It is these lines that are present in another version in MS add.b, with some additional material. It is possible that this draft pre-­dates MS add.a: There is a flowery, sunny-­dotted [shade del.] glade Well beloved by sweet melodious Pan. In a beech with roots of mighty span, Within whose cool green shade The fat sleek satyrs love to lie. In its branches are of birds a sweet-­ throated throng: None others sing like them, for to Pan’s piping They listen all day long. At this point in MS  add.a, halfway down the page, WBY switches to ink (only to delete the lines). Reconstruction here is necessarily in part speculative: [Beneath the ground is what is sought by thee; I then its mystery do ween: For ages long hast there been Beneath the beech a wizard manuscript, In which life’s forbidden secret is writ. I spirit through the cone of sky will [?run];

Pan

I will to this wood bring The spirit of every beauteous thing. del.] The next page relates to the deleted passage and may be a later development of it. The first piece of composition breaks off after three lines: For Prometheus wrote in a manuscript Life’s [long lost del.] forbidden secret, For writ in a WBY then recasts the passage, writing vertically on the left side of the page:

27 For there is writ In a manuscript The [long lost del.] life’s secret Since by Prometheus put in glad ground: The roots of the beech have wrapped it round.

Finally, the page contains a further four draft lines: And I will ^call^ search and find All spirits that live in man’s mind With my voice will [the earth del.] earth ring To the crowning of our king.

10

[‘ THE WORLD IS BUT A STRANGE ROMANCE’] MS context and date. This poem is written by WBY on the inside cover of the album (NLI 12161) containing six other poems in its bound pages (leaving a further twenty bound pages blank), along with twelve further unbound leaves, on which other poems and drafts are written. These eight lines are placed by WBY inside a rectangle and are accompanied there by a drawing of bluebells, a stretch of water, and a butterfly. The loose leaves in the notebook bear a watermark of 1882. A diplomatic transcription is in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 427. Spelling has been corrected in the text here and punctuation editorially provided which differs slightly from the version in UM, 66. Copy-­text: NLI 12161.

T

he world is but a strange romance; The end is lost by woeful chance.



I am but a Troubadour, Scholar in the woodland’s lore,

5

Scholar in the songs of birds And the flowers’ whispered words,



And the chimes the harebells ring As their heads in breezes swing.

1. The world is but a] WBY here adopts a very standard trope of sententious and religious verse in order to adapt it to his own purposes, which are at odds with the expected theme of the vanity of the natural world. Cp. e.g. the anonymous Middle English ballad ‘Timor Mortis Conturbat Me’, 17–18: ‘All Christian people behold and see, | This world is but a vanity’. 4. woodland’s lore] Cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), XVII, 210: ‘through default of woodland lore’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-11

4–5. Scholar] In both these lines, ‘Scholar’ replaces the deleted word, ‘Learned’. 6. flowers’ whispered words] Possibly cp. Sydney Dobell, Poetical Works (1875), ‘A Shower in War-­Time’, 44: ‘While all the flowers whispered together’. 7. harebells] The wild hyacinth, Scillanutans. WBY’s spelling in MS  is ‘hairbells’: this, though occasionally attested, is a rare spelling.

11

SUNRISE Date of composition. 1882–3. This was the last (and therefore probably the latest composed) of the poems entered into the bound leaves of its album, which was begun in 1882 or 1883 (NLI 12161). Textual and publication history. The poem occupies the last of the four bound pages used by WBY in the album NLI 12161, with all but the last five lines on the recto. The verses are written in ink, with some signs of revision. WBY did not revisit the piece, and it was not published in his lifetime. G. Bornstein includes a diplomatic transcript in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 437, and an edited text in UM 72–3. In the text for the present edition, there are minor differences from Bornstein’s transcription (see notes), while the text as edited provides punctuation and rectification of spellings (also slightly at variance with UM). The major editorial intervention provided here, however, is the introduction of breaks after every five-­line unit to produce seven stanzas: these breaks are not obviously present in the MS, where WBY attempts to fit as much as possible of the poem on to one side of the page (though the final five lines in fact require him to use the other side). Interpretation. In his notes to UM, Bornstein claims that ‘This expression of natural energy and desire rates among the most technically polished of Yeats’s unpublished work of the 1880s’ (116). Standards of polishing are, of course, relative, but the signs of apprentice errors here are still plainly on view (e.g. the clumsy enjambment for rhyme’s sake of 2–3). The overall coherence of WBY’s metaphors, too, is open to some question. Nevertheless, the poem does represent a sustained attempt to apply a broadly mythic framework to the description of a natural event, as the rising sun supplants the light of the moon across a landscape. It is less clear where ‘Voices as of elf or gnome’ (7) fit into this arrangement, and they seem to be forgotten almost as soon as they are heard. The final stanza, however, has a certain power, albeit one that depends as much on what the poem is not about (the moonlight) as on its professed subject.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-12

30 Sunrise

T

he young leaves spring, the cattle low, The torrents in the valley go On thirsting for the ocean’s flow:   Loud they rejoice 5   Hearing his voice. Reddening in the mountains’ comb Voices as of elf or gnome Through the twisted valleys roam   And gently croon 10   That ancient rune. At the touch of Proserpine, Sweetest from every golden line Of the loom among the pine,   How it sweeps 15   Up the steeps; Round each heather-­bell it floats While merle and throstle gloats On its wild and tender notes;   The morning red 20   From yonder head

3. the ocean’s flow] Probably cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam III xi, 9: ‘far o’er the white Ocean’s flow’; but the phrase was also a favourite of T.C. Irwin, in e.g. Poems (1866), ‘Imogen in Wales’ V, 5: ‘Across the clear gold ocean’s flow’, Poems, Sketches and Songs (1869), ‘The Palace of Dreams’ I, 104: ‘vibrated with the ocean’s flow’, and in the same book ‘The Peasant’s Pilgrimage’ II, 2: ‘Above the summer ocean’s flow’. 6. comb] This is probably OED 1.a, ‘A deep hollow or valley’; but see note on 11 for the possible relevance of the word’s more everyday, hairdressing connotations. 9–10. croon . . . rune] This is Bornstein’s reading (with WBY’s spelling ‘crune’), and is preferred here; it is also possible, however, to read the words in MS as ‘chime . . . rime’. 11.] In the MS, this line comes as 14, but is moved up to 11 by WBY, with the instruction ‘Transpose’.

Proserpine] The daughter of the goddess Demeter, whose annual return from captivity in Hades was also the return of Spring. Here, perhaps cp. M. Arnold, ‘Thyrsis’, 87–9: ‘the beauteous head | Of Proserpine, among whose crowned hair | Are flowers first opened on Sicilian air’. 12. Sweetest] The word in MS is very difficult to read, and Bornstein gives (the more metrical) ‘Swept’. 13. pine] WBY has deleted this word, presumably for giving too exact a rhyme on ‘Proserpine’, but it is restored in the present text. 17. merle and throstle] Merle is poeticism for the blackbird, Turdus merula, and throstle is another poetic term, for any of the thrush family, e.g. Turdus philomelos, the song thrush. The two are found together in Robert Browning, Pippa Passes (1841), IV, 104 (JBY’s artwork based on that work hung in the Yeats home, and this was evidently a favourite poem of JBY’s).

Sunrise

31

Sweeping down the mountain side Past the pine trees in their pride To the ravine’s gullet wide  Doth pursue 25   The flying dew. At last from the shroud Of a many-­domed cloud The sun rushes, proud   Of his restless fire, 30   Wild with desire To browse upon the dancing light Of the moon whose sickle bright Reapeth the barren night,   On the steel-­like fire 35   Of her streaming hair.

23. ravine’s] The MS  has ‘ravenes’: there is a slight possibility that WBY means ‘raven’s’, but the gullet of a ravine here seems more plausible. gullet wide] Perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘The Cyclops’, 343–4: ‘For your gaping gulf and your gullet wide | The ravin is ready on every side’. 27. many-­domed] The epithet is again Shelley’s: cp. ‘Lines Written among the Euganean

Hills’, 214–5: ‘By the skirts of that grey cloud | Many-­domed Padua proud’. 33. the barren night] This phrase is very rare, and in poetry occurs only in the works of Sir Richard Blackmore, e.g. Creation (1712), VII, 695: ‘the fields of barren Night’. 35. streaming] WBY begins to write ‘shining’, but cancels it and replaces it with this word.

12

THE DELL Text and date of composition. This poem is on the second leaf of WBY’s MS album of 1882–3 (NLI 12161). It is written in ink, but with revisions partly in pencil. Printed in UM, 68, and reproduced with a diplomatic transcription in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 430–431.

A 5 10

ll the bees that in this country dwell, Flying hither to this favoured dell, Rob the honey from this blue harebell Or fall victim to the chase Of some genie of the place, Who hid deep within the purple rim With tight-­drawn bow awaiteth him. He will have no other powers Among his own beloved flowers, For merry fairies love to sip Sweet nectar from the flower’s lip.

1–3.] WBY’s repeated use of ‘this’ in these lines is undoubtedly clumsy. It is possible to read ‘their’ for ‘this’ in 1; but not compellingly so, however tempting that reading may be on grounds of style. 3. Rob the honey] Cp. John Dryden, The Works of Virgil (1697), Georgics IV 311–312: ‘they themselves contrive | To rob the honey, and subvert the hive’. harebell] The wild hyacinth, Scillanutans. WBY’s spelling in the MS  is ‘hair bell’, with which cp. another poem in the notebook, ‘This world is but a strange romance’ 7 and note. 5. genie] WBY spells ‘geni’ in the MS: it is likely that he is thinking in this line of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-13

Latin genius loci (spirit of the place), but he is also hearing in it the Middle Eastern ‘genie’ familiar from his childhood reading. 6–7.] These two lines originally followed the final line 9; in the MS, WBY moves them up into their position here. 10. merry fairies] This very early appearance of fairies in WBY’s poetry is in the context of an inelegantly chiming phrase; it is not quite unprecedented, however – cp. William Davies, Songs of a Wayfarer (1869), ‘To the Genius of my Colour-­Box’, 293–4: ‘Or merry fairies frisk about  | In wreathèd dance and jovial rout’.

13

[‘ TOWER WIND-­B EATEN, GRIM’] Date of composition. 1882–3. Textual and publication history. The poem is included in WBY’s album (NLI 12161) as one of the six pieces on the first four leaves: it occupies the recto of the third leaf. It is a fair copy, written in ink and with stanzas both numbered and given a pattern of indentation, but is without a title. A transcription is given in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 436, and an edited text appears in UM 70–71. The present text supplies punctuation and corrects spelling. Interpretation. G. Bornstein’s description of this poem as ‘a good early example’ of WBY’s ability to be ‘whimsical or humorous in his poetry’ (UM, 116) is perhaps closer to the piece’s intention than to its actual achievement. The poem is eye-­catching in that it seems to anticipate one of the mature WBY’s key symbols in its ‘Tower’, though of course there is here no hint of the later symbolic resonance, and the tower is more in the nature of a picturesque (perhaps Gothic) ruin. The poet’s intention is a satirical one, at the attempted expense of the wisdom conventionally represented by the owl, here characterised as ‘scholarly’ – already something other than a positive term in WBY’s vocabulary. The ghosts that patrol the ruin are expressions of a far past which the owl’s wisdom (or scholarship) finds alarming, and so the bird himself, upset by these spirits who ‘frolic and howl’, flies off in panic only (and somewhat bathetically) to drop dead from its fear. WBY’s concluding stanza delivers a mock moral for the story, identifying the hubbub from the phantoms of the past as ‘anti-­ philosophic’ – somewhat owlish language, perhaps, in this poem’s terms. WBY’s humour amounts to little more than poking fun at the self-­congratulatory ‘philosophic’; but the poem certainly means to be a humorous one. The final stanza may show some awareness of Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, though it scarcely absorbs any of that poem’s tone, and it is possible that WBY is also conscious of the long European tradition of bird-­debate poems, though again this would seem to have little real bearing on the piece as executed. There may be a suspicion of private resonance about the poem’s final ‘anti-­philosophic howl’, which may reflect debate (or banter) in the young WBY’s social or family circle, and it is possible that the whole poem is conceived in order to deliver this final line.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-14

34

[‘Tower Wind-­Beaten, Grim’]

Copy-­text: NLI 16121.       1.

T

ower wind-­beaten, grim,   The warmth of the ivy   Has shrunken from thee: It saw the mocking grin       2. 5 Of the ghosts on thy battlement,   The ghosts of thy thousand years,   And shaken with creeping fears The green tendrils back from you bent.       3. Once there rested a scholarly owl, 10   Hooting in a grey stone nook.   Midnight chimed; the tower shook; He heard the spirits frolic and howl.       4. The owl flew far through the night   And much to himself did moan; 15   At last he fell like a stone: He was quite dead – dead of fright.       5. Sullen brained as a common fowl,   Thus died this learned bird   Because he simply heard 20 An anti-­philosophic howl.

11. chimed;] This punctuation is editorial: the MS (which is very light on punctuation throughout) here in fact has a full stop.

17.] Perhaps cp. Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’, 10: ‘Every fowl of tyrant wing’.

14

[DRAMATIC FRAGMENT] Date of composition. 1882–3. Text. Over two sides of a page preserved in the 1882–3 MS  album, this fragment is written in ink, with no indication of the broader context. The speaker is evidently addressing a ‘youthful spirit’, but beyond that little can be inferred about his identity. While mention of the Caucasus suggests a Shelleyan background, and possibly the influence of Prometheus Unbound, the druids in search of mistletoe, as well as the ‘sun-­ basking, bright-­eyed squirrel’ (10) point to scenes nearer home. The first half of the first page of composition is taken up with cancelled versions of 1–5 (though these do not show significant variation from their later form); after a line drawn across the page, composition resumes from the beginning, then for four lines on the other side of the paper, before breaking off entirely. This fragment was not incorporated in WBY’s surviving early verse-­plays and was never published. The version here contains editorial punctuation and spellings. Copy-­text: NLI 12161.

O 5

ld, aye older by many a winter Than are the oaks where the pale druids seek By moonlight for the sacred mistletoe; Yet I will outlive thee, youthful spirit By many a long and dreary century – ’Tis well nowhere my name be known, For the race of sleeping gods love it not. The keeping of so terrible a name Would sink for ever in melancholy

1. Old, aye] Old I MS. 2–3.] These druids and their activity have a conventional feel, but perhaps cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘Dartmoor’, 93–6: And many a crested oak, which now lies low,

Waved its wild wreath of sacred mistletoe; Here, at dead midnight, through the haunted shade, On Druid-­harps the quivering moonbeam played. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-15

36 0 1 15

[Dramatic Fragment]

Even the sun-­basking, bright-­eyed squirrel. I crossed the tops of the windswept Caucasus Where ever lie the placid antique snows; A barren valley there I found [] Where naught but the barren lichens grew. There a stream of murmuring water was, Fretting on through melancholy places.

10. sun] brown del. MS. 11. the windswept] the [windy del.] windswept MS.

13.] The final word in this line is illegible: the reading ‘eventuall[y]’ is a possibility, but not a sufficiently strong one to merit a place in the edited text.

15

VIVIEN AND TIME Context and date of composition. Vivien and Time is the first of WBY’s early poetic dramas to have survived intact. Its inclusion (albeit in fragmentary and revised form) in WO prompted WBY to remark to a correspondent on publication that ‘the substance of it was written before anything else in [the] book and like most things old has pleasant associations gathered about it’ (letter of 30 Jan. 1889, CL 1, 129). These ‘pleasant associations’ were with WBY’s life at Howth in 1883–4, and in particular his friendship at that time with Edith Laura Armstrong (a distant relative by way of the Corbet family). Writing to KT in 1889, and treading what feels like a very delicate line in explaining to her his new friendship with MG, WBY mentioned both Laura Armstrong and the early play (CL 1, 154–5): As for the rest she [MG] had a borrowed interest, reminding me of Laura Armstrong without Laura’s wild dash of half insane genius. Laura is to me always a pleasant memory she woke me from the metallic sleep of science and set me writing my first play. Do not mistake me she is only as a myth and a symbol. I heard from her about two years ago and am trying to find out where she is now in order to send her ‘Oisin’. ‘Time and the Witch Vivien’ was written for her to act. ‘The Island of Statues’ was begun in the same notion though it soon grew beyond the scope of drawing room acting. The part of the enchantress in both poems was written for her. She used to sign her letters Vivien. This offers evidence both for the early date of the verse-­play and for its initial nature as a piece suitable for ‘drawing room acting’; it also specifies Laura Armstrong as the inspiration. We can probably assume from this that WBY embarked on a full-­scale piece of dramatic verse in order to produce something in which Laura could take the starring role and that a venue of some kind was on offer, leading to an actual performance in front of friends and family, perhaps in Howth. The editors of CL identify the venue as the home of ‘Judge Wright, Kilrock House’: this large redbrick house (built recently, in 1870) certainly possessed a drawing-­room spacious enough for such an amateur theatrical event, looking out towards Howth Harbour and Ireland’s Eye. Sydney W.S. Wright was a well-­to-­do solicitor who had lived in Kilrock House with his sister since at least 1876; a Miss C. Wright, who may have been another sister, occupied Balscadden Cottage just before the Yeats family moved in (for six months) in the autumn of 1881. It is possible that JBY knew Wright from his own days in the legal profession; Laura Armstrong’s father, too, was an Irish barrister from Dublin. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-16

38

VIVIEN AND Vivien and TIME Time

The MS  notebook in which the play survives (see Text) includes, after its verse ‘Dedication’, the date ‘January the 8th | 1884’. The day before this, JBY wrote to Edward Dowden, asking for the return of a MS copy, which he must have given to his friend at TCD sometime beforehand (JBY to Dowden, quoted Hone, 43) – this cannot be the same thing as the MS  notebook (unless the Dublin post managed to get the letter to Dowden, and the item then returned to Howth, within a day): Jan 7th 1884 Could you send me Willie’s MS. – his railway ticket is up so that he is a prisoner at Howth and cannot go for it – if you rolled it up and put a stamp on it would it not come safely – he wants it for a rehearsal which is to come off immediately. Of course I  never dreamed of publishing the effort of a youth of eighteen  – The only passage in it which seems to me finally to decide the question as to his poetic faculty is the dialogue between Time and the Queen  – There was evidence in it of some power (however rudimentary) of thinking – as if some day he might have something to tell. I tell him prose and verse are alike in one thing  – the best is that to which went the hardest thoughts. This also is the secret of originality, also the secret of sincerity – so far I have his confidence – That he is a poet I have long believed – where he may rank is another matter. That the doubt may have a chance of resolving itself I favour his wish to be an artist – his bad metres arise very much from his composing in a loud voice, manipulating of course the quantities to his taste. Evidently, the ‘rehearsal’ was imminent, and if JBY was asking for the MS from Dowden on Monday 7th, it is possible that a performance was planned for the weekend. For rehearsal purposes, several copies would have been needed; if the MS notebook was one of these – the author’s – then Dowden’s copy could have served as one of the others. The MS notebook, in any case, could not easily have been rolled up and given a stamp for postage: JBY’s instructions seem to apply to a set of pages, not a book. At all events, some kind of performance in Howth seems to have been planned for Jan. 1884, and most likely did take place then. When, though, was the verse-­play itself composed? There are no surviving MS drafts (the notebook is a fair copy), and no references in any surviving correspondence; but it is likely that WBY wrote the piece in the autumn of 1883: he stopped attending the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin in Dec., and this would have given him more time to finish the piece then. 1883 is also probably the year in which WBY met Laura Armstrong for the first time (R. Foster follows W.M. Murphy is putting the first meeting in 1882). The only account of their meeting is the poet’s from a long time afterwards, in 1914 (CW 3, 87–88): I was climbing up a hill at Howth when I heard wheels behind me and a pony-­ carriage drew up beside me. A pretty girl was driving alone and without a hat. She told me her name and said we had friends in common and asked me to ride beside her. After that I saw a great deal of her and was soon in love. I did not tell

VIVIEN AND Vivien and TIME Time



39

her I was in love, however, because she was engaged. She had chosen me for her confidant and I learned all about her quarrels with her lover. Several times he broke the engagement off, and she fell ill, and friends had to make peace. Sometimes she would write to him three times a day, but she could not do without a confidant. She was a wild creature, a fine mimic, and given to bursts of religion. I had known her to weep at a sermon, call herself a sinful woman, and mimic it after. I  wrote her some bad poems and had more than one sleepless night through anger with her betrothed. Laura was engaged to Henry Morgan-­Byrne, another man in the legal profession; she was older than WBY by three years, and Morgan-­Byrne older still, older than his fiancée by another three: so the besotted poet was a spectator on a courtship drama being conducted between people whose experience of such things considerably exceeded his own. In 1917, JBY remembered Laura as ‘a most fascinating little vixen’, and it appears that he painted a (now lost) portrait of her around the time she knew his son (see Murphy, 132, quoting letter from JBY to John Quinn of Dec. 1917). WBY’s later recollection allows Laura the status of muse only in a very limited way: ‘I wrote her some bad poems’ does not sound as though it encompasses entire poetic dramas, though, of course, by the time he wrote this the poet had long dropped both IoS and ‘Time and the Witch Vivien’ (salvaged from Vivien and Time) from his canon, and might in some sense have forgotten them. It may well be that the relationship was anyway somewhat artificial and self-­consciously literary: SMY much later ‘always denied that WBY had been in love with Laura Armstrong and said he hardly knew her’ (letter from GY to Allan Wade, 1953, quoted in Foster Vol. 1, 34). In 1889, when writing his novel John Sherman, WBY drew on memories of Armstrong in constructing the character of Margaret Leland, a glamorous and beguiling, but ultimately unsuitable object of the hero’s (somewhat lukewarm) affections. There, JBY’s term ‘vixen’ is anticipated – and this probably reflects the vocabulary of family conversations about Armstrong from nearer the time – when Sherman’s mother, on hearing that the engagement between Margaret Leland and her son has been broken off, says: ‘I cannot pretend to be sorry, John [. . .] She puts belladonna in her eyes, and is a vixen and a flirt, and I dare say her wealth is all talk’ (JS, 138–9). In the wake of Vivien and Time, with its drawing-­room performance, WBY and Armstrong clearly kept up some kind of contact, which included the sending of poems. In connection with this, probably, the one piece of their correspondence which survives allows Laura’s own voice to be heard. In a letter dated 10 Aug. 1884, written from her father’s house in Dublin, Laura addresses WBY as ‘Clarin’, and signs herself ‘Vivien’ (we can reasonably assume that these roles postdate the play, rather than being established in advance of its composition). The tone is nothing if not flirtatious (quoted, CL 1, 155): My dear Clarin, What can I say to you for having been so rude to you – in not being at home when you called and I had asked you? I am really very sorry about it. I hope you will forgive me. It so happened that I was positively obliged to go out at the hour

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I had appointed for you to come but it was only to a house quite close here – and I told our maid to send me over word when you came – she did so – (but I find since it was just before you went!) and I was rising to leave the room. I looked out of the window and to my great disappointment – saw my Clarin leaving No. 60. It was too bad – and I am indeed sorry I missed you. – I like yr poems more than I can say – but I should like to hear you read them – I have not nearly finished them. Could you come some aft: – and read a little to me, I shall be in all Tuesday afternoon. I promise! so can you come? I should have written to you sooner but I have been away from home. Pray excuse my silence. Trusting to see ‘the poet’ – ! and with kind regards – Believe me Ever yrs ‘Vivien’ WBY was soon to find more readily accommodating audiences for his poetry. But the persistence of literary role playing which is evident here, barely a month before Armstrong’s much-­postponed and debated wedding, suggests that WBY was still willing for much of 1884 to allow her a part in his own imaginative world. One might wonder, though, how good a reader Armstrong really was and, if a good one, how personally tolerant. The role of Vivien is not the most flattering (and the other potential roles which developed in the course of 1884, of Ginevra in Love and Death and the Enchantress in IoS are scarcely more so); doubtless, any element of villainy implicit in the roles was taken as romantic playfulness, whether or not it was given entirely in that spirit. Much of the detail of the actual relationship between WBY and Armstrong is lost, and it is probably wrong to speculate too determinedly about it on the basis of the plays, poems, a very few letters, and recollections from decades later. This does not stop E.B. Cullingford, who says confidently that ‘At the beginning of his career Yeats was metaphorically ravished by a Muse who displayed the traditionally masculine qualities of aggression and initiation’ (14); nor does it stand in the way of E.B. Redwine, who claims that ‘The works [WBY] wrote with Armstrong in mind stand as important precedents, particularly in their examinations of the links between class, gender, and performance’, and that these are works ‘that both celebrate and limit female power’ (‘“She set me writing my first play”: Laura Armstrong and Yeats’s Early Drama’, Irish University Review 35/2 (2005), 245). R. Foster’s summary, sticking to what can be known, offers about as just an estimate of Armstrong’s importance for WBY’s early work as can be given, scanty as it is: ‘WBY’s own later memory of her was intertwined with his first burst of literary creativity [. . .] he used her for the scheming belles dames sans merci in his early work [. . .] But a myth and symbol she remained’ (Foster 1, 34). Sources. A significant source is the well-­known fairy story by J. and W. Grimm, Snow White (first publ. 1812). It is clear that WBY intends this story to be at the forefront of his audience’s attention, and its well-­known nature is probably an important factor in his choosing to make such extensive use of it in the first place: if the piece was intended for presentation before an audience in Howth, it was instantly recognisable as – essentially – an elaborate variation on the fairy tale. In Snow White, the Queen (who corresponds to Vivien) is ‘a beautiful woman, but proud and overbearing’, who ‘could not bear to be



VIVIEN AND TIME

41

surpassed in beauty by any one’, and develops a jealousy for her step-­daughter, Snow White, once informed by her ‘magic looking glass’ that ‘Queen, you are full fair, ’tis true, | But Snow White fairer is than you’. She arranges for a huntsman to murder the young girl, and, when this scheme proves unsuccessful (the huntsman, like Vivien’s seneschal, proving at the last moment unwilling to carry out the deed), she disguises herself as an old woman, and (after two unsuccessful attempts on her life) poisons Snow White with an apple – these three assaults being compressed by WBY into one, not with the laces, comb, or deadly apple of the Grimms, but with a poisoned flower. Snow White’s death-­ like swoon is broken in the story only by the good luck of her glass coffin being shaken as it is borne away by the King’s son, thus dislodging the apple and returning the girl to life and a romantic union with the prince. Asphodel’s swoon, too, is eventually broken, but without the happy ending of the fairy story. The Grimms’ Queen, like Vivien, comes to grief; though Vivien’s fate is by comparison a mild one, when she is ushered out of life by the figure of Time: the Queen in Snow White is more harshly punished – ‘For they had ready red-­hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead’. The other source which is intended to be noticed is Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivien (1859). This episode in the Laureate’s longer Idylls of the King is set ‘in the wild woods of Broceliande’ (2) – a setting recalled at the beginning of WBY’s later poem ‘Under the Moon’ (first publ. 1901) as ‘Brycelinde’. Here, Merlin finds himself alone with the young Vivien, who is secretly in league with King Arthur’s enemy, King Mark, and has been attempting to destroy Camelot from within, by undermining the moral standards of the court. She attempts to seduce Merlin, asking him for the details of a spell which will render its victim helpless an immobile for ever (203–212):

For Merlin once had told her of a charm, The which if any wrought on anyone With woven paces and with waving arms, The man so wrought on ever seemed to lie Closed in the four walls of a hollow tower, From which was no escape for evermore; And none could find that man for evermore, Nor could he see but him who wrought the charm Coming and going, and he lay as dead And lost to life and use and name and fame.

Most of Tennyson’s poem is taken up with Vivien’s repeated attempts to obtain the spell and Merlin’s repeated refusals as part of his resistance to her insistent declarations of love. Tennyson strengthens the erotic intensity of Vivien’s assaults on the resolve of the old wizard, portraying her as a subtle, resourceful, cunning, and powerfully attractive woman. When at last Merlin gives in, Vivien immediately uses the spell on him, leaving him imprisoned in a hollow oak. WBY intends his verse-­drama to be in some way a sequel to Tennyson’s poem and, although it is very different in all kinds of ways (not least, in its near-­total lack of psychological depth), the play does take for granted that Vivien’s character is already known to be dangerous; her impulsive and uncontrollable jealousy, for one thing, is carried over from Tennyson’s creation. The prominence of the

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book of spells which once belonged to Merlin helps to ensure that this source is kept close to the surface of WBY’s piece, and the action of the play is perhaps intended to provide the kind of sequel to the poem in which the villain receives her just deserts. As such, this is not only a sequel to Tennyson but also a radical simplification of the complexities (sexual, moral, and other) of his work. Text. The sole surviving text for the verse-­play in its entirety is a notebook signed by WBY (NLI 30357). This matches the small maroon-­covered notebooks used for the slightly later poetic drama Love and Death and other works in the 1883–5 period (MS in notes). WBY enters the text in what is evidently fair copy, though there are subsequent (and less fairly copied-­in) revisions. If an amateur performance of the play was indeed given at the start of 1884, at least one (and more likely more than one) further copy must have existed (one seems to have been read by Edward Dowden: see earlier). At some point, six pages were removed neatly from the notebook: these are the pages that contain the meeting between Vivien and Time, and they are preserved separately as NLI 30460. Evidently, WBY removed these when he was considering using the scene as a stand-­alone poem in what was to be WO; the date of this decision is not known, but the eventually published piece shows revision much beyond the version on these detached pages (see the poem separately edited as ‘Time and the Witch Vivien’, and notes). A separate fragment, a much-­expanded version of the beginning of II ii, is found in another notebook, now in TCD (TCD 3502); details are given in the notes. This may postdate the MS notebook fair copy of Jan. 1884 and show an early intention to recycle and revise the material. The NLI notebook was the basis of an edited text provided by D.R and R.E. Clark, accompanied by a lengthy critical essay, in YACTS 5 (1987), 1–86 (Clark and Clark in notes). The present text corrects spellings and supplies punctuation; it often differs from the Clark and Clark version in the latter, and the notes indicate points at which different editorial decisions have been made. Copy-­text: NLI 30357 and NLI 30460. Dramatis Personae

Vivien – The Goblin Queen Asphodel Clarin Time Page

Dramatis Personae Vivien] The name (and character) is taken from Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivien (see Sources). Asphodel] WBY adopts the flower here as the name for his innocent heroine. In mythology, the asphodel was associated with the afterlife in both Hades and the Elysian fields.

Although the name does not seem to have featured in renaissance or earlier pastoral, this is probably the effect at which WBY is aiming. Clarin] It is likely that WBY takes this from Shelley’s ‘Scenes from the Magico Prodigioso: From the Spanish of Calderon’, where Clarin is a character’s name. The translated fragment also provides WBY with other names in

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43

Dedication

I’ve built a dreaming palace With stones from out the old And singing days, within their graves Now lying calm and cold.

5

Of the dreamland marble Are all the silent walls That grimly stand, a phantom band Above the phantom halls.

10

There among the pillars Are many statues fair, Made of dreamland marble Cut by the dreamers’ care;

his early work, such as those of Moscon and Cyprian. Dedication Of this dedicatory piece, which he was the first to put partially in print (quoting four stanzas), R. Ellmann remarked that ‘the syntax is sometimes tortured and the sense has little to recommend it, but the poem is smoother than anything [WBY] had done before’ (Man and the Masks, 33). Yet there is a good deal more to be said, and more to be asked, about the poem than just this. A  primary query might concern the heading, ‘Dedication’: WBY does not say to whom the poem is a dedication, and this is odd. Such contextual information as we have concerning the verse-­play suggests that the dedicatee here must be Laura Armstrong, and it would follow from this that lines 29–38 are in the nature of a depiction of Laura: black hair and dark eyes are the only physical features to receive a description, but this (as far as it goes) does agree with such an identification. WBY’s decision to withhold the name, however, could indicate that the fair copy in the notebook is meant for a circle wider than just Laura alone: the person who knows that she is ‘Vivien’, then, is able to keep that knowledge

to herself. The poem’s metaphorical premise is that of building a poetic/dramatic palace out of the blocks of ‘old  | And singing days’, the poetic stories of the past. It is these established literary achievements that are presented as ‘statues’ and then developed to become specific fictional figures. Here, WBY presents the unlikely pairing of Shakespeare’s Miranda and (apparently) John Ford’s Penthea (from his play The Broken Heart) as exemplary heroines. To their number it is WBY’s Vivien – and not, it would seem, his altogether more innocent character Asphodel  – who is added in the poem. The description of the work here as ‘a wayward play’ may be mildly self-­deprecating, though this hardly diminishes the ambition evidenced by the dedicatory verses as a whole. It is worth noticing that ‘wayward’ is also the word used by Vivien to describe her own life in II ii, 69. 7. a phantom band] Perhaps cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Dance of Death’ III, 22–3: ‘An indistinct and phantom band, | They wheeled their ring-­dance hand in hand’. 9. many statues fair] Perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘Julian and Maddolo’, 555–6: ‘casts from all those statues fair | Which were twin-­born with poetry’.

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15

And there I see a statue Among the maids of old, On either hand, a goodly band So calmly wise and cold.

20

On one side is Miranda For virgin beauty famed; Nearby is Penthea As she was fitly named –



O most fair and sad was she, Of the fairest, saddest pages Of all the burning dramas Of the great Eliza’s sages.

5 2

But there this image is ’Mid fair and pearly light, From the dreamland marble Like unto hawthorn white:

30

It is a pale elf statue With sweet Titania’s grace,

14. maids] fair del. maids MS. 17. Miranda] Prospero’s daughter in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Miranda’s ‘virgin beauty’ is relevant to the plot of the play itself, since she exercises a potent attraction over both the shipwrecked prince Ferdinand and (less respectably) the native dweller (and monster) Caliban, who plots a violent assault upon that virginity. 19–20. Penthea | As she is fitly named] It appears that the young WBY had come across the play by John Ford, The Broken Heart (1633), in which there appears the character Penthea, who is forced by her brother into an unhappy marriage, and subsequently starves herself to death. WBY’s ‘fitly named’ is not obviously the case, at least if he intends by this ‘Most fair and sad’: the name Penthea is glossed in the play itself as meaning ‘Complaint’. Penthea is, in any case, a secondary character in Ford’s tragedy. Pace Clark and Clark (37–8), who make a valiant attempt to relate Ford’s play to WBY’s (and beyond that, to his work more broadly), the effort to discern the influence of The Broken

Heart on Vivien and Time is spent in vain. WBY’s misdating of Ford to the Elizabethan age (24) is, like his misapprehension of the meaning of Penthea’s name, an indication of the casual nature of any acquaintance with Ford (whom he never again alludes to); and it is entirely likely that Penthea’s name was fetched in some haste for the purposes of this poem. The reference to this play, however WBY arrives at it, is a relatively out-­of-­the-­way one, for Ford was still (despite the efforts of pioneers like Swinburne) far from the mainstream of early English drama as this was generally known to readers. Possibly, there is an early sign here of the influence of T.W. Lyster (who later in 1884 was to help WBY with IoS), an aficionado of renaissance English literature and an informal tutor to the young poet on such matters. 24. the] Added in revision, MS. 30. Titania’s] Presumably a reference to Titania, queen of the fairies and consort of Oberon, the fairy king, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.



VIVIEN AND TIME



But black’s the hair, as though it were The peeping pansy’s face.

35

The eyes as the wine are bright In Circe’s charmèd cup; O, dark are the eyes as the morning When scarce the day is up.

40

And here I down before it Cast a wayward play Of a goblin Queen, and a goblin dream, And a pedlar grey;



Of a speaking magic mirror, Of a sad and heartless Queen, Of young Asphodel, and Clarin With his harp of lyric teen.

34.] In Homer’s Odyssey Book X, Circe is an enchantress whose food and drink transform men into captive beasts. WBY is here echoing Milton, Comus, 50–53:       who knows not Circe The daughter of the Sun, whose charmed Cup Whoever tasted lost his upright shape, And downward fell into a grovelling Swine?

45

44. lyric teen] By ‘teen’, WBY intends a meaning close to OED 2.a: ‘Affliction, trouble; suffering, grief, sorrow’. The word was archaic, and close to becoming obsolete; but WBY could well have encountered it in the poems of Matthew Arnold. e.g. ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, 147: ‘having used our nerves with bliss and teen’, ‘Tristram and Iseult’, 67: ‘Working love, but working teen’, ‘A southern Night’, 27: ‘public toil and private teen’.

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Act 1 Scene 1 A laurel grove. Time: night. Clarin zittar in hand, sitting on a large oak chair over the back of which hangs a leopard skin. Clarin

I find no solitude by wood or stream, For a radiant shadow [is] haunting me. Hear you the south-­west wind in the branches? It is calling Asphodel, O Asphodel!

Enter to R. Vivien and Asphodel behind arm in arm, the first with a mask in her hand, the second masked. 5

The enamoured nightingale hath stolen In a chorus thy name, my disturber, And the laurel fondles the sound in joy. What other note hath the sounding zittar? Vivien

10

O most wondrous – say, Sir Melancholy, Of the immortals who is favoured so? No lower than great Dian Clarin looks: Surely it is the moon, no lower thing?

Ii S.D. zittar] Thus MS, here and throughout the text. WBY probably means the sitar (occasionally spelled zitar), ‘A long-­necked, guitar-­like, Indian musical instrument, having from three to seven strings which the player plucks’ (OED), though he may also be confusing this with the zither (introduced in the mid-­19th century). The present text retains the spelling of the MS throughout. 2. a radiant shadow] The phrase is not unknown, despite its seemingly paradoxical character. Cp. e.g. F.W. Faber, Sir Lancelot (1857), VII, 736–7: ‘[childhood] returns to cast  | A  radiant shadow on the sin-­worn mind’, A. Procter, Legends and Lyrics: Second Series (1861), ‘Our Dead’, 26: ‘the radiant

shadow, fond regret’, and G.A. Simcox, Poems and Romances (1869), ‘Art and Death’, 52: ‘the radiant shadow’s face’. [is]] This word has been editorially supplied and is not present in the MS (where WBY has, however, taken the opportunity to correct his original spelling ‘shaddow’). The line could be read without ‘is’, so the present emendation is not a certain one. 4^5. S.D. arm in arm] Added in revision MS. 5. enamoured nightingale] Cp. Shelley, ‘Scenes from the Magico Prodigioso’, iii, 45–6: ‘’Tis that enamoured nightingale | Who gives me the reply’. 8. note] sound del. note MS. 11. Dian] Poetic form of Diana, Roman goddess of the Moon, and associated with pastoral activities, notably hunting. Diana (the

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47

Clarin 15

Being supremely wise, you’ve rightly guessed I spoke but of the moon personified, As was the fashion in those ancient days When sea-­built Troy the duchess Helen knew; But thou being learnèd ’fore all ladies Know all this. Vivien

      I am weary with the dance: Have you any pleasant tale to tell 20 Of pale Helen, or of Menelaus The stern old duke, or Paris, for I’m tired? Clarin 25

Why, what wonder of the song-­worn dead Have not the phantoms taught thee, goblin Queen? But here’s a ballad bought this very hour From a lean pedlar with a bag and scythe.



Vivien (troubled) Bought from a pedlar with a bag and scythe?

Greek Artemis) is also chaste, and sometimes violently resistant to admiring male attention. 16., 20–21 the duchess Helen  .  .  .  Menelaus  | The stern old duke, or Paris] This reference to Helen of Troy is couched very unusually and gives the allusion a medieval feel. WBY takes it from a translation of Sintram and His Companions by the German fantasy writer, Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué (1777–1843) 12: Venus bade [Paris] put on his knightly armour again, and don his nodding plumes, and thus attired, she conducted him to a brilliant castle, called Sparta, where ruled the rich Duke Menelaus, with his young Duchess Helen. She was the most beautiful woman on earth, and Venus wished to procure her for Paris, in consideration of the

golden gem he had awarded her. [.  .  .] The enchantress was honourable towards the knight [. . .] She told him at once, that if he should elope with the charming Duchess to his Troy, it would inevitably prove his own destruction and that of his castle, and of his whole race; but for ten years he could defend himself in Troy, and enjoy the sweet love of Helen. WBY makes use of the same book for his 1884 poetic drama, Love and Death. 25. a lean pedlar] This variation on the otherwise standard depiction of Time in the line is unusual; perhaps cp. R. Montgomery, Poetical Works (1854), ‘The Stage Coach’, 231–2: ‘Here, a lean pedlar winds his wintry track | With wallet strapped upon his weary back’.

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Clarin (reads) 30 35 40

Two shining drops of gracious dew, Two sprigs of rosemary and rue, Two loving friends there are: None fairer in story, But yonder is hoary Time on a whirling star: Falling are the golden sands In the glass in his old, old hands. The rosemary dead, and the rue In the monsoon burnt, and the dew Faints ’mid sunbeams that ban it; In life love hath ended Old Time hath descended From his far circling planet: Falling are the silent sands In the glass in his old, old hands. Asphodel

45

A most uncourtier song, for know you not Our only enemy is withered Time Here in the Castle Joyeuse, Sir Clarin? Clarin



If mirth you need, why sought you the laurel? The flood-­tide of joy is full in the hall.

28. rosemary and rue] These two herbs carry symbolic meaning: rosemary has long had associations with memory, especially memory of the dead (cp. e.g. Hamlet IV v 175, ‘There’s rosemary . . . for remembrance’), while rue, a shrub with yellow flowers and bitter, strongly scented feathery leaves, has since the renaissance borne associations of bitterness and regret based on its name. Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), Rokeby (1813), V xii, 38: ‘When villagers my shroud bestrew | With pansies, rosemary and rue’. 30. fairer] more fair del. fairer MS. 31. is] sits del. is MS. 36. the monsoon] WBY’s choice of storm seems exotic here, especially as there is nothing else

in the play to locate its action in southern Asia; the intention, probably, is merely to strike a momentarily exotic note. 43. uncourtier] Thus MS. The word does not exist as an adjective standing alone as here, though it is found in ‘uncourtier-­like’ – which seems to be WBY’s intended meaning. Before ‘not’ was added at the end of the line it is possible that WBY had inadvertently omitted the second part of the longer adjective, but this was forgotten as soon as the revision took place. Alternatively (and perhaps more plausibly), ‘uncourtier’ could be simply a confident coinage here.   not] Inserted in revision MS.

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Vivien 50

If sang you of us, well say who’s fairer Of us who care not for the shadowed dead Of empty story – so between us judge. (Asphodel unmasks) Asphodel



Gladly from such a contest I’d withdraw. Clarin

Always the Queen in her own right hath claim Of victory. (He recognises Asphodel)          Yet troubadours always Are free to judge in wilful wise, so then 55 My verdict is for Countess Asphodel. Asphodel

O Sir Clarin – Clarin

    Hear you? Again they dance. So, Countess Asphodel, a measure, pray! Vivien

The sad moon Sir Clarin hath deserted. That wan mistress shall die of jealousy.



(Exeunt to R. Clarin and Asphodel) (She sits in Clarin’s chair)

0 6

Slighted in person and in royalty: The woman and the Queen both are slighted – Doubly dangerous to those who slight them.

58.] The syntax is slightly twisted, but the meaning is that Sir Clarin has deserted the full moon as his ‘mistress’.

49

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Scene 2 A room in the castle. Magic mirror to R., surmounted by a skull in the background. A subdued light over everything. Enter to R. Vivien, the mask being still in her hand. She stands before the glass. Vivien

O glass, glass, glass I come to ask of thee If I am not the fairest in the land, For, glass, I have been most sadly slighted. Mirror

5 10

In each house I’ve an eye; To be damned and die A thousand shapes have I. But by dread Merlin’s self I swear Never have I aught as fair As Asphodel the countess seen, O no, not Dido that sad Queen Had so majestical a mien. Vivien

15

O glass, you are a sorry comforter. But ne’er to brook a rival I have sworn, (writes on her tablets) And now I sign her death warrant. When the rosemary’s dead the rue shall live So much more in the sun – O Asphodel, It is not well to be so fair. Clarin’s so loved By all the nobles, him I cannot touch

S.D. Magic mirror] WBY takes this directly from J. and W. Grimm’s fairy-­story, ‘Snow White’, a text which is of importance to the whole drama (see Sources). 1–3.] Cp. the Queen’s question to her mirror in ‘Snow White’: ‘Looking-­glass upon the wall, | Who is fairest of us all?’ 6. shapes] souls del. shapes MS. 10. Dido] The Queen of Carthage, who is first loved and subsequently abandoned by Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid, obedient to his divine

mission. In her despair, she immolates herself. This may be the earliest of WBY’s poetic uses of Dido, who features later in 1884 works such as ‘Behold the Man’ 8–10 and IoS II iii 287–9. 11. so majestical a mien] ‘Majestic mien’ was relatively common in eighteenth-­ century poetic diction, and remained current at this time in Victorian verse: in 1885, e.g., Tennyson would use the phrase ‘such majestic mien’ in Tiresias, and Other Poems, ‘Freedom’, 6. 18. nobles, him] nobles [that del.] him MS.

VIVIEN AND TIME





51

Unless with owlish wisdom in the dark.

(A Page appears at the door to R., carefully enclosing something in his hands.) Page 20

Look, look you here! Vivien

         What have you there, my child? (The Page shows a large tropical Butterfly. The Queen lays it on the table.)

’Tis dead – you should not slay these sunny things; They say they’re souls of long-­dead fairies.

(The Page begins to cry.) 25

Do not cry, my child: they’re dying always. The cold nights slay, and all birds slay them – What matter if you or I slay also?

(Puts the child sitting on the table close by Merlin’s book.) Page

Why is that book so large? (Tries to open it) Vivien

         Can you read, child? Page

Yes, quite fast, for Asphodel has taught me. (The Queen opens the book.) Vivien



Read then.

21. sunny things] Perhaps cp. Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘The Bard’s

Farewell’, 3: ‘the bright sunny things that in memory live’.

52

VIVIEN AND TIME

Page (reads with difficulty) 30

Him whom I name, Wrap him like flame, Souls of unrest. Vivien



Stay, stay. (Aside) These charms of Merlin’s have most might When said by sinless children’s lips, But I must make him repeat Clarin’s name.

35 (Aloud) My most dear child, whom love you best in the world? Page

Why Asphodel, of course. Don’t you? Vivien

                Whom next? Page

Clarin, for he showed me a squirrel’s dray. Vivien



What’s his full name? Clarin’s full name? Speak loud. Page



Sir Clarin of Tadmor, as all men know. Vivien

40

Now read. Page (reads) (As he reads the Queen grows more and more excited.)



Him whom I name, Wrap him like flame, Ye souls of unrest Who dwell on the crest

35. most, you] Inserted in revision, MS. 37. squirrel’s dray] OED Dray 2: ‘A squirrel’s nest’.

39. of Tadmor] Another flourish of the exotic: Tadmor was a name for the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra.

VIVIEN AND TIME



53

5   Of the wind-­worn waves 4   – In emerald caves   Where the salt foam raves, O cease ye to rest! 50

See, a blue flame played on the book just then – O let me stop! Vivien

       No, you but dream. Read, read! Page (reads) Him whom I name, Wrap him like flame; Arise, arise,   Rest on his eyes, 55   See that they weep,   See they ne’er sleep Till he dies, dies.   Let his body burn Till his ash lies 60   In his mural urn, Let his whole brain melt As a cloudy belt   Till he dies, dies.

The book is fiery hot! Vivien

65

Read, read! Page (reads in fear)



Him whom I name,

46. emerald caves] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘The Old Sword of Ireland’, 5: ‘Like that talisman hid in the emerald cave’. 60. mural urn] It is possible WBY writes this with a recollection of the phrase ‘mural crown’, as used in e.g. W. Scott’s Marmion (V, 105): see OED Mural 1: ‘Designating a crown or (later also) a garland, wreath, etc., conferred as a mark of honour (originally by the ancient Romans) on the first soldier to scale the walls of a besieged town. In extended use: designating any similar crown, esp. in

heraldic depictions or as worn by the goddess Cybele. Frequently in mural crown.’ However, the intention here may be simpler, with Clarin’s imagined funerary urn being placed in a wall. 61. brain] soul del. brain MS. 62. a cloudy belt] A mysterious (if not baffling) image: its primary rationale may well lie in the need for a rhyme. 65^66.] WBY initially writes 68–70 in this position, then deletes the lines, putting them back after line 67.

54

VIVIEN AND TIME

Wrap him like flame. Things that were fair As Eve’s bright hair 70   To Adam of old   Grow formless and cold To his weary stare.

That is all. O, what is it, your majesty? Vivien

75

’Tis the wild poem of a wild old man. Here, bear these tablets to the seneschal. Begone, I’d be alone. (Exit Page to R.)



(She takes the butterfly, and says excitedly)

80

O butterflies, butterflies ruined by a child, What did the laughter of thy wings for thee? What did the people’s favour do for thee, Or all the fancies of thine idle harp? Beneath some evil star ye twain were born. Great Circe, Circe, now thy fame is fled Since mine was born that shall have wing until – Mirror

85

Until the fountains on the steeps have rest, And ’fore the sun the flowers’ lips are closed. Vivien



And that is forever.

75. seneschal] OED 1.a: ‘An official in the household of a sovereign or great noble, to whom the administration of justice and entire control of domestic arrangements were entrusted’. 77. ruined] slain del. ruined MS. 82. Circe] See note to ‘Dedication’ 34. Vivien’s identification with Homer’s witch here is more in the nature of competition  – she wants to eclipse her ‘fame’ –, but the point of understood comparison is that both women are users of magic in order to enslave men, and keep lovers in captivity.

84. fountains on the steeps] although ‘on the steeps’ is not uncommon in describing mountain scenes, perhaps cp. again F.W. Faber, Sir Lancelot (1857), II, 44–5, in a passage on high-­ up natural springs: ‘the trickling mosses wet  | Gleaming like polished marble on the steeps’ (see note on I i 2 above). 84–5.] These lines become a leitmotif in the dramatic poem, returning at II i 20–12, II ii 82–3, and II ii 90. 85^86.] And that is never del. MS.



VIVIEN AND TIME

55

Scene 3 A room in the castle. The Queen Vivien, arranging flowers in a large antique vase, thus begins to speak. 5

I triumph, for Asphodel is slain Where the shadowy pool in the desert Leers upon heaven like a demon’s eye; Where again the echoes by this are still, So little of noise does a murder make: I think she now wanders a whimp’ring ghost.

10

Men saw in the heaven when I was born, When a wild swan passed in the blinding blue, Great was the might and the mirth of his wings. Down ’fore their feet fell he, dead in the way: Then wan-­faced augured the gray sign-­tellers

2. Where] By del. Where MS. 4. by this] Thus MS, but it is possible that WBY intends to write ‘by this time’ here. 6.] Originally written after l.4, then del. to be added in the present position. whimp’ring ghost] WBY re-­used this in his revision for ‘Time and the Witch Vivien’ in WO, 68: ‘Among the whimpering ghosts’. 6^7.] The MS marks a break here, with a row of four asterisks. It is very unclear, however, what this break represents, or indeed how WBY intended it to be represented in any staging of the text. If the MS  were in some hand other than the poet’s, it might be thought that a line (or more) was missing; but this can hardly be the case. Nevertheless, the beginning of 7 (‘Men saw’) does not make complete sense in terms of the syntax of 7–10: it would be more natural if the things which men saw had been mentioned somewhere before that line (as it is, what ‘Men saw’ has to be that ‘Great was the might and mirth of his wings’ – which, while far from impossible for the young WBY, is still somewhat forced and unconvincing. It may be relevant that

this page has numerous changes, and thus shows a degree of composing on the hoof by WBY, even though the MS  as a whole is in the nature of a fair copy: perhaps the row of asterisks indicates a line that had still to be supplied. 8. passed] whirled del. passed MS. the blinding blue] This arresting phrase is not entirely unprecedented, but it is unlikely that WBY had read any of its previous occurrences. He had not yet come into contact with KT, but by coincidence she also lights on the phrase in Louise de la Vallière and other poems (1885), ‘King Cophetua’s Queen’, 83: ‘the misty, blinding blue’. 9. mirth] This is very clearly the reading of the MS, though it is difficult to see just what WBY intends here. Possibly the pull of alliteration proves too strong, and overpowers sense. Perhaps, however, cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads (1866), ‘Madonna Mia’, 69–70: ‘This was my lady’s birth; | God gave her might and mirth’. 11. wan] sad del. wan MS.

56 15 20 25 30

VIVIEN AND TIME

That my lips should have might, like that wild wing That had for a soul the powers of night, (For ’twas no common bird, those old men said) But that lame-­footed fate would overtake me When the tide of my strength was full: So evil augured the grey sign-­tellers. But Clarin, whom alone I feared of men, Has journeyed forth to find new lands of woe, Lands which the wild soul of his zittar e’en, That was ’fore all sage things in sorrow versed, Knew not even in its tuneful heart. Sir Clarin, that wild singer of wild songs: I had a fancy for him once of old, Till his indifference – (to a flower) lie there Among thy sister mummers of the year, O pale narcissus – till his indifference Roused hate: so now he’s gone, and I grown bold May mock the dread presage that came From the hollow cave of the gray dreamers.

Enter Page, who carefully avoids the great book of Merlin that lies on a side table. In one hand he has a letter, in the other a mourning wreath. Page

A letter, your majesty. Vivien

           Ho! killer

Of butterflies, (takes the letter) what news have you today?



(She takes flowers from the vase, and begins arranging them in his dress.) Page



Last week when I was walking down the path Having just been here, I met Sir Clarin:

20. which] that del. which MS. e’en] even del. e’en MS. 22. in its] in [the depth of its del.] its MS. 26. mummers of the year] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (1881), ‘For Spring by Sandro Botticelli’, 13–14: ‘how question here |

These mummers of that wind-­withered New Year?’ 29. dread presage] Perhaps cp. R. Montgomery, The Sanctuary (1855), ‘Absolution’, 10: ‘Conscience shuddered with a dread presage’.

VIVIEN AND TIME



5 3 40

57

His eyes were wild, and he grasped at the air As though he too were chasing butterflies. He muttered to himself, and saw me not Though I called and threw my cap at him; A world-­worn pedlar with a bag and scythe Trod close behind. (The Queen shivers) Poor Clarin also dies? Vivien



He is a strange man, and has strange fancies.



(Sees wreath) That wreath – Page

’Tis of some snowy blossoms made That for tears stand, or for some tearful thing; So read my sister from a little book, 45 Wreathing this wreath that I go now to hang Upon the column by the river’s marge, That is for memory of Asphodel. ’Twas very kind of you to build it there; Bright are the waters and golden their tongue, 50 And there the tufted sedge is pendulous. Vivien

Pay honour to the dead always, my child.



(Opens the letter, starts, and mutters excitedly)



Not dead? What, has the deep and hungry pool Ungorged its prey? What, are the dead uncharnelled?

38. called and] called [why’s this dies he also del.] and MS. 39–40.] These lines are added in revision. The Page’s speech at first ended with the query ‘dies he also?’ (see note): WBY removed this to insert these lines on the figure of Time, ending with another question about Clarin’s mortality  – presumably from the Page, though it is possible the line was to be assigned to Vivien, whose shivering at the

mention of Time has just been indicated in a newly-­inserted S.D. 40. Poor] This is the reading of Clark and Clark, but it is not certain: the word is difficult to read, and could perhaps be ‘does’ (though the last word of the line seems to be ‘dies’ rather than ‘die’). 48.] This line originally followed 50 and is moved in revision. 53. ungorged] This very rare word may well be a mistake for ‘disgorged’.

58

VIVIEN AND TIME



(She continues to read, starts, and drops it)

55 60

As the law is, O traitors, shall ye die: False soldiers, and still falser seneschal! She lives, and through the desert wanders safe. To one she resembled his own dead child; To one old man one whom in youth he knew, And danced with on some old-­world village green, That growing weak they could not slay this child. Am I not Queen, and live they not but by my breath? Page



Do not so grieve for Asphodel that’s dead; My mother says she’s better off above, Amongst the many saints, than here on earth. Vivien

5 6

’Twas not for her I grieve – what, do you think The whole world pivots round dead Asphodel? (Turns to him)

70

Some of my subjects must die by the law, And like Rachel I weep for my children. Ha, ha! I have a thought she shall not live. The wild swan soars!

uncharnelled] From ‘uncharnel’, meaning to remove from a charnel-­house, or tomb. Although rare, the verb occurs in Byron, Manfred II iv 82: ‘Whom wouldst thou uncharnel?’ Cp. Henry Kirke-­White, Poetical Works (1830), ‘Fragment’, 37–8: ‘Tell of uncharnelled spectres, seen to glide  | Along the lone wood’s unfrequented path’. WBY likes the word well

enough to use it soon again, in Love and Death II iii 68. its prey] its [living del.] prey MS. What] Added in revision, MS. 68. like Rachel] In Genesis 29, Rachel is the younger daughter of Laban, and is loved by Jacob; for many years, however, she is unable to conceive children, being granted them only at the very end of her life.

VIVIEN AND TIME



59

Scene 4 Before a cottage in the desert. Enter to R. Clarin. Through the cottage door Asphodel is seen sitting spinning, her back turned. Clarin 5 10

By day and night, crying aloud her name On hills and in the sombre forest Where shuddereth eternal night, I seek Where pensive streamlets muse forever, Like children in a dream, so still they are. Even I follow the flying shadow, But yet it flies, and I must seek, still seek: Yonder it is, on the hillside glowing. While I live, I follow without ceasing: I come, I come, shadow of Asphodel! (Exit to L.) Enter Gypsy



(Asphodel turns round and says) Asphodel



Did some one cry my name? No, I had dozed.



(Turns back to her wheel.)



Gypsy (singing on a guitar)

O an evil thing   I suffered of yore Has withered my heart 15   Right unto the core.

11. cry] call del. cry MS. 11^12.] For vultures only [live del.] cry in the desert del. MS. 11^12. S.D. a guitar] her lute del. a guitar MS. 12. O] Added in revision, MS.

13. yore] Clark and Clark read ‘you’ here, but both WBY’s handwriting and rhyme confirm the present reading. 14–5. heart . . . core] Deriving from Shakespeare, Hamlet III ii 78: ‘In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart’, this relatively common figure

60

VIVIEN AND TIME

Spirit of doom,   Plagues of a feather, Trooping as one  Gather together. 0 2 My voice sinks down   To the country lone, Where each one sits   On a blood-­red throne. My voice sank down, 25   And each one started Up on his throne,   And earthward darted.

Asphodel has come slowly to the door while she is singing. Asphodel



Have you any news of the world, gypsy? Gypsy (not seeing her)

30

What! Claim I not most strict obedience From noble and from beggar all alike? Yet these dead dogs, in impudence Waxed proud, and spoke of memory to the Queen; But now their wrinkled heads can beg it from The sombre crows upon the castle gate. Asphodel

5 3

My poor woman, some grief is burning thee. I caught not thy words, but they seem troubled.

was to recur crucially in WBY’s ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’ (1889). 25. And each one] Up on his del. And each one MS. 31. impudence] imputence MS. The present edition follows Clark and Clark in taking this as WBY’s misspelling of ‘impudence’; however, WBY’s ‘u’ may also be read as

an ‘a’, making ‘impatience’ a possible reading. 32. Waxed] Clark and Clark read ‘Waked’ here. 33–4.] Perhaps cp. Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien, 593, 596–7: ‘’Their heads should moulder on the city gates’, ‘And many weeks a troop of carrion crows | Hung like a cloud above the gateway towers’.

VIVIEN AND TIME



61

Gypsy 40

Once in dead of night two genii fought, A good one and an evil, for my soul. The genie of evil slew the other: And therefore I mutter, being possessed. Asphodel



O pray to the good saints; their love is great. (She sits beside her.) Gypsy



No, the angel of evil would kill me. He’s by me now, standing invisible. Asphodel

45

To holy Mary I will pray for thee. But come within, you’re weary of travel, And we’ll exchange stories with each other. I’m hiding from a Queen who seeks my life; Yes, I too have known sorrow, so come in. (The Gypsy stands up.)

50 55

Gypsy (seeing a horseshoe that [is] over the door) I may not go in, I may not linger: Close in the desert my tribe is waiting, I sat but by your door to rest this form That is a weary weed of womanhood, A frail wreck of its beauty and old strength. But ’fore I go, of me take this flower I give in gratitude for gracious words.

37, 39. genii  .  .  .  genie] The first word here is the plural of ‘genius’, OED 3, ‘Any supernatural being or spirit’; the second is OED 3, ‘In Arabian and Muslim stories and legend: a

spirit with magical or supernatural powers, and which is typically capable of assuming human or animal form’. The plural of the second term is properly ‘genies’.

62

VIVIEN AND TIME

Asphodel

O, one of autumn’s passionate children, When scarcely tuned is the wild harp of spring: Stand back, stand back, I fear thee. (She steps back; the Gypsy advances.) Gypsy

               We gypsies As you know do deal with things above mankind, 60 But let me tell thy fortune, holy maid.

(She takes her hand. Asphodel tries to draw it away.)



The line of peace is wondrous deep and long: Ne’er saw I such a line on mortal hand. Most instant and most deep the peace shall be; Smell the flower. Asphodel

I seem to know your voice. (She smells the flower and falls back in a trance.) Gypsy 5 6 70

Die not, for that were but a weak revenge; But till thy lover Clarin dies – sleep, sleep, And when he breathes his last live breath on earth, Be it today, tomorrow or the next, Next year, or in a thousand thousand years, At morning or at noontide or at night,

57. the wild harp of spring] It is unlikely that WBY had come across this early work of hers, but perhaps cp. E.B. Barrett, An Essay on Mind (1826), I, 144–5: ‘To some the waving woods, the harp of spring,  | A  gently breathing inspiration bring’. 59. do] Added in revision, MS. 65–82.] A pink loose leaf, laid in to the MS notebook, carries a version of these lines (MS leaf in notes). In the notebook text itself, these lines are the first in a darker ink, suggesting that

they were entered sometime after the preceding part of this scene, perhaps having been drafted first on the pink loose leaf. 66.] Sleep till Clarin thy lover dies, sleep, sleep MS leaf. 67. live breath] A favoured phrase of A. Swinburne’s: cp. e.g. Songs of the Springtides (1880), ‘On the Cliffs’, 427: ‘The God whose soul is man’s live breath’, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), IX, 274: ‘with soft live breath’. 70. noontide] [the del.] noontide MS.

VIVIEN AND TIME



75 80

Awake, and let thy soul see only then (Born of the o’erworn embers of thy sleep) A deadly phantom that shall lead thee on From land to land, as Clarin wanders now, Haggard-­eyed, with his dear phantom flying. But tender it is as the wingèd dew, Or as the lady Hope herself, by thine; So doth the fever pass like racket ball From you to him, from him to you. Poor fools, Poor racket ball in Vivien’s driving bat!



(Throws off her disguise and stands revealed the Queen.)

63

Vivien

Shine sun, and blow ye summer winds, Sweet vagrants, for I’m glad with triumphing! (Sings)

85

Every flower bows his head, Passion-­worn and passion-­fed, Green and gold and lustrous yellow, Glutted with excess of sun; All the flowers choir as one: Now where is the wild swan’s fellow?



(Exit)

71, then] that MS leaf. 75. dear] pale del. dear MS leaf. 76. tender it is] [it is tender del.] tender it is MS leaf. 78. racket] wracket MS and MS leaf. See OED racketball 1.a: ‘A ball, typically small and hard, used in the game of rackets’.

81–2.] Blow blithe, ye vagrant zephyrs, blow, | For now my triumph takes its regal way MS leaf. 83–8.] These lines are entered twice in the notebook: the version on the facing recto is the earlier, and is cancelled by WBY. It has only one variant, in 86: ‘Glutted with the shining sun’. 87. choir] quire MS.

64

VIVIEN AND TIME

Act 2 Scene 1 Clarin comes in supporting his failing steps on a boar spear, his hair gray before its time with grief. Clarin Conscience, a little longer be thou still; Write not upon thy books O yet, recorder; O write not yet Clarin hath slain his Queen: My oath of fealty is spotless still. 5 Planets, you pale mariners of night, Have pity on a fellow wanderer, Look all as ye were wont of old to look When oft I wooed you in this laurel copse; O, disturb me not with your wan faces! 10 Why seem ye all, pale ones, so lustreless? I kiss my hand to you as heretofore; Be fair to me as once ye were of old. Wanderers, I tell you I am guiltless Of great Vivien’s blood! My meddling harp, 15 Why won thou from the fairy King his forces That shall in viewless combat on this night O’erthrow the goblin servants of the Queen That I may slay her and my fame in one And be a knight for endless time disgraced 20 For a broken oath? No more shall bards Sing of the deeds of Clarin, for a crime Shall quench his fame tonight – rather, my soul. Fairies, I cannot slay her now! A voice: I think a voice said ‘Asphodel’ just then.

(He listens)

S.D. failing] faltering del. failing MS. 5–6. Planets  .  .  .  fellow wanderer] WBY plays here on the etymology of ‘planet’, which is the Greek for a wanderer. 12. as] Added in revision MS. 14–18.] These lines compress heavily a large segment of the story, untold elsewhere in

the drama: it would seem that Clarin has paid a visit to the ‘fairy King’ (who must be an Oberon-­ figure to Vivien’s Titania) and secured the help of an army by means of his harp; the overthrow of the Queen will be the inevitable result of this. 19. endless] all del. endless MS.

VIVIEN AND TIME



5 2

Young Asphodel, in thy magic trance Hid in a secret cavern by the sea: For her, for her! Oh hear ye, fairy things, We storm the castle at the dawn of day.



(Exit)

65

Act 2 Scene 2 Room in the castle as in scene 2 and scene 3 of Act 1 Time night, a pale taper burning before the Magic Mirror. Queen alone. Queen 5

The lily-­wristed Asphodel has slept These summers three, and I have quaffed full deep The glorious cup of magic, till in drinking That dread forbidden wine that once I dreamt And read of only, my soul grows The image of the mighty viewless ones. No, ’tis changed, sweet metamorphosis,

1–27] A  longer version of Vivien’s speech is found in another notebook, now in Trinity College Dublin (TCD 3502). This occupies the opening pages of the notebook, which contains no other material related to the play (after the speech, WBY drafts the eight-­line poem ‘The Children play in White and Red’, then begins a draft of Mosada, and after that material for IoS). It is not possible to be certain that this fragment is an earlier draft than the fair copy version in the NLI MS notebook. If it is earlier, then presumably WBY had come to the end of a previous (now lost) notebook in composing up to Act 2 Scene 1, then started a fresh notebook with this version of the opening of scene 2, only to break off and continue composition in another place – again, in a notebook or on other pages now also lost. None of this is impossible, or even too improbable; but it would represent a relatively unusual situation.

There is a case, on the other hand, for considering the lines in the TCD notebook not as an earlier draft of part of the play, but as an attempt by WBY to expand this moment in the drama into a poem in dramatic monologue form. It is noticeable that the TCD MS expands very greatly on the version of Vivien’s speech in the NLI MS: this could mean that WBY compressed the material for the fair copy version, or that he developed that version in trying to construct from it a stand-­alone poem. Radical compression is (so far as can be gauged from other early pieces that survive in more than one MS) unusual at this stage of WBY’s apprenticeship; and some of the material in the TCD MS which this revision by compression would consign to the scrap-heap seems in itself much too strong to have been ruthlessly sacrificed by WBY. Expansion, however, may be a more persuasive hypothesis: in the TCD

66 10

VIVIEN AND TIME

To one great throbbing string that throbbing calls Only one wild word, one wild word – Power, power outspeeding envy self, The only drink for my unceasing thirst. O word, as the song of the sea to streams Art thou to me, in thee I’d lose myself, Outgrowing human sense and human thought.

MS, Vivien takes pains to explain who she is, and what has been going on up to now, as well as making a point of her Tennysonian back-­story. All of this would point towards a possible dramatic monologue form being explored here by WBY. The point at which the piece concludes is not the ‘’Tis here’ of Time’s arrival on the scene, but a further eleven lines (the last two being very fragmentary) on ‘the shining dream’ that goes ahead of Vivien in vision. These lines have no dramatic utility, and there is no sign of them in the NLI MS; but they make a plausible conclusion to a Tennysonian monologue. Another factor of possible relevance is the degree to which the TCD MS (still very clearly a draft, with multiple points of revision) is surer, in metrical terms, than the NLI MS: with the exception of a couple of lines that run into six feet, here the iambic pentameter is the norm, and is handled with a good deal of assurance  – in contrast to the fair copy of the play, where (e.g.) lines 5, 10, and 12 seem to fall short of the metrical regularity WBY is seeking. There are two points at which the TCD MS looks as though it is revising the wording of the NLI MS: in 1–2, ‘is dead’ is cancelled and replaced with ‘has slept’ in both versions, while the second line begins (like the NLI MS) with ‘These summers three’, only to delete this before embarking on an expanded version. In 42, the phrase ‘at the door’ is that of the NLI MS at the corresponding point, but this is deleted and replaced; again, perhaps, a sign of the TCD MS revising from a text very close to that of the NLI MS. None of this, of course, can prove that the TCD MS  is indeed later than the fair copy; and if it is later, it is in any case only slightly so, since the Mosada draft

in this TCD notebook is almost certainly from before Jun. 1884. In the present edition, the question of priority is left open, pending the emergence of further evidence that may help to decide it; certainly, there is not enough to justify the inclusion of these lines as a separate poem from early 1884. Nor, however, is it at all certain that these lines are (as Bornstein claims in Cornell Early Poetry 2, xxxiii) an early draft of material later included in the NLI MS notebook. The TCD MS text is given in a diplomatic transcription in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 173–5; below is a simplified version, with spelling corrected and some punctuation added, and with deleted lines and phrases supplied selectively. The final lines (57–8) are only partially readable, and the version offered here is substantially a speculative one. It should be noted that there is no title and no speech-­prefix at the beginning of the MS text. The lily-­wristed Asphodel [is dead del.] has slept [These summers three del.] Within her hidden cave these summers three, And I  – I  Vivien, the queen who [slew del.] charmed The [broad-­browed del.] mighty Merlin to his [famous end del.] leafy tomb, 5 I Vivien, whose curse brought wandering On Clarin sad, and blasted his young life, I Vivien the queen, that folded up The joyous soul of Asphodel in sleep – I stand upon the world [with light feet del.] like morning proud, 10 [?Disdaining all, the one imperious thing del.] As on a sea beneath a mountain’s root, Where never a beam of sun or thronèd star

VIVIEN AND TIME



5 1 20

As I have pity for the fleeting race Of men who bend to every sudden blast Of joy or grief or scorn, and as they bend Say it is human thus to bend, well then So much less human I, who shall not bend Until upon the steeps the fountains rest, And ’fore the sun the flowers’ lips are closed.



(She starts and trembles)

25

Some great spirit passes in the desert; Turning it enters by the city gate – I felt its influence through all my veins. ’Tis swifter far than swiftest dream: Now ’t’as passed the sentries; ’tis at the door; It is here! Has quickened in the goblin night, where ne’er A wave has laughed its life out on the sand.15 Will sudden in a moment rise a wondrous plant From that dumb water, and will shoot along, A tangled wonder, o’er the sullen sea With leaves and petals of a moon-­white flower Till all the lake is heaving with the bloom 20 And leaves of that [? imperial] goblin thing, And the long cavern [hundred fathoms del.] many fathoms [deep del.] down And those high cliffs unseen of living things Are burdened with the moving flames’ returns. Thus wondrous came I on the seas of life; 25 My [heart strings del.] soul’s [?harp] have one word, one tone, one note, Power that is unbounded as the air; As thus my long white fingers smite the air And it ne’er feels, so ^vainly^ smite my foes ’Gainst my victorious sprites, that are more strong30 Than are the green heartstrings of oaks. I stand The one thing never touched of sorrow in the world, In my imperial beauty and my strength I stand, I Vivien, who charmed

67

The [great-­browed del.] calm-­browed Merlin to his [prison end del.] famous end;35 I stand till on the hills the fountains rest, And ’fore the sun the flower-­ lips are closed. (She starts) Some mighty spirit through the desert goes; It turns and passes by the city gates; [Nearby del.] T’as passed where bound the fountains, [now it goes del.] past the square: 40 ’Tis swifter far than swiftest dream; T’as passed the goblin sentries [at the door del.] ’fore the gate, I feel its influence through all my [brains del.] veins – My brain reels round at its approaching strength – T’as passed the murmuring hall, ’tis at the door,45 ’Tis here. Where’er I go the shining dream goes first: I meet it in the mossy forest gloom; The infant summer winds forever cry To one another ’mong the trees her name –  50 Hear you, the south wind sings overhead, It calls the name of Asphodel, the maid [More than is the silver foam of the sea del.]

68

VIVIEN AND TIME



(Enter an Old Pedlar with a black bag a scythe and an hour glass)

  No check are bolted doors for thee. Come, father. Father Time        No, I never sit nor rest. Queen

Well then, to business: what is in thy bag?



(Putting the bag and hour glass on the table, Time rests on his scythe.) Father Time

0 3

Gray hairs and crutches for old age hath Time, And stately mansions of mild mellow thoughts Where dwell the souls of old men having peace: Such are the ripe fruits Time hath in his bag.



Queen (with a motion of disgust) No, none of these for me, old Father Wrinkles. Time

35

Someday mayhap you’ll buy. Queen

           Never! Time              Never? (laughs) More fair than lilies with their silver throats The enamoured nightingale has stolen, 55 That echoes from the hollow of my heart. [?Where ever last the vision lights, And smites to music all the grieving chord] 1. lily-­wristed] The epithet is an odd one, but must connote slenderness and paleness. WBY may be aware that the plant asphodel

was commonly assigned to the lily family (Liliaceae). has slept] is dead del. has slept MS. 10. envy self] Thus MS; but it may be that WBY intends ‘envy’s self ’ here. 26. ’t’as] The contraction in the MS here is ‘t’as’: the present text changes this slightly, though there is a case for printing the uncontracted ‘it has’ for the sake of clarity. However, WBY’s

VIVIEN AND TIME



69

Queen

You laugh, why? Time

    Best laugh is last: I laugh last always.

Queen (lays the glass on one side; Time puts it up again.) Your scythe I do not need. Let that bring peace Unto those men your ‘mellow’ gifts have wearied. I’d buy your glass. Time

             And that I will not sell. 40 Without my glass I’d be a sorry clown. Queen

Yet whiter beard have you than Merlin had. Time



For slumber ’neath an oak I have no taste. Queen



How old are you?



(She lays the glass down) Time

      Before thy grandam Eve I was.

(Puts [glass] standing upright again.) Queen



Oh, I am weary of that foolish tale.

sense of metre here probably requires the unorthodox contraction to stand. 38. men] Added in revision, MS. 39. I’d buy] But del. I’d buy MS. 41–2.] WBY alludes explicitly here to the story of Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivien, in which

Vivien engages in protracted erotic play with Merlin’s long beard and where the arch-­ magician is subsequently imprisoned by her within an oak tree. 44. I am] I’m del. I am MS. tale] story del. tale MS.

70 5 4

VIVIEN AND TIME

’Tis said ’mong men you are a gambler, Time; So come, I’d play thee for thine hour-­glass. I like such things about me; they are food For antiquarian meditation. (Fetches the dice) Time



The best of three shall win the glass. Queen (throws)

50 3–6. Time (throws)            4–6. Queen              By one point thou art first. (throws)

5–6, ha! Time (throws)

         6–6. Queen

O, I have lost: they’re loaded dice, as always Are the dice Time playeth with; but father

48. antiquarian] This adjective – ‘Of or connected with the study of antiquities’ (OED) – had not been in use for much longer than a century. Treating the hourglass as an antique deserving of study rather than fear, Vivien is perhaps attempting to put Time in his (old-­fashioned) place. In so doing, she echoes Byron: cp. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), III, xcviii, 6–8: ‘and thus I,  | Still on thy shores, fair Leman! may find room | And food for meditation’. 49.] The game of dice may owe something to S.T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient

Mariner’, where in part 3 of the poem the figure of Death plays dice with that of ‘Life-­in-­Death’ for the dead sailors’ souls (190–198). 50. 3–6] 2–7 del. 3–6 MS: it appears that WBY was more or less immediately aware of the oddness of the dice having seven sides. In the course of this dice game, numbers are written out in full (‘Three-­six’ etc.) for the revised version in WO. The present text, unlike that of Clark and Clark, reproduces the Arabic numerals of the MS.

VIVIEN AND TIME



55

71

Another chance, I’d play thee at the chess, For a young girl’s wits against a bent old man’s Are mated any day, as Merlin found. (Wheels over the chessmen.)



The passing of those little grains is snow Upon my soul, old Time.



(She lays the hour glass upon its side) Time

            No; thus it stands. (Puts it up again)

(The Queen sits at the chess board) Time



You’ve lost the glass. For other stakes we play.

54. I’ll play thee at the chess] The phrasing here echoes the Border ballad ‘Tam Lin’, 41–2: ‘Four and twenty ladies fair | Were playing at the chess’. In the ballad, Tam Lin has to be rescued from the Queen of the fairies. For the chess game itself, Clark and Clark report that ‘Somewhere there must be the perfect illustration . . . the young woman playing a game of chance or skill with hoary Time is immediately recognizable . . . We envision it, and we have seen it before. But where?’ (67) Unfortunately, the resultant search comes up with no clear source. A few years after the drama was composed, however, WBY in John Sherman has his protagonist play a game of chess with his rival for the affections of Margaret Leland (the character modelled in part on Laura Armstrong), and lose. The rival in fact comes across Sherman playing chess against himself, and disapproves intensely of this debilitating solitary pursuit: (‘Why, a few such games would ruin any man’s moral nature’).

The defeat of Sherman is an easy one, and a dialogue ensues in which it is clear that Sherman is also about to lose Margaret. As the chapter ends, he is left playing chess once more against only himself: ‘Presently Howard got up and went to his room, and Sherman, resetting the chess-­board, began to play again, and, letting longer and longer pauses of reverie come between his moves, played far into the morning, cheating now in favour of the red men now in favour of the white’ (132–3). In his teens, WBY clearly took an interest in chess, and an early MS  album in which a number of poems are preserved also has pages in which press versions of chess games are pasted (NLI 12161). 55–6.] Another allusion to Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivien, where the young Vivien outwits (or at least, wins against) the much older Merlin. 55. a bent old man’s] an ^bent^ old man’s MS. S.D. (The curtain falls . . . the curtain rises)] Scene 3 del. MS.

72

VIVIEN AND TIME

Queen 60

Well then, for triumph in my many plots. Time



Defeat is death.



(They play) Queen

        To fail in plotting is to die. Thus play we first with pawns, small things and weak; And then the great ones come, and last the King. So men in life and I in magic play; 65 First dreams, and goblins, and the lesser sprites, But now with Father Time I’m face to face.

Time (Laughs)



(The curtain falls for a moment)



(The curtain rises)



The Queen alone, her head on her hands gazing at the chessboard.



A voice



Lost.



The Mirror

   Lost. The Queen 70

The wild swan has sunk from the blinding blue; No more I trouble with my wayward life, Old dreaming night. O hungry oblivion, O sister Death, I take thy hand, I come!

68.] This line, the last use of the ‘wild swan’ motif for Vivien which has recurred throughout the drama, is the closest verbally to what might have been WBY’s source for the overall image,

Shelley’s ‘Ode to Liberty’ 273–5: ‘Then, as a wild swan, when sublimely winging | Its path athwart the thunder-­smoke of dawn,  | Sinks headlong through the aerial golden light’.

VIVIEN AND TIME



73

(She dies.)

Both voices (Laugh)



The Page (speaking without)



Keep back, strange pale man, this is the Queen’s room.



(A struggle; a cry.)



Clarin (rushing in with a drawn sword)

75

Now vengeance on the Queen, and then to seek A potent spell in Merlin’s stolen book To rouse young Asphodel from magic trance.



(He sees the Queen lying dead goes over and touches her.)



Dead, dead! That mighty shade has been before.



(Turns to door)

O my good goblins, we are late, all late! O, now who wonders that the night had signs That there was bitter frost in fairy land 80 Which never happened in all time before, And fairy souls from streams and flowers fled, Wherefore upon the steeps the fountains rest And ’fore the sun the flowers’ lips are closed? I now remember how an old grey man, 85 A world-­worn pedlar with a bag and scythe, Told me how I in after life would meet A great Queen whom I’d slay with mine own hand, Or scarce survive her for a minute’s space. The streams shall never hear my harp again. 90 O woe, there is a frost in fairy land, And on the steeps the fountains rest. O Asphodel! (Dies.)

Mirror (Laughs)

84.] [O del.] I  now remember how an old ^grey^ man MS.

88. Or] O MS. The present text follows Clark and Clark in assuming that WBY intends ‘Or’ here.

74

VIVIEN AND TIME

Scene 3 A dark grove. Enter Asphodel. No light on the stage or audience. Light only on Asphodel. Asphodel 5 10

O what a strange long sleep I’ve had, how long! And stranger dreams I’ve dreamt in sleep Of how a Queen once loved me – loved, yes, loved And hated then more than she loved at first. All vivid was, as though it had been life; How in those strange dark quiet days that flowed In the short compass of one dream I found Young Clarin whom I seemed to love. Now all is fading, and I feel alone, My whole soul bitterly athirst for peace. 1 Voice

Soon like us you’d find her,   And dwell with her above All mortal things, and bind her,   If you neither hate or love. 2 Voice 5 1 But quench, O thing of dust,   Those awful flames that dart And gleam beneath the crust   Of thy all-­throbbing heart. Asphodel

When shall I find peace, O fairy voices? 1 Voice

20

When tall trees are crashing, And lightning is flashing, When thunder doth toll, And wild waters roll.

9. feel] fell MS.

VIVIEN AND TIME



75

Both voices 25

Still peace dwells alone On her judgement throne. 2 Voice



When the bolts of death rattle ’Mong the dying in battle, Or broods silence profound On the lone desert ground. Both Voices

0 3

Still peace dwells alone On her judgement throne. Asphodel



And Clarin? 1 Voice

       Sister! 2 Voice              Sister! 1 Voice

Peace in the end you shall have, And your o’er-­worn heart shall have rest, 2 Voice

5 3

When the yew and the cypress wave In the cold earth over your breast.

END

(Exit Asphodel upon her wanderings)

28. Or] O MS. 32^33.] [(Exit Asphodel del.] MS.

34. o’er worn] poor worn del. o’er worn MS. 36^ END] This final S.D. is added in revision.

16

[‘AS ME UPON MY WAY THE TRAM-­C AR WHIRLED’] Text and date of composition. This poem was never printed by WBY. A single leaf, folded into four, carries on its first ‘page’ this poem, drafted in ink (NLI 30826): the other three ‘pages’ are left blank. A watermark carries the date ‘1883’, but there is nothing to establish a specific date besides this. The poem’s awkward diction, together with its attempt to write in sonnet form, suggest earlier rather than later apprentice work on WBY’s part, and the verses are probably no later than 1884. For a transcription of the MS, see Cornell Early Poetry 2, 416; an edited text is in UM, 61. Context and interpretation. The poem’s main significance may be that of an exercise in verse form: it is a sonnet, which may precede or come from quite shortly after WBY’s other apprentice sonnet, ‘Behold the Man’: it has the same sestet rhyme-­scheme as that poem, but where the other sonnet has an orthodox Petrarchan octave, this uses a ‘Shakespearean’ pattern for its octave rhymes (ababcdcd). WBY here also allows the verse of the octave to overrun into the first half of line 9, before breaking mid-­line to begin the sestet. The voice adopted in the poem is that of the alienated observer caught in the flow of the contemporary world, critical of the modern ‘Pharisee’ and the laughing ‘gaudy vessel of old tears’ (an old woman?) alike. Is the ‘wretch’ about whom the sestet speculates to be identified with the second figure in the octave? The poem does not permit any certainty about this, but its closing question raises the possibility of some reflective melancholy on the part of a ‘gossip’ who, when ‘Grown moody’, will find herself, too, alienated from the ‘well-­trodden’ modern city and its inhabitants. The poet, it is implied, gets there before her; and the tone of the whole is superior, even arch, in the confidence of its own boastful alienation. Copy-­text: NLI 30826.

A

s me upon my way the tram-­car whirled On through the night, thus did I moralize: Yon Pharisee, who dreams how goes the world And how it runs awry, what secret lies

1. tram-­car] The term is a recent one: OED’s earliest citation is 1873, and ‘tram’ itself, to describe a passenger car on a street tramway, is included in Webster’s American Dictionary in 1879. Trams began to run commercially London and in Dublin during the 1870s. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-17

3. Pharisee] After the Jewish religious party in the Jerusalem of the New Testament, OED 2: ‘A person of the spirit or character commonly attributed to the Pharisees in the New Testament; a legalist or formalist; a self-­righteous person, a hypocrite.’



[‘As Me Upon My Way the Tram-­Car Whirled’]

77

5 Within his lonely heart? And yonder weak Far burst of laughter, falling on my ears Shrill-­voiced – the gaudy vessel of old tears, What is its tale? Yon wretch, of whom none speak, Hoarder of shame, when she has lost the sun 10 And her poor tragedy is o’er and done, And sealed and finished her unsummered days, What gossip (surely even she has one?) Grown moody for a little while will shun The old companions, the well-­trodden ways? Title] The first line of the MS has what looks like a title, cancelled heavily in pencil: ‘A rime democratic’. Beneath this is another line, which may be a title (and is the more likely to be one because it does not promise to scan): ‘The veiled voices and the questions’. Beneath that is another cancelled line, this time, however, cancelled in ink, which is quite possibly an abandoned opening line rather than a title: ‘The mysteries and voices of the night’. Over the last three words of this, and uncancelled, WBY has written ‘of the dark’. In his UM text, Bornstein takes this to be part of a title, which he puts together as ‘The Veiled Voices and the Questions of the Dark’. The case for this is not compelling: the phrase seems in itself unlikely as a title, and it is impossible to be sure that WBY is not in fact attempting a line of poetry, rather than a title, at this point in the MS. Since ‘A rime democratic’ (written, like the rest of the MS, in black ink) is cancelled in pencil, WBY must have got rid of his original title without at that point writing in another (there is no more pencil in the MS): thus, ‘The veiled voices and the questions’ can only be a title if it was originally one of a pair of possible titles – and this would not be typical of WBY’s practice in even early drafts. It seems more plausible that the line, like the (ink-­) cancelled one below it, is part of an abandoned opening, one which is then separated from the completed poem by a line on the page. The rejected title, ‘A rime democratic’, may reflect WBY’s early contacts with Walt Whitman’s The Leaves of Grass: ‘Chants Democratic’ is the title of a major section in its 1860 edition, while the 1871 edition (and later ones) open with ‘One’s Self I Sing’, where the second line is ‘The word Democratic, the word En-­Masse’.

8. wretch] thing del. MS. 11. unsummered] This very rare word is almost certainly taken from Tennyson: cp. ‘Prefatory Poem to my Brother’s Sonnets’, 17–18: ‘And, now to these unsummer’d skies | The summer bird is still’. (Although this poem did not figure in one of Tennyson’s own volumes until Tiresias, and Other Poems (1885), it appeared as a Preface in Charles Tennyson Turner,

Collected Sonnets: Old and New (1880).) The word had in fact cropped up in poetry before this, in Sidney Dobell, Poetical Works (1875), ‘A Hero’s Grave’, 102–3: ‘When the unsummered woman in her blood | Glows through the Parian maid’. 12. gossip] OED 2.a: ‘A familiar acquaintance, friend, chum’. In this sense, a gossip is almost always female.

17

[‘DEATH HATH TA’EN MY CHILD TO NURSE’] Context and date. This six-­line poem occurs at the beginning of a prose dramatic sketch entitled ‘The Starving of Rothsay’, preserved as 10 pp. of MS in NLI 30402. The stanza opens the scene and is sung by a character called Emmeline. The sketch was included by GY among ‘Early unpublished plays 1884–1886’ when she put WBY’s MSS in order; its handwriting suggests it may be from the earlier of these dates. The subject of WBY’s short drama is the death of David Stewart, Duke of Rothesay (1378–1402), eldest son of the Scots King Robert III, who was reputed to have been starved to death at Falkland Palace in Fife by his uncle, the Duke of Albany. WBY would have encountered this story in W. Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). Copy-­text: NLI 30402.

D 5

eath hath ta’en my child to nurse, Yet he keeps his shrill small cry; Death would choke him in his hearse, Pat of earth his lullaby; But my baby cannot rest While the milk leaps in my breast.

2. shrill small cry] Cp. John Todhunter, Laurella and Other Poems (1876), ‘The Lost Violin-­ Theme’, 29–30: ‘It came like a revelation, | That DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-18

shrill, small, passionate voice’. Both Todhunter’s and WBY’s phrases obviously derive from 1 Kings, 19:12, ‘and after the fire a still small voice’.

18

[‘MY SONG THOU KNOWEST OF A DREAMING CASTLE’] Text and date. Possibly spring 1884. This fragment is found on a single folded MS page detached from a notebook (NLI 31042) which also contains lines for a lyric from the verse-­drama Love and Death (II iii 72 ff.). Since this draft is earlier than the version in the Love and Death notebooks of mid-­1884, it is likely to come from earlier that year. The page also contains a sketch by WBY of a head: this may (but need not necessarily) mean that the lines were drafted at the time WBY attended the Metropolitan School of Art (from May 1884). The lines are without cancellations and may be part of a stanza; they seem to belong to a distinct work (though not Love and Death) – perhaps a stanzaic narrative, now lost. A transcription is available in Early Poetry 2, 426, and an edited version in UM, 65. The text as edited here has minor additions of punctuation.

M 5

y song thou knowest of a dreaming castle – The pensive walls are like a woven net, For cunning corbeils are in carving set Of fair flowers in a wreathèd tassel – From old world pages they have singing met

2. pensive walls] Presumably, WBY intends the walls to provoke a pensive spirit, rather than being themselves engaged in thought. If an archaic effect is being aimed for here, it may come from Henry Wootten, Reliquae Wottonianae (1654), ‘Tears Wept at the Grave of Sir Albertus Morton’, 19: ‘even these pensive walls allow my moan’. 3. corbeils] WBY is being architecturally precise here: not to be confused with ‘corbel’, a corbeil is ‘A basket filled with earth and placed on a parapet to protect and conceal the defending soldiers’ (OED 1.) and in

architecture (OED 2.) ‘a carved basket with flowers and fruit’ (Joseph Gwilt,  An encyclopædia of architecture (1842)). 5.] This line is difficult to make sense of, and the lack of a full stop at the end (which might more usually in WBY’s MS  writings call for editorial filling-­in) may be an indication that a clause is in fact unfinished here. Are ‘They’ the walls? If so, how exactly might they have ‘met’ the ‘pages’? And who – walls or pages – does the ‘singing’? It is even unclear whether the ‘pages’ are in a book or in service. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-19

19

[SPEECH FROM THE OPENING OF AN ABANDONED DRAMATIC POEM] Nature of fragment, context, and interpretation. This piece is almost certainly the sole surviving record of a work that was never continued by WBY. It appears to be the opening speech of a poetic drama, in which a semi-­divine figure explains how he comes to be in the location of its action, how he has attempted to aid mankind, and how he had fled from the miseries of the world to this abode of classical nymphs, where a lake has formed magically as a result of his ‘word of might’. Quite where all of this might have led is unclear; and it was probably unclear to the poet himself. What is clear, however, is that the imaginative landscape being depicted reflects WBY’s enthusiastic reading of Shelley: Cyprian, though he seems to be going as yet unpunished, is a figure with clear affinities to Shelley’s Prometheus, and WBY also had found his name by looking elsewhere in Shelley’s works (see note). R. Ellmann, who was the first to print this fragment, rightly saw it in the context of those early pieces by WBY in which ‘the hero is ‘proud and solitary’, contemptuous of the crowd, Promethean, sad’ (Man and the Masks, 29). It is worth noting that Cyprian’s efforts on behalf of mankind seem to have been wasted, and to this extent (though, of course, the fragment marks only the beginning of some projected drama) WBY is indulging himself in a pessimistic, rather than a Shelleyan and optimistic, view of human capacities. In doing this, however, he makes use of (or, rather, revels in) a magical and shifting landscape which derives strongly from the Shelley poetry he had read (most decidedly, perhaps, from the scenery of ‘Alastor’, which was to be a long-­running influence). The imaginative inhabiting of these places continued in WBY’s work, and it may not be fanciful to remark on how the ‘lake-­girt’ island here, apparently isolated from humanity, anticipates lake-­surrounded islands as places of refuge and trial in his later poetry. Date of composition. 1883–4. Ellmann speculates that this is work of WBY’s ‘eighteenth year’, and therefore belongs to sometime between Sept. 1883 and Sept. 1884 (Man and the Masks, 32): this seems reasonably likely. The time was one in which WBY was producing a great deal of (often quickly abandoned) poetic material, and was especially ambitious to write poetic drama. Textual and publication history. The piece is found in a single MS (one folded sheet), in ink with signs of revision. It is quoted in full in Man and the Masks 30, and a reproduction of the MS with transcript is given in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 420–425. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-20



[Speech From the Opening]

81

G. Bornstein also provides an edited text (from which the present text differs at several points) in UM, 64. Copy-­text: NLI 30839 Scene 1 Cyprian

I 5 10

live in this lake-­girt tropic island; Never a human eye has seen it, Never a boat has touched its magic shore. Long centuries ago I pitied man, And passed o’er the world a spirit of unrest And rebellion ’gainst the race of sleeping gods. But men were mad and thought that they were blest, Misery was but a toll for living, That Olympian Zeus was good and slept, That the devil of the robber nation

Cyprian] WBY takes this name from Shelley’s ‘Scenes from the Magico Prodigioso: From the Spanish of Calderon’, where Cyprian is the principal character, and begins the play with a soliloquy: In the sweet solitude of this calm place, This intricate wild wilderness of trees And flowers and undergrowth of odorous plants, Leave me; The fragment (first published in Shelley’s Posthumous Poems (1824)) also provided WBY with the name Clarin, which he uses in his verse-­drama ‘Vivien and Time’. 1.] I ^live^ in MS. lake-­girt] Perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘Hymn of Pan’, 3: ‘From the river-­girt islands’. 2.] human ^eye^ MS. 3. magic strand] Perhaps cp. W.H. Drummond, The Giants’ Causeway (1811), II, 49–50: ‘Smooth glides the skiff, and up the rustling sand | Rolls the light surge, by Bosca’s magic strand’.

4. I pitied man] Perhaps an allusion to the Greek Prometheus, known to WBY from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound; and cp. E.B. Browning’s translation of Aeschylus, Poems (1850), ‘Prometheus Bound’, 283–4: ‘And I, who pitied man, am thought myself | Unworthy of pity’. 6. rebellion] The present edition follows Ellmann’s and Bornstein’s assumption that this is the word intended by WBY, who has here written ‘repellin’. 10. the robber nation] WBY’s intention here is probably to make a very general reference, where Cyprian laments the contrivance of subject peoples in their colonial or imperial oppressions. Bornstein (UM, 114) thinks the phrase ‘may suggest England in its relation to Ireland’, but this degree of specificity is unlikely  – the poet’s embrace of Irish nationalism was still some years away, and the phrase itself is not one especially associated with Irish anti-­British rhetoric of the time. Nevertheless, ‘robber nation’ did carry a degree of political resonance; and it had been applied to England at the time of the Crimean War by the Liberal journalist

82 15 20

[Speech From the Opening]

Was good though they for all ages wept. Yet though I am cursed with immortality, I was moulden with a human nature; With the centuries old age came on me, And weary of flying from the wrath of nations, I long since crossed the mountains Seeking some peace from the world’s throbbing, And sought out a little plaining fountain, Blaming because no nymphs had decked his valley. And then I spoke to it a word of might, And it heard the Oreads’ language: It spread a lake of glittering light,

and newspaper owner J. Passmore Edwards, who in his The War: A Blunder and a Crime (1855), wrote: ‘Let anyone glance at a map of the world and see where the English have planted their aggressive feet, and ask himself the question whether we, with any colourable pretence of morality, should attempt to chastise Russia for her sins of aggression? Why, England is the great robber nation of the world.’ (14) A more usual use of the phrase, though, was in fact in relation to British India, where imperialism was celebrated for restraining what Thomas De Quincey in his Memorials (1856) called the Marhattas, ‘a robber nation that previously had descended at intervals upon the afflicted province of Bengal’. In discussion of Montenegro in The Times for 20 Sept. 1861, there was mention of ‘the scandal of patronising a robber nation, considerable only for its powers of mischief ’. 11.] This final reading in the MS replaces a line which originally read: ‘Was good though they for ever wept’. 13. moulden] ‘Molden’ is Ellmann’s and Bornstein’s reading, and this seems to be the correct word (though the final letter resembles another ‘m’ rather than ‘n’). The term itself (meaning moulded) is rare, and feels medieval; but it had in fact turned up more recently: cp. R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances

and Songs (1861), ‘Fair Helen of the Dell’, 9–10: ‘I’ve never yet beholden  | A  form so finely moulden’, and Jean Ingelow, One Hundred Holy Songs (1878), ‘Such as Have not Gold to Bring Thee’, 19: ‘By Thy hand to beauty moulden’. This spelling of the word is used in the present text. 17. the world’s throbbing] It may be a sign of deliberate avoidance of cliché here that WBY denies the world a ‘throbbing heart’: coincidentally, KT a few years later arrived at ‘the throbbing world’ (Shamrocks (1887), ‘In a Meadow’, 2). 18. plaining] fretting del. plaining MS. OED ‘plaining’, n., ‘The expressing of grief, sorrow, or dissatisfaction; a lamentation, a complaint. Also fig.: a mournful or plaintive sound.’ 19. Blaming] Fretting del. Blaming MS. 20. word of might] Cp. T.B. Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), ‘Virginia’, 91: ‘For then there was no Tribune to speak the word of might’. 20^21.] In the almost forgotten del. MS. 21. the Oreads’] In Greek myth, the Oreads are nymphs associated with mountains. They feature commonly in English poetry’s mythic reaches, e.g. Robert Southey, Poetical Works (1838), ‘Hymn to the Penates’, 82–3: ‘At day’s dim dawn or evening’s misty hour | They saw the Oreads on their mountain haunts’.



25

[Speech From the Opening]

83

Then once more I spoke that tongue And there rose a stately island, Bright with the radiance of its flowers, And I stood upon its dry strand.

22.] With this arresting line, perhaps cp. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), V, 127–131: And, looking backwards when he looked, mine eyes Saw, over half the wilderness diffused, A bed of glittering light: I asked the cause: “It is,” said he, “the waters of the deep Gathering upon us;”

26. strand] Ellmann and Bornstein here read ‘stream’: while there will doubtless have been many reasons why WBY gave up entirely on composition at this point, the egregious oddness of having Cyprian stand on a dry stream here is not likely to have been one. ‘Strand’ is a possible reading of the handwriting here, and, while far from certain, it may make more sense.

20

[‘WHEN TO ITS END O’ER-­R IPENED JULY NEARS’] Background and date of composition. This narrative poem in Spenserian stanzas is likely to date from 1884, and probably from the first half of that year. It survives only in a series of manuscript leaves, which have apparently been removed from a notebook, showing signs of incompleteness and of sometimes heavy revision. The poem itself is finished, but with several stanzas deleted, and with a number of stanzas missing, and now lost, from the MS materials. If WBY’s memory in 1938 is to be trusted, there may once have been a fairer copy of the poem, one which was lost close to the time of composition. In his BBC talk ‘I Became an Author’ (printed in The Listener, 4 Aug. 1938 (CW10, 297–300)), WBY mentions ‘one long poem in Spenserian stanzas, which some woman of whom I remember nothing, not even if she was pretty, borrowed and lost out of her carriage when shopping’. The identity of ‘some woman’ is not clear, but the time in question was one in which WBY had been conducting a poetry-­based courtship with his cousin Laura Armstrong. Criticism and interpretation. This fragment, despite its obscurity, has not gone entirely unnoticed: it is included by G. Bornstein in UM, along with some commentary, and is discussed in W. Chapman, Yeats and English Renaissance Literature, 73–77. Chapman’s account of WBY’s ‘early drilling in a prosodic form which Spenser and Shelley both employed extensively’ sees Shelley as just as important an influence as Spenser, but is also committed to the assumption that only the final stanzas are fully developed, with the bulk of the material representing ‘an apparently earlier, provisional stage of the poem’. This is doubtful; it is true that WBY’s poem is not in any finished form, but true also that it was decisively abandoned by its author by the autumn of 1884; and all of the surviving MS material is in the nature of a draft. The poem’s major significance lies in its determination to bend Spenserian sources towards a more romantic – and perhaps especially Shelleyan – dwelling upon unsatisfied desire and infinite longing. Other elements, however, are more miscellaneous and remain imperfectly assimilated in the poem’s design: chief amongst these are its two knightly protagonists, Roland and Olaf, whose wanderings and meeting are not explained with very much clarity. The structure (as we have it at this stage of composition at least) is both confused and confusing: Roland meets Olaf, who tells him his story; but much of that story is about how he himself met ‘a man like those in story’, who has told him yet another story of his own about ‘the dead fair maid’ Ingiborg. Much still remained for WBY to reshape and amend, and this might indeed have been what happened in the fair copy which was lost by ‘some woman . . . shopping’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-21



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85

Possibly, on the other hand, the entire poem was felt by the poet to be collapsing in his hands to the extent that it could not be either continued or put right. The lyric ‘Sansloy – Sansfoy – Sansjoy’ (also from 1884) may be WBY’s attempt at some modest amount of salvage work. Text. The poem is in NLI 30830, 30328, and 30440. A diplomatic transcription of the MS leaves is contained in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 362–400; G. Bornstein also prepared a corrected reading text of the poem (under the editorial title ‘Sir Roland’) for UM. The present edition, like UM, corrects spellings and amends or supplies punctuation, though in a less thoroughgoing way than Bornstein’s reading text. It also differs from many of Bornstein’s readings and respects all of WBY’s deletions. Deleted material is transcribed in the notes, where only the more significant disagreements with the text of UM are recorded. The poem’s stanzas are all numbered by WBY, but the present text adjusts the numbers themselves in the light of WBY’s deletions of stanzas (as the poet does not), to make the sequence straightforwardly a progression from stanza 1 to stanza 29; the three stanzas lost from the MS materials are, in this count, stanzas 23 to 25, so the present text marks a lacuna at the end of the lines of stanza 22, and resumes with stanza 26. 1.

W 5

hen to its end o’er-­ripened July nears One lucid eve befell mine history – No rime impassioned of envenomed years On the embattled earth: a song should be A painted and be-­pictured argosy And as a crew to guide her wandering days Sad love and change, yea those that sisters be, For they upon each other’s eyes do gaze And they do whisper in each other’s ears always.

2. lucid] lurid UM. For ‘lucid eve’, cp. Ebenezer Elliott, Poetical Works (1876), The Splendid Village II, 333–5: ‘ remembrance still | Shall hear thy throstle, o’er the lucid rill, | At lucid eve’. 3. impassioned] empassioned MS. envenomed years] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (1881), ‘Genius in Beauty’, 12–13: ‘So in like wise the envenomed years, whose tooth  | Rends shallower grace with ruin void of ruth’. 4. On] Or UM.

5. argosy] ‘A merchant-­vessel of the largest size and burden; esp. those of Ragusa and Venice’ (OED). WBY would have been familiar with the word from Keats, The Eve of St Agnes (1820), 268–9: ‘Manna and dates, in argosy transferred  | From Fez’. WBY used the word in Love and Death (1884) III ii 78, and again in Mosada (begun by Jun. 1884), 88. 6. days] ways del. MS. 7. Sad love] Dreams always del. MS.

86

[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

2. 0 1 15

As gently down the apple blossom dropped As is the muffled tread of misery; The creepers that no envious sickle cropt With flowers bemisted every plumy tree In Lethe’s valley by the silent sea, And then at times from out the wood advances A shadowy thing, and where the billows flee Along the sand and ’mong their foamy glances, A moment to and fro the elfin shadow dances. 3.

20 25

Upon the hem of the unfruitful sand An old man passed with visage worn and wan, And time had seamed his brow with many a band; A Templar cross of red was sewn upon His shoulders thin, his eyes but dimly shone, And he at times at that thing or at this Of memory would smile, but had when done A pilgrim’s face – O lonely is The way – his comrades mainly ’mong the dead, I wis.

11. muffled tread of misery] Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lady of the Lake III xvii 7–8: ‘a mourner’s muffled tread, | Who comes to sorrow o’er the dead’. 12.^13.] In Lethe’s valley by the silent del. MS. 13. bemisted] An archaic word: ‘To cover or obscure (a thing) with, or as with, mist; to becloud, dim’ (OED bemist 2., with no citation after 1720). every plumy tree] Cp. John Stuart Blackie, Lays of the Highlands and Islands (1872), ‘Rob Roy’s Cave’, 3: ‘Fish own the pools, and birds the plumy trees’. WBY uses ‘plumy’ again, then deletes and replaces it, in 48 below. 21. seamed his brow] See OED seam v.2, 2.b.: ‘Said of a scar, wound, etc.; also of care or the passions as marking the face’. Cp. Tennyson, Enoch Arden (1864), ‘Aylmer’s Field’, 813–4: ‘and narrow meager face  | Seamed with the shallow cares of fifty years’. 22. A Templar cross of red] A  Templar cross is a croix formée or croix pattée, with arms

flared to broad curves and narrow at the centre; it is red on a white ground. WBY probably has in mind here the emblem worn by Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight at the beginning of The Faerie Queene: ‘But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,  | The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, | For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore’ (I i 2, 1–3). 23. his eyes but dimly shone] And very few beams shone MS. 24. And he at times] Within his eyes del. MS. 27. his comrades] Thy friends are MS. I wis] Defined by OED as a pseudo-­ archaism, used to mean ‘I know’. Used again by WBY in IoS II i 75 (see note) and elsewhere in his early verse. WBY would have encountered ‘I wis’, also in a rhyming position of a final couplet, in Shelley’s ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 647–8: ‘much, I wis, | To the annoyance of king Amasis’.



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87

4. 30 35

He drew anigh to where upon the south Clothed in a wood of hazel and of lime ’Mong goblin fruitage gazed the valley’s mouth. Weak-­voicèd he began an ancient rime – The long waves were a chorus with their chime – A song forlorn about a lady fair Who in the old forgotten barbarous time In iron Norway loved a dead corsair And till she faded would across the dim seas stare. 5.



Now with her and with him that drear shade came; Upon his ears the sun by night appalled Sank slowly seaward rolled in horded flame;

28. drew anigh] This seemingly inconspicuous piece of poetic diction is in fact rare in nineteenth-­century verse, but is used very commonly in the poems of W. Morris. It may be intended here as Spenserian, but ‘anigh’ is not a word that occurs even once in Spenser’s poetry. 30.] Looks forth the shadow-­haunted valley’s mouth MS. goblin fruitage] There is an echo here inevitably of C.G. Rossetti, Goblin Market (1861), 468–9: ‘suck my juices | Squeezed from goblin fruit for you’. 31. ancient rime] S.T. Coleridge’s title, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, here delivers to WBY this phrase (and rhyme) ready-­made. 34. old] long del. MS. 34–5. barbarous time  .  .  .  iron] Perhaps cp. J. Thomson, The Seasons (1730), ‘Spring’, 838– 9: ‘the rampart once | Of iron war, in ancient barbarous times’. 35. corsair] OED: ‘The name in the languages of the Mediterranean for a privateer; chiefly applied to the cruisers of Barbary, to whose attacks the ships and coasts of the Christian countries were incessantly exposed. In English often treated as identical with pirate, though the Saracen and Turkish corsairs were authorized and recognized by their own government

as part of its settled policy towards Christendom.’ What a corsair might be doing in medieval Norway is unclear, but WBY probably has recourse to the word through familiarity with Byron’s The Corsair (1814). 36.] The MS  here has another stanza, numbered 5., which WBY has deleted: Sir Roland passed in singing that old stave Within the mouth of Lethe’s vale profound That gazed across the ever-­labouring wave, And there there seemèd breathing from the ground In all the dim and dolorous vale around Some soul forlorn of old unhappy love, And from the waves now veiled with trees a sound Of sighs, and from the vale and trees thereof, And from the fruited creepers hanging from above. The present text, in accepting WBY’s deletion, renumbers subsequent stanzas, as the poet’s MS does not. WBY’s failure to renumber probably indicates that his deletions are made at a point after the composition of the whole poem. 37. And now within the valley’s mouth he came MS; And soon no more the ocean’s heaving came del. MS. 39. horded] plumy del. MS; gathered del. MS.

88 0 4 45

[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

The flakèd fire within the valley crawled Along the giant fruits; the owlets called, A ghastly, ever-­growing company From where the steep some long-­dead man had walked. Soon all things else but these things sleeping be, The owls that hoot round cliff and wall and crumbling tree. 6.

50

Then Roland spake: ‘Old knight, drawn unto thee I come upon no quest of high renown. Of late I rode upon a far journey, But fain to ease mine horse I ’lighted down Thinking to go afoot along the brown Sea-­sand, for he was weary with the way,

40. flakèd] fakèd MS, corr. this edn. In 1887, WBY uses the phrase ‘flakèd fire’ again in ‘How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent’ 70, and in the 1889 ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ II, 113 ‘flaked clouds’. The meaning is OED flaked b: ‘Marked with flakes or streaks’. 44–5. Soon all sounds cease and all things sleeping be | Save only that the owls hoot on continually del. MS. 45.] After the stanza, the MS  has two further stanzas, headed ‘6’ and ‘7’, both clearly deleted by WBY. The present text, in respecting the poet’s deletion, suffers from the lack of coherence which that deletion imposes upon the narrative. The ‘huge knight’ and his address to Sir Roland are necessary to make sense of the next undeleted stanza in the MS. 6. Anigh the valley’s head a fountain sprang Nearby a twisted fruit tree’s shadow dappled, By bounteous eve begilded while it sang Beneath the trees when autumn comes, o’er-­appled, Now flower-­pale. Upon the shadow dappled A huge knight lay whose calm eyes softly shed A far-­ off gaze, as of some ghost unchapelled, Of one who once in immemorial ages bled

Yea as the far-­off gaze of one for ages dead. 7. So far the joys and sorrows of the world Had fled from him who lay where eve’s red flake Of flame dancèd upon the fountain curled, And old he was. He to Sir Roland spake: ‘Old man, whence comest thou? for what deed’s [sake] Thus heavy armed? For gleamings of plated mail From ’mong the crimson of thy vestments brake. O knight, for thou art such, what rumoured tale Of high emprizes leads thee unto Lethe’s vale?’ deed’s sake] MS  breaks off after the first word, where the notebook page is torn: ‘sake’ is a conjecture based on demands of the rhyme-­scheme at this point. 50–51. brown | Sea-­sand] Perhaps cp. William Bell Scott, Poems (1875), ‘The Sea-­ Shore’, 17–18: ‘Wave after wave for ten thousand years | Has furrowed the brown sand here’. 51. weary with the way] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘November: The Story of Rhodope’, 651: ‘Drowsy she felt, and weary with the way’.





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But sudden from a bursting billow’s crown A sea-­snake glided, and in wild dismay My good horse fled; wherefore within the valley grey 7.

5 5 60

I seek thy help, O thou whom Mary keep.’ Then rose the dreamer while a drooping bough Of apple blossom light as fairy sleep Snowed o’er with crimson all the dreamer’s brow, And through the silence of the valley now Passed on these twain. The history of the vale Sir Roland longed for eagerly I trow, Yet would not ask – but soon unbade this tale The clear-­browed dreamer told within the hollow dale: 8.

65

‘I ruled of yore a land where warless castles Lay by their fields of grain and [palèd] fold, A feastful land; I ruled o’er joyous vassals Who gathered often in my castle hold Where sea-­tales on the winter eves were told By some swart rover who with his long vessels

52. a bursting billow] Not an uncommon phrase in poetry: cp. e.g. R.H. Horne, Orion (1843) I iii 213: ‘O’er which they, like a bursting billow, fell’, or Frederick Tennyson, Days and Hours (1854), ‘Love and the Muses’, 35: ‘The sound of bursting billows’. 65. palèd] A word in the MS here (which may be ‘tinkling’, as Cornell Early Poetry 2 suggests) is deleted, with another word written above. In the same ink as this insertion, WBY strengthens the letter ‘d’ of the original ‘folds’ in such a way as to suggest that he intends a change to the singular form (producing a better rhyme with ‘hold’, ‘told’, and ‘gold’ later in the stanza). The new word is very hard to read, but it is almost certainly not ‘kattle’, as G. Bornstein transcribes it (the initial letter is ‘p’, with the final one ‘d’, and in any case it is sheep, and not cattle, who have folds). The present editor transcribes the word as ‘palled’, a spelling WBY intends

very possibly for ‘palèd’ (the other possibility, ‘that he means ‘pallid’, seems less likely in context). The imagined fold, then, would be ‘palèd’ in the sense of OED ‘pale’ 1.a., ‘To enclose with pales or a fence; to provide with a fence; to encircle or surround’ – a sensible provision for a sheepfold. This said, WBY’s word remains extremely difficult to read, and ‘palèd’ should not be taken as more than an editorial conjecture. 66. feastful] A  common poetic pseudo-­ medieval word: not present in Spenser, in the nineteenth century it is widely used by both Morris and Aubrey De Vere. joyous vassals] Perhaps cp. Mary Russell Mitford, Narrative Poems on the Female Character (1814), ‘Blanch’, I xxi 6–7: ‘I see it now, the lovely scene! | Thy joyous vassals all around’. 69. some swart rover] Perhaps cp. Keats, Endymion (1818), 377: ‘down some swart abysm’.

90 0 7

[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

Measured the sea for merchandise or gold Where some spice isle upon the ocean nestles, Or wind with polar water in the darkness wrestles. 9.

75 80

I was most blessed, ’fore all mine were: the coy And wild lark liberty, who hath her broods ’Mong barren hills, and the swift eagle joy, And love, who seeks alone dim solitudes To muse on her high kinsman grief, the woods And water saw the bound’ries of my lands And knew them wide – yet by the fleecy floods All these I did renounce when homeward bands Of hunters left me lingering lone upon the sands.

70. measured the sea] Cp. M. Arnold, Empedocles on Etna (1852), I ii 321: ‘We measure the sea-­tides, we number the sea-­sands’. 75. swift eagle] Between these words in MS the word ‘blind’ is inserted: UM gives the phrase as ‘swift blind eagles’, on the grounds that WBY has not deleted ‘swift’. However, this pushes the line’s metre out of shape, and it seems more likely that WBY entered ‘blind’ as an alternative for ‘swift’, to be decided upon at the next copying out of his poem. In the absence of that subsequent version, an editor must choose between the two possibilities, and the present text selects ‘swift’ as less jarring in connection with eagles than ‘blind’: ‘blind’ was, nevertheless, clearly an adjective WBY had under consideration. With ‘swift eagle’ cp. Shelley, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 405: ‘a swift eagle in the morning glare  | Breasting the whirlwind’. 76–7. dim solitudes  .  .  .  grief] Cp. Thomas C. Irwin, Poems (1866), ‘L’Angelo’, 20, 23–4: ‘I seek in earth’s dim solitudes for thee | . . . | While, from the void of sunset’s empty air, | The stars look on the glory of my grief ’. 77. muse on] dream of del. MS. 78. bound’ries] WBY’s MS spelling, ‘boundris’, records his intended disyllable here.

80. homeward bands] This very unusual phrase may perhaps recall the opening line of a poem by James Grahame in his Poems (1808), ‘An Evening Sabbath Walk’: ‘When homeward bands their several ways disperse’. Grahame (1765–1811) was a Scottish poet, an associate of James Montgomery and admired by W. Scott, whose works had a wide readership in the early-­mid nineteenth century. 81.] WBY here deletes the following stanza: 12. Upon the surf-­beseigèd shore I stood; I stood and gazed upon the leaping wave. The funeral pyre of day was red as blood, The white-­maned horses of the sea did rave Where the fire did descend himself to lave 5 Forgetful of their ancient feud. Within The waters then I saw a vessel drave Forth from the flame, yea from the flame and din, And soon her keel the surf-­beseigèd shore did win. 5.] I  stood and gazed upon the western wave del. 6. feud] flood Cornell: MS reads ‘fewd’ or ‘flood’; it may make more sense for fire to forget an ancient feud with the element of water than for it to ‘lave’ itself while forgetting that the waves are wet.



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91

10. 85 90

And from her came a man like those of story; A dateless weariness was in his eyes, Unhuman sorrow and unhuman glory. A raven, darkest minion of the skies, Before him flew, and still before him flies, And he a-­nigh me drew, and from a lyre Within his [] hands I heard arise Sweet song, but on my soul there came a fire That never shall till comes the end of days expire. 11.



He sang of Ingiborg, the fair dead maid,

82. from her] This phrase relates to the stanza deleted by WBY (see earlier); the poet does not revise it to accommodate the deletion, most probably intending an amended version of the stanza which would describe the vessel again. 84.] A  more than human sorrow and a glory del. MS. WBY’s ‘unhuman’ corresponds to OED unhuman 2: ‘Not limited by human qualities or conditions; superhuman’: he would have encountered the word in Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘In a Cathedral Close’, 41–2: ‘the child’s glad eyes | Your joy unhuman shall control’. WBY uses the word again in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889 version) I, 173, II, 134, and III, 56 (see notes). 85. minion] daughter del. MS. 88.] One word here is illegible for both G. Bornstein and the present editor. Possible conjectures would include ‘weary’ and ‘fearless’. 90.] That never more until the end of days shall tire del. MS. 91. Ingiborg the fair dead maid] wild Aslauga that dead maid del. MS. WBY’s choice of name for the ‘dead maid’ begins with Aslauga. He would have come across this in a well-­known work by Friedrich La Motte Fouqué (1777–1843), Aslauga’s Knight (first translated into English by Thomas Carlyle in 1827). WBY shows his familiarity with

La Motte Fouqué’s works in his early verse-­ play, Love and Death, where the character Sintram comes from another of his popular narratives, Sintram and his Companions. In Aslauga’s Knight, a Danish knight called Sir Froda falls in love with the long-­dead daughter of Sigurd, Aslauga (whom he encounters first in the figure of ‘a poor peasant woman, so closely wrapped in a grey mantle that he could not discern any part of her countenance’), fighting in tournaments in honour of her, and eventually dying in the hope of reaching his beloved in heaven. The story appealed to W. Scott, and also made its way into Victorian poetry, in particular William Bell Scott, Poems (1854), ‘The Artist’s Birthplace’ 73–5: ‘Aslauga whom the sea-­ king chanced upon  | Keeping her sheep beside Norse waves, the while | She made her matin mirror in the stream.’ Aslauga turns up also in M. Arnold, Poems (1855), ‘Balder Dead’, 81–2: ‘[I] saw my shepherdess, Auslauga, tend | Her flock along the white Norwegian beach’. The story might have been especially likely to feature in the childhood reading of the Yeats family due to JBY’s friendship with the historian of Old Norse, Frederick York Powell; it is interesting that it features in a posthumous poem by another friend of JBY, Edward Dowden, whose ‘Childhood’ lists, among other reading, ‘Aslauga’s knight’ (A

92 95

[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

Whose feet a-­roving are in heaven’s plain, Land of the Asphodels that never fade, O land beyond the springs of the swift rain. He sang of how afar beyond the main In vine-­hung vales where summer hath her home She will at times descend when evenings pale. Then ceased the song; I gazed, and saw the foam Smoking along the waves, and heard their voices moan. 12.

00 1 105

But no black vessel lay among the surf, And no man with a raven by me was, Nor by the neighbouring vale, whose plumy turf Was heavy with the sheep-­delighting grass, Nor by the wood-­hung river did he pass. Then musing I strode on my homeward way; Above the castle in a drowsy mass The banner hung; the bees from toil of day Were resting in their hives below the walls’ old grey. 13.

110

And sudden round me did I summon them, My dark sea-­nurtured people every one,

Woman’s Reliquary (1913)). WBY replaces the name Aslauga with that of ‘Ingiborg’: although the handwriting in the MS  is not clear enough to make this spelling certain, it seems very likely that WBY is not thinking of the best-­known historical Ingeborg, a Queen of Norway in the fifteenth century, but of the character who features in W. Morris’s translation, ‘The Story of Frithiof the Bold’, as ‘Ingibiorg’. In the opening chapter, Ingibiorg is introduced as the daughter of King Beli of Sogn-­Land: ‘Ingibiorg was fair of face and wise of mind, and she was ever accounted the foremost of the King’s children  .  .  . she was called ‘Ingibiorg the Fair’’ (Eirikr Magnusson and W. Morris, Three Northern Love Stories, and Other Tales Translated from the Icelandic (1875), 67). 92. heaven’s plain] Possibly cp. Thomas Chatterton, Aella (1777), xciv 5: ‘The dancing

streaks bedeckèd heaven’s plain’. (A Poetical Works of Chatterton appeared in 1875.) 93. Land] Plain del. MS. 94. swift rain] Cp. A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), 515: ‘Not thunder nor swift rain’. 100. black vessel] Cp. William Allingham, Poems (1850), ‘The Slaver’, 5: ‘the cry of ten-­ score in that black vessel crammed’. 104. wood-­hung river] wood or streamlet del. MS. Possibly cp. Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1854), ‘Vale of Clwyd’, 9: ‘wood-­ hung vales and hills’. 105. strode] passed del. MS. 107. The banner] My banner del. MS. the toil of day] Perhaps cp. Thomas Dermody, The Harp of Erin (1807), ‘Ode to Description’, 138: ‘the toil of day undone’, and Adelaide Procter, Legends and Lyrics (1861), ‘Listening Angels’, 24: ‘the toil of day was o’er’.



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115

93

And chose a stalwart crew of firm-­willed men, And manned a vessel, and, when all was done, Forth from the shadow of the shore sailed on; From ’mong the mourning people on we sailed Till of the noises of the land were none, And last the fragrance of the harvest failed; The throbbing stars were o’er us, and the sea-­fowl hailed 14.

120 125

From wave to wave each other ’mong the foam, And on we sailed by land the seas enfold And shores where ceaseless summer hath her home, And where the vine is, still the live sea rolled, And the bell-­tongued billows tolled and tolled and tolled Around a fleeting ship, and man by man My sea-­worn sailors died, and ’neath the mould Of far-­off isles were laid when their lives’ span Of wide world-­wandering to a lonely finish ran. 15.

130

Now here I dwelt upon the world’s wide face Those never more to be consolèd dwell; Here joy and sorrow have no dwelling-­place Such as are echoes in some wave-­worn shell, Mere dream-­winged sounds that can no story tell: My years shall flow in final peace I ween,

116.] Remaining, and the harvest fragrance failed del. MS. 120.] Here, WBY heavily cancels a first attempt at the middle of the stanza: And immemorial summer hath [there del.] her home And where the wave is [that no sun down gold del.] and where still the waters rolled Red cloud, I saw a maiden on the wold Whose eyes were ^coldly^ calm as far skies are, And wondrous hair she had of blazing gold Hung round her like as the beams of some clear star 128. Those] Men del. MS. The line strains WBY’s syntax to something beyond the breaking point: to make sense of it, the word ‘where’

needs to be understood before ‘Those’ (and, indeed, before the original ‘Men’). 130. wave-­worn shell] WBY uses ‘wave-­worn’ again at line 208. 131. dream-­winged] phantom del. MS. 132.] In ever-­growing peace my years serene del. MS. My years [in peace that ever grows del.] shall flow in final peace serene MS. Perhaps cp. Robert Gilfillan, Poems and Songs (1851), ‘Eliza! Fairest, dearest treasure’, 21–4: ‘Years shall flow in purest gladness, | Days shall pass in happy glee, | Joys shall banish care and sadness, | Eliza! when I’m loved by thee’. final peace] Cp. John Wesley, Poetical Works (1868), ‘I went out full of youthful hope’, 5–8: ‘A few more days of sad distress | I travel towards a tomb, | But trust to reach in final peace | Mine everlasting home’.

94 135

[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

Till I shall leave in silence this lone dell And live within the wandering isle serene With fair-­haired Ingiborg, the dead Norwegian queen.’ 16.

140

He ceased. The echoes of the hollow vale Died slowly, fondling the well-­loved sound Of that dear name through all the dinful dale. The flowers that among the branches wound Seemed singing o’er the dim becalmèd ground With little voices sweet and numerous: ‘With joy as deep we on our petals bound When thy dear name descending dwells with us As when the bees are on our petals luminous.’ 17.

45 1 150

As though in shadow of a willow tree Drowsed Cupid, weary grown of love and scorn, Till some name famous in his psaltery Came dreaming on the sleeping ear outworn And he went forth with torch and bow up-­borne, So swiftly in the windless valley these

133.] Till come the silence o’er me in this dell del. MS. this lone dell] Perhaps cp. Cornelius Webbe, Lyric Leaves (1832), ‘Good Night’, 17–18: ‘Till we again do meet | In this lone dell’. 134. wandering isle] Cp. John Todhunter, Alcestis (1879), 311–12: ‘Dear as the wandering isle where thou didst wake | To glorious life’. 135.] With Norway’s long-­ dead Aslauga, matchless queen del. MS. dead] fair MS (neither dead nor fair is del.) 136. hollow] hilly del. MS. 141. dear] sweet del. MS. A detached line at the head of the following MS leaf seems to represent the start of some revision to this line: ‘When through the wind thy sweet name [? will ? rise]’ 146.] Slept Cupid, tired out with love and scorn del. MS.

147. psaltery] Despite his later fascination with the possibilities of the stringed musical instrument called the psaltery, WBY seems here to intend ‘psalter’, for which ‘psaltery’ is probably a slip (albeit one convenient for the rhyme scheme). There is, however, some slight precedent for using ‘psaltery’ to mean ‘psalter’: Charles Lamb uses it as such in the London Magazine, Jan. 22 1822, and there is a similar use in Thomas Campbell, Poetical Works (1826), ‘O’Connor’s Child’, 93–4: ‘Their tribe, they said, their high degree | Was sung in Tara’s psaltery’. 148. the sleeping ear] Perhaps cp. Byron, Don Juan (1823) VI, 627–8: ‘the false alarm | That broke for nothing on their sleeping ear’. 150.] The ageless child, so in the valley there del. MS.





[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

95

The great fruits woke, as in the song of morn All swinging, swinging, swinging in the air, And in each gleamed a goblin fire wild and fair. 18.

155 160

They stood – the valley lilies, those that listen Forever with their ears upon the ground, Did round their feet along the pathway glisten. Spake Roland: ‘Surely thou art he, the sound Of whose great name has gone the wide world round, Olaf the hero Dane.’ ‘Yes, I am he’ The other spake. Now in a wood profound The twain had come to where did Roland see Among the dimness rise a cliff impassably. 19.

165 170

And all the voiceful legions of the land Within the windless, moonless night were still; All slept I think – all save alone the falling sand Of change, who wrings from love her tokens ill; All else – Nay, nay, I wish each mountain rill Was not unmindful of its weeping cry. Impassable the cliff-­wall seemed until They came the wood-­engirdled base anigh, And then appeared a stairway on its surface high. 20.



Along the stair to where the cliff uprises, High as the roving kestrel sails, they passed, High as the kestrel whose fierce soul surmises

151. the windless valley] Perhaps cp. M. Arnold, The Strayed Reveller (1849), ‘The New Sirens’, 145–6: ‘they found you sleeping | In some windless valley’. 154. valley lilies]: Another name for lily of the valley (convallaria majalis). Cp. Keats, Endymion (1818) I 157–8: ‘valley-­lilies whiter still | Than Leda’s love’. 157. Roland] Olaf del. MS. 159. Olaf the hero Dane] It is not clear who exactly WBY intends here – though it might

not have been clear to the poet himself. Possibly, the figure derives from that of Denmark’s King Olaf I (c. 1050–1095), whose death was thought to have helped deliver his people from famine, but whose place of burial was never known. However, this is a king rather than a knight, and WBY’s Olaf is ‘Sir’ at 181. 163. voiceful] A chiefly poetic word, OED 1.a: ‘Endowed with, or as if with, a voice; having voice or power of utterance’.

96 75 1 180

[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

And dreams of quarry, musing on the beast That drives him ever onward fast and fast, A cave they found a-­near the cliff wall’s head. The stars their brethren were, the earth was past; Unto the listening stars the cavern shed A muffled tune of hidden streams uncomforted. 21.

185

’Twas there the hermit knight Sir Olaf bode; On either side a black stone figure bore Upon his shoulders wide the ponderous load Of that wide dome which hung the cavern o’er; Down through a chasm in the riven floor, Belching above a stream did shrieking go. One crouching statue at the waters hoar Pointed forlorn with his arm, as though He numbered all the drops of water in their flow. 22.

90 1

The other’s eyes were fixèd on the sky, The sleepless baleful eyeballs dark as night;

175. quarry] battle del. MS. 176. fast and fast] Not an uncommon poetic phrase, but cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Reiver’s Wedding’, 93: ‘O fast and fast they downwards sped’. 178. the earth was past] This phrase may make more sense if ‘past’ (WBY’s spelling) is understood as ‘passed’. The verb ‘passed’, however, has already been employed in the b rhyme position in the stanza’s second line. 179. listening stars] Perhaps cp. Ebenezer Elliott, Poetical Works (1876), ‘The Village Patriarch’ IX, 168–9: ‘when you, love-­listening stars, confessed the might | Of earthly beauty’. It is the same, now obscure, Elliot (1781–1849), once well-­known as the ‘Corn-­Law rhymer’, who offers precedent for the reading ‘lucid eve’ in the opening line of WBY’s poem. Here, however, also cp. Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (1879) VI, 407: ‘the listening stars and moon’. 180. a muffled tune] Alway a sound del. MS.

182–195.] WBY’s presentation here of two enormous living statues is perhaps remembered in the 1889 ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ II, 50–60: Sat either side, Fog-­dripping, pedestalled above the tide, Huge forms of stone; between the lids of one The imaged meteors had shone and run, And had disported in the eyes still jet For centuries, and stars had dawned and set. He seemed the watcher for a sign. The other Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother, The stream churned, churned, and churned. His lips were rolled apart, As though unto his never slumbering heart He told of every froth-­drop hissing, flying. 185. chasm] hollow del. MS. 187. the waters hoar] Cp. T.C. Irwin, Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘A Day in the South’, 36:



195

[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

97

He watched how rose and set continually, How ebbed and flowed the stars and planets bright. Mirrored upon his eye in wandering light, The stars a thousand ages rose and set []

‘The simple ocean waters hoar’ and Aubrey DeVere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Sons of Usnach’, IV 266–7: ‘while the waters hoar  | Streamed from the ship’. 194.] Perhaps cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Lord of the Isles’, II xxx 6–7: ‘And from his pale blue eyes were cast  | Strange rays of wild and wandering light’. 195.] At this point the MS  of NLI 30328 breaks off. The remainder of the poem is from another MS  source, in NLI 30440. Although the source is separate, the MS is, in fact, loose leaves which match those in NLI 30328: both MSS probably are removed from the same (now lost) notebook. It would appear that some four stanzas of WBY’s poem have dropped out in the process that resulted in this division of the leaves between two places, for the first stanza preserved in NLI 30440 is numbered by WBY (who had been undercounting his stanzas by one since stanza 21) as ‘27’, his last (fragmentary) stanza in NLI 30328 being numbered by him ‘24’. Accordingly, the present edition marks a lacuna, and resumes with stanza 28. Parts of two MS stanzas, also among the loose leaves of NLI 30440, must belong to this poem; it is not possible, however, to say with any confidence that they once stood in the position of the present lacuna. They may perhaps represent early attempts at the final two stanzas. However, these stanzas are certainly connected to the composition of the narrative poem as a whole and are not apart from it: neither Bornstein (UM, 108) nor Chapman (Yeats and English Renaissance Literature, 75) is correct in the assumption that the stanza form here is conceived as non-­ Spenserian (the rhyme-­scheme of ‘28’ conforms to the

rhyme royal stanza, but only because WBY has moved too quickly in composition to his final couplet, which is clearly that of a Spenserian stanza, while ‘29’ is simply an unfinished Spenserian stanza, which has not got as far as its final couplet: in his eagerness to see here rhyme royal, Chapman moves up, and mistranscribes, the words of the fragmentary final line to be awkwardly absorbed in the seventh). WBY has numbered the stanzas ‘28’ and ‘29’ in ink: since other stanza numbers are in pencil, suggesting that they were added after the ink composition of the drafts, this may well place the stanzas earlier in the compositional history than the two final stanzas in the present edition. There is evidence, too, that suggests reworking of this material, especially the speech of ‘Sansloy’. With line 7 of ‘29’, e.g., cp. 203 below: ‘By mere or mountain or by shady creek’. The drafts are as follows: 28. Low hums the wind, and as the smoky rings Fall ring on ring from kindling watch-­fires’ heart, And light wherewith dumb nature speaks and sings Pours forth – so humming from the winds’ soul start Sound rings on rings and withering depart Unto the cavern high with fluttering flight. The word arose  – yea, speech is nature’s spoken light. 29. “Sansloy my name is, and all chains I hurl Afar, for fain would I free-­pinioned seek Joy’s footing on the sea, or where the merle Goes through the shadowy woods with flutings weak, And I have asked all things that shine or speak,

98

[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

26. 200

The weeping wind seemed ever singingly Unto the vale that heard insatiate To whisper some forlorn old history Of some once fair, now star-­bebaffled fate. At last these words do grow articulate: ‘Sansloy my name is: joy I ever seek. O surely she doth somewhere hidden wait By mere or mountain or by shady creek – Hath thou seen joy?’ and dying then the voice grew weak 27.

05 2 210

And ceased. The swift-­tongued colloquist, The lonely sea, sang forth these words anon: ‘O vale, O shore my waves have often kissed, Knowest thou me? Each wave-­worn skeleton Knows well my name Sansfoy, and ever on Searching the world for joy I rush and rush. Tell me, O thou whose days in silence run,

The glow-­worms and the old owls in the trees, Where dwelleth joy, by mere or mountain peak Or sea, but [ 199. star bebaffled fate] Chapman (Yeats and English Renaissance Literature, 76) sees here an allusion to Shelley, and ‘the prostrate, expiring Alastor poet at the end of his frustrating quest’. This may be so in a general sense, but there is no specific allusion. 201. Sansloy my name is] The paynim [pagan] knight of Spenser’s Faerie Queene Book I  is here revealed to be the voice speaking in ‘The weeping wind’. On the Spenserian context, in so far as it is relevant, see note to ‘Sansloy  – Sansfoy – Sansjoy’. WBY adds to the airborne voice of Sansloy, the sea-­borne words of Sansfoy (207–212) and the nightingale song that is the voice of Sansjoy (221–229). The appearance of these three explicitly Spenserian characters (even though it seems that what they have to say carries no significant allusion to anything

that happens in The Faerie Queene) might be seen as the climax of WBY’s poetic narrative: at all events, their speeches effectively bring that narrative to a close. However, the relation between this and Sir Roland and Sir Olaf, and their respective troubles, is far from clear. 205. colloquist] OED: ‘One who takes part in a conversation; an interlocutor’; the word is very rare. 208. wave-­worn skeleton] Cp. ‘Sansloy – Sansfoy – Sansjoy’, 12. ‘Wave-­worn’ is an extremely common piece of nineteenth-­century poetic diction, though generally in connection with rocks, cliffs, or beaches. WBY’s comparatively arresting ‘skeleton’ has no real precedent, and it is interesting that the image (if not quite the original phrase) returns more than forty years later in ‘Three Things’ (1926), and its refrain ‘A bone wave-­whitened and dried in the wind’. 211. in silence run] As in 133 above, there may be a recollection of Cornelius Webbe: cp. his Lyric Leaves (1832), ‘Summer’, 146: ‘Now the brooks in silence run’.





[‘When to Its End O’er-­Ripened July]

99

Dost thou hold her from me, O valley lush?’ Then sudden fell upon the land a bodeful hush. 28.

215 220

Till in the midmost of the elfin dale Began a honeyed voice with veilèd singing, Then loud and swift, till all the eager dale By cliff and wood and reedy pool was ringing. O spirit of the valley, song-­soul flinging Thy voice of tears upon the shrinking earth, O nightingale, most surely thou wert bringing This answer in thy song: ‘O sea wave-­curled, O moth-­like wings of wind, O wind with wings enfurled, 29.

225 230

And wherefore question me, thou sea and wind? To muse on sorrow is my days’ employ. [The] twain whom in your searching no bonds bind, [Do] ye not know that I am named Sansjoy, The self-­same as the long-­dead paynim boy? [But] this alone of all things do I know, [That] nothing’s holy saving only joy.’ [So] died the song-­souls’ singing down below, [And] from the forms of stone there came an echo low.

216. all the eager dale] WBY’s failure to find an a rhyme here is evidence of the draft status of the composition at this point. 217. reedy pool] Perhaps cp. J. Thompson, The Seasons, ‘Summer’, 482: ‘scarcely moving through a reedy pool’, and J. Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian (1805), Temora, p.  155: ‘His ghost shall hover, in mist, over the reedy pool’. 222.] ‘The wings of [the] wind’ is a common poetic phrase, deriving from Psalm 104. 3: ‘[God] Who walketh upon the wings of the wind’. WBY’s MS ‘enfurled’ is probably not a spelling slip for ‘unfurled’, but a neologism. 225–232.] The left margin of this leaf has been cut (presumably on being removed from the original notebook), removing all or parts of the first words in each line. 227.] In the MS, this line is squeezed in between the previous and the following line.

In completing the shape of the stanza, WBY here also allows his ‘Sansjoy’ to refer explicitly to his namesake in Spenser. The line itself may owe something to Spenser describing Una captured by Sansloy, FQ I iii 11: ‘Left in the hand of that same Paynim bold’. 228. this alone of all things] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘January: Bellerophon at Argos’, 115: ‘When this alone of all things then seemed wise’. 231.] At the foot of the MS  leaf here WBY writes in purple ink ‘END’, and draws a line. Whether he intends this as the end of the entire (untitled) poem, or the end of its first Canto (to borrow Spenser’s term) is not obvious: the latter seems (given the number of unresolved narrative elements) the more likely, but WBY evidently did not take the project any further than this.

21

FRAGMENT (‘I RAISE TO THEE NO PRAYING VOICE . . . ’) Text and date of composition. These three lines are found in an 1884 notebook (containing material for ‘Vivien and Time’, Mosada, and IoS), on the first page of Mosada drafts. The likely date for this is the first half of 1884. The rhyme in 2 and 3 suggests that WBY may be starting a poem here; and the lines seem to relate to none of the other material that surrounds them. Punctuation in the text is editorial. In 2 and 3, WBY writes simply ‘times’ and ‘seas’, which could each be either singular or plural; the edited text here makes choices of punctuation which are essentially conjectural. Copy-­text: TCD 3502/2.

I

raise to thee no praying voice In the old times’ ancient fashion, For the great sea’s endless passion.

1. no praying voice] Perhaps cp. an early poem by E.B. Barrett, The Seraphim (1838), ‘An DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-22

Island’, 165–166: ‘And I will choose a praying voice | To pour our spirits there’.

22

[‘ THE CHILDREN PLAY IN WHITE AND RED’] Text and date of composition. These eight lines appear in the same notebook as ‘I raise to thee no praying voice. . . ’, after an early draft of part of ‘Vivien and Time’ and before material from Mosada and IoS. Since the Mosada draft is almost certainly from before Jun. 1884, and the ‘Vivien and Time’ material probably before January 1884, it is possible that this short poem (or fragment) is from the first half of 1884. It should be noted, however, that the lines come on a verso and that the rest of WBY’s composition in this notebook is on the recto pages, so it could predate the conclusion of the ‘Time and Vivien’ draft; equally, it might have been composed in the notebook after composition of Mosada was underway. Nevertheless, the piece’s relative crudeness of style makes a date of early 1884 plausible. Copy-­text: TCD 3502/2.

T

he children play in white and red, From off the field their laughter wingèd, And nestled in the boughs o’erhead, And softly to its own heart singèd.

5

I asked my soul there on the grass Why more of joy than us had they: My soul said that the reason was The stars seem but a little way.

1. white] green del. MS. 2. From off the field] The construction is unusual in anything but a martial context, where the field is one of battle rather than play. Cp. e.g. George Chapman’s Iliads (1616), 13, 193–4: ‘Which the Grecians bore | From off the field’. laughter wingèd] WBY’s MS  indication that wingèd is a dissyllabic past tense creates a kind of faux-­archaism here (see also 4). The form is not known later than Middle English. It is possible that WBY here draws on a turn of phrase in Aubrey De Vere’s The Legends of St. Patrick (1872), ‘St. Patrick and the Founding of Armagh Cathedral’, 177: ‘The hours went by with laughter winged and tale’.

4. singèd] WBY’s need to rhyme with ‘wingèd’ forces him into a non-­existent verb (the past tense should of course be ‘sung’ or ‘sang’). As a native speaker, the poet would have known that ‘singed’ is impossible; perhaps, he sought to disguise this with the trappings of archaic diction by inventing a disyllabic past tense, then matching it by making a similar alteration to an otherwise orthodox, monosyllabic ‘winged’ in 2. 6.] Why were they children del. MS. 7. said that the reason] made answer that it del. MS. 8.] Cause stars seem but a league away del. MS. WBY’s revision may be echoing Robert Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), 27–8: ‘The Bird of Time has but a little way | To fly’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-23

23

[‘BEHOLD THE MAN’] Date of composition. The poem is signed and dated in WBY’s hand ‘March 8th 1884’. Text. The sole copy is a single sheet of MS (NLI 30347), in ink with some pencil emendations. WBY’s punctuation is very light, and the text here supplies punctuation in places, as does (slightly differently) the text in UM, 35. A transcription of the MS is in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 361. Copy-­text: NLI 30347.

B 5

ehold the man – behold his brow of care: He sought to stay the living and the dead That pass’d like shadows o’er an osier bed On which from her high cloud-­embosomed lair The sick moon peers; he plucked them by the hair And bid them stay. They smiled, and passing led

1. Behold the man] The phrase used by Pontius Pilate in John 19:5 of the captive Jesus and, as the Vulgate’s Ecce Homo, a common motif in Christian art and discourse. brow of care] A  commonplace (often in the phrase ‘to smooth the brow of care’), but one used in Aubrey De Vere’s sonnet ‘The light that played above thine infancy’, 3: ‘that countenance pale and brow of care’ (De Vere’s Sonnets (1875) were reprinted in the first volume of his Poetical Works in 1884). 2. to stay the living] This unusual phrase occurs in ‘The Cout of Keeldar’, a border ballad concerning fatal fairy enchantment, by John Leyden (1775–1811), included anonymously in W. Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), 223–4: ‘No spell can stay the living tide, | Or charm the rushing stream’ (cp. WBY’s ‘To trouble the living stream’ in ‘Easter 1916’, 44). DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-24

3. pass’d like shadows] Cp. Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814) VI, 107: ‘We met, and passed, like shadows’. osier bed] A bed of willows, planted often to be used in basket making. 5. sick moon] This phrase is used to mean a waning moon (OED sick 8, ‘Of a sickly hue; pale, wan’). plucked them by the hair] This phrase, the oddness of which might be largely attributable to the exigencies of rhyme, suggests a strongly physical contact between the protagonist and ‘the living and the dead’: some fighters in Homeric epic have long hair on the back of their heads by which (should they flee from battle) they can be seized by the enemy (see e.g. Iliad II 542: ‘the fast warriors the Abantes, with their hair grown long at the back’). This image may influence WBY’s line in ‘The Phases of the Moon’ (1918) 45: ‘Athene takes Achilles by the hair’.



10

[‘Behold the Man’]

103

Their ancient way, the living and the dead, As o’er the sea from love-­sick Dido’s stair Passed long ago the wanderer’s white-­sailed ships, Enamoured of the waves’ impetuous lips. He sighing rose, and took his way at length In rage inhuman, he who sought for more Than all the nations with their famous lore Of love – alone a sad forsaken strength.

7. the living and the dead] WBY’s repetition of the phrase from the end of line 2 is the last b rhyme of the sonnet’s abbaabba octave. 8–10.] These lines, alluding to the desertion at Carthage of Queen Dido by the Trojan prince Aeneas (in Virgil’s Aeneid, Book IV), are employed again by WBY in IoS, II iii 287–9: ‘Doth still the Wanderer rove? With all his ships  | I  saw him from sad Dido’s shores depart, | Enamoured of the sea’s impetuous lips’. In the same work, cp. also I i 8–10: ‘as from the pyre  | Of sad Queen Dido shone the lapping fire  | Unto the wanderer’s ships’. While WBY had referred to Dido as ‘that sad Queen’ before (in Vivien and Time, I  ii 10–11), this is probably the first in a number of WBY’s ‘lips’ images with Trojan resonances: cp. ‘The Rose of the World’, 2, 4: ‘For these red lips . . . Troy passed away’, and ‘The Sorrow of Love’ (1892 version), 5–7: ‘And then you came with those red mournful lips, | And with you came the whole of the world’s tears, | And all the sorrows of her labouring ships’ (the 1924 version sharpens the Trojan War associations into ‘A girl arose that had red mournful lips  | And seemed the greatness of the world in tears, | Doomed like Odysseus and the labouring ships | And proud

as Priam murdered with his peers’). See Warwick Gould, ‘Lips and Ships, Peers and Tears: Lachrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy’, YA 18, 15–57. 9. the wanderer’s] Aeneas’s. white-­sailed ships] Cp. the vessels in James Macpherson’s Fingal (1761), Book III p.  99 [1805 edition]: ‘Now, from the grey mist of the ocean, the white-­sailed ships of Fingal appear’. 10. impetuous] Written above a cancelled word in MS, which may be ‘impassioned’. The adjective returns in Aleel’s song in Scene iv of WBY’s The Countess Kathleen (1892), CW 2, 52: ‘Impetuous heart, be still, be still’ (cp. M. Arnold’s proleptically Yeatsian lines in Empedocles on Etna (1852) II, 90–94: ‘The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere  | To the subtle, contriving head;  | Great qualities are trodden down,  | And littleness united | Is become invincible’). 13. with] Written above the uncancelled word ‘by’ in this line of the MS. 13–14. famous lore | Of love] Cp. Shelley, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 198–200: ‘And other scrolls whose writing did unbind | The inmost lore of love – let the profane | Tremble to ask what secrets they contain’.

24

[‘A SOUL OF THE FOUNTAIN SPAKE ME A WORD’] Text and date of composition. This poem survives in MS only: the two leaves of NLI 20832 have (on both sides of fol.1) a first draft of the entire piece (MS1a), while the recto of fol.2 has a fair copy of lines 1–12 (MS1b); another MS leaf (MS2), preserved by having been tipped into one of the notebooks for WBY’s 1884 verse-­play Love and Death, continues the fair copy for the remainder of the poem (Boston College, Love and Death notebook 5, 31a). Although now in separate locations, MS1 and MS2 are both on the same paper and are both likely to represent the same session of composition. Any dating of the poem is necessarily conjectural, but the inclusion of the second MS source with materials for Love and Death, although there is no apparent connection to the play, may indicate that the lines were completed before Apr., 1884. Cornell Early Poetry 2, 417–419 has a diplomatic transcription of NLI 20832 (MS1a and b), and there is a reading text in UM 62–3 based on this, along with some explanatory notes. Copy-­text: NLI 20832 (lines 1–12) and Boston College Love and Death notebook 5 (lines 13–30).

A 5

soul of the fountain spake me a word: ‘Tell me word of thy spirit’s pleasure, Forever my deeds in Abeysherd, Laughter and dust to fashion of treasure.’ I gave to the spirit an answering word:

1. fountain] MS1b; mountain del. MS1a. spake] MS1b; sent MS1a. 3. Abeysherd] Unidentified. WBY spells this ‘Abesherd’ in MS1a, and ‘Abeysherd’ in both MS1b and MS2. G. Bornstein suggests (UM, 113) an identification with Abu Shahrain, the modern name of the Sumerian city of Eridu. This seems obscure, even for WBY’s reach, as well as being something of a phonetic stretch. It is conceivable  – though still not exactly likely – that WBY chanced upon an article in The Month Vol. 36 (1879), which mentions DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-25

‘the kingdom Eridu, of which the capital is represented by the ruins of Abu-­Shahrein’ (568); but the young poet’s development of the name towards ‘Abesherd’ or ‘Abeysherd’ would still be a far from obvious one. It is more likely that WBY here confects an exotic place name, and to do so falls back on the oriental material best known to him, the Thousand and One Nights, in which ‘Abu’ is naturally a common element of Arabic character names, such as e.g. Abu-­al-­Aswad or Abu Suwayd. 4. laughter] MS1b; earth del. MS1a.



[‘A Soul of the Fountain Spake Me a Word’]

10

‘Out of an ancient book I’ve heard ‘Be bold,’ the sage of old hath said, ‘Be bold, Be bold, and bold be ever more, And yet be not too bold’: thus have I read Out of some famous book of ancient lore. This is the word of my spirit’s pleasure; Deep in its heart there is secret treasure.’

15 20

I cast my line in the nethermost deep, Sounding the land where the fishes are – The apocalyptic soul of sleep – Out of the ship of Azolar, And I heard the laughter of scaly things, And the gleam and the flash of scaly rings. I sought the ore in a marble mount, Often I sounded the rock to find If hollowed it were, of vanity’s fount, And then I smote on the marble rind: Smitten of late was the mountain bound, And as did the sea then answered the ground.

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Far and near my hand takes measure, And out of the silver and gold comes earth, And out of the dust comes plenteous treasure, Diaphanous gleam of Edenic birth. Of late I smote on the mountain bound, And as did the sea then answered the ground.

6–9.] The reference here is to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene III xi 54, where the character Britomart goes to the House of Busirane: And as she lookt about, she did behold, How over that same door was likewise writ, Be bold, be bold, and everywhere Be bold, That much she muz’d, yet could not construe it By any riddling skill, or commune wit. At last she spyde at that rooms upper end, Another yron dore, on which was writ, Be not too bold; whereto though she did bend Her earnest mind, yet wist not what it might intend. 9. heard] MS1b; read MS1a. 13.] [A plummet del.] I cast ^my line^ in the nethermost deep MS1a. 14. are] keep del. are MS1a.

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15.] In the land of the [?visionary] soul of sleep MS1a. With ‘soul of sleep’ perhaps cp. B.W. Procter (Barry Cornwall), English Songs (1851), ‘Dreams’, 1: ‘Dream is the soul of sleep’. 16. Azolar] In WBY’s Mosada, this will be the name of a Moorish astrologer (‘Azolar, | The star-­taught Moor’, Sc. I, 24–5). WBY’s use of the name here may suggest that this poem is a little earlier than Mosada, but such evidence is hardly conclusive. Azolar in Spanish is not in fact a noun (and therefore an unlikely name): it is a verb meaning to cut, carve, or otherwise fashion something. WBY will have chosen it here mainly for its utility as a rhyme. 19. marble] rock MS1a; rock del. marble MS2. 21. vanity’s] [? bubbling] MS1a. 23. bound] ground del. bound MS1a. 24. ground] ground del. land MS1a.

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[‘A SOUND CAME FLOATING, AN UNEARTHLY SOUND’] Text, and date of composition. The poem, which was evidently abandoned by WBY soon after composition, was for a long time lost to view. These lines are found on pages inserted loosely into the notebook containing draft scenes from WBY’s verse-­play Love and Death (now Boston College, Notebook 5, and previously in the keeping of the Yeats family). The Love and Death notebook also contains material which is unrelated to that work, and a revised draft of approximately two-­thirds of one early poem (‘A soul of the fountain’), and the complete text of the present poem, both hitherto unremarked, are contained on sheets taken from another notebook, which have been laid in to notebook 5. The presence in the Boston College notebook of material relating to ‘A soul of the fountain’ shows that Yeats was using pages from a source in which he was already writing other compositions. It is possible that two other leaves, matching those laid in notebook 5, are to be found elsewhere in the Yeats archive. Two separate leaves (c. 20 cm high and 16.5 cm wide), which are most probably detached from a notebook/jotter of the kind often used by Yeats in the mid-­1880s, are catalogued in the National Library of Ireland as NLI 30832. The first leaf carries on both recto and verso ‘A soul of the fountain spake me a word’; the second leaf begins a revision of that poem on its recto, but the verso is blank. Where NLI 30832 breaks off, at the end of a revision of the first stanza, the leaves preserved in the Boston College Love and Death notebook 5 pick up. This is fol. 31a of the notebook, and all of the page is occupied with a version of the poem’s second and third stanzas that clearly represents a revision of the earlier version. Boston College notebook 5 here holds 12 pages, which have been detached from some other notebook and have been laid in (fols. 29a-­34b). Fols. 29a-­30b contain material for Love and Death: however, the ruled lines of the pages themselves show that Yeats is here writing with the book from which these pages have been extracted turned upside down. This is true also for fol. 31a, where the continued revision of ‘The Soul of the Fountain’ is found. Fols. 31b, 32a, and 32b carry text in pencil, written the ‘right’ way up – i.e. in accord with their original notebook context. With fol. 33a, material for Love and Death features again, and this continues to the last page of the insert, fol. 34b. Fols.31b-­32b, which appear to be upside down, are in fact written originally the right way up – i.e. with the first ruled line leaving a larger space above it than the last ruled line leaves at the foot of the page – and were composed in the order fol. 32b, fol. 32a, fol. 31b. Read in this order, they are seen to contain an entire poem. It seems that Yeats removed the pages containing this poem when he was also removing the pages that held his additional Love and Death DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-26



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material from a notebook, very likely the same notebook that contained the two leaves of NLI 30832. Here, he had evidently turned the book upside down to compose both the ‘A soul of the fountain’ revision and the Love and Death material. At some point, the removed pages were inserted in Boston College notebook 5. Since Love and Death was finished by Apr. 1884, it would follow that this poem was from some time before then. Context and interpretation. This narrative in blank verse appears to be an exercise in the uncanny, though it is not, as it turns out, the story of a supernatural event. WBY is operating here with a sense of the seagoing tale – behind it, doubtless, the supernatural adventures of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner – which takes place at a point of intersection between the sailors and the people of their port. A crew is startled by some ‘unearthly sound’ at sea which is heard also by the ‘drowsy citizens’ on shore (5). On both sides, ‘Wild fancy filled the interval of sound’ (20), but the crew returns safely to shore – there, presumably, to weave further fantasies about what has been heard from the water. The poem’s concluding turn (28–34) reveals that the voices heard were natural and not supernatural – some other crew, presumably, perishing on the sea – but swings into sententious mode, affirming that ‘the world is mad [. . .] And sanity is but degree of folly’. As a piece of writing, the poem exhibits little subtlety, especially at its conclusion. However, it is interesting that WBY chooses both to suggest the supernatural sea-­story and then to debunk it as a notion: superstition and fear of the unknown – which were to serve the poet’s purposes so well later on – are here the subjects of a slightly superior air of disdain. The contrasts with a poem of 1888, ‘The Phantom Ship’, are altogether striking: by then, WBY can engage wholeheartedly in the supernatural narrative, where the drowned sailors are seen from the shore by their bereaved relatives. This earlier poem – or rather, perhaps, this attempt at a poem – awkwardly joins together the register of the supernatural narrative with a sententious rejection of any otherworldly explanation. Copy-­text: Boston College Love and Death notebook 5, fol. 32b-­32a, 31b. Contractions have been expanded, spelling amended, and punctuation supplied.

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sound came floating, an unearthly sound Over the waste of waters from afar, Shrill as the blast that rumbles in the pine At times when frighted watchdogs bay and howl And drowsy citizens, in vague alarm, Think on their bolts and bars, and turn and sleep. A weird wild sound that floated on the sea,

1.] A sound came floating] Perhaps cp. Charles Swain (1801–1874), Beauties of the Mind (1831), ‘The Lyre’, 1, 5: ‘A sound came floating by’, ‘A sound came floating free’. 2. waste of waters] A  common poetic phrase, but perhaps cp. T.B. Macaulay, Works (1866), ‘The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad’, 523–5: ‘Thy few surviving sons and daughters  | Shall see their latest sun go down |  Upon a

boundless waste of waters’, and Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poems (1884), ‘The Voyage of St. Brendan’, 63–4: ‘some more sunny clime | Beyond the waste of waters at my feet’. 3. rumbles] trills del. MS. 5. drowsy] sleepy del. MS. 7. A weird wild sound] Cp. John Todhunter, Forest Songs (1881), ‘A Dream of Judgement’, 1: ‘A weird wild dream’.

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Affrighting fishermen far out from land And made the helmsman’s hair stand on his head With very fear, and made him start his eyes All shuddering in dread of seeing aught Beside the waters that gleamed dark afar. Shrill as the laughter of unblessèd souls, Mad in the madness of their utter loss And careless wild abandon, when the flames Lap higher than their wont, and sting more keen.

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Stillness; a pause; deep, tremulous, and long; And then another shriek, that seemed more dread Because ’twas heralded by silence in; Wild fancy filled the interval of sound With forms weird, elfine, terrible, that chased Each other o’er the surface of the sea.

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At last the fishermen, all pale and wan, Reach the much wished-­for harbour and the shore, And tell to anxious wives and curious friends Quaint explanations of that wondrous voice, And shudder as they think of what is past.

9–10.] Cp. Thomas Ingoldsby, The Ingoldsby Legends (1840), ‘The Wedding-­Day; Or, the Buccaneer’s Curse’, 362–3: ‘In sooth my very blood ran cold, it lifted up my hair | With very fear, to stand and hear ‘Wild Roger’ curse and swear!’ 12. gleamed dark afar] Dark gleaming is not perhaps immediately persuasive, but WBY may be trying simply to intensify the effect of W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘Rokeby’, II, 11–14: ‘But, westward, Stanmore’s shapeless swell, | And Lunedale wild, and Kelton-­fell, | And rock-­begirdled Gilmanscar, | And Arkingarth, lay dark afar’. 17. deep, tremulous, and long] Cp. J. Noel Paton, Poems of a Painter (1861), 87–8, 92: ‘thy song | Amid the leaves, around, above. . . | Low, tremulous, and long!’ 20. the interval of sound] Cp. Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1832), ‘A Dream of Fair Women’, 171–2: ‘She raised her piercing orbs, and filled with light | The interval of sound’.

21. elfine] This is WBY’s spelling in MS; although not recognized by OED, ‘elfine’ (for ‘elfin’) does exist in nineteenth-­century poetry, if only in the works of William Sotheby, whose Italy and Other Poems (1828) has ‘our elfine court’ (‘Retrospect, Written at Brighton 1820’, 292) and ‘thy Elfine lake’ (‘The Convent of the Great St. Bernard’, 94). WBY is unlikely to have taken his cue from this, and ‘elfine’ in MS could be simply a misspelling; on the other hand, the spelling may well reflect an intended pronunciation, and has been retained in the present edited text mainly on that account. 23. all pale and wan] Not an uncommon phrase, but cp. S.T. Coleridge, ‘The Three Graves’, II, 158–9: ‘He raised her from the bridal-­bed, | All pale and wan from fear’. 26. that wondrous voice] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Legend of St. Thecla’, 125: ‘Still heard that wondrous voice of him’.



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Poor simple folk – yet how were they to know Mortal as they, whose voices they had heard? Yet how – can common tongues strike terror dumb, Confusion’s worst confusion? Let it rest: No explanation, for the world is mad, All mad, a whirlpool of benighted fools, And sanity is but degree of folly.

29. whose] This is pretty clearly the MS reading; but it is possible that the word ‘those’ was intended here. 30. common tongues] Perhaps cp. Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Music and Moonlight (1874), ‘Europe’, 77–8: ‘with ribald

clamour and harsh clang  | Of common tongues’. 33.] Perhaps cp. Robert Montgomery, Satan: Or, Intellect without God (1854), II, 285–7: ‘blighted man! | His nature was a whirlpool of desires, | And mighty passions, perilously mixed’.

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LOVE AND DEATH Text and date of composition. This is probably the second of WBY’s apprentice verse-­ plays of the mid-­1880s, composed after Vivien and Time. At the beginning of the first of the five exercise books (Nb1-­Nb5) in which the verse-­play is written, WBY enters the date ‘April 21st’ (and in pencil has been added later ‘84’). This should be regarded as evidence for the date on which he began writing up the fair copy: the text in Nb.1 is a revision of that in Nb5, so probably composition had been underway for some time before Nb.1’s fair copy was undertaken. There is no firm evidence for when WBY began work on the play, but it is likely that most of the composition took place after the completion of Vivien and Time in Jan. 1884. The MS of Love and Death, in a series of five exercise books (all of the same brand and size), was for many years in the keeping of the Yeats family and since 1993 has been in the Burns Collection at Boston College. The first four notebooks preserve a complete fair copy; a fifth contains what is almost certainly an earlier version of parts of the play. In the notes, these notebooks are Nb.1-­Nb.5. The entire series of MS books, along with diplomatic transcriptions, have been made available by Boston College as the ‘Love and Death Manuscript Archives’ (www.bc.edu/sites/libraries/loveanddeath/index.html). In the present edition, the text corrects spelling and supplies and alters some punctuation, differing also in a number of the MS readings from the Boston College transcriptions. WBY’s habits in writing of stage directions, which are not entirely consistent across the MS as a whole, have been preserved in this edition. Context and interpretation. Love and Death is a work on a surprisingly large scale for a nineteen-­year-­old writer: a five-­act verse tragedy of more than 1600 lines, it is remarkable for having been seen through to completion by a poet who was evidently as determined as he was inspired – and more determined than inspired, perhaps. The piece’s genre is not really that of the stage play: even though Vivien and Time might have received a drawing-­room production in Howth (see headnote), WBY cannot as yet have been thinking of his writing as suitable for any kind of public presentation. Instead, Love and Death belongs with the nineteenth-­century poetic dramas by Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, and others which were either failures or never staged, and in some cases not intended for the stage at all. The generic mixture itself is more complex, for WBY puts together pastoral romance (with its renaissance origins often plainly acknowledged) and gothic sensation writing in this lengthy and involved story of medieval dynastic intrigue, sorcery, murder, and supernatural agency. In addition to all of this, the play is heavily concentrated on the psychological depiction of its central character, who descends into psychopathic madness as a result of her fixation on the mysterious Sintram, a ‘Spirit Hunter’ who, having been abducted by fairies of the pine forest, uses his supernatural DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-27



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powers to exact revenge on a corrupt royal court. WBY’s Ginevra, the central figure in the play, is the daughter of King Ralph who embarks on a course that leads her to several murders – that of the virtuous (and blind) Alice (an unacknowledged daughter of the king, living usefully amongst peasants in the forest), of the older poet/sage figure Sebald, and of her own father. In the end, Ginevra allows the baleful Sintram to strike dead his twin (but unabducted) brother Moscon, a series of courtiers, and at last the princess (now queen) herself. If the play is a tragedy (as the poet claims on the first page), it is not clear whether he intends it to be the tragedy wrought by Ginevra (her death toll is high enough), or Ginevra’s tragedy, in which her moral degeneration at the hands of cruel (supernatural) circumstance and her own desire are examined in detail. In fact, the play is a tragedy in both these senses. With the exception of Ginevra, the characters are one-­dimensional: Moscon, e.g., is as uninteresting an example of pastoral nobility as one could expect to come across; while the sinister and death-­dealing Sintram is a fairy-­tale monster. Two male figures are perhaps of some interest: Sebald, who combines poetry and magic in his skill set, and may be the first instance of WBY’s conception of the poet as mystic, and King Ralph, who is seen only as a fatally weakened and emasculated ex-­ villain (though one who proves surprisingly difficult to murder with the desirable degree of speed). It is Ginevra, though, who dominates the play. Plainly, her character is more advanced in terms of dramatic conception than that of Vivien in Vivien and Time, and the way in which her actions are to be understood – in terms of supernatural influence, and of more psychological factors – is much more complicated than anything attempted by WBY hitherto. In relation to the other female protagonists of his early plays, Ginevra is the most wicked, ultimately, when judged by her actions; this does not mean that she is presented in a one-­dimensional way, and WBY takes pains – that is, he devotes long stretches of dramatic writing to giving her a voice – so that her moral decline is matched by an increasingly strong sense of inward complexity and purpose. This is not to suggest, of course, that Love and Death is a work of Shakespearean power and depth. That WBY had been reading Shakespeare, though, is apparent: and it is especially Macbeth which makes its presence felt in Ginevra’s fall into evil, observed and attended by powers of supernatural malice (the three Shades of I i are clearly indebted to Macbeth’s witches, and the shocking deliberateness of the murder of the harmless Alice carries resonances of the Scottish tyrant’s worst excesses). All of this is quite different from the tableaux of Vivien and Time, though WBY’s powers of execution do not as yet match his growing ambition. Another problem for the piece is the difficulty of grafting the pastoral romance onto a drama of cruelty and obsession: here, the pine woods are required sometimes to carry reminiscences of the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, but these avail WBY’s overall purposes relatively little. In this respect, the poet is still on the way to the more fully realised inhabiting of the pastoral convention of IoS, in which the more luridly melodramatic registers are, by and large, avoided and where the magical and supernatural are less clumsily employed. In 1948, R. Ellmann’s report on the MS work was not enthusiastic: calling it ‘the worst and most ambitious of the group’ of plays from 1883–4, his account of the play’s weaknesses of plot and character was an accurate one. However, Ellmann also saw in the story the embryonic shapes of much later Yeatsian motifs: ‘Yeats is groping here towards his later use of the theme of father

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against child; in the twin brothers [Moscon and Sintram] who are mortal and immortal counterparts of one another, and in the mixture of ideal love and carnal murder in the queen’s character, he shadows forth his later theory of the divided or double self ’ (Man and the Masks, 35). Much of this may be to see a little too far ahead, but Ellmann’s perception that the whole plot has its origin in the bad behaviour and disregard for his children of the unfortunate King Ralph is a useful one. Nor was Ellmann using against the poet material which WBY himself had not already acknowledged his, for in 1916 the poet – who still had the MS notebooks to hand – included a paragraph about the play in his Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (CW 3, 86–87): I was writing a long play on a fable suggested by one of my father’s early designs. A king’s daughter loves a god seen in the luminous sky above her garden in childhood, and to be worthy of him and put away mortality, becomes without pity and commits crimes, and at last, having made her way to the throne by murder, awaits his coming among her courtiers. One by one they become chilly and drop dead, for, unseen by all but her, her god is in the hall. At last he is at her throne’s foot and she, her mind in the garden once again, dies babbling like a child. This, in a book which is all about a childhood (the poet’s own) is suggestive. As the adult WBY glances over his teenage play, he sees Ginevra as a child who never grows up, doomed to go to desperate lengths in order to realise the romantic visions of childhood, and what she once saw ‘in the luminous sky above her’. The other prominent detail in WBY’s brief account is that this ‘fable’ was ‘suggested by one of my father’s early designs’. There would seem to be a lot of plot to fit into a single design here, but JBY was of course to hand to explain the meaning of his various artworks, and there is no reason to doubt WBY on the point. Certainly, in the immediate wake of Vivien and Time (which JBY had shown to his friend Edward Dowden), it is likely that father instructed son on dramatic style and force – the elements in poetry which he most admired. At the same time, it is perhaps as well that Ginevra is a princess and not a prince, and not only because this helps diminish the troublesome comparisons with Hamlet that might otherwise obtrude: Ginevra’s adolescent miseries (that cause misery for everyone else) stem from the misdeeds of a weak and ineffectual father. King Ralph is murdered by his daughter – uncathartically, as it turns out – but not before he makes his own pathetic attempt at the last minute to murder her himself. The poet’s discussions with JBY about the meaning of his ‘early design’ cannot have been straightforward ones. It is worth noticing, also, how magic and the supernatural were not as yet objects of WBY’s aspiration; both father and son would have seen in Ginevra’s supernatural fixations (as even perhaps in Sebald’s sorcerer/poet status) the childishness which becomes her downfall. Another notable aspect of Love and Death is less thematic but more technical: here, the young WBY begins to improve his own verse writing over a very long stretch. It may be that the blank verse gains in assurance in the course of the play itself – the earlier scenes have some of the roughness which is noticeable often in Vivien and Time, while later ones (including protracted soliloquies) display much greater control of metre, pace, and effect. It should not be a critically belittling judgement to observe that this is apprentice work: in an important way, it is exactly and seriously this. In setting out to write a full-­scale poetic

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drama, WBY gave himself a large undertaking. In the period the play was being written (see Text and date of composition), WBY had time on his hands: the Yeats family had been obliged to decamp from Howth early in the year, and was now in Dublin, in Harold’s Cross, with resources even more than usually stretched. WBY himself had left the Erasmus Smith High School in Dec. 1883, and was not to enrol in the Metropolitan School of Art until May. It seems extremely unlikely that the poet thought the play suitable for staging; instead, it was an apprentice piece and, as such, an opportunity to learn on the job. If WBY learned less about playwriting and stagecraft than about verse and the expression of personality, that was neither a disadvantage nor, necessarily, a failure of the verse-­play’s purpose.

Love and Death A Tragedy Time – Twelfth Century

When we were not and these men were Loud did the crickets sing – When we are dead, still without care Loud shall the crickets sing. (Dramatis Personae)



Sintram – a Spirit Hunter Moscon – his mortal brother Ralph – Father of Ginevra

1–4.] This quatrain is present in Nb1 only, and not in the version of the opening in Nb5. 1. these men] old knights del. Nb1. 2, 4. the crickets] Crickets conventionally sing in much poetry, often on the hearth e.g. in Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’, 81–2 ‘Far from all resort of Mirth, | Save the cricket on the hearth’ (in the passage including lines on ‘some high lonely tower’, which would later influence WBY). ‘Loud’ in this context is an uncommon adjective: WBY may recall William Allingham, Poems (1850), ‘The Aeolian Harp’, 22: ‘The cat purrs loud, the crickets sing’. [Dramatis Personae] Sintram] Sintram and His Companions, by the German fantasy writer, Friedrich Heinrich Karl

de la Motte, Baron Fouqué (1777–1843) was translated in numerous English versions from 1820 onwards, and one translation had appeared in 1883. The story was a favourite of W. Morris’s. WBY draws on Baron Fouqué’s work for names in other works of his in the 1880s.   Moscon] The name is that of a character in Il Magico Prodigioso (1637) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), partly translated by Shelley (publ. 1824). WBY drew on names in this work for ‘Clarin’ in Vivien and Time and also probably for [Speech from the opening of an abandoned dramatic poem] (1884).   Ralph] Kings called Ralph may seem to be thin on the ground, but Ralph is a variant of Rudolph, and some kings, such as Rudolph II of Burgundy (d. 937) were known as ‘Ralph’.

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Sebald – a harper Colin – a shepherd Nobles, Peasants, etc.



Ginevra – a Princess Margaret – a waiting woman Amoret – a shepherdess Alice – a blind girl

  Sebald] WBY has this German name from Robert Browning’s Pippa Passes (1841), where the character Sebald is in love with Ottima, who is married already to a rich mill-­owner. Pippa Passes had furnished JBY with the theme for an oil painting of 1869–1872, commissioned by John Todhunter, and exhibited in Dublin in 1873.   Colin] As often with pastoral names, WBY draws here on Edmund Spenser, in whose The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene the shepherd-­poet Colin (in full, Colin Clout) is representative of the poet himself.   Ginevra] Shelley’s fragment ‘Ginevra’ (described by Mary Shelley in her 1839 edition as ‘part of a poem which Shelley intended to write, founded on a story to be found in the first volume of a book entitled “L’Osservatore Fiorentino” ’) depicts an unhappy bride, married to someone other than her beloved, who dies at her own wedding reception. WBY’s choice of the name is partly owing simply to Shelley’s being to hand, but is also likely to reflect something of his relationship with Laura Armstrong, who had been the model for Vivien in Vivien and Time. Like Ginevra, Laura was engaged to be married when she first met WBY, but their relationship did not, in the event, have any effect on the course of events: Laura went ahead with her wedding, and all connnections with WBY (it appears) were severed. The name Ginevra is also used in a section of Samuel Rogers’ Italy: A Poem (1822) as that of a bride who dies (through misadventure)

on her wedding day. Byron had used ‘Ginevra’ for the addressee of some poems (to Frances Webster Wedderburn).   Amoret] In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene III and IV, Amoret represents ‘goodly womanhed’ and is the twin sister of Belphoebe (representative of virginity). Amoret is the faithful wife of Scudamour, from whom Spenser’s story separates her; the lovers are not re-­united in the course of the poem. WBY included the ‘vision of Scudamour’ (FQ IV, x) in his Poems of Spenser (1906), and wrote in the Introduction to that volume (later reprinted as ‘Edmund Spenser’ in The Cutting of an Agate (1912)): ‘The vision of Scudamour is, I sometimes think, the finest invention in Spenser. Until quite lately I knew nothing of Spenser but the parts I  had read as a boy. I did not know that I had read so far as that vision, but year after year this thought would rise up before me coming from I knew not where. I  would be alone perhaps in some old building, and I would think suddenly ‘out of that door might come a procession of strange people doing mysterious things with tumult’ . . . It was only last summer, when I read the Fourth Book of the Faerie Queene, that I found I had been imagining over and over the enchanted persecution of Amoret’ (CW 4, 275). WBY’s boyhood reading of Spenser may also influence his choice of the twelfth century as the setting for Love and Death: ‘He [Spenser] wrote of knights and ladies, wild creatures imagined by the aristocratic poets of the twelfth century’ (CW 4, 265).

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Act 1 Scene 1 A cave’s mouth, a forest of pine behind, a fire dimly burning; the red light of the setting sun. Enter Moscon, a dead boar on his shoulder. He throws the boar down and speaks thus, while he is casting branches on the fire. Moscon 5 10 15

I Moscon am a sad and savage man. Here dwell I ’neath an ivy-­cinctured rock Among eternal twilight, on the sod Where stand my bretheren the changeless pine, So proud in their unnumbered centuries And in the firmness of their sunless stems, Like Titans gathering in their pride apart. Here dwell I in the living rock alone, From their still shadows sucking balm to soothe A sleepless ill called poor humanity That I have caught – I am not lonely here: When in the morn horizons burn, and when Begins the dance and paean of the day, I see the company of timid ghosts. At evening also, when the sun is low, Each with its finger to its lips goes by,

1. savage man] cp. Spenser’s ‘saluage man’ in The Faerie Queene VI iv. 2. ivy-­cinctured rock] Cp. M. Arnold, ‘The Strayed Reveller’ (1849), 12: ‘The deep cup, ivy-­cinctured’. 3. eternal twilight] Perhaps cp. Felicia Hemans, ‘The Abercerrage’ (1819) iii, 389–91: ‘the still and solitary shades  | Of ancient pine, and dark, luxuriant glades,  | Eternal twilight’s reign’. 4. bretheren] This is more correctly ‘brethren’. WBY’s spelling shows the three-­syllable place the word occupies in the metrical line, and is preserved here. This is the case also in IV i 19 later. changeless pine] Cp. John Keble, The Christian Year (1827), ‘The Accession’, 19: ‘One changeless pine in fading woods’. 4^5.] Where live the pines’ serene and awful shade;  | About their head play beams of wingèd sun Nb5.

5. unnumbered centuries] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Legends of the Saxon Saints (1879), ‘The Banquet Hall of Wessex’, 521: ‘Through all the unnumbered centuries yet to come’. 7. gathering] sleeping del. gathering Nb5. 9. soothe] still del. soothe Nb5. 10. poor humanity] Though a common phrase, it is possible (given the ‘Titans’ of 7, and the echo in 16) that this recalls Keats’s fallen Titan poem, ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’ I, 158: ‘And more, like slaves to poor humanity’. 11. lonely here:] lonely here – Oh no, Nb5. 12. horizons burn] Perhaps cp. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), ‘The Fire-­Worshippers’, 1547–8: ‘Night, dreadful night, is gathering fast, | More faintly the horizon burns’. 16. each with its finger to its lips] Cp. Keats, ‘Hyperion: A  Fragment’ I, 13–14, and ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, I, 317–8: ‘the Naiad ’mid her reeds | Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips’.

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Poor wild unutterable mysteries, My dear companions and mine only friends, For no word I have addressed to living man Since those dim days of many years ago. My father died as I shall die when time Has broken the speed of my restless feet, As a sudden sorrow, speedy and light, When I find no help in this great bow That sendeth its arrows fatal and fast And fleet as the footfall of winds – this bow Is not methinks a toy for old mens’ hands. Then some wild beast shall slay me ’mong the pine, Then shall my great twin brother shake mayhap Some hoary mountain’s head, and hurl the snow To mightily entomb my scattered bones, And all the winds shall sing a funeral song, The fountains white-­throated their dirges sing. But see how splendidly the day lies dead And night the burning blood is lapping up: The royal towers far below shine red; Clouds, vale, and misty mountain melt in flame.

20. dim days of many years ago] Conventional (after Thomas Moore’s ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, with its ‘Memory brings the light | Of other days around me’), but cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘December’, 47: ‘kin of ours in the dim days of old’. 22. restless feet] A phrase used twice by W. Morris in The Earthly Paradise (1870): III, ‘November: The Lovers of Gudrun’, 3782 (‘pace with restless feet’) and IV, ‘January: Bellerophon at Argos’, 1029–30 (‘with restless feet | Paced’). 24–25.] When the speed of my arrows is broken,  | Whose flash is as flashes of fountains are del. Nb5. The first version of 22–27 is heavily deleted in Nb5, with a rewritten version (almost identical to Nb1 version of the lines) written on the facing verso. 26. fleet  .  .  .  winds] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances and Songs (1861), ‘The Templar Knight’, 9: ‘than the fleet winds faster’. WBY wrote about this volume (along with Deirdre (see note to 36–7), which he called ‘by far [Joyce’s] finest work’) in The Irish Fireside, 27 Nov. 1886 (CW 9, 28–38).

33. white-­throated] Aubrey De Vere’s sonnet ‘The Solitudes of Malbay’ (1842) has ‘your white-­throated surges | Leap, and dissolve in air’ (6–7); the same poem makes a rhyme-­ word from ‘Paean’ (cp. 13). 33^34,] Stay! Over-­meditation saps my soul: | Not thus shall I fulfil my father’s task, | The task of hating all men till I die | And leave my bones on some far hill del. Nb5. 34. day lies dead] D.G. Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (1881), ‘Rose Mary’, III, 32: ‘Till day lies dead on the sun-­dial’. 35.] Cp. T. Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’, 1392–3: ‘I pledged that bowl, | ’Twas burning blood’. 36–7.] Not in Nb5. Cp. R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Return to Eman’, 3624–7: ‘O Naisi, see o’er Eman’s towers below  | Yon cloud terrific hang of crimson stain, | Dripping through lurid air its dreadful rain  | Of gore-­drops, till all things beneath are red!’ 36^37.] Look there – a mighty shadow standing is. |’Tis he whom long ago the goblins stole Nb5.

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40 45

What mighty shadow stands on yonder peak? ’Tis he whom long ago the fairies stole, My great twin brother, gazing down On me with face perplexed of some vague care. Of late I have oft seen him gazing thus. He’s gone; I saw him slowly fade away, And with him all the holy hair of day Has sunk into the silver night, And stealthily the winds creep forth to dance And revel on the froth of lakes, And wind their horns among the pine.



(Exit into cave)

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(The red sunlight fades slowly away till the wood is very dark, save where it is lit by the gleams of the fire before the cave.) Enter three muffled shades who stand warming their hands before the fire. 1 Shade

What sight see you? 2 Shade

0 5

I see a bright star shining clear, A mist like a man’s hand drawing near. 1 Shade



And you?

38. mighty shadow] Cp. Shelley, ‘Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude’ (1816), 306: ‘that mighty Shadow’ (of Death). 40–41.] gazing there.  | His face is sad with strange prophetic grief Nb5. 41. perplexed of] perplexed with del. Nb1. 44. hair of day] OED n.2b. hair (fig.), ‘Applied to rays or ‘tresses’ of the sun’. Cp. C. Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), ‘Yet shall the aged sun shed forth his hair’, and R. Lovelace, Lucasta (1659), ‘A Panegyric to the Best Picture of Friendship, Mr. Peter Lely’, 49: ‘Her beams ne’er shed or change like th’ hair of day’. 46. creep forth] In preparing for Moscon’s return to his cave, this phrase’s proximity

to ‘wind their horns’ of 48 may indicate some influence from a well-­known stanza of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, 1033–6: ‘the snail, whose tender horns being hit  | Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain;  | And there, all covered up, in shade doth sit  | Long after fearing to creep forth again’. S.D. three muffled shades] WBY here deliberately recalls the three Weird Sisters in Macbeth. 51. a mist like a man’s hand] 1 Kings 18: 44: ‘And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.’

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3 Shade 55

I see a maiden sitting alone By the alien hearth of an alien home. And look ye, there’s blood on the root: The pine tree’s borne a fearful fruit. 2 Shade



Lap ye the blood from the red pine trunk. 1 Shade



Let’s lap, let’s lap.



(They stoop) 3 Shade



’T ’as into the future sunk 2 Shade

60

Of him within. 1 Shade



Draw near.



(The other two gather round) 3 Shade



Peace, peace, the lion man comes forth.



(Moscon comes from his cave and makes the sign of the cross. The three grey shades creep away with their fingers to their lips.) Moscon



They’re gone, disturbers of my peace.



(Exit into the cave)

54. alien home] Sir Samuel Ferguson, Poems (1880), ‘Mesgedra’, 150: ‘bondage in an alien home’. WBY’s combination of ‘alien’ and ‘home’ recalls Keats’s Ruth in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (66–7), ‘sick for home | . . . amid the alien corn’.

56. fearful] dreadful del. fearful Nb5. 57. red] grey del. red Nb5. 59. ’T ’as] Thus Nb1: WBY intends a contraction for ‘It has’. No, ’t ’as Nb5. S.D. to their lips] on their mouths Nb5.

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Scene 2 A forest in the valley. A distant sound of hunters’ horns. Enter Ginevra leading Amoret, followed by a Page holding a falcon. Ginevra 5 10 15

O Amoret, my simple shepherdess, My Queen of Arcady – you soon shall find Court life more merry than a shepherd’s days, And harper’s songs than woodland pipes more sweet, And sound of fountains dimming all the noise Of passing people than the voice of streams More cadent far. You’ll be my fairest maid – Ho page! Come take her hand, ’tis thy new friend. I found her by a streamlet’s shady marge, Cooling her feet in the idle water. No friend she has save one; that one she says Pays not her love with fit return of love, So she has come with us. Ho page! Sir page! Among those pale exotics of the court, My waiting maids, this wild wood rose we’ll plant. So come, my waif of Arcady.



(Exeunt)

3. a shepherd’s days] the shepherd ways Nb5. 5–7] Not in Nb5. 7. cadent] Falling. Cp. Shakespeare, King Lear I.iv.264: ‘With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks’. 8.] You’ll be the fairest of my waiting maids Nb5. 9. streamlet’s shady marge] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Tragedy of the House of the Red Branch’, 4096 ‘’cross the streamlet’s marge’ and ‘The Palace Garden’, 409: ‘the streamlet’s grassy brim’. In his 1886 article

on Joyce (CW 9, 35), WBY quotes from Deirdre. 12. fit return of love] WBY (probably by coincidence) here echoes exactly a phrase in a sonnet by the prolific poet, journalist and spiritualist George Barlow, The Marriage Before Death (1878), ‘The Angel’, 5: ‘It seemed a fit return of love and fame’. 15. this wild wood rose] Perhaps cp. Charles Tennyson Turner, Sonnets and Lyrics (1878), ‘The Butterfly and the Rose’, 1: ‘She plucked a wild wood rose’.

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Scene 3 (Another part of the forest – a rose bush in the foreground) Enter Colin (with a cup) Colin 5

So with the princess she has gone from me, O cruel Amoret, but here I’ll die, And lay me down, and clasp about the stem Of this rose tree we two together set And made our vows above in days gone by. And here I’ll hang mine oaten pipes grown dumb, Poor quills who never played of aught but love. (He hangs his shepherd pipes on the rose bush)

10 15

Fit dying place for thee, fit place for me – Grow on, O tree, till thou art standing high Above thy fellows, monument of love, And ’neath thy leaves sad shepherds shall deplore Their love, and cry against the world. But nay, I had forgot you’re but a rose bush small: A poplar had been best, a poplar great – Lie there, my pipes dumb grown with grief and love, I’ll drink the poison from my hornèd cup. I’ll bind it round with roses, thus, thus, thus, The roses that she loved, for it is meet I leave with loving stirrup-­cup this world,

6. mine oaten pipes] ‘Oaten’ is a conventional poeticism (especially in renaissance pastoral verse) applied to musical pipes made from the straw or stem of an oat, e.g. Spenser, The Shepherds Calender, ‘January’, 72: ‘broke his oaten pype’, or Milton, Lycidas, 21: ‘the oaten flute’. 9. art standing high] dost stand Nb5. 10. monument of love] Cp. A. Pope, The Odyssey of Homer (1725–6), XV [translated by Elijah Fenton] 96: ‘some monument of love’ and 138: ‘this monument of love’. 14. great] tall Nb5.

15 dumb grown] dumb things Nb5. 17. thus, thus, thus] A  triple ‘thus’ is used by Robert Herrick, Hesperides, ‘Up Tails All’, 3–4: ‘And thus, thus, thus let us smother  | Our lips for a while’. 19. loving stirrup cup] WBY merges ‘loving cup’ (OED n.2, ‘A drink shared as a sign of friendship, unity, or good will’ (possibly carrying some force from the obsolete n.1., ‘A love potion, a love drink’)) and ‘stirrup-­cup’ (OED, ‘A cup of wine or other drink handed to a man when already on horseback setting out on a journey; a parting glass’).

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0 2 25

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This lodging house where we a little rest And think we are at home. I go, proud world. I’ll drink a toast to thee, O rose bush sad, That you may grow for ever, higher, higher. But nay, a poplar had been best – farewell, Farewell, O cruel Amoret, farewell! No more at harvest feasts I’ll play my pipes. (He raises the cup) Enter Sebald the old harper Sebald



Ho peasant! I have lost my way, and would Fain reach the towers of the king ’fore night. You shall have pay if you can show the road. Colin

30

(aside) ’Tis some great lord. (aloud) I’ll do your bidding, sir. (puts the cup on the ground)



Farewell, good cup, good tree, I’ll soon return. Rose tree that should have been a poplar tall, An odd few minutes more of this proud world, Then I’ll be back again. Sebald

         Lead on, lead on. (Exeunt)

After a pause, enter Moscon

20–21.] Not in Nb5. 19^22.] This travellers’ lodging-­ house, this fickle world Nb5. 26^27.] Unto a jolly she[?pherd] del. Nb5. 32. poplar tall] This inversion is conventional: e.g. Ben Jonson, Underwoods, ‘Praises of a country Life’ 9–10: ‘The Poplar tall, he then

doth marrying twine | With the grown issue of the vine’), Pope, The Iliad of Homer (1715), XIII, 493 and XVI, 591: ‘as the Mountain Oak, or Poplar tall’, Tennyson, ‘Leonine Elegiacs’ 4: ‘Down by the poplar tall rivulets bubble and fall’. 34.] My cup, I’ll soon be back Nb5.

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Moscon 5 3 40 45

Who is that maid so wondrous pale, who lives With that old charcoal-­burner where the stream Divides the silent forest from the plain? All day the blackbirds hold a high debate Beneath the shady copse around her hut, As though they wrangled of her shining hair. Her face is sweet and sorrowful and calm, And yet my father called all women false; Indeed I fear it must be so, for he Was wise, most wise, most wonderfully wise. What’s this? (finds the cup) Why, it is wine, yes, surely wine. I never tasted wine of any sort; I thought it was more red than this. I’ll drink Unto thy face, most beautiful unknown; Thy heart, I know, must be most false. (drinks) ’Tis sour. (throws the cup down)

0 5

I think but ill of human taste – I’ll go And sit me in the shade of some great tree, And sigh about her face, and sigh still more About the faithless heart it hides.



(exit) Enter Colin Colin

55

I’ve dodged the old man, and I’m here again. So then, farewell O world, false world, proud world.

36. charcoal-­burner] Not necessarily an anachronism in this supposedly twelfth-­ century setting, since evidence for the production of charcoal in forests goes back far beyond the early industrial era. 36–37.] With that old charcoal-­burner, on the land  | Where forest ends and treeless plain begins? Nb5. 38. blackbirds] thrushes Nb5. 41.] Not in Nb5. 44.] Cp. Shakespeare, Othello I  iii 185–6: ‘She swore i’faith ’twas strange, ’twas

passing strange,  | ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful.’ 47. thought] heard Nb5. 51. some great tree] This simple phrase on its own would not convincingly allude to W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), Book 1, 248–9: ‘garland all about the ancient stem | Of some great tree’; but comparison of Morris’s lines with Sc. 3, 3–4 earlier, ‘clasp about the stem  | Of this rose tree’, makes some recollection on WBY’s part plausible. 54–62.] Not in Nb5.

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(finds the cup) 60

’Tis drunk, and here be foot marks on the ground. Someone has drunk it all, and by Pan’s self, And by the fauns and all the shepherd gods, And by Demeter sad and Proserpine, And by the spring – I swear that he will die. Now hence to find him dead with three good swains, Two for his head, and for his feet two more.



(Exit)

57. Pan’s self] Pan is a satyr-­god, often alluded to and invoked in pastoral convention. He is also a recurring figure in WBY’s poetry of 1883–4 (see e.g. ‘The Priest of Pan’ and ‘Pan’). 59. Demeter sad] The Greek goddess Demeter went into protracted mourning after the abduction of her daughter Persephone (the Roman Proserpine) by Hades, god of the Underworld. WBY’s ‘sad’ may owe something to John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘A Song of Secrets’, 73: ‘sad Demeter’. Todhunter was a Yeats family friend (JBY wrote to him in Apr.  1885 to say that ‘Willie  .  .  . watches with an almost breathless interest your career as dramatic poet  .  .  . he has read everything you have written most carefully’ (CL 1, 515)); and this

particular poem is twice echoed elsewhere in WBY’s writings, first in a letter to KT of 6 Feb. 1889 on ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, where he echoes ‘A Song of Secrets’ 19: ‘A land of infinite repose’ (‘There are three incompatible things which man is always seeking – infinite feeling, infinite battle, infinite repose – hence the three islands’); second, in WBY’s ‘The Two Trees’, 7 ‘The surety of its hidden root’, cp. ‘A Song of Secrets’ 133–4: ‘All my oaks and almond-­trees | Bathe their hidden roots in these’. Proserpine] goddess of spring (each spring being taken to re-­enact her annual return from the Underworld). 61–2.] WBY’s arithmetic, as well as his meaning, is obscure here.

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Scene 4 Another part of the pine forest Moscon in a swoon in the foreground Enter Colin and three peasants 1 Peasant   Yon by the tree stump is the man we seek. 2 Peasant   A great pale man with tangled hair. 1 Peasant  Lift him. 3 Peasant   He’s not yet dead. Colin

He soon will be.

1 Peasant Look you How huge the bow he had, four fingers thick.

(They hand the bow about among them) 2 Peasant

5

E’en you, long John, could scarcely bend that bow.

5. four fingers thick] The mode of measurement may recall that in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879) 2, 226: ‘a Talas tree six fingers thick’; the Cork-­born writer, Unionist and Tory journalist William Maginn (1793–1842) wrote a comic ‘Festal Ode’ in

which (alongside references to the potato as ‘Erin’s fruit  | With which the bogtrotter his stomach cheers’) there is (19–20) ‘bacon smoked, where grease  | Five fingers thick, each stripe of lean surrounds’ (Miscellaneous Writings (1855)).

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3 Peasant

Be not so sure of that. 2 Peasant

             But you’ll not try, I know you well. 3 Peasant           He was a man of might: He would have been the king of charcoal-­men. Colin 10

He would have been a peerless shepherd lad, But who, alas, is in his right employ, Or keeps the measure of his life in tune? 3 Peasant



Look to his pockets, they are lawful game. 2 Peasant



If he be dead, it pays his burial. 3 Peasant



And if he lives, the finders must be paid. 1 Peasant

5 1

Nor yet do so, he is a knight – perhaps His people are not far away – we’d best

7. man of might] conventional, especially in medieval and pseudo-­ medieval romance (frequent in Thomas Chatterton); familiar also through its use in Charles Jennens’ libretto for the final chorus of Handel’s oratorio Saul (1739), ‘Gird on thy sword, thou

man of might’; the phrase occurs in Samuel Ferguson’s Conary (1880), 272: ‘verily a man of might’. 9. lad] swain Nb5. 10. does know] is in Nb5. 12. they are lawful] for they are fair NB5.

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Look out for ransom, it were better pay, And some good league more safe in case they come. 2 Peasant



Best see what he has got and leave him here. 3 Peasant

20

He’s mine, I found him first. 1 Peasant

              Come, take him up And bear him to my hut. My foster-­child, She that is blind, may cure him of his hurt (Whate’er it be), for she is skilled in herbs. 3 Peasant

And then the whole reward is thine, you think? 1 Peasant

25

And I’ve the right. 3 Peasant

           No, for he’s mine, I found him first. 1 Peasant         No, fool, he’s mine. 3 Peasant

Me, fool?

22. cure him of his hurt] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Morte D’Arthur’ 264 and Idylls of the King, ‘The

Passing of Arthur’, 432: ‘Where I will heal me of my grievous wound’.

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1 Peasant         Yes, fool. 3 Peasant              Take that! (strikes him) Colin (parting them)

What spoil there is ye shall divide. Lift him: we’ll take him to thy hut, old man. 2 Peasant

30

And if he dies, his cloak is mine. 3 Peasant

                 We’ll share. Let’s bear him off. (They lift Moscon) 1 Peasant            What shall I tell my child Has hurted him? Colin      A sunstroke I – I think.

(Exeunt)

33. hurted] This attempt at rustic diction has precedent in Elizabethan literary use, e.g. in Golding’s Ovid (Metamorphoses X 344, ‘His weapons too have hurted thee’ and XI 370, ‘It surely hurted her’), but a more recent poetic

instance was in Tennyson’s ‘The Northern Cobbler’ 19: ‘I slithered an’ hurted my huck’. 30.] There, take him up unto thy hut, old man Nb5. 34. S.D.] exeunt cursing Moscon Nb5.

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Act 2 Scene 1 A room in the castle with high pointed windows. Enter Ginevra followed by Amoret, Margaret, and other waiting women crowned with wreaths of flowers. Amoret 5

The day is done: throw now your wreaths aside. Alas, that flowers in a May-­day wreath Should wane and grow so sickly on their stems! So, May-­day’s almost gone again; its eve Is like a dying rose whose crimson face And curving petals are usurped with black, As on the rose I pluck from out my hair This piteous citizen of plundered spring Is like – Ginevra

     What, moralize upon May-­ day? 10 Why Amoret, girl, Amoret you’re sad And bowed with thought, as though thy summers were So many summers doubled thrice, or sad As though the villain rain had spoilt May-­day. Margaret 15

Methinks there was a cloud on her May-­day: A gallant, whom I wot not of, was there; They’ve fallen out.

3. grow so sickly] Cp. W. Blake, ‘The Sick Rose’, 1: ‘O Rose, thou art sick’. grow] hang Nb5. 5–6] For roses and crimson petals, cp. Tennyson’s lyric from The Princess, ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white’. WBY would be aware, additionally, of John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876): ‘Laurella’, II st. 77: ‘For women are like

roses – love, their sun, | Awakes their hearts from some dull winter’s trance, | Their crimson petals opening one by one | To bounteous richness in his radiance’. See also Act 2 Sc.4, 56. 8. plundered] pillaged del. sacked del. ravished del. plundered Nb5. 15.] A  gallant whom I  wot of was not there Nb5.

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Ginevra             Love’s quarrels are as light As the impetuous froth of the salt sea, Aye, lighter far. Amoret          Oh no, I’m sore afraid They’re whole worlds deep. Margaret               But yours are not, I’ll swear; 20 And, why, he’s but a landless man at best. Amoret

But then – Givevra

        How high would you look, Margaret? Waiting woman

Although she is the youngest of us all, She’d have an emperor, or king at least. Margaret

25

A knight crusader with a cross of red Who’d been unto the Holy Land and fought The Saracens and Turks whom Mary hates,

17. As the impetuous froth] As is the wilful froth Nb5. 18. sore afraid] Luke 2:9: ‘And lo, the Angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.’ 19. They’re whole worlds deep] They’re deep as is the sea del. Nb5.

yours are] yours is Nb5. 19^20.] I  mind it well, you quarrelled thus before del. Nb5. 20. a landless man] Cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), II 1262: ‘A landless man crowned only with a curse’. 26. whom Mary hates] WBY’s ascription of anti-­Islamic hatred to the Virgin Mary is out

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And did a dragon slay, and had its skin; And when he was away I’d keep his house And rule his vassals with a swerveless hand: Whene’er I passed, they’d bow meek heads and say ‘Behold the warrior-­lady of our lord’. My very shadow’d be a thing to fear. Waiting woman



I told you how exalted ’bove us all she is. Ginevra

35 40 45

Oh yes, all those of low degree look high, And those who are set high would fain be low. Now I am weary of embattled walls, Of dancing, and of courtiers bowing low, And all the things that lose us for ourselves. The very walls are wearisome to me: There wandering alone I seek for peace And for the lone nymph quietness – but gloom The evil brother of poor peace I find, For I’m oppressed with gazing on the pine; Their heads the very spring doth never change. This might be Hades where the spring is not, And if I lift mine eyes and seek afar, Beyond the land of pine the loud sea is: That is no cordial for restless hearts.

of keeping with both literary and devotional traditions (probably through ignorance rather than choice). 29. swerveless] Unswerving; WBY’s poeticism here is not an especially antique piece of diction: OED’s first instance comes from 1863 (though the word is found in some poems from earlier in the nineteenth century). 31. warrior-­lady] Perhaps a recollection of Tennyson’s (very different) warrior who is a man dressed as a woman in The Princess (1849), ‘Prologue’ 118–9: ‘I saw | The feudal warrior lady-­clad’. 34^35. Her hopes would humble Prester John Nb5.

36, 39. weary, wearisome] The effect of Ginevra’s repetition in this speech recalls that of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shallott’, ‘I am aweary, aweary’. 38. lose us for] lose for us Nb5. 41. but] and Nb5. 43. I’m] I am Nb5. 46. lift mine eyes] Cp. Psalm 121, 1: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help’. 47. loud sea] Cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam XII, 80: ‘Sucked into the loud sea’, and D.G. Rossetti The House of Life 34 (‘The Dark Glass’), 5: ‘doors and windows bared to some loud sea’. 48. restless hearts] Cp. M. Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse’, 143–4

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Waiting woman 50

Yes, you’re by far too fond of solitude. I would not be alone for all the world. Ginevra

55 60 65

And I would like to live afar from here, Not great nor poor, but rich enough for peace In that bright land where old storks bring their young, Away from winter winds and winter’s woes; And I would have for lord some peaceful man Who loved the people and their way and works, And he would build for me a home of brick, A laughter-­peopled castle in the sun, A house not cold and grey and grim like this, But where the green vine hangs its pointed leaves. And I would have there peacocks four and grounds Where grass grows long and bountiful and free Around the roots of many a mossy tree That in ripe autumn, like small lamps of red Would on the tangled grass bright apples shed; And there a sundial would I have all round With climbing of the dark green melons bound, An old world garden where the birdly throng

(addressing the spirit of Shelley): ‘Inheritors of thy distress | Have restless hearts one throb the less?’ 53. that bright land] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘May’, ‘The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, 2053–4: ‘now that bitter war | From that bright land had long been driven afar’, and John Banim The Celt’s Paradise (1821), Second Duan, 269–70: ‘hand in hand,  | We wander through her own bright land!’ 56. way and works] Cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), III 1830: ‘barren ways and works of banishment’. 62. bountiful and free] Cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867) XVII, 945: ‘noble hearts, how bountiful and free!’

63. roots] stem del. root Nb5. 65. tangled grass] In R.D. Joyce’s last work, Blanid (1879), whose lack of ‘barbaric simplicity’ WBY deplored in 1886 (CW 9, 37), the heroine’s idyllic garden is despoiled: ‘Where the feet of my girlhood roved, | From the tangled grass  | In my desolate place of roses  | The grim, gray wolf doth whine’. 66. would I have] I would have Nb5. 67. dark green melons] Cp. M. Arnold, Poems (1853), ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ 198–9 (describing a meal for Rustum): ‘A side of roasted sheep, and cakes of bread, | And dark green melons’. 68. birdly] A  very rare word, and unrecognised in OED. It is used in the seventeenth century by Anne Killigrew, in Poems (1686),

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70 75

Doze almost out of memory of song, An old world garden with a pool’s soft sheen, Where ’neath broad weeds the sleeping pike are seen, An old world garden where the calm dreams nod, Dream nodding to dream o’er the shady sod; An old world garden where the pulse and beat Alone is heard of summer’s rushing feet: There far away from courts I’d live and die.



(Enter Page)

80

But I have found a batch of friendly dreams, And here’s a herald from the Underworld Who’d drag us from their dizzy eyrie down. Speak for yourself; your sin is great, sir Page. Page



The famous harper Sebald has returned: He sings unto the people in the hall Of Roland and his friend, dead Oliver,

‘An Ode’, 19: ‘Who thus her birdly kind doth stain’. Curiously, it was to be used later by KT, Cuckoo-­Songs (1894), ‘Brother Ronain of the Birds’, 64: ‘And sweet ‘tweet tweet’ of birdly chatter’. 68, 70, 72, 74. an old world garden] The adjectival ‘old world’ here (OED B.1., ‘Belonging to or characteristic of former times, esp. with reference to picturesqueness, or to the charm and courtesy supposed to have prevailed in the past’) had recently gained a certain poetic currency in the title of C.G. Rossetti’s ‘An Old World Thicket’ (A Pageant and Other Poems, 1881), where a garden is filled with (sometimes alarming and disconcerting) allegorical flora. 71^72.] An old world garden where with folded wing | All [day del.] summer long the hours sit and sing Nb5. 73. dream nodding to dream] To make firmer his personification of these dreams, WBY plays here on a second sense of ‘nod’, which in 72 means to sleep, and here becomes the physical gesture of nodding the head.

74. pulse and beat] Philip Bourke Marston (1850–87), a protégé of D.G. Rossetti and a member of the Pre-­ Raphaelite circle in London, uses this phrase in his sonnet ‘Spring’s Return’ (All in All (1879)), 7–8: ‘Laughter of winds and waters, pulse and beat  | Of Nature’s heart’ (to rhyme with ‘All the flowers that rise beneath her feet’). 75. rushing feet] Cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam XI, 99–100, ‘Hear’st  thou not the tread  | Of rushing feet?’ 77. batch of friendly dreams] nest del. batch of dizzy del friendly dreams Nb5. 78^79.] To bring us thither word: ho, speak Sir Page! del. Nb5. 79. eyrie] nest del. eyrie Nb5. 79. their] WBY possibly intends ‘our’. 83.] Le Chanson de Roland, a French poem of the late eleventh century, centres on Roland, nephew of the emperor Charlemagne. Roland’s friend Olivier [WBY’s ‘Oliver’ in the MS carries a mark which may signify an intended stress for the final syllable] is killed by Margarice.

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85

133

And of the trumpet-­blast of Fonteurault, And how the bright blades sprang at Fonteurault, And Charlemagne’s bitter wrath at Fonteurault. He sings of Roland’s uncle, whom God curse, And of – Ginevra

      Be still; lead on, we’ll follow thee As fast as though the heathen were behind.

(Exeunt)

84.] The poem’s famous ‘trumpet-­blast’ comes in fact at Roncevalles, when Roland’s last act is to give three great blasts on his olifant horn, in order to summon Charlemagne’s forces to the battle. Fontrevault Abbey in Maine

sur Loire, founded in 1101, is presumably intended by WBY here, though it does not figure in the Chanson de Roland. 87. Roland’s uncle] Probably in fact the character Ganelon, a traitor who is Roland’s stepfather.

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Scene 2 A ruined tower. A tomb in the foreground, on which a gnome sits cross-­legged. Gnome 5 10 15 20 25

I like to read my epitaph And stretch my bones here once a day, Feeling warm evening winds Stir in my thin grey hair. ’Tis a mouldy place below, Under the deep-­cut epitaph. See, here they’ve cut it, chiselled thus: ‘A gnome, once terror of this land, Lies here. God rest his sinful soul.’ Ay, rest his soul; ay, rest his soul: His soul shall rest and never fear When of thy house, King Ralph, A man shall fall for every blow Of steel upon the stone Ten years ago in felling me. Thy sword in slaying me raised up My gossips and my friends, The spirits of the pine, ’gainst thee And all the people of thy house. The stranger at thy door shall die, The dogs before thy gate, Yea, thy whole house will fall: The goat upon thy walls will climb, The laughing fays will dance, Weaving circles green ’Mong bones that are shining

S.D. tower] building Nb5. 4. thin grey hair] Cp. the Traveller encountered in the first stanza of Wordsworth’s ‘Guilt and Sorrow: Or, Incidents Upon Salisbury Plain’, 7: ‘Down fell in straggling locks his thin grey hair’. 5. ’Tis] It’s Nb5. 5–6.] Perhaps cp. Robert Blair, The Grave (1753), 204–5: ‘The Busto moulders, and the deep-­cut Marble, | Unsteady to the Steel, gives up its Charge’.

17. gossips] playmates del. gossips Nb5. 20. stranger at thy door] Strangers at doors have proverbial force, and enter some religious discourse, as e.g. in a hymn by Joseph Grigg which begins ‘Behold, a stranger at the door!’ (the stranger being Christ). This proverbial/religious element may underlie the unexpected substitution of ‘angel’ for ‘stranger’ in W. Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’ from Songs of Innocence, ‘Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door’.



30 35 40 45 50 55

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135

With pallor of snow, Sunk in the dewy grass, Yea, bones as white as snow – The little agile fays With chatter and dancing The pinions will feather Of hours a-­fleeting, Each stone moss-­encumbered In the moony quiet Of the roofless towers, Will harbour a fairy As a moon-­flake of light. O, time will be speeding In halls that are royal As never it speedeth In days of the striving Of planner of tourney, Of masque-­makers’ labour. O, the dead walls will ring With singing and laughter From lips that are redder Than reddest ash-­berries, And nodding their bright heads The wild-­footed fairies, The courtier fairies, will bow To Mab, the illustrious queen, Proudest and fairest of fairies. O, then shall be feasting, King Ralph: Not, Ralph, for thee; not, Ralph, for thine: But the bones are for thee, and thy people. From thy beautiful daughter, King Ralph, I will fashion a flame for consuming Thee, and thy house, and thy people.

30. little agile fays] Perhaps cp. Matthew Prior, Solomon on the Vanity of the World (1718) III, 623–4: ‘this little, agile, pervious Fire, | This flutt’ring motion, which we call the Mind’. 36. the roofless towers] Perhaps cp. Thomas Ingoldsby [Richard Harris Barham], The Ingoldsby Legends (1840), ‘Netley Abbey’, 3–4: ‘a golden glow | To thy roofless towers he gave’. 52. Mab] The Queen of the fairies in English folklore, described in Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet I iv 55–96. WBY would probably be

familiar also with Shelley’s early work, Queen Mab (1813). A few years later, he associated Mab with the legendary Irish Queen Maeve: see John Sherman (1891), Part 5, ch.4: ‘the grave of Maeve, Mab of the faeries’. 56. and thy people,] King Ralph. Nb5. 57–65.] Not in Nb5 [Marks made in the MS may indicate the need for further lines to be composed here.] 56^66.] Then shall my ghost have peace, | Then shall my soul have rest. Nb5.

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Smitten, thy life will blossom The fruit and the flower of sin, For I joy in the fall of the gracious, The fall of the gentle of heart. And then in victorious sleep My ghost shall rest in the tomb.

(Starts up, standing)

The clock has struck, The time’s at hand; The years have flown, My peace is near.

(Blows his horn) 0 7 75 80 85 90

Gather from the quarters four To the sound of the master’s horn. Come all unholy things Hence and sing the song of Moscon With slumbering memories. Voice it as his brother’s The song-­soul of the pine, ‘’Tis done, ’tis done, ’tis done.’ I hear the far-­off lips Of the fountains’ low reply, I hear the little trumpets sound Of an hundred thousand streamlets, ‘’Tis done, ’tis done, ’tis done.’ Ere the new moon is old The final fate will come. My time of grace has passed away, Once more I seek the tomb. ’Mong the worms and the dark earth-­beetles I lie till you are dead, O Ralph and your people. Hark, the far-­off echo Of some great lonely rock Sendeth back the sound triumphant Of my horn to me returning.

(Sinks back into the tomb) 79. low] fierce Nb5. 81. hundred thousand streamlets] Cp. Robert Southey, Poetical Works (1838), Thalaba

the Destroyer, VI 116–117: ‘In mazy windings o’er the vale  | A  thousand streamlets strayed’.

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137

Scene 3 An antique room, gothic windows. Enter Ginevra and waiting women. Ginevra

How is the clock? 1 waiting woman

  The time is close on three. Ginevra

Last eve about this hour ’mong the pine I wandered by that shadow-­peopled path That heads, I think, unto a peasant’s house. Waiting woman

5

O, who would live among the haunted pine? Ginevra



I saw a hunter resting on his bow Among the tumbling forest lights, and sing Of love and sorrow’s endless brotherhood, To ease his heart it seemed. Waiting woman

 O wonderful! Ginevra 0 1

He was not of the common sort (heigh ho! My heart has gone from me for that sweet voice!) And yet not it, but sudden memory That it has roused unto new kindling life About a child I knew full long ago.

3. hour] disyllabic. shadow-­peopled] Cp. Shelley, Prometheus

p eopled Unbound II v 102: ‘shadow-­ infancy’.

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5 1 20

The hunter’s face or song, I know not which, Has oped the door and ta’en the seal from off An old deserted chamber of my brain, And let embattled memories rush out. Is Sintram’s name familiar to your ears? He was a boy, a fairy-­plundered boy.



(Enter Sebald at a distant door) Waiting woman



Here comes the holy church’s enemy. Ginevra

25

’Tis Sebald. See you not the golden chain He wears? He won it from a southern bard Down by the vine-­hung margent of the Rhine. They fought with war of song; the vanquished bard Laid deadly hands upon himself for grief. Waiting woman



We’ll go: we do not love that fearful man.



(Exeunt waiting women) Ginevra

30

How is it, Sebald, though you sing great songs And are a famous courtier and a sage, All these my waiting women fear you so, You whom so many courts have hailed most wise?

17. chamber of my brain] The chambers of the brain were commonly referred to in verse: see e.g. Samuel Rogers, The Pleasures of Memory (1792), I 171: ‘the countless chambers of the brain’, R.W. Buchanan, The Book of Orm (1870) I 239–240: ‘withdrawn  | Unto the innermost chamber of the brain’, or T.C. Irwin, Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘An Old September: Song’, 38–9:

‘And from the chambers of the brain  | Draw beauty forth’. 24. margent] OED 2: ‘An outline, edge, or border of something; a river bank’. The word occurs in Spenser, The Faerie Queene III iii 34: ‘the margent of the foamy shore’ and V x 3: ‘the margent of the Molucas’. More recently, it had turned up in R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Winning of Amarac’ 134: ‘she nears | The margent of the lake’.

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Sebald 35

Most radiant princess, wisdom is a plant That seldom flowers in a golden vase, But loves the rock, and wisdom’s nurse, old age, Has faded eyes, few hairs, and features stern. These are but paltry bubbles of the court Thou hast with you. Ginevra

           Come sit ye down, I’ll sit: I’ve wished for some time past to question you. Can you recall the tale of Biorn’s sons? 40 One whom I knew of old was Sintram called, His brother (I forget his name) they said Was like him as is reed to reed in spring As yet unblown-­on by the fragrant blast, For they were twins. Speak: I would know their fate. Sebald 5 4

When he was very young, the fairies stole Young Sintram whom you knew; the other child, Whom they called Moscon, with his father passed, The outlawed earl, unto another land ’Tis said, for never trace was found of them. Ginevra

50

’Twas Sintram that I heard. Sebald

               What said you then Beneath your breath? Ginevra            Why naught, unless it be I wondered if you ever were in love. Sebald

No, child; I hold the sorrows of one man And his own brooding thoughts shall make him grey,

139

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But if he take another to his house Her sorrows shall be his beside his own. Ginevra



What of him the fairies stole? Sebald

             Among the pine He rules the fleeting shadows, and he hath His court in rising and in setting suns. 60 His name is mighty by the rushy marge, And loud above the froth of haunted lakes. Full oft belated wanderers ’mong the pine Have heard a sound of hunting, and have seen Pass by the phantom hunter and his hounds. 65 His father is the foe of all this house If he still live, but most I fear the son. There is an ancient prophecy, by me Uncharnelled from old legend-­lore, that saith No mortal hand shall overthrow this house: 70 But Sintram is no mortal, and ’tis known Naught living sees him near and lives. But hark!

(A voice in the distance sings)

60. the rushy marge] Perhaps cp. Jean Ingelow, A Rhyming Chronicle (1850), ‘The Death of Moses on Mount Nebo’, 58–9: ‘The winding river, by whose rushy marge | The tribes by number lay’. 61. haunted lakes] Cp. John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘Poesy: Rhapsodia’, 132: ‘Magic meres and haunted lakes’. 68. uncharnelled] From ‘uncharnel’, meaning to remove from a charnel house, or tomb. WBY had used this word shortly before, in Vivien and Time I iii 53 (see note). Cp. Henry Kirke-­White, Poetical Works (1830), ‘Fragment’, 37–8: ‘Tell of uncharnelled spectres, seen to glide | Along the lone wood’s unfrequented path’.

legend-­lore] Perhaps cp. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Golden Violet (1827), ‘The Dream: The Lay of the Scottish Minstrel’, 198– 9: ‘the store | He treasured up of legend lore’. 72–118.] These lines for the ‘voice in the distance’ (originally, for Moscon) were to be for the most part salvaged by WBY as the poem ‘Love and Death’ in the Dublin University Review for May 1885. (This version is included separately in the present edition.) It may be that the periodical publication of the lyric, carrying the same title as the verse tragedy, marks the latest date before which Love and Death could have continued to be thought of by WBY



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See the flashing waters   A cloven dancing jet From the milk-­white marble 75   For ever foam and fret; Far in the drowsy meadow   Where yellow saffron blow, The feet of summer dabble   In their coiling calm and slow. 80 The banks are worn for ever   By a people sadly gay, A Titan with wild laughter   Made of the mingled spray. Go ask the springing flowers 85   And flowing air above as a viable work – probably, that is, about a year after the verse play had been finished. For these lines, another MS source exists besides those in Nb5 and Nb2: this is a single sheet of paper, NLI 31042 [MS1 in notes below], which also includes the five-­line poem (or fragment) ‘My song thou knowest of a dreaming castle’. The presence on this leaf (which has been folded so as to make four ‘pages’) of a sketch of a head may indicate that the lines were being drafted while WBY was attending the Metropolitan School of Art (i.e. from May 1884), but this is by no means certain. Indeed, the fact that the lines here are very clearly (unlike their companion fragment) a first draft, and have no explicit connection with any dramatic context, could mean that they pre-­date the composition of this part of WBY’s tragedy (and we need not suppose that WBY only began sketching heads once he went to art school). It is possible that the lines were brought into the drama only after the scene between Sebald and Ginevra, preserved in Nb5 and edited separately here, had been abandoned. There, as here, a voice from outside sings a lyric, for the hearing of the two characters: the poem in that scene (‘Sweet was the voice of morning’) is markedly weaker than these lines, which were to become the only lines from the work that WBY allowed into print. S.D. A voice] Moscon Nb5 Moscon del. Nb2. 72. flashing waters] A common piece of poetic diction. WBY would have encountered it in Aubrey

De Vere, Irish Odes (1869), ‘Lines Written beside the Lago Varese’ 13–14: ‘Still o’er the flashing waters lean | The mulberry and the maize’. See two flash[ing] del. MS1 See the dancing waters del. Nb5. 73. dancing] purple MS1 74. milk-­white marble] Cp. Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (1879), II 4424–6: ‘a tank  | Of bulky marble built, and laid with slabs  | Of milk-­white marble’. 76–79.] [Through the drowsy meadows Where wide-­eyed [flowers del.] blossoms blow del.] With the globes of dancing dew The twin-­born rivers flow. MS1 77. yellow saffron] Perhaps cp. John Dryden, Georgics of Virgil I, 84: ‘Thus Tmolus is with yellow saffron crowned’. Where the yellow saffron blow MS1. 79. calm] deep del. long del. calm MS1. 80–84.] Not in MS1. 81. sadly gay] Perhaps cp. Lady Morgan, The Lay of an Irish Harp (1807), ‘The Drawing Room’, 4: ‘So coldly pleased, so sadly gay’. 82. A Titan] One of the Greek deities supposed to precede the Olympians. WBY returns to the breed in his poem ‘The Two Titans’ (1886). 83. the mingled] their mingled Nb5. 84. springing] wide-­eyed MS1.

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What are the twin-­born waters,   They’d answer death and love. Bearing withered flowers,   Two lonely spirits wait,   90 Bearing withered flowers   ’Fore paradise’s gate. They may not pass the portal,   Poor earth-­enkindled pair, Though sad is many a spirit   95   To pass and leave them there Staring, and their flowers   That dull and faded are. If one rise beside thee,   The other is not far. 00 1 Go ask the youngest angel,   She will say with bated breath By the door of Mary’s garden   Are the spirits love and death. I was happy in the green wood 105   And careless of the morrow, Till by the stealing rivers   I saw the pilgrim sorrow Beneath a shady cypress   Sitting on a mossy seat. 110 I saw him in the water   Bathe his aching feet;

85. flowing] the flowing MS1. 86. What are] They say MS1 They’d say del. What are Nb5. 87. They’d answer] Are the rivers MS1. 90.] Hand in hand there sitting del. MS1. 91.] O lonely lonely spirits Fair as flowers for a star, If one shall rise beside thee, Then the other is not [far] MS1. 94. spirit] ghost Nb5. 95. and] at Nb5. 100. Go ask] If you’d ask MS1. 100–101.] Far o’er the merry meadow | Flows the river [?rain’s] dew-­breath MS1.

101. bated breath] The commonplace, meaning ‘breathing subdued or restrained under the influence of awe, terror, or other emotion’ (OED), originates in Shakespeare, Measure for Measure I iii 123: ‘With bated breath, and whispering humbleness’. will] would MS1. 104–119.] Not in MS1, though lines similar to 104–5 are deleted, and fragments of lines are begun, including ‘I stole the winged sandal’ and ‘Now for ever at my’. 107. pilgrim sorrow] cp. Frederick Tennyson, Days and Hours (1854), ‘Twenty-­ First of June’, 21: ‘the lonely pilgrim Sorrow’. 112–115.] An allusion to John 12:3: ‘Then took Mary a point of ointment of spikenard, very

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143

I took them from the water,   I wept upon them there, The feet of pilgrim sorrow, 115   And I wiped them with my hair. But if you come he’ll vanish   And the sun will shine again; But if you come he’ll vanish   And the woods will laugh again. Sebald 120

The honied voice of some aerial thing.



(Ginevra is going)



Why do you sigh and tremble at the song? Come back: who sang? Ginevra

             Where nearest sweeps the pine I’ve heard the song before a hunter sang. We have not spoken, but I’m worlds in love. Sebald 125

Child – Ginevra

      Nay, not the man – the voice I meant. Sebald 130

Though silence is the manna of the soul, Yet fear the pine: they are a haunted race. At times a mournful flame will ripple past Along the sorrel leaves from gloom to gloom, A dwarf at times will leap along the ground, Will shriek and laugh, and then is gone once more. At times a lonely glade will sudden ring

costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair’. 120.] Song like the shriek of a dying bittern  | Caught in the clutches of amorous death del. Nb5. 124. worlds] world Nb5.

129. from gloom to gloom] A  fairly common poetic expression, but cp. Aubrey De Vere, Legends of Saint Patrick (1879), ‘St. Patrick and the Children of Fochlet Wood’, 35–6: ‘A thousand pathways wound | From gloom to gloom’.

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135 140 145

With horses’ hoofs, and crash of shattered spears, As though two knights had met in mid-­career, And then ’tis gone, and naught is seen or changed, But silence seems to gather round more deep; Or with their long beards nodding up and down, A troop of old men in white robes go by, And many singing shades are there – such was The one who sang. For never mortal man Lives ’mid the windless and the birdless dusk Of that dread wood. Beyond the outer edge The very charcoal-­burners, who were made Too slow for stroke of doom, will venture not. O, fear that land: there dwells a curse that fell On many a father of thy gloomy race. Ginevra (going near to him)



I place my hair by thine, and it is bright, But yours is old and thin, and very white.



(exit) Sebald (alone)

150 155

’Tis well for bards to brood on graves gone by, And on the grave to come, and hear their voice, And even gaze on silence’s grey eyes; But laughter and bright deeds are children’s part. Yet she is not as other children be; Some day she may inherit mine old harp, And it will gloat and ring with lyric joy, And feel the living touch of passion’s fire, And flash new singing in the bardic choir.

135. is] was Nb5, 136. seems] seemed Nb5. 138. go] pass Nb5. 139. such was] Not in Nb5. 139–142.] Such was the one who sang but now his song, For not a mortal lives in all that wood: Naught there but its own fearful populace Nb5. 143^146.]

Beyond the outer edge of scattered trees, And you of all mankind should fear that land For there there walks a withering curse that falls On many a father of thy gloomy race. Nb5. 152.] Merry word and laughter is for children Nb5. bright deeds] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), March’, 8: ‘Yet though the time with no bright deeds was rife’. 155. lyric joy] fierce song Nb5 fierce song del. lyric joy Nb2.

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145

Scene 4 A long corridor with gothic pillars and windows. At the far end a huge window through which the pine wood appears, lit up by the setting sun that during the progress of the scene grows redder and redder at the far end of the corridor. Enter Ginevra 5 10 15

Ginevra (coming down the corridor) Why does that spirit song so trouble me? Is’t memory of faded days, or love (A love the nursling of unhuman pride) For some fantastic thing of wandering air? Yes, memory of faded days or love? When in that ancient castle lived we twain And saw the days pass by in careless peace, Each bringing some new joy – in those fair days The hours like a troop of maidens gay, Some crowned with roses, and with lilies some, With streaming hair passed by in endless song. The swallows nested on the ivied walls; From woodlands came the whispers many-­fold At eve, the murmur of the laden bees. Now man the alien of the world has ta’en His pining and unrest from those calm walls, Within his banquet hall the swallows nest, The lonely heron sleeps upon the wall, And joy and peace sit there carousing still.

2. faded days] fading day Nb5. 3. A love the nursling of] The foster-­child of mine Nb5. 4. wandering air] The phrase is not uncommon, but it is a particular favourite of T.C. Irwin, who uses it four times, in e.g. Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘Drifted beyond the wave’, 6–7: ‘Unto the wandering air | Whispering its fancies rare’, and Songs and Romances (1878), ‘Le Tour de Halle, Bruges’, 41–2: ‘by the dim walls came and went | A wandering air amid the leaves’.

9. maidens gay] Cp. S.T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 609: ‘youths and maidens gay’. 10.] This conjunction of roses and lilies was to become common  – almost a commonplace – in WBY’s writings of the 1890s, when it would generally carry mystical as well as sexual connotations. 13. whispers] murmurs Nb5. 14.] Not in Nb5. 16. those calm walls] its calm years Nb5. 17.] And now within his banquet hall the swallows [hang del.] nest Nb5.

146 0 2

LOVE AND DEATH

The ageless hours pass with self-­same song Though banished is the lord of that old house: Why then such storm in after memory? Yet it is memory. (Turns the other way, and speaks excitedly)

25 30 35

Nay, all the earth is loud with one wild word! The little voices of the rivers cry, The voices of far woodlands cry I love This thing of air. A mist takes shape; Deep in the gloom by yonder wreathèd arch I see two children sitting side by side, See one is crying, and the other speaks. Peace soul, peace soul, hear thou the elder’s voice; Upon the other look not – ’tis thy self, See how the bright hair glows around his face; His hand lies fair on yonder pillar’s curve, Just where the pomegranates hang in stone, The hand that rules above the forest now. His lips are moving: peace, he speaks, he speaks! (She stands still)

40

Oh who may taste the honey of dead flowers, Or hear the breathing voices of the past? I may not hear my own loved Sintram’s voice; These are the phantoms of ten years ago. Tell me, are you living children? Tell me. (Advances to the pillar)



Ye vanish, progeny of my poor brain, Nothing more: ye are but fiery memory.

20. pass] pass on Nb5. 23^24.] A word, a voice from out my soul has spoken Nb5. 27–28.] What is that glowing mist that taketh shape | Deep in the gloom by yonder wreathèd arch? Nb5. 27. thing of air] Cp. Byron, Don Juan xvi, st. 23: ‘Once, twice, thrice passes, repassed  – the thing of air’, and Shelley, Prometheus Unbound II i 129: ‘yet ’tis a thing of air’. 31.] Peace soul, harken the voice of the elder Nb5. 35. hang] flash del. hang Nb5.

39.] Or hear [again del.] the ^breathing^ voices of the past Nb5. breathing voices] Cp. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), XIII, 12: ‘A Spirit, not a breathing voice’. 44. fiery memory] A distinctively Swinburnian phrase. Cp. Poems and Ballads (First Series) (1866), ‘Erotion’, 3: ‘some fiery memory of his breath’, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), ‘Summer in Auverne’, 47: ‘Some fiery memory stays’, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) VI, 289: ‘A fiery memory for all storied years’.

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147

(Turns the other way, and becomes composed) 5 4 50 55

A thought, a memory, is like a lute That hangs upon the arras in the hall ’Mong shields and armour and the hunting-­horns, Till, found by chance, a stranger touch the strings Uncaring and unknowing whose it was, And then the listeners hear its sweet complaint: So is a thought, when once aroused by chance. To its o’er-­mastering self it bows all down, And does usurp the fiery might of love; So am I made the sport of memory – How splendidly the flame-­red flower eve Has hurled its crimson petals o’er the world! (Turns and paces the other way, becoming immediately excited)

60 65

Why is it, when I turn myself this way And face the country of the haunted pine, My thoughts are with a burning signet stamped? O holy Mary, look upon thy child, See what is standing ’twixt the earth and sky! My joy, my terror, and my splendid love, Half-­fashioned of the fiery sunset’s glow! Sintram, Sintram, My childish love, my friend of long ago, Sintram, Sintram! (She stands gazing out of the windows till the light has paled)



He has vanished!



(exit)

47^48.] A  lute that hath not spoken many years Nb5. 50. listeners] list’ners MS. 53. fiery might] Perhaps cp. M. Arnold, Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems (1852), ‘Memorial Verses’ 59: ‘Man’s prudence and man’s fiery might’.

55–56.] How shining streams the holy hair of day  | Till all night’s growing deep it has illumed Nb5. 56. crimson petals] Cp. Tennyson, The Princess, Song, 1: ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white’. See note to Act 2 Sc.1, 5.

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Scene 5

A glade in the forest. Enter Alice and Moscon with a bundle of herbs. Alice



How has your searching sped? Full many sick Will need to thank thee for these herbs. Moscon

5

Behold, The mountain twelve you asked me for I have: Behold blue, purple, green, and fretted white Your twelve apostles in the holy art. You’re sad? Alice

     Nay, see I smile: I am not sad. I thank thee in my peasants’ name for these And in my own. The flowers that you bring, 10 You called them blue and purple some, and white: I only know them by their smells and shapes, For I am blind these many lightless years. But yet the past and future grow more near To those the present holds with lightest hands: 15 I had a vision in the midmost night Of thee that makes me sad. Lead me, I pray, Unto the fallen pine that lies nearby, That I may rest, and tell it thee. Moscon              ’Tis here, I lead thee here, as you my gentle maid 20 Led me, a poor wild forester, again Unto the holy saints and love of men. Alice

A sudden gleam of colour seemed to come, First like a mist, then like a maiden crowned,

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25 30 35 40

149

And yet no maid, for never mortal maid I think had eyes of such a fearful calm. It took my hand and bid me rise, in tones More wild than ghastly screech-­owls’ call – I rose And went with it; soon by the odorous air And calm I knew we were among the pine. As footing of the wind we passed, until I saw before my feet a silent hall, And hand in hand the thing and I passed in. Upon the ground tall warriors lay, who held Some cups, and some had drawn their mantles close As though with sudden chill, but all were dead. Some lay upon the ground, but most sat still Around the tables in a pallid throng, All dead. Upon a throne-­topped dais raised Nearby the further end, a maiden sat With head hung low upon her breast. The thing That held my hand said, ‘dead’, and I awoke, the voice Still ringing wildly in mine ears that felt The silence of the wood more dread, and then Afar above the trees I saw dawn burn. Moscon

5 4 50

Fear not, I’m but a simple forester; My death will never come beneath a roof. From this my seat upon the fallen tree I see high up the mountain’s misty slope Not far beneath the gleam of ancient snows, A dead and solitary tree, that rears A tempest-­blanched and sapless length on high

25. such a fearful calm] Perhaps cp. Shelley, Queen Mab (1813), IV, 53–4: ‘deep silence, like the fearful calm  | That slumbers in the storm’s portentous pause’. 27. I rose] though low Nb5 though low del. Nb2. than ghastly] than ^ghastly^ Nb2. 28–30.] And passed with it among the silent trees  | As fast as footing of the wind until Nb5. 41. and I  awoke, the voice] I  looked on it Nb5.

41^42.] With her upon the throne it seemed as one  | Near that dead crownèd maid methought you lay. | The thing sighed ‘dead’, and I awoke, the voice Nb5. 43. more dread, and then] [more strange and dread del.] Nb5. 44. I saw dawn burn] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), ‘The Statue of Victor Hugo’, 131–2: ‘the fragrant song whose burning dawn disperses | Darkness’. 47. tree] trunk Nb5.

150

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55 60 65

Above its kind, that leave a glade around As though they sank from its forsaken strength. Near that high tree there is a hollow rock Whose mouth’s unknown to any feet save mine, Mine and the printless footing of the wind. There I shall live and die, unless mayhap Some mountain bear, or wounded boar at bay, Shall slay me in his lonely rage. Why then Should you whom fate used ill, man worse than fate, Make yourself sad with vacant augury? I hear your foster-­father’s step close by Upon the pine cones and the noisy leaves: Farewell, the bands of mine old life will still A bit fain keep me from men’s company. Farewell, farewell my sweetest counsellor.



(Enter an old peasant, running) Alice



Farewell, if you must go. Moscon

           I’ll soon return. Peasant

How is your sunstroke sir?



Moscon          ’Tis well. Peasant

                       Hussy, Begone – you know the way as well as I, 70 In spite of those owl’s eyes: owls see at night. Mole’s eyes – aye that’s the better word, mole’s eyes.

(Exit Alice)

67. return] be back Nb5.

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Moscon

Old man! Peasant

  And isn’t she my foster-­child? Now sir, just wait: I’d have a word with you. Upon the day you were with sunstroke down, 75 The shepherd Colin and those other two Would after robbing you have left you there, Hawks’ food, worms’ food. But I (you see this mark Upon my face?) brought you away by force. Now sir, or rather noble knight – Moscon                 I see; 80 I’ll come again – you shall have pay. Peasant                        Stay now, Not altogether that I meant, but this – Moscon                 Oh, I’ll return again.

(Exit up the mountain) Peasant (shouting)

85

And see you keep your fire a-­lit all night: The banded pards and mountain bears are up – They slew a sheep last night, a goodly sheep, There was no better ten miles round, nay twelve. Moscon (shouting from above)



I’ll not forget.

80. you shall have pay] and give you what I can del. Nb5.

151

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LOVE AND DEATH

Peasant (shouting)        And if the phantoms speak, Then answer not again. Moscon (from above)            Look here, old man, ’Tis not for naught I’ve ranged the woods ten years. Peasant   90

Hot blood, young blood! He’s half up the mount. (shouts) Guard well your neck, sir knight, among the rocks!

  95 100

He’s out of hearing now, hot blood, young blood. Methinks I’d had a better bargain far To do as those two loons had wished me do, To take his cloak and purse, and leave him there. ’Twere worth a crown or two, nay four at least. When once he has the pine ’twixt him and me I’ll never see him more: who now will say That gray beards are the nurse of wisdom calm And forethought sage? For I have been a fool And have disgraced my age. I’ve been a fool.



Exit

88. woods] pine Nb5. 93. To do . . . me do] To’ve done . . . to do Nb5.

98. wisdom calm] wisdom’s self Nb5. 99. sage] calm Nb5.

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153

Act 3 Scene 1 A dark stone room decked with strange figures, columns, and alchemist’s tools. A flight of stone steps lead to a door above. Sebald stooping over a small furnace. Enter at the door above a torch-­bearer followed by Ginevra, attended. Ginevra

You saw them talking, say you? Torch-­bearer

                Aye, Lady. Ginevra

And knew them not? Torch-­bearer

          I did not know them, lady. 1 Waiting woman (still on the steps)

We’ve oped the doors and let the light on hell. 2 Waiting woman



Pshaw! How the brimstone smells! 1 Waiting woman

           Now keep us, saints!

2^3.] O gossip, we have done a wondrous deed Nb5.

154

LOVE AND DEATH

Ginevra (to Sebald) 5

I’m here about the thing you know of, sir – Muster him whom I wish to see: you know. 1 Waiting woman



Now holy Mary, be thou merciful! 2 Waiting woman



To raise the devil is against the Church.



(1 Waiting woman begins telling her beads) 3 Waiting woman



Good sir, the sight of him would kill us all! Ginevra

0 1

Have peace! Hence, fools, and wait me by the door; Ye talk of lofty things ye know not of. Good friend, I pray thee hold my cloak for me; Go wait without the door till ye are called.



(They hurry out) Sebald



Your waiting women are but timid souls. Ginevra

5 1 20

Among the changeless woods their fathers lived, And passed, a quiet folk, to quiet graves; They knew not war or cunning of thy song. What wondrous thing if fear forever sits To warm his warm heart by their chimney corners And jog their elbows in the public way?

9. would] will Nb5. 15. the changeless woods] Cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), X, 230: ‘past the changeless woods they went’.

16. quiet graves] Perhaps cp. John Dryden trans., Aeneid VI 456: ‘Their funeral honours claimed, and asked their quiet graves’. 19–20.] What wondrous thing if fear forever is | By the side of the fires, warming his [?hair] [MS: hear] Nb.5.

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155

As native as the spots on woodpeckers Is fear unto the harmless peasants’ race. Here sit I down in this old carvèd chair That standeth, chatting as it were, with thine. (sits down)

5 2 30 35

Do not the dead men come and sit down here When thy old fingers sweep along the harp? Does Paris come at times – I think ’tis so – And tell thee of the blue of Helen’s eyes As yet untamed by Hades’ mist? And when you sing, sits old Ulysses here, The thin old Greek with his keen eyes of gray, And tells thee of the strong things done of old When through the froth smote all the sounding oars, And draws the sea-­stained cloak about his chin As though the foam sang all around him still? And here the long-­armed Aesop sits and tells How green the earth was in the olden days. Is it not so? Sebald

          Shall I perform the spell? Ginevra

Is not the ground o’er-­trod with holy feet? Sebald (his hand on a curtain that hangs at the back of the stage)

40

What hour of the day shall I recall? Ginevra (pointing to the top of a stone shelf of alchemist’s tools)



Yet stay, why are the pipes of Pan carved there?

23 old] great Nb.5. 26. along] across del. along Nb5. 27. Does] Doth Nb5. 30. old Ulysses] An unusual epithet for the Greek hero, but present in Keats, Endymion (1818), II, 26–7: ‘Though old Ulysses tortured from his slumbers | The glutted Cyclops’.

34. And draws] Drawing Nb5. sea-­stained] Cp. John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘The Daughter of Hippocrates’, 159–60: ‘No common sailor, by his noble air | And rich though sea-­stained dress’. 37. in the olden days] was green in Latium Nb5, del. Nb2.

156 45 50

LOVE AND DEATH

Is it because, before the birth of years, Gifts all the happy gods to science gave, And Pan from ’mong his bounding satyrs cried: ‘A greater gift than all these gods I give. By these my hoofs and curvèd horns I swear, For tunes of Pan shall wrap thy robe alway, And laugh in every sweeping fold it has.’ Is it not so? I will delay no more. Sebald, you know what I have come to see, And let the time be twelve of yesterday. Draw back the curtain: I am very firm.

(Sebald draws the curtain and shows a magic mirror, before which are burning herbs that send up odorous vapour. A bright light from the mirror fills the room.) Sebald

What do you see? Ginevra



A mist, and nothing more.

Sebald

What now? Ginevra

55 60

I see a vision of dim trees Among the twilight of the haunted wood; The shrivelled pine-­cones strew the grassless ground. Like columns of blue smoke the pine trees rise: On one I see a little nuthatch climb And peck without a sound upon the stem; An owl goes by, and sinks among the trees, For it is everlasting evening there. These things I see, naught else.

44. bounding satyrs] Perhaps cp. Charles Mackay, Studies from the Antique (1864), ‘Bacchus and Evanthe’, 30: ‘The bounding satyrs struck the tambourine’. 52. very firm] firm as rock Nb5. 58. a little] an [eager del.] Nb5.

60. trees] gloom del. trees Nb5. 61. everlasting evening] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘A Lady’s Imprisonment’, 212–13: ‘In everlasting evening, pallid ghosts  | Seemed wandering’.

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157

Sebald

Look once again.

Ginevra 65 70

Upon a beaten track that wanders wide Beneath an even stretch of sword-­bright sky I see two walking with short steps, in talk; Behind, before the deep blue pinewood shade, Of ageless night unhaunted of the moon, Their lips move as with those who talk of love. I hear no word, and without sound they tread On o’er the withered cones and roots of pine. His face and hair – illuminated face – Their lips move as with those who talk of love! (faints) Sebald (rushing to the door)



The princess faints! Help, help!



Enter Waiting women 1 Waiting woman



’Tis all against the holy Church!

63. wanders wide] winding lies Nb5. 64. sword-­bright] It is possible that WBY’s epithet here (which is unique) simply inverts the word-­order of Othello I  ii 59: ‘Keep up your bright swords’. sky] blue del. sky Nb5. 65. in talk] and slow Nb5.

66. pinewood shade] pines’ blue shade Nb5. 67.] Not in Nb5. 70. cones] husks del. cones Nb5. 71.] ’Tis his sad face and glowing hair, his face Nb5. 72. talk of] mutter del. talk of Nb5.

158

LOVE AND DEATH

Scene 2 A room in the palace. Ginevra sleeping on a couch in the foreground. Waiting women about. Ginevra (in her sleep) 5

Thou art uneasy in thy grave, say’st thou? So of us two, you are the ghost, not I. O cross-­legged sitter on the stone, knowest him? He is above the cedars and the pine, Above the pine and cedars dwelleth he. Thy name? What means that changeless smile of thine? Answer me, spirit! What, the stone is bare! Why to the beetles of the earth so fast? 1 Waiting woman



She wakes. Ginevra

10

There is no legend on the stone: Gone, gone, outworn by footing of old time. 2 Waiting woman



These many days she has been raving thus. Ginevra (awaking)



O my good friends, I have been raving sore. Go, swiftly send for Sebald and his harp: I’m sad of soul. 1 Waiting woman



What hast thou dreamed?

4. is] his Nb2. is Nb5. 6. changeless smile of thine] everlasting smile Nb5. changeless smile] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘March:

Atalanta’s Race’, 454: ‘the white Queen’s changeless smile’. 8.] Why hurry so fast to the earth-­beetles? Nb5. 10.] Gone, blurred away by the sucking of time Nb5.

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159

Ginevra 5 1 20 25 30 35

There is a tower of a far-­off wood, A roofless tower in a gloomy depth Of rocks and ashy trees and dripping boughs, A place of pallor, of a changeless mist, A tower that has known so soon decay It seems the court of time and crownèd death, A place where time and death have played at chess. It might have been the toy of centuries And firmer stood, for time hath worn it not. Forever in the tower whirls the wind, A place of everlasting wind and rain, But all the wilderness around is calm As though it were a nation charmed to stone. The fountains scarce may speak a honied word Unto the moon, so wondrous still it is. Yet ever there the fiend of the storm Sits on the walls and blows his trumpet shrill. No sooner do mine eyelids close in sleep Than my soul seems to stand within those walls: Close by a slab of stone, a nameless tomb, And from the tomb there comes a twisted shape, A hideous shape with plumes of azure flame. My soul and it talk there upon the tomb, A ghost by ghost upon the lonely tomb.

13.] I’m sad] [For del.] I am sad Nb5. 14.] ^The excommunicate!^ What hast thou dreamt? Nb5. WBY’s insertion here is from the (otherwise blank) facing verso and is intended to replace ‘What hast thou dreamt’, which remains undeleted on the recto. The line, shared between Ginevra and the Waiting Woman, was first ‘For I am sad of soul.  | What hast thou dreamt?’, then ‘I am sad of soul. | The excommunicate!’ WBY dropped this when revising for the Nb2 version, though in the process he left his text with a tetrameter rather than a pentameter here. 15. tower] chateau Nb5. 16. depth] wild Nb5. 17. Of rocks and] A place of Nb5.

20. of time and crownèd death] and banquet hall of death Nb5. 21. played at chess] gambled long Nb5. 23^24.] No sooner do mine eyelids close in sleep | Than my soul seems to stand within its walls, | Close by a slab of stone, a nameless tomb Nb5. 24. tower] castle Nb5. 28. a honeyed word] Perhaps cp. Oscar Wilde, Poems (1881), ‘Charmides’, 122: ‘all night long he murmured honeyed word’. 36. azure flame] Cp. W.H. Drummond, Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), ‘The Lay of the Chase of Glennasmol’ II, 9: ‘as it glanced, in azure flame’, Aubrey de Vere, Irish Odes (1869), ‘Psyche’, 30: ‘An azure flame invests thine eyes’, and R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Flight from Eman’, 215: ‘flooding all the skies with azure flame’.

160

LOVE AND DEATH

1 Waiting woman

Of what? Ginevra

  Of many things they hold converse. 40 Is Sebald coming? For I’m sick at heart. If ever from the dream I do not wake, Cross thus my hands, place thus the crucifix To keep me safe from that fell sprite – thus, thus. 3 Waiting woman 45

It is the gnome her father slew of old: It cursed the king and died, and it was laid Beneath the ground in some old tower far Within the centre of the mountain-­land.



Enter Sebald Ginevra



O Sebald, I am sick of soul and sense. (She takes his hand)

50

I wish for respite from a world of thoughts; From the abyss thy harp can hurry dreams, I’d know if it can also banish them. Did ever mortal and a spirit wed? If it is so strike on thy harp and sing. Sebald



I have abundant pleasure to obey.

47.] After this line, the version of the scene in Nb5. moves directly to line 139: what is omitted is the entry of Sebald and his performance of the ‘Yeagan’ ballad, along with the

eleven lines following. It is possible that some pages were excised from Nb5 here in order to provide a reader (perhaps Charles Johnston) with a text of the poem.

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161

(Sings) 5 5 Dwelt the princess great Yeagan,   Fairest child of Sweden old, By the sad and sounding Baltic   In her towers calm and cold. In summer’s winsome flood-­time 60   When citron flowers blow, By the sad and sounding Baltic   The princely suitors go. They left their southern vineyards,   They left their joyous castles, 65 The hunting in the forest,   The bowing of their vassals. Be merry, O ye blithe green wood,   The horns will blow again, Another race of hunters slay 70   The heron o’er her fen. The princess great Yeagan   Is waning day and night, She loves a fay of Ocean   Whose eyes are blue and bright.   75 To the towers calm and cold   When the pallid vapours twine

55–126.] This poem, Sebald’s ballad, survives only here. It is mentioned by WBY’s schoolfriend Charles Johnston, in his memoir ‘Yeats in the Making’, published in the Boston journal Poet Lore in 1906, as an instance of ‘largeness and epic sweep’ (see headnote). Johnston quotes only the opening stanza (Mikhail I, 11): Dwelt the princess great Wiagin Fairest child of Sweden old, In her castle by the Baltic In her towers calm and cold The fact that Johnston is quoting from memory more than twenty years after the event probably accounts for the differences from the Love

and Death text which survives, though there is a possibility that he is preserving part of an earlier (or later) version here. 59. flood-­time] Cp. T.B. Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome (1842), ‘The Battle of the Lake Regillus’, 17, 27: ‘So comes the Po in flood-­ time’, ‘corn-­sheaves in the flood-­time’. 62. princely suitors] Perhaps cp. E.B. Browning, Poems (1844), ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’, 14: ‘Upon princely suitors praying she has looked in her disdain’. 63. the southern vineyards] Perhaps cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘English Soldier’s Song of Memory’, 19: ‘With English blood the southern vineyards laving’.

162

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Come all the jovial suitors   In their argosies of pine. O blithely feast the suitors,   80   The chieftains young and bold, But the vapours twine for ever   O’er the towers calm and cold. To a serving-­man she cried,   ‘Slay these suitors ere the sun’.   85 Behold, when all were sleeping   Was the deed she ordered done. In lands of dreaming summer   There’s mourning in the castles, There’s wailing in the green wood,   90   There’s arming ’mong the vassals. As they died arose the day   Like to a laughing child, And placed his rosy finger   Upon the vapours wild.   95 At morning stood Yeagan   ’Mid seamews’ screaming flight, And from off her lovesome face   Tossed her hair of skyey light. Where bands of waves a-­many 100   All kiss their snowy hands While they glance, in whirling dance,   Over the chilly sands. Then cried the fair Yeagen,   ‘O waves that ever beat 105 In a merry band, o’er the chilly sand,   On wildly wingèd feet, Fly waves and tell your master   I’ve quenched each human part, And driven piteous pity 110   From out my foolish heart. 78. argosies] An argosy is ‘A merchant-­vessel of the largest size and burden; esp. those of Ragusa and Venice’ (OED). WBY would have been familiar with the word from Keats, The Eve of St  Agnes (1820), 268–9:

‘Manna and dates, in argosy transferred  | From Fez’. 98. skyey] OED 1.a: ‘Of, relating to, located in, or emanating from the sky’. The word is not uncommon in nineteenth-­century poetry.

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163

O tell him I am worthy   To be a merman’s bride.’ Then plunged the fair Yeagan   Beneath the glossy tide. 15 1 And never more hath mortal man   Seen Yeagán the fair. Ah well-­a-­day, the waves at play   All toss their silv’ry hair! Around the sunny wavelets 120   All wring their snowy hands As they glance, in whirling dance,   Over the chilly sands. So wrought the great Yeagan,   Fairest child of Sweden old, 125 By the sad and sounding Baltic,   By her towers calm and cold. Ginevra

Do her eyes see not in the lonely night Accusing shadows of the men she slew? Sebald

130 135 140

Ever the soul of a spirit hath peace: She proudly rules in the heart of the sea On a pearly throne in the flickering light, Hearing the mermen harp, the mermaids sing, There down in the land where the waves are not. She hears with a smile of the worlds above As she dreamily leans with half-­shut eyes Back on her throne in the emerald light. Full many the ships that have reached their ports Or sunk down under the laughter of waves Have sunk for the joy of her royal whim; The Tritons all shepherd for her their flocks While her vassals stout are the wandering waves:

138.] Down under the frantic joy of the waves Nb5. 140.] Tritons] WBY’s sense here is probably OED 1.b: ‘A figure of a Triton in painting, sculpture, etc.; in  Heraldry  represented as

a bearded man with the hind quarters of a fish, and usually holding a trident and a shell-­trumpet’. 141.] While the wandering waves are her vassals stout Nb5.

164 145

LOVE AND DEATH

At beck of her hand is the boundless sea. For bards and those they love the world was made: If these live on, what matter who may die? What count doth make a sparrow, eagle-­slain? Ginevra



Can feeble mortals then do such a deed By driving human pity from their hearts, And grow as phantoms of the sea or air? Sebald



Yes, some such legend is among the bards. Ginevra

50 1

Father, I thank thee for thy song, ’twas good: She was a maid o’er-­masterful but queenly. Go one of you, I’d have my palfrey brought. (No one stirs)



I tell you I will have my palfrey brought! Go, go – I ride this afternoon. Waiting woman



Ride forth! (Exit)

Sebald 155

But you are pale and ill – ride not today. Ginevra



Old man, unto thy laboratory, old man! Work ’mong thy simples and thy roots and ores, Go round the measure of thy lonely songs, Go measure out the wisdom of the world:

143.] The world is for the darlings of the bards Nb5. 146. feeble] weakly Nb5.

153–154.] What, dare you stop? You dare to linger? Go!  | Within this hour I  ride forth Nb5.

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160

165

Say that is hollow, and this still has truth. But canst thou see pale sorrow’s pilgrim ways, Who wanders through the world on noiseless feet? No, no, thou art too old for that, old man. Waiting woman

165

Who’d see the wanderings of a young girl’s wits? Who’s young enough for that? Ginevra



You saucy girl!

Waiting woman

Go not alone, for heaven’s love! Sebald

Are sick.

You still

Ginevra

At thy peril follow me. (Exit) Waiting woman (crying)

170

O sir, she’s been of late as one possessed: You may not count on her a minute’s space, So gentle once. Sebald



I’d follow, but I do not dare.

161–162.] But hast thou tried a wayward thought in scales, | Or counted the steps of a wandering grief? Nb5.

164. see] count Nb5. 165. You saucy girl!] Girl, you’re saucy! Nb5. 167. At thy peril] Fools, fools, at thy peril Nb5.

166

LOVE AND DEATH

Scene 3 A part of the forest on the outskirts. A winding beaten (path) in the foreground, on which Moscon and Colin meet from opposite sides. Moscon

Whither, my shepherd paragon, so fast? Colin



To meet my lovely Amoret this eve: She leaves the palace this most joyous day. Moscon

5

I thought before the first of shouting May Ye two fell out, and she with angry heart Went with the princess as her waiting maid, So why this sudden change? Colin

Why, many things: You see she hungered for the idle woods And for the many glades and bleating fields, 10 And then a tree close by her window grew, Cut like a bird, a shape unnatural, And it was heavy on her country heart, And so we’d make our quarrel up she said, And she would be a shepherdess once more. 15 At dusk I meet her in the castle yard Where from the lion’s strong mouth there flows The water ’mong the brazen drinking-­cups. Farewell. ’Tis fully time I start. Moscon

4. first of shouting] shouting first of del. Nb2. 12. her country heart] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Lady

Farewell.

Clara Vere de Vere’, 3: ‘You thought to break a country heart’.

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167

Colin 20

(aside) I’ll never tell him of the poisoned cup That did not prove so poisonous – now for The lion fountain, and for Amoret.



(exit) Moscon

25

O Alice, Alice, Alice, poor blind maid! I meet in every glade thy pensive face Like some poor piteous thing by magic raised From its long-­unremembered forest tomb.

24. poor, piteous thing] Perhaps cp. Robert Montgomery, Poetical Trifles (1825), ‘Dark night, thou herald of the musing hour’, 57–8: ‘Deceitful maid! irresolute and weak, | Poor piteous sample of an inconstant sex’. 25. long unremembered] Perhaps coincidentally, WBY here uses a rare phrase

which had hitherto been used only by the poet and travel-­w riter Lady Emmeline Stuart-­ Wortley, who employed it twice: in Poems (1833), ‘Evening’, 10: ‘Long-­unremembered feelings’, and London at Night (1834), 122: ‘old long-­unremembered years’.

168

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Scene 4 Another part of the pine forest. Alice giving medicinal herbs to a company of charcoal-­ burners, peasants, shepherds etc. Ginevra standing in the background. 1 Shepherd

My Mary begs for some the same as last. 1 Charcoal-­burner



Last eve my youngest burnt his hand and arm. Ginevra (aside)

5

She has sad vacant eyes, yes, she is blind. I had so heard, but had not thought it true; I thought some peerless beauty it had been – What, has this pale blind peasant drawn his love Away from me, whom men call very fair? 1 Charcoal-­burner



When I was out a-­seeing to the wood The child fell. Voice from the crowd

10

Peace, man! Let the lady pass. Your talk has shut your eyes, long John. Ginevra (coming forward as they make way for her)

Peasant. Alice (starting slightly)

Your ladyship, what may I do for you? I know not whom you are, for I am blind.

12. whom] The reading in MS: WBY’s grammatical error is not corrected in the present text.

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169

Ginevra

You grow pale. Alice



Do I blanch? It is not so. What may I do for you? Ginevra

Have you sure salves 15 To be a rest for heated brains? Alice

Yes, these.

Ginevra

And cordials for slighted hearts? Alice

Yes, this (Though much I doubt) is rumoured so by fame.

Ginevra (leaning close to her) And what for jealousy? Alice

Wait thou till last. (Ginevra goes to a distance, the peasants respectively making way for her) Charcoal-­burner 20

And as I was saying then, she fell And burnt her arm, and I need salves for that.

16. slighted hearts] Cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘There’s not a look, a word of

thine’, 16–17: ‘If this slighted heart must see | Its faithful pulse decay’.

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Alice

Take this, and if thou needest more go then And ask my foster-­father where it grows, And bruise it thus between the stones, as thus. 1 Charcoal-­burner



All blessing light upon your holy head! 2 Charcoal-­burner

5 2

I need some ointment for this arm of mine That was sore squeezed among the charcoal logs.



(holds out his arm) Alice



Take this, and when it’s gone, come ask for more From my old foster-­father, and he’ll find The plant that is the mother of the salve. 2 Charcoal-­burner

30

May Mary keep thee ever in her kin! A Shepherd



What I had last for my sick Susan’s done. Alice



Take this, and how to make it for thyself You know, for you have seen me make it oft. My father’ll gladly find for you the herb. Shepherd

35

But will you not make me some more yourself? Alice



While I am here I’ll gladly give to all, And be no miser of the skills I have.

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Shepherd

May you live long in light of all men’s love! Alice



Now Mary, art thou here? I’d speak to thee. Mary

40

I am. Alice



You know I think what I would say: Go not with that tall fellow as you do; Sit ’neath the rusted gold of thy thatched cot And mind the spinning of thy wheel, not him. Mary



You’re hard on me. A Woman in the crowd



Don’t you forget!

A Shepherd 45 The last.

Mary’s

Alice

Farewell. Peasants all All blessing on your head! (they go) Alice



Draw near: I am prepared, your ladyship.



Ginevra (coming forward) Is there a salve for jealousy?

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Alice

There’s none.

Ginevra

There’s none, thou sayest so? Methinks there is – Not ’mong thy herbs. These peasants, what were they? Alice

50

Poor folk I serve, and who in turn love me. Ginevra



And on the morrow will you serve again? Alice



I cannot tell, your grace. Ginevra

I think not so. There is no salve for jealousy, you said? Alice

In land nor air nor water is no salve.

55

Ginevra (seizing her arm) Art thou afraid to die? Art thou afraid? Alice



Not more than others be, and less than some. (Enter three grey shades) Grey ones, O sad presagers, whence come ye? Ginevra



What do you see with those blind eyes of thine, That mine though straining cannot see?

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173

1 Shade 0 6

Who stands by the white rose bush Pale as a burnt-­out star, Where quivering, quivering, quivering The white rose-­blossoms are? 2 Shade

65

Draw close to me, sisters twain, Hourly, daily, doth she fade, A burning heat in her brain, The lonely royal maid. 3 Shade

70

Be mute, be mute, and mark her well: Soon shall the gnome have peace, For the star and the mist have met; Soon shall his trouble cease. Alice



Do you hear what they sang? They sang of thee. Ginevra



I see the mists of evening huddle close On ever-­soundless feet, and nothing hear. Alice

5 7

As woman may be I am firm: now strike. I cannot struggle; I am blind and weak. (Ginevra kills her. The three grey shades creep away, with their fingers to their lips.) Ginevra



To horse and home! (exit)

74. soundless feet] Cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘To Victor Hugo’, 118: ‘The years with soundless feet’,

and Songs before Sunrise (1871), ‘A Watch in the Night’, 150: ‘The soundless feet of the sun’. 74. hear] more del. hear Nb3.

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Act 4 Scene 1 The pine wood. Time: night. Enter a procession of peasants with torches. At the head of the procession a coffin is carried, followed by Moscon and the Old Peasant foster-­father to Alice. The coffin is lowered into a grave in the foreground. The Old Peasant throws himself on the ground, with signs of great grief. The peasants fill up the grave while Moscon is speaking thus: Moscon 5 10 15 20 25

The whole wide human world has sunk from me, There lowered slowly in the mother earth; Naught now is left save shadows and the trees That stand the sentries of my cavern dim. There I’ll return and spend my days, and brood Upon my heart, where death has taken toll, Among the kindly shadows of my cave Where I have lived the hater of all men Till came the day you found me strangely sick, And then, old man, I from thy daughter learnt That man is but a poor weak thing, not ill At heart, as my worn father taught of old Among the lengthening shadows ’fore our cave. He said that I and all the world were evil, That only silence and the woods were good, And then he died, and for ten years I strove To live without the kindly talk of men Till silence grew well-­nigh articulate, And all the grey ghosts seemed my bretheren. But many times with weary heart I came And stood before the towers of the king, And wondered what it was to live with men. Such had I done that self-­same day gone by Some weeks (how much I’ve lived since then, who knows?), The day you found me in the forest sick, And then, old man, I saw your foster-­child, No peasant’s child, as these have thought, but one

18.] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘October: The Man who Never Laughed Again’, 1493–4: ‘To hearken to the silence of the trees | Because it seemed well-­nigh articulate’.

19. bretheren] Three syllables, as shown in WBY’s spelling. Cp. I i 4.

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30 35 40

175

Who should have been the first in all the land. She was the elder daughter of King Ralph: He hid her here to keep the royal crown For her he loves more than his false old life, Ginevra – yes, true heir of Ralph the King, The false old greybeard with the restless eyes! Fate used you ill, man used you worse than fate. Yes, cast thou down the earth upon her head! Man’s like a flame within the lonely night, A lingering ghost among the sepulchres, His soul is like the sea that hungereth on, Consuming till he dies: is there then peace, Hast thou then peace? Cast down the earth, cast down! So fell the sacred manna long ago. (turns to the old man)

45 50 55

Old man made great by right of tears, see’st thou This is, old man, a heavy sword and long; Its edge is blunt with rust of many years; The stalagmites have whitened it somewhat In ten years’ slumber ’neath a cave’s recess: It was my father’s in the days gone by. Old sword, thou hast made widows in thy time: I think thou canst avenge a murder yet. They’re feasting in the castle – there I’ll go, I’ve traced the murderer’s tracks to there, And my two-­handed sword will justice do. Crouch down before my feet, crouch down, O grief: I’ll seek my cave and then thou may’st have sway, But I’ll not seek it yet, and thou shalt crouch. The linnet flies before the carrion crow; The crow has scented offal afar off, He seeks the towers of the king – farewell. Several voices

60

Revenge! We follow to Ralph’s towers. My lord, we too have griefs – revenge!

38. the sea that hungereth on] Cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound III ii 49: ‘It is the unpastured sea hungering for calm’.

56. the linnet flies] Perhaps cp. Thomas Dermody, The Harp of Erin (1807), ‘The Vision of Fancy’, 87: ‘Fancy’s own fav’rite bird, the linnet, flies’.

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Moscon I go alone. Oh, be he lord or peasant, he shall die. They feast and drink: I too shall feast and drink; My sword shall be a solemn feaster there. 65 (looking up at the sky) How dark, and what a gathering of cloud! Methinks the lord of winds goes shepherding Within the fold and pastures of the sky, Or do the high gods shout in jubilee In answer to the joy within our hearts? 70 For we have had a merry meeting here. Friends, O friends, she was a lordly lady. All

She was, she was. Moscon

A most holy lady. Farewell. Hence, hence I tell you, hence! (They fly from him and out. He snatches a torch from one of them. Of all the peasants the Old man only remains; he still kneels unnoticed and unnoticing by the grave.) Moscon 75 80 85

Poor peasant folk, live on among your woods. Good day and bad, and seasons in their time And such poor things will make you soon forget; Forget I may not, so alone I go. I’ll find him ’mong the feasters in the hall And he shall die, and then his friends will come And ring me round – ’tis well, ’tis very well. Their swords shall school me in forgetfulness: For thee, O holy maid, no more I’ll seek The blessèd herbs upon the mountain tops, No more I’ll seek, no more, no more, no more. Hence, grief – farewell, most holy grave – hence, grief! I now am nothing but a sheathless sword.



(exit)



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177

Scene 2 A corridor in the castle. Night time. Enter Ginevra with a lamp. She opens a latticed window: the storm is heard among the trees without. 5 10

Ginevra (as she gazes into the night) O, how it blows! The moon above the trees Sends fitful ghastly gleams o’er garden paths Where whirling dance the yellow autumn leaves. See there – just then, one passed me flitting by! Our souls are as these wind-­borne leaves, all Fate’s For good or ill: how can we change our way? That leaf, how can it change its course, how choose If it is blown to dance above the grass Around the marble satyrs ’neath the moon, Or borne away among the ageless pine? And like the leaf we go no man knows where When this our span of gathering regrets And dwindling hopes has faded to the end.



(She closes the casement. A moth flies against the lamp.)

15 20 25 30

Keep back, O dusky farer through the night. Thou fliest straight upon the flame, keep back! Thus have I dashed thee down and saved thy life. For good and ill, we are all Fate’s as thou; We may not choose our course, she moulds us all: Brown moth, how canst thou guess if ’tis or no? The inviolable law, that makes thee yearn To all bright things, shall lead thee through the night, Not to some campion-­clump, but to the flame. So all of us are led by Fate, until She crushes us as I crush thee, thus, thus, Now dead and little heap of scattered down And crumpled plumes. When she has left us thus, Do our souls also die? Who knows, who knows? The sleepless stars on their eternal thrones Are still on gaze, and have no answering word; The clamorous sea has no prophetic voice;

8. above] upon del. above Nb3. 30. The clamorous sea] Perhaps cp. Edmund Waller and Sidney Godolphin, The Passion of

Dido for Aeneas (1658), 429: ‘the Tumult of the Clamorous Sea’.

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The little flame, the soul, what can it tell But airy fablings that one by one Have shown their hollowness and sunk away?

(Enter a Messenger) 35

Your pleasure, sir? What is your pleasure, sir? I am much occupied with mine own thoughts.

Messenger

The king would see your grace. Ginevra (turning round)

You’re from the king? You are Sir Tristram, his dear friend, my friend. The best-­known faces often slip away From my dull brain of late. What stirred just then? 40 A muffled figure passed by yonder door Within the shade. No dead man walks, not yet. Messenger

One of your women passed the door. Ginevra

You know At times I mutter wandering words, good sir. Farewell, kind friend. I’ll see the king anon.

(Exit Messenger) Ginevra

45 50

Old honest Tristram, he is happy now Because I smiled on him. Why cannot I Live also as he lives, for little things, Be happy in the sunlight and the shade, In all content, or be as other maids With whom is folly the rich comforter

44. Farewell, kind friend. I’ll] Forgive me. I will del. Nb3.

48^49.] Not ask such things, I know not what, from life del. Nb3.

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Of all most innocent and thoughtless hearts, Not ask such things – I know not what – from life. But oh, the quenchless flame around my heart!



(Enter a Page)

179

Page 55

I’ve found you now – I have been looking long. The king has sent for you. Ginevra

My pretty page, Do you love stories of the ghosts and fays? Methinks thou dost. Page

At morn, not now.

Ginevra Tell me, Hast ever heard of there being seen at times Unto the blind strange things, unseen by all, 60 That have sound eyes? Come nearer, and I’ll place This summer’s almoner, this purple rose, Upon thy cloak – nay, let me now. Page No, no, ’Tis womanish. Ginevra

Nay see, I’ve placed it thus.



(she holds him back, at arm’s length)

65

Oh my fair page, my pretty page, my page, You are so like another child I knew, Another child I loved.

56. the ghosts and fays] Cp. Hartley Coleridge, Poems (1851), ‘On Seeing Three Young Ladies

on Grasmere Lake’, 3–4: ‘in ancient days, | When all the world believed in Ghosts and Fays’.

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Page And did he live In that far tower with the garden old You talk so much about? Ginevra In that old tower.

He lived, my child,

Page You’re so queer tonight – 70 You often laugh I know not why, and then Your eyes are bright, and you are very pale. The king is not like you: his eyes are dull; I looked in them tonight, and he is sad And asks continually for you – he says 75 He’s had a strange foreboding all day long Of coming ill: he’d have you sing to him To give him peace. Ginevra I’ll come; he shall have rest. When men are old like him, then life and death Go hand in hand, and all their path around 80 At that strange meeting is o’er-­trod with dreams. He shall have peace. Page Why do you grow so strange? You sometimes give a queer short laugh; When once your hawk passed all the hawks in flight, I heard you laugh though you but seldom laugh, 85 And I was glad; but now I grow afraid. Why is it so? Ginevra

Unto the king lead on. (Exeunt)

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181

Scene 3 A room in the castle. Ralph in bed. Ginevra sitting by him, splendidly dressed. The Page nearby.

King Ralph Send for the wine; I fain would sleep. Ginevra

Hence page, And seek the cup: it standeth ready filled Close by a wreathèd pillar in the hall.

(exit Page) King Ralph

5

Sing, child; thine airy song keeps off ill dreams Almost as well as wine that giveth sleep Unhaunted by the dreams that haunt my days. Ginevra



I cannot sing – I am in haste tonight. King Ralph

10

Come near and let me hold thy hand, fair child. Through all these weeks by lingering illness bowed I have been sad, yet most of all today – Go first raise up that light – there is a thing, A phantom of my youth, that troubles me To sadden without cause, and see strange sights. Is that a sign of coming death? Ginevra



Perhaps.

King Ralph 15

It is a graveless thing: with sudden stab

15. graveless] Perhaps cp. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Vow of the Peacock (1835), ‘The Frozen Ship’, 57: ‘Peace to the souls of the graveless dead!’

182 20 25 30 35

LOVE AND DEATH

I slew a man for his fair leman’s sake. His bones are still among the tangled grass, Picked by the eagles white as mountain snow – All save the skull: that his fair leman found And bore it long with her, more mad than winds. At times, the peasants on their way at eve Have heard a sound of singing in the air, Then seen the maiden in some lonely dell Oft sitting on a thyme-­empurpled bank With that white thing before her on the grass, Sing it in loving tones soft catches of court song, And when she saw them come she’d nod to them, And laughing loud would toss the thing on high And catch it once again, and laughing call Wild words, and they would fly from her in fear. At last she died: her grave is ’mong the hills. When I am sick her phantom haunts me still, Though why I know not, for in younger days Orphans and widows I have made, and yet Their ghosts have haunted not when dead. The light In yonder corner where the curtain hangs – She tossed the skull by eagles picked of yore, I saw the glimmer of the lipless teeth! Ginevra



Peace, peace: old brains are fanciful. King Ralph

All day 40 She has been standing here – will you not sing?

19. leman] WBY’s use of the archaic leman (OED 1a., ‘a lover or sweetheart’) has numerous nineteenth-­century parallels, though the Spenserian precedent may be important for the poet here: The Faerie Queene II x 18: ‘Als his faire Leman’, and III viii 40: ‘his Leman and his Ladie trew’. 22. sound of singing in the air] Cp. W. Morris, the Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘May: The Story

of Cupid and Psyche’, 965: ‘This singing in the air, and no one seen’. 23. some lonely dell] Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), Rokeby XXIII, 17–19: ‘thy ray serene  | Was formed to light some lonely dell | By two fond lovers only seen’. 38. lipless teeth] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), 1241: ‘Glittering with lipless tooth’.

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Ginevra

I cannot sing, I am in haste tonight. King Ralph



Give me your hand – it is a fevered hand: Hast thou not ghosts that haunt thee, child? Ginevra



Nay, none.

King Ralph 45

Thou wilt have yet – nay never fear, thou wilt: Thou art thy father’s child.



(enter Page) Ginevra



Here is the wine.



(taking cup, to Page aside)



Go tell my ladies I will meet them soon Within the pillared alcove ’fore the hall, And let them robe as though for festival.



(exit Page) King Ralph



My favourite cup, the stem a Bacchus young? Ginevra

50

It is. King Ralph



You mixed the wine yourself? Ginevra

I have, I have – it is a sleep-­inducing draught.

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King Ralph 55 60 65

’Tis well. My ministers have all been here Before you came; they do my bidding well, Yet from them I would take nor wine nor food – They’d poison it. They say my deeds are ill, And look you child, remember when you’re queen They lie, they lie: there is no sin in life. To him that does, there is no sin e’en though It seemeth to the watchers from afar – Save only failure, that is sin indeed. Stand back and let me see thee child – thus, thus – You are magnificently robed tonight, Beyond your wont – aye, scarlet suits thee best. You are as my queen was long years ago When she and I were crowned, long years ago. You’ll make a noble queen. Ginevra



Here is the cup.

King Ralph (taking it) Why is the wine so dark? Ginevra

Are glassed in it.

The hangings blue

(The King drinks. Ginevra leans against a pillar, watching him.) King Ralph

70

Why are your eyes so bright? The lamp, the thing That bears the skull, see, it draws near, But now that I have drunk I fear it not. But strange, whence came that icy chill?

62. magnificently robed] WBY’s slightly bathetic (albeit polysyllabic) phrase has a (probably coincidental) parallel in R.B.W. Noel, Livingstone in Africa (1874), I, 477–8: ‘Magnificently robed | In rich luxuriant foliage’.

68. glassed] The verb here (OED 4b., ‘To reflect, give back an image of ’) is common in nineteenth-­century poetry.

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Ginevra (aside) 75

Behold, he pales. O mighty herb, be thanked, Thou herb I gathered when the dewy morn Had twined his roses o’er the highest peaks And ageless snows upon the mountain-­side; I gathered thee at morn, O herb, be thanked. King Ralph



Why mutterest to thyself with glittering eyes? What means this sudden chill, this sudden pain? Ginevra (aside)

80

Behold, the white steals o’er his wrinkled face! King Ralph



It was a poisoned cup – why you, why you? – Daughter, I trusted you! Ginevra (aside)



He weaker grows.



(draws a crucifix from the folds of her dress)



This have I brought: ’tis meet his eyes should look Last on this thing. (aloud) Behold thy Lord! King Ralph

85 Daughter, I trusted you! Ginevra (aside) His eyes are dim, They wander aimlessly. What matter though ’Twas made for souls of sorrow and of sin? We twain, we sin but sorrow not.

(lets the crucifix fall)

His eyes Grow dim as grew the dying peasant’s eyes.

Why you, why you?

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King Ralph 0 9

What, didst thou come in robes of festival Thus decked to watch me die, thou scarlet witch? You think to reign, and rule my servile lords When I am lying dead? Behold this blade I have for such as thee!



(He starts up, seizing a dagger that lies nearby)



You tremble not?

Ginevra (aside) 5 9

Upon his face death casts a pallid cloud; Death sits upon his heart and eyes enthroned.



King Ralph (trying to strike her with the dagger) You seem leagues off from me in this death-­mist! I touched thee then – no, no, the dark guards thee: Too dark, too weak. Ginevra (aside)

The death draws very near; 100 Now back upon his bed he gasps for breath, His fingers clutch the braided coverlet: The loosèd soul will soon be wandering now. King Ralph

Before I die I have a thing to say. You stand too far – draw nearer to my side. Ginevra (aside)

05 1

At death, whence goes the soul? To wander far Without a body, exiled in the world, Until it fades mayhap, as once before

90. in robes of festival] Perhaps cp. an appropriately grisly context for this phrase in Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the Faith (1883), ‘Az Zarr’, 119–125:

‘carcasses | Of men and women . . . | Not mouldered . . . | . . . the skin and flesh | Yet clinging, and the robes of festival | Still gay of colour’.

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187

The body faded in the days of life? King Ralph

110

Draw near, I pray thee: I will harm thee not. Mild looks and cadent words are old men’s part, And meek forgiveness, for their hands are weak. Ginevra (aside)

115

But if there is another world than this, Why then sought it this world and flesh at all? For here it ever gathers gnawing grief And plenteousness of evil, and small joy. King Ralph (the dagger still in his hand)



Draw near, fear not: I fain would tell of vaults Where hidden treasure lies, for dead men’s souls Who leave hoards unrevealed can never rest. Ginevra (aside)



How tedious and long this dying is! King Ralph

20 1

Hast thou drawn near? Touch me, that I may know Where thou dost stand, for death has dimmed mine eyes. (He raises the dagger, and it slips from his fingers)



Too weak! No hope for vengeance now, too weak! Ginevra (aside)



The final icicles are round his heart. King Ralph



What, once again thou phantom with the skull,

120–148.] A draft for the end of this scene survives on pages (torn from a smaller notebook) laid in to Nb5. The lines here are evidently an early draft, showing many more deletions and

corrections than the material elsewhere in the preserved notebooks. There are two attempts at King Ralph’s death and Ginevra’s subsequent speech. The first is as follows:

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Ralph [No hope for vengeance, none del.] What, must I unavenged die? Oh, mayest thou [Find life the round of all heavy things del.] May all that follow thee or give thee help [Die one by one about thee with strange death When all are gone then wither, wither thou del.] At some [triumphant del.] victorious moment of thy life Die one by one about thee with strange death [When all are gone then wither, wither thou: No kin shall make a marble tomb for thee Or soothe thy soul with weeping or with prayer, That dear men love, beneath time-­wasting hand They cast del.] O life, stay yet a little while, that I may curse! Uncared, thy very castle walls shall melt, And leave no record of thy name to men, Unless some hunter on a winter’s night Shall scare his children with thy name, and say Such is a curse’s chronicle. These things Shall time bring forth, yet how I  do not know. The phantom with the skull, the phantom maid, Ask thou for him: he is among the tangled grass, [Among the dew: he pulls me down, down, down! [he dies] del.] Avenged, avenged! I see a vision rises: A banquet hall, tall feasters in a [band del.] throng, From out their fingers fall the glittering cups: Oh how they bounce and rattle o’er the floor! How pale the feasters are! A muffled form, Red dawn upon his face. Avenged! Avenged! What, once more here, thou carrier of bones? Ginevra The final icicles are round his heart. King Ralph The phantom with the skull, the phantom maid! Ask you for him, he is [?deep] and [illeg.]

Among the dew, among the [illeg.], white bones. (Ginevra’s speech (127–147) follows, exactly as in the later Nb3.) Another version of the end of the scene is also present, again on separate pages laid in to Nb5: [Ginevra] (Drops the crucifix on the bed) Dull grow his eyes, as grew the peasant’s eyes. Ralph Oh wherefore was it thou? False poisoner, die! (Snatches a dagger from beneath his pillow) There’s scarcely light enough to strike: too [weak del.] dark. Too weak, too weak. (Falls back) Ginevra The death is very near. Now back upon his bed he gasps for breath: His fingers clutch the braided coverlet; The loosèd soul will soon be wandering now. [But stay del.] whence goes the soul? To wander far Without a body, exiled in the world, Until it fades mayhap, as once before The body faded in the days of life? But if there is another world than this, Why then sought it this world and flesh at all? For here it ever gathers gnawing grief And plenteousness of evil, and small joy. King Ralph The phantom with the skull, the phantom maid! [Darkness del.] She pulls me down [I die del.] No hope for vengeance now. (Dies) Ginevra [His arms fall back, he falls and dies at last. O what a tedious herald is this death, And what a struggle for a little thing. If other worlds there be, [why good or ill del.] beside this globe

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25 1

189

Ask thou for him? The wood among the hills, The valley’s edge, among the dew, white bones. (dies) Ginevra

130 135 140 145

His arms fall back, he gasps, and quivering dies. With subtle death he battled long, most long. O what a tedious herald was this death, And what a struggle for a little thing. If other worlds there be beside this globe They hold some chance of good, or it were strange; If none, why then ’tis neither good nor ill, So what a fangless fate to fight against! Hence for the crown! Sintram, great spirit, have I vanquished yet From my sad heart all lingering human ties That were a heavy ban ’twixt thee and me? Sintram, reveal thyself to me this night! Does this suffice? Think not I shrink, oh no: All sinks – thou only art. Farewell, dead king, In plotting firm, and mighty in thy rage Thou wert, but yet the past did trouble thee – Not so with me, I think not on the dead. I am a flame consuming ever on; Afar before me lies hope’s garden fresh, Behind the unremembered, burnt-­out past: Thus have I done, and go consuming on.



(exit)

They hold some chance of good, or it were strange; If none, why then ’tis neither good nor ill, So what a fangless fate to fight against! In words and wars thou wert, dead king, del.] [O mighty del.] Farewell, dead king, thou wert a man [whose del.] of strength, Yet never didst thou learn this thing, that tigers fierce Have never in one narrow cave agreed, But one would compass how to run alone: So was’t with I and thee. Farewell, dead king, In [counsel strong del.] plotting firm, and mighty in thy rage [But yet the del.] Thou wert. But yet the past did trouble thee –

Not so with me: I think not on the dead. I am a flame consuming ever on; Afar before me lies hope’s garden fresh, Behind the unremembered, burnt-­ out past: Thus have I  done (pointing to the dead king) and go consuming on. 123.] Cp. Peter Pindar, Works (1816), ‘Ode’, 12: ‘Thawing time’s icicles around his heart’. 128. subtle death] Perhaps cp. Mary Tighe, Psyche (1811), ‘Pleasure’, 56: ‘Deceitful calms deal subtle death around’. 129. tedious herald] Cp. Robert Southey, Poetical Works (1838), ‘The Chapel Bell’, 13: ‘Thou tedious herald of more tedious prayers’.

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Act 5 [Scene 1] Scene: A  banquet hall in the castle. Sword and shields hanging from the pillars; torches burning. During the progress of the scene day dawns and the red glare through the long gothic windows dims the torches. Knights are sitting feasting at the long tables, before them flagons of wine. Sebald is sitting by his harp. 1 Knight

How the wind howls above the castle top! Blow, shriek, yell, crack your voice, old Boreas, You cannot dim the wine – a health, a health! 2 Knight

5

What health is left to drink, I’d like to know? We drank them all twice o’er two hours since. 1 Knight



I’ve thought of one – I love a mad-­brained health. 2 Knight

Mad or sane, we’ve drunk them all. 1 Knight No, Hast thou forgot the gnome the old king slew? 2 Knight

That health were treason – bloody and high treason.

[Scene 1]: WBY does not provide this (and there is only a single scene in this act), but it is given editorially for the present text. 2.] Cp. Shakespeare, King Lear III ii 1: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks’.

old Boreas] Boreas is the classical name for the North wind; cp. Isaac Watts, Works (1810), ‘Divine Judgements’ 15–16: ‘Old Boreas with his freezing powers | Turns the earth iron’. 6. mad-­brained] Cp. Shelley, Peter Bell the Third (1819), 557: ‘A mad-­brained goblin for a guide’.

191

LOVE AND DEATH



1 Knight 0 1

He’s housed among the worms these many years. Bah – what is treason in a feast’s December? I’ll swear there is no other toast to drink. Sebald



Drink not. 2 Knight



Peace, old man, or thou’lt also drink. Sebald



I go – 3 Knight



Thou shalt not go: we need thy help. (he stops him)

15

What a storm! 1 Knight



Drown it in a storm of wine. 2 Knight



The gnome!

3 Knight There’s no one to respond. 4 Knight Heaven forbid. I thought that gust had blown the windows in: ’Tis wondrous strange that all the sky is clear 20 Save one great cloud that’s brooding o’er the pine, A mass that never stirs, but sends forth wind,

192

LOVE AND DEATH

And bitter drouth has been these many days: The thirsty air has drunk the moat up dry. 5 Knight

25

I but half like that toast, though he be dead. When moats are dry the spirits cross at will. 1 Knight



Who’d think we’d feasted unto morning light? We grow so melancholic and long-­jawed: Come Sebald, we must have a song – come man. Sebald (sings to his harp)

30

The singer’s harp is broken, The dying word is spoken, The lamp of the sage is dead, The light of the rose’s head. . . 3 Knight

35

That’s of the breaking of an old man’s heart: Not that, that song you have been singing oft These last three days. Come, strike thy harp, old man! Is it unmindful of its other tunes? Sebald (sings to his harp)

40

Sad thou art, O summer, Since the strange newcomer, The new thing grief Has stolen away thy singing, And thither instead comes winging Sorrow the thief.

22. bitter drouth] Perhaps cp. Byron, The Island (1823), I, 148: ‘Exhaustion’s deep and bitter drouth’.

27. long-­jawed] Cp. Thomas Beddoes, Poems (1851), ‘Death’s Jest Book’ IV iv 158: ‘the long-­jawed, piteous crocodile’.

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193

2 Knight

Stop, stop! We need a new and blither tune – That is a sad, mad maiden’s dying dirge. (The doors at the end of the hall open)



Enter Ginevra, attended.

4 Knight 45

The princess! The princess comes! Ginevra

50 55

My subjects, hear – for such you are henceforth: The king that has been dying many days Is dead. Not wishing to disturb the land, And having will to grasp the sceptre firm, My nobles being masterful and strong, I said not he was dying: now he’s dead. Oh, other dames would weep, and say their hearts Beneath the wings of sorrow nestled close, But I, of royal race, shall do not so. I must be firm to rule, for I am young: See, thus I crown myself the queen, your queen.



(She places the crown on her head and passes down the hall to the raised dais at the end.) Several voices



The king dead! Dead so suddenly! A Knight (aside)



The princess casts no shadow on the ground.

58.] This remark is paralleled in the final touch added to IoS, where the closing S.D. informs us that the heroine, Naschina, having overcome the villainous Enchantress, now ‘casts no shadow’ – the implication being that she has taken on something of the sinister supernatural status of her antagonist. This addition to IoS was made after the latest surviving MS state, and is likely therefore to have been made in the process of

proof correction (i.e. before – and possibly very shortly before  – Jul. 1885): conceivably, WBY found this final twist by taking up a detail from the by-­then abandoned Love and Death. The motif itself may owe much to Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley (1847), I, 6–10: Some sorcerer, whom a far-­off grandsire burnt Because he cast no shadow, had foretold,

194 60

LOVE AND DEATH

Ginevra (aside) ’Twas well to gather my chief nobles thus. I think I’ll make these fiery Vikings bend. (taking a cup of wine from a page)



The princess drinks to her assembled peers! (The majority of the Knights shout)



Long live Ginevra, Ralph’s great child!

(Ginevra walks down the hall to where a small knot of Knights did not shout) Ginevra 65 70

Here me, Duke Conrad, you whose strength Is Ebremar the mountain town, and you My lord, whose power upon the sea has root: Have you forgot the battle of the sands? And by the rood, the lord of Ringleguard Had best recall how high his father’s head Was staked and pinnacled in days gone by! And you, the rest of these false traitorous knaves, The scum of kingdoms and the curse of kings, The leprosy of nations, and the scourge-­ Envenomed adders that beset the path!

Dying, that none of all our blood should know The shadow from the substance, and that one Should come to fight with shadows and to fall. 64. Ebremar the mountain town] This is something of a puzzle. Ebremar is not a place name and, even if WBY intended a specific Duke Conrad in the previous line, his seat would be likely to be altogether more Germanic than this Spanish-­ sounding location. However, the name is one which WBY evidently liked well enough to employ again: once, in IoS II i 53 (as a person’s name), and again in Mosada as the name of a main character. WBY is likely to have found the name in a work by

John Ruskin, published serially between 1877 and 1884 and as a volume in 1884 (see notes to Island of Statues and Mosada), but the Ebremar encountered there is clearly a person, not a place. Supposing that WBY simply lights on Ebremar here, much as on Duke Conrad, as a convenient name, not pausing to find out what kind of name it is, there may be supporting evidence for the supposition that Love and Death pre-­dates Island of Statues as well as Mosada. 67. Ringleguard] WBY’s choice of name, in this instance, may be wholly of his own devising: the intention, again, is to sound in some way Germanic. 70. traitorous] trait’rous Nb.3.

LOVE AND DEATH



(The blast of a horn is heard, followed by violent knocking.) 75

Ho! Ope the doors, some knight has tarried late. And ye proud lords, proud traitors, hear your queen!



(Moscon enters, throwing down his torch) The end is very near. 1 Knight

O look, ye knights, Who’s this tall fellow with the shining eyes? 2 Knight 80

And see you what a mighty sword he bears? He’s great enough to come from Woden’s hall; That sword is rusted, like a thing from graves. 3 Knight



A great pale man, all clad in rusted mail, Like some drowned Viking by the winds swept home. 1 Knight



Speak not of graves and dead men on a night When outer air’s a-­quake with shrieking storm. Several knights

85

(to Moscon, drawing their swords) There is our queen; hold not thy head so high. Moscon



Silence, ye spaniels to a sovran’s feet! Ginevra (aside)



O greatest Sintram, I have done the thing. The last of all the spells is o’er and done;

73^74.] In wait for foolish mercy’s wandering feet del. Nb3.

195

196   90

LOVE AND DEATH

By loss of pity I have grown thy peer: I now am nothing but a crownèd strength. 1 Waiting woman



The madness comes upon the queen again: A memory of flame has drowned near things. 2 Waiting woman



From her dim sight the banquet hall has sunk. 3 Waiting woman



Upon the long-­dead past her eyes are set. Moscon

  95

O radiant maiden, royal maiden here, Within the forest was a murder done: Alice the daughter of the false King Ralph, The blind and gentle daughter of the king Have I seen buried on this very night. Ginevra (aside)

00 1 105

Was that pale peasant girl my sister then? I thought I heard she died long years ago. The phantom tries me, but my heart is dead: He shall have proof that I am pitiless. One dies – the world is but a jester’s staff: I’ve learnt to shake it. (aloud) Thou’lt have the man.



(The sunlight has been gradually growing redder and brighter.)



(Sebald raises his harp) A Knight



Be still, old man! The stranger and the queen Are in mysterious talk. Ginevra



Sebald, silence!

(The Knights force him to sit down)

LOVE AND DEATH



197

Moscon (kneels) 110

O let me find the man, and let my hand Slay him – see, see the golden clue I have: I found it shining in the tangled grass.

(holds up a dagger)

Ginevra (laughs)



The handle is a serpent of pure gold; Twin opals with a many-­changing hue Stand for the eyes that nigh have living light In their deep orbits of the sealèd gold. Moscon

115

Declare the owner of the dagger. Ginevra

See, The mouth is wide agape, and fiercely set With shining fangs that are of diamonds all. A waiting woman

The queen’s own dagger. Ginevra

And zigzag’s the blade, With grapes and grape-­leaves near the guard engraved: 120 You might, such cunning had the hand that wrought, Nigh feel in those small leaves wild summer throb – It hath no fellow in my kingdom wide. Moscon

The name? The name?

117. that are of diamonds all] Cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), ‘The Sylph’s

Ball’, 14: ‘A palace, paved with diamonds all’.

198

LOVE AND DEATH

Ginevra

Come, see how fair it is.

(she takes the dagger from his hand) 125

’Tis small and light, most beautifully small. It was the joy of Spain’s first armourer – My waiting women, heard ye e’er a song From out the chronicles of old-­time lore, Of how a maiden when she killed her heart Had found strange love?

(she tosses the dagger away)

(to Moscon)

Of him who owns yon thing, 130 I’ll place his name upon the poor fair face Of spotless ivory that likes but ill So great a stain.

(writes on her tablets)

135

(aside) I’ve written Conrad’s name, But no, not that – I’ll write another name: There’s that black-­bearded lord of Ringleguard, His grey eyes tell of danger and revolt. I hate the man.

(writes again on the tablets, and gives them to Moscon) 140

There is the name. Ask where he sits, and strike – Strike thou, nor let him speak! Yet soft, not so: See, give me back the tablets, for I’m wrong, It is another owns the blade – the tablets!

(she takes them and rubs out the name, and is about to write again, but throws them down as if she had changed her mind)

127. old-­time lore] Nb4 seems to read ‘love’ rather than ‘lore’; but the reading is not certain, and the repetition of ‘love’ at the end of the sentence in 128 suggests that WBY

intended ‘lore’ here, even if he did indeed write ‘love’. The present text, accordingly, emends to ‘lore’. 142. Moscon] S.D. ‘(kneeling)’ del. Nb4.

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199

But rise, and think not on these foolish things. Moscon

The name? The name? Ginevra

It is the face I know. Thou had a song that ran on somewhat thus:

(sings)

145

If you’d ask the youngest angel, She would say with bated breath ’Fore the door of Mary’s garden Are the spirits love and death.

150 155 160 165

Come, and we will divide those comrades sad: Old death shall spread his wings and fly; We’ll live beneath love’s shining eyes – come thou, Though in a laughing humour saith the song, To mock the world a titan fashioned man A fragile thing, of all the shifting wave Of those twin rivers death and love, and though He has the pilgrim sorrow for his friend, To win away from folly’s balm the heart Grown amorous of all unhappy things, Yet joy will seek our unrepentant hearts. Death’s wave shall touch us not; we’ll send instead From our throne’s foot a river wide and strong Of endless majesty – all shall be ours. Behold my wizard love, the whole wide world Chimes endlessly unto the tune of love. The shoutings of the rivers are his name, And voices of the forest many-­fold.

155. pilgrim sorrow] Cp. Frederick Tennyson, Days and Hours (1854), ‘Twenty-­ First of June’, 21–2: ‘Hard by those walks the lonely pilgrim Sorrow | Wandered’. It is possible that these words influence the 1895 revision of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (where ‘the grey wandering osprey sorrow’ (I, 303) supersedes the 1889 ‘wild grey osprey sorrow’ (I, 340)). ‘Pilgrim’ was to remain a favoured adjective of WBY’s, most notably in the 1891 ‘When

You Are Old’, 7, ‘one man loved the pilgrim soul in you’ (with a possible provenance in the poetry of ‘Speranza’: see note). 159. death’s wave] Perhaps cp. Robert Browning, Dramatis Personae (1864), ‘James Lee’s Wife’, 229: ‘For himself, death’s wave’. 163. the tune of love] Cp. Keats, Endymion (1818), II, 767: ‘the very tune of love’, and E.B. Browning, Poems (1844), ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’, 21: ‘All sounds of life assumed one tune of love’.

200

LOVE AND DEATH

Moscon

Have done with this fantastic foolery! Who owns the dagger? Who?



Ginevra (writing)

There is the name. At last I am thy peer, behold. (Moscon reaches for the tablets, but before he reaches them she drops them, leaving them to hang at her girdle, for at the far end of the hall, in all things like his brother save that he is of superhuman size, Sintram the phantom hunter enters. Redder and redder the blood-­ red sunlight pours around him. Sebald raises his harp and sings as if inspired, gazing at the shade. The feasters drop their cups, and fall dead silently one by one as the shade passes them. Ginevra’s eyes are eagerly fixed on it: it stands before her.) (Meanwhile, Sebald has been singing thus his dirge) 170 175 180

O barons, draw your cloaks around ye, for we die. Take up your staffs, and on your feet the sandals bind, Because the long and lonely journey has drawn nigh, Frail peace among the nations of grey dreams to find, Who tread unknowing joy and sorrow by the sea Of dim forgetfulness – no mercy for thy youth Think thou to beg, or for some lady waiting thee, Or beg no mercy for a life of blameless truth: While I am singing, growing cold about ye die, The dead men’s souls among the living feasters stand, And ever to and fro the mute things wond’ring ply And swell their numbers with the falling of the sand. From tourney, and the dances, and from the tilting-­ring, As in the morn the rifts of cloud, we pass away – When we are gone, as joyous shall the crickets sing, And then as now shall day still follow after day.

169–197.] Sebald’s song is written in alexandrines, which are rhymed (up to 192) abab. WBY’s formal inspiration here probably includes the alexandrine couplets of George Chapman’s Iliad; he may have been experimenting in abab alexandrines already in the quatrain ‘Love and Sorrow’. 173–4. the sea | Of dim forgetfulness] Perhaps cp. William Motherwell, Poetical Works (1849), ‘Change Sweepeth Over All’, 36–7:

‘On to the main  | Of dim forgetfulness for ever rolling’. 180. swell] fill del. swell Nb4. 182. rifts of cloud] Another possible echo (see note to IV iii 62) of R.B.W. Noel, Livingstone in Africa (1874), here IV, 102: ‘Circling among wan stars in rifts of cloud’. 183.] This line is taken up in the quatrain-­ motto for the entire play before I  i earlier (present in Nb1, but not in the earlier version of the beginning preserved in Nb5).

LOVE AND DEATH



201

85 1 190 195

Upon the flaming altar of a soul o’er-­fraught By love that knew no pity, life that knew no tie, Cruel without measure has a maiden wrought The inviolable doom that comes, and we must die. Turn round if ye have strength, and gaze upon her there: Unto the altar of her love we’re sacrificed. Take up in hand your staffs, and meetly set your hair, For now the fatal final journey doth betide Unto us all for this most cruel, heartless maid. Yet most I mourn and weep because the tide Of death her burning heart grown very cold shall fade. O hear ye – thus before the world began, our doom The calm-­eyed sisters wrought before their fatal loom.



(The harp falls from his hand, and he dies.)



(The shade stands close to where Ginevra and Moscon are, they alone now living.) Moscon



This is no harping time. I shall kneel here Till I have vengeance for thy sister’s death. Ginevra

00 2

I was mistaken in thy face, fair sir: Another’s it is strangely like.



(she makes a few steps towards Sintram)

Great peace Has come unto the waters of my soul. Draw near, O Sintram, thou hast tarried long Among the strangers, my companion lost 205 These many years; now have I wealth of joy. The rosy morning with her fingers light, O Sintram, fondles ever o’er thy hair, And each small ringlet is a burning light. 185. Upon the flaming altar] [Our doom del.] upon the ^flaming^ altar Nb4. a soul o’erfraught] Perhaps cp. Alfred Dommett, Poems (1833), ‘This brave bright earth with Mind o’erflows’, 2: ‘With secret soul o’erfraught’. 192. the fatal final journey] WBY’s rather clumsy combination of adjectives here is not without

precedent: cp. e.g. R. Monckton Milnes, Poetical Works (1876), ‘Never return!’, 31: ‘the fatal final sea’. 197. the calm-­ eyed sisters] Presumably, the Fates, who conventionally weave men’s destinies upon their loom: these include the Greek Moirai, the Roman Parcae, and the Nordic Norns.

202

LOVE AND DEATH

Moscon 210 215 220

Call not, for thou hast oft congealed, men say, The wandering air to phantoms fierce and strange. Call not aloud upon that dreaded thing, But grant to me the death of him I seek – By God, I move not till his name is said. I tell you that thy holy sister’s dead: Still on your face that strange bewildering smile. Are you bewitched, or is it mockery? A wind-­worn osprey on his towered rock Would feel more sorrow for a fellow slain! False, fair, and cankered rose of womanhood, Hear me – thy sister murdered lies. Ginevra

I think You spoke just now of someone slain, fair sir? Look round upon the feast: see, all are dead. Look round: ten, twenty, forty lying there: Small count they make among the morning’s dead, 225 Less count among the ghosts at Peter’s door. You start, and take with puzzled fingers up The old man’s harp – see, touch his hand, he’s dead: Swan-­like he died. You have a puzzled look: Mayhap my very words, my face and form, 230 The paleness of the feasters all around Seem somewhat strange to you – not so to me: To me, my heart alone is passing strange, And that calm spirit standing yon – He is my lover.

210. the wandering air] A nineteenth-­century commonplace, which WBY would have come across in Shelley, The Cenci III i 28: ‘Burst forth into the wandering air’, and which is also to be found often in the works of T.C. Irwin, e.g. Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘Drifted Beyond the Wave’, 6: ‘Unto the wandering air’, as well as John Todhunter, Alcestis (1879), II ii 270: ‘thou art breathed into the wandering air’. See also note to 260. 219 rose of womanhood] Cp. Tennyson, Poems (1842), ‘The Two Voices’, 417: ‘Wearing the rose of womanhood’.

220.] Hear me, thy sister’s dead, thy sister’s dead del. Nb4. 225. Peter’s door] The gate of Heaven, as tended by St. Peter. 228. swan-­like he died] The swan was supposed, in ancient tradition, to sing only once, just before its death (as Sebald has sung to the lyre, before himself expiring). 233. yon –] Presumably, WBY means ‘yonder’: Ginevra may interrupt herself here, and the line is metrically incomplete, before the revelation of 234.

LOVE AND DEATH



203

Moscon Thou most deadly phantom, 235 O wherefore hast thou come? My great twin brother, No mortal man may draw nigh thee and live. Ginevra (to Moscon) 240

I think there is a question in your face, Or did you speak? I heard not, for my thoughts Move softly on the golden chains of love. Fair sir, you asked about one dead I think?



(The phantom makes a few steps forward) Moscon



Fearful phantom!



(staggers, and falls dead) Ginevra

245 250 255

Why ask about one dead? What count makes one among so many dead? See, they all lie like sheaves of smitten corn, Ripe corn, green corn, all gathered up and mown. I must collect my wits – they’re wandering ones: When we are happy we do moralize, And I could sing to ease my heart of joy. I’ll sing – but no, I must reply to thee. You asked me why they all are dead, fair sir; Oh yes, I’ll tell you why they all are dead. My nobles they are dead because – because – Stay, yes, I do remember they were slain (’Twill be a brave funeral) of a hurt Got unaware of Cupid’s arrows light. But was it so? Stop – I’ll think – I’ll think – and here I’ll sit me in this chair and think. (she sits down) Oh yes, My memory is now quite clear again. Some loved the dryads of the antique oaks,

241.] Why asked you of ^for^ one dead? del. Nb4.

251. are] This word is editorially supplied: Nb.4 reads ‘they dead’.

204 260

LOVE AND DEATH

And some the guiding souls of wandering air; Hard strove they to unmake their human hearts In their disdain of this sad earthly clay – Oh surely he’s a mischief-­making child, The young Olympian with his soundless bow – Oh, ’twill be a brave funeral! Thy hand – (turning to the dead body of Moscon)

65 2 270 275 280 285

What, no? And when you are so seldom here? I know you now: we’ve often talked of you, You are the brother of my playmate here. Why do you live so far away from us? Moscon, a third we oft do need in play. They say I am a strange, old-­fashioned child, And love to act as grown-­up princes do. I am resolved to take thy hand – but why, It is not time to sleep. How dark it grows. My child lover, O Sintram, come thou near. How gently yonder star blinks down at us: So, saith the good old priest, shines God’s own eye, To keep the innocent and pure in ken. Do not yet leave me, Sintram: are you cold? You always were a colder child than I. Is not the garden in the evening sweet? See, yon red sun has scarcely yet gone home To where he sleeps behind the poplar row: He smileth yonder on his doorstep still. Stop here, my little lover, yet a bit, For till the sun has gone no dew may fall. See you the robin watching with bright eyes, Does he not seem to matter? Go not yet. But no, ’tis very cold: come, we will go. Moscon’s asleep, we will together go.



(She dies, and the phantom fades.)

261. sad earthly clay] Perhaps cp. Eva Mary Kelly, ‘Chant’, 24: ‘No ray can pierce from those sad earthly spheres’. Kelly, better known of ‘Eva’ of The Nation (she had been a frequent and well-­known contributor to

Thomas Davis’s paper in the 1840s) published ‘Chant’ in the Fenian journal The Irish People in 1865, and it was included in Poems by ‘Eva’ of The Nation in 1877. 263.] i.e. Cupid.

27

UNUSED SCENE FROM LOVE AND DEATH Text. This scene is in the fifth of the Boston College notebooks containing Love and Death. Nb.5 is earlier than the fair copy of the play that runs sequentially through Nb.1­Nb.4. WBY did not incorporate this scene in his finished version: it was possibly abandoned in favour of II iii. Context. The characters of Ginevra and Sebald are here shown together early in the chain of events that will eventually lead to catastrophe. Ginevra, having seen the three Shades, is still fearful; she approaches Sebald, who does what he can to allay her fears of the supernatural forces now at work. It is interesting that Sebald is presented in this scene as having a quasi-­paternal relationship with the princess  – whose father, King Ralph, offers no source of wisdom or consolation – though he is, in fact, the ultimate source of the many disasters to come. The song which is included in this scene is, like other lyric poetry in the play, partly a means of marking dramatic time, rather than anything integral to the action. Copy-­text: Boston College Love and Death notebooks, Nb.5. An antique room. Gothic windows. Sebald the harper musing by his harp. Enter Ginevra Sebald

Y

ou have been wandering long. What ails thee, child? So pale.

Ginevra

Things many and fantastical. Sebald



Come now, sit down and tell me of these things.

1. What ails thee, child?] This conventional phrase is used also in Keats’s verse drama, Otho the Great, IV iv 116. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-28

206

UNUSED SCENE FROM LOVE AND DEATH

Ginevra

Oh Sebald, Sebald, things that bode much ill. Sebald

5 10

Sit by me here. You oft in play have called Me Solomon, and Councillor in Chief: Speak now, for seven ages have I seen, And scarce a thing befalls I have not seen, And I have seen the ghosts that haunt the pine, And long pored over books of fantasies. So tell the sign, and do not wring thy hands; Sit down and be at peace. (She sits) That’s well, that’s well. Ginevra



Oh ’tis the number three affrights me so. Sebald



Speak in a saner mood. Ginevra

I wandered forth; 15 Before the pine-­wood down the path I went, The path whereof the honey-­bee has sung, But all was gloomy with a brooding mist, And sudden from the gloom’s deep heart there came Three shrieks, from air above or earth beneath. Sebald 20

Forth from the limbo of nightmares they came. Ginevra



And troubled then I fled, in sore dismay.

17. a brooding mist] Cp. John Todhunter, Forest Songs (1881), ‘Chill November’s sullen breath’, 3–4: ‘All the woods lie still in death, | With the brooding mist for shroud’.

19^20.] Or well-­ spring of my soul  – who knows, who knows? del. MS.

UNUSED SCENE FROM LOVE AND DEATH



207

Sebald

Pale child, full many are the phantoms of the wood Who often cry aloud their unknown woes: Have peace. Ginevra

And thrice I heard the raven croak, 25 And in broad daylight on his soundless wings Three times he answered to that wizard bird The raven flapping on a shrivelled oak. When in the castle cinctured by the moat I stood I turned and spied beyond the misty moat 30 Three shades with fingers on their mouths speed by. Sebald

They dare not cross the water. Ginevra

From the walls Thrice the death-­watch smote. Sebald

Why blanch you so?

Ginevra 35

I fear the striking of the tower clock; Soon will it voice the fateful number three: ’Tis true, yet how I know, I do not know.



(She stands up)

24.] Whether or not on purpose, WBY’s reference to the raven’s croaking three times suggests the cock’s crowing three times before the betrayal of Christ. 26.] I heard him three times hoot, that wizard bird del. MS. wizard] OED 2.a: ‘Of, pertaining to, or associated with wizards or wizardry; hence gen. magic,

enchanted, bewitched.’ Cp. e.g. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Bride of Tiermain III xxiv 69: ‘The wizard song at distance died’. 31.] WBY at first gives Sebald the whole line: ‘They dare not cross the water [by their law del.]’ MS. 32. the death-­watch smote] Presumably, Ginevra hears inside the room the sound of ‘Any of

208

UNUSED SCENE FROM LOVE AND DEATH

Sebald

Sit down, sit down, and for a time compose Thy poor soul’s ruffled plumes. Ginevra

It is about to strike, I know, for all my heart is bound with ice.

(The clock strikes slowly) (A song from without)

Sweet was the voice of morning 40   In wood and valley and mountain, Sweeter than singing of harper   The song of the white-­lipped fountain. Songs of the water I hear not,   Spells of the morning are broken 45 By love that bringeth of death   A sign and a warning and token. My feet were speedy and light   As the feet of a sudden sorrow When after a joyful day 50   Cometh a woeful tomorrow. Mine arrows were fatal and fast   As the arrows of young Apollo To the snows that ling’ring bide   On mountain and woody hollow. 5 5 But broken the speed of my feet,   The speed of mine arrows is broken By love that bringeth of death   A warning, a sign and a token. Sebald 60

The fatal hour only brings a song. What thing is this to make you grow so pale?

various insects which make a tapping noise likened to the ticking of a watch, sometimes said to herald a death’ (OED death-­watch).

39. voice] hand del. voice MS. 51. fast] sure del. fast MS.

UNUSED SCENE FROM LOVE AND DEATH





(He looks out of the window)



(Aside) The mighty hunter-­spirit of the pine: I know his pale illuminated face. He’s gone again.

209

Ginevra More than a song I hear: The soft sweet sound of fleeting water 65 ’Neath walls where swallows hang their pendant nests By the home where I lived in my childhood, And two fair children by each other’s side. The careless arms of one around the neck[...]

65.] This line reveals the presence of Shakespeare’s Macbeth just beneath the surface of WBY’s play. Cp. Banquo approaching the castle, where ‘this

bird [the martlet] | Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle’ (Macbeth I vi 9). 68. around] cast o’er del. around MS.

28

SONG OF THE FAERIES Date of composition. The earliest version of these lines is found on the inside back cover of the notebook in which WBY worked on the second draft of IoS: this dates from before Aug. 1884. The MS of WBY’s first draft of that verse-­play is in a notebook dating from before Jun. 1884, so the most likely period for the composition of these lines is summer (between Jun. and the end of Jul.) 1884. Copy-­text. Dublin University Review (Mar. 1885). The poem appeared again with revisions when DUR printed the whole of IoS, as part of II iii (Jul. 1885), and it was included subsequently in the same position in the extracts from the play included in WO. Drafts are preserved in four of the five MSS for IoS (MSS 2–5 [for details see headnote to that poem]).

A

man has a hope for heaven, But soulless a faery dies, As a leaf that is old, and withered and cold When the wint’ry vapours rise.

1. a hope for heaven] Cp. Gerald Griffin, Poetical Works (1843), ‘The Isle of Saints’, 9–12: For heaven we hope, for heaven we pray, For heaven we look, and long to die, For heaven – for heaven, by night, by day, Untiring watch, unceasing sigh. Perhaps also cp. John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works (1868), Hymn 20 (‘Wretched soul, the strife forbear’), 7–8: ‘If thou canst not hope for love,  | Thou canst not hope for heaven’, and Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Songs of a Worker (1881), ‘Christ will return’, 237–8: ‘These who have given  | And lost their love without a hope of heaven’. (In 1887, KT was to publish an essay on O’Shaughnessy in The Irish Fireside, on which WBY congratulated her in DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-29

a letter of 8 May, as ‘admirable well written in every way’ [CL 1, 12]; WBY included a poem by O’Shaughnessy in his A Book of Irish Verse [1895]). 2. faery] spirit MS2 spirit del. faery MS3. 4. wint’ry] wintery MS3, MS4 wintery del. wint’ry MS5. DUR makes the MS5 reading the basis for its spelling of the word here, but in allowing MS5 also to provide the spelling wintery in the last line of the poem, it introduced a relatively eye-­catching inconsistency. It is possible that the inconsistency is deliberate on WBY’s part, and faithfully reproduced as such in DUR; but this is far from certain. When the poem was republished as part of IoS in DUR and WO, the word appeared as wintry in both occurrences (II iii 252, 262).



Song of the Faeries

5

Soon shall our wings be stilled, And our laughter over and done, So let us dance, where the yellow lance Of the barley shoots in the sun.

10

So let us dance on the fringèd waves, And shout at the wisest owls In their downy caps, and startle the naps Of the dreaming water-­fowls.

15

And fight for the black sloe-­berries, For soulless a faery dies, As a leaf that is old, and withered and cold When the wint’ry vapours rise.

6.] And the tale of our laughter done MS2 And our revelry over and done MS5. 7. yellow] flaming MS2, MS3. For ‘yellow lance’, cp. Charlotte Smith, Conversations (1804), ‘Wild Flowers’, 34: ‘the tall Mullein’s yellow lance’. 9. fringèd] MS3, MS4, MS5; DUR has fringed, but WBY clearly intends the disyllabic version of this word.

211

10. wisest] dreaming del. wisest MS2. 14. faery] spirit MS2. 16. wint’ry] wintery MS3, MS4, MS5 wintery DUR. The present text emends DUR in conformity with the spelling of the word there in l.4.

29

[‘’MONG MEADOWS OF SWEET GRAIN’] Date of composition. This fragment probably dates from 1884 (the date of the watermark on the MS sheet), when WBY was writing several poetic dramas, for one of which these lines might well have been intended. Copy-­text. A single sheet of MS (NLI 30454) contains this fragment. Punctuation in the present text is largely editorial, differing slightly from that supplied in UM, 55. For a transcription of the MS, see Cornell Early Poetry 2, 406.

’M 5

ong meadows of sweet grain and musing kine Wanders my little rivulet: I like Her more than those mad singers who passed by, And following her shaded shores I’ll rest Where she within the cherry orchard sings

King’s poem ‘Remembered Paths’ (which begins ‘I will arise and go to-­day’) has ‘The little rivulet between | In merry flashes heard and seen’ (9–10). 3. those mad singers who passed by] This reference to past action is the clearest hint in the fragment that it relates to a dramatic scenario written (or planned) by WBY. 6. bulrush-­beds] Cp. M. Arnold, ‘Balder Dead’, 1. grain] MS reads ‘gran’, but it is possible that 499: ‘as the swallows crowd the bulrush-­ WBY intends ‘grass’ here. ‘Sweet grain’ is the beds’, and Tennyson, ‘Morte D’Arthur’, 434–5: more unusual phrase, however, and is there‘plunged | Among the bulrush-­beds’. fore (despite the potentially awkward asso5–7.] The central conceit of these relatively accomnance with ‘kine’ at the end of the verse) the plished lines may owe something to Keats’s reading given in the present text. description of the self-­communing of a flowthe musing kine] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poeting stream in Endymion (1818), which ‘white ical Works (1884), ‘The Bard Ethell’, 46: ‘And did lave | The nether sides of mossy stones and eyes like the eyes of the musing kine’. rock, – | ’Mong which it gurgled blythe adieus, 2. little rivulet] Not as common a poetic phrase to mock  | Its own sweet grief at parting’ (I, as might be supposed, this occurs in a book 936–939). The poetic contraction ‘’mong’ (with of contemporary poetry to which WBY might which WBY’s fragment begins, and is very common elsewhere in his early verse) is used sevenhave had access, Harriet Eleanor Baillie-­ teen times by Keats, five in Endymion alone. Hamilton King’s The Book of Dreams (1883). Before the opening, the MS  has a cancelled line, ‘A little puritan in Sunday best’. WBY deleted this line (which must have stood for long enough at least to generate the rhyme ‘rest’ five lines on) presumably to remove what seemed to have become an extraneous element of mild religious satire. The feminine nature of the ‘rivulet’, however, remained.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-30





[‘’Mong Meadows of Sweet Grain’]

213

Forever in the bulrush-­beds, about Herself and to herself, sweet egotist.

7. sweet egotist] The word ‘egotist’ (OED n.1: ‘One who makes too frequent use of the pronoun I; one who thinks or talks too much of himself; a selfish person’) was at this time being displaced by ‘egoist’ (OED n.2: ‘One who makes regard to his own interest the

guiding principle of his conduct’), in the wake of George Meredith’s novel The Egoist (1879): see e.g. Saturday Review, 15 Nov. 1879: ‘thoroughly selfish, an ‘egoist’, as Mr. Meredith, adopting current slang, writes the word which used to be ‘egotist’.’

30

SANSLOY – SANSFOY – SANSJOY Date of composition, context, and interpretation. Composed probably in Sept. 1884. This lyric is found on a loose leaf amongst those of NLI 30440, where the other three leaves carry stanzas that make up the ending of ‘When to its end o’er-­ripened July nears’. The relationship of this poem to these stanzas is in some respects unclear – in particular, it is not possible to say with certainty whether the poem is earlier than or subsequent to the writing of WBY’s Spenserian narrative poem. The two compositions have elements in common besides their treatment of the three Spenserian knights Sansloy, Sansfoy, and Sansjoy: the ‘garden by the sea’ of 2 recalls the location of the longer poem’s events (as well as offering clues about possible influences on the lyric itself – see notes), while there are close verbal parallels in 10, 12, and 20–24. At the foot of the poem, WBY writes ‘Sept.’, and this is likely to mean that it was written in that month in 1884; by this time, WBY was working on IoS, but had probably abandoned his Spenserian narrative poem. Sept. was also the month in 1884 when Laura Armstrong married, and it is possible that ‘When to its end. . . ’ had been given to her in a now-­lost fair copy before then (see headnote to poem). There is no evidence to support the assumption made by W. K. Chapman that this lyric pre-­dates the longer poem, nor that it is rewritten in its Spenserian stanzas (Yeats and English Renaissance Literature, 74–6). The present edition presents ‘Sansloy – Sansfoy – Sansjoy’ as later in the chronological order of composition than the narrative poem, with the hypothesis that WBY turned material from the last stanzas of that poem into a twenty-­one-­line lyric, and not vice versa. With the loss of the fair copy of ‘When to its end. . . ’, busy with a new long poetic drama and aware that any possible romantic attachment to Laura Armstrong was now a thing of the past, WBY might well have recast what little he wanted to keep from the long poem in order to salvage a serviceable lyric: this may explain why the MS is found with the drafts of just the later stanzas of the Spenserian poem, from which WBY had perhaps been working. Textual and publication history. A transcription of the leaf in NLI 30440 is in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 400–401, and an edited text in UM, 51.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-31



Sansloy – Sansfoy – Sansjoy

215

Copy-­text: NLI 30440.

’T

is of a vision heard and seen In a garden by the sea On a day of gracious mien,   Once when o’er a lily spotted, 5   Broken all and pale and blotted,   O’er the lawn with daisies dotted Came the wind along the green.

Title] Sansfoy, Sansloy, and Sansjoy are the names of three pagan knights (Saracen, or ‘paynim’) in Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The names mean, respectively, Without Faith, Without Law, and Without Joy. The three are brothers, and the eldest, Sansfoy, is killed by the hero of Book I, the Redcrosse Knight. The wicked Duessa (posing at this point as the virtuous Fidessa) tells Redcrosse about the trio (FQ I ii 25): At last it chaunced this proud Sarazin To meete me wandering, who perforce me led With him away, but yet could never win The Fort, that Ladies hold in soveraigne dread. There lies he now with foule dishonour dead, Who whiles he liv’d, was called proud Sans foy, The eldest of three brothers, all three bred Of one bad sire, whose youngest is Sans joy, And twixt them both was borne the bloudy bold Sans loy. Sansjoy is also defeated by Redcrosse, but saved from death by Duessa, while Sansloy abducts the character Una, killing in the process the lion that is the symbol of her strength: allegorically, the incident is taken to represent the capture for Rome of the Protestant English Church during the reign of Mary I. 2.] WBY’s line is the title of a lyric by W. Morris from The Life and Death of Jason (1867) IV, 577–608, which was printed separately in 1870 and afterwards. Morris’s poem is one of supernatural questing, and has elements in common with WBY’s scenario, both here and in the longer ‘When to its end. . . ’:

I know a little garden-­close, Set thick with lily and red rose, Where I would wander if I might From dewy morn to dewy night, And have one with me wandering. And though within it no birds sing, And though no pillared house is there, And though the apple-­boughs are bare Of fruit and blossom, would to God Her feet upon the green grass trod, And I beheld them as before. There comes a murmur from the shore, And in the close two fair streams are, Drawn from the purple hills afar, Drawn down unto the restless sea: Dark hills whose heath-­bloom feeds no bee, Dark shore no ship has ever seen, Tormented by the billows green Whose murmur comes unceasingly Unto the place for which I cry. For which I cry both day and night, For which I let slip all delight, Whereby I grow both deaf and blind, Careless to win, unskilled to find, And quick to lose what all men seek. Yet tottering as I am and weak, Still have I left a little breath To seek within the jaws of death An entrance to that happy place, To seek the unforgotten face, Once seen, once kissed, once reft from me Anigh the murmuring of the sea. 3. of gracious mien] The phrase is a standard piece of Victorian medievalism, and as such it could be widely encountered, but here WBY

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Cried the ever-­roving wind:   ‘Sansloy my name is – joy I seek. 10 Never chains my way shall bind.’   Cried the wave: ‘Full many a one   Now a wave-­worn skeleton   Knew my name, Sansfoy, and on Seeking joy I ever wend.’ 5 1 Sighed the lily: ‘White as snow   Once my curving petals were, Now drooping on my stem a-­low,   And my name it is Sansjoy,   Selfsame as the paynim boy – 20   Nothing’s holy, saving joy: This much only do I know.’

may be recalling D.G. Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets (1861) and Dante and his Circle (1874), Jacopo Da Lentino ‘Sonnet: Of his Lady in Heaven’, 11–12: ‘I only would behold her gracious mien,  | And beautiful soft eyes, and lovely face’. (D.G. Rossetti is borrowed

from at the beginning of ‘When to its end. . . ’: see note.) 12.] Cp. ‘When to its end. . . ’, 217, and see note. 16. curving] gleam[ing] del. MS. 19. paynim] A  word much used by Spenser, meaning non-­Christian, or pagan.

31

[LOVE AND SORROW] Text, date of composition, and interpretation. These lines appear on the final leaf of drafts for Mosada Scene 3, in the 1884 TCD notebook, which is likely to be from before Aug. 1884 (see note on Text for Mosada [MS1]). WBY has turned the notebook upside down to draft this quatrain. The present text supplies punctuation and rectifies spelling. WBY here seems to have been experimenting with alexandrines, arranging these in an abab rhyming pattern. Alongside this, the quatrain is notable for its apparent aspiration to a painterly pose for its twin abstractions. Copy-­text: TCD 3502/2.

P

ale Love and Sorrow pass, nor do I greatly grieve About the ending of their famous wanderings; I see how round each other’s necks their arms they wreathe; I see how they do whisper, ’mong their ponderings.

1. Love and Sorrow] love and sorrow MS.

4. ponderings] pongerings MS. WBY’s misspelling here is as definite as it is spectacular. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-32

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THE POEMS

Date of composition. This short verse-­play seems to have been begun before mid-­1884 (see Manuscript versions), but there is no evidence for a specific date on which composition began. A letter from WBY to KT of 1888 does not offer much more help, when discussing IoS and saying ‘Mosada was then written and a poem called Time and Vivien’ (CL 1, 98), the poet means here that Mosada was already written when IoS was being finished, and this would agree with a dating of spring to late summer 1884 for Mosada as a whole, though local revision is likely to have been going on until shortly before publication. Reception and interpretation. One of the earliest reactions to the poem in its pamphlet form comes from its recipient G.M. Hopkins, who told Coventry Patmore, ‘Now this Mosada I cannot think highly of, but I was happily not required then to praise what presumably I had not then read’ (7 Nov. 1886, Correspondence (eds. Thornton and Philips, 2013) vol. 2, 835). More positive private reactions in Dublin can be inferred, however, and in particular it seems likely that JBY’s old friend Edward Dowden did not disapprove of the young poet’s verse-­play (his brother having been signed up for a major role in the subscription process). The book fared very well in terms of reviews, given that it was so slim a volume by so young a poet. In the Freeman’s Journal, Irish praise was prompt and fulsome (27 Nov. 1886): Mr. W.B. Yeats is not one of the numerous young authors who write verses more or less correctly and on the strength of little knacks of versification, expect the world at large to class them amongst the immortals. He is a genuine poet, and if his reputation has not extended more widely, it is because he is blessed  – or afflicted – with the modesty that attends genius. When ‘Mosada’ was first published in the Dublin University Review, we freely expressed our sense of its many excellences, and our appreciation of the promise that it gave. With sincere pleasure, therefore, we welcome its re-­publication, and our only regret is that the author should have limited the edition to a very small number of copies. A notice for The Graphic balanced its praise with criticism’s helping hand (26 Mar. 1887): A very striking, though brief, dramatic sketch is ‘Mosada: A Dramatic Poem,’ by W.B. Yeats. The piece, reprinted from the Dublin University Review, treats of the charge of sorcery brought against a Moorish girl, and her tragic end under circumstances of special pathos which we will not forestall the reader’s enjoyment by revealing. There are signs of juvenile workmanship here and there, and the author has not quite mastered the mystery of blank verse, but as a whole the piece is one of so much promise that we shall watch with interest for future DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-33



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work from the same pen. There is a touch almost of genius in the monk Ebremar’s last lines – it reminds one of Fagin’s meditation on the broken spike. May we suggest to Mr. Yeats that footsteps do not whisper [Sc.3, 5], and that the simile of the golden-­crested wren [Sc.2, 52] is a mistake, being a mere ornament, and irrelevant to the matter in hand? We advise him to study the elder makers carefully, for his mind seems to us a field worth cultivating. In the same month, Mosada was greeted with a positive fanfare in The Irish Monthly by KT (Mar. 1887): The voice in the poem seems to us a new voice, wonderfully clear, rich, and soft in its minor tones, for it has this one point of agreement with modern music that it is pitched in a minor key. We are glad to welcome a new singer in Erin, one who will take high place among the world’s future singers if the promise of this early work be fulfilled, or if, indeed, the performance of the future be equal to that of to-­day. The young poet follows no master, and reminds us of no elder poet. This poem is rich with colour, alive with dramatic feeling, and the stately measure of the blank verse never halts or is disconcerted. [. . .] It is full of such beauty as this – beauty rapt and exalted, the very spirit of poetry; it is strong and joyful with the consciousness of power. A few years later, KT was to write of WBY ‘at the time he was doing those dreamy, dramatic things, ‘The Island of Statues’, ‘Mosada’, and the like, which savour more of Coleridge’s opium-­hued fantasies than of the open air of the Celt’ (Outlook (New York), 30 Jun. 1894). Yet when the work disappeared from WBY’s oeuvre in 1895, KT numbered Mosada, WBY’s ‘early romantic drama’, among poems ‘which one wonders why Mr. Yeats omitted from this collected edition’ (The Speaker, 4 Jan. 1896). The poem’s qualities appealed to the Manchester Guardian as symptomatic of a certain racial talent: ‘His tendency to mysticism and Orientalism, well known to those who are familiar with his striking lyrics and his more ambitious “Mosada”, are real helps towards the appreciation of the unwritten poetry of the most mystical people in western Europe’ (15 Oct. 1888), and the piece continued to impress in the context of WO, when for J. Todhunter in The Academy, Mosada was ‘the most ambitious’ of WBY’s ‘dramatic sketches’, with ‘some touches of true pathos’ (30 Mar. 1889). Early enthusiasms did not necessarily survive their time, or wear well in the long period during which the poem was effectively lost to sight. WBY himself was somewhat surprised when looking upon his early work once more: in a copy of Mosada (now in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin) the poet wrote in 1923 that ‘I read this through for the first time since it was first published’, and decided that ‘I wrote it when I was twenty one and think rather sadly that if a young man of that age sent in like work I [would] not be able to foresee his future or his talent’. In fact, as early as the publication of WO WBY had been telling Edward Dowden (hoping perhaps – though in vain – for some answering contradiction) that Mosada was ‘not much good’ (17 Jan. 1889, CL 1, 628). By 1901, writing to AG, he referred to the work simply as ‘a bad early play of mine’ (22 Dec., CL 3, 139). R. Ellmann’s verdict of 1954 was that the play was full of ‘Byronic melodrama and unconvincing passionateness’ (Identity, 24), but T.R. Henn had found more to admire in 1950, noting that the poem ‘has not, perhaps, received the

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attention it deserves as a specimen of early technique’, and claiming it as ‘almost a copy-­ book specimen of the work of a young but potentially distinguished poet with an admirable ear for the music of his verse’ (Henn, 110). Much of this music, Henn added, came from Tennyson and especially from Shelley; H. Bloom also saw Mosada as ‘overwhelmingly Shelleyan’, but extended this to the plot as well as the style: ‘a Moorish maiden is martyred by the Inquisition because she practises magic in order to recover a vision of her lost Christian lover, who by a characteristic Yeatsian touch enters the poem as his own anti-­self, no less than the Grand Inquisitor’ (Bloom, 55). A similar observation had been made by T.R. Whitaker, for whom ‘The Inquisitor’s militant Christianity rests upon a denial and suppression of its apparent opposite or adversary, which is really its darkly feminine half ’, so that Ebremar is ‘rejecting his shadow’ (Whitaker, 21). In less sophisticated terms – though perhaps ones which in fact come closer to WBY’s conscious intentions – G. Bornstein saw the play as one in which ‘the forces of worldly reality frustrate the quest for ideal love’ (Bornstein, 15). However, very little is found to say about Mosada in much modern criticism of WBY. One aspect which has been brought into discussion, and which could be further investigated, is the relation between the ‘orientalism’ involved in a setting of Moorish Spain and the situation of Irish nationalist thought in the late nineteenth century, especially with regard to the inherited divisions of a sectarian history. E. Larrissy sees Mosada as having ‘a covert but still obvious relation to the poet and Ireland; for it is on an oriental subject, and, as so often, this permits a displaced handling of Irish or Celtic subjects’. ‘Mosada’, he claims, ‘is oriental temperament representing Irish temperament’ while Ebremar has ‘taken the wrong road: the wrong road for patriotic Irish Catholics too’. This may seem a little opaque, but the parallels are derived from Larrissy’s belief (not unfounded) that ‘In this picture of the Inquisition, in fact, one feels something of the fear natural to an Irish Protestant whose family hailed from the northern part of the island [. . .] Yeats must have felt his sojourns in Sligo as an inhabiting of an uncertain, permeable boundary which permitted him access to good and bad in both traditions’ (Larrissy, 30). For J. Lennon, in Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2004), 253–4: ‘The tensions in Mosada between Oriental magic and European Catholicism reveal Yeats’s position as a young Anglo-­Irish Protestant poet interested in a heretical mysticism and Celtic legend [. . .] The Orient, which often included Moorish Spain, offered a symbolic realm in which Yeats could work out his religious tensions’ (253). That there are various ‘tensions’ in play can hardly be in doubt; but these must include some aspects of the work which sit awkwardly alongside WBY’s nationalist thinking, both as it was evolving in 1884–5 and as it was later to develop. However much the symbolic complexities of orientalism as a veiled nationalism may be explored, it is impossible not to remark at the same time how WBY’s drama feeds on some fairly hackneyed presentations of the Spanish Inquisition as an expression – somewhere between history and myth – of Roman Catholic corruption and wickedness, within the overall context of the ruthless pursuit and oppression of free thought. The girl Mosada, in fact, is less a version of (as Larrissy claims) the ‘Irish temperament’ than of the (clichéd) virtuous and dissenting individual whom the machinery of Rome exists to torture and destroy. Whether there is much of an Irish dimension to the play, though, is open to some doubt. The fact that its beginnings were in 1884 means that, whatever fresh intellectual impetus was being provided to WBY as a result of his coming into the circle of John



MOSADA

221

O’Leary from early 1885 onwards, the verse-­play itself is heavily encoded with much that pre-­dates any active interest in political and cultural nationalism on the poet’s part. Specifically, Mosada is a stage in the developing poetic meditation on magic and sexuality played out also in Vivien and Time, Love and Death, and IoS (and, in very concentrated form, in the short ‘The Seeker’): the figure of Mosada shares with Vivien, Ginevra, and the Enchantress an association with magical knowledge and practice, which leads to ruination. This motif should be seen less as part of WBY’s own involvement with magical thought and practice (which at this point still belongs some years in the future) than as evidence of the poet’s brooding over Romantic models of feminine allurement and peril. In Mosada, the character of Ebremar embodies the twinned attraction to and rejection of the femme fatale; but here (unlike in the other plays) it is the female figure who is sympathetic, and not her lover. Gomez/Ebremar is the piece’s true villain, both as an exploitative lover and as an oppressive Inquisitor. This gives Mosada a dimension which, arguably, the other verse-­dramas of 1883–5 lack: predatory love here belongs with the man, not the woman; and once Mosada dies, that love is denied outright by the public man. Manuscript versions. The earliest MS material is in a notebook (now in TCD), dating probably from before Jun. 1884. The notebook begins with the opening of Act 2, Scene 2 of Vivien and Time and contains, after the material from Mosada, the first draft of IoS. (The next draft of IoS is found in a notebook dated by WBY August 1884, so the material will be from a time before this.) Over nine pages of the notebook, WBY twice drafts the conclusion of Scene 3; the first attempt is four pages long, and the second five. The first draft begins at a point corresponding to fol. 21 of the MS2 notebook (see notes to text, Sc.3, 18–83); the second picks up the action at a slightly later point, when ‘Vallence’ wakes Mosada.) It is possible that WBY began his work on Mosada with these rough drafts of how he wanted the piece to end; it is of course also possible, and may be more likely, that material relating to the earlier phases of the dramatic piece has been lost. That something, at least, has been lost seems extremely likely: the draft begins at a point in Mosada’s speech where she has already taken poison and is addressing the lover (here Vallence, in later versions Gomez) whom she supposes absent, although he is soon to appear at her side. WBY gives no speech attribution to Mosada herself and this, as well as the point at which the action is taken up, strongly suggests that he is continuing in the notebook material already drafted elsewhere. In the present notes, the two MS1 drafts are referred to as MS1a and MS1b. The next MS version is complete, in another notebook (also in TCD). The appearance is of a fair copy, written in ink and (as was WBY’s practice at this period) with versos of the notebook left blank throughout. The notebook’s cover has, in faded ink, ‘MOSADA | a Dramatic Poem | Jun. the 7th 188[?4]’. The final digit is beyond legibility, but a date in summer 1884 seems likely; WBY might have wished to complete a fair copy of the piece before moving on to the next phase of the composition of IoS, which happened in Aug. of that year. Readings from this notebook are given as MS2. A third MS version is fragmentary; this consists of loose foolscap pages (in TCD), written mainly in ink. It does not represent a complete account of the play, breaking off before the end of Sc.3, and it does not resemble a version that WBY might have intended for printer’s copy. This phase of composition is later than that in MS2, but there is nothing to provide a more secure date than the probability that it is from after the summer of

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1884. By the time of the poem’s first appearance in print, a further process of revision had evidently taken place, any MS records of which are now lost. Readings from the TCD foolscap pages are given as MS3. All of the MS  material is reproduced and transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 1, 21–125. The present edition differs in some details of transcription and also reproduces a selection of textual variants; for full details of all variants, the Cornell edition should be consulted. Published editions. The poem first appeared in print in the Dublin University Review for Jun. 1886 (DUR). The printers of DUR (Seely, Bryers, and Walker) were commissioned (by subscribers assembled by JBY) to reprint the play as a twelve-­page pamphlet, which was done in Oct. 1886: this was the first book (albeit a very slim one) to appear with WBY as its author and seems to have been in a limited edition of 100 copies, few of which were sold. A portrait of the bearded young poet by JBY was included as a frontispiece, and was a major element of the advertisement that appeared in DUR for Nov. 1886: ‘the powerful and pathetic poem, “Mosada”, contributed to a recent number of this Review [. . .] The reprint contains a pen-­and-­ink portrait of the author by Mr. J.B. Yeats – a very beautiful and characteristic piece of work admirably reproduced on zinc by a Dublin engraver, Mr. Lewis’. In 1904, writing in John Quinn’s copy, WBY remarked of this portrait that ‘There was to have been a picture of some incident in the play but my father was too much of a portrait painter not to do this instead’, adding that ‘I was alarmed at the impudence of putting a portrait in my first work, but my father was full of ancient and modern instances’. In another copy, WBY wrote in 1923: ‘It was my father who insisted on the portrait for he refused to consider any body’s diffidence where a portrait was concerned, it was also his insistence that kept me bearded’. A number of copies were distributed by the poet and his father, including one to the Dublin-­based priest and poet G.M. Hopkins, who wrote to Coventry Patmore of how JBY ‘with some emphasis of manner [. . .] presented me with Mosada: A Dramatic Poem, by W.B. Yeats, with a portrait of the author by J.B. Yeats, himself; the young man having finely cut features, and his father being a fine draughtsman’. Hopkins added, laconically: ‘For a young man’s pamphlet this was something too much; but you will understand a father’s feeling’ (7 Nov. 1886, Correspondence (eds. Thornton and Philips, 2013) vol. 2, 835). Copies went also to Edward Dowden and his brother, the Bishop John Dowden (who – presumably as a key subscriber – received no fewer than twelve). KT’s copy was inscribed ‘Miss K. Tynan from her friend and fellow worker in Irish poetry the author’ (Garvan Collection, Yale University Library), while a copy presented to John O’Leary was signed ‘from his disciple and friend the Author W.B. Yeats’. (A full account of the book and the copies whose fate is known is given in Colin Smythe, ‘W.B. Yeats’s Mosada’, YA 20, 239–261.) The next publication of the play was in WO in 1889, but it was not reprinted thereafter by WBY in any collected edition. Evidence that the poet was still thinking of keeping the work in his oeuvre at some point after 1889 is contained in the marked-­up copy of WO which was given to Thomas Mark (WBY’s copy editor at Macmillan) by GY and is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (Morgan in notes). The alterations made to the WO text here were largely carried over in the Cuala Press publication of Mosada (1943) ‘with the manuscript corrections made by the author on his own copy’.

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223

Copy-­text: WO (with emendations from Morgan). Mosada

[Dramatis Personae] Mosada, a Moorish lady Ebremar, a monk Cola, a lame boy Monks and Inquisitors

Title: Mosada  | A  Tragedy in three acts  | By W.B. Yeats MS2. Dramatis Personae Mosada] WBY probably came across this name at the same time that he found the name Naschina for a character in IoS. In one account (widely reprinted in the nineteenth century) of Arab Grenada the names of both Naschina and Mosada occur together. The ultimate source of this, which featured in e.g. The London Encyclopaedia (1829) and The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1832) is William Jacob, Travels in the South of Spain (1811), Letter xxxix: ‘So general was the love of learning in Grenada, that it extended, notwithstanding the prohibitions of Mahomed, to the softer sex. Naschina acquired celebrity as a poetess; Mosada as an historian; and Leila as a mathematician and universal scholar’ (279). (See Enrico Reggiani, ‘Rewording in Melodious Guile’, Studi Irlandesi 2 [2012], 87.)   Ebremar] The likely clerical original for WBY’s character is Ehremar (sometimes Ebremar, or Evremar) de Chocques, Patriarch of Jerusalem and later Bishop of Caesarea under Baldwin I  at the beginning of the twelfth century. This Ehremar has no connection to Moorish Spain (he came from Flanders), and there is no reason to believe that WBY had any particular knowledge of him; indeed, he is able to use ‘Ebremar’ simply as a place name in Love and Death V i 64. A clue as to where WBY unearthed this character comes in its

conjunction with the name Guarimond (used in IoS) in John Ruskin, St. Mark’s Rest: A History of Venice (publ. in parts 1877–1884, and in vol. form 1884). Here (on p. 8), Guarimond is listed among the signatories of an agreement with Baldwin; the next name on the list is that of Ebremar, Bishop of Caesaraea. Presumably, WBY’s Ebremar is to parallel ‘my Lord Cardinal’ in the original epigraph, as a powerful Church figure, the ‘strange days’ of whose youth are the subject of the drama.   Cola] It is likely that WBY took this name in the first instance from John Todhunter’s play The True Tragedy of Rienzi Tribune of Rome (1881). The title character here is Cola di Rienzo (or Rienzi) (c. 1313–1384), a politician of Rome whose period of power included attempts to unify Italy. During the Risorgimento, Rienzo was a widely celebrated figure, but he was already a presence in nineteenth-­ century art: e.g. Edward Bulwer-­Lytton, Rienzi, The Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835), and Richard Wagner’s first successful opera, Rienzi (1842). WBY takes no more than the name from this tradition, in what may be a nod towards Todhunter (whose play includes both this Cola and his uncle, Cola Orsino).   Epigraph in DUR and WO] ‘And my Lord Cardinal hath [has MS3] had strange days in his youth.’ Extract from a Memoir of the Fifteenth Century MS2, MS3, DUR, WO del. Morgan. The epigraph is deleted in Morgan; its source has been long untraced, and remains so.   (After Dramatis Personae)] Scene: in and about Grenada MS2.

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Scene 1

A Little Moorish Room in the Village of Azubia. In the centre of the room a chafing dish. Mosada (alone)

5 10

Three times the roses have grown less and less, And thrice the peaches flushed upon the walls, And thrice the corn around the sickles flamed, Since ’mong my people, tented on the hills, Where they all summer feed their wandering flocks, He stood a messenger. In April’s prime (Swallows were flashing their white breasts above Or perching on the tents, a-­weary still From waste seas cross’d, yet ever garrulous) Along the velvet vale I saw him come –

the Village of Azubia] La Zubia, about 11  km to the South of Grenada, is likely to be WBY’s intended location. A  sketch of the place by Samuel Edward Cook gives an impression of its early nineteenth-­century condition: ‘After issuing from the gorge which the village occupies, the [river] Monachil takes a sweep through a flat in front of the village of Azubia, the most beautiful of all those of the environs of the capital [Grenada]. It is seated on a rising ground, which is beautifully laid out in the style of Frascati, with gardens and country houses, noble cypresses and other trees, and is a favourite retreat of the Granadinos. Beyond, to the west, all is bleak and dreary waste’ (Sketches in Spain During the Years 1829–1832 Vol. 1 (1834), 10). 1.]

Thrice has the winter come and gone again [As autumn del.] And thrice the roses have grown less and less [As autumn climbed the steps of summer’s throne del.] [Where youthful del.] As [?tuneless del.] slowly autumn climbed the golden throne Where sat old summer fading [in his del.] into song. MS2

2–3.] As slowly Autumn climbed the golden throne |Where sat old Summer fading into song, MS3, DUR. 4.] Since to my people’s tents among the hills MS2 Since [to my del.] ’mong my people’s [tents del.] tented on the [dear del.] hills MS3. 6. stood] came MS2. prime] flush MS3. 7.] Where swallows flashed their white breasts high above MS2. Possibly cp. Eleanor Baillie-­ Hamilton King, Aspromonte and Other Poems (1869), ‘A Week in July’, 27–8: ‘Ceaseless the swallows’ breasts of white  | Forwards and backwards flashed and crossed’. 8–10.] Or perched upon the tents, [still del.] when weak they seemed From their long flight, yet ever garrulous Along the winding vale I  watched him come MS2 9. waste seas cross’d] [their long flight del.] waste seas crossed MS3. 10. velvet vale] Cp. Mary Tighe, Psyche (1811), ‘Pleasure’, 42: ‘Ten thousand blossoms o’er each velvet vale’.



15 20 25

MOSADA

225

Feet of dark Gomez, wherefore wander ye? In Autumn, when far down the mountain slopes The heavy clusters of the grapes were full, I saw him sigh and turn and pass away; For I and all my people were accurst Of his sad God; and down among the grass Hiding my face, I cried long, bitterly. ’Twas evening, and the cricket nation sang Around my head and danced among the grass; And all was dimness, till a dying leaf Slid circling down and softly touched my lips With dew, as though ’twere sealing them for death. Yet somewhere in the footsore world we meet We two before we die, for Azolar The star-­taught Moor said thus it was decreed By those wan stars that sit in company Above the Alpujarras on their thrones,

11.] Not in MS2, MS3, DUR. Gomez is a name easily found for WBY’s purposes, which require something plausibly Spanish. 11-13.] ’Twas autumn when far down the mountain’s side The heavy clusters of the grapes were full I saw him go. He sighed and turned away. MS2 In autumn when far down the mountain’s slopes The heavy clusters of the grapes were full I saw him sigh and turn and pass away. MS3 15.] I and my people seemed to him accurst. | He passed away and down among the grass | I hid my face and cried long, bitterly MS2. 16. his sad God] his sad [faith del.] God MS3. Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘October: The Man Who Never Laughed Again’, 316: ‘the rites of some sad God’. 18–21.] ’Twas evening, and I heard the grasshoppers Sing close around my head among the grass, [And all around the lemon leaves fell down del.] And naught I knew, until a dying leaf Came circling down MS2 20. And all was dimness] Cp. George Croly, Poetical Works (1830), ‘Czerni George’, 118–9: ‘the moonbeam sunk, | And all was dimness’.

21. Slid] Came MS3. 22. ’twere sealing them for death] ’twould seal them up for death MS2. 23–24.] Yet somewhere in the world we two must meet | Again before we die MS2. 24. Azolar] It is not clear that WBY derives this name from any specific source, though the Spanish verb azolar does exist, meaning to shape wood. WBY also used the name in ‘A Soul of the fountain spake me a word. . . ’ (probably composed before Apr. 1884), where it may be either a personal or a place name. 25. The star-­taught Moor] Possibly cp. Thomas Aird, Poetical Works (1878), ‘Belshezzar’s Feast’, 32: ‘The star-­taught Chaldee Sages’; and Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh, (1817), ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’, 127: ‘star-­taught Soliman’. 26. wan stars] Cp. S.T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 317: ‘The wan stars danced between’. 27^28.] And gaze upon the silence of the world MS2 A-­gazing on the silence of the world MS3. 27. the Alpujarras] A region in Andalucia, on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, which spans the provinces of Almeria and Grenada. Its name derives from the Arabic. The region was slow to be converted back from Islam after the Moors had been driven from Spain, and it is possible that this struck WBY as a

226 30

MOSADA

That when the stars of our nativity Draw star to star, as on that eve he passed Down the long valleys from my people’s tents, We meet – we two.

(She opens the casement. A sound of laughter floats in.) How merry all these are Among the fruit! But there, lame Cola crouches Away from all the others. Now the sun Sinks, shining on the little crucifix 35 Hung on his doublet – dear and mournful child, Seër of visions! Now eve falls asleep, The hour of incantation comes a-­tiptoe, And Cola, seeing, knows the sign and rises. Thus do I burn these precious herbs, whose smoke 40 Pours up and floats in fragrance round my head In coil on coil of azure.

suggestive parallel with Irish experiences of religious power and change. See e.g. William Hickling Prescott, History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain Vol. 3 (1866), 6–8: ‘It was decided that the best mode of effecting the conversion of the Moslems was by breaking up those associations which connected them with the past, – by compelling them, in short, to renounce their ancient usages, their national dress, and even their language. [. . .] By far the larger part of the Moorish population was scattered over the mountain-­range of the Alpujarras, south-­east of Grenada, and among the bold sierras that stretch along the southern shores of Spain. [. . .] Thus, gathered in their little hamlets among the mountains, the people of the Alpujarras maintained the same sort of rugged independence which belonged to the ancient Goth when he had taken shelter from the Saracen invader in the fastnesses of the Asturias. Here the Moriscoes, formed into communities which preserved their national associations, still cherished the traditions of their fathers, and perpetrated those usages and domestic institutions that kept alive the memory of ancient days. It was from the Alpujarras that, in former times, the

kings of Grenada had drawn the brave soldiery who enabled them for so many years to bid defiance to their enemies. The trade of war was now at an end. But the hardy life of the mountaineer gave robustness to his frame, and saved him from the effeminacy and sloth which corrupted the inhabitants of the capital. Secluded among his native hills, he cherished those sentiments of independence which ill suited a conquered race; and, in default of a country which he could call his own, he had that strong attachment to the soil which is akin to patriotism, and which is most powerful among the inhabitants of a mountain region.’ 30. Down the long valleys] Perhaps cp. (as in 24 above) Thomas Aird, Poetical Works (1878), ‘Flowers of the Old Scottish Thistle: Maude of Raventree’, 88: ‘Down the long valley go the Orphan Band’. 31.] Then in the world somewhere we two must meet MS2. 31.] S.D. the mingled sound of the voices and laughter of the apple gatherers floats in. DUR. 31–41.] How merry all these are among the fruit! Each heart a kingdom for winged laughter sways! But yonder’s Cola sitting by himself.

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(Enter Cola)

All is ready.

Cola

I will not share your sin. Mosada

This is no sin. No sin to see in coil on coil of azure Pictured, where wander the beloved feet 45 Whose footfall I have longed for, three sad summers. Why these new fears? Cola The great monk Ebremar, The dark still man, has come and says ’tis sin.

’Twere sad if my unlawful spells weighed down His buoyant heart. Aye, how the slanting sun Sinks down at last with yonder minaret Of the Alhambra, black athwart his disk: That is the sign, and Cola comes this way. (She throws herbs upon the chafing dish.) So do I burn this fragrant herb, whose smoke Pours up and floats along the roof In coil on coil of green. MS2 32. there] yond[er del.] MS3, yon DUR. 32–36.] Now the sun – A-­shining on the little crucifix Of silver hanging round lame Cola’s neck – Sinks down at last with yonder minaret Of the Alhambra black athwart his disk; MS3, DUR. 38. rises] WO Morgan; comes MS3, DUR, WO. 40. round] o’er DUR.

floats in fragrance] Perhaps cp. James Montgomery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘Via Crucis, Via Lucis’, 18: ‘May floats in fragrance on the breeze’. 41. ready] prepared MS2. 41^42.] Mosada, it is then so much the worse. MS2, MS3, DUR. 42.] [I will not look and share thy sin against del.] I will not aid thy spells and share thy sin | ’Gainst the far reaching power of the Church MS2. 42–43.] It is no sin | That you shall see on yonder glowing cloud MS3, DUR. 46. The great monk Ebremar,] The great ecclesiastic, and his boast | Is of the countless heathen he has burnt MS2, The servant of the Lord, MS3, DUR. 47^48.] Fear not, the sin is mine, and think you I Would sin if he might know – what sin to see, Within the charmèd depth of whirling smoke, What one who left me long ago does now? MS2

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Mosada 50 55

They say the wish itself is half the sin; Then has this one been sinned full many times. Yet ’tis no sin; my father taught it me. He was a man most learned and most mild, Who, dreaming to a wondrous age, lived on, Tending the roses round his lattice door. For years his days had dawned and faded thus Among the plants; the flowery silence fell Deep in his soul, like rain upon a soil Worn by the solstice fierce, and made it pure. Would he teach any sin? Cola

Yourself.

Gaze in the cloud

Mosada

None but the innocent can see. Cola

0 6

They say I am all ugliness; lame-­footed I am; one shoulder turned awry – why then Should I be good? But you are beautiful. Mosada



I cannot see.

50–51.] This is a harmless art my father old  | Who dreamed unto a wondrous age taught me MS2. 53.] Why, he would spend the livelong day to trail  | And tend the roses round about his door MS2. 56. deep in] Upon MS2 Down on MS3. 57^58.] And when ’twas dark his faded eyes would gaze

On those wan mariners who sail and sail Upon their ever-­foamless sea, the stars. MS2 58. sin] ill MS2. Gaze in the cloud | Yourself] I will not look MS2. 58^59.] O child, you cannot tell how yearnings for | A sight of far-­off ones can fill sick hearts. MS2. 59–66.] Not in MS2.

MOSADA



229

Cola The beetles, and the bats, And spiders are my friends, I’m theirs, and they are 65 Not good; but you are like the butterflies. Mosada 70

I cannot see! I cannot see! but you Shall see a thing to talk on when you’re old, Under a lemon tree beside your door; And all the elders sitting in the sun, Will wondering listen, and this tale shall ease For long the burthen of their talking griefs. Cola



Upon my knees I pray you, let it sleep, The vision. Mosada

You are pale and weeping. Child, Be not afraid, you’ll see no fearful thing. 75 Thus, thus I beckon from her viewless fields – Thus beckon to our aid a Phantom fair And calm, robed all in raiment moony white. She was a great enchantress once of yore, Whose dwelling was a tree-­wrapt island, lulled

72–74.] Cola. I  will not look for you, look for yourself. | Mosada. No, no, none but the innocent can see. | Are you afraid? You’ll see no fearful sight. MS2. 73.] You’re pale and weeping, child. DUR. 76.] I’ll call unto thine aid a spirit fair MS2 a Phantom fair] Perhaps cp. John Anster, Poems (1819), ‘Zamri: A  Fragment’, 291–2: ‘Methought it was my idle brain | Had shaped the phantom fair’; but WBY may more plausibly be influenced by Tennyson, Maud, And Other Poems (1855), ‘The Daisy’, 65: ‘How faintly flushed, how phantom-­fair’.

77. robed all in raiment moony white] Perhaps cp. Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (1876), V, 71: ‘robed in raiment of glad light’. 78. a great enchantress] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’, 30: ‘A great enchantress you may be’. 78–90.] The description of the enchantress and her isle here has strong resemblances to the Enchantress and her island in IoS. Since it is not possible to be certain whether Mosada was written before or after IoS (and it is possible that both pieces were being written at or around the same time), the question of deliberate self-­allusion on

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0 8 85

Far out upon the water world and ringed With wonderful white sands, where never yet Were furled the wings of ships. There in a dell, A lily-­blanchèd place, she sat and sang, And in her singing wove around her head White lilies, and her song flew forth afar Along the sea; and many a man grew hushed

WBY’s part here must remain open. However, something more deliberate is involved once both works are printed by the poet in WO, in which a substantial portion of IoS is the final item, with Mosada as the sixteenth of the book’s thirty-­one pieces. In this context, Mosada’s account effectively prefigures the dramatic setting which will provide the volume’s conclusion. 80. the water world] the ocean world MS2. Cp. Keats, Endymion (1818), III, 101: ‘the deep, deep water-­ world’, and Tennyson, Maud: A  Monodrama II I  68: ‘Through his dim water-­world’. 81. sands] sand DUR. 83. lily-­blanchèd] Perhaps cp. William Watson, The Prince’s Quest and Other Poems (1880), ‘Three Flowers’, 7: ‘The white lily blanched a paler white’. 84–6.] And as she sang she’d bind about her head  | White lilies, and her song would fly afar  | From where the lilies of the wan lips grew MS2. 86.] From this point to the end of the scene, MS2 differs widely from all later versions: Mosada. O yes, For why should not the young be innocent? Cola (starts and listens). Now I will do whate’er you wish. Mosada,  Thanks, thanks! Stand thou aside, and I will chant the spell For thee: ’twas by a famous poet made In an unremembered tongue [– he loved] [The princess of del.] It was a touching and unhappy tale,

The princess of a town whose very name None know, and where it was none now can tell. (There is a faint sound without.) Why do you grow so pale, and sit apart Like to a startled hare? Fear not, we’re far From all the world among the climbing coils Of this green smoke. When I  have sung the spell To call the song-­soul of that ancient isle, A burning spark shall glimmer in the smoke That wraps us, and – (Cola darts forward and throws down the chafing dish. The glowing charcoal and the herbs are scattered.) Cola. Burn, burn, thou Moorish witch! I scatter thus These things of crime, that you may hide them not. Burn, burn, thou heretic! Mosada. (Trying to gather together the herbs) I cannot now Know where he is – these herbs alone I had [Kept long for one spell ample and no more del.] And child, I  know not where to gather new. (The doors are burst open and the Officers of the Inquisition enter.) First Inquisitor. I here arrest thee in the Church’s name Mooress, surrounded by the implements Of thy accursèd art.

MOSADA



90

231

In his own house or ’mong the merchants grey, Hearing the far-­off singing guile, and groaned, And manned an argosy and sailing died. In the far isle she sang herself asleep, But now I wave her hither to my side. Cola

95

Stay, stay, or I will hold your white arms down. Ah me! I cannot reach them – here and there Darting you wave them, darting in the vapour. Heard you? Your lute hung in the window sounded! I feel a finger drawn across my cheek! Mosada



The phantoms come; they come, they come, they come!

Mosada. ’Tis Allah’s will. Touch not this boy, he is most innocent. Cola. Forgive me lady, I have told them all: The spells you planned, and this the chosen day. They threatened me, and said I’d burn in hell Unless I  told them all, and [went del.] came to you Without a word. They wished to come as now And find you ’mong the vapour and the herbs. (She turns away. He clings to her dress.) Cola. Will you not forgive? Mosada. ’Twas Allah’s will. Cola. Forgive, or I will die! Mosada. ’Twas Allah’s will.

(Exeunt) 88. singing guile] tuneful guile MS3. Cp. WBY’s phrase ‘melodious guile’ in ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’, 49. MS2 of IoS carries the title ‘The lady of tuneful guile’. 89. manned an argosy] WBY had previously used ‘argosy’ to describe a sailing vessel in ‘When to its end o’er-­ripened July nears. . . ’ where the metaphor bears comparison with that used here: ‘a song should be | A painted and be-­pictured argosy  | And as a crew to guide her wandering days  | Sad love and change’ (4–7). An argosy is ‘A merchant-­vessel of the largest size and burden; esp. those of Ragusa and Venice’ (OED). WBY would have been familiar with the word from Keats, The Eve of St  Agnes (1820), 268–9: ‘Manna and dates, in argosy transferred | From Fez’. 91.] At last. But now I  wave her to my side. MS3, DUR. 95. hung in the window] upon the wall has MS3, DUR. 96.] Oh horrible! I  feel a finger drawn across my cheek MS3. 97. they come, they come, they come!] Morgan; ha ha! they come, they come! MS3, DUR, WO.

232

MOSADA

100

I wave them hither, my breast heaves with joy. Ah! now I’m Eastern-­hearted once again, And, while they gather round my beckoning arms, I’ll sing the songs the dusky lovers sing, Wandering in sultry palaces of Ind, A lotus in their hands –



(The door is flung open)



(Enter the Officers of the Inquisition) First Inquisitor

Young Moorish girl Taken in magic, in the Church’s name 105 I here arrest thee. Mosada It was Allah’s will. Touch not this boy, for he is innocent. Cola

Forgive! for I have told them everything. They said I’d burn in hell unless I told.



(She turns away – he clings to her dress.)



Forgive me! Mosada



It was Allah’s will.

98. heaves] leaps MS3. 99. Eastern-­hearted] Cp. Lord Byron, The Corsair (1814), III viii 83: ‘The fire that lights an Eastern heart’. It is possible that WBY had come across a poem by R.W. Buchanan, ‘Charmian’

(1867), 35–6: ‘Knowing that eastern heart of thine | Shared the dim ecstasy of mine’. 105. was] is MS3, DUR. 108^109.] Them all, and let them find you in the vapour. MS3, DUR.

233

MOSADA



Second Inquisitor

The cords.

Mosada 10 1

No need to bind my hands. Where are ye, sirs? For ye are hid with vapour. Second Inquisitor

The vapour is much thicker.

Round the stake

Cola God! the stake! Ye said that ye would fright her from her sin – No more; take me instead of her, great sirs. 115 She was my only friend; I’m lame, you know – One shoulder twisted, and the children cry Names after me. First Inquisitor

Lady – Mosada

I come. Cola (following) Forgive, Forgive, or I will die. Mosada (stooping and kissing him) ’Twas Allah’s will.

109. The cords] Now cords. MS3, DUR. 110^111.] [This mist has hidden thee del.] MS3.

111. vapour.] vapours? DUR.

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MOSADA

Scene 2 A room in the building of the Inquisition of Granada, lighted by stained window, picturing St James of Spain. Monks and Inquisitors First Monk

Will you not hear my last new song? First Inquisitor

Hush, hush! So she must burn, you say? Second Inquisitor

She must in truth.



First Inquisitor



Will he not spare her life? How would one matter When there are many? Second Monk

Ebremar will stamp 5 This heathen horde away. You need not hope; And know you not she kissed that pious child With poisonous lips, and he is pining since? First Monk

You’re full of wordiness. Come, hear my song.

1.] Not in MS2. 3.] First Inquisitor. Will he not spare her life? First Monk. The most just man Will stamp this race of Vipers from the earth.

Second Inquisitor. In truth, these Moors are a most evil race. Unto the cross our lives we hold in trust, And we must stamp them out. Why strive for her? She’s but a little Moorish girl MS2. 7. poisonous lips] Cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam IX xv 1: ‘the falsehood of their poisonous lips’.

235

MOSADA



Second Monk 10

In truth, an evil race; why strive for her, A little Moorish girl? Second Inquisitor



Small worth.

First Monk

My song –

First Inquisitor 15

I had a sister like her once, my friend. (Touching the first Monk on the shoulder) Where is our brother Peter? When you’re nigh, He is not far. I’d have him speak for her. I saw his jovial mood bring once a smile To sainted Ebremar’s sad eyes. I think He loves our brother Peter in his heart. If Peter would but ask her life – who knows? First Monk

20

He digs his cabbages. He brings to mind That song I’ve made. ’Tis of an Irish tale. A saint of Munster, when much fasting, saw This vision of Peter and the burning gate. (Sings)



I saw a stranger tap and wait Beside the door of Peter’s gate,

12. nigh] [nigh del.] near MS2. 17.] If he would ask he’d grant her life mayhap. MS2 And Peter’d ask her life, why then who knows? MS3. 19.] A  song I’ve made about a Russian tale MS2 That song I’ve made  – is of a Russian tale MS3, DUR. 20–21.] Of Holy Peter of the Burning Gate:  | A saint of Russia in a vision saw MS3, DUR.

22–33.] This short ‘song’, a twelve-­line poem in iambic tetrameter couplets, is likely to have Russian rather than Irish origins for WBY. The initial description of it as ‘A Russian tale’, up to and including the DUR version (see note) should probably be taken as evidence for this story about St  Peter at the gates of heaven having come to WBY from some Russian folktale source. The source itself is

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The stranger shouted, ‘Open wide Thy sacred door;’ but Peter cried, ‘No, thy home is deepest hell, Deeper than the deepest well.’ Then the stranger softly crew – ‘Cock-­a-­doodle-­doodle-­doo!’

untraced, but a later letter by WBY about his short story of 1893, ‘Michael Clancy, the Great Dhoul, and Death’, written in 1898 for publication in the Kilkenny Moderator, may be relevant. In it, WBY says, ‘When I  was about eighteen, I  came upon a Connaught folk tale of a tinker and Death and the Devil; and a little later on I found that it existed in Russia, where it had gathered unto itself the man who crowed to shame St. Peter, and some other old tales’ (CL 2, 317). The dates here seem to fit with the likely time of the composition of Mosada. The tale as WBY recalls it is not found in the major English account then available, W.R.S. Ralston’s Russian Folk-­Tales (1873), although the tinker’s story involving Death and the Devil is present there. Ralston does remark, however, on how ‘Many of the Russian stories closely resemble those of a similar nature which occur in German and Scandinavian collections; all of them, for instance, agreeing in the unfavourable light in which they place St. Peter’ (332). (Associating WBY’s material here with a short story of Leo Tolstoy, though tempting, is problematic: Tolstoy’s ‘Repentance’, or ‘The Repentant Sinner’, in which a soul newly arrived at the pearly gates reminds St Peter of the cock crow and his denial of Jesus (though unsuccessfully, in this particular instance), appeared in 1886, and in English not until 1887: by then, WBY’s play  – and certainly its earlier drafts  – were already written.) It is highly likely that WBY did come across a Russian folk tale around the time he was composing Mosada, in which St Peter is pointedly reminded of his denial of Jesus by a soul imitating the sound of a cockerel. The 1893 short story probably preserves at least the gist of this material. The character of the tinker (who corresponds to a stock type in Ralston’s account of Russian stories) speaks

in an exaggerated Irish manner, which is itself matched by St Peter (version in The Old Country annual (1893): ‘I like me whiskey either hot or could, an’ I’ll keep clear of Purgatory anyhow,’ he said. “I’ll thry Heaven for a turn.” He went on until he came to a little door in a big wall, with a square barred hole in the door for talking through. He looked in and saw Death shooting arrows at a butt a good way off among the trees, but could not see St. Peter anywhere. He therefore put his mouth to the square hole and crowed like a cock as loud as ever he could. Presently he heard St. Peter running up to the gate, calling out “Whisht! now, whisht!” Michael Clancy stopped crowing, and St. Peter whispered through the hole, “If ye’ll shtop that, an’ don’t be disgracin’ me afore the blessed Archangels an’ all the Holy Innocents, I’ll go straight and bring your case before the authorities.” He went away, but after a little returned and said, “It’s no use at all at all; we’ve got to make an example of somebody.” ’   WBY’s decision to reassign the song in Mosada to ‘a saint in Munster’ may indeed be based on some Irish parallel having come his way; it may also, perhaps, reflect a decision to turn the mildly anti-­Catholic tone of his source motif towards something a little closer to home. The crowing of the cock was later to become a much more wide-­reaching image in WBY’s writings, but this is its earliest outing. 22.] A stranger new arisen wait MS2, MS3, DUR. 23. Beside the] Morgan; ’Fore the MS2, By the MS3, DUR, WO. 24. The stranger shouted,] Morgan; And he shouted MS2, MS3, DUR Then he shouted WO. 25. Thy] The MS2, MS3. 28. Then] But MS2, MS3.

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0 3

Answered Peter: ‘Enter in, Friend; but ’twere a deadly sin Ever more to speak a word Of any unblessed earthly bird.’ First Inquisitor

35

Be still; I hear the step of Ebremar. Yonder he comes; bright-­eyed, and hollow-­cheeked From fasting – see, the red light slanting down From the great painted window wraps his brow, As with an aureole.



(Ebremar enters. They all bow to him.) First Inquisitor



My suit to you –

Ebremar 40

I will not hear; the Moorish girl must die. I will burn heresy from this mad earth, And –

31. Friend; but] But friend MS2. 33–61.] First Monk. Hist! I hear the step of Ebremar. (Enter Ebremar the great ecclesiastic. They all bow low to him.) First Inquisitor. Highness, my suit to you. . . Ebremar. I will not hear. I will destroy this nation of the Moors And burn the utter roots of heresy, Sow salt where they have dwelt – I plant the cross: They die. First Inquisitor. My lord, would you yourself descend

Into the dungeon ’mong the prisoners And importune with weighty words the maid, That, being repented of her heresy And bowing to the cross, her life be saved? Ebremar. I see none but the servants of the cross And dying men. This Moorish maid hath sinned, And therefore must she die. I will not hear. (He sits down at a table and begins to write.) First Inquisitor. But mercy is the manna of the world. Ebremar. Stipendium paccati mors est. Second Inquisitor. Let’s hence, It is no use.

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First Inquisitor

Mercy is the manna of the world. Ebremar



The wage of sin is death. Second Monk



No use. No use.

First Inquisitor 45

My lord, if it must be, I pray descend Yourself into the dungeon ’neath our feet And importune with weighty words this Moor, That she forswear her heresies and save Her soul from seas of endless flame in hell. Ebremar



I speak alone with servants of the Cross And dying men – and yet – But no, farewell. Second Monk

50

No use.

First Inquisitor. We’ll go; it is no use. (They bow to Ebremar and go out.) Ebremar (alone) Stipendium peccati mors est, mors est: The wages of sin is death, ’tis writ. High God, I have established far and near Thy fear, and shall destroy this alien church. MS2 42.] Thus Morgan; The wages of sin is death || No use. DUR The wages of sin is death. || No use. No good. WO. WBY’s revision in Morgan seems to be suggested by an enthusiasm

for metrical regularity rather than scriptural accuracy, ‘The wages of sin is death’, Romans 6.23. 43–61. MS3 breaks off at 42, but another MS  stage is preserved as a single leaf (NLI 30430) which contains material for the end of the scene from this point: it is clearly subsequent to MS2, but possibly earlier than MS3. The leaf was preserved, presumably, because it contains the poem ‘A Song of Sunset’ which the final draft lines of the scene are written over. Variants presented next from this leaf are referenced as from MS3a. 50. Hear,] Hear oh! DUR.

MOSADA



239

Ebremar Away! (They go.) Hear, thou enduring God, Who giveth to the golden-­crested wren Her hanging mansion. Give to me, I pray, The burthen of Thy truth. Reach down Thy hands And fill me with Thy rage, that I may bruise 55 The heathen. Yea, and shake the sullen kings Upon their thrones. The lives of men shall flow As quiet as the little rivulets Beneath the sheltering shadow of Thy Church; And Thou shalt bend, enduring God, the knees 60 Of the great warriors whose names have sung The world to its fierce infancy again.

51. golden-­crested wren] A once common form of the name of the goldcrest, Regulus regulus. It is a winter visitor only in Spain, but is in Ireland year-­round. 52. mansion] [nest del.] mansion MS3a. 56.] [And the great warriors whose names have sung del.] MS3a.

58. the sheltering shadow] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘Miletus’, 22: ‘under the stony porch’s sheltering shadow’, and D.G. Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (1881), ‘John Keats’, 8: ‘In dead Rome’s sheltering shadow’.

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Scene 3 The dungeon of the Inquisition. The morning of the auto-­da-­fé dawns dimly through a barred window. A few faint stars are shining. Swallows are circling in the dimness without. Mosada 5

Oh, swallows, swallows, swallows, will ye fly This eve, to-­morrow, or to-­morrow night Above the farm-­house by the little lake That rustles in the reeds with patient pushes, Soft as the whispering of a lost footstep Circling the brain? My brothers now pass down Along the cornfield, where the poppies grow, To their farm work; how silent all will be! But no, in this warm weather, ’mong the hills,

S.D. auto-­da-­fé] The trial and execution session of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions (the name is the Portuguese for ‘act of faith’). It involved the public penance of convicted heretics, followed not uncommonly by their being burned at the stake. MS2 preserves an earlier version of this final scene (MS3 having by this stage broken off). Eight lines precede what was to be line 1: Mosada (looking at her ring) My ring where I have stored a poison drop: ’Twas once but for an idle fancy’s sake, A fashion with us dreaming Moorish maids. But ring, I love thee this fair morn, for ring Thou only in the world obeyest my wish. I will not die just yet, my serpent ring, That art so fair in thy small coils of gold; I’ll stand a little in the window here. (She gazes out of the window.) MS2 1.] The repeated invocation of swallows has a certain late nineteenth-­ century poetic currency, deriving from Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘Itylus’, 1: ‘Swallow my sister, O sister swallow’, e.g. Edmund Gosse, New Poems (1879), ‘At Dawn’, 9: ‘O swallows, swallows’. Mosada here betters reduplication by achieving a triplication of ‘swallows’.

4. That rustles] That’s rustling DUR. 4–7.] Soon now my brothers will be passing through The narrow corn-­field where the poppies grow, To their farm work. MS2 5. lost footstep] Morgan; long-­lost WO. 5–6.] Soft as a long dead footstep whispering through | The brain DUR. 6. now pass down] Morgan; will pass down WO will be passing down DUR. 7. Along] Morgan; Quite soon DUR, WO. Along the cornfield] WBY’s unusual choice of ‘Along’ for his revision may recall the usage of Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Dover (In a Field)’, 3–4: ‘the going of a murmurous sound  | Along the corn’. A  much closer parallel for the whole of WBY’s line is to be found in a book published in 1888 by Edith Nesbit, Leaves of Life, where the poem ‘Refugium Peccatorum’ has the line ‘And through the cornfields where the poppies grow’. The book is some years after the publication of Mosada, but Nesbit’s poems had both been given periodical publication before this and were in circulation in the London circle of W. Morris (in which WBY was numbered).

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0 1 15

Will be the faint far thunder-­sound, as though The world were dreaming in its summer sleep; That will be later, day is scarcely dawning. Hassan is with them too – he was so small, A weak, thin child, when last I saw him there. He will be taller now – ’twas long ago.



The men are busy in the glimmering square. I hear the murmur as they raise the beams

11.] Cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Evening’, 7: ‘And steeped in summer sleep the world must lie’. 12–13.] That will be later, as yet dawn’s not come.  | And Cecco will be with them  – he was small MS2. 13. Hassan is with them too] Morgan; And Hassan will be with them DUR, WO. 15^16.] O swallows, swallows, swallows, all I think Is not right here. (touching her forehead) I do not weep and yet, O look ye swallows, it is sad to join All those unhappy ones who died in youth. (A pause) MS2 16. the glimmering square] WBY’s phrase for the sunlit Spanish plaza repeats Tennyson’s description of a household window, The Princess (1849), ‘Tears, idle tears’, 14: ‘The casement slowly grows a glimmering square’. 18–83.] To build the wooden circle of the seats Where shall the churchmen sit above the crowd. O cowlèd race – I am too dazed to curse; I’m not of that pale company whose feet Ere long shall falter through the glimmering square And not come thence.

(She poisons herself from the ring.) This precious poison drop Will soon thieve from me with its sleepy mood My thoughts, and yonder brightening patch of sky With three bars crossed, and these four walls my world, [How soon so small a drop makes one grow weak, And yon few stars that ^grown del.^ dim like old men’s eyes del.] And yon few stars so dim like old men’s eyes. How soon so small a drop makes one grow weak! Where shall I  lay me down? That question is A very weighty question, being the last. If here, on yonder alcove shadowed deep Where I’ve imagined ghostly feet to pass On lonely nights, my fading eyes must look. If here, on the long rows of square-­cut stone Upon the wall I must look last, their sight Were very wearisome to dying eyes. Nay, here I’ll lay me down, for I can see The burghers of the night fade one by one: Five, five, nay six. (She lies down. A pause.) ’Tis thus they shone the night When my lost love passed down among the hills.

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MOSADA

To build the circling seats, where high in air Soon will the churchmen nod above the crowd. I’m not of that pale company whose feet Ere long shall falter through the noisy square, And not come thence; for here in this small ring, Hearken, ye swallows! – I have hoarded up A poison drop. A toy, a fancy once, A fashion with us Moorish maids, begot Of dreaming and of watching by the door The shadows pass; but now, I love my ring, For it alone of all the world will do My bidding.

O Vallence, Vallence, we shall meet at last! The stars of thy nativity and mine Burn side by side, two ministering lights Throbbing within the circle of green dawn. Too late, too late, for I am near to death. I try to lift mine arm, and it falls back, Grown very heavy in a little time. A painless death creeps over me like sleep. What do ye mean, O stars? When death has come Shall in his being all my being fade? I think all’s finished now, and all is sealed. (A long pause, then enter Ebremar) Ebremar Prisoner, the final day has come for thee: Repent thy heresies, and save thy soul From endless pain. (He starts, and rushes forward) Mosada, O Mosada! Turn round – a word, a look! Lie not so still! I thought thou wert on the Alpujarras’ side, Far, far away from this most ill-­starred town. O God, she lies as still as on a tomb, A sculptured lady in the marble white. Look, look! (throws back his cowl) I am thy Vallence; rise

Magnificent in thy black hair that pours A shining wonder in its heavy folds, And thither fading with the morning star We’ll fly ^far from here.^ There is a secret way, From nearby tunnelled to the river’s marge, Where lies a boat among the shadowy reeds That sigh to one another all year long. Awake, awake, and we will sail afar, Afar along the fleet white river’s face – We two alone upon the river wan, Alone among the murmurs of the dawn. Far ’mid thy people none will know that I Was Ebremar whose thoughts were fixed on God, Whom now I lose: awake, Mosada, wake, Thy Vallence is by thee. MS2. 18.the circling seats] Perhaps cp. W. Thornbury, Historical and Legendary Ballads and Songs (1876), ‘Nero Imperator’, 6 (describing a gladiatorial arena): ‘High up above the circling seats the whirling pigeons flew’. 21. falter through] Cp. A. Swinburne, Songs Before Sunrise (1871), ‘Mater Dolorosa’, 16: ‘Where her faint feet stumble and falter through year-­long days’. 24. A poison drop] Perhaps cp. Thomas Campbell, Poetical Works (1837), ‘Ode to the Memory of Burns’, 86: ‘one baleful poison drop’. A toy, a fancy] The toy of DUR.

243

MOSADA



(Sucks poison from the ring) 30 35 40 45 50

Now ’tis done, and I am glad And free – ’twill thieve away with sleepy mood My thoughts, and yonder brightening patch of sky With three bars crossed, and these four walls my world, And yon few stars grown dim, like eyes of lovers The noisy world divides. How soon a deed So small makes one grow weak and tottering! Where shall I lay me down? That question is A weighty question, for it is the last. Not there, for there a spider weaves her web. Nay here, I’ll lay me down where I can watch The burghers of the night fade one by one. An apple blossom circles in the gloom, Floating from yon barred window. Small new-­comer, Thou’rt welcome. Lie there close against my fingers. I wonder which is whitest, they or thou. ’Tis thou, for they’ve grown blue around the nails. My blossom, I am dying, and the stars Are dying too. They were full seven stars; Two only now they are, two side by side. Oh, Allah! it was thus they shone that night When my lost lover left these arms. My Gomez

30. sleepy mood] Cp. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes (1841) III, 172: ‘For he was got to sleepy mood’. 40^41]  .  .  .  . Yonder a leaf DUR, WO, del. Morgan. 41. An] Morgan; Of DUR, WO. 41-­] MS1a begins at this point in the action. The lines correspond in part to those in MS2 (note on ll. 18–83 earlier), but not completely: that they are earlier is suggested by WBY’s alteration in MS1a of ‘the dawn’ to ‘green dawn’, a reading without alteration in the comparatively fair copy at this point in MS2. The lines in MS1a have no attribution to Mosada, although they are clearly to be spoken by her; this may indicate that WBY is resuming work here from some other MS source, now lost. ’Tis thus they shone the night

When my lost love passed down among the hills. O Vallence, Vallence, we shall meet at last! The stars of thy nativity and mine Burn side by side, two ministering lights Throbbing within the circle of [the del.] green dawn. Soul’s dawn, pour down your beams into my hea[d]; [And it will del.] ’Twill answer with old [?Memnon’s] tuneful joy. Too late, too late, for I am near to death. (MS1a.) 42. Small new-­comer] New comer DUR. 50. Gomez] Vallence DUR. WBY’s original choice of (assumed) name for Mosada’s lover carries French alongside Spanish associations, as well as being a surname known in Britain; ‘Gomez’ is more distinctively Spanish.

244 55 60

MOSADA

We meet at last, the ministering stars Of our nativity hang side by side, And throb within the circles of green dawn. Too late, too late, for I am near to death. I try to lift mine arms – they fall again. This death is heavy in my veins like sleep. I cannot even crawl along the flags A little nearer those bright stars. Tell me, Is it your message, stars, that when death comes My soul shall touch with his, and the two flames Be one? I think all’s finished now and sealed. (After a pause enter Ebremar) Ebremar



Young Moorish girl, thy final hour is here;

57. flags] Morgan here has the marginal note, ‘stones ?’. 62.] At this point MS1a continues, with Ebremar awakening Mosada. The fact that WBY begins with a line for Ebremar but does not give his name and that the line itself is indented on the page so as to indicate that it completes another line (of two feet) by another character suggests that this does not follow exactly the lines on the notebook’s previous page and that WBY may be drafting additional passages for an earlier (and now lost) draft version. The dialogue brings the play to a swift conclusion and is here given in full: [Ebremar] Awake, Mosada, wake: Thy Vallence is by thee. Mosada. Down [among del.] below the hills Go not this eve, for it [is] [very dark del.] The way is very long and it is late. Ebremar. Lift up thine eyes: ’tis Vallence kneels by thee, Who leaves thee nevermore. Mosada. [I do del.] [not go del.] Stay one more [?day] ’Tis dark, I never knew so dark a night.

Ebremar. [Upon the breast of Vallence lies thy head del.] O still the troubles of thy wandering mind: Upon the breast of Vallence lies thy head. Mosada. [Let us sit here a little ’fore you go, And put my cloak about, for it is cold; I never knew a night so bitter cold. del.] The way is very long, and it is [very del.] late; See you how lies the cold dew on my face? Ebremar. One look, one look! Mosada. [On this smooth mossy root del] On this wide mossy root, Let us sit here a little ’fore you go, And put my cloak about me, for ’tis cold; I never knew a night so bitter cold. (Dies) Ebremar. Mosada, Mosada! Enter Monks 1 Monk. My lord, you called? Ebremar. [Not del.] Not I! Not I – this Moorish maid is dead. 1 Monk. A suicide. You cannot trust the Moor. You’re pale, my lord.



65 70 75

MOSADA

245

Cast off thy heresies, and save thy soul From the undying worm. She sleeps – (Starting) Mosada – Oh, God! – awake! thou shalt not die. She sleeps, Her head cast backward in her unloosed hair. Look up, look up, thy Gomez is by thee. A fearful paleness creeps across her breast And out-­spread arms. (Casting himself down by her) Be not so pale, dear love. Oh, can my kisses bring a flush no more Upon thy face? How heavily thy head Hangs on my breast! Listen, we shall be safe. We’ll fly from this before the morning star. Dear heart, there is a secret way that leads Its paven length towards the river’s marge, Where lies a shallop in the yellow reeds. Awake, awake, and we will sail afar, Afar along the fleet white river’s face – Alone with our own whispers and replies –

Ebremar. I am not very well; ’Twill pass. I’ll [speak with del.] see the other prisoners now, And importune them that they may repent, And dying, save their souls. My crucifix! (A Monk hands it [to] him) 1 Monk. I [always knew del.] often said you could not trust these Moors. (MS1a) 64. the undying worm] A commonplace, after Mark 6.44 [on Hell]: ‘Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched’. Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost VI, 739: ‘chains of darkness, and th’undying worm’. 65.] From dateless pain. She sleeps – (Starting.) Mosada – thou – DUR. 67. Gomez] Vallence DUR. 73. before the morning star] KT borrows WBY’s phrase in The Wind in the Trees (1898), ‘Chanticleer’, 27–8: ‘And creeping shadows sighing | Before the morning star’. 73–80.] This passage is markedly Shelleyan. In his essay ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (wr. 1899–1900), WBY writes of Shelley’s ‘single vision that would come to him again

and again, a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where there were caves and towers’, and imagines the poet ‘following the light of one Star’ (CW4, 71). Specific Shelleyan echoes in these lines include ‘the morning star’: cp. (amongst many uses) Prometheus Unbound III ii 38–9: ‘the young Spirit  | That sits i’ the morning star’, ‘Ode to Liberty’ 256–8: ‘’lead out of the inmost cave | Of man’s deep spirit, as the morning star | Beckons the Sun’; ‘secret way’ (74), cp. Prometheus Unbound II ii 45–7: ‘All spirits on that secret way | As inland boats are driven to Ocean | Down streams made strong with mountain-­thaw’; ‘paven’ (75), used six times by Shelley, cp. e.g. The Revolt of Islam VII xiii 1–2: ‘the fountain’s brink was richly paven  | With the deep’s wealth’, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 517: ‘Through lotus-­paven canals’, ‘Epipsychidion’, 546: ‘the pebble-­paven shore’, and ‘The Triumph of Life’, 368: ‘lily-­paven lakes’; ‘shallop’, cp. ‘Alastor’, 299: ‘A little shallop floating near the shore’. As G. Bornstein says of this passage, ‘The lines unmistakably suggest ‘Alastor’’ (Bornstein, 18), comparing them with WBY’s memory of wanting, like the Poet in Shelley’s poem, ‘to disappear from everybody’s sight as he disappeared

246 0 8

MOSADA

Alone among the murmurs of the dawn. Once in thy nation none shall know that I Was Ebremar, whose thoughts were fixed on God, And heaven, and holiness. Mosada

Let’s talk and grieve, For that’s the sweetest music for sad souls. 85 Day’s dead, all flame-­bewildered, and the hills In list’ning silence gazing on our grief. I never knew an eve so marvellous still.

drifting in a boat along some slow-­moving river’ (CW3, 80) Adele M. Dalsimer sees Ebremar in this passage ‘experiencing nature as Mosada had earlier’, and suggests that ‘In adopting the diction of ‘Alastor’, Yeats suggests the relation of the Gomez-­Mosada half of Ebremar’s nature to Shelley’s Poet, who chose the dream and death over the limitations of unfulfilling life’ (The Unappeasable Shadow (2016), 42). 79–80. whispers and replies . . . murmurs] Cp. KT, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885), ‘Louise de la Vallière’, 18: ‘Silken-­soft murmurs, whispers and replies’. Since WBY’s lines are not found in the latest of the drafts (probably 1885), and occur first in DUR (Jun. 1886), the poet had time and opportunity to borrow here from Tynan’s poem. KT and WBY first met in Jun. 1885, at the time her debut volume was being published, and WBY later (in 1892) referred to Louise de la Vallière as ‘too full of English influences to be quite Irish, and too laden with garish colour to be quite true to the austere Celtic spirit’ (CW 9, 153–4). 81. Once in] Among thy DUR. 83.] At this point, WBY begins the draft of the conclusion in MS1b. 83–7.] A  single torn leaf of green paper, preserved along with MS3, has a version of these lines. Beginning with a partial line (evidently for Ebremar), it evidently postdates the version in MS2. The reading

‘dewildered’ in its third line looks like an obvious error, given the ‘bewildered’ of MS2 and the printed versions; the transcription provided next, however, preserves this, on the grounds that it might have been WBY’s first thought, and also that this word  – or mistaken writing of a word  – could have played some part in the formulation ‘dew-­ bedrowned’ (104). Gaze on my face, awake. Mosada. Let’s talk and grieve, For that [‘s] the sweetest music for sad souls. Day’s dead, all flame dewildered, and the hills In listening silence gaze upon our grief.[It is the silent[?est] eve I ever del.] I never knew an eve so wondrous still. 84. the sweetest music for sad souls] Cp. Jean Ingelow, Poems (1863), ‘The Star’s Monument’, 470–1: ‘to plead | With sweetest music for all souls oppressed’. 86. gazing on] gaze upon MS1b, MS2. list’ning silence] Not an uncommon phrase: cp. e.g. W.L. Bowles, Poetical Works (1855), ‘The Spirit of Discovery by Sea’, IV, 346–7: ‘A kiss | Stole on the listening silence’, or George Eliot, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), III, 19: ‘Seeking the listening silence of the heights’. 87.] Not in MS2. 87^88.] Ebremar. Her thoughts hold commune with old time. MS1b, MS2.

MOSADA



247

Ebremar

Her dreams are talking with old years. Awake, Grieve not, for Gomez kneels beside thee – Mosada

Gomez,   90 ’Tis late, wait one more day; below the hills The foot-­worn way is long, and it grows dark. It is the darkest eve I ever knew. Ebremar

I kneel by thee – no parting now – look up. She smiles – is happy with her wandering griefs. Mosada

  95

So you must go; kiss me before you go. Oh, would the busy minutes might fold up Their thieving wings that we might never part. I never knew a night so honey-­sweet. Ebremar

100

There is no leave-­taking. I go no more. Safe on the breast of Gomez lies thy head, Unhappy one. Mosada



Go not, go not, go not; For night comes fast. Look down on me, my love, And see how thick the dew lies on my face. I never knew a night so dew-­bedrowned.

89. Gomez] Vallence DUR. 91. foot-­worn] shadowy MS1b, MS2. 93.] I kneel by thee – I leave thee nevermore. MS1b, MS2. 95. So you must] Ah must you MS1b, MS2. 98.] I  never knew so still and sweet a night. MS1b, MS2. 99.] All parting now is passed, I go no more. MS1b, MS2.

100. Gomez lies] Vallence lies MS1b, MS2, Vallence is DUR. 102. night comes fast] fast night comes MS1b, MS2. 104.] Not in MS1b; added to MS2 in pencil. dew-­bedrowned] WBY’s unusual ‘bedrowned’ here influences KT’s own compound, ‘tear-­bedrowned’, Experiences (1908), ‘The Garden’, 20.

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MOSADA

Ebremar 05 1

Oh, hush the wandering music of thy mind. Look on me once. Why sink your eyelids thus? Why do you hang so heavy in my arms? Love, will you die when we have met? One look Give to thy Gomez. Mosada

Gomez – he has gone 110 From here, along the shadowy way that winds Companioning the river’s pilgrim torch. I’ll see him longer if I stand out here Upon the mountain’s brow. (She tries to stand and totters. Ebremar supports her, and she stands as if pointing down into a valley.) Yonder he treads The path o’er-­muffled with the leaves – dead leaves, 115 Like happy thoughts grown sad in evil days. He fades among the mists; how fast they come, And pour upon the world! Ah! well-­a-­day!

105.] Oh, still the wandering sorrow of thy mind MS1b, MS2. wandering music] Cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘To a Picture of the Madonna’, 7–8: ‘Far hence, there wandering music fills | The haunted air of Roman hills’ and E. Barrett Barrett, The Seraphim and Other Poems (1839), ‘The Seraphim’, II, 602–3: ‘The winding, wandering music that returns  | Upon itself ’. 106.] One look, one look! Why sink your eyelids so? MS1b. thus?] so? DUR. 107.] Why fall you back so heavy in my arms? MS1b, MS2. 108–10.] As thou[?gh] sleep sleep was [?sighting] by one look. | Oh will you die when we have met? One look | [cast on del.] Give to thy Vallence! MS1b.

109. Gomez] Vallence MS1b, MS2, DUR. 110. here] sight MS1b. 111.] [Along del.] Its way close by the river ’mong [the del.] wandering light MS1b; Its way close by the river’s wandering light MS2. companioning] WBY’s relatively unusual verb here may indicate a more general reminiscence of the scene set in Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘A Summer Moon’, 1–2: ‘Queen-­moon of this enchanted summer night, | One virgin slave companioning thee’. 113. S.D. a valley] a visionary valley MS1b, MS2, DUR. [Along the path del.] Yonder he [goes del.] treads MS1b. 116–117.] how fast it comes  | And pours MS1b, MS2.

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MOSADA



120

Poor love and sorrow, with their arms thrown round Each other’s necks, and whispering as they go, Still wander through the world. He’s gone, he’s gone. I’m weary – weary, and ’tis very cold. I’ll draw my cloak around me; it is cold. I never knew a night so bitter cold. (Dies.) (Enter Monks and Inquisitors) First Inquisitor



My lord, you called? Ebremar



Not I. This maid is dead.

First Monk 25 1

From poison; for you cannot trust these Moors. You’re pale, my lord.

First Inquisitor (aside) His lips are quivering; The flame that shone within his eyes but now Has flickered and gone out. Ebremar I am not well. ’Twill pass. I’ll see the other prisoners now, 130 And importune their souls to penitence, So they escape from hell. But, pardon me,

121.] I’m wearied out and it is very cold MS1b, MS2. 123^124.] Ebremar.  Mosada! Oh, Mosada! MS2, DUR. 123–133.] The conclusion of the scene in MS1b is as follows: Ebremar. [Mosada, Mosada! del.] [Henceforth I’m but the actor of a part. del.]

She dead [i]s, and have I alone left a mask To play a part. (Calls) Peter and Jerome, come! Enter Monks [Monks] My lord. [Ebremar] Peter, this Moorish maid is dead. 1 Monk. A suicide. You cannot trust these Moors.

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Your hood is threadbare – see that it be changed Before we take our seats above the crowd.

(They go out)

You pale, my lord. Ebremar. [’Twill pass del.] I am not very well; ’Twill pass. I’ll see the other prisoners now And importune them that they may repent And dying, save their souls. My crucifix!

(A monk picks it up where it had fallen earlier [?in the scene] and hands it him.) 1 Monk. I often said you could not trust these Moors. (MS1b)

133.] After 133: First Monk. I always said you could not trust these Moors. DUR.

33

[‘FOR CLAPPING HANDS OF ALL MEN’S LOVE’] THE POEMS

Text and date of composition. Probably composed in 1884. A single leaf of lined paper (likely to have been removed from an exercise book) carries a first draft of the poem on one side, with a subsequent draft on the other. The watermark carries the date of 1884, and it seems likely that this is also the year in which WBY composed the poem. Both sides of the leaf, along with transcriptions, are reproduced in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 410–413, and a version of the fuller draft (from which the version of the present edition differs in places) is given in UM, 59. Interpretation. G. Bornstein’s judgement in UM 111, that ‘This lyric sounds an early instance of the typical Yeatsian romantic theme of the poet standing apart from social applause or appreciation’ is certainly true. Beyond this, though, the poem marks an interesting point in the nineteen-­or twenty-­year-­old poet’s emerging sense of both vocation and social positioning. Whether ‘the fire of longing’ for the world’s applause is a deep trouble or not, its outright rejection here has the feel of an act of quasi-­religious dedication. There is no shortage, either, of vatic elevation: the poet’s ‘throne’ enables him both to engage in his ‘dreams profound’ and to hold in ‘censorious’ contempt the ‘mob’, since he becomes ‘the judge of judges’. The poem does not, then, set its aspirant poet (clearly, WBY himself) on any purely otherworldly imaginative course, but prepares him instead for the position of ‘judge’ over the world, listing in the process all the outrages which the ‘cold herds’ have offered to the ‘labour’, the ‘altar’, and the ‘sacred fire’ of high poetry. Bornstein’s speculation that ‘it is possible that the poem continued on another, now lost leaf ’ is not entirely necessary, since the lines do appear to reach their conclusion in a spirit of haughty triumphalism, one that glories in the outward signs of popular dislike. The poet as a pagan god-­figure (the ‘tripod’ may link this with Apollo) is subject here to the attentions of a very early version of the filthy modern tide; at the same time, for all the classical atmosphere WBY is careful to generate, the divine figure being mocked and assaulted inevitably recalls aspects of Christ’s passion. The many tensions and contradictions arising from this in relation to WBY’s evolving sense of a poet’s calling are very far from any artistic resolution as yet; at the same time, they are perceived with some clarity. Copy-­text: NLI 30823, MS leaf recto, with editorial emendation of punctuation and spelling.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-34

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[‘For Clapping Hands of All Men’s Love’]

F 5 10 15 20

or clapping hands of all men’s love, Oh poet still the fire of longing: They pass, and where you live above In golden freedom, there comes thronging The foolish wise men with their words. Live thou in calmness, though cold herds Shall fling ephemeral laughter round Thy throne, where wrapt in dreams profound There forms the fruitage of thy days, Unborn its own melodious praise. Censorious man thou art, In thyself the judge of judges; Hath e’er contentment let thy heart Bid the mad mob that ’neath thee trudges? Aye, thou hast known contentment mock Thy labour – aye, and bid them rock The altar from its place, and spit At where the sacred fire was lit With offices of reverend hands; Aye, aye, and where the sacred tripod stands.

1–11.] The second, longer version of the lines (on the recto) is a considerable expansion of the text on the verso of the MS leaf; with editorial emendation of punctuation and spelling, this reads: Oh poet still the fire of longing For clapping hands of all men’s [praise del.] love: They pass away, and there comes thronging [The del.] Of foolish wise men with their words. Go to where your dwelling ^lies^ above, In golden freedom the cold herds [Thy throne where wrapt in dreams profound del.] Who fling ephemeral laughter round Thy throne, where wrapt in dreams profound, You form the fruitage of your days, Nor long for all your labour praise. 2. the fire of longing] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876), I, 171: ‘And the hate, and the fire of longing’. 7. thou] though MS: the present text adopts this emendation from UM, on the assumption that WBY’s handwriting was running ahead of his thinking, and anticipated the ‘though’ of this line’s second half.

9. wrapt] This is WBY’s spelling in both recto and verso of the MS; it is possible he intends either ‘wrapped’ or ‘rapt’; and it is conceivable that he means both. 10. There forms . . . thy] You form . . . your del. MS. fruitage] A figurative use of the word: OED 2.a, ‘a crop of fruit’. This is common in nineteenth-­ century poetic diction, deriving from Milton, Paradise Lost X, 562: ‘The fruitage fair to sight’. 11. Unborn] MS  reading here is uncertain: Early Poetry 2 reads ‘emborn’, and this becomes in UM ‘Inborn’. 12.] The MS  here is difficult to untangle, but it is possible that one version of the line, subsequently subject to much deletion, was ‘You sternest censor, man of art’. ‘Censorious’ was arrived at after much trouble with spelling on WBY’s part and remains uncertain as a reading; the earlier ‘You’ is not quite certainly deleted before it, and Early Poetry 2 and UM here read ‘Ye censorious’. 14^15.] [Then let the mad mob where it trudges del.] MS. 20. reverend hands] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), II, ‘Pygmalion and the Image’, 315: ‘They stripped her of her weed with reverend hands’. 21. the sacred tripod] WBY probably intends (or at least, is aware of) the tripod at Delphi where Apollo’s priestess sat to voice the oracles of the God.

34

THE MAGPIE

THE POEMS

Text and date of composition. The poem is found on two sides of a folded MS page and is a fair copy in ink, which has been signed by WBY at the end. There is no direct evidence to help with dating the composition, but the poem’s style and relative fluency suggest it is no earlier than 1884. The MS is reproduced and transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 402–405, and there is an edited text in UM, 53. The present text supplies punctuation and corrects spelling. Copy-­text: NLI 30449.

O

ver the heath has the magpie flown, Over the hazel cover. Ah, why will a magpie live alone?   He waits for the lady and lover. 5 ‘What may be the sadness that ends your smile?’   She said, ‘My peace is o’er, love.’ ‘I am going afar for so brief a while,’   She said, ‘We meet no more, love.’ They stood for the swish of the mower’s blade 10   As they went round the meadow, And under him as he sang and swayed   Moved his meridian shadow. ‘The ruddy young reaper he sings so glad,   In the sphere of the earth is no flaw, love.’

Title] The magpie (Pica pica) is a bird of the crow family (Corvidae) to which a number of superstitions attach. Here, one popular belief which has particular relevance is that seeing a single magpie brings bad luck. WBY imagines the solitary bird as a witness (and perhaps presiding spirit) at the meeting of a pair of lovers who are caught in the unhappy act of parting. 3. Ah] This word is added to the line in pencil by WBY.

8, 32. meet] must Early Poetry 2 and UM. 14. In the] The del. MS. sphere of the earth] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Juvenilia’, ‘Early Sonnets’ 10, 1–4: If I were loved, as I desire to be, What is there in the great sphere of the earth, And range of evil between death and birth, That I  should fear, – if I  were loved by thee? DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-35

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The Magpie

5 1 She said, ‘He is singing all life’s grown sad,   He knows no other law, love.’ The grass and the sedge and the little reed wren   A sociable world were talking, And the water was saying enough for ten 20   As they by the stream went walking. ‘The grass and the sedge and the little reed-­wren   Are saying it low and high, love, There’s a feast in the forest and mirth in the fen.’   She said, ‘Oh how they sigh, love.’ 5 2 He flew by the meadow and flew by the brake,   She saw him over the flag fly, Down by the marsh, with his tail a-­shake,   Alone with himself, that magpie. ‘What may be the sadness that ends your smiles?’ 30   She said, ‘My peace is o’er, love.’ Ah, who with folly from love beguiles?   She said, ‘We meet no more love.’

17. reed wren] In Britain and Ireland, a now rare term for the reed warbler, Acrocephalus scirpaceus. 20. went] were del. went MS.

25. brake] lake del. brake MS. 27. by] in del. by MS. 28, 30. smiles . . . beguiles] smile . . . beguiled Early Poetry 2 and UM.

35

THE ISLAND OF STATUES

THE POEMS

An Arcadian Faery Tale – in Two Acts

Publication and textual history. The publication of IoS in the Dublin University Review (DUR) was in four instalments (beginning in Apr., then May, Jun., and Jul. 1885). In fact, a lyric from the drama had appeared in the Mar. DUR (‘A man has the fields of heaven’) and it is possible that the entire IoS had either been accepted by the editors, or was substantially complete, by this date. After the play’s appearance in DUR, it was never again reprinted in its entirety by WBY. II ii, however, was included as the last item in WO (with a note accounting for the plot up to that point), while lines from the beginning of that scene (1–15) were published as the poem ‘The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes’ in the ‘Crossways’ section of P95 and retained in collected editions by WBY thereafter. IoS has an unusually full MS record for an early piece by WBY. Selected variants are given in these notes from the five MS stages of this work. In order of composition, the versions are as follows: MS1: Notebook, also containing drafts of Vivien and Time, and Mosada, in Trinity College Dublin (TCD 3502/2). This is an initial draft of the play, not yet in verse. The whole is transcribed in Appendix 2 of the present edition. MS2: Notebook and two additional loose leaves. A full version of the play, with numerous corrections. The loose leaves represent an earlier stage of composition than that recorded in the notebook itself (NLI 30328). MS3: Notebook and an additional loose leaf (NLI 30328). A full version of the play, but with the entirety of II iii cancelled by WBY. Inside front cover is dated in WBY’s hand ‘August | 1884’. MS4: The version labelled thus for convenience is in fact from three separate MS sources, but represents the fourth overall stage in composition. The material covers II ii and iii and begins with a loose leaf folded to make two pages relating to Scene ii. Two notebooks (NLI 30328) contain fourth-­stage composition for Scene iii. MS5: This bound set of MS pages (owned first by Hugh Walpole and now in the Walpole Collection of King’s School, Canterbury) was prepared by WBY for circulation. An initial reader was the librarian at the National Library of Ireland, T.W. Lyster; the numerous corrections made to the MS, which are not in WBY’s hand, are likely to be his. Lyster cannot be claimed with complete certainty as the maker of these alterations (identified in the present edition as ‘hand 2’): in a note at the end of what was to be the first DUR instalment, there is a note in ink which reads: ‘Please send proofs to W. B. Yeats | 10 Ashfield Terrace | Rathgar | and to: – T.W. Lyster | 89 Marlborough Road | Donnybrook’. In pencil under this is the phrase ‘Corrections made DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-36

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by’, and an arrow pointing to Lyster’s name; however, this is signed by a ‘W. Frazer’, presumably identical with the Frazer who appears as the addressee a loose envelope with this MS, ‘From T.W. Lyster MSS of W.B. Yeats’ Poem ‘Island of Statues’’. This was Dr. William Frazer (1824–1899), a Dublin surgeon and antiquary, who also collected autograph materials of Irish interest (and contributed some of these to the Olympia Irish Exhibition held in London in the summer of 1888). Frazer seems to have acquired the materials of MS5 from Lyster: he is unlikely to have been responsible for the hand 2 revisions. On the whole, the changes made in MS5 by hand 2 are matters of spelling and punctuation, but there are also more substantive revisions, which might well have been made in consultation with WBY. It is clear that this version of the work was the basis for its publication in DUR: what were to become the separate instalments are signed off by WBY, and a number of directions are given which relate to eventual setting by the printers. This is probably the text from which WBY read his play aloud to the editors in TCD; it is not quite, however, the ‘final’ pre-­publication version, since other changes are made between this text and that in DUR which must have been entered in a now lost proof stage. Reproductions and transcriptions most of the MS material are in Cornell Early Poetry 1. Date of composition. Composed summer 1884 to autumn 1884/early 1885. This work belongs with other poetic dramas conceived and written by WBY in 1883–4, such as Vivien and Time and Love and Death. Its composition began in the summer of 1884, when WBY drafted the main outline in prose (MS1); rapidly thereafter, he began to compose the whole piece in verse, changing and elaborating the plot in the process. MS2, which contains the first major verse draft, dates from before Sept. 1884, and may belong to Jul. and Aug. of that year; however, it incorporates material on loose leaves, which may come from earlier in the summer. A third major phase in composition comes with MS3, which is a notebook dated by WBY 1884; two further MSS (MS4 and MS5) have no datings, but in a letter of Sept. 1888, WBY writes of ‘finishing the Island’ ‘about 4 years ago’ (CL 1, 98). Circumstances of composition. Like its predecessor, the verse-­play Vivien and Time, IoS seems to have had some of its initial occasion in WBY’s relationship with his distant cousin Laura Armstrong (see introductory note to Vivien and Time). Writing to KT in 1889, WBY mentioned Armstrong’s ‘wild dash of half insane genius’, ‘to me always a pleasant memory’ but ‘only as a myth and a symbol’: here also he claims that, just as Vivien and Time had been written for Armstrong to perform, ‘ “The Island of Statues” was begun with the same notion though it soon grew beyond the scope of drawing room writing’ and ‘The part of the enchantress in both poems was written for her’ (CL 1, 155). The sole surviving letter from Armstrong to WBY (it survives because he kept it, and is therefore presumably of some biographical significance) is from 10 Aug. 1884. In it, Armstrong (who calls herself ‘Vivien’, and the poet ‘Clarin’, thus remaining partly in the world of Vivien and Time) apologises for having missed a visit from WBY, writing in a mildly (but definitely) flirtatious way (quoted CL 1, 155): I looked out of the window and to my great disappointment saw my Clarin leaving No. 60. It was too bad – and I am indeed sorry I missed you. – I like yr. poems more than I can say – but I should like to hear you read them – I have



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not nearly finished them. Could you come some aft: – and read a little to me. I shall be in all Tuesday afternoon. I promise! so can you come? [. . .] Trusting to see ‘the poet’ – ! Laura married her long-­standing fiancé Henry Morgan Byrne just over a month later. It seems likely that Aug. was when WBY worked most intensely on IoS and that Armstrong (whether or not WBY ever envisaged her playing that role in a putative staged version) was in part the inspiration for the Enchantress, as she was to be again a little later for the character of Margaret in his novel John Sherman. It seems clear, however, that WBY wrote IoS with more than simply Armstrong on his mind, for the poetic drama is consciously an exercise in pseudo-­renaissance pastoral, and its literary framing is intended to impress others besides his distant cousin. WBY had been a student at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin since May and was sharing his literary efforts with his schoolfriend, Charles Johnston, as he had done since first trying his hand at verse. In a memoir of 1906, Johnston mixed together recollections of several early works by WBY, saying that ‘In the later days of precise enamelling, of dainty word-­ music, I have many a time regretted the largeness and epic sweep of the earliest work, much of which was never published’; he noted also that ‘there was nothing to reveal or even suggest the poet of mystical Ireland; no consciousness, even, of any special poetical material to be drawn from mystic Eire’. Johnston refers to both Love and Death and Mosada, and clearly intends IoS when he mentions ‘Greek islands with a mystical people of statues’; his overview of the work of this period is that it contained ‘nothing peculiarly Celtic or Irish’, but that there was ‘everywhere a largeness, a vague gloom, an imaginative and dreamy depth, a sense of cavernous things, of overhanging deeps, from which there were presently to issue the more purely Celtic forms of vision and of dream’ (Mikhail 1, 10–11). In a briefer piece from 1904, Johnston spoke of IoS specifically, as ‘Greek in colouring, but after the Greece of Keats rather than the essential Hellas’ (Mikhail 1, 14). In part, the compositions of 1883–5 are exercises in education for the poet, and IoS is indeed, amongst other things, WBY’s homework in poetic Hellenism. In Reveries Over Childhood and Youth (1916), WBY mentions IoS in the course of an anecdote concerning his early dissatisfaction with ‘the system of education which I had suffered’: his wish to meet and question ‘some schoolmaster’ on the subject issues in an awkward and stilted exchange with one such, which takes place in the setting of Charles Oldham’s rooms at Trinity College Dublin. WBY has come here to read his play aloud to the editorial committee of the Dublin University Review (CW 3, 98): I had been invited to read out a poem called ‘The Island of Statues’, an Arcadian play in imitation of Edmund Spenser, to a gathering of critics who were to decide whether it was worthy of publication in the college magazine. The magazine had already published a lyric of mine, the first ever printed, and people began to know my name. We met in the rooms of Mr. C.H. Oldham, now Professor of Political Economy at our new University; and though Professor Bury, then a very young man, was to be the deciding voice, Mr. Oldham had asked quite a large audience.

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This editorial meeting-­cum-­audition must have taken place in late Mar. or early Apr. 1885: the ‘lyric’ WBY refers to (in fact, two lyrics, both taken from the longer poetic play) appeared in the DUR for Mar. 1885, and the whole play was published there in monthly instalments beginning in Apr. of the same year. Charles Oldham (1859–1926), was a favourably intentioned editor, and at this point lecturing in mathematics and science at the College, but the final decision would have rested with the future Professor Bury: this was J.B. Bury (1861–1927), who was to become the pioneering editor of Edward Gibbon, and one of the most eminent ancient historians of his time: although just four years older than WBY, by 1885 he had already been elected a fellow of TCD. In 1938, WBY returned to this editorial gathering in the script for a projected BBC broadcast entitled ‘How I Became an Author’. Here, the account is fuller than, and different from, that of the 1916 memoir (CW 10, 298–299): When eighteen or nineteen I wrote a pastoral play under the influence of Keats and Shelley, modified by that of Jonson’s Sad Shepherd, and one of my friends showed it to some Trinity undergraduates who were publishing the Dublin University Review, an ambitious political and literary periodical that lasted for a few months – I cannot remember who [. . .] The undergraduates liked the poem and invited me to read it to a man four or five years older than the rest of us, Bury, in later years a classical historian and editor of Gibbon. I was excited, not merely because he would decide the acceptance or rejection of my play, but because he was a schoolmaster and I had never met a schoolmaster in private life. [. . .] Perhaps I could get Bury to explain why I had been told to learn so many things that I had not been able to fix my attention upon anything. [. . .] For some reason which I cannot recollect I was left alone with Bury and said, after a great effort to overcome my shyness: ‘I know you will defend the ordinary system of education by saying that it strengthens the will, but I am convinced that it only seems to do so because it weakens the impulses’. He smiled and looked embarrassed but said nothing. My pastoral play The Island of Statues appeared in the review. I have not looked at it for many years, but nothing I did at that time had merit. There is no mention of Charles Oldham here, and it is instead a group of Trinity undergraduates who listen to the play; Bury’s attention is kept for a separate occasion. WBY’s anecdote about his attempt at educational conversation is carried over from the 1916 account, though here he remembers addressing not Bury, but ‘a young man who was, I had been told, a schoolmaster’ (CW 3, 99). While it is possible that Bury had some experience teaching school between his graduation from TCD in 1882 and taking up his fellowship there three years later, he was not a schoolmaster at the time of this meeting. WBY’s memories are, however, very much involved in questions of educational achievement and esteem; and this story about his being admitted to the College magazine as a means of entry to the world of literary publication must be read in the context of his own inability (both academic and financial) to become, as his father had been, a student at Trinity. IoS itself may be regarded as a kind of poetic audition, and WBY’s mention of



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Spenser and Jonson is perhaps an accurate recollection of the significance at the time for this work of its specifically poetic (and somewhat academic) pedigree. In shaping this pedigree, WBY needed a certain amount of help. Here, a figure of some importance was T.W. Lyster (1855–1922), who had been Assistant Librarian at the National Library of Ireland since 1878 (and was to become Librarian in 1895). Lyster knew many of the younger men with literary interests in Dublin at this time, including friends of WBY, and was himself a literary scholar and enthusiast for English and European poetry. On Lyster’s death, WBY wrote to his widow of how ‘I knew him when I was a boy and he a very young man’ and said that ‘Your husband was one of the first who encouraged me to write and it was he indeed who showed me how to correct my proof sheets – when my first poem was published’ (letter of 17 Dec. 1922, InteLex 4235). In a memorial piece published in 1926, WBY went into more detail (CW 10, 209): When I was a very young man, I read literature in the National Library [. . .] and it was Mr Lyster who guided me. He had a great knowledge of Elizabethan literature, and I  read that constantly under his guidance in that magnificent eighteenth-­century room. [. . .] My first published work owed much to his correction. I  wrote a long pastoral play, which was accepted by the short-­lived Dublin University Review. When a young man writes his first poems, there will often be a good line followed by a bad line, and he should always go to a scholar to be advised, and Mr Lyster did that for me. I used to go to his house, and he would go over the manuscript of my play with me, and help me to correct the bad lines. As WBY remembers this, Lyster’s involvement seems to be early in the course of composition (when the poet was able to take advantage of his knowledge of the very pastoral tradition in which he proposed to work) and at a time prior to the acceptance of IoS by Bury and the DUR. It is certainly possible that the process described corresponds to the evidence of the most advanced of the manuscripts (MS5), in which changes in hand 2 could well be those of Lyster (see Manuscript versions). If so, WBY perhaps plays up Lyster’s role a little, since many changes are to errors of spelling and punctuation only, though there are indeed places where more substantial alterations are carried out. Although MS5 does contain markings that relate to eventual page layout, and appears also to provide for the separate DUR instalments in its division of the text, there is no reason to doubt WBY’s claim that Lyster helped also with the proofs (the actual proofs for the DUR publication are now lost). Lyster’s role as a kind of literary midwife for WBY is possibly visible in the Spenserian and other early modern touches; insofar as WBY’s poem is selfconsciously learned in tone, its learning may owe as much to Lyster’s ‘encouragement’ as to the poet’s own habits of reading. In 1884, during the poem’s composition, WBY’s literary horizons were very much those fixed by TCD; in particular, his father’s friend, Edward Dowden (1843–1913), Professor of English Literature and a well-­known scholar and critic, particularly of Elizabethan and Romantic literature, was someone whose good opinion the novice poet was keen to cultivate. This relationship was a very important one for the young WBY, and it

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is discussed at length in the 1916 Reveries, by which time WBY understood it as part of a longer-­running series of disagreements with his father (CW 3, 94): From our first arrival in Dublin, my father had brought me from time to time to see Edward Dowden. He and my father had been college friends and were trying, perhaps, to take up again their old friendship. Sometimes we were asked to breakfast, and afterwards my father would tell me to read out one of my poems. Dowden was wise in his encouragement, never overpraising and never unsympathetic, and he would sometimes lend me books. The orderly, prosperous house where all was in good taste, where poetry was rightly valued, made Dublin tolerable for a while, and for perhaps a couple of years he was an image of romance. My father would not share my enthusiasm and soon, I noticed, grew impatient at these meetings. He would sometimes say that he had wanted Dowden when they were young to give himself to creative art, and would talk of what he considered Dowden’s failure in life. [.  .  .] I  was not influenced, for I  had imagined a past worthy of that dark, romantic face. Although the Yeats family did not move into the city of Dublin itself until the spring of 1884, WBY here probably intends by their ‘arrival’ the autumn of 1881, when JBY brought his wife and three of his children to live in Howth. If Dowden is remembered as an enabler, the source of books and artistic encouragement, he is also seen retrospectively by WBY as being at the time ‘an image of romance’, and this concentrates itself into an image of ‘that dark, romantic face’. JBY, on the other hand, is made to display with Dowden the same ‘impatience’ he displayed with his son, and WBY thus sets against the values of what his father calls ‘life’ those of romance, which Dowden, with his deep knowledge of literature, seems to embody for the young man. Thought about in these terms, the plot of IoS seems aimed to please WBY’s conception of Dowden more than it plays to the moral and artistic priorities of JBY. The return to Dublin of the Fenian exile John O’Leary, at the start of 1885, was to provide another (and very different) kind of mentorship for WBY, but in 1884 it was Lyster and Dowden who offered the best guidance for the beginning of his career as a published poet. Dowden appears to have approved of IoS, and when a part of it was published as the final piece in WO (1889), Dowden’s letter of thanks to WBY for a copy takes pains to point out its importance as a balance to the more recent (and much more ‘Irish’) ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (LTWBY 1, 4): I decidedly think the ‘Wanderings of Oisin’ the best thing in the volume, but I wish you had made the book a little larger so as to include the whole of the ‘Island of Statues.’ Fragments are very provoking and somewhat illegitimate things. (Except when Time is the sculptor of the torso.) I do not expect to get from you as good Fairy poetry in any future volume. You will I suppose advance rather in the direction of the poetry of human romance and passion.



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WBY was still proud enough of Dowden’s good opinion in 1889 to announce his praise at once to George Russell (but remembering this with selective overemphasis in claiming that Dowden said that ‘Oisin is far the best thing in the book’); and although not mentioning Dowden’s praise of IoS, the same letter goes on to say ‘I am sorry that the whole of the “Island of Statues” is not in my book [. . .] It will be printed later on, in some later volume’ (letter of 8 Feb. 1889, CL 1, 143). The poem was in some ways the high point of WBY’s creative involvement with the TCD circle. In the notebook containing the fourth draft of parts of Act II (MS4), WBY hastily jotted down what looks like a review of his 1885 DUR publication, but which is otherwise untraced: A new poet has appeared among us in the person of Mr. W.B. Yeats, a young student of Trinity College Dublin. The Island of Statues: An Arcadian Fairy Tale [compiled ?] in the June number of the University Review is a sufficient proof of powers distinctly out of the common. Mr. Yeats has only to be careful that his evident facility shall not tempt him to over-­production, and if we judge from the promise of his published verse well, his performance should yet justify the most flattering predictions. Nor is Mr. Yeats to be judged alone by a single poem: ‘Voices’ in another number of the Review is even more remarkable as the production of a very young writer. ‘Voices’ is the lyric at the beginning of II iii (1–15), which appeared in the Mar. 1885 DUR (in 1899, it was reprinted in Russell’s Irish Homestead’s ‘Celtic Christmas’ supplement as ‘The Fairy Voices’, and by WBY himself in P95 and after as ‘The Cloak, The Boat, and The Shoes’). These lines had not yet reappeared in DUR in Jun. (they would be in the Jul. instalment of the play), so the reference to them here as a separate poem suggests that the author is not likely to be WBY himself. But whoever made these remarks, WBY’s sense of his literary work as being associated with TCD is rendered unmistakable by the presence of these transcribed lines in his notebook. By the time the poem was published again in part, in WO, WBY’s attitudes to the literary figures in TCD had changed, and the political culture inhabited by O’Leary and his followers had become more pressing. Dowden, for one, was now a figure suspect on account of his Unionist sympathies, and even Lyster could be described as ‘too West British’ in an 1889 letter from the poet to O’Leary himself (CL 1, 125). WBY’s plans for IoS, despite his promise to Dowden of its appearance in ‘some future book’, had probably lapsed by the time of the publication of WO. It is possible that, earlier on, the piece had figured in a larger conception for a work of romantic pastoral fantasy: in a letter likely to date from Jun. 1886, George Russell reports that [WBY’s] ‘great drama “The Equator of Olives” is finished’, and claiming that this work, which ‘will appear shortly after his first volume is published’, contains what he calls ‘the episode of the Sculptor’s Garden’ (Letters from AE. ed. A. Denson (1961), 3). Although it is not typical of Russell to misremember WBY’s words, this may refer to IoS as taking a place in the sprawling, abandoned assembly of dramatic scenes (collected as NLI 30414) which was abandoned by WBY in the summer of 1886. (The title ‘The Equator of Olives’ is not in fact used in these MS materials, for which ‘The Epic of Forests’ and

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‘The Village of the Elms’ are the undeleted titles (deleted titles include ‘Sans Eyes’): Ellmann adds to these ‘The Equator of Wild Olives’, but this may be a mistaken addition of a Ruskinian element to an already elusive Yeatsian title (Man and the Masks, 47).) In Sept. 1888, when he was finalizing the contents for WO, WBY’s letter to KT treated IoS as the culmination of a pre-­nationalist phase in his career (CL 1, 98): I have added to the book the last scene of the Island of Statues with a short argument to make all plain. I am sure the Island is good of its kind. I was then living a quite harmonious poetic life. Never thinking out of my depth. Always harmonious narrow, calm. Taking small interest in people but most ardently moved by the more minute kinds of natural beauty. Mosada was then written and a poem called Time & Vivien which you have not seen – it is second in my book. Every thing done then was quite passionless. The ‘Island’ was the last. Since I have left the ‘Island’ I  have been going about on shoreless seas. Nothing anywhere has clear outline. Everywhere is cloud and foam. [. . .] The early poems I know to be quite coherent and at no time are there clouds in my details for I hate the soft modern manner. The clouds began about 4 years ago. I was finishing the Island. They came and robbed Naschina of her Shadow as you will see, the rest is cloudless narrow and calm. Reception and critical history. WBY’s poem as it appeared in DUR attracted the notice of the Irish Times, which said of the Jul. issue (where IoS was brought to conclusion) that ‘Mr. W.B. Yeats proves himself in “The Island of Statues” to have the true instinct of the poet, and adds to a fine imagination considerable descriptive force and melodious felicity of phrase’. This brief notice noted that ‘The song commencing “A man has a hope for heaven” in fancy and beauty of expression is superior’ (5 Jul. 1885). At the time of publication of WO, WBY’s letters show an awareness of the competing claims on readers’ admiration of IoS and ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. In the same letter that relates his meeting with an admiring William Morris, WBY mentions how T.W. Rolleston told him ‘he could have spared some of “Oisin” for the sake of “Island of Statues”’ (perhaps chiming with the poet’s own uncertainties: ‘I was getting quite out of conceit with “Oisin” until I  met Morris’) (CL 1, 128). Another letter mentions that John Todhunter ‘likes best. . . Island of Statues’ and other early poems, and WBY goes on to voice regret, telling George Russell ‘I am sorry that the whole of the “Island of Statues” is not in my book’, ascribing the omission to the economics of publishing, but promising that ‘It will be printed later on, in some future volume’ (CL 1, 142–3). The early press notices of WO included one by W.E. Henley in the Scots Observer (9 Mar. 1889), which praised the excerpt from IoS as being ‘written under the charm of the Shelleyan manner and music’, and being something that ‘proves him [WBY] to have dramatic fire and dramatic insight, as well as the gift of telling a story in mellifluous verse’. However, perhaps the most important early reaction to IoS was a private one, from the ‘Miss Gone’ WBY had only recently met in Jan. 1889, and whom he mentions in a letter to KT (CL 1, 234): Miss Gone (you have heard of her no doubt) was here yesterday with introduction from the O’Learys she says she cried over the ‘Island of Statues’ fragment but altogether favoured the Enchantress and hated Nachina.



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Since it largely vanished from WBY’s oeuvre in 1895, IoS was for many years by and large invisible in modern criticism of the poet. For R. Ellmann in 1948, the work was ‘the climax of [WBY’s] youthful verse’, but also ‘a picture play [. . .] completely removed from the world’ (Man and the Masks, 36). With the publication of VE (in 1956), the verse-­play once again came back into view. H. Bloom’s account in 1970 gives IoS considerable weight in the larger interpretation of WBY’s development. Acknowledging that the play is a ‘Spenserian and Shelleyan blend’, Bloom sees in it signs of distinctly Yeatsian artistic development (53): The Island of Statues takes its Circe-­like enchantress from Spenser, and most of its verse-­texture from Shelley, yet its decadent and savage theme is curiously Yeats’s own, holding in embryo much that is to come. The shepherdess’s desire to convert her Arcadian lovers into murderous men-­of-­action; the equivocal enchantress longing for the embrace of ordinary flesh; the frozen sculpture that ensues from a defeated naturalistic quest; the mocking and embittering moonlight that exposes an occult victory as a human defeat – all these, despite their Pre-­Raphaelite colourings, are emblems that Yeats was never to abandon. Also in 1970, G. Bornstein’s Yeats and Shelley paid acute attention to the play, casting useful further light on the significance of the ‘quest’ motif. On Spenser’s influence, more detail is provided by W.K. Chapman, in Ch. 3 of his Yeats and Renaissance English Literature. The pictorial elements in the play are explored in an illuminating discussion of the young poet’s debt to a painting he remembered often going to see in Dublin, J.M.W. Turner’s The Golden Bough, by E.B. Loiseaux; she points out how ‘Naschina’s lack of shadow, the painting’s ruins and snake, in their indication that even the Golden Age came after the Fall, suggest a symbolic impulse in poet and painter’ (Loiseaux, 55). It remains the case, however, that IoS is relatively seldom discussed in any detail when modern critics examine WBY’s development as a poet. Sources. The broad outlines of WBY’s scenario are probably too common to point towards a specific source for his island with its resident Enchantress, where men are turned into stone statues. While there is a general reminiscence here of Circe’s island in the Odyssey (Book VI), where men are turned into wild animals, and of a number of fairy stories, WBY intends the piece as a whole to be suggestive of the kinds of story contained in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Spenser’s epic romance contains more than one enchantress, though petrifaction is not one of his favoured plot devices; but WBY will have been aware of Spenser’s metaphorical understanding of men being turned to stone, as put most prominently in the Proem to Book V:

For from the golden age, that first was named, It’s now at earst become a stonie one; And men themselves, the which at first were framed Of earthly mould, and form’d of flesh and bone, Are now transformed into hardest stone;

Besides Spenser, WBY himself in the 1938 ‘How I Became an Author’ mentioned Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd (a fragmentary play, published posthumously in 1641) as one

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of his models. The influence of this text is so general that it would not be apparent without WBY’s reference: Jonson’s play is a pastoral, in which Robin Hood and his Merry Men consort with the luckless pastoral lover Aeglemour, who believes his beloved to have been drowned by malignant nymphs of the River Trent, when in fact she has been imprisoned by a witch and the witch’s daughter, who go on to play pranks on Robin and his friends. While there is enchantment and a pastoral setting here, there is nothing which is taken up specifically in IoS. Copy-­text: WO, supplemented by DUR.

The Island of Statues An Arcadian Faery Tale – In Two Acts Dramatis Personae

Naschina, Shepherdess. Colin, Shepherd.

Title. The title in this edition is that of the DUR version of the play. In WO, Act 3 Scene 2 appears under the title ‘Island of Statues  | A  Fragment’. MS1 has no title; MS2 contains the title ‘The lady of tuneful guile –  | a fairy tale  | in two acts’. MS3 carries the title ‘The Island of Statues | an Arcadian fairy tale’, and MS5 has the title: ‘The Island of Statues  | An Arcadian faery-­tale in Two Acts’. Dramatis Personae Naschina] WBY’s choice of a name for his heroine (which appears first in MS2, having been ‘Evadne’ in MS1) takes the focus away from conventional pastoral (in which this name is unknown) towards a more obscure area. This was, however, a frame of reference with which WBY was working already in the poetic play Mosada, since it is that of Moorish Spain. In one account (widely reprinted in the nineteenth century) of Arab Grenada the names of both Naschina and Mosada occur together. The ultimate source of this, which featured in e.g. The London Encyclopaedia (1829) and The

Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1832) is William Jacob, Travels in the South of Spain (1811), Letter xxxix: ‘So general was the love of learning in Grenada, that it extended, notwithstanding the prohibitions of Mahomed, to the softer sex. Naschina acquired celebrity as a poetess; Mosada as an historian; and Leila as a mathematician and universal scholar’ (279). (See Enrico Reggiani, ‘Rewording in Melodious Guile’, Studi Irlandesi 2 [2012], 87.) In giving his shepherdess the name of an obscure poet rather than one more familiarly pastoral, WBY probably intends no specific reference to the culture of Moorish Spain, wanting merely, perhaps, to produce something more exotic and strange (there are no Naschinas in English literary tradition). Nevertheless, the submerged identity of poet may be relevant to the development of WBY’s play from its first draft in MS1 to the more complex and symbolically dense work that evolves through the four subsequent major stages of composition. In this respect, too, the literary uniqueness of WBY’s chosen name may help to serve his purposes.





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Thernot, Shepherd. Almintor, A Hunter. Antonio, His Page. Enchantress of the Island.

And a company of the Sleepers of the Isle.

  Colin] WBY’s choice of name here is almost certainly due to his knowledge of Spenser: in The Shepheardes Calender, Colin Clout is a shepherd-­poet; he appears again in the pastoral Book VI of The Faerie Queene. In the Gloss by ‘E.K.’ to ‘January’ in The Shepheardes Calander, the literary name is traced back both to John Skelton and the sixteenth-­century French poet Clemont Marot, ‘Under which name this Poet secretely shadoweth himself, as sometime did Virgil under the name of Tityrus, thinking it much fitter, than such Latine names, for the great unlikelyhoode of the language’. Spenser continued to employ the name as a kind of alias, in his late Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595). WBY may allow for an element of self-­ identification with the proximity of Colin to the ‘Clarin’ used in Vivien and Time and his correspondence with Laura Armstrong (see notes): this proximity is more pronounced in MS1, where Colin is ‘Clorin’.   Thernot] WBY adapts here another name from The Shepheardes Calender, Thenot; again, according to ‘E.K.’, the name comes from Marot.

  Almintor] In Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), the character Amintor is the husband (under duress) of Evadne; along with her, he dies at the end of the play. WBY probably derives his Almintor from this source (Evadne was also intitially to be the name of the heroine in IoS), although the play does not have any particular influence on his work. Amintor as a name derives from classical myth: in Ovid, Anyntor is a companion of Meleager in the hunt for the Calydonian boar (Phoenix, son of Amyntor is mentioned by Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII 307). Amintor became a name common in pastoral writing of the renaissance, and up to the eighteenth century; in English, it is especially common in the work of Henry Lawes. The form ‘Almintor’ may well be WBY’s deliberate adaptation; it can be found in obscure corners, such as the translation of the Metamorphoses into French by G.T. Villeneuve (1806), or a work by the German poet Friedrich Mosangell, Almintor: Idyll zur Fier des zehnten Novembers (1821), but of these WBY was almost certainly unaware.

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Act 1 Scene 1 Before the cottage of Naschina. It is morning; and away in the depth of the heaven the moon is fading. Enter Thernot with a lute. Thernot 5

Maiden, come forth: the woods keep watch for thee; Within the drowsy blossom hangs the bee; ’Tis morn: thy sheep are wandering down the vale – ’Tis morn: like old men’s eyes the stars are pale, And thro’ the odorous air love-­dreams are winging – ’Tis morn, and from the dew-­drench’d wood I’ve sped To welcome thee, Naschina, with sweet singing. (Sitting on a tree-­stem, he begins to tune his lute.)



Enter Colin, abstractedly.

1–7.] Maiden come forth, the woods are waiting thee; ’Tis morn: how high the dawn burns overhead; ’Tis morn: thy sheep are browsing in the vale; ’Tis morn; like old men’s eyes the stars are pale; ’Tis morn; through the air love-­thoughts are winging; ’Tis morn, and from the dew-­drenched woods I sped To welcome thee, Naschina, with sweet singing. MS2 1. keep watch for thee] MS5 [hand 2] Maiden, come forth] Cp. Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley, ‘Come down, O maid, from yonder mountain height’. There is further indebtedness to The Princess in the four lines of MS2 (covering 8–21 of the finished version, see

below) which allude to Tennyson’s lyric, ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white’. 3. down] [in del.] down [hand 2] MS5. 3^4.] ’Tis morn; the dawn light burneth gold and red MS3. 5. thro’] in MS3 [in del.] thro’ [hand 2] MS5. the odorous air] Possibly cp. Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Music and Moonlight (1874), ‘Andalusian Moonlight’, 13: ‘And the moonlight floods all the odorous air’. love-­dreams] Cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound IV, 447: ‘As a youth lulled in love-­ dreams faintly sighing’, Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), ‘Second Angel’s story’, 335–6: ‘Vague wishings, fond imaginings,  | Love-­dreams, as yet no object knowing’, and John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘The Lost Violin-­Theme’, 161–2: ‘All anguish of aspiration,  | All passion of deep love-­dreams’.

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Colin 10

Come forth: the morn is fair; as from the pyre Of sad queen Dido shone the lapping fire Unto the wanderer’s ships, or as day fills The brazen sky, so blaze the daffodils;

8–21.] Naschina, dawn the crimson bud hath spread, Naschina, crimson petals overhead; Naschina hear, my music pours for thee A quenchless grieving of love melody. MS2 9–11.] In Aeneid Book V, 1–4, Virgil shows Aeneas sailing away from Carthage where he has left his grieving and infuriated lover, Queen Dido; from the ship, he sees the flames of her funeral pyre. In Dryden’s version: Meantime the Trojan cuts his wat’ry way, Fix’d on his voyage, thro’ the curling sea; Then, casting back his eyes, with dire amaze, Sees on the Punic shore the mounting blaze. The cause unknown; yet his presaging mind The fate of Dido from the fire divin’d. WBY’s decision to make this story so prominent, as the first classical allusion in his poetic drama, is a significant one, all the more so since it is reverted to near the end of the work, when the Second Sleeper asks after Aeneas, pointedly repeating the term ‘wanderer’ and the adjective ‘sad’ for Dido (see notes to II iii 286–9). Here, Dido is the first of three women being invoked (with Clytemnestra and Oenone), all of them betrayed by their husbands or lovers, and all three associated with blazing fires, destruction, and self-­destructiveness. It is not possible to say whether WBY had any knowledge of the poetry of Sir William Jones (1746–1794) at this point, but Jones’s Arcadia: A Pastoral Poem (1772) offers a suggestive parallel to WBY’s use of this Dido motif, as well as presenting another pastoral Colin. In Jones’s poem, Manalcas, King of Arcadia, identifies in the poet Tityrus a Virgilian potential for the singing of imperial epic.

This is in contrast to another aspirant poet, Colin, with whom Jones identifies Spenser (Poetical Works (1810), ‘Arcadia’, 294–302): Henceforth of wars and conquests shall you sing, Arms and the Man in every clime shall ring: Thy muse, bold Maro, Tityrus no more, Shall tell of chiefs that left the Phrygian shore, Sad Dido’s love, and Venus’ wandering son, The Latians vanquish’d, and Lavinia won. And thou, O Colin! heaven-­defended youth, Shalt hide in fiction’s veil the charms of truth; Thy notes the sting of sorrow shall beguile, And smooth the brow of anguish till it smile. 11. daffodils] The triple reference in this speech (here and in 15 and 19) provides a link in imagery between the three women from classical myth. The flower itself, however, is not classical, but distinctively English in terms of its poetic lineage. Famous instances of daffodils apart (such as in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’), their most relevant occurrence for WBY’s purposes here might be that in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), ‘Aprill’, where the pastoral poets Hobbinol and Thenot (the model, presumably, for the name ‘Thernot’ here) sing the praises of ‘fayre Eliza, Queene of Shepherdes all’, ‘Vpon her head a Cremosin coronet,  | With Damaske roses and Daffadillies set’ (34, 59–60). Another link between the classical and post-­ classical worlds in this allusion would hinge on ‘Eliza’, and the name of Dido as given in Aeneid V, 3 (which WBY alludes to explicitly in 9–11), ‘Elissa’ (infelicis Elissae’). 12. Argive Clytemnestra] The wife of Agamemnon, King of Argos, whose murder of her

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15 20

As Argive Clytemnestra saw out-­burn The flagrant signal of her lord’s return, Afar, clear-­shining on the herald hills, In vale and dell so blaze the daffodils; As when upon her cloud-­o’er-­muffled steep Oenone saw the fires of Troia leap, And laugh’d, so, so along the bubbling rills In lemon-­tinted lines, so blaze the daffodils. Come forth, come forth, my music flows for thee, A quenchless grieving of love melody.



(Raises his lute) Thernot



(Sings) Now her sheep all browsing meet By the singing waters’ edge, Tread and tread their cloven feet

husband on his return from leading the Greek forces in the Trojan War is staged in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. At the beginning of the play, a watchman sees the signal fire that announces Troy’s fall and announces this to Clytemnestra. WBY’s familiarity with this may well be derived from Robert Browning, whose The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877) has its Watchman declare ‘And now on ward I  wait the torch’s token, | The glow of fire, shall bring from Troia message’ (8–9). Browning’s ‘Troia’, while true to the Greek, is relatively unusual in English poetry, and is adopted by WBY in 17 later (and again at II iii 313); Browning also mentions the ‘Achaioi’, which may influence WBY’s spelling of ‘Achaians’ in II iii 312; and the last line on the first page of Browning’s text has the Watchman ‘driven from rest, dew-­ drenched’, which may well have influenced the ‘dew-­drench’d’ of WBY in 6 earlier. 16. upon] from on MS3 [from on del.] upon [hand 2] MS5. 17. Oenone] In Greek myth, a nymph from Mount Ida (outside Troy), who was the lover of Paris. When he forsook her for Helen, Oenone became enraged, and refused to use her powers to aid him when he suffered a mortal war wound. Consumed subsequently by remorse, she flung herself on his funeral pyre. WBY

knows this myth by way of Tennyson’s adaptation of it in ‘Oenone’: here, the emphasis is on Oenone’s anger with Paris, after he has accepted Aphrodite’s offer of Helen’s hand when making his judgement between the three goddesses on Mount Ida. Tennyson ends the nymph’s monologue with a vision of fire, before both Paris’s death and the sack of Troy (258–265): I will rise and go Down into Troy, and ere the stars come forth Talk with the wild Cassandra, for she says A fire dances before her, and a sound Rings ever in her ears of armed men. What this may be I know not, but I know That, wheresoe’er I am by night and day, All earth and air seem only burning fire. WBY further adapts the story by making Oenone see ‘the fires of Troia leap’, thus associating her fury with the city’s ultimate destruction. The poem ‘Oenone’ is alluded to explicitly at a crucial point towards the end of WBY’s poetic drama: see note to II ii 285. 22–98.] The earliest version of this lyric competition is in MS2: Thernet (who does not see Colin) (Sings) Come forth, for in a thousand bowers



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On the ruddy river sedge, For the dawn the foliage fingereth, And the waves are leaping white, She alone, my lady, lingereth While the world is roll’d in light.

Blossoms ope their dewy lips; On the lake the water-­flowers Floating are like silver ships; The hand of dawn the foliage fingereth And the waves are leaping white; Thou alone, O maiden, lingereth While the world is rolled in light. Colin What, here with thy cracked voice to mar the morn? Hear me, and, shepherd, hearing me, grow dumb. Colin (Sings) Come, thou maid with burning hair; Red’s the dewy mountain heather; A thousand birds are singing there, Joy and sadness both together In their song is ever blending: Come thou, come, and to this string, Though my love-­sick heart is rending, Not a sad note will I sing. Thernet I am not dumb: I’d sooner in the fold Be dumb to hear the creaking of the gate – (Sings) In mine heart thine image ever Sitting is, O maiden fair; ’Fore mine eyes a burning river Is the glory of thine hair. Once I saw thee, ever after O my love, I had assurance From the long and wandering laughter Of the river song’s endurance, For the nymphs and Naiads cry Down among the wildering billows Loud thy name, as back they lie On their wan and watery pillows. Colin. I’ll silence this dull singer. (Sings) Wherefore, maiden, lingereth thou?

[O’er the trees the moon is failing, And her shining dappled brow Dawn bewildered’s paling, paling. Come – I’ve loved the lonely glade And have squandered all my sorrow ’Fore the stars began to fade, Or the buds’ new lustre borrow: Come, and thou, my heart is rending; For the pleasure I will sing Merry songs, melodious blending With the lyric viol string. del.] Thernet I’ll quench his singing with loud song. (Sings) Come forth, for in a thousand bowers Blossoms ope their dewy lips; Over the lake the water flowers Floating are like silver ships. All the dawning day is singing: Joy and love are one existence, Ever ringing, ever ringing Is the song with loud persistence. Colin Here waiting thee thy Colin weepeth: Love and sorrow one existence; Sadness, soul of joy the deepest, Is the burden and persistence Of the song that never sleepeth: Love from heaven came of yore As a token and a sign, Singing o’er and o’er and o’er Of its death and change malign. Thernet With louder song I’ll drown his song. (Sings) The moon has gone with sickle bright, Slowly, slowly fadeth she, Weary of reaping the barren night, [And the writhing moonlight sea del.] The barren and the shuddering sea. Round her crimson raiment flinging,

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Colin 30 35

Shepherd, to mar the morning hast thou come? Hear me, and, shepherd, hearing me, grow dumb. (Sings) Where is the owl that lately flew Flickering under the white moonshine? She sleeps with owlets two and two, Sleepily close her round bright eyne; O’er her nest the lights are blending: Come thou, come, and to this string – Though my love-­sick heart is rending, Not a sad note will I sing.

Far and wide the dawn is winging, And the clarion-­rivers singing. Colin Loud for thee morning crieth, And my soul in waiting dieth, Ever dieth, ever dieth. Thernet Far the morning vapours shatter, As the leaves in Autumn scatter. All the world is singing, singing; All the world is ringing, ringing. Colin Lift my soul from deepest night. Thernet Stricken all the night is past, Back the shadows creep aghast. Colin Music of my soul and light, Come, Naschina, thou my light. 22–29.] First present in MS3. 23. the singing waters’ edge] Possibly cp. William Davies The Shepherds’ Garden (1873), ‘To Pan’, ‘Shepherd Pan, who lov’st  to play  | On thy oaten pipe all day, | Where the singing waters meet, | Lapping round thy horny feet’. 24. cloven] del. hand 2 MS5, which emends to ‘little’, then del. ‘little’ to re-­insert ‘cloven’. 28. She alone, my lady] Thou alone O Lady MS3 [Thou del.] She alone [O del.] my lady MS5 [hand 2]. 29. roll’d in light] Cp. James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian (1805), ‘Carric-­Thura’,

p. 423: ‘But morning rose in the east; the blue waters rolled in light’. 32. Where is the owl that lately flew] Added by hand 2 in MS5; The owl has gone from where she flew MS3, del. MS5. WBY mentions owls frequently in IoS (also below 102, II i 9, II iii 115, II iii 233 and 258). The symbolic function of the image is in line with Spenser: see e.g. The Fareie Queene II xii 36: ‘The ill-­faste Owle, deaths dreadfull messengere’. In this same symbolic way, the owl figures in Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd, where the melancholic Aeglamour mentions ‘the scritching Owle [. . .] harke, harke, harke the foul | Bird! How shee flutters with her wicker wings’ (I v 64). This gothic-­tinged imagery featured elsewhere in WBY’s early Spenserian verse: see e.g. ‘When to its end o’er ripened July nears’, 50–52: ‘the owlets called, | A ghastly, ever-­growing company | From where the steep some long-­dead man had walked’. 35. eyne] The archaic plural of eye is intended to accentuate the renaissance character of WBY’s diction here; by the mid-­nineteenth century, the word was an affected poeticism and capable of being used more archly than here, as memorably in Matthew Arnold’s rhyming of ‘eyne’ with ‘Philistine’ (‘Poor Matthias’, 191). 36. lights are] Added by hand 2 MS5; light is MS3, del. MS5.

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271

Thernot 40 45

I am not dumb: I’d sooner silent wait Within the fold to hear the creaking gate – (Sings) The wood and the valley and the sea Awaken, awaken to new-­born lustre; A new day’s troop of wasp and bee Hang on the side of the round grape-­cluster; Blenching on high the dull stars sicken Morn-­bewildered, and the cup Of the tarn where young waves quicken Hurls their swooning lustre up. Colin

50 55 60

I’ll silence this dull singer – (Sings) Oh, more dark thy gleaming hair is Than the peeping pansy’s face, And thine eyes more bright than faery’s, Dancing in some moony place, And thy neck’s a poisèd lily; See, I tell thy beauties o’er, As within a cellar chilly Some old miser tells his store; And thy memory I keep, Till all else is empty chaff, Till I laugh when others weep, Weeping when all others laugh. Thernot

65

I’ll quench his singing with loud song – (Sings wildly) Come forth, for in a thousand bowers Blossoms open dewy lips;

42.] [O del.] The woodland and valley and sea MS3 The wood[land del] and ^the^ valley and sea MS5. 44. wasp and bee] Cp. Christina G. Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), ‘Goblin Market’, 417: ‘Sore beset by wasp and bee’. 46. Blenching on high] [Withering del.] Blenching high MS3 Blenching ^on^ [hand 2] high MS5.

the dull stars sicken] ‘Sicken’ is OED 3, ‘To grow pale; to fade’; cp. Wordsworth, The Excursion (1815), VI, 805: ‘Till the stars sicken at the day of doom’. 48. young] [dull del.] MS3. 49. Hurls] [Casts del.] MS3. 51. gleaming] lustrous MS3 [lustrous del.] gleaming [hand 2] MS5. 55. neck’s] [head del.] neck^s^ MS3. 65. Blossoms open] Blossoms ope their MS3.

272 70

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Over the lake the water-­flowers Drift and float like silver ships; Ever ringing, ringing, ringing, With unfaltering persistence, Hundred-­throated morn is singing, Joy and love are one existence. Colin

75 80

(Sings) Lone, and wanting thee, I weep; Love and sorrow, one existence, Sadness, soul of joy most deep, Is the burthen and persistence Of the songs that never sleep. Love from heaven came of yore As a token and a sign, Singing o’er and o’er and o’er Of his death and change malign. Thernot



With fiery song I’ll drown that puny voice.



(Leaping to his feet) (Sings) Passeth the moon with her sickle of light, Slowly, slowly fadeth she, Weary of reaping the barren night

dewy lips] Cp. William Sharp, The Human Inheritance (1882), ‘A Dialogue’, 28–29: ‘heedless winds that kiss  | The dewy lips of flowers while they sleep’. 66. water-­flowers] Cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound II ii 72–3: ‘the pale faint water-­ flowers that pave  | The oozy bottom of the lakes and pools’. 67. Drift and float] MS5, hand 2; Floating are MS3, del. MS5 70. Hundred-­throated morn] Hundred-­throated dawn MS5, hand 2; All the dawning day MS3, del. MS5. Hundred-­throated] Cp. Tennyson, ‘The Vision of Sin’, II, 27–8: ‘As ’twere a hundred-throated

nightingale,  | The strong tempestuous treble thronged and palpitated’. 72. wanting] MS5 hand 2; waiting MS3, del. MS5. 74. most deep] MS3, MS5; [the deepest del.] MS3. 82–85.] Not in MS3. 82.] MS5, hand 2; [The moon has gone with her sickle of light del.] [with sickle bright del.] MS5. a sickle of light] Cp. T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1872), ‘A Vision of Eire’, 71–2 (addressing the Young Ireland poet Thomas Davis): ‘Rise Davis, whose pen in a few happy years  | Reaped harvests of thought like a sickle of light’.

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85

273

And the desolate shuddering sea. Colin



(Sings) Loud for thee the morning crieth, And my soul in waiting dieth, Ever dieth, dieth, dieth. Thernot

90

(Sings) Far the morning vapours shatter, As the leaves in autumn scatter. Colin



(Sings) In the heart of the dawn the rivers are singing, Over them crimson vapours winging. Thernot



(Sings) All the world is ringing, ringing; All the world is singing, singing. Colin

95 (Sings) Lift my soul from rayless night – Thernot

(Sings) Stricken all the night is past – Colin



(Sings) Music of my soul and light – Thernot



(Sings) Back the shadows creep aghast –

85. the desolate shuddering sea] Cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), VIII, 497: ‘And round him all the bright rough shuddering sea’. ‘Shuddering’ is used prominently several times in IoS, and this also may owe something to its prominence in Tennyson’s Maud: A Monodrama (1855), e.g. I.i.16: ‘The shrill-­edged shriek of a mother divide

the shuddering night’, and II iv st. vii: ‘In the shuddering dawn’. 87–88. dieth, dieth, dieth] Cp. Tennyson, The Princess, ‘The splendour falls.  .  .  ’, 8: ‘dying, dying, dying’. 95. rayless night] Cp. Shelley, ‘Orpheus’ [attrib. to Shelley, but uncertain: included in W.M. Rossetti’s edition of 1870], 10: ‘Hid by a rayless night’.

274

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(They approach one another, while singing, with angry gestures.) Enter Naschina Naschina

100

Oh, cease your singing! wild and shrill and loud, On my poor brain your busy tumults crowd. Colin

105

I had fain been the first of singing things To welcome thee, when o’er the owlet’s wings And troubled eyes came morning’s first-­born glow; But yonder thing, yon idle noise, yon crow, Yon shepherd – Thernot

Came your spirit to beguile The singing sweet as e’er round lake-­lulled isle Sing summer waves. But yonder shepherd vile, All clamour-­clothed – Colin Was’t clamour when I sung, Whom men have named Arcadia’s sweetest tongue.

(A horn sounds.)

10 1

A horn! some troop of robbers winding goes Along the wood with subtle tread and bended bows.

99–100.] You grew in clamour louder and more strong | Till all my brain was spinning with your song MS2. 100. busy tumults] Cp. R. Southey, Poetical Works (1838), Joan of Arc 10, 144–5: ‘In each heart | Doubt raised a busy tumult’. 102–103.] To welcome thee, before the luminous wings  | Of shoreward sweeping waves had lost the glow | Of dawn upon their wan, wild, wildering snow MS2; To welcome [thee, when quivering morning rings  | With her first light the waters’ chiming flow del.] when o’er the owlet’s wings  | And troubled eyes came morning’s new-­born glow. MS3.

106–7. round lake-­lull’d isle | Sing summer waves Cp. Felicia Hemans, Poems (1808), ‘Evening: On the Sea-­Shore’, 7–8: ‘The breezes o’er the water play, | The summer waves are lull’d to rest’. Sing summer waves] Beat waves’ winged feet MS2. 109^110.] All mischiefs on the man who shall repeat | That word, for I might cast him at my feet  | [And give del.] his spirit to the [word indeciph. del.] winds MS2. 109. named] MS5 hand 2; called MS2, MS3, del. MS5.

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275

(An arrow passes above.)

Fly!

Thernot

Fly!

(Colin and Thernot go.) Naschina

So these brave shepherds both are gone; Courageous miracles! Enter Almintor and Antonio, talking together. Almintor The sunlight shone Upon his wings. Thro’ yonder green abyss 115 I sent an arrow. Antonio

And I saw you miss; And far away the heron sails, I wis. Almintor



Nay, nay, I miss’d him not; his days Of flight are done.



(Seeing Naschina, and bowing low.)

Most fair of all who graze Their sheep in Arcady, Naschina, hail! 120 Naschina, hail! Antonio

(Mimicking him) Most fair of all who graze Their sheep in Arcady, Naschina, hail! Naschina, hail!

116. sails] MS5 soars MS2, MS3. 117. I miss’d him not] MS5, hand 2; I did not miss MS3, del. MS5.

121–122.] [Young sheep in many a southern-­ facing del.] lair  | [Of all clear-­browed our Arcadians del.] most fair MS2.

276

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Almintor 125

I’d drive thy woolly sheep, If so I might, along a dewy vale, Where all night long the heavens weep and weep, Dreaming in their soft odour-­laden sleep; Where all night long the lonely moon, the white Sad Lady of the deep, pours down her light; And ’mong the stunted ash-­trees’ drooping rings, All flame-­like gushing from the hollow stones,

122–131.] This passage for Almintor is drafted twice in MS2: the first attempt is heavily corrected: Yon southern facing vale Will [?richly] feed with grass thy sheep, [For o’er it all night del.] long the heavens weep, [There all night long the lady of the deep del.] In [drowsy del.] odorous silence of their sleep. When dawn about her flings, Singing her raiment’s crimson glow There all night long the heaven is bent O’er breezes heavy with the lilac scent, There all night long a fountain sings And cries, fluttering wide its wan wild wings, And sings all day long to its own heart. The second version in MS2 is: [O may I drive thy sheep del.] I’ll drive thy woolly sheep, If so I may, into a dewy vale, Where all night long the heavens weep and weep, Dreaming in their odour-­laden sleep, Where all night long the lonely moon, the white

Sick lady of the deep pours down her light, Where all night long the brooding heaven is bent O’er breezes heavy with the lilac scent, And ’mong the stunted ashes’ drooping rings, [And there high del.] All flame-­like gushing [’mong del.] from the [mossy del.] hollow stones All day and night a lonely fountain sings, [Like some mysterious thing with wide white wings del.] [[And cries and flutters wide its shuddering del.] wings, del.] And there to its own heart for ever [sings del.] moans. This second version is substantially that of MS3 and of MS5, in which the lines ‘Where all night long the brooding heaven is bent | O’er breezes heavy with the lilac scent’ are heavily deleted (possibly by hand 2). 125. odour-­laden] Cp. J. Noel Paton, Poems by a Painter (1861), ‘Song’, 21: ‘A warm wind, odour-­laden’. 127. Sad] MS5. 128. ash trees’] MS5 hand 2; ashes del. MS5.

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30 1

277

By day and night a lonely fountain sings, And there to its own heart for ever moans. Naschina



I’d be alone. Almintor

135 140

We two, by that pale fount, Unmindful of its woes, would twine a wreath As fair as any that on Ida’s mount Long ere an arrow whizzed or sword left sheath The shepherd Paris for Oenone made, Singing of arms and battles some old stave, As lies dark water in a murmurous glade, Dreaming the live-­long summer in the shade, Dreaming of flashing flight and of the plumèd wave. Antonio



Naschina, wherefore are your eyes so bright With tears? Naschina

145

I weary of ye. There is none Of all on whom Arcadian suns have shone Sustains his soul in courage or in might. Poor race of leafy Arcady, your love To prove what can ye do? What things above Sheep-­guiding, or the bringing some strange bird, Or some small beast most wonderfully furr’d, Or sad sea-­shells where little echoes sit?

136. The shepherd Paris] Perhaps cp. Dryden, Miscellany Poems (1685), ‘Daphnis and Chloris’, 1–4: ‘The shepherd Paris bore the Spartan bride | By force away, and then by force enjoyed;  | But I  by free consent can boast a bliss, | A fairer Helen, and a sweeter kiss’. For Oenone, see note to 17. 137–142.] Not in MS2. 138. lies] sleeps MS3, MS5.

140. flashing flight] MS5 hand 2; speed and del. MS5. Cp. R.W. Buchanan, Balder the Beautiful (1877) II, 608–9: ‘the air  | Still rainbow’d with the flashing flight of birds’. 142–145.] Begone, begone, | For all on whom Arcadian suns have shone  | Are all alike a cowardly race. MS2. 149. sad] [gathering del.] sad MS2.

278 150

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Such quests as these, I trow, need little wit. Antonio



And the great grey lynx’s skin! Naschina

In sooth, methinks, That I myself could shoot a great grey lynx.

(Naschina turns to go.)



Almintor



Oh stay, Naschina, stay! Naschina

155 160

Here, where men know the gracious woodland joys, Joy’s brother, Fear, dwells ever in each breast – Joy’s brother, fear, lurks in each leafy way. I weary of your songs and hunter’s toys. To prove his love a knight with lance in rest Will circle round the world upon a quest, Until afar appear the gleaming dragon-­scales: From morn the twain until the evening pales Will struggle. Or he’ll seek enchanter old, Who sits in lonely splendour, mail’d in gold, And they will war ’mid wondrous elfin-­sights:

150. Such quests as these, I  trow] Such paltry quests methinks MS2; Such questing I  methinks MS3 Such [questing methinks del] quests as these I trow MS5. 151–2. great grey lynx] Cp. Shelley, ‘Scenes from the Magico Prodigioso from the Spanish of Calderon’ (1824), Sc. II, 144–5: ‘A lynx crouched watchfully among its caves  | And rocky shores’. WBY drew on this translation in naming the characters in other poetic dramas of 1883–4. 154.] You’re all the same: | Hearts quenched of courage by the woodland joys MS2.

157.] I’m weary of your [shells del.] songs and [hunters’ del.] woodland toys MS3. 160–161.] Absent in MS3; Until he found a dragon shiny-­scaled; | From morn the twain until the evening paled | Will war MS2; Until [he’s found a dragon, shining scaled, del.] afar [hand 2: appears] the gleam of dragon-­scales MS5. 163. mail’d in gold] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Striving of St. Patrick on Mount Cruachan’, 31: ‘All mailed in gold, and shining as the sun’.

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65 1

Such may I love. The shuddering forest lights Of green Arcadia do not hide, I trow, Such men, such hearts. But, uncouth hunter, thou Know’st naught of this.



(She goes.)

Antonio

And, uncouth hunter, now –

Almintor

Ay, boy. Antonio



Let’s see if that same heron’s dead. (The boy runs out, followed slowly by Almintor.)

169.] Let’s see if that same heron slid | Down dead or if you missed: I know you did MS2, MS3.

279

280

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Scene 2

Sundown. – A remote forest valley.



Enter Almintor, followed by Antonio. Antonio



And whither, uncouth hunter? Why so fast? So! ’mid the willow-­glade you pause at last. Almintor

5

Here is the place, the cliff-­encircled wood; Here grow that shy, retiring sisterhood, The pale anemones. We’ve sought all day, And found. Antonio

’Tis well! – another mile of way I could not go.

(They sit down.) Almintor



Let’s talk, and let’s be sad, Here in the shade. Antonio



Why? Why?

2.] My strength all gone, ay, so you pause at last. MS2; I’m wearied out  – Aye, so you pause at last. MS3; So! [’mong these moss-­ grown trees del.] ’mid the willow-­glade [hand 2] you pause at last. MS5 3. cliff-­encircled] Cp. W.L. Bowles, Poetical Works (1855), ‘Coombe-­ Ellen’, 283–4: ‘the

stream  | That tinkles through the cliff-­ encircled bourne’. 5. pale anemones] Perhaps cp. Arthur W. O’Shaughnessey, Lays of France (1874), ‘The Lay of Eliduc’, 725–6: ‘The blue of pale anemones | Her eyes were’. sought] Hand 2, MS5; searched MS2, MS3, MS5 [del.]

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281

Almintor For what is glad? For, look you, sad’s the murmur of the bees, 10 Yon wind goes sadly, and the grass and trees Reply like moaning of imprisoned elf: The whole world’s sadly talking to itself. The waves in yonder lake where points my hand Beat out their loves lamenting o’er the sand; 15 The birds that nestle in the leaves are sad, Poor sad wood-­rhapsodists. Antonio

Not so; they’re glad.

Almintor

All rhapsody hath sorrow for its soul. Antonio

20

Yon eager lark, that fills with song the whole Of this wide vale, embosomed in the air, Is sorrow in his song, or any care? Doth not yon bird, yon quivering bird, rejoice? Almintor



I hear the whole sky’s sorrow in one voice. Antonio



Nay, nay, Almintor, yonder song is glad.

11–12. elf . . . itself] The rhyme is strongly Keatsian, e.g. Endymion (1818), II, 277–278: ‘The journey homeward to habitual self! |A mad pursuing of the fog-­born elf ’, and ‘Isabella’ (1821), 449/453: ‘wither by itself ’/ ‘many a curious elf ’. 12.] Possibly (with ‘murmur’ in 9 above) cp. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) IV, 119– 121: ‘like a river murmuring | And talking to itself when all things else | Are still’. 13–14.] In yon far lake that is where points my hand | The waves lament their life out on the sand MS2.

16. rhapsodists] For a bird as a rhapsodist, perhaps cp. Aubrey de Vere, Poems (1855), ‘Birds in the Baths of Diocletian’, 1: ‘Egerian warbler! unseen rhapsodist!’ WBY’s spelling in MS2, MS3 and MS5 is finally corrected from ‘wrapsodists’ by hand 2 in MS5. The same hand corrects WBY’s ‘wrapsody’ in line 17 of MS5. 18. eager lark] MS5; Yon lark MS2, MS3. 23. yonder song] yonder bird MS2; [yon brown del.] yonder bird MS3; [bird del.] song MS5.

282

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Almintor.

’Tis beautiful, and therefore it is sad. Antonio

25

Have done this phrasing, and say why, in sooth, Almintor, thou hast grown so full of ruth, And wherefore have we come? Almintor



A song to hear.

Antonio

But whence, and when? Almintor

Out of the air.

Over the willows sere

Antonio

And when? Almintor

When the sun goes down 30 Over the crown of the willows brown. Oh, boy, I’m bound on a most fearful quest; 24^25.] For grief and beauty wander on their way | And whisper in each other’s ear alway del. MS2. 25. phrasing] The sense here is a Scottish one: see OED Phrase vb., 5. trans., ‘To make much of in words, to make a fuss about; to praise, to flatter, esp. over-­effusively or insincerely. Also intr.: to talk over-­effusively, esp. in appreciation or praise.’ 26. full of ruth] Something of a commonplace, but one deployed also in Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Windle-­Straws’, V, 6: ‘So full of ruth, so sweet’.

32–37.] The description of the island here may owe something to Aubrey De Vere, The Foray of Queen Maeve (1882), ‘The Sons of Usnach’, I, 79–84: He spake: ‘She shall not die: this babe I take, My ward, until her destinies be known: An isle tower-­girt is mine in yonder lake: There shall she live; and there shall live alone: That fatal beauty shall by none be seen: Full-­grown the maid perchance may be my queen.’

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35

283

For so he willed – thou heard’st? Upon the breast Of yonder lake, from whose green banks always The poplars gaze across the waters grey, And nod to one another, lies a green, Small island, where the full soft sheen Of evening and glad silence dwelleth aye, For there the great Enchantress lives. Antonio

And there Groweth the goblin flower of joy, her care, 40 By many sought, and ’tis a forest tale, How they who seek are ever doomed to fail. Some say that all who touch the island lone Are changed for ever into moon-­white stone. Almintor

That flower I seek. Antonio



Thou never wilt return.

34. waters grey] Cp. M. Arnold, Empedocles on Etna (1852) II, 133–135: ‘Where the long green reed-­beds sway | In the rippled waters grey | Of that solitary lake’. poplars] high trees MS2. 35. nod to one another] In a review of Tennyson from 1889, WBY wrote of how ‘The earliest poet of India and the Irish peasant in his hovel nod to each other across the ages, and are in perfect agreement’ (CW 7, 97). 35–36.] lies a small | [And bosky isle del.] Green isle where neither withered leaf of blossom | falls MS2; a small  | Green isle, where never leaves or blossoms fall MS3. 36. soft sheen] Perhaps cp. R.W. Buchanan, Balder the Beautiful (1877) III i, 224–5: ‘as the soft sheen of the summer moon | Arising silvern in the cloudless west’.

37. glad silence] Cp. Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), Ch.12, ‘The old man and the child passed on through the glad silence, elate with hope and pleasure’. 38. great] MS2; fair del. great MS3. 39. flower of joy] Cp. John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘A Vision of Death’, 553–554: ‘For every thorn a flower of joy, snow-­white, | And vermeil-­tinged, and eye’d with burning gold’. 39–40.] There grows the goblin flower, all her care,  | By many sought. It is a forest tale  | How all who sought were doomed to ever fail MS2; Groweth the goblin flower, all her care,  | By many sought. It is a forest tale  | How all who seek are doomed to ever fail MS3. 42–43.] Not in MS2, MS3; [seek del.] tou[ch] reach MS5.

284

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Almintor 45

I’ll bring that flower to her, and so may earn Her love: to her who wears that bloom comes truth And elvish wisdom, and long years of youth Beyond a mortal’s years. I wait the song That calls. Antonio



O evil starred!

Almintor It comes along 50 The wind at evening when the sun goes down Over the crown of the willows brown. See, yonder sinks the sun, yonder a shade Goes flickering in reverberated light. There! There! Dost thou not see? Antonio I see the night, 55 Deep-­eyed, slow-­footing down the empty glade.

45–47.] I  seek the bloom for her that I  may earn  | Her love: to whom that hath that bloom comes truth  | Before unthought on, and strange years of youth | Beyond a mortal time MS2; I seek the bloom for her that I may earn | Her love – to him who hath that bloom comes truth | And elfin wisdom and [strong del.] long years of youth | Beyond a mortal’s time MS3; I’ll bring that flower to her, and so may earn | Her love – to her who wears that bloom comes truth  | And [elfin del.] elvish [hand 2] wisdom, and long years of youth  | Beyond a mortal’s time ^years^ [hand 2] MS5. 46. truth] truth. DUR. The full stop in the printed version is likely to be a misprint (and is not present in MS5). 53. reverberated] OED adj. 2., ‘Driven or forced back, esp. (of flames, heat, etc.) deflected or

reflected on to something’. Perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘Epipsychidion’, 163–169: ’tis like thy light, Imagination! which from earth and sky, And from the depths of human fantasy, As from a thousand prisms and mirrors, fills The Universe with glorious beams, and kills Error, the worm, with many a sun-­like arrow Of its reverberated lightning. 54. There! There!] MS5 [hand 2] Yon! Yon! MS2, MS3, del. MS5. 55. slow-­footing] Cp. Spenser, The Faerie Queene I i 10: ‘till at last she has | A damzell spyde slow footing her before’. Slow-­footed gathering o’er the empty glade MS2, MS3; [Slow footing down the del.] [In dewy sandals coming down the glade del.] Deep-­eyed slow-­footing down the empty glade MS5.

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285

A Voice (sings) From the shadowy hollow Arise thou and follow! Almintor



Sad faery tones. Antonio

’Tis thus they ever seem, As some dead maiden’s singing in a dream. Voice 60 65

When the tree was o'er-appled For mother Eve’s winning, I was at her sinning. O’er the grass light-­endappled I wandered and trod, O’er the green Eden-­sod; And I sang round the tree As I sing now to thee: Arise from the hollow, And follow, and follow!

0 7 75

Away in the green paradise, As I wandered unseen, (How glad was her mien!), I saw her as you now arise; Before her I trod O’er the green Eden-­sod, And I sang round the tree, As I sing now to thee: From the shadowy hollow

56–57.] Not in MS2. 59. singing in a dream] Cp. E.B. Barrett The Seraphim (1838), ‘Sounds’, 37–38: ‘Half mystical and half pathetic, | Like a singing in a dream’. 60–83.] These lines were reprinted in The Irish Homestead Dec. 1899, as ‘The Fairy’s Call’. Apart from removal of the stage directions, there are no significant changes to the DUR text. It is unlikely that WBY had any hand in this republication.

60–77.] Not in MS5, which lacks 2 pages at this point (the lines corresponding to 82 and 83 are perhaps a late addition to the missing pages of material). 68^69.] The green leafy hollow del. MS2. 68–69. and 78–79.] Cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound II i 196–197: ‘O follow, follow!  | Through the caverns hollow’. 72. [Hopeful in del.] Glad was her mien MS2. 78. shadowy] green MS2, MS3.

286

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Come follow! Come follow!



(Almintor goes.)



(The Voice sings, dying away.)

80

And I sang round the tree, As I sing now to thee: From the green shaded hollow Arise, worm, and follow! Antonio

85

I, too, will follow for this evil-­starred one’s sake Unto the dolorous border of the faery lake. (Goes.)

80–84.] Not in MS2. 82–83. From the [shadow del.] shade-­vested hollow | [Worm and mortal, rise and follow del.] Arise, worm, and follow! MS3; From the  [shade-­vested del.] shadowy [hand 2] hollow | Arise thou and follow! MS5.

84–85.] [Ah woe is me! I’ll never see him more del.] I’ll follow to [the] border of [sullen del.] that sea. | Him never more, no more, no more I’ll see MS2; I will follow for this evil-­starred one’s sake | Unto the dolorous border of the faery lake MS3.

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287

Scene 3 The Birth of Night. – The Island. – Far into the distance reach shadowy ways, burdened with the faery flowers. Knee-­deep amongst them stand the immovable figures of those who have failed in their quest. In MS2, this scene is drafted twice; before WBY’s second attempt (which is closer to the later MS  versions and the printed text), the scene reads as follows [with spelling and punctuation corrected and supplied]: Scene: The Palace of Flowers Far into the distance reach pillared halls and corridors where the flowers grow. Figures of men are standing immovable: to the ground their long beards reach. Through the corridors at times floats wandering faery music. Enter Almintor. Woe’s me that on a [bootless del.] useless quest I go, For how may I the sacred flower know Among this flowery pomp? Ah, woe is me [Woe that I e’er have crossed the singing sea del.] That e’er in faery boat I crossed the sea; Woe that I heard the water sigh and sing, Beneath the faery frigate, faery wing: For he who shall not find the sacred bloom Shall ne’er return. Why have I crossed the gloom With that song guiding where [harmonious del.] remotest woods Nourish their sorrow in dim solitudes; Vast greenness, where eternal Rumour dwells, And hath his home through many-­folded dells. I passed by many caverns of dim stones, And heard the viewless echoes on their thrones, Lone regents of the woods, deep muttering, And then new murmurs came, new uttering In song from goblin waters swaying white, Who mock with patient laughter all the night

Of that vast wood; [ay, woe is me that e’er del.] and then I saw the boat, Living, wide-­winded, upon the waters float, And sitting down between the living wings, It bore me swiftly where the white sand rings This lake-­embosomed isle. – But how to find The flower that [lies del.] is so heavy to my mind? Oh, where to seek? I will address this weird Old man who standeth [here]: O thou whose beard Like a river of moonlight sweeps the ground, Where is the [faery del.] enchanted flower to be found? For all these thousand thousands are as one, And fairer than the others there is none – No answer. (Goes over and touches the old man.) He is as the others: he is cold, Congealed to stone, because in heart o’er-­bold; Long centuries ago, he sought the sacred bloom And with all others found an equal doom. Such may I  find, who [must the hazard choose del.] risketh all in chance. [For there is no return del.] All shepherd gods, but chiefly Pan, down glance From thy deep withered brow and guard me now. (He pulls a flower and immediately becomes stone.) S.D.] In contrast to the earlier drafts, the scene is now set out of doors, and not within the Enchantress’s palace. The change still carries elements of the original setting, which may be influenced by that of Act V Scene i of R.L. Shiel’s Evadne; Or, The Statue (1811): ‘A vast hall in Colonna’s palace, filled with statues. – The moon streams in through the gothic windows, and appears to fall upon the statues.’

288

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First Voice 5

See! oh, see! the dew-­drowned bunches Of the monk’s-­hood how they shake, Nodding by the flickering lake, There where yonder squirrel crunches Acorns green, with eyes awake. Second Voice



I followed him from my green lair, But wide awake his two eyes were. First Voice

10

Oh, learnèd is each monk’s-­hood’s mind, And full of wisdom is each bloom, As, clothed in ceremonial gloom, They hear the story of the wind, That dieth slow with sunsick doom. Second Voice



The south breeze now in dying fears Tells all his sinning in their ears. First Voice

15

He says ’twas he, and ’twas no other, Blew my crimson cap away O’er the lake this very day. Hark! he’s dead – my drowsy brother, And has not heard absolvo te.

1–19.] These lines first appear in MS5, apparently in fair copy. (8–12 first appear in MS2, opposite the beginning of the scene there). They were reprinted (without WBY's permission) The Irish Homestead Dec. 1899. 2. monk’s hood] The plant Aconitum (known also as wolfsbane), a strong poison. 6. green lair] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, May Carols (1857), xxx, 5–6: ‘By wind unshaken hang in dream  | The wind-­flowers o’er their dark green lair’. 9. wisdom] learning del. wisdom MS2. 10. ceremonial] This is written by hand 2 in MS5 over a heavy deletion: the deleted word

may well have been ‘ceremonious’, the reading of MS2. 12. sunsick] Cp. John Todhunter, Forest Songs (1881), ‘Forest Pool’, 5: ‘Hid from the sun-­ sick noon’. Hand 2 in MS5 changes to ‘sun-­ sick’, but this is not carried through to the DUR text. 19. absolvo te] Latin phrase, meaning ‘I absolve thee’, adapted from the Catholic sacrament of penance, as spoken by the priest after confession, when the penitent has made an act of contrition. The phrase is correctly ‘ego te absolvo’.

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289

(A pause.)

First Voice

20

Peace, peace, the earth’s a-­quake. I hear Some barbarous, un-­faery thing draw near. Enter Almintor



Almintor

25 30

The evening gleams are green and gold and red Along the lake. The crane has homeward fled. And flowers around in clustering thousands are, Each shining clear as some unbaffled star; The skies more dim, though burning like a shield, Above these men whose mouths were sealed Long years ago, and unto stone congealed. And, oh! the wonder of the thing! each came When the low sun sank down in clotted flame Beyond the lake, whose smallest wave was burdened With rolling fire, beyond the high trees turbaned With clinging mist, each star-­fought wanderer came As I, to choose beneath day’s dying flames;

19^20.] MS5 has three heavily deleted lines for Second Voice here: ‘Now I hear the grains of sand | [?departing] | The [illeg.] has to sing to his soul asleep | And we two alone our watching keep.’ 20. a-­quake] Cp. John Todhunter, Forest Songs (1881), ‘A Dream of Judgement’, 38: ‘All our bones a-­quake for fear’. 22.] At this point, MS2’s second version of the scene begins. 23. along] Above del. Upon MS2 Upon del. Along MS3. 23–25.] where white stars flickering tread  | Flowers an hundred thousand round me [flow del.] are | [A blinding sea of ever burning shining glow del.]  | In [one vast sea of ever shining glow del.] MS2. 25. unbaffled star] WBY’s sense here is very unusual, and is not quite accounted for in

OED: the underlying idea seems to be that of light and fire being let loose. Perhaps cp. Robert Browning’s ‘unbaffled’ in Men and Women (1855), ‘Old Pictures in Florence’, 282–4: ‘the long-­pent fire,  | Like the golden hope of the world, unbaffled, | Springs from its sleep’. 27. Above] Of gold above MS2. 28. Long years ago] Full long ago MS2. 32. rolling] [crimson del.] rolling MS2. 33^34.] As I to choose [the flower of his bane del.] just when the sunbeams wane Chose wrong, and so was stone as I, unless Some god [illeg.] [how long in such [dis] tress del.] How [long have I in this green wilderness del.] [Gone to and fro del.] Among the flowers how many men have I

290

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5 3

And they are all now stone, as I shall be, Unless some pitying god shall succour me In this my choice.



(Stoops over a flower, then pauses.)

Some god might help; if so Mayhap ’twere better that aside I throw All choice, and give to chance for guiding chance 40 Some cast of die, or let some arrow glance For guiding of the gods. The sacred bloom To seek not hopeless have I crossed the gloom, With that song leading where harmonic woods Nourish the panthers in dim solitudes; 45 Vast greenness, where eternal Rumour dwells, And hath her home by many-­folded dells. I passed by many caves of dripping stone, And heard each unseen Echo on her throne, Lone regent of the woods, deep muttering, 50 And then new murmurs came new uttering In song, from goblin waters swaying white, Mocking with patient laughter all the night Of those vast woods; and then I saw the boat,

Called to here where the pilgrim wavelets ply About the isle [?shining] in each man’s veins, Was like to find for all my calling gains. MS2 43. harmonic woods] This may mean that the woods are filled with musical harmonies; there may also be a visual sense, close to OED ‘harmonic’ 4.b.: ‘Applied to ‘accidental’ or subjective complementary colours, formerly supposed to be analogous to harmonic sounds’. 44.] Cp. Shelley, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 347–349: ‘The panther-­ peopled forest, whose shade cast  | Darkness and odours, and a pleasure hid | In melancholy gloom’. 46. many-­folded] Used four times by Shelley, e.g. Prometheus Unbound II i 201: ‘Through the many-­folded mountains’. 47.] The opening lines of KT’s ‘Waiting’, published in 1885 in her Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems, may show the influence of this line; though conceivably, WBY might already

have read Tynan’s poem at the time of composition (1–5): In a grey cave, where comes no glimpse of sky, Set in the blue hill’s heart full many a mile, Having the dripping stone for canopy, Missing the wind’s laugh and the good sun’s smile, I, Fionn, with all my sleeping warriors lie. 53–57.] This account of the boat is influenced by Shelley, who uses similar imagery frequently, e.g. ‘The Witch of Atlas’, st. 20: As we sate gazing in a trance of wonder, A boat approached, borne by the musical air Along the waves which sung and sparkled under Its rapid keel – a wingèd shape sate there, A child with silver-­shining wings, so fair, That as her bark did through the waters glide,

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55 60 65

Living, wide wingèd, on the waters float. Strange draperies did all the sides adorn, And the waves bowed before it like mown corn, The wingèd wonder of all Faery Land. It bore me softly where the shallow sand Binds, as within a girdle or a ring, The lake-­embosomed isle. Nay, this my quest Shall not so hopeless prove: some god may rest Upon the wind, and guide mine arrow’s course. From yonder pinnacle above the lake I’ll send mine arrow, now my one resource; The nighest blossom where it falls I’ll take.



(Goes out, fitting an arrow to his bow.)



A Voice



Fickle the guiding his arrow shall find! Some goblin, my servant, on wings that are fleet, That nestles alone in the whistling wind, Go pilot the course of his arrow’s deceit!



(The arrow falls. Re-­enter Almintor.)

291

Almintor 70

’Tis here the arrow fell: the breezes laughed Around the feathery tip. Unto the shaft This blossom is most near. Statue! Oh, thou Whose beard a moonlight river is, whose brow

The shadow of the lingering waves did wear Light, as from starry beams; from side to side, While veering to the wind her plumes the bark did guide. In the conclusion to his essay ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (1900), WBY specified the ‘single vision’ that would ‘come to [Shelley] again and again’: ‘a vision of a boat drifting down a broad river between high hills where there were caves and towers, and following the light of one Star’ (CW 4, 71). By the time of the essay, this insistence on Shelley’s symbolism

was expressed as something of a rebuke to Dowden (the poet’s biographer and editor), but in 1884 WBY’s Shelleyan allusion is more likely to be intended to court Dowden’s favour. 58.] Cp. Spenser, The Faerie Queene II vi 38: Tho him she brought abord, and her swift bote Forthwith directed to that further strand; The which on the dull waues did lightly flote And soone arriued on the shallow sand, Where gladsome Guyon salied forth to land, And to that Damzell thankes gaue for reward.

292 75 80

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Is stone: old sleeper! this same afternoon O’er much I’ve talked: I shall be silent soon, If wrong my choice, as silent as thou art. Oh! gracious Pan, take now thy servant’s part. He was our ancient god. If I speak low, And not too clear, how will the new god know But that I called on him?

(Pulls the flower, and becomes stone. From among the flowers a  sound as of a multitude of horns.) A Voice 85 90 95

Sleeping lord of archery, No more a-­roving thou shalt see The panther with her yellow hide, Of the forests all the pride, Or her ever burning eyes, When she in a cavern lies, Watching o’er her awful young, Where their sinewy might is strung In the never-­lifting dark. No! Thou standest still and stark, That of old wert moving ever, But a mother panther never O’er her young so eagerly Did her lonely watching take As I my watching lest you wake, Sleeping lord of archery.

73. moonlight river] Perhaps cp. James Hogg, The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd (1876), ‘Elen of Reigh: Maria Gray: A Song’, 8: ‘By the morning bower, or the moonlight river’. 82. No more a-­roving] Cp. Byron, ‘So we’ll go no more a roving’ (1817), 1–2 and 11–12: ‘So we’ll go no more a-­roving  | So late into the night’, ‘So we’ll go no more a-­roving | By the light of the moon’.

85. ever burning eyes] The context here makes a reminiscence of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ very likely (echoing both ‘burning bright’ (1) and ‘hand or eye’ (3)); WBY’s actual phrase, however, coincides with E.B. Barrett, The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), ‘The Seraphim’, 298: ‘your cloudless ever-­burning eyes’.

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293

Act 2 Scene 1

The wood in the early evening. Enter Antonio and Naschina. Naschina

5

I, as a shepherd dressed, will seek and seek Until I find him. What a weary week, My pretty child, since he has gone, oh say Once more how on that miserable day He passed across the lake. Antonio

When we two came From the wood’s ways, then, like a silver flame, We saw the dolorous lake; and then thy name He carved on trees, and with a sun-­dry weed He wrote it on the sands (the owls may read 10 And ponder it if they will); then, near at hand The boat’s prow grated on the shallow sand, And loudly twice the living wings flapt wide, And, leaping to their feet, far Echoes cried, Each other answering. Then between each wing 15 He sat, and then I heard the white lake sing,

3–5] since he has gone ’tas been. | Tell o’er again how unto you was seen | His passage o’er the lake. MS2, MS3, MS5. 6. the wood’s ways] out the wood MS2. like a silver flame] Cp. Keats, Endymion (1818), IV, 991–2: ‘into her face there came | Light, as reflected from a silver flame’, and perhaps cp. Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), LVII, 6–7: ‘As slowly steals a silver flame  | Along the letters of thy name’. 7. dolorous] [goblin del.] dolorous MS2. 8. sun-­dry weed] Cp. T.C. Irwin, Songs and Romances (1878), ‘Harvest Twilight’ III, 3: ‘Dim figures pace the sun-­ dry roads’ and

Versicles (1883), ‘The Faery’s Child’, II, 1: ‘Down the sun-­dry harvest road’. 9. He wrote it on the sands] Cp. Spenser, Amoretti (1595) LXXV, 1: ‘One day I  wrote her name upon the strand’. 11.] See note to I iii 58. 12. the living wings] Cp. Shelley, Hellas, ‘Prologue’, 67–69: ‘And in their pavilioned chariots led | By living wings high overhead | The giant powers move’. 14. Each other answering] Up standing on their thrones del. MS2. 15. white] [sad del.] white MS2. Perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘Ode to Liberty’, 235–6: ‘as clouds

294

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Curving beneath the prow; as some wild drake Half lit, so flapt the wings across the lake – Alas! I make you sadder, shepherdess. Naschina



Nay, grief in feeding on old grief grows less. Antonio

20

Grief needs much feeding then. Of him I swear We’ve talked and talked, and not a whit more rare Your weeping fits! Naschina

Look you, so very strait The barred woodpecker’s mansion is and deep, No other bird may enter in. Antonio

Well?

Naschina Late – 25 Aye, very lately, sorrow came to weep Within mine heart; and naught but sorrow now Can enter there. Antonio

See! See! above yon brow Of hill two shepherds come.

of glimmering dew | From a white lake blot heaven’s blue portraiture’. 16. Curving beneath the prow] Beneath the prow, and then MS2. 17. Half lit] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Poems (1866), ‘Oak Leaves and Mould’, 26–7: ‘Yet still this earth | Is but a crescent sphere, half lit with dawn’. 19. old] [fresh del.] old MS2. 21. We’ve talked and talked] A deal we’ve said MS2.

22^23.] [Farewell, I’ll don | My travelling dress and then return anon del.] MS2. 23. barred woodpecker] Both the greater-­ and lesser-­spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos majora and Dendrocopos minor) have black and white feathers that present the appearance of bars along the wings and tail. Although common throughout the rest of Europe, there were no woodpeckers resident in Ireland in WBY’s time.

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295

Naschina Farewell! I’ll don My shepherd garments, and return anon.

(Goes.)



Enter Colin and Thernot.

Thernot 30

Two men who love one maid have ample cause Of war. Of yore, two shepherds, where we pause, Fought once for self-­same reason on the hem Of the wide woods. Colin



And the deep earth gathered them.

Thernot

We must get swords. Colin

Is’t the only way? Oh, see, 35 Yon is the hunter’s, Sir Almintor’s, page; Let him between us judge, for he can gauge And measure out the ways of chivalry. Thernot 40

Sir Page, Almintor’s friend, and therefore learned In all such things, pray let thine ears be turned, And hear, and judge.

29. shepherd garments] [travelling dress del.] shepherd cloak MS2; shepherd’s cloak MS3; shepherd raiment MS5. 31. war] strife [hand2] del. MS5. 33. the deep earth] Perhaps cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘A Beech-­Tree in Winter’, 5: ‘blissful secrets told of the deep earth’. 39. In all such things] In suchlike things MS2, MS3; In ^all [hand2]^ such [like del.] MS5.

40.] Well [grasshopper del.] [feather-­head del.] my popinjay, what [is’t del.] now? MS2. my popinjay] Antonio’s identification of Thernot or Colin with a pet parrot has many literary precedents, but WBY may also be recalling Lewis Carroll, Phantasmagoria (1869), ‘The Lang Coortin’, 7–8: ‘Now speak and say, my popinjay, | If I sall let him in’.

296

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Antonio

My popinjay, what now?

Colin 45

This thing we ask: must we two fight? – Judge thou. Each came one morn, with welcoming of song, Unto her door; for this, where nod the long And shoreward waves, we nigh have fought; waves bring The brown weed burden, so the sword brings fear To us. Thernot

Oh wise art thou in such a thing, Being Almintor’s page. Now judge you here. We love Naschina both. Antonio

Whom loves she best?

Colin 50

She cares no whit for either, but has blest Almintor with her love. Enter Naschina, disguised as a shepherd boy. Colin

Who art thou? – speak, As the sea’s furrows on a sea-­tost shell, Sad histories are lettered on thy cheek.

44. shoreward waves] Cp. T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘Before the Battle’, 40: ‘showery ringing of the shoreward waves’. 44^45.] Where | Each came and met and then not after long | Each would have treasured for himself alone | And for his lowly joy a pebble stone  | On which her sandals in the morn first trod. | For these things down where the long waves nod | Unto the shore fain have we fought [del.] MS2.

50. Almintor] Another MS2, MS3; [Another del.] Almintor MS5. 52.] Cp. Caroline Bowles Southey, Poetical Works (1867), ‘Once upon a Time’, 8–9: ‘Round those laughing lips and eyes  | Time may write sad histories’. 52^53.] (Naschina seems embarrassed) MS2. 53. Guarimond] This is not a name from literary pastoral: in history, it belongs to the Patriarch of Jerusalem at the time of the crusader King

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297

Antonio 55

It is the shepherd Guarimond, who loveth well In the deep centres of the secret woods Old miser hoards of grief to tell and tell: Young Guarimond he tells them o’er and o’er, To see them drowned by those vast solitudes, With their unhuman sorrows. Naschina

Cease! no more! Thou hast an over-­nimble tongue. Colin 60 What is it, friend?

Thy grief,

Antonio

He lost i’ the woods the chief And only sheep he loved of all the troop.

of Jerusalem Baldwin II (d.1131). It seems highly likely that WBY came across the name in this context, relatively obscure as the history may appear: his source is probably not the more recondite works of chronicle history, but in a work by John Ruskin, St. Mark’s Rest: A History of Venice (publ. in parts 1877–1884, and in vol. form 1884). Here (on p. 8), Guarimond is listed among the signatories of an agreement with Baldwin; but what makes this striking circumstantial evidence for WBY’s knowledge of the book is the next name on the list, which is that of Ebremar, Bishop of Caesaraea: Ebremar was the character name for a Spanish monk in WBY’s Mosada, and is also used as a place name in Love and Death V i 64. 53. who loveth well] [who loves to dwell] del. who loveth well MS2. An allusion to the advice given by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (‘He prayeth well who loveth well | Both man and bird and beast’) is hardly to WBY’s purpose here, but the phrase is nevertheless very probably being recalled.

57. vast solitudes] Perhaps cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘Modern Greece’, 131–3: ‘There, by some lake, whose blue expansive breast  | Bright from afar, an inland ocean, gleams, | Girt with vast solitudes’. 58. unhuman sorrows] WBY’s adjective is a relatively unusual one, and is uncommon in nineteenth-­century English: the meaning here is closest to OED 2., ‘Not limited by human qualities or conditions; superhuman’. ‘Unhuman’ recurs in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889) I, 173 (‘unhuman sound’), and leads to ‘human sadness’ (175) and ‘human joy’ (268). It is possible that WBY was struck by the adjective as used by Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘In the Cathedral Close’.41–2: ‘the child’s glad eyes | Your joy unhuman shall control’. 59. an over-­nimble] [a nimble del.] agile MS2; a nimble MS3. 60. He lost i’the woods the chief] He lost the favourite chief MS2, MS3. 61. the troop] his flock MS2, MS3; [his flock del.] the troop [hand2] MS5.

298

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Colin 65

More grief is mine. No man shall ever stoop Beneath the weight of greater grief than I; I like you, and, in sooth I know not why. Now, judge, must shepherd Thernot there and I For this thing fight – we love one maid? Naschina



Her name?

Colin

Naschina. Naschina



Oh, I know her well – a lame, Dull-­witted thing, with face red squirrel-­brown. Antonio



A long, brown grasshopper of maids!



Naschina



Peace, sir!

Colin 70

’Tis clear that you have seen her not. The crown Is not more fair and joyous than she is Of beams a-­flicker on yon lonely fir, Nor faeries in the honey-­heart of June astir. By bosky June I swear, and by the bee, her minister.

63–65.] Than thy grief shepherd greater is the stock  | Of mine MS2, MS3 del. MS5, More great is mine. No man shall ever stoop  | Beneath the weight of greater grief than I;  | I like [thee del.] you, though in sooth I know not why. | Now judge, must shepherd Thernot there and I [hand2] | For this thing fight MS5.

64.] WBY probably recalls here Antonio’s line at the opening of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’. 72. a-­flicker] a-­footing MS3; [a-­footing del.] a-­flicker MS5. 73.] MS5 (not in MS2, MS3). WBY’s ‘the honey-­heart of June’ influenced lines in two

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299

Naschina 75

There is no way but that ye fight I wis, If her ye love. Thernot

  Aye, Colin, we must fight. Colin Aye, fight we must. (Antonio and Naschina turn to go.) Naschina Tell me, Antonio, might They get them swords, and both or either fall? Antonio 80

No, no; when that shall be, then men may call Down to their feet the stars that shine alone, Each one at gaze for aye upon his whirling throne.



(They go.)

poems by his friends: KT, Shamrocks (1887), ‘In the May’, 5: ‘The honey heart o’the cowslip’, and George Russell (AE), Collected Poems (1913), ‘Carrowmore’, 20: ‘the honey-­ heart of earth’. 75. I wis] Defined by OED as a pseudo-­archaism, used to mean ‘I know’; here, effectively ‘iwis’, an adverb with the force of ‘Certainly, assuredly, indeed, truly’, much used in archaizing Victorian verse, e.g. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads:

First Series (1866) ‘The Masque of Queen Bersabe’, 48: ‘I wis men shall spit at me’. Cp. another use of the words by WBY at this time, in ‘When to its end o’er ripened July nears. . . ’, 24. 81. at gaze] Originally from heraldry, this phrase came to mean ‘in the attitude of gazing, esp. in wonder, expectancy, bewilderment, etc.’ (OED). whirling] [circling del.] whirling MS2.

300

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Scene 2 A remote part of the forest. – Through black and twisted trees the lake is shining under the red evening sky. Enter Naschina, as a shepherd-­boy, and Antonio. Antonio

Behold, how like a swarm of angry bees The light is dancing o’er the knotted trees, In busy flakes; re-­shining from the lake, Through this night-­vested place the red beams break. Naschina

5

From the deep earth unto the lurid sky All things are quiet in the eve’s wide eye. Antonio



The air is still above, and still each leaf, But loud the grasshopper that sits beneath. Naschina

10

And, boy, saw you, when through the forest we Two came, his name and mine on many a tree Carved; here, beyond the lake’s slow-­muffled tread, In sand his name and mine I’ve also read. Antonio



Yonder’s the isle in search whereof we came; The white waves wrap it in a sheet of flame,

1. swarm of angry bees] fleet of fiery bees MS2; swarm of fiery bees MS3, MS5. 2. the knotted trees] Cp. Shelley, ‘Rosalind and Helen’, 102–3: ‘Pursuing still the path that wound | The vast and knotted trees around’. 3. re-­shining] This rare intransitive verb is used by WBY also in ‘On Mr Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy’, 11–12: ‘The fire sweeps round | Re-­shining in his eyes’. 5. the lurid sky] Perhaps cp. Byron, Heaven and Earth: A Mystery (1825) I iii 730–731: ‘Hark,

hark! the sea-­birds cry! | In clouds they overspread the lurid sky’. 14. a sheet of flame] Cp. Robert Browning, Men and Women (1855), ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, 201–2: ‘in a sheet of flame | I saw them and I knew them all’; also perhaps cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1831), The Lay of the Last Minstrel III xxix, 4–5: ‘For a sheet of flame, from the turret high,  | Waved like a blood-­flag on the sky’.

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5 1

301

And yonder huddling blackness draweth nigh – The faery ship that swims athwart the sky. Naschina

20

Antonio, if I return no more, Then bid them raise my statue on the shore; Here where the round waves come, here let them build, Here, facing to the lake, and no name gild; A white, dumb thing of tears, here let it stand, Between the lonely forest and the strand. Antonio



The boat draws near and near. You heed me not! Naschina

25 30

And when the summer’s deep, then to this spot The Arcadians bring, and bid the stone be raised As I am standing now – as though I gazed, One hand brow-­shading, far across the night, And one arm pointing thus, in marble white. And once a-­year let the Arcadians come, And ’neath it sit, and of the woven sum Of human sorrow let them moralize;

16.] ’Tis that strange boat against the blinding sky MS2, MS3, MS5. 17–22.] Boy Antonio, if I die full soon – As if I find him not I shall – this boon Then grant: ’tis very very quiet here, So bid them carry me to this quite near, When I am dead to bury me, and build A white stone statue [over me del.] near to me, and gild It not, and cut no name when I am dead, And put no blossom [wreath del] crown around the head; A white lone thing of sorrow let it stand

Between the dead lake and the dead lake sand. MS2 23. draws near and near] is almost here MS2, MS3, MS5. 27. across] into MS2, MS3; [in del.] across MS5. Cp. R.W. Buchanan, Balder the Beautiful (1877), VII ii 9–10: ‘Far across the night, | And down the drifts of snow’. 28. thus, in marble white] let the stone be white MS2. 30–31. the sum | Of human sorrow] Perhaps cp. B.W. Procter (Barry Cornwall), English Songs (1851), ‘A Bridal Dirge’, 19–20: ‘This the truest lover’s lot; | This the sum of human sorrow!’ 31. human sorrow] human grief MS2.

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And let them tell sad histories, till their eyes All swim with tears. Antonio

The faery boat’s at hand; You must be gone; the rolling grains of sand 35 Are ’neath its prow, and crushing shells. Naschina (turning to go)

And let the tale be mournful each one tells.



(Antonio and Naschina go out.)



Re-­enter Antonio. Antonio

40 45

I would have gone also; but far away The faery thing flew with her o’er the gray Slow waters, and the boat and maiden sink Away from me where mists of evening drink To ease their world-­old thirst along the brink Of sword-­blue waves of calm; while o’er head blink The mobs of stars in gold and green and blue, Piercing the quivering waters through and through, The ageless sentinels who hold their watch O’er grief. The world drinks sorrow from the beams And penetration of their eyes.

(Starting forward.)

32. let them tell sad histories] With “neath’ it sit’ in 30 above, this suggests Shakespeare, Richard II, III ii 160–161: ‘For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground | And tell sad stories of the death of kings’. 33. All swim] Are dim MS2, MS3, MS5. 36. mournful] dolorous MS2, MS3; [dolorous del.] sorrowful [hand 2] MS5. 37–49.] Far through the mist the boat and maiden sink.

Where yonder blotch

[Upon del.] Down there on the flickering lake the [cold del. blue del.] cold stars blink In quires of green and gold and blue Piercing the quivering water through and through, The sentinels of night who keep their watch O’er grief. I drink new sorrow from the beams Of [your pale del.] their cold eyes (starting) – where yonder lilac blotch Above the edge and pulsing water gleams. MS2 47. penetration] persecution MS3.

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50

303

Of lilac o’er the pulsing water gleams, Once more those shepherds come. Mayhap some mirth I’ll have. Oh, absent one, ’tis not for dearth Of grief. And if they say, ‘Antonio laughed,’ Say then, – ‘A popinjay before grief’s shaft Pierced through, chattering from habit in the sun, Till his last wretchedness was o’er and done.’

A voice from among the trees 55 Antonio! Enter Colin and Thernot. Thernot

We have resolved to fight.

Antonio 60

To yonder isle, where never sail was furled, From whose green banks no living thing may rove, And see again the happy woodland light, Naschina’s gone, drawn by a thirst of love, And that was strange; but this is many a world More wonderful! Thernot



And we have swords. Antonio

Of wonders! eve of prodigies!

O night

Colin

56–61.] Not in MS2, MS3. 59. a thirst of love] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870) III ‘October: The Man who Never Laughed Again’, ‘Song’, 4–5: ‘Come, thirst of love

Draw! draw!

thy lips too long have borne, | Hunger of love thy heart hath long outworn’. These lines also influence the opening of ‘Into the Twilight’, ‘Outworn heart in a time outworn’ (as publ. in 1893).

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Antonio (aside)



He’ll snap his sword. Thernot



Raised is the lion’s paw.

(Colin and Thernot fight.) Antonio

65

Cease! Thernot’s wounded, cease! They will not heed. Fierce thrust! A tardy blossom had the seed, But heavy fruit. How swift the argument Of those steel tongues! Crash, swords! Well thrust! Well bent Aside! –



(A far-­off multitudinous sound of horns.)

The wild horns told Almintor’s end, And of Naschina’s now they tell – rend! rend! 70 Oh, heart! Her dirge! With rushing arms the waves Cast on the sound, on, on. This night of graves, The spinning stars – the toiling sea – whirl round My sinking brain! – Cease! – Cease! Heard ye yon sound? The dirge of her ye love. – Cease! – Cease! (An echo in a cliff in the heart of the forest sends mournfully back the blast of the horns. Antonio rushes away, and the scene closes on Colin and Thernot still fighting.)

72. The spinning stars] Perhaps cp. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856), VII, 814–815: ‘No lily-­muffled hum of a summer-­ bee, | But finds some coupling with the spinning stars’. 73. sinking] [dazzled del.] sinking MS2.

after 74.] The echoes fling upon my weary brain [The sound pouring down their cadent pain del.MS2] The labour and the cadence of their pain. MS2, MS3, MS5.

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305

Scene 3 The Island. – Flowers of manifold colour are knee-­deep before a gate of brass, above which, in a citron-­tinctured sky, glimmer a few stars. At intervals come mournful blasts from the horns among the flowers. First Voice

What do you weave so fair and bright? Second Voice

The cloak I weave of Sorrow.   Oh, lovely to see in all men’s sight Shall be the cloak of Sorrow, 5   In all men’s sight. Third Voice

What do you build with sails for flight? Fourth Voice

A boat I build for Sorrow.   Oh, swift on the seas all day and night Saileth the rover Sorrow, 10   All day and night. Fifth Voice

What do you weave with wool so white? Sixth Voice

The sandals these of Sorrow.   Soundless shall be the footfall light, In each man’s ears, of Sorrow, 15   Sudden and light.

In WO, the final scene is reprinted as the book’s last piece, with the title ‘Island of Statues  | A Fragment’. Immediately beneath the title is a ‘Summary of Previous Scenes’:

Two shepherds at dawn meet before the door of the shepherdess Naschina and sing to her in rivalry. Their voices grow louder and louder as they try to sing each other down. At last she

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Naschina, disguised as a shepherd-­boy, enters with the Enchantress, the beautiful familiar of the Isle. Naschina

What are the voices that in flowery ways Have clothed their tongues with song of songless days? Enchantress

20 25 30

They are the flowers’ guardian sprites; With streaming hair as wandering lights They passed a-­tiptoe everywhere, And never heard of grief or care Until this morn. The sky with wrack Was banded as an adder’s back, And they were sitting round a pool. At their feet the waves in rings Gently shook their moth-­like wings; For there came an air-­breath cool From the ever-­moving pinions Of the happy flower minions. But a sudden melancholy Filled them as they sat together; Now their songs are mournful wholly As they go with drooping feather. Naschina

35

O Lady, thou whose vestiture of green Is rolled as verdant smoke! O thou whose face Is worn as though with fire! O goblin queen, Lead me, I pray thee, to the statued place! Enchantress

40

Fair youth, along a wandering way I’ve led thee here, and as a wheel We turned around the place alway,

comes out, a little angry. An arrow flies across the scene. The two shepherds fly, being full of Arcadian timidity. Almintor, who is loved by Naschina, comes in, having shot the arrow at a

heron. Naschina receives him angrily. ‘No one in Arcadia is courageous,’ she says. Others, to prove their love, go upon some far and dangerous quest. They but bring Arcadian gifts, small birds and

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307

Lest on thine heart the stony seal As on those other hearts were laid. Behold the brazen-­gated glade!

(She partially opens the brazen gates. The statues are seen within. Some are bending, with their hands among the flowers; others are holding withered flowers.) Naschina 45

Oh, let me pass! The spells from off the heart Of my sad hunter-­friend will all depart If on his lips the enchanted flower be laid. Oh, let me pass!



(Leaning with an arm upon each gate.) Enchantress

That flower none Who seek may find, save only one, A shepherdess long years foretold; 50 And even she shall never hold The flower, save some thing be found To die for her in air or ground. And none there is; if such there were, E’en then, before her shepherd hair 55 Had left the island breeze, my lore Had driven her forth, for evermore

beasts. She goes again angrily into her cottage. Almintor seeks the enchanted island, to find for her the mysterious flower, guarded there by the Enchantress and her spirits. He is led thither by a voice singing in a valley. The island is full of flowers and of people turned into stone. They chose the wrong flower. He also chooses wrong, and is

turned into stone. Naschina resolves to seek him disguised as a shepherd. On her way she meets with the two shepherds of Scene I; they do not recognize her, but like to be near her. They tell her they love one maid; she answers, if that be so, they must clearly settle it by combat. She, not believing they will do so, passes on and comes

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to the edge of the lake in which is the enchanted island, and is carried over in a boat with wings. The shepherds also come to the edge of the lake. They fight fiercely, made courageous by love. One is killed. The scene quoted gives the adventures of Naschina on the island. The copy-­text for II iii in the present edition is WO. Significant variants in the DUR printing are included in the notes. 1–15.] These verses first appeared as a poem entitled ‘Voices’ in DUR for Mar. 1885, and were eventually established (as ‘The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes’) among the poems reprinted by WBY in collected editions of his work. For the Mar. 1885 variants, and later changes to the text, see notes to poem. 1. (and in 1–15. passim) Sorrow] sorrow MS4, MS5, DUR. 14. footfall light] Cp. W. Morris, The Defence of Guinevere (1858), ‘Golden Wings’, 52: ‘Many dames with footfall light’. 17. songless days] Possibly cp. H.D. Rawnsley, Sonnets at the English Lakes (1882), ‘Spring Days’, 9: ‘Autumn, with songless days and glassy lakes’. 21.] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘October: The Man who Never Laughed Again’, 653–4: ‘one who, waked up suddenly | To life’s delight, knows not of grief or care’. 23–24.] As adder’s back | The sky was banded o’er with wrack MS4, MS5, DUR. 24. And they] They MS4, MS5, DUR. 34. vestiture] In OED’s sense 2.b. (‘Clothes, clothing, vesture’), which WBY uses here, the word is first recorded in 1841; rare in verse, it nevertheless appealed to poets in WBY’s circle, and was taken up later by AE (George Russell) in the title-­poem of his The Earth-­Breath (1896), 27–28, ‘the human | Vestiture of pain’, and was a particular favourite of Oscar Wilde’s, who uses it in four poems, including ‘The Garden of Eros’ 205–6: ‘all the world for him | A gorgeous-­coloured vestiture must wear’. 43. brazen-­gated] Cp. Shelley, ‘The Tower of Famine’, 12: ‘The brazen-­gated temples’ and A. Swinburne, Songs Before Sunrise (1871), ‘Mater Triumphalis’, 77: ‘the centuries brazen-­gated’.

45–46.] [Of my sad hunter lover shall de[part] del.] [At touch of the enchanted flower depart del.] MS4. 52.] [Who will del.] die for her in [wave del.] air or ground MS4. 64. wingèd day] Cp. Robert Burns, Poetical Works (1808), ‘To Mary in Heaven, 23–24: ‘the glowing west  | Proclaimed the speed of wingèd day’, and Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘To a Boy with a Watch’, 17–18: ‘the wingèd day  | Can ne’er be chained by man’s endeavour’. 66. a girl’s forgotten lute] Perhaps cp. Fanny Kemble, Poems (1883), ‘Sleepless Nights’, 1–2: ‘my sad forgotten lute  | Breathes with low strains of broken melody’. 68. all aflash] The word is not quite a coinage of WBY’s (OED records the first use in 1852), but it is rare: the only poet to have used it before (whose work WBY did not know) was G. M. Hopkins, in ‘The Woodlark’, 29: ‘crush-­silk poppies aflash’. 69. I’d] I  would MS4; [I would del.] I’d MS5 (hand 2). 70. I am all gentleness] Perhaps cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Europa’, 36–37: ‘He stooped, all gentleness, | Inviting touches of the tender hands’. (This poem of Dowden’s may figure in the background, much later, of WBY’s ‘Leda and the Swan’.) 73. over wold and water] Cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1881), VIII, 557: ‘The wind’s note ringing over wold and lea’. 75. ’Tis but to see] I fain would see MS4, MS5. 78. A very little] A little MS4, MS5. 80. My lips, fair youth] Fair youth, my lips MS4, MS5. 83–84.] Good youth, as we two hither came | I besought thee in this island to remain MS4. 84. wane and wither] Cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), ‘Autumn in Cornwall’, 9: ‘The wild bents wane and wither’. 87.] And banish evermore thine hopeless quest; | But thou refused ^ wouldst not^, for then thou were unblest | And stony-­hearted MS4. 93. In the far world] Within the world MS4. Again, WBY’s phrase was to enter poems by his friends: KT, Shamrocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’, VI, 35:



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‘Echoes of the far world’s strife’, and Lionel Johnson, Poetical Works (1915), ‘Hill and Vale’, 37: ‘For thee the far world spied’. 94. Till thou remembrest] And you’ll remember MS4; Till [you del.] thou [hand 2] remember^est^[hand 2] MS5. 95. fenced us round] Perhaps cp. John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works (1868), ‘Hosea’ (‘Sing to the God of faithful love’), 8–9: ‘He hath into the desert brought | And fenced us round with sacred thorn’. 96.] [But why are you so silent? Did you hear MS4; But why [are you del.] art thou [hand2] so silent? [Did you del.] Didst thou [hand2] hear MS5. 100. on mortal lips] Perhaps cp. E.B. Browning, Poems (1844), ‘L.E.L.’s Last Question’, 57–8: ‘But while on mortal lips I shape anew | A sigh to mortal issues’. 102.] Missing in MS4. 104. thine] [your del.] thine MS4. 108. million-­footed] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, The Foray of Queen Maeve (1882), ‘The Sons of Usnach’, III, 127–8: ‘when the spirit of joy  | Runs million-­footed forth through earth and air’. 108^109.] And all the quiet of my faery brow MS4; [And all the quiet of my faery brow. del.] MS5. 108^109.] Hear  – and let thy whispering cease | O thou hot-­hearted one, and thou, | O mortal thing by wave and waste MS4. 110. oozy pine] [willows bow del.] MS5. 111. quivering] shuddering MS4; [shuddering del.] quivering MS5. ‘Quivering pinions’ is eighteenth-­ century poetic diction: cp. James Thomson, Winter (1726), 23–4: ‘the well-­poised Hornet, hovering, hangs  | With quivering Pinions, in the genial Blaze’, and William Shenstone, Poems (1763), ‘The Sky-­ Lark’, 3–4: ‘And there on quivering pinions rise, | And there thy vocal art display’. 113. the clay-­cold dead] ‘Clay-­cold’ is common in poetry up to WBY’s time, but here cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam (1818), XI, 96: ‘Warm corpses fall upon the clay-­cold dead’. 115.] See note to I i 32; here, also cp. Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (1579), ‘December’,

309

71–2: ‘And where the chaunting birds luld me a sleepe,  | The ghastlie Owle her grievous inne doth keepe’. 128. festival] [revelry del.] festival MS4. 133. the folded heart] Perhaps cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘Ivan the Czar’, 55: ‘The secrets of the folded heart’. 136. Thus for] [But for del.] Thus at MS4. 143, star-­throbbing] MS5, DUR; star throbbing WO. 145. dumb eternity] A phrase favoured by R.W. Buchanan: cp. Balder the Beautiful (1877), III v 15–16: ‘faded back | Into its own sad, dumb eternity’. 146. Has rolled away the stars] rolled ^away^ the stars [away del.] [hand 2] MS5. 147. eyes of grey] eyeballs grey MS4, MS5; eyes’ clear grey DUR. 148. ragged Time] [knavish del.] ragged time MS4; ragged time MS5, DUR. 149. all grief] sorrow MS4. 157.] Perhaps cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘Edith: A Tale of the Woods’, 79–82: While in grave silence, yet with earnest eye, The ancient warrior of the waste stood by, Bending in watchfulness his proud grey head, And leaning on his bow. 165.] [the lilies enclose del.] MS4. 168. infantine] This largely poetic adjective (meaning ‘infantile’) is used by Shelley: cp. The Revolt of Islam (1818), II 190: ‘A child most infantine’, and ‘Lines Written Amongst the Euganean Hills’, 322: ‘Leading the infantine moon’. 170.] From thence I came winging MS4; [From del. hand 2] Thence I  came winging MS5. Thence have I come winging DUR. 175. I’faith] In truth MS4, MS5. 177.] This may echo a line in Elizabethan poetry purely by coincidence; it is just possible, however, that the echo indicates some of the reading in verse of that period favoured by WBY’s mentor T.W. Lyster. The parallel is with a poem by the obscure pastoral writer Francis Sabie (at work between

310

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1587 and 1596), and his The Fisher-­Mans Tale (1595), 479–481: ‘Not knowing that the Canker soonest eates | The milk-­white Rose, and that corruption doth | Soon’st enter into grey and hoary haires’. (Sabie’s work did not, however, enter the collection of the National Library of Ireland until 1910.) At all events, it is WBY’s line that echoes into Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, 487–8: ‘But neither milk-­white rose nor red | May bloom in prison air’. 179. sinewy wings] Cp. R. Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810) VI, 33: ‘And springs aloft in the air with sinewy wings’. together close] he doth up ^together^ close MS4. 180. shepherd-­boy] shepherd [young del.] boy MS4. 181. swimming, sought] [sought to reach del.] MS4. 183. dreadful] deathful MS4, MS5. 186. words] [thing del.] MS4. bid] bade MS4. 190. No time for thinking] No time to think MS4, MS5, DUR. 193^194.] [Thou dealer with foul phantoms and black art del.] MS4. 195. dispart] OED 4.a.: ‘To part asunder, fly apart, and open up’ seems closest to WBY’s intended meaning here. The word is a particular favourite of Robert Browning, who uses it on ten occasions in his poetry; closer to home, it was prominent in a poem by Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘A Child’s Noonday Sleep’. 3–4: ‘your lips’ soft petals dewy bright | Dispart so tenderly’. 196. a scarlet bloom] [A starry bloom del.] MS4. Why raisest thou, pale one] O [wizard del.] dying fairy one MS4; O dying faery one MS5. 197–198.] Why dwells the [scarlet del. MS4] famous minion of the sun  | In shadow thus MS4, MS5. 200. thy wan face] The phrase ‘wan face’ is common in verse, but here perhaps cp. Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A  Dream’, I  256–7: ‘Then saw I a wan face, | Not pined by human sorrows’.

Hear, daughter of the days] Hear thou, O daughter of days MS4; Hear thou, O daughter of the days MS5. The phrase probably derives from Shelley’s ‘Mother of the Months’ in Prometheus Unbound IV 207, and ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 73. 202.] The [star del.] [sign del.] token of [thy del.] lone life. O daughter of days MS4. 206. days of ruth] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876) I, 682: ‘the death of my days of ruth’. 208. a hurt] an hurt MS4, MS5, DUR. 210. Pitiless and bright] [laughter bright del.] MS4. 212. burden] burthen DUR. 214. for ages] for many ages MS4, MS5, DUR. 215^248.] Naschina. I  know not of the things you speak, but what Of him on yonder brazen-­gated spot, By thee spellbound? Enchantress (going) Thou shalt know more When thou shalt meet two ravens by the shore [Long hence del.] Hence, mortal. (goes) Naschina (following her) Will he have happiness? (exit) MS4 216–226.] These lines, not in MS4, appear in MS5; unusually, however, a version of them prior to that in MS5 has been preserved, on one leaf of a sketchbook belonging to WBY. (The sketchbook was lot 70 in the sale of Yeats items at Sotheby’s, 27 Sept. 2017.) This version includes a line rhyming with 222, which eventually becomes 226 in MS5 and the printed versions. The fragment was probably jotted down in some haste, with the sketchbook (reserved generally for pencil sketches, some of which may well be exercises of WBY’s from art school) being the nearest thing to hand. They were subsequently used for MS5. Ah me! I pass from [the del.] sun [and the del.] and shade, And the joy of the streams where [the del.] long-­limbed herons wade, And never any more the wide-­eyed bands Of the pied [tiger del.] panther kittens from my hands

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60 65

311

To wander by the bubbling shore, Laughter-­lipped, but for her brain A guerdon of deep-­rooted pain, And in her eyes a lightless stare; For, if severed from the root The enchanted flower were; From my wizard island lair, And the happy wingèd day, I, as music that grows mute On a girl’s forgotten lute, Pass away – Naschina



Your eyes are all aflash. She is not here. Enchantress

70

I’d kill her if she were. Nay, do not fear! With you I am all gentleness; in truth, There’s little I’d refuse thee, dearest youth. Naschina

75

It is my whim! bid some attendant sprite Of thine cry over wold and water white, That one shall die, unless one die for her. ’Tis but to see if anything will stir

Shall feed. No more shall I at evening hear Again the woodland laughter [of del.] [or del.] and the clear Cries grown sweet with cries and lingers long Of the earth [lapping del.] cradling his blind soul [in del.] with song. I fade I shall not see the morning [break del.] wake, Fluttering the egg-­born populace of lake And sedge stream, and the rough each babbling brake And hollow lulling the young winds with song.

For a photographic image of these lines, see W. Gould, ‘Introduction’ to YA 21, li. 224. painted populace] Cp. Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742) III, 124–5: ‘Queen lilies! and ye painted populace | Who dwell in fields’. 227.] I dream! – I cannot die! – No! no! DUR. 231. subtile and slow] Cp. George Crabbe, The Library (1781), 415–16: ‘Still may yon spider round your pages spin, | Subtile and slow’. 243. along their russet floor] [on their unruffled floor del.] MS5. 244. sleuth-­hounds] WBY’s term is of Scottish origin: OED ‘A species of bloodhound, formerly employed in Scotland for pursuing game or tracking fugitives. Now Hist. or arch.’

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For such a call. Let the wild word be cried As though she whom you fear had crossed the wide Swift lake. Enchantress

A very little thing that is And shall be done, if you will deign to kiss 80 My lips, fair youth.

245–247.] Before I am too weak, fierce mortal, let me fly, | And crouch [in some far stillness del.] | [And del.] In some far [leafy del.] stillness of the isle, and die. MS5; Before I am too weak, fierce mortal, let me fly, | And crouch in some far stillness of the isle, and die. DUR. 249–264.] This lyric had appeared separately as ‘Song of the Faeries’ in DUR (March, 1885). 249. the fields of heaven] an hoped-­for heaven MS4, MS5. ‘Fields of heaven’ is a fairly common poetic phrase, but here perhaps cp. John Todhunter, Alcestis: A Dramatic Poem (1879), 171– 2: ‘there’s a cave | In the blue fields of heaven’. 250. fairy] spirit MS2; spirit del. faery MS3. 252, 264. wintry] wintery MS4, wintery del. wint’ry MS5 254.] And the tale of our laughter done MS2; And our revelry over and done MS5. 258. wisest] dreaming del. wisest MS2. 265. her dress of green] Cp. S.T. Coleridge, Poems (1834), ‘Alice Du Clos or The Forked Tongue: A  Ballad’, 5: ‘Put on your dress of green’, 63: ‘rose and donned her dress of green’, 85: ‘The huntress in her dress of green’. 267–8. St. Joseph’s image  .  .  .  Upon my necklace] This is the first (and the last) moment of association between Naschina and familiar Christian practices: St Joseph, husband of Mary the mother of Jesus, is in addition to being patron saint of fathers, workers, and families, the saint thought especially favourable to all those who seek a holy death. For Naschina, his image

offers protection – perhaps against unholy death, in the event of her suffering mortal punishment from the Enchantress. In 1870, Joseph had been proclaimed ‘Patron of the Universal Church’ by Pius IX, so there is a connection between his veneration and the claims of Roman Catholicism in the world: here, WBY would be especially aware of Irish resonances in the politics of his own time. For all this, Naschina’s sudden identification as a Roman Catholic, in the reference to a protective ‘image’ which (to Irish Protestant eyes) appears superstitious, disturbs somewhat the pastoral equilibrium of WBY’s setting. 270.] The implication is that the Enchantress, on her death, has become (or perhaps reverted to being) no more than a ‘green frog’. This is also a reversal of what witches might usually do to unfortunate humans in fairy tales, and as such it is part of the wholesale transformation of ‘Arcady’ at this point which Naschina’s speech registers. WBY here brings his conclusion closer to the typical Spenserian exposure and defeat of witches and other manipulators of supernatural force by means of several types of Christian virtue in episodes of The Faerie Queene. 273–275.] Ah me! I  knew some evil on this day, | E’en since the solitary magpie crossed | My road [del.] MS4. 277. as a bee sips] Cp. Shakespeare, The Tempest V i 98: ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’. WBY’s slightly more decorous adaptation of

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313

Naschina

It shall be as you ask. Enchantress



Forth! forth! O spirits, ye have heard your task! Voices



We are gone!



Enchantress (sitting down by Naschina)

85 90 95

Fair shepherd, as we wandered hither, My words were all: ‘Here no loves wane and wither, Where dream-­fed passion is and peace encloses, Where revel of foxglove is and revel of roses.’ My words were all: ‘O whither, whither, whither Wilt roam away from this rich island rest?’ I bid thee stay, renouncing thy mad quest, But thou wouldst not, for then thou wert unblest And stony-­hearted; now thou hast grown kind, And thou wilt stay. All thought of what they find In the far world will vanish from thy mind, Till thou rememberest only how the sea Has fenced us round for all eternity. But why art thou so silent? Didst thou hear I laughed?

Ariel’s song, which recurs as a formula with variations in lines 285, 291, 299, and 306, allows for the rhyme with ‘lips’ and ‘ships’ which is important to the overall effect here. It is not without precedent, and WBY could well have read Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘Under the Rose’, 9–12: Where the likeness is found to thy breath and thy lips, Where honey the sweetest the summer bee sips, Where Love, timid Love, found the safest repose, There our secret we’ll keep, dearest, – under the rose.

278. the fairy flower] A case for Lover’s indirect influence at this point becomes stronger when this phrase is compared with the short poem ‘The Charm’ from his Songs and Ballads: They say there’s a secret charm which lies In some wild flowret’s bell, That grows in a vale where the west wind sighs, And where secrets best might dwell; And they who can find the fairy flower, A treasure possess that might grace a throne, For oh! they can rule with the softest power, The heart they would make their own.

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Naschina

And why is that a thing so dear?

Enchantress 100 105

From thee I snatched it; e’en the fay that trips At morn, and with her feet each cobweb rends, Laughs not. It dwells alone on mortal lips: Thou’lt teach me laughing, and I’ll teach thee peace Here where laburnum hangs her golden fleece; For peace and laughter have been seldom friends. But, for a boy, how long thine hair has grown! Long citron coils that hang around thee, blown In shadowy dimness. To be fair as thee I’d give my fairy fleetness, though I be Far fleeter than the million-­footed sea. A Voice

110

By wood antique, by wave and waste, Where cypress is and oozy pine, Did I on quivering pinions haste, And all was quiet round me spread, As quiet as the clay-­cold dead. I cried the thing you bade me cry.

The Indian has toil’d in the dusky mine, For the gold that has made him a slave; Or, plucking the pearl from the sea-­god’s shrine, Has tempted the wrath of the wave; But ne’er has he sought, with a love like mine, The flower that holds the heart in thrall; Oh! rather I’d win that charm divine, Than their gold and their pearl and all! WBY’s ‘fairy flower’ has a different task to perform from that of Lover; but ‘The Charm’ seems close to the imagery and framework of IoS as a whole. In ‘The Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’, begun a little more than two years after IoS was first published, and printed eventually in The Leisure Hour in 1889, WBY had come to profess a great distaste for Lover, but the

principles behind this had yet to be formed for him at the time of composing IoS (CW 9, 108): The English reader may be surprised to find no mention of [Thomas] Moore, or the verses of [Charles James] Lever and [Samuel] Lover. They were never poets of the people. [. . .] Lever and Lover, kept apart by opinion from the body of the nation, wrote ever with one eye on London [. . .] Ireland was a metaphor to Moore, to Lever and Lover a merry harlequin, sometimes even pathetic, to be patted and pitied and laughed at so long as he said ‘your honour’, and presumed in nowise to be considered a serious or tragic person. 281. dreaming lay] dreamed MS4. 286. blossom] [flower del.] MS4. 288. the Wanderer] Aeneas. WBY’s shorthand here may owe something to Percy’s Reliques

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15 1 120 125 130 135

315

An owl, who in an alder tree Had hooted for an hundred years, Upraised his voice, and hooted me. E’en though his wings were plumeless stumps, And all his veins had near run dry, Forth from the hollow alder trunk He hooted as I wandered by. And so with wolf and boar, and steer. And one alone of all would hark, A man who by a dead man stood. A starlit rapier, half blood-­dark, Was broken in his quivering hand. As blossoms, when the winds of March Hold festival across the land, He shrank before my voice, and stood Low bowed and dumb upon the sand. A foolish word thou gavest me! For each within himself hath all; The world within his folded heart – His temple and his banquet hall; And who will throw his mansion down Thus for another’s bugle call! Enchantress

140

But why this whim of thine? A strange unrest, Alien as cuckoo in a robin’s nest, Is in thy face, and lips together pressed; And why so silent? I would have thee speak. Soon wilt thou smile, for here the winds are weak As moths with broken wings, and as we sit The heavens all star-­throbbing are alit. Naschina



But art thou happy?

of Ancient English Poetry (1767), ‘The Wandering Prince of Troy’, 7–12: Aeneas, wandering prince of Troy,

When he for land long time had sought, At length arriving with great joy, To mighty Carthage walls was brought; Where Dido queen, with sumptuous feast,

316

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Enchantress Let me gaze on thee, 145 At arm’s length thus; till dumb eternity Has rolled away the stars and dried the sea I could gaze, gaze upon thine eyes of grey; Gaze on till ragged Time himself decay. Ah! you are weeping; here should all grief cease. Naschina 150

But art thou happy?

Enchantress

Youth, I am at peace.

Naschina

But art thou happy? Enchantress

Those grey eyes of thine, Have they ne’er seen the eyes of lynx or kine, Or aught remote; or hast thou never heard ’Mid babbling leaves a wandering song-­rapt bird 155 Going the forest through, with flutings weak; Or hast thou never seen, with visage meek, A hoary hunter leaning on his bow, To watch thee pass? Yet deeper than men know These are at peace.

Did entertaine this wandering guest. 288–290.] WBY repeats here elements of I i 9–10 (see notes). The lines now draw on WBY’s sonnet dated 8 Mar. 1884, ‘Behold the Man’, 8–10: ‘As o’er the sea from love-­ sick Dido’s stair  | Passed long ago the wanderer’s white-­ sailed ships,  | Enamoured of the waves’ impetuous lips.’ On this image, and the ‘ships’/’lips’ rhyme,

see W. Gould, ‘Lips and Ships, Peers and Tears: Lachrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy’, YA 18, 15–57. 290. impetuous lips] WBY was to make use of this adjective again, for the ‘heart’ rather than the ‘lips’ in Aleel’s song in The Countess Kathleen (1895 version), ‘Impetuous heart, be still, be still’. The echo there of M. Arnold, Empedocles on Etna II, 90–91 (‘The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere  | To the subtle,

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317

A Voice 160 165 170

Sad lady, cease! I rose, I rose From the dim wood’s foundation – I rose, I rose Where in white exultation The long lily blows, And the wan wave that lingers From flood-­time encloses With infantine fingers The roots of the roses. Now here I come winging; I there had been keeping A mouse from his sleeping, With shouting and singing. Enchantress

175

How sped thy quest? This prelude we’ll not hear it. I’faith thou ever wast a wordy spirit! The Voice



A wriggling thing on the white lake moved, As the canker-­worm on a milk-­white rose; And down I came as a falcon swoops When his sinewy wings together close.

contriving head’) may also point towards the germ of ‘impetuous’ here. 295. love storm; and] DUR; love storm and WO. The DUR reading has been preferred here, as making slightly better sense: with this punctuation, the meaning may be ‘stained with mist [is] the new moon’s flare’. The semicolon is unlikely to have been WBY’s, however. In the MS material, WBY writes ‘new moons’, without an apostrophe; so, conceivably, more than one moon could be intended. However, the present text takes the printed versions as more authoritative in this respect. 298. Wake! soft] Wake shepherd, soft MS4, MS5.

297.] WBY makes the third Sleeper a contemporary of King Arthur (later in chronological sequence than the second Sleeper, who remembers Aeneas). Uther is Uther Pendragon, the father of Arthur, and his predecessor as King. WBY’s ‘austere Arthur’ is slightly odd (as well as lacking in euphony): possibly cp. George Chapman, The Iliads of Homer I, 554: ‘Austere king of the skies’ [of Zeus]. 301. god Pan] Pan is the god of shepherds, and hence of pastoral poetry in literary convention. WBY’s dropping of the definite article here (presumably for metrical convenience) is awkward, though there is precedent in the first sentence of ‘E.K.’’s Argument to Spenser. The Shepheardes Calaender (1579),

318 80 1 185

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I ’lit by the thing, ’twas a shepherd-­boy, Who, swimming, sought the island lone; Within his clenchèd teeth a sword. I heard the dreadful monotone The water-­serpent sings his heart Before a death. O’er wave and bank I cried the words you bid me cry. The shepherd raised his arms and sank, His rueful spirit fluttered by. Naschina (aside)

I must bestir myself. Both dead for me! 190 Both dead! – No time for thinking. (Aloud) I am she, That shepherdess: arise, and bring to me, In silence, that famed flower of wizardry, For I am mightier now by far than thee, And faded now is all thy wondrous art.

(The Enchantress points to a cleft in a rock.) Naschina

195 200

I see within a cloven rock dispart A scarlet bloom. Why raisest thou, pale one, O famous dying minion of the sun, Thy flickering hand? What mean the lights that rise As light of triumph in thy goblin eyes – In thy wan face?

‘December’: ‘ended with a complaynte of Colin to God Pan’. 303. insolent eyes] Cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘In the Mountains’ 17: ‘small, hard, insolent eyes’. unused to tears] to grief unused MS4, MS5. 305.] And rule the shades of evening and of dawn MS4. the eve and dawn] the eve and [trembling del.] [weeping del.] dawn MS4.

306. Nay] Yea MS4, MS5. 309. The years] [Are del.] the years MS4, Are the years of [faery del.] goblin sleep MS5. 310–11.] For ‘Troia’ and ‘Achaians’, see note on I i 12. [Do they still hold the Achaian host at bay? del.] MS4.

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319

Enchantress 205 210 215 220

Hear, daughter of the days. Behold the loving loveless flower of lone ways, Well-­nigh immortal in this charmèd clime; Thou shalt outlive thine amorous happy time, And dead as are the lovers of old rhyme Shall be the hunter-­lover of thy youth. Yet evermore, through all thy days of ruth, Shall grow thy beauty and thy dreamless truth; As a hurt leopard fills with ceaseless moan And aimless wanderings the woodland lone, Thy soul shall be, though pitiless and bright It is, yet shall it fail thee day and night Beneath the burden of the infinite, In those fair years, O daughter of the days. And when thou hast these things for ages felt, The red squirrel shall rear her young where thou hast dwelt – Ah, woe is me! I go from sun and shade, And the joy of the streams where long-­limbed herons wade; And never any more the wide-­eyed bands Of the pied panther-­kittens from my hands Shall feed. I shall not in the evenings hear Again the woodland laughter, and the clear Wild cries, grown sweet with lulls and lingerings long.

312–313.] Where rise the walls majestical above  | The plain, a little fair-­haired maid I love MS4, MS5, DUR. 314. The Sleepers all together] [Naschina del.] MS4. 314^315.] [Truly the greyhound Sorrow courses through the world del.] MS4. 317. the halcyon’s wing] Perhaps cp. the end of a poem by James Montgomery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘The Voyage of the Blind’ I, 83–4: ‘their sorrows hide  | Beneath the halcyon’s wing’. 318. flaming minstrel-­word] Cp. WBY’s ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’, 19: ‘Only a sudden flaming word’. The poem appeared first as ‘An Epilogue To ‘The Island of Statues’ and ‘The Seeker’ in DUR October 1885.

[High-­fixèd like a glad thought on his crest del.] MS4 322. clear-­browed] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘November: The Lovers of Gudrun’, 386: ‘Clear-­browed and wide-­eyed was he’. 323. the charmèd ring] Cp. William Allingham, Poems (1861), ‘Fairy Dialogue’, 17–18: ‘To mingle in a charmèd ring | With a perfect welcoming’. 324. star-­shuddering] star-­shuddered MS4, MS5. The recurrence of ‘shuddering’ in this final line underscores its prominence in the work as a whole: see note to I  i 85 (‘shuddering sea’). S.D. The rising moon . . . shadowless] Not in MS4, MS5. This SD has a marked effect on the whole work and is introduced by WBY

320 225 230 235

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I fade, and shall not see the mornings wake, A-­fluttering the painted populace of lake And sedgy stream, and in each babbling brake And hollow lulling the young winds with song. I dream! – I cannot die! – not die! No! no! I hurl away these all unfaery fears. Have I not seen a thousand seasons ebb and flow The tide of stars? Have I not seen a thousand years The summers fling their scents? Ah, subtile and slow, The warmth of life is chilling, and the shadows grow More dark beneath the poplars, where yon owl Lies torn and rotting. The fierce kestrel birds Slew thee, poor sibyl: comrades thou and I; For ah, our lives were but two starry words Shouted a moment ’tween the earth and sky. Oh, death is horrible! and foul, foul, foul! Naschina

240

I know not of the things you speak. But what Of him on yonder brazen-­gated spot, By thee spell-­bound?

between MS5 and the DUR printing. WBY’s letter to KT of Sept. 1888 speaks of how ‘clouds’ ‘came and robbed Naschina of her Shadow’, dating this to ‘about 4 years ago’: if we take WBY literally here, the change subsequent to MS5 would have been made in autumn 1884, but in that case would have been in some MS version which is now lost. Arguably, a change at proof stage (in 1885) is more plausible (though, of course, WBY could have decided upon this crucial change earlier than then). The implication is that Naschina has taken fully the place of the Enchantress and is therefore now, like her, no longer a mortal being. Instead of winning his beloved, Almintor has come into contact with something otherworldly and perilous. The idea that a malevolent wielder of supernatural power might cast no shadow was fleetingly present in the last act of WBY’s Love and Death, where a Knight says of the murderous Ginevra, ‘The princess casts no

shadow on the ground’ (V i 58). The motif itself may owe much to Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley (1847), I, 6–10: Some sorcerer, whom a far-­off grandsire burnt Because he cast no shadow, had foretold, Dying, that none of all our blood should know The shadow from the substance, and that one Should come to fight with shadows and to fall. MS2 and MS3 contain material for II iii which differs very widely from that of MS4, MS5, and the printed versions. The version here is that of the whole scene in MS3 (which is a fair copy, slightly emended, of MS2). WBY subsequently cancelled the entire passage in MS3. MS3 text: Scene:

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321

Enchantress Thou shalt know more: Meeting long hence the phantom herdsman, king Of the dread woods; along their russet floor His sleuth-­hounds follow every fairy thing. 245

(Turns to go. Naschina tries to prevent her.) Before I am too weak, oh let me fly, Fierce mortal, and crouched low beside the lake In a far stillness of the island die. (Goes.)



Naschina (following)



Will he have happiness? Great sobs her being shake. Voices (sing)

250

A man has the fields of heaven, But soulless a fairy dies, As a leaf that is old, and withered, and cold When the wintry vapours rise.

255

Soon shall our wings be stilled, And our laughter over and done: So let us dance where the yellow lance Of the barley shoots in the sun.



So let us dance on the fringèd waves, And shout at the wisest owls In their downy caps, and startle the naps

The island of flowers. Far into the distance reach shadowy ways burdened with the fairy flowers. Bearded figures of stone are seen among them. There also is the statue that once was Almintor. Over all in the distance a citron-­tinctured sky where falter a few stars.

And very young thou art, and wherefore I Who pitied none so pity thee, I know not why Save that you’re young, and by my staff I swear,5 My staff with ivy bound, that you are fair.

Enter Naschina, disguised as a shepherd, and the Enchantress, the beautiful familiar of the isle.

Naschina Where is the flower, Lady?

Enchantress O youth, by this my vine-­hung staff I swear I pity thee: turn thou again, for fair

Enchantress If I tell I die, by old decree. Nay, seek it not.

322

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260

Of the dreaming water-­fowls.



And fight for the black sloe-­berries, For soulless a fairy dies, As a leaf that is old, and withered, and cold, When the wintry vapours rise. Re-­enter Naschina. Naschina

265 270 275

I plucked her backwards by her dress of green. To question her – oh no, I did not fear, Because St. Joseph’s image hangeth here Upon my necklace. But the goblin queen Faded and vanished: nothing now is seen, Saving a green frog dead upon the grass. As figures moving mirrored in a glass, The singing shepherds, too, have passed away. O Arcady, O Arcady, this day A deal of evil and of change hath crossed Thy peace. Ah, now I’ll wake these sleepers, lost And woe-­begone. For them no evil day!

Sit here – the shade is gracious in this spot And I will tell thee old-­world fairy tales 10 About the sorrows of the nightingales That sing within the portal of this shell. Naschina The phantoms of dead waves. Enchantress And I will tell Their pent-­up secrecies, and why they toil. But if I show where is the faery flower 15 And it be pulled, then, by the sacred coil Of the slow sea-­snake, upon the self-­same hour I die. Naschina Then wake the sleepers from their sleep Of stone. Enchantress No, no, I cannot, for they keep

Sealed hearts until some mortal touch their lips 20 With that strange flower: then light as some bee sips They’ll wake, and some will murmur of old loves And some of comrades now for ages dust. Seek you, O youth, within these shining groves Some comrade dear and sad whom find you must 25 Or die? What’s love? For breathing faery breath I know not love at all; I have heard say It is the clinging friend of change and death, And with these twain full often whispereth. O youth, give o’er thy hopeless quest – yet stay30 Upon this isle. Forget thy hopes and fears, Forget the world and its embattled years: Here all sweet odours by the winds are brought,

THE ISLAND OF STATUES





(Throws open the brazen gates.)



(To Almintor) O wake! wake! wake! for soft as a bee sips The fairy flower lies upon thy lips.

323

Almintor 280

I slept, ’twas sultry, and scarce circling shook The falling hawthorn bloom. By mere and brook The otters dreaming lay. Naschina!

These gentle as the moth-­like wings of thought, And here the writhing waves are stilled and calm 35 As sleep, each burdened o’er with poppy balm, And hope and memory grow still as these; Scarce stir or trouble by these shuddering seas. Naschina By chance I choose the flower. Enchantress Stay, Not there, but yon a pillar tall and grey 40 A broken shaft rears high, and from its head There hangs a flower like a ruby, red And dropping flame. See, shepherd, I have told. Yet pull it not, though all the world-­wide gold Be not its worth. You’re silent and quite still:45 Be not so silent – woe is me, you will Take it, and when the busy wings are furled Of faeries, they are dead indeed: their life, ’Tis a happy dream within a dreamless world Of sleep. ’Tis pleasant here, the waves have strife 50 And toil about us: shepherd, sit thou here, To thee I’ll give my ivy staff, the fear Of goblins all, and I will bring thee fruits Far-­nourishèd about the huddling roots

Of the dead wood, and many a wide-­eyed band55 Of the pied tiger kittens from thy hand Will I  make feed. But ay! You touch the crown Of the pillar! Thus upon my knees low down I kneel to thee – oh let me live on still, I know not what death is, for I’ve seen fill 60 The years’ whole rounds, and seen the summers fling Their scents four thousand years; an evil thing I only know it is. Your eyes are wet; Ah, you will spare to me my poor life yet; A moment stay! Naschina Blood from the snapped stem drips.

65

Enchantress I fade! (dies) Naschina Blue pallor on her close-­sealed lips And on her forehead dwells, and as this hair I lift, or as this cheek nothing so fair The [citied] earth can show. A Voice sings One on the island dies, 70 And soon where white waves call On the sands away, ’neath the poplars grey, Two with the sword-­blade fall.

324

THE ISLAND OF STATUES

Naschina Ay! Behold the hapless sleepers standing by. I will dissolve away the faeries’ guile; So be thou still, dear heart, a little while! 285 (To the Second Sleeper) Old warrior, wake! for soft as a bee sips The fairy blossom lies upon thy lips. Sleeper

Have I slept long? Naschina



Long years.

The Sleeper With hungry heart Doth still the Wanderer rove? With all his ships I saw him from sad Dido’s shores depart, 290 Enamoured of the waves’ impetuous lips. Naschina

Those twain are dust. Wake! Light as a bee sips The fairy blossom lies upon thy lips; Seafarer, wake!

Naschina (to Almintor) O wake, wake, wake – for light as some bee sips, The sacred flower lies upon thy lips. 75 Almintor I slept, ’twas sultry, and scarce circling shook The falling hawthorn bloom. Naschina Knowest thou me? Look. Almintor Naschina! Naschina Hence!

(The faeries of the dead Enchantress sing, while Naschina and Almintor whisper apart.) A man has a hope for heaven, But soulless a [spirit del.] faery dies, 80 As a leaf that is old, and withered and cold When the wintery vapours rise. Soon shall our wings be stilled, And our laughter over and done: So let us dance where the flaming lance 85 Of the barley shoots in the sun. So let us dance on the fringèd waves, And shout at the wisest owls

THE ISLAND OF STATUES



325

Third Sleeper

Was my sleep long? Naschina



Long years.

Third Sleeper. 295

A rover I who come from where men’s ears Love storm; and stained with mist the new moon’s flare. Doth still the man whom each stern rover fears – The austere Arthur – rule from Uther’s chair? Naschina



He is long dead. Wake! soft as a bee sips The goblin flower lieth on thy lips. Fourth Sleeper

300

Was my sleep long, O youth? Naschina



In their downy caps, and startle the naps Of the dreaming water-­fowls. 90 And fight for the black sloe-­berries, For soulless a faery dies, As a leaf that is old, and withered and cold, When the wintery vapours rise.

Long, long and deep.

[First] Sleeper With hungry heart Doth still the wanderer rove with all his ships? I saw him from sad Dido’s shore depart, Enamoured of the waves’ impetuous lips. 100

Naschina [Sea-­farer wake, for del.] Wake; light as some bee sips, 95 The sacred flower lies upon thy lips.

Naschina These twain are dust. Wake; light as some bee sips, The sacred flower lies upon thy lips: [Wake sleeper del.] Sea-­farer, wake.

First sleeper (awaking) Have I slept long?

Second Sleeper. Was my sleep long?

Naschina Long years.

Naschina Long years.

326

THE ISLAND OF STATUES

The Sleeper 305

As here I came I saw god Pan. He played An oaten pipe unto a listening faun, Whose insolent eyes unused to tears would weep. Doth he still dwell within the woody shade, And rule the shadows of the eve and dawn? Naschina



Nay, he is gone. Wake! wake! as a bee sips The fairy blossom broods upon thy lips. Sleeper, awake! Fifth Sleeper



How long my sleep? Naschina

The years of goblin sleep.

Unnumbered

The Sleeper Ah! while I slumbered, 310 How have the years in Troia flown away? Are still the Achaians’ tented chiefs at bay? Where rise the walls majestical above, There dwells a little fair-­haired maid I love.

Second Sleeper A rover I, who come from where men’s ears Love storm, and stained with mist the new moon’s flare. 105 Does still the man whom each stern rover fears – The austere Arthur – rule from Uther’s chair?

Naschina Long, long and deep.

Naschina He is long dust – Wake; light as some bee sips, The sacred flower lies upon thy lips.

Third Sleeper Youth, as I came I saw god Pan. He played An oaten pipe unto a listening faun, Who oft with eyes to grief unused would weep. Doth he still dwell within the forest shade And rule the shadows of the eve and dawn?115

Third Sleeper Was my sleep long, O youth?

Naschina Long dust he is. – Wake; light as some bee sips,

110

327

THE ISLAND OF STATUES



The Sleepers all together



She is long ages dust. The Sleeper



Ah, woe is me!

First Sleeper 15 3

Youth, here will we abide, and be thou king Of this lake-­nurtured isle! Naschina

Let thy king be Yon archer, he who hath the halcyon’s wing As flaming minstrel-­word upon his crest. All the Sleepers



Clear-­browed Arcadian, thou shalt be our king! Naschina

20 3

O, my Almintor, noble was thy quest; Yea, noble and most knightly hath it been. All the Sleepers



Clear-­browed Arcadian, thou shalt be our king!

The sacred flower [lies del.] broods upon thy lips. Sleeper, awake. Fourth Sleeper (waking) How long my sleep? Naschina Unnumbered Are the years of [faery del.] goblin sleep. Fourth Sleeper While I slumbered,

How in Troia passed the years away? 120 Doth it still hold the Achaean host at bay, Where rise those walls majestical above The windy plains, a fair-­ haired maid I love? Naschina Alas, She is long ages dead. Fourth Sleeper Ah, woe is me!

328

THE ISLAND OF STATUES

Almintor

Until we die within the charmèd ring Of these star-­shuddering skies, you are the queen. (The rising moon casts the shadows of Almintor and the Sleepers far across the grass. Close by Almintor’s side, Naschina is standing, shadowless.)

First Sleeper Youth, here we will abide, and be 125 [Thou our king ^chief^, O youth, and del.] Be thou king Of this lake-­nurtured isle. Naschina Let thy king be Yon archer, he who hath the halcyon’s wing High-­fixèd like a glad thought on his crest. (The Awakened Sleepers shout) Clear-­browed Arcadian, thou shalt be our king!130 Naschina O, my Almintor, worthy was thy quest, Yea, worthy and most noble it hath been. Sleepers Clear-­browed Arcadian, thou shalt be our king. Almintor (to Naschina) And till we die within the charmèd ring

Of this star-­shuddering sky you are the queen.135 Selected variants to draft above from MS2: 28.] It is a whispering thing [the friend of del.] of change and death 33–35.] [Here come the winds from where they rent  | Upon the far off hills their honeyed scent | And here the writhing wave is still del.] 40.] Not there [with eyes upon del.] the [burning del.] way 49.] Is a little dream reared up within a world 55. dead] deep 61. The years’ whole rounds] The round of months 62. four] two 66–69.] Blue pallor creeps across her lips | And dwells upon her cheek so round and full;  | Cruel her life, her death most pitiful 76. An hour-­long nap ’twas – warm, scarce circling, shook | The falling hawthorn bloom 122. walls] [towers del.] walls 134–135.] Not in MS2.

36

THE CLOAK, THE BOAT, AND THE SHOES THE POEMS

Date of composition. The lines were first composed as part of IoS: they are found first in MS4 of that work, so were probably added after Aug. 1884 and before the end of the year (see notes to IoS for MS details). Context. These lines are taken from IoS II iii 1–15. Their appearance in The Dublin University Review for Mar. 1885 was ahead of that of the verse-­play itself (in which context they were printed in the magazine in Jul.). Publication history. Although the verses had been plucked out of the context of his verse-­play for their first publication (which was also, in fact, WBY’s first appearance in print), they remained in the text of IoS when the play was excerpted for WO. (Some notice was attracted by the lines when they were quoted in full [as ‘a dainty little song’] by J. Todhunter in his review of WO for The Academy, 30 Mar. 1889.) With P95, WBY salvages the lines as a poem with a title, removing the ‘First Voice’, ‘Second Voice’ etc., of the original speaker designations in favour of simple quotation marks. Changes are made also to the phrasing of some lines (see notes). The resultant poem is placed among work in the final section of P95, ‘Crossways’, where unlike some other inclusions, it appears without an appended date. The poem was included as part of ‘Crossways’ in all collected editions by WBY thereafter. Text. The text of the poem remained stable after P95. The notes provided record changes to the text of WO: for variants from before this, see notes to IoS. Copy-­text: P49.

‘W 5

hat do you weave so fair and bright?’ ‘I make the cloak of Sorrow: O lovely to see in all men’s sight Shall be the cloak of Sorrow, In all men’s sight.’

Title] Voices The Dublin University Review Mar. 1885. 1. fair and bright] Possibly cp. J.J. Callanan, Poems (1861), ‘The Recluse of Inchidony’, 113–114: ‘those orbs so fair and bright, | Still burning on’.

3. lovely to see] Perhaps cp. Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘Mary Machree’, 1–2: ‘The flower of the valley was Mary Machree,  | Her smiles all bewitching were lovely to see’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-37

330

The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes

10

‘What do you build with sails for flight?’ I build a boat for Sorrow: O swift on the seas all day and night Saileth the rover Sorrow, All day and night.’

15

‘What do you weave with wool so white?’ ‘I weave the shoes of Sorrow: Soundless shall be the footfall light In each man’s ears of Sorrow, Sudden and light.’

14. footfall light] Cp. W. Morris, The Defence of Guinevere (1858), ‘Golden Wings’, 52: ‘Many dames with footfall light’.

37

[‘ TRUTH IS BOLD, BUT FALSEHOOD FEARS’] THE POEMS

Text and date of composition. These lines are found in a small sketchbook, used by WBY presumably during his time studying at the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin. At the front is the address ‘10 Ashfield Terrace | Rathmines’: WBY moved here from Howth in May  1884, and he attended the art school until Apr. 1886. The sketchbook (which contains numerous studies, some of them clearly of models, busts, etc., in the school’s studio) contains a brief burst of draft material for IoS (II iii 216–226), and this suggests that WBY was using the book at a point between MS4 and MS5 of that work: after Aug. 1884, therefore, and before early 1885 (see headnote of IoS for more information on these MS stages). If the written material in this sketchbook comes from autumn 1884 (as seems very possible), it is tempting to see in this twelve-­line poem a quick reaction to the reversal of the poet’s romantic hopes with regard to Laura Armstrong, who (after a certain amount of inventive uncertainty in front of WBY) married her fiancé Henry Byrne in Sept. This is perhaps to over-­read what is certainly a fairly improvised piece, and one for which there is no evidence of the poet’s future interest, since the lines do not turn up again. Publication history. The MS page is reproduced and a transcription of the lines offered in W. Gould, YA 21, lii-­liii. Copy-­text: Sketchbook, Yeats: The Family Collection auction, Sotheby’s 27 Sept. 2017, lot 70.

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ruth is bold, but falsehood fears Question of the lie of years. But when time her fickle pages Has been turning endless ages, Then some pilgrim when he searches For the sight of fallen churches He shall see the heron pass

5. pilgrim] Pilgrim MS. 6. fallen churches] Perhaps cp. John and Charles Wesley, Poetical Works (1868), Psalm LXXX, Pt.1, 27–8: ‘Our bitter household-­foes abound, | And laugh our fallen church to scorn’, and Pt.3, 11: ‘And bid our fallen church arise’, and John

Keble, The Christian Year (1866), ‘St. John Baptist’s Day’, 1–3: ‘Twice in her season of decay | The fallen church hath felt Elijah’s eye  | Dart from the wild its piercing ray’. 6^7.] Slowly [?rising] to depart, | He shall mutter to his heart del. MS. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-38

332 10

[‘Truth Is Bold, But Falsehood Fears’]

Over ruins green with grass, And shall mutter to his heart Slowly rising to depart, He shall mutter, passing by, ‘Fair the ruin of a lie.’

8. ruins green with grass] Perhaps cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘Cadyow Castle’, 30–31: ‘Where, with the rock’s wood-­covered side, | Were blended late the ruins green’. Perhaps also cp. Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen, Julia Alpinula (1820), ‘The Captive of Stamboul’,

II i 27: ‘O’er altars rent, and sculpture green with grass’: this work by Wiffen (1792–1836), a poet commended by Scott and best known for his translation of Tasso, might have appealed to WBY’s teenage taste for the poetry of adventure and romance.

38

FRAGMENT (‘AND HELEN’S EYES’)

THE POEMS

Text and date of composition. This stray couplet is jotted down by WBY in his 1884 sketchbook (for details, see [‘Truth is bold, but falsehood fears. . . ’]). It is possible that it was intended for IoS or some other project of the poet’s in 1884, perhaps Love and Death, where a character asks, ‘Does Paris come at times – I think ’tis so – | And tell thee of the blue of Helen’s eyes | As yet untamed by Hades’ mist? (III i 27–29). A transcription and reproduction of the relevant page in the sketchbook is to be found in W. Gould, YA 21, lv. The text here does not quite agree with Gould’s transcription, and supplies a comma at the end of the first line. Copy-­text: Sketchbook, Yeats: The Family Collection auction, Sotheby’s 27 Sept. 2017, lot 70.

A

nd Helen’s eyes beneath their moveless lids, The bold [fierce] glance of godhead in their gaze.

1. moveless] Perhaps cp. this adjective as it occurs in the sestet of E.B. Browning, Poems (1844), ‘Grief ’: I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair, Half-­taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, In souls as countries, lieth silent-­bare Under the blanching, vertical eye-­glare Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-­hearted man, express Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death – Most like a monumental statue set

In everlasting watch and moveless woe Till itself crumble to the dust beneath. Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: If it could weep, it could arise and go. The whole of Browning’s sonnet is of interest in relation to WBY’s work in this period; as well as the anticipation of the opening of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ in its final words, the poem may exercise some influence of the scenario for IoS. 2. WBY writes ‘fier’: it is possible, but less likely, that the word is ‘firm’, and possible also that ‘fier’ is meant for ‘fier[y]’ (though this would render his line unmetrical). DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-39

39

LOVE’S DECAY

THE POEMS

Text and date of composition. This dialogue poem survives on seven leaves of MS, inserted loosely in a notebook which also contains some lines from IoS (these were published in DUR Mar. 1885 as ‘Voices’, and subsequently retained by WBY as ‘The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes’ in P95 and after). On the reverse of one of the seven leaves is a draft of the five lines that open ‘Time and the Witch Vivien’ in the WO revision of a scene from Vivien and Time, along with a short (and probably very early) draft list of contents for the WO volume itself. ‘Oisin’ is given there as the first poem in the list: while this does not necessarily mean that the whole poem had been written by this point, it is likely at least that it had been well begun, so that WBY was using this piece of paper sometime after October 1886, when composition of ‘Oisin’ had started in earnest. It is reasonable to assume that WBY’s use of the MS of ‘Love’s Decay’ for WO-­related drafting (of both contents and the new version of ‘Time and the Witch Vivien’) means that by this stage the poem was not under consideration for inclusion and probably not among his recent compositions. There is, however, no direct evidence of this poem’s date of composition. Perhaps the presence in the notebook of the other loose leaves relating to ‘Voices’ offers some kind of indirect evidence: these lines are not present in IoS drafts before MS4 of that work, which comes from some time after Aug. 1884 and before Apr. 1885, and this seems a possible timeframe for ‘Love’s Decay’ also. The creation myth in lines 40–51 of the poem may well owe something to the theosophical and quasi-­theosophical speculations of WBY and friends such as George Russell and Charles Johnston, and this interest becomes a prominent one in later 1884, leading to their formation of the ‘Dublin Hermetic Society’ in Jun. 1885. Although esoteric mythmaking is present in the poem (indeed, somewhat incongruously so for a pair of parting lovers), there is no sign here of the thoughts of the soul’s future reincarnation which mark WBY’s ‘Ephemera’. This may indicate that WBY was not yet fully exposed to theosophy’s governing tenets: it was at the end of 1884 that his aunt, Isabella Pollexfen Varley, sent WBY a copy of A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Bhuddism (which he subsequently lent to Johnston); but it is, of course, difficult to use this as a firm means of dating the poem before late 1884. What may be more revealing is the relation between ‘Love’s Decay’ and ‘Ephemera’. There appears to be an echo of the poem in ‘Ephemera’ (see note to 87–91); both are poems in which lovers part and are engaged in dialogue: ‘Love’s Decay’ is the cruder in both conception and execution – its lovers are partly the soldier and the girl he leaves behind as he goes off to war, and partly (very awkwardly) figures of esoteric allegory. ‘Ephemera’ refined and simplified this scenario (losing the soldier and girl motif altogether, while ditching myths of divine origin in favour of a more subtle, and more emotionally resonant, interest in the soul’s reincarnations). It seems DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-40



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extremely likely that ‘Love’s Decay’ is the earlier of the two poems, on these grounds if no other. If WBY reworked his earlier lovers’ dialogue in writing ‘Ephemera’, it may be significant that one of the MS leaves of ‘Love’s Decay’ has two pieces of WO-­related material on the reverse (including in its draft list of contents ‘Ephemera’ itself). Since the traditional dating of ‘Ephemera’ (of 1884) is unlikely to be correct and the poem itself is more plausibly dated to early 1887 (see notes), it may be more plausible to suppose that ‘Love’s Decay’ belongs to 1884 and is the first of WBY’s poems to be substantially rewritten (as ‘Ephemera’) a little more than two years later. Text. The sole MS is NLI 30066. A full diplomatic transcription is in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 476–9. The present text corrects spellings and provides editorial punctuation: it differs in some details from that offered in UM, 84–88. A riverside. A boat in the rushes. Two lovers awaiting the bugle’s call that divides them. She

T

he giddy day goes barefoot on the hills; She hath her scarlet slippers somewhere left Within the chambers of the sky. He

  And laughs, Teasing away poor night with globes of flame 5 From the deep woods. She hides for sleep, poor thing, The mother of sleep who knows no good but sleep, Within the lily’s funnel, and the folds Of shadowy purple in the rose’s heart, In hanging foxgloves and the quiet river, 10 And in the shadows of your spinning-­wheel. She

You like a lover gaze into her eyes: What see you there, O wooer of night?

Title] Cp. Robert Browning, Dramatic Lyrics (1842), ‘In A Year’, st. 2: Was it something said, Something done, Vexed him? was it touch of hand, Turn of head? Strange! that very way Love begun: I as little understand Love’s decay.

S.D.] Two lovers parting. He is faithless to her, and to his cause. She suspects perhaps. del. MS. 3. chambers of the sky] Cp. John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘Hymn for a May Morning’, 10: ‘Wide are the blissful chambers of the sky’. 4. globes of flame] Cp. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817) ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’, 785: ‘Macedonian pikes and globes of flame’.

336

Love’s Decay

He

The lure and mystery of things a-­dying. She

15 20 25

Then look no more, my wooer of the night, Ah gaze no more on her, nor on the earth. The loneliest dewdrop in the midst of space The old and bitter earth has never loved. Nor gaze along the wood: its spirit loved To madness in his youth and was deceived, And he is now all sighs. Gaze thou on me And I will laugh, and you’ll be scarce so sad. But ah! you’re gazing on the wood and sky. I loved them once, but now I have no joy Save only thee: the blue of yon kingfisher Frets me – the useless fire. He

I have no joy Save only thee: the blue of yon faint star That holdeth her unending festival In a wild songless melancholy waste Is throbbing as a fever in my brain.

13.] The fascination and the passion of death del. MS. 15. gaze no more] The word gaze, in various forms, is an important one in this poem, occurring a total of eight times: in the MS, WBY even writes ‘gaze’ twice where he clearly intends ‘gave’ (89, 91). The next poem by WBY in which ‘gaze’ will have similar importance is ‘The Two Trees’ (1891), and its pivotal line 21 (‘Gaze no more in the bitter glass’). Here, possibly cp. Keats, Endymion (1818), IV, 57: ‘Phoebe is fairer far  – O gaze no more!’ and William Allingham, Poems (1850), ‘The Music-­Master: A  Love Story’, I, 481–3: ‘gaze no more,  | Sad heart! – although thou canst not, wouldst not shun | The visions future years will oft restore’. earth] wood del. MS.

17. old and bitter earth] Cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Fishers’, 3: ‘waves of a more old and bitter sea’; Spenser, The Faerie Queene III v. xxii., ‘He tumbling downe, with gnashing teeth did bite | The bitter earth’, but also perhaps Arthur W. O’Shaughnessey, The Lays of France (1874), ‘The Lay of the Two Lovers’, 26–7: ‘make dear  | One spot of bitter earth with bliss’. 28. wild songless melancholy waste] Cp. M. Arnold, Empedocles on Etna (1852), II, 2: ‘On this charred, blackened, melancholy waste’, and Shelley, ‘Alastor’ (1816), 273: ‘A wide and melancholy waste’. Also perhaps cp. A.W. O’Shaughnessey, Music and Moonlight (1874), ‘Europe’, 174: ‘the songless waste of dismal wrongs’.



0 3 35 40 45 50 55

Love’s Decay

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Oh dear one, lace thine hands across my eyes And I will see no more my wanderings. At thy young feet all restlessness hath died, And I could weave forever daisy-­chains As children do, their whole philosophy To watch with solemn eyes the devious chain Grow in the grass. I could well-­nigh forget The lonely voice of yonder violet star, That sings how endlessly from star to star The angels sweep: for them the burthen is Of the eternal loneliness. Far down Within the deeps, so sings the star, God broods With rugged brows and never-­resting eyes. Ere any world was born, he rose from sleep That no beginning knew, and saw his loneliness, And being filled with fear of the vast spaces That had no voice and fear of his dread self, He snatched from his own spirit flakes of fire And hurled them with a cry into the dark. Thus angels formèd he, and talking worlds, And bid them buzz away his loneliness, And mourns the voice of yonder violet star. They are the tongues of his own loneliness, And such am I, these hands, thy glimmering eyes, Thy lingering mouth, and all that moves and loves. Oh lay thy fluttering fingers o’er mine eyes My sweet, and I will cry the wild star lies.

42. rugged brows] The MS  may read rugged or ragged here. WBY was familiar with John Todhunter’s Laurella (1876) (see the likely echo in 3), where in ‘Poesy: Rhapsodia’, 75, ‘The rugged brows of Pan himself appear’. The alternative reading may have a precedent in Keats, Endymion (1818), I, 865–6 (though here describing landscape rather than godhead): ‘a deep hollow, from whose ragged brows | Bushes and trees do lean’. 44. That no beginning knew] Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost VII, 251: ‘for who himself beginning knew?’ 45. fear of the vast spaces] WBY may well have in mind Blaise Pascal’s well-­known statement in his Pensées (1669): ‘Le silence eternel de ces

espaces infinis m’effraie’ (‘The eternal silences of these infinite spaces terrifies me’). For WBY’s phrasing, possibly cp. Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742) IV, 654: ‘Through the vast spaces of the universe’. 47. flakes of fire] Cp. Spenser, The Faerie Queene V v. viii.: ‘flakes of fire, bright as the sunny ray’. 53. glimmering eyes] Cp. Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798), ‘The Idiot Boy’, 250: ‘His glimmering eyes’. 55. fluttering fingers] Cp. George Barlow, Poems and Sonnets (1871), ‘The Home of Love’, 89–90: ‘Who casts aside with rosy fluttering fingers | The star-­bespangled robe of night’.

338

Love’s Decay

She

Star of the foam, tossed up before my feet, Oh wood that none before us ever loved! [A trumpet sounds. He



Away, my destiny. She

Oh let me fix 60 This red rose in your cap: I scarce can reach, You are so tall, so tall. How many girls Have stood a-­tiptoe weaving roses round False lovers caps? He

A thousand.

She More than that, Ah, more than that. [The trumpet sounds again. He I cannot stay: farewell. She (letting the rose fall) 65 Ah, stay till I have perched the rose above Your peaked cap. See where amid the shade The soft rose shines. I’ll pull another – thus! – And lay it gently down beside the first. They are the shadowy eyes of maidens’ loves 70 That had no voice, and gazed away their life, So when they died the pitying spirits bid The roses be their musing eyes, and thee

72. their musing eyes] Perhaps cp. E.B. Browning, Poems (1844), ‘The Lay of the Brown Rosary’, I, 78: ‘the large musing eyes, neither joyous nor sorry’. Long afterwards, in

‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ VII, 19, WBY uses this phrase again: ‘The ladies close their musing eyes’.



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And me their watching: now those envious souls Through yonder crimson curtain gaze – kiss me, beloved. [The trumpet sounds. 75 Ah, heed it not, leave wandering for the waves And for the winds that walk among the stars. [He steps into the boat. (Slowly fixing the rose in his cap, and bursting into tears) You will forget me soon; Oh dear one, hate me rather than forget!

[The trumpet sounds. He pushes off into the river. On the far side a procession of girls pass, carrying a statue of the Virgin and singing.

Song Oh Mary, keep the million hands of battle 80 Harmless as thine own hands when there go by The young men, or amid the ignorant rattle Of dizzy war they may drop down and die Before they live. God gave the hawk for meed To spring through voiceless caverns of the sky, 85 His spirit worn with suffering of speed Immeasurable. Let him drop down and die, For he has lived. Rapture of alien laughter Breaking the sloth of woods with many a cry God gave the gypsy children, and thereafter 90 Passion of wandering: let them drop and die, For they have lived. God gave the salmon wary The long and piping rivers lapsing by, 74. yonder crimson curtain] Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘Harold the Dauntless’ VI v, 2: ‘A dusky crimson curtain o’er the bed’. 84. caverns of the sky] Cp. Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1854), ‘The Omnipresence of the Deity’ I, 135–6: ‘To see the caverns of the sky disclose | The buried flames that in their wombs repose’. 87–90. alien laughter  .  .  .  passion of wandering] These lines seem to be partially recalled in ‘Ephemera’, in lines 12–13 of its WO version: ‘Often has passion worn our wandering hearts, | Earth’s aliens’. 90. drop and die] Perhaps cp. Isaac Watts, Works (1810), Hymn 48, 15–16: ‘While such

as trust their native strength  | Shall melt away, and drop and die’. 91. salmon wary] Thus MS: it is possible that WBY intends weary, which is then repeated two lines later in ‘weary spindle’. The rhyme is to ‘Mary’ (94), but this would not quite rule out a reading of weary which (arguably) makes in any case the better sense: salmon will be weary as they come to the goal of their journey upstream. In the absence of firmer evidence, however, the present text respects WBY’s MS spelling. 92. lapsing by] OED lapse v. 4b., ‘Of a stream: to glide, flow’. Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost VIII, 263: ‘And liquid lapse of murmuring streams’.

340

Love’s Decay

As us the weary spindle – may they die, For they have lived. A voice singing alone

Hear me, O Mother Mary, 95 Let not my lover be ’mongst those who die: Our love’s the youngest thing beneath the sky, White Mary.

93. the weary spindle] Cp. W. Morris, ‘The Two Sides of the River’, 5: ‘Watching the weary spindle twist and turn’. Although this poem was not collected in volume form until Songs By The Way (1891), it had appeared in the Fortnightly Review for Oct. 1868.

97. White Mary] Cp. R.W. Buchanan, London Poems (1866), ‘The Death of Roland’, 128–9: ‘White Mary, take your souls, and place them at her side, | White Mary take your souls, and guard them tenderly’.

40

THE FIELD MOUSE

THE POEMS

Date of composition. Perhaps from late 1884 or early 1885. These lines were written during WBY’s time at the Metropolitan School of Art, so could date from any point between May 1884 and Apr. 1886; however, it is likely that they are from 1884 or early 1885, both on grounds of style and because rough draft material under the heading ‘Aphorisms’ is on the facing MS page, perhaps suggesting work towards what would be the quatrains of ‘Life’ (probably composed 1885). Text. The lines are found in a sketchbook with many drawings by WBY, which belongs to his time studying art. WBY gives the lines a title, so there is presumably here some intention of a poem rather than lines to be inserted in some other ongoing work. Nevertheless, this piece does not make another appearance in WBY’s unpublished or published work. The text here derives from a photographic image in the sale catalogue of WBY materials and association items. A transcription is also available in W. Gould, ‘Introduction’, YA 21, lx. (This sketchbook was acquired by NLI and will join other WBY MS materials in the library’s collection.) Interpretation. The lines seem quickly improvised, though WBY does revise in minor ways as he composes them (see notes). But if this is intended to stand as a poem on its own – as the provision of a title would imply – it is unusual in that there is no rhyme, and two of the six lines are shorter than the four others, which are pentameters. While it is not impossible that WBY intended these lines for insertion in another piece, such as IoS or some of the dramatic sketches and treatments he worked on intermittently in 1884 and after, it seems more likely that this short poem is in the nature of a sketch (and at home, therefore, in an actual sketchbook). Copy-­text. Fonsie Mealy, auction 14 Nov. 2017, lot 630. Some punctuation has been added.

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he field mouse running yonder has reared up No pyramid of custom or of laws To break her heart; No, she is angry sometimes, and she loves The shadow of the wheat sheaves: that is all The history of her life.

2. of custom] of [laws del.] custom MS.

4^5.] The history del. MS. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-41

41

TIME AND THE WITCH VIVIEN

THE POEMS

Date of revision. There is no evidence for the date of WBY’s rewriting of this scene from his play written in 1883. In the present edition, the piece is placed with work from 1884, but it is possible that the substantial rewriting took place later than this. Background. For an account of the play from which this poem derives, its sources and its context in WBY’s life and artistic development, see headnotes to Vivien and Time. Text and publication history. WBY draws here on his verse-­play Vivien and Time (1883), excerpting from it the penultimate scene (II ii) in which the sorceress Vivien is confronted by Death, the one adversary whom she cannot defeat or outwit. It is unlikely that the poet considered seriously the inclusion of the whole of this work in the materials for WO; but this particular scene had probably been in his mind for some time as one which could be recycled, and the MSS for the play show that he had earlier made some attempts at recasting Vivien’s opening speech in this scene as a dramatic monologue, probably in 1884 (see notes to Vivien and Time). It is not possible to know when WBY finally decided on excerpting the scene for WO; but this evidently involved a good deal of re-­writing, and there are signs in this of a greater stylistic command that argues for a considerable space of time between the original verse-­play and the WO vignette. The six leaves of the notebook in which WBY kept the fair copy of his 1883 play, which were removed (NLI 30460), were obviously intended for the work of revision, but there is no surviving MS of the revised version itself, and so no clues about the date of the revision. WBY allotted the piece quite a prominent position in WO, placing it as the second item, after the long title poem. The thinking behind this might have been to establish a literary register quite different from that of the Irish mini-­epic of ‘Oisin’– a drawing-­room verse piece, showing knowledge of and elegant variation upon a well-­known story of Tennyson’s – as another mode available to the poet here making his substantial public debut. It is also perhaps exhibited as a stage in the new author’s development which can now be left behind. WBY wrote to KT in Sept. 1888 of how she would read in second position in the book ‘a poem called Time and Vivien which you have not seen [. . .] Everything done then was quite passionless’ (CL 1, 98). To an early admirer of WO, WBY wrote of how ‘Your liking for “Time and Vivien” pleases me’, adding that ‘the substance of it was written before anything else in the book and like most things old has pleasant associations gathered about it’ (to E.J. Scull, 30 Jan. 1889, CL 1, 130). The dramatic fragment did in fact attract praise from reviewers (it ‘expresses an original idea in a vivid and picturesque form’ said the Morning Post on 13 Mar. 1889), and WBY reported to KT that ‘mostly all [of the early reviews] praise my dramatic sketches: most after Oisin Time and Vivien seems liked’ (CL 1, 157). Even those who, like Montagu Griffin (a friend of Matthew DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-42



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Russell, who had praised WO in the Irish Monthly) found relatively little to admire in the volume, could concede ‘I think that “Time and the Witch Vivien” of the longer poems seems to me the most powerful’ (quoted, CL 1, 132). But an early taste for this poem was not shared by WBY himself, and he never reprinted the piece. However, the poet did record amendments in the copy of WO now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (Morgan in notes), indicating that for a short time at least he considered retaining the poem in his oeuvre. These changes are incorporated in the present text and recorded in its annotations. The notes here do not record differences from the 1883 MS (for which text, see Vivien and Time), but do register the small number of changes made by WBY in the proof copy of WO at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin (Proofs). Copy-­text: WO. A marble-­flagged, pillared room. Magical instruments in one corner. A fountain in the centre.

V

ivien (looking down into the fountain). Where moves there any beautiful as I, Save, with the little golden greedy carp, Gold unto gold, a gleam in its long hair, My image yonder? (Spreading her hand over the water.) Ah, my beautiful, 5 What roseate fingers! (Turning away.) No; nor is there one Of equal power in spells and sacred rites. The proudest or most coy of spirit things, Hide where he will, in wave or wrinkled moon, Obeys. Some fierce magician flies or walks 10 Beyond the gateway – by the sentries now – Close and more close – I feel him in my heart – Some great one. No; I hear the wavering steps Without there of a little, light old man; I dreamt some great one. (Catching sight of her image, and spreading her hand over the water.) Ah, my beautiful,

5, 15. roseate fingers] Although the phrase here belongs to WBY, it derives from his reading of Homer and one of the standard epithets for the dawn, ‘rosy-­fingered’. 11. Close and more close] This phrase is not unknown, and occurs in a number of eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century poets, e.g.

James Hogg, Works of the Ettrick Shepherd (1876), ‘Mador of the Moor’, I, 73: ‘Close and more close, the deer were bounding by’. The best-­known use of the same syntactic figure is Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Dark and more dark, the shades of evening fell’. 12. No] corr. from Nay Proofs.

344 5 1 20 25 30 35

Time and the Witch Vivien

What roseate fingers! Enter Time as an old pedlar, with a scythe, an hour-­glass, and a black bag. (laughing) So then it is you, The wrinkled squanderer of human wealth. Come here. Be seated now; I’d buy of you. Come, father. Time. Lady, I nor rest nor sit. Vivien. Well then, to business; what is in your bag? Time (putting the bag and hour-­glass on the table and resting on his scythe). Grey age and crutches, crutches and grey hairs, Mansions of memories and mellow thoughts Where dwell the minds of old men having peace, And – Vivien. No; I’ll none of these, old Father Wrinkles. Time. Some day you’ll buy them, maybe. Vivien. Never! Time (laughing). Never? Vivien. Why do you laugh? Time. I laugh the last always. Vivien. I do not need your scythe. May that bring peace To those your ‘mellow’ wares have wearied out. I’d buy your glass. Time. My glass I will not sell. Without my glass I’d be a sorry clown. Vivien. Yet whiter beard have you than Merlin had. Time. No taste have I for slumber ’neath an oak. Vivien. When were you born? Time. Before your grandam Eve. Vivien. Oh, I am weary of that foolish tale. They say you are a gambler and a player At chances and at moments with mankind. I’ll play you for your old hour-­glass. You see I keep such things about me; they are food

wavering steps] Cp. W. Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), II xxii 5: ‘With wavering steps and dizzy brain’. 15. So then it is you] Morgan; Ha, ha! ha, ha, ha!, WO. 19. to business] corr. from our business Proofs. 20. grey age] corr. from grey hairs Proofs.

30–31.] WBY alludes explicitly here to the story of Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivien, in which Vivien engages in protracted erotic play with Merlin’s long beard and where the arch-­magician is subsequently imprisoned by her inside an oak tree. 36.] WO has S.D. after ‘hour-­glass’: (Pointing to the instruments of magic.) Canc. in Morgan.



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345

For antiquarian meditation. [Brings dice. Time. Ay, We throw three times. Vivien. Three-­six. Time. Four-­six. Vivien. Five-­six. Ha, Time! Time. Double sixes! Vivien. I lose! They’re loaded dice. Time always plays With loaded dice. Another chance! Come, father; Come to the chess, for young girls’ wits are better Than old men’s any day, as Merlin found. [Places the chess-­board on her knees. The passing of those little grains is slow Upon my soul, old Time. [She lays the hour-­glass on its side. Time. No, thus it stands. [Rights it again. For other stakes we play. You lost the glass. Vivien. Then give me triumph in my many plots. Time. Defeat is death. Vivien. Should my plots fail I’d die. [They play.

38. antiquarian] This adjective – ‘Of or connected with the study of antiquities’ (OED) – had not been in use for much longer than a century. Treating the hourglass as an antique deserving of study rather than fear, Vivien is perhaps attempting to put Time in his (old-­fashioned) place. In so doing, she echoes Byron: cp. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), III, xcviii, 6–8: ‘and thus I,  | Still on thy shores, fair Leman! may find room | And food for meditation’. 46.] The game of dice here may owe something to S.T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, where in part 3 of the poem the figure of Death plays dice with ‘Life-­in-­Death’ for the dead sailors’ souls (190–198). WBY in John Sherman (1891) has his protagonist play a game of chess with his rival for the affections of Margaret Leland (the character modelled in part on Laura Armstrong), and lose. The rival in fact comes across Sherman playing chess against himself, disapproving intensely of this debilitating solitary pursuit:

(‘Why, a few such games would ruin any man’s moral nature’). The defeat of Sherman is an easy one, and a dialogue ensues in which it is clear that Sherman is also about to lose Margaret. As the chapter ends, he is left playing chess once more against only himself: ‘Presently Howard got up and went to his room, and Sherman, resetting the chess-­ board, began to play again, and, letting longer and longer pauses of reverie come between his moves, played far into the morning, cheating now in favour of the red men now in favour of the white’ (132–3). In his teens, WBY clearly took an interest in chess, and an early MS album in which a number of poems are preserved also has pages in which press versions of chess games are pasted (NLI 12161). for young girls’ wits] corr. from for a young girl’s wits Proofs. This is another allusion to Tennyson’s Merlin and Vivien, where the young Vivien outwits (or at least, wins against) the much older Merlin.

346

Time and the Witch Vivien

I trap you. Time. Check. Vivien. I did miscalculate, Being dull to-­day, or you had lost the game. 60 Chance, and not skill, has favoured you, old father! [She plays. Time. Check. Vivien. Ah! how bright your eyes. How swift your moves. How still it is! I hear the carp go splash, And now and then a bubble rise. I hear A bird walk on the doorstep. [She plays. Time. Check once more. 65 Vivien. I must be careful now. I have such plots – Such war plots, peace plots, love plots – every side; I cannot go into the bloodless land Among the whimpering ghosts. Time. Mate thus. Vivien. Already? Chance hath a skill! [She dies.

58. I trap you] corr. from I have you Proofs. did] Morgan; do WO. 59.] Morgan; I am dull to-­day, or you were now all lost WO.

69. Chance hath a skill!] corr. from Chance, and not skill Proofs.

42

[‘HUSHED IN THE VALE OF DAJESTAN’]

THE POEMS

Date of composition. The paper on which the MS is written (detached from an exercise book) has a watermark from 1885. Beyond this, there are no clues about the poem’s date; however, 1885 seems a likely year, and the fragment of a drama on the other side of the page would indicate that the poem was composed at a time when WBY was still attempting or sketching dramatic scenarios – in this respect, 1885 would be much more likely a time than the following year. Translation and literary context. This poem is a translation of ‘The Dream’ by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841), a posthumously published late poem. WBY’s version sticks close to the Russian text, a prose version of which is as follows (D. Obelensky trans., The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (1962), 169–170): In the heat of noon, in a gorge in Daghestan, I lay motionless, with a bullet in my breast. My deep wound was still steaming, and my blood oozed out, drop by drop. I lay alone on the sand of the gorge; the ledges of the cliffs clustered around, the sun was scorching their yellow summits, and scorching me; but I slept the sleep of the dead. And I dreamed of an evening feast, glittering with lights, in my homeland; young women, garlanded with flowers, were gaily talking about me. But one of them sat there, sunk in thought, not joining in the gay conversation, and her young soul, God knows why, was plunged into a sad dream. And in her dream she saw a gorge in Daghestan . . . A familiar figure lay dead in that gorge, a black wound was steaming in his breast, and blood flowed in a stream that was growing cold. . . [Ellipses in the original] WBY knew no Russian, so it is clear that he must have prepared this poem using an English crib of some kind, taking care not to depart far from it in his verse. Almost certainly, this would have come from a literary source in Dublin, and quite possibly from the circle of the Dublin University Review (where Russian literature was a feature of the publication: a translation of Turgenev’s novel On the Eve, e.g., was run there in 1885). The degree of care taken by WBY in this draft (where there are numerous revisions) suggests something other than an exercise for the poet’s own amusement; it is tempting to speculate that he had been approached to produce a translation of the Lermontov for publication in some context that, whether sooner or later, proved unforthcoming. The translation might well have been intended for the Dublin University Review. It is notable DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-43

348

[‘Hushed in the Vale of Dajestan’]

that the verse here preserves the rhyme scheme of the Russian poem, so WBY must have been informed on this, as well as on the literal meaning. Textual and publication history. The poem is found in a single MS written in ink with ink cancellations and revisions. This is reproduced and transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 408–409, and an edited text is in UM, 57. Copy-­text: NLI 30459, with spelling and punctuation amended. 1.

H

ushed in the vale of Dajestan I lay alone, pierced through with lead. Out of a smoky wound blood ran And coiled beneath my heavy head. 2.

5

The cliffs clung near in yellow bands; The sunlight burnt their horned steeps

1. Dajestan] Lermontov’s ‘Daghestan’. The region, between the Caucasus mountains and the Black Sea, had been the scene of fighting throughout the mid-­nineteenth century, and most recently had been part of a conflict between Russia and Turkey. If WBY was aware of Daghestan at all beyond this poem, he might have known of it as a place where the Russian Empire encountered armed resistance, but which had, by the 1880s, officially accepted its imperial fate. It is conceivable that either WBY or the person who supplied him with the Lermontov poem felt that Daghestan might present some kind of parallel with the situation of Victorian Ireland. In 1877, The Irish Times had reported on the fighting in the region between Russian and Turkish-­ backed forces, which was contributing to a rise in international tensions, attracting the rival notice of both Britain and Germany, speaking of how ‘It has consequently been deemed necessary to collect the Dagestan column again in the Andia heights to support the troops in the Terek territory’ (26 Jul.). In The Times for 26 Sept., 1883, in the course of an appraisal of Tsar Alexander II, the conversion of Dagestan from a rebellious region to

an (officially) obedient part of the Russian Empire was mentioned: ‘The policy of Russia has been to attach the Asiatic peoples to her cause by flattering their vanity and humouring their caprices; and with the recent visit of the Khans to Turkestan, and of Turcoman deputations to Moscow it would be a mistake to assume that she has failed of success. The words, in 1866, of Schamil, once the bitterest of her foes, would show that her skill in this respect has not been exaggerated, and that for the Asiatic mind there is something truly imposing in the pretensions and surroundings of the Great White Czar: “. . . Let it be known in all parts, Sire, that if the aged Schamil of Dagestan, who fought for 30 years against your Empire, feels a regret now that his days are closing in, it is that he cannot be born again in order to devote his whole life to the service of this Empire” ’. 2.] I lay and lead was in my [breast del.] side del. MS. 5. near] round del. near MS. 6. horned] This is possibly intended as disyllabic, hornèd. However, the MS here shows the reading Vast del. horned, so it is worth noting that a single-­syllable word did originally stand in this



[‘Hushed in the Vale of Dajestan’]



349

And burnt me where among the sands I slept the heedless sleep of sleeps. 3.

10

And as I lay I dreamt a dream Of feasting in my native vale, And young wives gathering in the gleam To tell of me an eager tale. 4.

15

And one was there in sadness swathed; She was not of the lisping round, But with her hands before her bathed Her soul in reverie profound. 5.

20

Far off in hollow Dajestan She saw a well-­known corpse abide, And drip on drip the black blood ran Down from the gaping tattered side.

position. WBY’s revision may, of course, be on purely metrical grounds, precisely in order to introduce a disyllabic word; but it is impossible to be sure, and the present text retains the reading of the MS. But cp. the ‘hornèd hills’ of another 1885 poem by WBY, ‘The Seeker’ (Sc.1, 27), which offers supporting evidence for reading a disyllabic ‘hornèd’ here.

12. eager] Above and below this word in MS, WBY has written ‘wondrous’ and ‘lisping’. No deletions have been made, so WBY is keeping open options which an edited text necessarily closes – in this case, in favour of the first word written in the line. 13. was] sat del. was MS.

43

AN OLD AND SOLITARY ONE

THE POEMS

Text and date of composition. This poem is on one side of a single detached MS  leaf, on the reverse of which is material for ‘Quatrains and Aphorisms’ that evidently predates the publication of lines relating to that poem in DUR for Jan. 1886. A date in 1885 seems likely, and it is also likely that the leaf was detached and preserved for this poem’s sake rather than for the superseded drafts towards ‘Quatrains and Aphorisms’. The poem itself, however, was never printed by WBY. Published in UM, 60, and in facsimile and diplomatic transcription in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 414–5. Form. This poem is unusual in gesturing towards the elaborate repetitive forms, especially those deriving from early French models, favoured by some late nineteenth-­century English poets. G. Bornstein calls the poem ‘roundel-­like’ (UM, 112), and although WBY does not adopt the exact form of the roundel as introduced by Christina G. Rossetti and given wider currency by A. Swinburne (whose volume A Century of Roundels, dedicated to Rossetti, was published in 1883), there is enough similarity here to suggest a general influence on WBY. Copy-­text: NLI 30826.

T

hey say I’m proud and solit’ry, yes proud Because my love and hate abideth ever, A changeless thing among the changing crowd: Until the sleep, an high soul changes never.

5

This crowd that mock at me, their love and hate Rove through the world and find no lasting home,

Title] And del. An MS

1. solit’ry] solit’ary MS. WBY’s apostrophe is meaningless in its MS position, but its presence probably indicates that he intends here a three-­syllable value for the adjective in order to achieve an iambic pentameter. The present text places the apostrophe accordingly. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-44

4. Until the sleep] Changeless I am del. MS. an high] WBY’s decision to employ an rather than the more normal a for the indefinite article in this refrain (and in an home (14)) looks odd. Presumably, he is emulating the correctness of uses such as ‘an hotel’, but the effect is one of pointless and obtrusive faux-­antique diction.



An Old and Solitary One



Two spectral things that beg at many a gate; O, they are lighter than the windy foam!

10

Full often have I loved in olden days, But those I loved their hot hearts changèd ever, To coldness some, and some to hate always; I am the same: an high soul changes never.

15

And often where I loved I fain would hate, And where I hated found for love an home, But have not changed, though waxing old of late: But they are lighter than the windy foam.

20

And therefore I am proud and sad forever: Until the sleep, an high soul changes never. The crowd, their love and hate hath never home: O, they are lighter than the windy foam!

8. windy] feathered del. MS. 9.] ^Full^ Often [I gave my love del.] have I loved in olden days MS.

351

13, 14. where] This could also be read in each line as when, as in UM. 16. windy] feathered del. MS. 20. windy] feathered del. MS.

44

A SONG OF SUNSET

THE POEMS

Date of composition. Since these stanzas (in a different order) were incorporated in ‘Life’, published by WBY in The Dublin University Review in Feb. 1886, the poem is certain to be earlier than this; WBY’s Mosada was not published until Jun. 1886, but one of the notebooks used in its composition carries a date of 1884: the isolated MS page used for ‘A Song of Sunset’ contains lines from the end of scene 2 of Mosada in close to their final form, so is likely to date from a point before WBY’s preparation of the final printer’s copy (now lost) for the dramatic poem. Given this, it is plausible to assign ‘A Song of Sunset’ to 1885. Text. The MS version of this poem is on a page used by WBY for composing Mosada, where it is written over and across a few lines from that poem. For transcription see Cornell, Early Poetry 2, 332. Copy-­text: NLI 30430.

T 5

he talking wind hath found her home, Eve-­soothed in some far leafy nest; Then wherefore should thy bright brow roam, Madonna Mia, from my breast? A squirrel yonder hushed and wise,

2. leafy nest] A poetic commonplace: e.g. Mary Robinson, The Foster Child (1806) I, 152: ‘the ring-­dove murmur’d in its leafy nest’, Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Freed Bird’, 24: ‘Sigh’d for wild flowers and a leafy nest’; Edwin Arnold, Poems (1853), ‘The Fairy’s Promise’, 17–18: ‘Thou never didst fright from her leafy nest | The bird that the Fairies love ever the best’. It should be noted, however, that when this line is recycled by WBY for ‘Life’ in 1886, the phrase printed is ‘leafy rest’, and the MS here may permit the reading ‘rest’ instead of ‘nest’. 3.] Cling close nor let thy bright brow roam MS (uncancelled). DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-45

bright brow] Cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘At the Oar’, 4–5: ‘I know ye lean bright brow to brow, and say  | Your secret things’; also W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870) I, ‘March’, ‘The Man Born to be King’, 1979–80: ‘The rosy colour went and came  | In her sweet cheeks and smooth bright brow’, and R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Flower Feast in Mana’, 390–1: ‘with garlands meet | For youth’s bright brow and Age’s head’. 4. Madonna Mia] A. Swinburne had a poem with this title in Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866). 5. A squirrel yonder] See where yon squirrel MS (uncancelled).



10

A Song of Sunset

353

Forswears his wandering ’mong the pine, And wherefore then should thy grey eyes Wander away so soon from mine? A little while and now day dies – Our love shall be of yesterday – Ah let us kiss each other’s eyes And laugh the foolish world away.

7. thy grey eyes] Cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), XVII, 820–1: ‘some honied kiss | From other lips shall make thy grey eyes wet’, and The Earthly Paradise, ‘May: The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, 694–700: ‘Thou hearkenest, love? Oh! make no semblance then | That thou art loved, but as thy custom is | Turn thy grey eyes away from eyes of men.  | With hands down-­dropped, that tremble with thy bliss,  | With hidden eyes, take thy first lover’s kiss;  | Call this eternity

which is to-­day,  | Nor dream that this our love can pass away.’ 9. now] see del., yon del. MS. 12. laugh the foolish world away] In a note to his poem ‘The Island of the Blest’ in Firdausi in Exile (1885), Edmund Gosse quoted lines by Andrew Lang on ‘The sage who laughed the world away, | Who mocked at Gods, and men, and care’ (‘L’Envoi to E.W.G.’, 13). The reference is to the fifth-­century BC Greek philosopher Democritus.

45

LOVE AND DEATH

THE POEMS

Text. This poem was printed only once in WBY’s lifetime, when it appeared in the Dublin University Review for May 1885. It is a revised version of a lyric in WBY’s verse-­drama Love and Death (1884), where it is found (in a longer version) at II iii 72–199. The present text reports for convenience variants from the edited text of Love and Death (LD); for MS variants within this earlier text, see notes to that work. Date and context. There is no firm evidence for dating this revision. However, it is reasonable to assume that WBY prepared the poem for DUR at a point after he had concluded that his long verse-­drama would not (or should not) see publication, and to suppose that this is to some extent an act of salvage. In May 1885 the play had been finished for probably about a year, so the work of revision for publication of this lyric might well have taken place in spring 1885. Copy-­text: DUR.

B

ehold the flashing waters,   A cloven, dancing jet, That from the milk-­white marble   For ever foam and fret; 5 Far off in drowsy valleys   Where the meadow-­saffrons blow,

1. Behold] See LD. flashing waters] A common piece of poetic diction. WBY would have encountered it in Aubrey De Vere, Irish Odes (1869), ‘Lines Written beside the Lago Varese’ 13–14: ‘Still o’er the flashing waters lean  | The mulberry and the maize’. 3. That from] From LD. milk-­w hite marble] Possibly cp. Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (1879), II, 4425–6: ‘laid with slabs  | Of milk-­w hite marble’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-46

5–6.] Far in the drowsy meadow | Where yellow saffron blow, LD. 6. meadow saffrons] The meadow saffron is ‘any of various crocus-­like plants constituting the Eurasian and North African monocotyledonous genus Colchicum (family Colchicaceae), esp. C. autumnale of Britain and western Europe (also called autumn crocus, naked ladies), which produces mauve flowers in the autumn and broad leaves in the following spring and which is a source of the drug colchicine’ (OED). WBY’s plural form here is extremely unusual.



Love and Death

355

The feet of summer dabble   In their coiling calm and slow. The banks are worn for ever 10   By a people sadly gay: A Titan, with loud laughter,   Made them of fire and clay. Go ask the springing flowers,   And the flowing air above, 15 What are the twin-­born waters,   And they’ll answer Death and Love. With wreaths of withered flowers   Two lonely spirits wait, With wreaths of withered flowers, 20   ’Fore paradise’s gate. They may not pass the portal,   Poor earth-­enkindled pair, Though sad is many a spirit   To pass and leave them there 25 Still staring at their flowers,   That dull and faded are. If one should rise beside thee,   The other is not far. Go ask the youngest angel, 30   She will say with bated breath, By the door of Mary’s garden   Are the spirits Love and Death.

10. sadly gay] Perhaps cp. Lady Morgan, The Lay of an Irish Harp (1807), ‘The Drawing Room’, 4: ‘So coldly pleased, so sadly gay’. 11. A Titan] One of the Greek deities supposed to precede the Olympians. WBY returns to the breed in his poem ‘The Two Titans’. 12.] Made of the mingled spray. LD. 16. And they’ll] They’d LD.

17, 19.] Bearing withered flowers LD. 25. Still staring at] Staring, and LD. 30. bated breath] The commonplace, meaning ‘breathing subdued or restrained under the influence of awe, terror, or other emotion’ (OED) originates in Shakespeare, Measure for Measure I iii 123: ‘With bated breath, and whispering humbleness’.

46

[‘ THE DEW COMES DROPPING’] THE POEMS

Date and context of composition. This poem, which survives as a single page of MS, may perhaps be dated by the other page (torn from the same notebook) with which it is accompanied: there, a pencil sketch has the inscription ‘Laying foundation stone of Museum in Kildare Street’, along with ‘H.R.H. in Ireland 1885’. The Prince and Princess of Wales visited Dublin in Apr. 1885, and on 10 Apr. laid the new National Museum’s foundation stone. How soon after that date (when, presumably, the little notebook sketch was made) WBY drafted this poem cannot be known; but it was probably not written before then, and in all likelihood was composed not long afterwards. It is not certain that the fourteen lines are meant for a sonnet (the rhyme scheme, not to mention the short line lengths, may suggest that it is not). Text: from NLI 30752, with some additional punctuation. The pattern of line indentation is not entirely clear in the MS, and the present text attempts to reproduce the shape as WBY left it. For reproduction of the MS with transcript, see Cornell Early Poetry 1, 464–5; an edited text is in UM, 79.

T

he dew comes dropping   O’er elm and willow, And soft without stopping   As tear on pillow – 5 Yea softly falls As bugle calls On hill and dell, Or a liquid note From the straining throat

1. comes] came del. MS. comes dropping] This unusual phrase might perhaps have been at the back of WBY’s mind later when he composed ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 5: ‘peace comes dropping slow’. 5–6.] These lines recall Tennyson’s lyric from The Princess, ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’, which was often reprinted with the title ‘Bugle Song’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-47

6.] This line is squeezed between 5 and 7 in MS, entered as a revision. 7. hill and dell] The phrase is conventional, but perhaps cp. J.C. Mangan, ‘Welcome to the Prince of Ossory’ (first publ. 1847), 55–56: ‘O’er heathery hill and dell come | Shouts for the King’. 9. straining throat] Perhaps cp. F.W. Faber, Poems (1857), ‘The Yellow-­Hammer’, 34–36: ‘How from thy straining throat | Each separate, successive note | Beats like a pulse in me’.



[‘The Dew Comes Dropping’]

357

0 1 Of Philomel.   As the dew drops dart, Each one’s a thought From heaven brought   To the evening’s heart.

10. Philomel] The Greek mythological character, whose story is told in Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: after her rape and mutilation at the hands of King Tereus, she was transformed into a nightingale. Her name is identified with the nightingale in poetic tradition, and it remains a deeply conventional reference in much nineteenth-­century poetry. 11.] As the[y swarm and del.] ^the dew drops^ dart MS.

14.] To the [each del.] [one del.] evening’s heart MS. (The possible earlier versions of this closing line would appear to be ‘To each evening’s heart’ and ‘To one evening’s heart’, assuming that WBY initially failed to cancel ‘the’ and then, having tried and cancelled ‘each’ and ‘one’, brought the definite article back into play to make the final version of the line.)

47

[FROM THE VILLAGE OF THE ELMS] THE POEMS

Context. These lines have been excerpted from a long and involved collection of dramatic fragments, all apparently belonging to WBY’s large project which had successively a number of different titles. This play is unfinished and is in a mixture of prose and blank verse, often extremely difficult to untangle in the jumbled MS materials. Titles for this MS assembly begin with ‘Sans Eyes’ [del.], then ‘The Epic of Forests’, and finally The Village of the Elms. The first act has the location (which is also perhaps a title) ‘The Village of the Elm Trees’; the second act is given a title, ‘The Blindness’. The verse which has been excerpted here from Act One is in the nature of a lyric interlude, and its genre is squarely that of the pastoral: girls’ choral song is joined (at length) by that of a shepherds’ choir. Date of composition. There is little evidence with which to establish a firm date. It is the case, however, that the first page in the MS material, besides carrying the Harold’s Cross Dublin address for WBY (where his family lived from the spring of 1884 until Mar. 1887), has on it a date of ‘July 86’. To judge from the style of the poetry, this seems rather late: it is hard to believe that verse of this kind could have been written appreciably later than that of IoS or Mosada. It may be that the pastoral genre was felt by WBY to give him a license for locutions such as ‘we wis’ a long time after he had abandoned such things in his other lyric verse. It may also be, however, that this 1886 date is from later than the composition itself – perhaps marking the point at which the MS material was brought together and put away for good. In the absence of solid evidence, the present edition places this lyric excerpt in 1885; but it could also plausibly be put at 1884 (on stylistic grounds) or 1886 (on grounds of the MS date entry). Text. These lines are found in NLI 30414. Spelling and punctuation have been corrected and emended, and illegible portions have been indicated in the edited text and notes. Voices in the distance of girls singing

S

ing ye the song of the rusting scythe And sing ye the languor of crimson June And the tale of the madness that lies in the tune Of the crickets yon in the hedge-­way blithe,

2. sing] praise del. MS. 4, 37. yon] The meaning is ‘yonder’; WBY’s use here is self-­consciously archaic. There DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-48

is poetic precedent in Milton, ‘Il Penseroso’, 52: ‘bring  | Him that yon soars on golden wing’.

[FROM THE VILLAGE OF THE ELMS]

5

359

And praise ye the purple sleep of skies – We have rested our cheeks on the alder trees And hear in their hollows the humming of bees: Oh sing ye of them and the tears in our eyes. Voice of the shepherds

10 15 20 25 30 35

Oh how shall we sing ye a paean of pain? Our arms we have tossed by the sleeping rills; At dawn we have shouted alone on the hills At the leonine sun in the gold of his mane. We are filled with the passion of crimson June; We have stood where the flattening forests rise And snatched with our hands at the sleep of the skies; In our hearts is the pain of the crickets’ tune. Can the sun as he treads the eternal road And flames on the pavements of echoless heaven, Can Saturn sing, and the planets seven, The tale of their passion, their joy, their good? They are dumb – and the leaves a-­shaking nigh, A-­dizzy with Spring, hear the selfsame word The dying ears of Absolom heard, Gave passion to any man more than a cry; For she sits and dreams, on her haunted throne, Of her endless days, and her endless strife. We are one with her and her purple life, For the [wain] of the stars we have made our own And truly we know that our life were a light With a length, and our feet with a gleam and a glance In the whirl of the [] of the stars, which dance When the sun was born of the seeds of the night – When the sun shall go out with a cry and a moan We dream our souls in the bustle and gleam Of the stars will gather and dream As now on the steps of a haunted throne.

9. shall] can del. MS. 12. the gold of his mane] his leonine mane del. MS. 23. The dying ears of Absalom] Absalom was King David’s third son, who rebelled against his father and was killed in battle (2 Samuel 18).

28. [wain]] This is a conjectural reading of the word in MS. 31.] A  gap in the MS  here shows that WBY never completed the line. 32. seeds of the night] Perhaps cp. William Davies, Songs of a Wayfarer (1869), ‘O spirit of the dreary dawn’, 10–11: ‘with beams | That all the seeds of night destroy’.

360 [FROM THE VILLAGE OF THE ELMS] The shepherds pass with their sickles. Carrying distaffs the troop of the young maidens follows singing. 40

Yon on the pathway the hollyhock lies; To the atoms who dwell where the red petals start The dew drop that sleeps in the shadowy heart Is a sea – and their petals black-­beaded their skies.



This petal’s their France, and their Spain is this; But ah! you have crushed them under your feet. The atoms are dead, and their world so sweet; The atoms are dead and their world we wis.

38, 43, 44. atoms] This is the clear reading of the MS handwriting, but in context the word seems odd. If the reading is correct, however, WBY is using the word in the sense of OED 9.a. ‘Any very small object (without the implication that it is a particle of something else); a (relatively) tiny person or thing’, to describe tiny insects. (This is in fact the meaning given to ‘atoms’ in a Spanish-­English dictionary of 1798.)

44. we wis] An archaism for ‘we know’, with poetic precedent in e.g. Coleridge, Byron, and E.B. Browning. However, it is usually in the first person singular, and not the plural. WBY uses ‘I wis’ in [‘When to its end o’er-­ripened July nears’] (1884), 27 and in (1884) II i 75 (see notes).

48

THE SEEKER

THE POEMS

A Dramatic Poem – In Two Scenes Date and publication. This brief dramatic poem was first printed in The Dublin University Review in Sept. 1885; it was included in WO, but not reprinted subsequently by WBY. In a letter to KT of Sept. 1888, WBY suggests that the poem postdates IoS (published in Apr., Jun., and Jul. 1885): ‘Since I have left “The Island” I have been going about on shoreless seas . . . Oisin and the Seaker are the only [coherent del] [intelligible del.] readable result’ (CL 1, 98). While the single revision in the copy of WO now in the Pierpont Morgan Library (Morgan in notes) suggests that WBY entertained thoughts of keeping this poem in his canon after 1889, he was already considering its exclusion in Apr. 1888 when faced with questions of available space in Keegan Paul’s projected volume: ‘If it comes to lightening the ship I will hardly know what to throw over board – the “Seaker” for one thing I fear’ (to KT, 11 Apr. 1888 (CL 1, 59)). Manuscript versions. Drafts for the poem are contained in notebooks (NLI 30328 A and B) which also contain some of IoS (MS in notes). These are reproduced and transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 250–273. Criticism and interpretation. Some reviews of WO mentioned the poem, but only to give brief summaries, as J. Todhunter did in The Academy: ‘an aged knight comes at last into the presence of a phantom he has been all his life pursuing, and finds a bearded Witch whose name is Infamy’ (30 Mar. 1889). WBY’s decision not to reprint the poem after WO meant that it faded further into the background of critical attention for many years, only becoming visible again with VE. Subsequent criticism of WBY seldom dwells on the poem. R. Ellmann cited ‘The Seeker’ as an instance of how ‘When Yeats seriously contemplates leaving the observable world, he customarily points out what a mistake it would be’: ‘the hero is so enraptured by the pursuit of an other-­worldly ideal that he cannot fight in battle.  .  .  . At last, after a lifetime of unheroic behavior and tenacious searching, he reaches the visionary figure he has sought. But she is no image of transcendent beauty. . . . Yeats suppressed this object-­lesson for symbolists about the danger of isolating experience from an ideal, but its theme is common to many poems he retained’ (Identity, xii). H. Bloom wrote of the poem: ‘This grim fantasy is rather clearly blended out of Shelley’s Alastor and Fra Dubio’s discovery in The Faerie Queene that his beloved is the Whore of Infamy, Duessa; but Yeats’s allegory is characteristically more savage and more destructively self-­directed. The quest that reduces a man-­of-­action to a coward is truly only a lust after infamy, and ends with a mirror image of the faded self ’ (Bloom, 54). G. Bornstein also remarks on the importance of Alastor for Yeats’s version of the quest narrative here: ‘The outcome of the quest remains as uncertain as the character of the Figure. . . . The uncertainty about the Figure and about the conclusion of the search DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-49

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makes the knight’s death ambiguous. On the one hand he could, like the poet of Alastor, die because of the failure of his quest; on the other hand, like Keats in Adonais, his death may signify entrance into a consuming ecstasy of the spirit’ (Bornstein, 16). This short poem gives a dramatic presentation of some central Yeatsian preoccupations of 1883–5 in extremely concentrated form. The shepherds place the piece in the pastoral genre, but the questing Knight and the otherworldly ‘Figure’ suggest more supernatural forms of

Title] The word ‘Seeker’ inevitably carries religious overtones, deriving most obviously from ‘Seek, and ye shall find’ (Matthew 7:7). It is very likely that the twenty-­year-­old WBY would have been ignorant of the existence of the seventeenth-­century Protestant sect who identified themselves as ‘Seekers’ (‘Many  .  .  . go under the name of Expecters and Seekers. & doe deny that there is any true Church, or any true Minister, or any Ordinances: some of them affirme the Church to be in the wildernesse, and they are seeking for it there: others say that it is in the smoke of the Temple, & that they are groping for it there’ (Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography: or, a description of the heretickes and sectaries of these later times (1645), 141)). Nevertheless, the term had continued to carry a religious charge, and it was reclaimed and brought into the devotional mainstream of religious diction for Anglican orthodoxy in a hymn of Charles and John Wesley, ‘Have I not sought a length of years’, the second verse of which is: How can I lose, if God is true, My unavailing pain? What is it keeps Him from my view, And makes me seek in vain? If every earnest seeker finds The smiling Deity, It must be sin my spirit blinds, And hides my God from me. The hymn goes on to make a prayer to ‘Thou great incomprehensible’ to ‘Th’obstructing thing, the secret bar | Discover by Thy light, | And now at last my soul prepare | To seek Thy face aright’. Less specifically Christian religious connotations accrued to ‘seeker’ in the course of the nineteenth century, and in 1868 the Dean

of Canterbury (and best-­selling novelist) F.W. Ferrar published a study of pagan philosophers under the title Seekers After Truth; its preface explains how ‘The Divine declaration that, ‘Every one that asketh, receiveth; and he that seeketh, findeth; and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened,’ does not apply to Christians only [. . .] we may believe with unfeigned gratitude that in ‘seeking after the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him,’ they learned to recognize that deep and ennobling truth to which some of their own poets had given expression, that ‘He is not far from every one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being’ ” (1881 edn., vi-­vii). WBY would have come across numerous instances of ‘seeker’ as a term implying otherworldly spiritual and imaginative involvement. Samuel Lover, in Metrical Tales (1860), has a short mystical lyric, ‘Yearning’, addressing a ‘Far shore’ ‘Where the seeker finds but a tomb’, with the exhortation to ‘Dream not of shores so far, | Heed not a siren’s song, | Seek not for mystic star – | Trust to the means that are’. W. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1870) III, ‘October’: ‘The Man who never Laughed Again’ contains a ‘Song’ which probably influences WBY’s poem: O thou who drawest nigh across the sea, O heart that seekest Love perpetually, Nor know’st his name, come now at last to me! Come, thirst of love thy lips too long have borne, Hunger of love thy heart hath long outworn, Speech hadst thou but to call thyself forlorn. The seeker finds now, the parched lips are led To sweet full streams, the hungry heart is fed, And song springs up from moans of sorrow dead.



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romance (which in the longer verse-­dramas had been represented through practitioners of magic). It seems obvious that the young WBY is attempting here to represent a tableau in which devotion to and pursuit of a romantic ideal, having been protracted through an unnaturally long period, is fulfilled at death; and that this fulfilment is a cruelly ironic one, since what the Knight meets  – and what he is shown in the mirror, in his own person – is decrepitude of the body and waste of the spirit. The kinds of romantic love indulged in by figures from pastoral, such as the Shepherds, are less exalted than the force by which the Knight has been driven; but he and his singleness of purpose may belong to the more foolish, as well as the more tragic, of the two literary registers here – ‘the voice of all our hearts that laugh’ (7) is safer, though less dramatic, than ‘the voice!’ that ends the poem (80). WBY’s melodramatic resources inevitably make the female ‘Figure’ the focus of a revulsion which is hard for a young poet to bring under dramatic control; and the poem as a whole suffers from this, as from a general effect of drastic foreshortening. But the Knight’s failure (until the very last moment) to temper devotion with reality, and to see himself, suggests imaginative consequences for the romantic pursuit motif which WBY will go on to develop. Copy-­text: WO, with revisions from Morgan.

Draw nigh, draw nigh, and tell me all thy tale; In words grown sweet since all the woe doth fail, Show me wherewith thou didst thy woe bewail. Draw nigh, draw nigh, belovèd! think of these That stand around as well-­wrought images, Earless and eyeless as these trembling trees. I think the sky calls living none but three: The God that looketh thence and thee and me; And He made us, but we made Love to be. Think not of time, then, for thou shalt not die How soon soever shall the world go by, And nought be left but God and thou and I. And yet, O love, why makest thou delay? Life comes not till thou comest, and the day That knows no end may yet be cast away. A further parallel for at least the temper of WBY’s poem comes in Swinburne’s ‘Hertha’, in his Songs Before Sunrise (1871), 23–5: ‘I

the mouth that is kissed  | And the breath in the kiss, | The search, and the sought, and the seeker, the soul and the body that is’. John Todhunter’s ‘The Hunter’s Quest’, in his Sounds and Sweet Airs (1905) shows signs of having been influenced by WBY’s poem (13–18): Enter the gloomy Forest! Music here Makes of each glimmering pool a magic mere In an enchanter’s land, where night and day Mingle their powers, and every woodland way, Whispering of mystery, tempts the Seeker’s feet To chase the thing he fears, yet longs, to meet. 1–5.] Heavy with wool the sheep are gathered in And in the hall of the spirit my wingèd dreams Rove over thoughts of plenty as a panther In her desert cavern roves and roves Unceasingly around her wide eyed young. MS

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Scene 1 A woodland valley at evening. Around a wood fire sit three Shepherds. First Shepherd. 5

Heavy with wool the sheep are gathered in, And through the mansion of the spirit rove My dreams round thoughts of plenty, as in gloom Of desert caves the red-­eyed panthers rove And rove unceasing round their dreadful brood. Second Shepherd.



O brother, lay thy flute upon thy lips; It is the voice of all our hearts that laugh. (The first Shepherd puts the flute to his lips; there comes from it a piercing cry. He drops it.) First Shepherd.



It is possessed. Second Shepherd.



A prophesying voice.

Third Shepherd.

Nay, give it me, and I will sound a measure;

1. the sheep are gathered in] Clumsily and probably inadvertently, WBY’s phrase here recalls the well-­known 1844 harvest hymn of Henry Alford (1810–1871), ‘Come, ye thankful people, come’, 3–4: ‘All is safely gathered in | Ere the winter storms begin’. 2. the mansion of the spirit] Cp. Philip James Bailey, Festus: A Poem (1877), XLI, in which an Archangel declares ‘every globe | A mansion of the spirit’. 3–4.] My dreams o’er thoughts of plenty, as the red-­ | Eyed panthers in their desert caverns rove DUR. 4. panthers] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Mater Venerabilis’

1–2: ‘Come from the midnight mountain tops,  | The mountains where the panthers play’ desert caves] Cp. Milton, Lycidas, 39–41: ‘Thee Shepherd, thee the Woods, and desert Caves,  | With  wilde Thyme and the gadding Vine o’regrown, | And all their echoes mourn.’ 7. hearts that laugh] Cp. Thomas Hood, Works (1862), ‘The Departure of Summer’, 113–14: ‘that sudden din | Of little hearts that laugh within’. 8. Second Shepherd] This character’s half-­line is not in MS, DUR.



The Seeker

10

And unto it we’ll dance upon the sward.



(Puts it to his lips. A voice out of the flute still more mournful.)

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First Shepherd.

An omen! Second Shepherd.



An omen! Third Shepherd.



A creeping horror is all over me.



Enter an Old Knight. They cast themselves down before him. Knight.



Are all things well with you and with your sheep? Second Shepherd.



Yes, all is very well. First Shepherd.



Whence comest thou?

Knight. 15

Shepherds, I came this morning to your land From three-­score years of dream-­led wandering Where spice-­isles nestle on the star-­trod seas, And where the polar winds and waters wrestle

12. creeping horror] Cp. James Montgomery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘The Vigil of St. Mark’, 83: ‘While creeping horror drank his blood’. 16. dream-­led] Cp. Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Songs of a Worker (1881), ‘A Fallen Hero’, 66–7: ‘that great gift the dream-­led seeker strives | To gain and give them’.

17. spice isles] The term ‘Spice Islands’ can refer to several locations, including islands of the Zanzibar archipelago and the Maluku Islands (also known as the Moluccas) in the Pacific Ocean off New Guinea. nestle on the star-­trod seas] Possibly cp. Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poems (1884),

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In endless dark, and on the weedy marge Of Asian rivers, rolling on in light. But now my wandering shall be done, I know. A voice came calling me to this your land, Where lies the long-­lost forest of the sprite, The sullen wood. But many woods I see Where to themselves innumerable birds Make moan and cry. First Shepherd.

Within yon sunless valley, Between the hornèd hills – Knight. Shepherds, farewell! And peace be with you, peace and wealth of days. Second Shepherd. 30

Seek not that wood, for there the goblin snakes Go up and down, and raise their heads and sing With little voices of the fearful things. Third Shepherd.



No shepherd foot has ever dared its depths. First Shepherd.



The very squirrel dies that enters there.

‘The Foray of Con O’Donnell’, 193–4: ‘When comes the raven of the sea | To nestle on an alien strand’. 20. Asian] India’s MS, DUR. 22–3.] A  voice has told me how within this land | There lies MS, DUR. 27. hornèd hills] WBY’s phrase is cited in OED horned adj., 1.c, simply (and perhaps unhelpfully) as ‘fig.’; its figurative use by WBY, imagining a horned profile

to the shape of the hills, might well be derived from Keats’s ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream’, I, 137: ‘approaching near the hornèd shrine’. 28. wealth of days] Cp. Barry Cornwall, English Songs (1851), ‘Wishes’, 5: ‘All golden thoughts, all wealth of days’. 32.] They say an awful spirit has been sitting there | Enthroned a thousand years immovable del. MS.



The Seeker



Knight. Shepherds, farewell!



(Goes)

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Second Shepherd.

He soon will be –

First Shepherd. 35 Before the wind.

Ashes

Third Shepherd.

Saw you his eyes a-­glitter? His body shake? Second Shepherd.   Ay, quivering as yon smoke



That from the fire is ever pouring up Among the boughs, blue as the halcyon’s wing, Star-­envious. Third Shepherd.



He was a spirit, brother. Second Shepherd.

0 4

The blessèd God was good to send us such, To make us glad with wonder as we sat Weary of watching round the fire at night.

36. quivering as yon smoke] Cp. W.L. Bowles, Poetical Works (1855), ‘The Missionary’ Canto 4, 9–10: ‘his wild locks and mien, | And fierce eye, through the quivering smoke, was seen’. 38. Among the boughs] Within the woodways MS, DUR.

42. weary of watching] Cp. C. G. Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), ‘Rest’, 2: ‘Seal her sweet eyes, weary of watching, Earth’. Scene 2 S.D.] On a stone chair above a row of shattered steps sits a veiled figure. Lizards crawl on the floor. del. MS.

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Scene 2 A ruined palace in the forest. Away in the depth of the shadow of the pillars a motionless Figure. Enter the Old Knight. Knight. Behold, I bend before thee to the ground Until my beard is in the twisted leaves 45 That with their fiery ruin fill the hall, As words of thine through fourscore years have filled My echoing heart. Now raise thy voice and speak! Even from boyhood, in my father’s house, That was beside the waterfall, thy words 50 Abode, as banded adders in my breast. Thou knowest this, and how from ’mid the dance Thou called’st me forth. And how thou madest me A coward in the field; and all men cried: ‘The spirits stole his heart, and gave instead 55 A peering hare’s;’ and yet I murmured not, Knowing that thou hadst singled me with word Of love from out a dreamless race for strife, Through miseries unhuman ever on

47. my echoing heart] WBY employs here a pet phrase of the poet Robert Montgomery, who uses it five times in his work, as e.g. in Poetical Works (1854), ‘The Weeping Christ’, 53–4: ‘And when bereaved ones o’er the coffin bend | To hear the earth-­clod with an echoing heart’. 48. from boyhood] from ^my wild^ boyhood MS. 49–50.] thy words  | Abode, as banded adders The words | Of thee, were as an adder ^ the dream  | Of winging words [above as del.] banded ^ MS.

54–5.] Behold the Knight of the waterfall, whose heart | The spirits stole, and gave him in its stead WO: the present text is amended in line with WBY’s deletion and revision in Morgan. 56. with word] from men del. MS. 58, 59. unhuman] Another instance of this unusual word in WBY’s early work. Cp. ‘When to its end o’er Ripened July nears’, 84: ‘Unhuman sorrow and unhuman glory’, Love and Death II iv 3, ‘A love the nursling of unhuman pride’, II i 58, ‘their unhuman sorrows’. Cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876),





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To joys unhuman, and to thee – Speak! Speak! (He draws nearer to the Figure. A pause.)

60 65

Behold, I bend before thee to the ground; Thou wilt not speak, and I with age am near To Death. His darkness and his chill I feel. Were all my wandering days of no avail, Untouched of human joy or human love? Then let me see thy face before I die. Behold, I bend before thee to the ground! Behold, I bend! Around my beard in drifts Lie strewn the yellow leaves – the clotted leaves. (He gathers up the leaves and presses them to his breast.)

70

I’m dying! Oh, forgive me if I touch Thy garments’ hem, thou visionary one! (He goes close to the Figure. A sudden light bursts over it.)



A bearded witch, her sluggish head low bent On her broad breast! Beneath her withered brows Shine dull unmoving eyes. What thing art thou? I sought thee not. Figure.

Men call me Infamy. 75 I know not what I am.

‘In a Cathedral Close’, 41–2: ‘the child’s glad eyes | Your joy unhuman shall control’. WBY uses the word again ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’, 58, ‘some unhuman misery’, and in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889 version) I, 173, II, 134, and III, 56 (see notes). 60^61.] I bow – around my beard the lizards crawl | Thou wilt not speak – O cruel art thou yet del. MS. 62–68.] My heartstrings are all broken saving one Trembling and vibrating unto songs of thee

^ That trembles and resounds with hymns to thee^ That fill the [hungry del.] ^blazing^ hollows of my heart [As summer rain is to the parching ground del.] MS. 71.] A  moss-­grown skeleton del. MS [which marks ‘End’ at this point, also del.] 74.] This line is del. in Morgan, but with the query ‘?’ alongside. WBY’s uncertainty leads the present edition to retain the line.

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Knight.

I sought thee not.

Figure.

Lover, the voice that summoned thee was mine. Knight.



For all I gave the voice, for all my youth, For all my joy – ah, woe!

(The Figure raises a mirror, in which the face and the form of the Knight are shadowed. He falls.) Figure (bending over him and speaking in his ear).

What, lover, die before our lips have met?



Knight.

80

Again, the voice! the voice! (Dies.)

78. ah, woe!] Ay woe what have I left? MS.

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THE SONG OF THE HAPPY SHEPHERD THE POEMS

Dates of composition and revision. It is likely that this poem was composed after the completion of IoS, and possibly after the final part of its serialization, in the Dublin University Review in Jul. 1885. ‘The Seeker’, to which it is also in DUR for Oct. 1885 an ‘Epilogue’, had appeared in the previous issue (Sept.), so there is a possibility that the poem was composed around Sept., perhaps as a retrospective on the ‘Arcadian’ material WBY had been publishing in DUR that year. There is no sign of anything resembling an epilogue in any of the IoS MSS, but it is possible that the poem was drafted as a free-­standing dramatic piece, since its surviving MS has no title, but does carry a stage direction (see below). After the text in P95, WBY placed the date ‘1885’. The P95 text is, though, a substantial revision of the two printed versions (DUR and WO) that precede it. It is not possible to establish the exact date of revision, but in his letter to Fisher Unwin about P95 of 23 Nov. 1894, WBY was able to ‘enclose a full list of probable contents’: here, there was a ‘Crossways’ section to close the book, but the poem is placed as the penultimate item, and under its WO title (though it is immediately preceded by what is now the retitled ‘The Sad Shepherd’) (CL 1, 411–413). This may be a clue that WBY had not yet embarked on substantial revision, but that he was now thinking of some form of pointed-­up contrast between this poem and what had been ‘Miserrimus’; in that case, the revision would have taken place between Nov. 1894 and 27 Mar. 1895, when the full MS was sent to Unwin. Work was still very much ongoing on 16 Feb. 1895, when WBY wrote to Unwin that ‘I am getting on gradually with the revision – like most things it takes a little longer than I expected’ (CL 1, 439). Textual and publication history. A single MS survives, six pages of a draft in ink which have been bound in with the other material (largely for ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’) in NLI 3726. These pages were placed at the end of the MS book, after they were presented to the NLI in 1923 by W.K. McGee (who had himself been given them by WBY’s sister). The head of the first MS page carries a stage direction: ‘Enter a Faun | Holding a shell’. The first discussion of the MS (with useful remarks on the poem) was by M. Witt, ‘Yeats’s ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’’, Philological Quarterly 33/1 (1953), 1–8. The MS is reproduced, with diplomatic transcription, in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 202–211 (a partial transcription is also in W.K. Chapman, Yeats and Renaissance Literature, 62). The poem was first published in DUR Oct. 1885, as ‘An Epilogue | To ‘The Island of Statues’ and ‘The Seeker’’, the works by WBY that had appeared there through much of the year. It was next printed in WO, taken well out of the vicinity of both the poems named in its earlier title, as ‘Song of the Last Arcadian’. WBY here placed the poem after the suite of Indian-­inspired material which ends with ‘Jealousy’, and immediately before the first poem in the book’s sequence to be sourced from Irish myth, ‘King Goll’. When DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-50

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the poem was included in P95 (placed as the first item in the ‘Crossways’ section, a position it would continue to occupy), it was in a revised form: thereafter, the text remained largely stable, and the poem was included in all subsequent collected editions. Context, sources, and critical interpretation. WBY himself left no remarks on this poem, though in 1933, when introducing the edition of his newly-­rediscovered articles in Letters to the New Island, he wrote: ‘I can remember myself sitting there [in the National Library] at the age of twenty-­six or twenty-­seven looking with scorn at those bowed heads and busy eyes, or in futile revery listening to my own mind as if to the sounds in a sea-­shell’ (CW 7, 4). The sea-­shell, like the ‘revery’, suggests this poem may have been on his mind; though while the location of Dublin is accurate enough, the poem itself was first composed when WBY was at least five years younger than he remembers being here. Although almost all of the critical attention paid to this poem has regarded it as a significant artistic starting point for WBY, it began as a public signal of the end, not the beginning, of a creative phase. Readers of the DUR would already have been well acquainted with ‘The woods of Arcady’ in WBY’s work, to which in this poem he bids farewell. The poem’s initial status as ‘An Epilogue’ places it in a tradition which WBY would have associated with dramas and masques of the renaissance. The most direct models are probably Shakespearean ones: Puck at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Prospero at the close of The Tempest. The poem’s burden, as announced in the very first line, is that the Arcadian world has passed away; in this sense, it follows its dramatic models in establishing a path away from the world of fiction back to the world of an audience’s reality. When WBY collected the poem in WO, decoupling it from the DUR pieces, it stood more in its own right as a poem with ‘Song’ in the title, but its position gave no indication that the poet intended it as a manifesto-­like piece. At this stage, there was still no obvious sense in which the poem was especially put in contrast with ‘The Sad Shepherd’ (still called ‘Miserrimus’, and written later, not being published in DUR until Oct. 1886). It was with P95 that the poem moved into the position of the first piece in a major section, the ‘Crossways’ part of that book, into which a culled selection of WO pieces, many rewritten, were now collected. In P95, ‘Crossways’ was the volume’s final grouping; although the placing of the section was to change in later versions of Poems, it was not the opening grouping in any edition. Now (quite possibly as late as spring 1895 [see Dates]), WBY engineered a direct contrastive pairing of ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and ‘The Sad Shepherd’, which followed it directly. In his extensive revisions, the poet can be seen at one point to establish a verbal point of contact with the later poem (which had itself worked through a number of references to ‘The Song of the Last Arcadian’, most importantly with the central image of the sea-­shell) when he revises line 42 from ‘For ruth and joy have brotherhood’ (itself a prediction of the later contrastive mirroring of the two ‘Shepherd’ poems) to ‘And die a pearly brotherhood’, the adjective picking up exactly that of ‘The Sad Shepherd’, 25: ‘Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim’ (‘The Sad Shepherd’ also has the shell with a ‘hollow pearly heart’ (21)). The 1895 creation of a pair of ‘Shepherd’ poems has its most immediate model in Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’: these poems remained important to WBY in his creative thinking, and Milton is in any case involved in a vital chain of rhymes for ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’: ‘youth’, ‘sooth’, and ‘ruth’ (see note to 23 and 41). The allusion to Milton’s ‘optic glass’ (see note



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to 29) further strengthens the poem’s Miltonic associations, and while some of these are in place at the time of initial composition, they are certainly strengthened by the P95 formation of a contrasting pair of poems. WBY’s more general field of source material extends across early modern pastoral: both Edmund Spenser (at least in the title of his The Shepheardes Calender) and Sir Philip Sidney (see note on 26–7), as well perhaps as the Masques of Ben Jonson, contribute to the poem’s setting and tone. If WBY sets the two poems up as a kind of debate, the terms of that debate are broad: at the heart of the contrast between the two seems to be a disagreement about the truth or intelligibility of the ‘words’ spoken by a shepherd/poet (WBY was well aware of the conventional dressing-­up of poets as musically-­gifted tenders of flocks). Almost all critical discussion of the poem has fixed on the significance of lines 10 and 43, ‘For words alone are certain good’, often understanding this as an endorsement by WBY of the view that only words (and not the scientifically verifiable realm of what the poem calls ‘Grey Truth’) can be of use in revealing the truth that begins in ‘thine own heart’. These words, however, have to undergo a process of transformation before they can become ‘certain good’; it is the ‘twisted, echo-­harbouring shell’ (itself something of a metaphor for the ways and means of poetry) that changes them in the poem – changes them not to the ‘truth’ but to that word as transmogrified by rhyme, into ‘sooth’. WBY’s archaism is complex (see note to 23), but is absolutely necessary to the poem’s artistic effect: it is not only ‘Grey Truth’ that is changed here but ‘human truth’ as well – and this may argue for at least some caution in finding the poet in complete agreement with the proposition that ‘Words alone are certain good’. While in this poem the ‘shell’ works and enables the speaker to envisage a stage beyond that of his Arcadian incarnation (one where he can continue to ‘Dream’, presumably with a new kind of energy, separating him from ‘earth’s dreamy youth’ (54)), in the subsequent companion poem, the same instrument has stopped working, where for the sad shepherd the shell ‘Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan . . . forgetting him’ (27–8). The later poem tempers the enthusiasm of the earlier, then; but it is not a simple negation, and more a drawing-­out of a theme which was already implicit there. Can ‘sooth’ take the place of ‘human truth’ without a certain cost, one to which the stilted archaism itself bears witness? In the poem’s reception, its generation of such perplexities has seldom been noticed. While the WO version was mentioned by W.E. Henley in the Scots Observer (9 Mar.1889) as ‘the subtlest in thought of all the pieces in the volume’, praise which the poet received enthusiastically (CL 1, 152), such subtlety was perhaps harder to detect once the poem was presented as one of a contrasting pair. A review of P95 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (May 1896) asked, ‘Were the claims of the poet, as opposed to the man of science or of action, ever more cogently expressed than in the opening lines of the exquisite ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’?’; and in general, the critical reception has tended to follow this lead, without too much hesitation about what ‘the claims of the poet’ might either be over, or might be. For N. Grene, the sea-­shell is ‘a symbol for the self-­ generating, self-­validating dream of art’ (Grene, 53), while R. Schuchard sees in it an image of ‘a revivified oral culture’ that would bring succour to those ‘too long deprived of dreaming, reverie, and the ‘certain good’ of words chanted by the poet’s magical voice’ (Schuchard, 31). Not all readers have been so effortlessly won over by what the shepherd

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offers: H. Bloom hears the poem as ‘a chant’ also, but as one in which ‘The reader is urged not to seek action or truth, but only whatever story a murmuring sea-­shell will give to him, after which the satyr closes by insisting on the value of mere dreaming as its own end’ (Bloom, 54). Another sceptical reading, from a very different angle, is offered by E. Cullingford, who writes that ‘Male selfhood and its constitution in language’ are central to the poem, and that the shepherd ‘solipsistically affirms the self and its speech as the only ‘truth,’ but male identity is sustained by an Other [the sea-­shell]’; she ends by claiming that the shepherd is ‘a verbal narcissist’, who ‘suggests that the male find a sympathetic female who will repeat his words in her own way’ (Cullingford, 18–19). On the whole, though, modern criticism accepts the poem as one in which, as J. Pethica writes, there is an injunction ‘to draw on the power of reverie and imagination to generate words which may comfort or inspire in the face of a world of sick hurry and divided aims [an allusion to Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gypsy’] or, better yet, transcend its limitations’ (Holdeman and Levitas, 205). For E. Larrissy (who also invokes Arnold’s poem, as well as his On the Study of Celtic Literature), ‘The happy shepherd is offering a Celtic which accepts both Joy and Sorrow [. . .] a transitional quality, which laments the past but offers a specific against a modern malaise [. . .] it is slightly infected by what it rebukes, formally, politically, and philosophically’ (Larrissy, 45). For a detailed (though somewhat strained) discussion of musical-­aesthetic implications, see Enrico Reggiani, ‘Rewording in Melodious Guile’: W.B. Yeats’s The Song of the Happy Shepherd and its Evolution Towards a Musico-­Literary Manifesto’, Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 2 (2012), 73–92. Copy-­text: P49.

T 5

he woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted toy; Yet still she turns her restless head: But O, sick children of the world,

1. The woods of Arcady] Possibly cp. Barry Cornwall, Dramatic Scenes (1857), ‘The Falcon’, Sc. 2, 115–117: ‘And I  will swear thine eyes are like the stars, |Thyself beyond the nymphs who, poets feigned, | Dwelt long ago in woods of Arcady.’ In the next lines, Cornwall’s speaker declares ‘I’ll crown thee with | The whitest lilies’ (cp. 46 below, and also see MS readings for 12–16). 1, 4.] The woods of Arcady . . . Grey Truth] It is possible that WBY here influenced Oscar Wilde, whose poem ‘Pan: A Double Villanelle’

opens: ‘O Goat-­Foot God of Arcady!  | This modern world is grey and old’ (the poem was not published until 1913, and date of composition is not established; Wilde might very well have been drawing on WBY). 4. Grey Truth] [And del.] But truth MS. 5. her restless head] The metaphor here continues to be that of the world’s uneasy sleep: cp. William Allingham, Poems (1850), ‘The Music-­Master’, II, 331–2: ‘That night Claude’s pillow bore a restless head,  | Aching with memories’.



The Song of the Happy Shepherd

10 15 20

Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good. Where are now the warring kings, Word be-­mockers? – By the Rood, Where are now the warring kings? An idle word is now their glory, By the stammering schoolboy said, Reading some entangled story: The kings of the old time are dead; The wandering earth herself may be Only a sudden flaming word, In clanging space a moment heard, Troubling the endless reverie.



Then nowise worship dusty deeds, Nor seek, for this is also sooth, To hunger fiercely after truth,

7. changing] doubtful del. changing MS. 9. the cracked] the old cracked MS, DUR, WO. 12. be-­mockers] WBY’s noun is not recognized by OED, but is derived from bemock, ‘To mock at, flout; to delude mockingly.’ Cp. Shakespeare, The Tempest III iii 63: ‘bemocked-­at stabs’, and S.T. Coleridge, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, 267: ‘Her beams bemocked the sultry main’. By the Rood] A  fairly common archaism, but WBY’s example here is probably Hamlet II iv 14: ‘No, by the rood, not so’. 12–16.] [And all their battles del.] by the rood [Lilies are and plumy peace del.] [On their battlefield the golden Lilies are and plumy peace del.] [And all unwordy things del.] are dead [Happy utterance del.] of the dead [Telling of del.] Chimeras fled Chronicling chimeras fled MS. 13–16.] Where are now the old kings hoary? They were of no wordy mood; An idle word is now their glory,

375

By the stammering schoolboy said, In the verse of Attic story Chronicling chimeras fled. DUR, WO. 16.] In [some del.] the verse of [latined del.] attic story MS. 17.] [Chimera on their deeds has fed del.] And [words are all del.] [the heroes’ works are dead del.] MS. 18. The wandering earth herself] The very world itself DUR, WO. With ‘wandering earth’, WBY would seem to be playing on the Greek root of the word ‘planet’, planetes, a wanderer. 19. sudden flaming] flaming sudden MS. 20. In clanging] ’Mid clanging DUR, WO. space] WBY’s sense here (OED 8: ‘The expanse in which celestial objects are situated’) had its poetic predecessors, including Shelley, ‘The Daemon of the World’ 99: ‘through the depths of space’; a very early instance was Milton, Paradise Lost I, 650: ‘Space may produce new worlds’. The fact that sound cannot carry in space does not trouble WBY’s phrase. 21.] In the universe’s reverie DUR, WO. 22.] Then worship not an idle deed MS.

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The Song of the Happy Shepherd

Lest all thy toiling only breeds New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then, No learning from the starry men, Who follow with the optic glass The whirling ways of stars that pass – Seek, then, for this is also sooth, No word of theirs – the cold star-­bane Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain, And dead is all their human truth. Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-­harbouring shell, And to its lips thy story tell,

23. sooth] This is a crucial word for the poem, occurring as a rhyme word here and in 31, 44, and 57. It is archaic, or a poeticism, and unremarkable enough in the context of late-­ Victorian verse (its revival in the nineteenth century is arguably attributable largely to W. Scott); strictly, WBY’s meaning is OED sooth n. 1a., ‘Truth, verity’, out of use since the early seventeenth century, though revived in Tennyson, The Idylls of the King, ‘The Holy Grail’, 709: ‘Where is sooth in Arthur’s prophecy?’ WBY could very well have been aware of the word’s use (as an adjective) by Milton in his translation of Psalm 5, where the context is that of protection against the ways (and in particular the words) of enemies, ‘those  | That do observe if I transgress’ (24–28): Set thy ways right before, where my step goes: For in his faltering mouth unstable No word is firm or sooth Their inside, troubles miserable; An open grave their throat, their tongue they smoothe. W. K. Chapman speculates that ‘No word is firm or sooth’ ‘may have provided Yeats’s happy shepherd with a refrain’, since it ‘is contradicted repeatedly by Yeats’s speaker’ (Chapman, 64). Cp. also Milton’s description of Meliboeus in A Masque (Comus), 28: ‘The soothest shepherd that e’er piped on plains’. 25.] [Because del.] For all thy toil [shall del.] would only breed MS.

26–8.] There is no truth Maugre within thine heart. [The searches Of science, the wisdom of churches Shall never add del.] [Shall only dim its holy youth del.] Seek then No learning from the starry men MS. 26–27. there is no truth | Saving in thine own heart] Almost certainly an echo of Philip Sidney, Astrophel and Stella, I, 14: ‘Fool, said my Muse to me, Look in thy heart and write’. 27. thine own heart] Perhaps cp. Byron, The Corsair: A Tale (1814), III vi, 16–18: ‘To pine, the prey of every changing mood; | To gaze on thine own heart’, and Shelley, The Revolt of Islam (1818) IX xxvi, 4–6: ‘Alas! Gaze not on me, but turn thine eyes  | On thine own heart.’ See also note to WBY’s ‘The Two Trees’, 1. 29. the optic glass] Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost I, 287–8: ‘like the Moon, whose Orb | Through Optic glass the Tuscan Artist views’. 30. stars that pass] Cp. E.B. Browning, Poems (1844), ‘Patience Taught by Nature’, 10–11: ‘To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass | In their old glory’. 33. cloven] torn MS, DUR, WO. 35–6.] But gather by the humming [tide del.] sea | Some [painted del.] [echoing and gaudy del.] twisted, echo haunted shell MS.



The Song of the Happy Shepherd

40

And they thy comforters will be, Rewording in melodious guile Thy fretful words a little while, Till they shall singing fade in ruth And die a pearly brotherhood; For words alone are certain good: Sing, then, for this is also sooth.

45

I must be gone: there is a grave

humming sea] WBY uses the phrase ‘humming sands’ in ‘The Sad Shepherd’ (3), probably as a deliberate point of contact with this poem. twisted shell] If WBY ever chanced on the first page of a poetic drama by Joanna Baillie, The Bride (1851), he would have found in I i 6–9: ‘such as in each list’ner’s fancy wakes  | Responding sounds, such, as from twisted shell  | On sea-­beach found, comes to the bended ear | Of wand’ring child’. 39. Rewording] Thus MS, DUR, WO, P95, P99, P01: this becomes ‘Rewarding’ in P04, then again in collected editions, including EPS (1925) and CP33. PW06 and CWVP08 both revert to ‘Rewording’. In P49 (and CP50) the reading Rewording was restored. R. Finneran makes much of the virtues of ‘Rewarding’, on numerous (though unrelated) grounds: these include WBY’s failure to change back to ‘Rewording’ in the proofs of CP33 and the Edition de Luxe, ‘Rewording’ being ‘awkward if not illogical’ in terms of style, and – a somewhat desperate final strait – the claim that ‘It is of course also possible that ‘Rewarding’ was in fact a misprint, but one that Yeats decided to accept’ (Finneran, 46). In fact, there is no evidence for ‘Rewarding’ being anything other than a long-­ running misprint: the MS has (relatively unambiguously, by WBY’s standards) ‘rewording’, so any argument for ‘Rewarding’ must be one that turns on WBY making a revision (rather than just correcting a misprint) for P04, a revision which he failed to honour in both 1906 and 1908. Here,

377

GY's correspondence with Thomas Mark, in preparation for P49, should be conclusive: in a letter of 1 Apr. 1949 she mistakenly attributes the change to 1912 rather than 1904 (a slip upon which Finneran seizes), but she is emphatic in describing ‘Rewarding’ as ‘obviously a printers’ error’. There is no reason to mistrust GY on this point. melodious guile] Cp. the ‘singing guile’ in Mosada, Sc.1, 87, which WBY associates strongly with the singing of the Sirens. 41. fade in ruth] Cp. Milton, Lycidas, 163: ‘Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth’. 41–3.] Till they have sung their way from ruth,  | For ruth and joy have brotherhood  | And words alone have certain good MS. 42–3.] For ruth and joy have brotherhood,  | And words alone are certain good, DUR, WO. 44–5.] No break between these lines in DUR, WO. 45–52.] I must be gone – there is a grave Where daffodil and lily wave [And hairy bees del.] And downy bees have ambuscade, And birdly iteration is Through^ the deep and murmuring^ Through all the well-­beloved glade. Farewell; I must be gone, I-­wis, That I may soothe the hapless faun [Whose body’s buried ^lies beneath^ in the ground del.] Who’s buried ’neath that grassy ground

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The Song of the Happy Shepherd

Where daffodil and lily wave, And I would please the hapless faun, Buried under the sleepy ground, With mirthful songs before the dawn. His shouting days with mirth were crowned; And still I dream he treads the lawn, Walking ghostly in the dew, Pierced by my glad singing through, My songs of old earth’s dreamy youth: But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou! For fair are poppies on the brow: Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

[With song of mirth del.] With mirthful songs till rise the dawn His shouting days with mirth were crowned, And still I dream he treads the lawn, Walking ghostly ’mong the dew, MS. I must be gone – there is a grave Where daffodil and lily wave, And downy bees have ambuscade, And birdly iteration is Through all the well-­beloved glade. Farewell; I must be gone, I-­wis, That I may soothe that hapless faun (Who’s buried in the sleepy ground),

With mirthful songs till rise the dawn. His shouting days with mirth were crowned, And still I dream he treads the lawn, Walking ghostly ’mong the dew, DUR, WO. 46. daffodil and lily wave] In English pastoral elegy, daffodils feature most prominently in Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, ‘April’, 140: ‘Strowe me the ground with Daffadowndillies’, and Milton, Lycidas, 150: ‘And Daffadillies fill their cups with tears’. See note to IoS I i 11. 54.] My songs of the old world’s dreamy youth MS.

50

IN A DRAWING-­R OOM

THE POEMS

Date of composition. Since some draft material relating to this poem is found on a leaf with drafts of a poem probably from 1885 (‘An old and solitary one’), it seems likely these lines are also from 1885. No further evidence exists to suggest a more precise date. Textual and publication history. NLI 30826 contains drafts of eight lines, four of which correspond to lines 5–8 of the present poem. The first four lines in the MS seem never to have been developed any further by the poet (these are transcribed at the end of the notes). The poem was published in the Dublin University Review Jan. 1886, and both stanzas were subsequently absorbed in ‘Quatrains and Aphorisms’ (WO), as stanzas VI and II respectively. Copy-­text: DUR Jan. 1886.

A

round the twitter of the lips of dust A tossing laugh between their redness ’bides – With patient beauty yonder Attic bust In the deep alcove’s dimness smiles and hides. __________

5

Two spirit things a man hath for his friends: Sorrow that gives for guerdon liberty, And joy, the touching of whose finger lends To lightest of light things all sanctity.

3. patient beauty] This phrase links the stanza with a poem by Charles Tennyson Turner, Small Tableaux (1868), ‘Decadence of Greece’, a sonnet whose octave seems to have a bearing on the stanza as a whole: Young tourist to the land whose hope has passed! Fain would I seek with thee those shores sublime That hear no promise from the lips of Time, Of hours so bright as those He overcast! There is that Athens! still in ruin fair, Though long gone by her intellectual reign; Arcadia waits in patient beauty there, To hear her lingering shepherd’s voice again!

5–8.] The MS draft reflects an earlier stage of composition (here with editorially supplied punctuation): Two guides a man has for his friends: Grief that bringeth liberty, And happiness that ever lends To slightest things wild sanctity. The MS  has also (before the lines earlier) another draft stanza (again given with editorial punctuation): To make a beautiful thing, To make a beautiful deed; Which is the greater who shall say Of these, the works of Adam’s seed? DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-51

51

LIFE

THE POEMS

Date of composition. There is no evidence to provide a firm date for the composition of these lines. The verses that made up ‘In a Drawing-­Room’ are from 1885, and it seems likely that this is true also for the present poem. Textual and publication history. No MS material survives for this poem other than for lines 5–12 (in their earlier incarnation as ‘A Song of Sunset’). The sole text for ‘Life’ is that of its first publication, in the Dublin University Review, Feb. 1886. Although portions were incorporated into ‘Quatrains and Aphorisms’ in WO, WBY never reprinted the poem and dropped even the WO version from all future collected editions. Interpretation. This poem is a curiosity, since it appears to frame a three-­quatrain lyric (5–12) with two quatrains that may reflect indirectly upon its content. The lyric within the poem is ‘A Song of Sunset’ (of 1885), lightly revised. The opening quatrain sets up a child, a sage, and a preacher who – all going about their businesses – are somehow in flight from what WBY calls ‘their dread selves’. After the three-­stanza lyric, the idea of laughter from its final line (16) is picked up by the laughter of ‘Fate’. That the lyric should be one of unhappy love – that is, of love lost because the beloved has become weary of her lover – is not irrelevant to the perspectives of the two framing stanzas. Effectively, the sadness of lost love is thus distanced as part of vaster processes: the effect is perhaps less sophisticatedly ironic than it is ineptly arch. Copy-­text: DUR, Feb. 1886.

T

he child pursuing lizards in the grass, The sage, who deep in central nature delves, The preacher watching for the evil hour to pass, All these are souls that fly from their dread selves. __________ 2. central nature] WBY’s phrase had its currency from R.W. Emerson, Essays, Orations and Lectures (1848), ‘Art’, 202: ‘This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object, so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle, – the painter and sculptor exhibit in colour and in stone. The power depends on DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-52

the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world.’ 4. their dread selves] The phrase is entirely WBY’s, but it may nevertheless be within close earshot of Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), I,

Life

5

The squirrel yonder, hushed and wise, Forswears his wandering ’mong the pine, And wherefore, then, should thy grey eyes Wander away from mine?

10

The talking winds have found their home, Eve-­soothed in some far leafy rest, And wherefore should thy bright brow roam Madonna from my breast?

381

A little while and – red eve dies – Our love shall be of yesterday, 15 Ah, let us kiss each other’s eyes, And laugh our love away. __________ 20

‘I laughed upon the lips of Sophocles, I go as soft as folly; I am Fate.’ This heard I where among the apple trees, Wild indolence and music have no date.

47–8: ‘That men may rise on stepping-­stones | Of their dead selves to higher things.’ 10. leafy rest] The more likely transcription of this in ‘A Song of Sunset’ is ‘leafy nest’ (see note to poem). The phrase as printed here, however, had been used to describe – confusingly – birds’ nests: see Robert Montgomery, Sacred Meditations (1847), ‘A Beautiful Sunset’, 20: ‘While birds, day-­worn, are couched in leafy rest’.

12. Madonna] In ‘A Song of Sunset’, this is ‘Madonna Mia’: A. Swinburne has a poem with this title in Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866). 13. red eve] Perhaps cp. R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances and Songs (1861), ‘My True Love’, 21: ‘How I long for red eve’s shining’, and R. Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868), VII, 1580: ‘that tragical red eve’.

52

THE SAD SHEPHERD

THE POEMS

Date of composition. WBY dates the poem ‘1885’ when it is reprinted in in P95. There is no evidence to date the composition any more exactly than this, though it may seem unusual that WBY would have kept the poem out of print until the autumn of 1886 (see Textual and publication history). Criticism and interpretation. The poem attracted little in the way of specific comment in early decades, and in modern criticism of WBY it is often mentioned alongside the poem which was positioned (from P95 onwards) as its companion piece, ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’. In this pairing, it is on the whole the less critically interesting item and remains the less discussed. Putting the two poems into alignment in 1895, WBY was operating (as W.K. Chapman suggests) within ‘a tradition which began with the contrapuntal debate between “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” ’ (Chapman, 64). Undoubtedly, the pastoral cast of ‘Song of the Happy Shepherd’, and the links made between that poem and this one on the level of the sea-­shell imagery, encouraged the poet also to make the decisive change in title (jettisoning, in the process, a proximity to Wordsworth which would have been easily picked up by readers of WO [see notes]). Stylistic tidying up also took place at this point, and T. Parkinson (33–4) discusses WBY’s revisions to the poem for P95 in terms of the simplification and clarification of syntax and diction. Yet the question of how the poems relate to one another often resolves itself into one not of complementarity, but of opposition. N. Grene sees this poem as an ‘antithetical complement’, but finds that in the ending, ‘the poet, so far from speaking the deep truths of the universe, is a mere narcissist who can make no connection with a natural world equally absorbed in itself ’ (Grene, 53). More circumspectly, E. Larrissy notes that ‘The nature of the happy shepherd’s instructions is quite clear’, but that ‘Some settled disposition of character means that what works for one does not work for the other’; he sees here a Blakean ‘contrary’ and concludes that WBY ‘does privilege the happy over the sad shepherd: the latter, alas, can never be “Celtic” enough, no matter how hard he tries’ (Larrisssy, 46). For H. Adams, ‘The Sad Shepherd’ is ‘a kind of answer, though by no means a final one’ to what the Happy Shepherd has had to say, and the evidence for this lies in the differing approaches to the shell: ‘He [the Sad Shepherd] wants more than the happy shepherd claims it can give’, because ‘He wants a shell that will sing his song back to him, that will unburden him of it yet preserve it’. The complementary poems, then, in fact create (or record) an impasse: where ‘the happy shepherd promised pleasant, ‘melodious guile’, the sad shepherd never wanted that, and his experiment is a disaster’, since in the end ‘he is alone, and his story gone’ (Adams, 39). That the sea-­shell may carry symbolic DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-53



The Sad Shepherd

383

and allegorical resonances far from WBY’s original perception of the image as a piece of useful pastoral/pictorial convention is often taken for granted. In E. Cullingford’s reading of the poem, ‘the sea-­shell retakes the initiative’ from its companion piece, so that ‘the egotistical shepherd discovers that the “wildering whirls” of the female sea-­shell dissipate the imperial self ’; not only this, but the forward-­seeing sea-­shell anticipates Julia Kristeva’s theories, in which ‘one who speaks the language of the father, the language of lack and desire, confronts but cannot understand the semiotic language of the mother, the “wildering whirls” of the semiotic song of self-­containment’ (Cullingford, 19). Companion poem though it became and remained, there may be some critical advantage to reading this piece somewhat apart from ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’. A fundamental condition for the poem is the man’s fateful relation to ‘Sorrow’, which has ‘named’ him its ‘friend’: this is a friendship which creeps into every corner of perception, and colours all the man sees, thinks, and does. This man is a dramatic character and not to be taken as the poet – whether that is WBY himself or an ideal type. In fact, it makes more sense to regard the man as a failed poet, one who wishes to have the world answer too exactly to his desires, providing him with ‘comfort’ (6), but not with challenge; what he wants to hear in the shell is ‘my own tale’ (22) and expression through art (if we allow the shell to figure artistic form) of his personality. The problem is – or rather, it has been pronounced to be this from the very beginning of the poem – that his personality is not his at all, but itself only an expression of ‘Sorrow’. The man ends up as ‘The Sad Shepherd’ in WBY’s presentation of the poem; but he begins as ‘Misserrimus’, and the poem is an exercise in the gloomy reflection that nomen est omen. Once WBY places this poem in contrast to ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, the ‘winner’ is not the happier of the two shepherds, but the freedom of ‘song’ itself as something beyond the predicaments of an individual. Textual and publication history. NLI 30450 has two leaves removed from an exercise book, with drafts for the poem written in ink (MS1). Another leaf contains what is probably a later draft of the beginning and the end of the poem: this was in the possession of WBY’s daughter Anne when consulted by G. Bornstein for Cornell Early Poetry 2 (MS2). Another piece of paper (NLI 30469) contains draft versions of the first four lines (MS3). All these MSS are transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 221–225. The poem was first published in the Dublin University Review (Oct. 1886) (DUR in notes) and then in WO. It was included in P95 and all of the poet’s collected editions thereafter.

384

The Sad Shepherd

Copy-­text: P49.

T 5

here was a man whom Sorrow named his friend, And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming, Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming And humming sands, where windy surges wend: And he called loudly to the stars to bend From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they

Title] Miserrimus DUR, WO. Jeffares (Commentary, 5) draws attention to a short book by Frederic Mansel Reynolds, the full title of which is On a Gravestone in Worcester Cathedral is this Emphatic Inscription, Miserrimus; with neither Name nor Date, Comment nor Text (1832, 2nd, edn. 1833). [The memorial at Worcester is in fact one to Thomas Morris (1668–1748), a vicar who, as a non-­juror under William III, was deprived of his position and died in poverty.] This melodramatic tale (dedicated to William Godwin) concerns a tortured and self-­aware murderer, who marries and destroys the sister of his victim, and it has no obvious relation to WBY’s poem. However, ‘Miserrimus’ (the Latin word for ‘the most unhappy [man]’) is the title of a sonnet by Wordsworth, ‘A Grave-­Stone upon the Floor in the Cloisters of Worcester Cathedral’. Reynolds mentions a conversation with Wordsworth about the mysterious Worcester gravestone, as well as drawing attention to the poem (1832 edn., 12). Wordsworth’s sonnet may be significant for Yeats’s ‘Miserrimus’: “Miserrimus!” and neither name nor date, Prayer, text, or symbol, graven upon the stone; Nought but that word assigned to the unknown, That solitary word – to separate From all, and cast a cloud around the fate Of him who lies beneath. Most wretched one, Who chose his epitaph? – Himself alone Could thus have dared the grave to agitate, And claim, among the dead, this awful crown; Nor doubt that He marked also for his own

Close to these cloistral steps a burial-­place, That every foot might fall with heavier tread, Trampling upon his vileness. Stranger, pass Softly! – To save the contrite, Jesus bled. It may be relevant that WBY’s poem consists of seven abba quatrains, which are in early printings laid out with the b rhymes indented, visually recalling the Petrarchan octave of (e.g.) a sonnet such as Wordsworth’s. The title ‘The Sad Shepherd’, used from P95 onwards, is first found in WBY’s letter to T. Fisher Unwin, 23 Nov. 1894. WBY may have known of Ben Jonson’s final, unfinished play The Sad Shepherd (1637); but a more generally pastoral frame of reference is probably intended, and the renaissance commonplace (especially in the work of Spenser) of equating ‘shepherd’ with ‘poet’ is likely to be in WBY’s mind. 1. his friend] her friend MS1, her his MS2, her MS3. 2. comrade] kinsman DUR, WO. 3. steps] feet MS1, MS2, MS3. 4.] Of the sands where [the MS3] billows cry and in their crying rend MS1, MS3, del. MS2. 5–6.] He called aloud to all the stars to lend | Their hearing, and some comfort give, DUR, WO. to bend | From their pale thrones] Possibly cp. Adelaide Procter, Legends and Lyrics: Second Series (1861), ‘The Angel’s Bidding’, 54–5: ‘the Angels of God will thank you, | And bend from their thrones of light’, and R.W. Buchanan, Poetical Works (1884), Balder the Beautiful, VII, v, 2–3: ‘And lo! The dream of the gods is broken, | And each pale throne is shaken’.



The Sad Shepherd

10 15 20

385

Among themselves laugh on and sing alway: And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend Cried out, Dim sea, hear my most piteous story! The sea swept on and cried her old cry still, Rolling along in dreams from hill to hill. He fled the persecution of her glory And, in a far-­off, gentle valley stopping, Cried all his story to the dew-­drops glistening. But naught they heard, for they are always listening, The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping. And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend Sought once again the shore, and found a shell, And thought, I will my heavy story tell Till my own words, re-­echoing, shall send Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart; And my own tale again for me shall sing, And my own whispering words be comforting, And lo! my ancient burden may depart.

7. sing alway] Cp. William Sharp, Poems (1884), ‘Gaspara Stampa’, 187: ‘And strange bright birds their sweet songs sing alway’. 8. And then] Then cried DUR, WO. 9.] ‘O sea, old sea, hear thou my piteous story!’ DUR, WO. dim sea] A  commonplace by the time of composition, but the numerous occurrences of the phrase all owe something to Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, 10–11: ‘Though scudding drifts the rainy Hyades | Vext the dim sea’. 12–15.] And from the persecution of her glory He fled, and in a far-­off valley stopping, Cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening; But naught they heard, for they are ever listening, DUR, WO. 12. persecution] WBY’s word is arrestingly unusual. The legal sense (OED 2), ‘prosecution of legal claim to a property’, is almost certainly irrelevant; ‘He fled the persecution’ has an incongruous note of religious history; but ‘persecution’ was also beginning to take on psychological meaning: ‘persecution mania’ was used in the Times, 3 Jan., 1881,

and OED 1.e., ‘Victimization, esp. as imagined in certain forms of paranoid mental disorder’, instances T.S. Clouston, Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases (1883), vi., 255: ‘The third great class of delusional cases are those of suspicion and persecution’. 14. dewdrops glistening] Cp. Adelaide Procter, Legends and Lyrics: First Series (1858), ‘A Dream’, 27–8: ‘There was nothing but glistening dewdrops  | Remained of my dream to-­day’. 17. his friend] her friend MS1. 18. found] chose MS1, DUR, WO. 19–24.] And thought, ‘To this will I my story tell, [And del.] it shall echo in each whispering bend When I do whisper to its surging heart, That mine own tale to me shall sing, And mine own words be comforting, And ^then^ mine heavy burden may depart. MS1. And thought, ‘To this will I my story tell, And mine own words re-­echoing shall send Their sadness through the hollows of its heart,

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Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim; But the sad dweller by the sea-­ways lone Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.

And mine own tale again for me shall sing, And mine own whispering words be comforting, And lo – my heavy burthen may depart.’ DUR, WO. 21. hollow, pearly heart] Cp. S.T. Coleridge, ‘Christabel’, II, 420: ‘To free the hollow heart from paining’ and J.C. Mangan, ‘Fronti Nulla Fides (From the Ottoman)’, 4–6: ‘For Vice is oft encrusting  | The hollow heart  | Within unseen’. WBY’s earlier ‘the hollows of its heart’ echoes Arthur O’Shaughnessey, The Lays of France (1874), ‘The Lay of Yvenec’, 736: ‘In the old hollows of the heart’. 25. he sang] sang he DUR, WO. 25–28.] And so he sang the shell a mournful ditty But that sad dweller by the sea’s edge lone Changed all his words to inarticulate moan (Forgetting him) of delicate self-­pity. MS1. 27–28.] Changed all his words to inarticulate moan | Within her wildering whirls – forgetting him. DUR, WO.

27. inarticulate moan] Cp. J. Noel Paton, Poems of a Painter (1861), ‘Threnody’, 21–3: ‘My heart, alone,  | Discordant, yields no joyous tone, | But one dull, inarticulate moan’. 28. wildering whirls] wondering whirls MS1; [wandering del.] wildering whirls MS2. WBY’s poetic ‘wildering’ (for bewildering) is common in nineteenth-­ century verse, but cp. Philip James Bailey, The Mystic and Other Poems (1855), ‘A Fairy Tale’, 76: ‘The dance’s wildering whirl’. See WBY’s MS2 draft of IoS, (note to I  i 22–98): ‘For the nymphs and Naiads cry  | Down among the wildering billows  | Loud thy name, as back they lie | On their wan and watery pillows.’ Robert Bridges was convinced that ‘whirls’ must have been a misprint: ‘I have no doubt that you mean whorls for whirls [. . .] Whirl I think always implies motion, and whorl seems the correct word’ (letter of 12 Oct. 1915, LTWBY, 319). That Bridges’s sense of the lexically ‘correct’ should have so dominated his ear for verse as to have permitted him to imagine  – even for a moment – ‘wildering whorls’ is remarkable.

53

THE T WO TITANS

THE POEMS

A Political Poem

Date of composition. There is no firm evidence for a date, but it is likely that the poem was composed in early 1886 (it was published in Mar.) or at the end of 1885. WBY’s insistent subtitle advertises the poem’s status as ‘political’, and it was certainly the first of his contributions to the Dublin University Review to make a bid for this status. In Nov. 1885 WBY joined the Contemporary Club (founded by C.H. Oldham), and in Dec. he attended a Young Ireland Society meeting; such milieux offered the poet cultural discussion and debate of a broadly political nature, which may be reflected in this early attempt at a politically engaged work. Context, interpretation, and reception. The poem’s subtitle leaves no room for doubt that WBY intended this to be a poem with visible relevance to the world in which he lived. The meaning of ‘political’, though, is not entirely clear, and neither is the allegorical import of the poem itself. WBY was in close and regular contact with those editing DUR, and it is likely that the poem is the result of some discussions with the DUR circle, rather than a spontaneously political effusion on WBY’s part. The DUR’s temper in this regard was noted with a good-­natured archness in the ‘Pigeonhole Paragraphs’ round­up of The Irish Monthly (probably written by the its editor, Fr. Matthew Russell), which spoke of how ‘the March number’ of DUR ‘is ardently political’ and pointed out drily that ‘Mr. Yeats himself calls his “Two Titans” (of which I do not understand a syllable) “a political poem” ’ (14/154 (Apr. 1886), 225). Until the poem’s publication, WBY’s contributions had been of a markedly different character: after the spring and summer 1885 serialization of IoS, the poet’s work in the magazine, published in Jan. and Feb. 1886, had been the aphoristic quatrains of ‘In a Drawing-­Room’ and ‘Life’. ‘The Two Titans’ could hardly have struck a more different note. WBY’s next contribution to the DUR was Mosada in Jun., and this is a historical melodrama, set far from home. It was not perhaps until later in 1886 that WBY began thinking in a concerted way about Irish politics in relation to poetic culture and practice: his reading of Sir Samuel Ferguson, prompted by John O’Leary, bore its first fruits in his articles on that poet of Oct. and Nov. 1886. Doubtless, O’Leary played an important role in the stimulation of WBY’s political faculties – and the young poet had been in regular contact with him since the beginning of 1885 – but in early 1886 there was still some time to go before the poet was operating according to a clearly defined set of cultural and political coordinates. In contrast to some of the discussion at the Contemporary Club, and especially that of the barrister J.F. Taylor (with whom WBY’s relations would become increasingly uneasy), O’Leary offered a more romantic example of Irish nationalism, argued along more principled DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-54

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than immediately pragmatic lines. For WBY, O’Leary’s status as a survivor of the Fenian movement of the 1860s, whose youth and early middle age had been spent in imprisonment and long exile, gave his views the glamour of association with a suffering hero. Insofar as ‘The Two Titans’ has a political allegory, the story it tells is O’Leary’s, and the ‘grey-­haired youth’ (7) wasted by tribulation yet still undaunted in the service of a pure ideal (an ideal conflict, essentially, with the female figure who may stand as England or the British Empire) probably owes a good deal to WBY’s perceptions of Dublin’s returned Fenian celebrity exile in 1885–6. The politics of the poem itself are hard to define in anything but relatively abstract terms: the two figures that are its subject are in what seems to be perpetual conflict, isolated and chained down like prisoners. If we take the ‘youth’ to be Ireland and the ‘sibyl’ to be Ireland’s imperial oppressor, then it would be reasonable to expect from the allegory some sense of eventual resolution and liberation. Here, things begin to break down: the ‘sad soul for ever old and young’ (25) appears not to be in reach of any victory and instead must endure (and submit to) an encounter with the ‘sibyl’ that is sexually charged, leading to a defeated acceptance of ‘Failure for glory’ (54), while the female antagonist herself is reduced to a ‘withered foe’ (55). E. Cullingford describes the poem simply as ‘a symbolic depiction of the struggle between Ireland and England’ (Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism (1981), 32), but in fact its symbolism is curiously opaque. The struggle itself, between oppressor and oppressed, is both endless and mutually destructive. If this is indeed WBY’s first poem of Irish nationalist political engagement, it is a curiously negative one in its implications, and far from the first stirrings of a revival of Young Ireland. R. Ellmann’s interpretation registers this in various ways; accepting that ‘the youth is of course Ireland’ (though male rather than female personifications of the nation were – to say the least – thin on the ground), he sees the allegory as contributing to what he calls ‘this preposterous poem’ (Man and the Masks, 49–50): for the first time Yeats made use of an extended metaphor, so that the poem could not be taken merely as a picture; the ulterior meaning – the subtitle is ‘A Political Poem’ – demands recognition, but seems deliberately obscured, as if the poet did not want the reader to understand it too well. For a political poem, ‘The Two Titans’ is strangely apolitical; Yeats makes one step to the side for every step forward, in a combination of assertion and qualification which was to dog him all his days. We may also find in the two titans, one representing weak youth, the other powerful age, an unconscious reference to the poet’s conflict with his father; and the mystical kiss, which has no corporeal object, suggests something of the sexual frustration which Yeats was beginning to find very troublesome. But above all, he is here for the first time identifying himself closely with Ireland, even to the point of representing his country by a young man instead of by the traditional Cathleen Ni Houlihan. There is enough uncertainty and obscurity in the poem’s conscious allegory, it might be thought, to mean that searches for ‘unconscious’ references are unlikely to be especially fruitful; and WBY is probably not (even subconsciously) turning JBY here into



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a vicious and sexually menacing ‘sibyl’. It should be noticed, too, that the poem does possess a first-­person narrating voice distinct from the oppressed ‘youth’ (‘I saw him stagger’, 31), so questions of whether the poet identifies himself with Ireland here are complicated ones. A further perplexity is added by 33–36, where the youth gives ‘little cries of joy’, ‘laughed’, and ‘sang songs of love | And flowers and little children’. One possible interpretation would be that Irish culture grew reconciled (in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries) to its subject status, developing its own minor modes of sentimental entertainment: it is even possible that WBY allows Tom Moore to flit across the surface of allegorical attention. However, the storm at sea redoubles its fury after line 39 and the youth’s suffering resumes, with a climax in the enforced submission before the female oppressor and her placing a ‘kiss of fire on the dim brow | Of Failure’ (47–8). WBY may intend here some resonance of Ireland’s famine in the 1840s, with its effects stretching into the subsequent decades. Technical uncertainties hamper the poet at every step, and it is a severe awkwardness of style that moves from ‘To place’ in line 47 (where it is the ‘sibyl’ who does the placing of the kiss) to ‘and to crown her crownless head’ in the next line, where it is again the sibyl who acts, crowning herself (and not being crowned by the youth, or indeed giving him the crown). There is a recollection here of lines by a Fenian activist and poet known to O’Leary and celebrated by political Young Ireland, John Keegan Casey (see note to 48), but it is not in any sense in keeping with the narrative of national self-­realization and liberation: instead, the implication is that the failure and dependence of the victim are necessary to confirm the oppressor’s identity as ‘mother of the foiled and dead’ (50). If this is so, the allegory becomes forbiddingly grim, and the poem’s closing movement rings with something like despair. It is as though WBY is consigning everything – both Ireland and the British Empire – to oblivion, or a kind of eternal torment. Pushed just a little further (and a little beyond what scanty evidence we have), it is as if ‘The Two Titans’ were ‘A Political Poem’ only in the sense that its allegory depicts the ultimate futility of much of what ‘politics’ in Ireland was taken to mean. This may be where the poem’s title becomes relevant. Both the protagonists are ‘Titans’, and WBY’s understanding of this term derives almost entirely not from a grounding in Greek mythology but from protracted reading of Shelley and in particular of Prometheus Unbound, where the hero is a Titan and addressed regularly as such. The sufferings of Prometheus (he, too, is chained to a rock) are also seemingly endless and are endured in the service of mankind. By doubling the number of Titans involved, WBY complicates matters; furthermore, his allegorical poem does not suggest a resolution to the turmoil it describes, and is thus at some distance from Shelley’s revolutionary apocalypse, in which not only mankind but the entire universe is finally liberated. It is possible that WBY interprets his own Titans as ancient warring principles, whose struggle as played out in Irish nationalism and British oppression requires some radical and hitherto-­unforeseen resolution. In this respect, the role of the mysterious figure of Demogorgon in Shelley’s poem may be a significant parallel; but WBY in fact can write of no such resolution in his own allegory. The Ireland that will be liberated may be embodied not in one of the Titans, but in the observing narrative voice. This, however, is something that remains outside what the poem itself can manage to imagine or articulate. At any rate, ‘The Two Titans’ is written in a style so Shelleyan as to be unmistakeable (though it is more in the

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style of early work like The Revolt of Islam than Prometheus Unbound), and it was this that caught the attention of H. Bloom, who saw the poem as ‘the most imaginatively impressive’ of WBY’s youth, though noting that this is ‘with a rhetoric so Shelleyan as to be scarcely his own at all’ (Bloom, 55). Bloom’s is the only substantial account of the poem in modern criticism and suggests that WBY’s imagination here foreshadows his (yet to come) deep engagement with Blake, seeing parallels with poems such as ‘The Mental Traveller’. ‘All that happens’, Bloom writes, identifying the ‘youth’ with WBY, ‘is that the enchained poet makes yet another heroic attempt to get free of the Titaness and fails, receiving as his reward a sadistic kiss from his tyrannical captor, who is yet as bound as she is’. This reading, which makes the allegory aesthetic rather than political, takes from the poem what Bloom calls ‘a clear and impressive meaning’: ‘the poet, if he relies on a naturalistic Muse, participates in the bondage of nature, and is devoured by his own Muse, destroyed by the cyclic rhythms of a running-­down natural world’. This surely neglects the poem’s ‘political’ dimensions, while it may overestimate the complexity of WBY’s reception of Romanticism in 1886. Nevertheless, it is likely that Blake has a role to play in the poem, though this is primarily visual rather than poetic. In the powerful first plate of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), two figures, one male and one female, are chained to a rock in the sea and bound back to back, seemingly howling in anguish. To their left a little above, another male figure squats, his head sunk on his knees. These represent Bromion and Oothoon, with Bromion’s rival Theotormon to one side. WBY was not a serious student of Blake by 1886, but it is likely that he was aware of the image, if not the exact nature of its allegorical import. One early reaction to the poem is especially interesting (and it has been adduced by almost every modern critic who mentions ‘The Two Titans’). This is contained in a letter from G. M. Hopkins to Coventry Patmore of Nov. 1886, where Hopkins recounts a visit to JBY’s studio, in which the young poet’s father pressed in his hand a copy of Mosada (7 Nov. 1886, Correspondence eds. Thornton and Philips (2013), vol. 2, 835): Now this Mosada I cannot think highly of, but I was happily not required then to praise what presumably I had not then read, and I had read and could praise another piece. It was a strained and unworkable allegory about a young man and a sphinx on a rock in the sea (how did they get there? what did they eat? and so on: people think such criticisms very prosaic; but commonsense is never out of place anywhere, neither on Parnassus nor on Tabor nor on the Mount where our Lord preached; and, not to quote Christ’s parables all taken from real life but in the frankly impossible, as in the Tempest, with what consummate and penetrating imagination is Ariel’s ‘spiriting’ put before us! all that leads up and that must follow the scenes in the play is realised and suggested and you cannot lay your finger on the point where it breaks down), but still containing fine lines and vivid imagery. It is very likely that Hopkins had discussed this poem with his Jesuit acquaintance, Fr. Russell, whose published view of the poem in Apr. had amounted to amused incomprehension. Hopkins’s titanic parenthesis here contains a number of cogent objections



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to the poem, but it is clear that he felt the verses contained enough merit to justify his verbal praise of them to JBY. It is interesting to note that Hopkins, who was alert to the manifestations of cultural and political Irish nationalism (which he did not warm to) does not see fit to mention any of the ‘political’ dimensions of WBY’s youthful allegory. This may reflect his natural reserve and his unwillingness to open such a subject with JBY, Patmore, or both; but it may also indicate that, despite its subtitle, ‘The Two Titans’ failed to strike at least one contemporary reader as an especially ‘political’ piece. Nevertheless, WBY’s omission of the poem from WO in 1889 may well reflect some element of discomfort with its possible political connotations. G. Bornstein (‘Remaking Himself: Yeats’s Revisions of His Early Canon’, Text 5 (1991), 344–5) sees this in the context of WBY’s arrangement and selections for WO as a whole: The greatest change of all [to WO] would have come had Yeats included ‘The Two Titans’ [. . .] But it is not simply that inclusion of this poem itself would have made [WO] more obviously political and nationalist. Equally importantly, the mythological machinery of the poem would have affected a reading of the entire volume, for ‘The Two Titans’ politicizes the basic fable of the major poems Yeats did include. The male figure’s devotion to a supernatural female possessed of magic powers echoes the situation of the title poem ‘The Wanderings of Oisin,’ ‘The Seeker,’ ‘The Island of Statues,’ and to some extent ‘Mosada’. Branding that situation as political in ‘The Two Titans’ would certainly have affected the way readers interpreted the other poems as well. Textual and publication history. There is no surviving MS material. The poem appeared only once in WBY’s lifetime, in DUR for Mar. 1886. Copy-­text. DUR.

T

he vision of a rock where lightnings whirl’d   Bruising the darkness with their crackling light;

1–2.] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Songs and Romances (1878), ‘A Scene in the Vaudois’, II, 68–70: the summit of a hill, | Where lightnings flash and torrents dash  | From bleak, impending rocks’; also John Todhunter, Laurella, And Other Poems (1876), ‘Chorale’, 1–11:

Cities proud, or hamlets lowly; Not in plots ’mid sheltering trees, Pleasant haunts of lovers’ ease. But where lightnings flash and glare, Burning poison from the air; And the eagle laughs aloud In the glooming thunder-­cloud.

Where shall Freedom’s banner wave? Where shall be the glorious grave Of the world-­redeeming brave? Not in fanes that once were holy,

2. crackling light] Perhaps cp. Adelaide Procter, Legends and Lyrics (1858), ‘The Voice of the Wind’, 60 (but describing a hearth fire, not lightning): ‘the red and crackling light’.

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The waves, enormous wanderers of the world,   Beat on it with their hammers day and night. 5 Two figures crouching on the black rock, bound   To one another with a coiling chain; A grey-­haired youth, whose cheeks had never found,   Or long ere this had lost their ruddy stain; A sibyl, with fierce face as of a hound 10   That dreams. She moveth, feeling in her brain The lightnings pulse – behold her, aye behold –   Ignoble joy, and more ignoble pain Cramm’d all her youth; and hates have bought and sold   Her spirit. As she moves, the foam-­globes burst 15 Over her spotted flesh and flying hair   And her gigantic limbs. The weary thirst Unquenchable still glows in her dull stare,   As round her, slow on feet that have no blood, The phantoms of her faded pleasures walk; 20   And trailing crimson vans, a mumbling brood, Ghosts of her vanished glories, muse and stalk   About the sea. Before her lies that youth, Worn with long struggles; and the waves have sung   Their passion and their restlessness and ruth 25 Through his sad soul for ever old and young,   Till their fierce miseries within his eyes

3. wanderers of the world] Cp. T.C. Irwin, Versicles (1883), ‘The Northman’s Foray’, 94: ‘Wild wanderers of the world of waves’. 8. ruddy stain] Perhaps cp. R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Feast in the House of Feilmid’, 81–3: ‘The wine flowed like the plenteous April rain, | Spattering their long limbs with its ruddy stain | Like the red tide of battle!’ 9–10. a hound  | That dreams] Cp. Sydney Dobell, Poetical Works (1875), ‘Home, Wounded’, 183–4: ‘My soul lies like a basking hound, | A hound that dreams and dozes’. 12. ignoble joy] The phrase occurs in a play upon which WBY drew for IoS, Richard Lalor Shiel’s Evadne; Or, The Statue (1811) II iv 190–1: ‘the poor revenge  | That makes a little mind’s ignoble joy’. It also occurs prominently near the beginning of Friedrich

Schiller’s ‘On the Tragic Art’, Essays Aesthetical and Philosophical (1875), 340: ‘See what a crowd accompanies a criminal to the scene of his punishment! This phenomenon cannot be explained either by the pleasure of satisfying our love of justice, not the ignoble joy of vengeance.’ 14. foam-­globes] Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), Rokeby, II vii 21: ‘Till foam-­globes on her eddies ride’. 16. gigantic limbs] Perhaps cp. John Dryden, Aeneid VI, 806–7: ‘Here his gigantic limbs, with large embrace,  | Infold nine acres of infernal space’. 20. vans] Wings OED 3, ‘chiefly poet.’ 24–25. and ruth . . . Through his sad soul] Probably a reminiscence of the words in Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 66: ‘Through the sad heart of Ruth’.



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Have lit lone tapers. Now the night was cast,   Making all one o’er rock and sea and skies; And when once more the lightning Genii passed, 30   Strewing upon the rocks their steel-­blue hair, I saw him stagger with the clanking chain,   Trailing and shining ’neath the flickering glare. With little cries of joy he kissed the rain   In creviced rocks, and laughed to the old sea, 35 And, nodding to and fro, sang songs of love,   And flowers and little children. Suddenly Dropt down the velvet darkness from above,   Hiding away the ocean’s yelping flocks. When flash on flash once more the lightning came, 40   The youth had flung his arms around the rocks, And in the sibyl’s eyes a languid flame   Was moving. Bleeding now, his grasp unlocks, And he is dragged again before her feet.   Why not? He is her own; and crouching nigh 45 Bending her face o’er his, she watches meet   And part his foaming mouth with eager eye – To place a kiss of fire on the dim brow   Of failure, and to crown her crownless head, That all men evermore may humbly bow 50   Down to the mother of the foiled and dead. For this did the Eternal darkness bring   Thither thy dust, and knead it with a cry,

32. ’neath the flickering glare] Perhaps cp. Edwin Atherstone, The Fall of Nineveh (1868), XVI, 834–5: ‘beneath the flickering glare | Of torches’. 39. flash on flash] Perhaps cp. W.H. Drummond, Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), ‘The Lay of the Battle of Gavra’ II xiv 3–5: ‘in fitful flash, | The lightnings darting flash on flash | Illumined all the glen’. 47. a kiss of fire] Perhaps cp. Philip James Bailey, Festus (1877) VI vii 225–6: ‘salutes  | As with a kiss of fire our hallowed earth’. 48. to crown her crownless head] Cp. John Keegan Casey, Reliques of John K. Casey (1878), ‘Ireland Darling’, 9–12:

There were moments, oh Ireland darling, When I fancied the dream was dead That lifted your emerald banner – Placed a crown on your crownless head!   Casey (1846–1870) was in the 1860s a Fenian and was arrested and sent to prison after the 1867 rebellion. Released in poor health after a matter of months, Casey embarked on lecturing tours, promoting both nationalism and its poetry, and he continued to press the cause of extra-­ constitutional resistance. After his early death from consumption, which took place conveniently on St Patrick’s Day and was popularly

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Gathered on her own lips, Oh youth, and fling   Failure for glory down on thee, and mould 55 Thy withered foe, and with the purple wing   Of ocean fan thee into life, and fold For ever round thy waking and thy sleep The darkness of the whirlwind scattered deep.

attributed to the effects of his mistreatment in captivity, Keegan’s funeral in Dublin drew a crowd in the tens of thousands. WBY largely avoided mention of Keegan: in ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ in The Leisure Hour (1889) he merely lists his name amongst those ‘In the little blue ballad books’ who are ‘dear wherever the Irish are’, and mentions his ballad ‘The Rising of the Moon’ (CW 9, 106–7), while in the introduction

to his own Book of Irish Verse (1895) he includes him (with Charles Kickham and Ellen O’Leary) amongst poets of ‘the Fenian movement’ whose poems ‘were at times very excellent’ (CW 6, 107). Keegan does not feature in A Book of Irish Verse, though WBY’s Acknowledgements in the second edn. (1900) mention him as a poet he ‘would gladly have included’, but for whom copyright permission was not forthcoming.

54

[‘ THERE SINGS A ROSE BY THE RIM’] THE POEMS

Textual history and dates of composition and revision. This poem, which has two MS versions, appears in the long, unfinished drama The Village of the Elms, which WBY abandoned in the summer of 1886 (NLI 30414: MS2). However, it is likely to have been composed some time before then: a draft which is a single leaf (NLI 30458: MS1) is on paper with a 1883 watermark and has no indication of a speaker or any other sign of relation to the play. In the MS2 version, the poem of MS1 has been radically rewritten and the whole of its second stanza, even in rewritten form, has been struck out. Now appearing as a song voiced by a character with the name El Jazal, the MS2 version may represent WBY’s appropriation of an earlier composed and discarded lyric. The eventual removal in MS2 of the second stanza possibly reflects an awareness on WBY’s part that the lyric bore too strong a resemblance to William Blake’s ‘The Sick Rose’: this, at any event, seems a more reasonable supposition than that he chose first to delete and then to reinstate and amplify the Blakean elements in MS1. G. Bornstein (Cornell Early Poetry 2, 406–7) takes the single-­leaf MS1 to be later than the version in The Village of the Elms, which would place the version he gives some time after summer, 1886 (see also UM 56, where the poem appears as ‘I heard a rose under the brim’). In the present edition, the poem is placed amongst work from 1886 (the year of MS2), but it is likely that MS1 was composed earlier, at any time from 1883. The copy-­text here is MS2, with spelling and punctuation editorially emended.

T

here sings a rose by the rim Of a rock in the wood-­ways dim

[MS1 version:] I heard a rose on the brim Of the moss in the wood-­ways dim, On a rock’s rim Where prattling the blackbirds meet, Where the paw of the squirrel rushes, 5 Sing to the soft winds’ gushes A song that was giddy and sweet: ‘Dear wind, I long to rest Upon thy song-­heaved breast, Wind of the west.’

10

I saw the fingers close Of the wind on the ruined glow, I saw petals scattered, a-­blow. Ah rose, poor love-­sick rose! 1. rim] brim del. 2. of the moss] Of a rock del. 13.] Of the del. I saw ^scattered petals [a-­ torn and del.] a blow MS1. 1. There sings a rose] Perhaps cp. George Barlow, Love-­Songs (1880), ‘A White Rose in DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-55

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[‘There Sings a Rose by the Rim’]

Where patter the rabbits’ feet And the foot of the squirrel rushes 5 Through the home of the babbling thrushes, A song that is giddy and sweet.

November’, 17–18: ‘It always must be summer when the white rose sings, | With music in her outspread, sun-­seeking petalwings!’ 6.] MS2 at this point has a cancelled second stanza, which probably is a revision of the second stanza in MS1 (line 13 of MS1 is clearly the basis for line 5 here, and incorporates the revisions visible in the MS1 version):

‘Dear wind, I long to rest Upon thy song-­heaved breast. If a light breath o’er it flows, Then ah! for the ruined glow Of the scattered petals a-­blow! Ah! dead of thy love, poor rose!’

5

6.] Cp. William Blake, Songs of Experience (1798), ‘The Sick Rose’, 1: ‘O rose thou art sick’.

55

THE PRIEST AND THE FAIRY THE POEMS

Date of composition. Probably early 1886. An anecdote of JBY’s relating to this poem, given by Murphy, 139–140, implies that it may date from WBY’s time at the Metropolitan School of Art (which he attended from May 1884 to Apr. 1886). The anecdote relates to a dinner with the portrait artist Sarah Purser: Sarah Purser worried about the apparent aimlessness of his [WBY’s] career. ‘You can make the boy a doctor for fifteen shillings a week,’ she told JBY bluntly at dinner in her home. JBY defended his son’s course, and his own approval of it, by making claims not for Willie’s painting but for his poetry. He asked the diners if they would be willing to hear a poem his son had written. ‘I will listen,’ replied Mrs Purser, ‘but without any sympathy.’ So he read aloud a poem called ‘The Priest and the Fairy’. That was all that was needed. ‘From that moment she and her family became my son’s friends. His passports were made out and he was free to enter the kingdom of poetry, all because of a little poem . . . in which these infallible critics had found the true note, the fresh note of the Discoverer.’ JBY is unlikely to be confusing this with another poem, though he may perhaps be misremembering the time at which the dinner took place. Nevertheless, this constitutes circumstantial evidence for the poem’s being available to JBY while he was still (in some way) responsible for his son’s education, and is in that sense sufficient to support a tentative dating of ‘The Priest and the Fairy’ no later than Apr. 1886. Source. Kinahan 49–50, while pointing out that the outline of this story is a very common one, draws attention to a possible source for WBY in Patrick Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866): Yeats follows the lead of tales like that told by Patrick Kennedy, who had written that ‘sometimes [the fairies] experience a slight hope that their place may not be with Satan and his angels’. At moments like these they press ‘holy and wise mortals’, generally priests, ‘to give judgment on their case’ (97). Kennedy follows this prefatory comment with a folktale in which a country priest, returning from a sick call, loses his way in a darkened field and is overtaken by the sidhe. One of their number asks him if the fairies have a chance for salvation and promises to reward an affirmative answer. The priest is at first afraid, but when he recovers the courage to speak, he asks the sidhe if they ‘adore and love the Son of God’, and ‘receive[s] no answer but weak and shrill cries, and the rushing of wings’ (99). The wings bear their sad owners away, and the priest makes his way back home. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-56

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The Priest and the Fairy

Interpretation. It is understandable that this poem is largely passed over by WBY’s critics: the stylistic register of his ‘fairy’ writing is still unstable here, but remains far from that of his more consequential engagements with such materials in poetry, and shows clear signs of its inheritances from more sentimental and quasi-­comic Irish ‘fairy’ writings. While noting that the poem obviously cost WBY some trouble, as witnessed by the numerous revisions in MS, it is worth reading past the uneven style to form a sense of the poem’s relations with the tensions between the Irish supernatural and the Irish religious realms. Here, the world of the fairies seeks out a Roman Catholic priest for counsel: WBY presents a sentimentally conceived fairy, but also a satirically caricatured rural priest, whose religion is open to light comic disdain on the part of the poet (and, it is implied, of the poet’s readers too). Yet the point at issue is one which would become graver for WBY – that is, the fairies’ souls, or rather their lack of immortal souls, the knowledge of which brings them an unassuageable sorrow. The same point will return, in a very different key, in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. Manuscript material and copy-­text. NLI 30455 has seven pages of draft material for this poem. The five leaves contain no other pieces, and so offer in themselves no clues about when WBY was drafting the poem: the dimensions of the pages, however, and the spacing of the paper’s chain lines, match those of the MS leaves for ‘Miserrimus’ (‘The Sad Shepherd’), suggesting they might have been excised from the same notebook. The MS contains two stages of composition, though only its version of 55–72 is a revision of the earlier draft state. Reproduction and transcription of the MS is contained in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 226–243. The poem had gained further changes by 1889, when it appeared in WO. It was not included in any subsequent collected edition by WBY, so WO is the copy-­text here; however, WBY did make three changes to the text in the copy of WO in the Pierpont Morgan library (Morgan), suggesting that for at least a short time after 1889 he thought of retaining the poem for future editions: these changes are incorporated in the present text (see notes).

U

nto the heart of the woodland straying, Where the shaking leaf with the beam was playing,



Musingly wandered the village priest. As the summer voice of the daytime ceased,

5

He came to the home of the forest people From where the old ivy crawls round the old steeple,



And under a shady oak-­tree sat, Where the moss was spread like his own doormat.

2. the shaking leaf] Cp. W. Allingham, Day and Night Songs (1860), ‘A Boy’s Burial’, 3: ‘When the sycamore had not a shaking leaf ’. 4.] As [the light del] summer sound of the day time ceast MS.

6.] From the ^brown del.^ church [of del.] ^with the^ ivy steeple MS. 7–8.] He under a [willow tree del.] shadowy willow oak tree [sits del.] sat



The Priest and the Fairy

10

The tangled thoughts of the finished day Fled from his brow where the hair was grey;



And as the time to darkness plodded, He thought wise things as his grey head nodded.



How ‘the only good is musing mild, And evil still is action’s child.

15

‘With action all the world is vexed,’ He’d find for this some holy text.

399

*  *  *  *

He’d slept among the singing trees, Among the murmurs of the bees,

20

A full hour long, when rose a feather Out of a neighbouring bunch of heather;



And then a pointed face was seen Beneath a pointed cap of green;



And straight before the sleeping priest There stood a man, of men the least –

25

Three spans high as he rose to his feet, And his hair was as yellow as waving wheat.



Now, what has a fairy to do with a priest Who is six feet high in his socks at least?

30

He drew from his cap a feather grey, On the nose of the sleeper he made it play;

[And the ^tangled^ care of the day waits del.] Like the moss was [spread del.] close like [his own del.] a woven doormat MS. 10^11.] Fled as a spider out of his hole And said to himself as sleep over him stole del. MS. 13–14.] How the only good is musing child

[All del.] And the evil is action’s daughter wild MS. 16.] [And this I  will preach on Sunday next del.] MS. 17. the singing trees] Cp. Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Music and Moonlight (1874), ‘Zuleika’, 21: ‘He sang of the singing trees’. 26. waving] ripened MS. 29–30.] With this couplet, perhaps cp. Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, II v 312: ‘to tickle our

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The Priest and the Fairy



The sleeper awoke with a sudden start, With open mouth and beating heart.



He had dreamed the cow had got within His garden ringed with jessamine,

35

And many a purple gillyflower eaten, And under her hoofs the marigolds beaten.



Then ’gan to speak that goblin rare, Brushing back his yellow hair:

40

‘Man of wisdom, from thy sleeping I have roused thee; for the weeping



‘Of our great queen is ever heard Among the haunts of bee and bird.



‘We buried late in a hazel dell A fairy whom we loved full well;

45

‘The swiftest he to dance or fly, And his hair was as dark as a plover’s eye.



‘Man of wisdom, dost thou know Whither the souls of fairies go?’

50

The priest looked neither to right nor left, Nigh of his wits by fear bereft.



‘Ave Marie,’ muttered he Over the beads of his rosary.



The fairies’ herald spake once more: ‘Say and thrice anigh thy door

noses with spear-­ grass, and make them bleed’: WBY mentions spear-­grass at 78. 34. Jessamine] A common form of ‘jasmine’ in the nineteenth century. 35. gillyflower] OED 2., ‘Any of several plants of the genus Dianthus  which have flowers with a spicy, sweet scent similar to that of cloves and are frequently cultivated as

ornamentals’. See Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, IV iv 96: ‘our carnations and streaked gillyvors’. 48. Whither] WBY’s emendation in Morgan. To where MS; Where WO. 51.] But ‘Mea Culpa’ muttered he MS. 54. thrice anigh thy door] yearly by thy door del. MS.



The Priest and the Fairy

55

‘Every summer wilt thou see Wild bees’ honey laid for thee.’



The father dropt his rosary – ‘They are lost, they are lost, each one,’ cried he.

60

And then his heart grew well-­nigh dead Because of the thing his tongue had said.



As a wreath of smoke in wind-­blown flight The fairy vanished from his sight,



And came to where his brethren stood, Away in the heart of an antique wood;

65

And when they heard that tale of his They grew so very still, I wis



Were you a fairy you’d have heard The breathing of the smallest bird,

70

The beating of a leveret’s heart; And then the fay queen sobbed apart,



And all the sad fay chivalry Lifted their voices bitterly.

401

* * * *

56. laid] placed MS. 58.] Begon [sic] they are damned each one cried he MS. 59–60.] [And then for that which he said del.] [Then feared because of the del.] [Then sorely feared for what he’d said del.] Then his heart with fear grew well nigh dead Because of the thing his tongue had said MS. 62. fairy] herald del. fairy MS. 63.] But the queen of the fairies weeping stood MS. 65.-­72.]

And the fairy queen [goes del.] went mournfully Among the fairy chivalry [But then each [summer del.] year the fairies bore the honey to the father’s door del.] MS. 69. leveret’s] Emended thus by WBY in Morgan; a squirrel’s MS; lev’ret’s WO. Perhaps cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘Written in imitation of Crabbe’, 27: ‘A squadron’s charge each leveret’s heart dismayed’. 72. Lifted] WBY’s emendation in Morgan; Raised up MS; Upraised WO.

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The Priest and the Fairy



A woodman on his homeward way Heard the voice of their dismay,

75

And said, ‘Yon bittern cries, in truth, As though his days were full of ruth.



‘If I were free to do as little As dance upon the spear-­grass brittle,

80

‘Or seek where sweetest water bubbles, Remote from all the hard earth troubles,



‘And cut no wood the whole day long, I’d glad folks’ hearts with blither song.’

74. Heard] He hears MS. 76. As though his days were [labourful del.] hard – good sooth MS. 77.] I would that I could do as little del. MS. 78. spear-­grass] A  term for couch-­grass. See note to 29–30 earlier. 80. Remote from] Forgetful of MS. 82.] I would not sing so sad a song MS.

blither song] Perhaps cp. Emmeline Stuart-­ Wortley, Poems (1833), ‘The Season Comes’, 17–20: I sat within the bower I love, Where waveless waters glide along, And listened to the murmuring dove, And to the blackbird’s blither song.

56

KANVA ON HIMSELF

THE POEMS

Date of composition. Although WBY had met the model for ‘Kanva’ in 1885, this poem may well date from early 1886. The sheet of paper on which a draft survives (see Textual and publication history) also contains a draft of st. 3 of ‘Quatrains and Aphorisms’ (in WO). Parts of that poem appeared in early forms in DUR in Jan. 1886 (‘In a Drawing-­ Room’) and Feb. 1886 (‘Life’) without this stanza, which would eventually join them in WO. On that basis, it is possible that the poem was drafted after Feb. 1886 (though WBY might, of course, have written the lines before drafting the extra portion of ‘Quatrains’). Context. This poem is perhaps the earliest record in WBY’s verse of his contacts in Dublin with Mohini Chatterjee (1858–1936). Chatterjee was closely associated with Madame Blavatsky’s theosophists, and it was in this capacity that he was invited to Ireland by C.H. Oldham and others in 1885. This young Brahmin influenced various early poems of WBY, and much later became the subject of his ‘Mohini Chatterjee’ (1929). In an account of a meeting of the Dublin Hermetic Society, the DUR of Aug. 1885 mentioned that ‘there is some possibility of the celebrated Mr. Mohini visiting Dublin some time towards the end of the year’ (66). In 1900, WBY first gave his memories of Chatterjee’s visit in an article entitled ‘The Way of Wisdom’ in The Speaker (14 Apr). Here WBY takes up a tone of distant retrospect: Most of us who are writing books in Ireland to-­day have some kind of spiritual philosophy; and some among us when we look backward upon our lives see that the coming of a young Brahmin into Ireland helped to give our vague thoughts a shape. I  had thought to write of one to whom I, at any rate, owe more than to any book years hence, when our little school had done something worthy of remembrance, or had faded in the impersonal past; but it is better to give my words time to come to his ears, perhaps, by some long and unlikely road. [. . .] When we were all schoolboys we used to discuss whatever we could find to read of mystical philosophy and to pass crystals over each others’ hands and eyes and to fancy that we could feel a breath flowing from them as people did in a certain German book; and one day somebody told us he had met a Brahmin in London who knew more of these things than any book. With a courage which I still admire, we wrote and asked him to come and teach us, and he came with a little bag in his hand and Marius the Epicurean in his pocket, and stayed with one of us, who gave him a plate of rice and an apple every day at two o’clock; and for a week and all day long unfolded what seemed to be all wisdom. He sat there beautiful, as only an Eastern is beautiful, making little DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-57

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Kanva on Himself

gestures with his delicate hands, and to him alone among all the talkers I have heard, oratory, and even the delight of ordered words, seemed nothing, and all thought a flight into the heart of truth. WBY goes on to give an account of Chatterjee’s discussions with his new Dublin disciples: We brought him, on the evening of his coming, to a certain club which still discusses everything with that leisure which is the compensation of unsuccessful countries; and there he overthrew or awed into silence whatever metaphysics the town had. And next day, when we would have complimented him, he was remorseful, for it was an ‘intellectual lust’. And sometimes he would go back over something he had said and explain to us that his argument had been a fallacy, and apologise as though he had offended against good manners. And once when we asked him about some matters of fact he told us what he seemed to remember, but asked us not to give much weight to his words, for he had found that he observed carelessly. He said, ‘We Easterns are taught to state a principle carefully, but we are not taught to observe and to remember and to state a fact carefully. Our sense of what truthfulness is is quite different from yours.’ His principles were a part of his being, while our facts, though he was too polite to say it, were doubtless a part of that bodily life, which is the one error. [. . .] Somebody asked him if we should pray, but even prayer seemed to him too full of hope, of desire, of life, to have any part in that acquiescence that was his beginning of wisdom, for he said, one should say before sleeping: – ‘I have lived many lives. It may be that I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knees, and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.’ Beautiful words, that I spoilt once by turning into clumsy verses. After giving a number of instances of Chatterjee’s philosophical turns on common questions in the Western philosophical tradition, WBY concluded: And I  remember these phrases and these little fragments of argument quite clearly, for their charm and their unexpectedness had made them cling to the memory; but when I try to remember his philosophy as a whole I cannot separate it from what I myself have built about it, or have gathered in the great ruined house of ‘the prophetic books’ of William Blake; but it seemed then that he taught us by what seemed an invincible logic that those who die, in so far as they have imagined beauty or justice, are made a part of beauty and justice, as, indeed, Shelley believed, and move through the minds of living men; and that mind continually overshadows mind even among living men, and by pathways that lie beyond the senses; and that he measured all our labours by this measure, and put the hermit above all other labourers, because, being the most silent and the most hidden, he lived nearer to the Eternal Powers, and showed their mastery of the world.



Kanva on Himself

405

Alcibiades fled from Socrates lest he might do nothing but listen to him all his life, and certainly there were few among us who did not think that to listen to this man who threw the enchantment of power about silent and gentle things, and at last to think as he did, was the one thing worth doing; and that all action and all words that lead to action were a little vulgar, a little trivial; nor am I quite certain that any among us has quite awoke out of the dreams he brought among us. (WBY revised his 1900 essay as ‘The Pathway’ for Vol. 4 of CWVP08; this is repr. in CW 4, 289–294.) Textual and publication history. A  single draft survives for this poem, in ink on a folded sheet of paper, NLI 30448 (MS). A transcription is in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 189. The poem was published in WO, but not collected by WBY thereafter. Copy-­text: WO.

N

ow wherefore hast thou tears innumerous?   Hast thou not known all sorrow and delight Wandering of yore in forests rumorous,   Beneath the flaming eyeballs of the night, 5 And as a slave been wakeful in the halls   Of Rajas and Marajas beyond number? Hast thou not ruled among the gilded walls?   Hast thou not known a Raja’s dreamless slumbers?

Title] [Kanva del.] Kauri Hymn to his [Soul del.] Spirit MS. Kanva is the name of a sage in a play by the fifth-­century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, Sankuntala, which WBY read in translation. 1.] My spirit, why art thou so troublous MS. WBY intends three syllables in the last word here, which he spells ‘troubelous’. innumerous] This word, meaning ‘without number, too numerous to be counted’ is classed by OED as ‘Now only poetical or rhetorical’. Here, cp. Milton, Paradise Lost VII, 455–6: ‘teemed at a birth  | Innumerous living creatures’; the word is in fact common in nineteenth-­century poetry. 4. rumorous] OED 1., ‘Making a (usually prolonged) resonant noise; sonorous, resounding’ is intended here. This rare word, and something of WBY’s context, are picked up by George Russell (AE), The Earth-­Breath

and Other Poems (1896), ‘Weariness’, 5–7: ‘Moving in a joyous trance, | We were like the forest glooms | Rumorous of old romance’. 6. Rajas] Indian kings or princes, the term later also used of lesser dignitaries. In WBY’s time, the spelling ‘Rajah’ was also common, and it is in this form that the poet would have encountered the word in e.g. R. Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810), VII, 68–9: ’the dread Rajah, terrible alike  | To men and gods’. Marajas] A highly uncommon spelling of ‘Maharajahs’ (doubtless prompted by ‘Rajas’: the spelling in WO is also that of WBY’s MS): another Indian title denoting high, and especially royal, rank. 7. gilded walls] WBY here gives a literal turn to Tennyson’s metaphor in ‘Aylmer’s Field’, 832–3: ‘painted ancestors  | Staring for ever from their gilded walls’.

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Kanva on Himself

Hast thou not sat of yore upon the knees 10   Of myriads of beloveds, and on thine Have not a myriad swayed below strange trees   In other lives? Hast thou not quaffed old wine By tables that were fallen into dust   Ere yonder palm commenced his thousand years? 15 Is not thy body but the garnered rust   Of ancient passions and of ancient fears? Then wherefore fear the usury of Time,   Or Death that cometh with the next life-­key? Nay, rise and flatter her with golden rhyme, 20   For as things were so shall things ever be.

8. a Raja’s] a joyous MS. 10, 11. myriads, myriad] WBY’s MS  spelling here (‘mirriods’, ‘mirriod’) may give some

indication of his sense of the sounds of these words.

57

ON MR. NET TLESHIP’S PICTURE AT THE ROYAL HIBERNIAN ACADEMY THE POEMS

Date of composition. It is likely that WBY composed this poem around Mar. 1886, when the painting which is its subject was on display in Dublin. Context and interpretation. The annual exhibition of new art at the Royal Hibernian Academy was the highlight of the year for Irish art lovers. The 1886 exhibition opened on 1 Mar., and attracted positive press notices for its mixture of contemporary Irish and British art. The Irish Times gave detailed accounts of the exhibition on several occasions during its run, but did not single out Nettleship’s Refuge (the critical hit of the show was ‘After Culloden: Rebel Hunting’ by the English artist John Seymour Lucas, a large oil painting where a blacksmith’s forge is burst upon by a group of redcoats: ‘Its imagination is grand, its faithfulness in the portraiture of incident, which is yet never obtruded, is infinite’ [The Irish Times, 26 Mar. 1886]). It was left to the Dublin University Review to enthuse over J.T. Nettleship’s painting of wild beasts caught in a forest fire, ‘Refuge’. It did so in terms that are very close, verbally and in other ways, to WBY’s poem of the following month (DUR, Mar. 1886): This is undoubtedly an impressive picture. On a rocky eminence, driven together in unexpected brotherhood by fear, we have a lion and a lioness, and with the air of one that feels itself in security, an antelope is crouched. The lioness has forgotten her fear in maternal solicitude, and with touching intentness is licking her cub. The cub meantime has scented out the antelope, and divines its natural prey. Beyond the lioness a lynx catches, with pricked ears, the flutterings of a bird. All over dominates the central form of the king of beasts. He stands with tail outstretched and head laid low, the saliva drops from his mouth, and he is roaring – not as when he shakes the forest – but a low musical roar at once of defiance or despair. Beyond the rolling fire and smoke we see a glimpse of serene sky, in which is just visible the crescent moon in its first quarter. Either this was written by WBY or his poem is an act of plagiarism, and given that the place of publication is the same, and that the poet was later in correspondence to defend the idea of the painted lion possessing a ‘low musical roar’ (see note to 7–9), the former of these possibilities is overwhelmingly the more likely. The poem itself gives Nettleship’s painting a quasi-­symbolic interpretation, though this is one which feels DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-58

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On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture

strained – and which indeed subjects the closing lines to the kind of strain from which aesthetic recovery is impossible. A  modern account of the poem by E.B. Loiseaux is unsparing, but not critically inaccurate (40): The poem, carefully surveying the depicted scene, provides the visual details (the sickle of the moon, the soft cub, the dewdrop on the blade of grass) and places them in their appropriate spatial relation (yonder, here, above). Aware even while writing the poem that such inventory is limited as poetry, Yeats tried to move beyond description by glossing the painting’s meaning. Yet no poetic transcendence is forthcoming, and the poem’s attempt in the final five lines to reveal the painting’s apocalyptic significance seems a last-­ditch effort. A less symbolically loaded description of the painting than WBY’s was given when it had been on display in London the previous year (The Academy, 4 Apr. 1885): Mr. Nettleship, the animal painter, will be represented at the Grosvenor by two pictures. One of these, which is the largest canvas the artist has yet attempted, will call to remembrance his famous blind lion of two years ago. It is entitled, ‘In the midst of the fire, and they felt no hurt.’ On an island of rock, rising from out a forest on fire, a group of wild beasts have taken refuge – among them a lion still defiant, a lioness licking her rescued cub, and a deer huddling in paralysis of fear against the lioness. The flames are only to be inferred from the red reflection on the animals and on the background, where wreathes of dusky smoke, blasted tree trunks, and a towering precipice are seen confusedly beneath a crescent moon. The other picture is a life-­study of a brown bear. This is probably a much fairer account of the canvas than anything in the DUR. The painting itself is now untraced (and the line sketch which appeared alongside the DUR account of it in Mar. 1886 is not overly informative about its quality), but a sense of the general effect can be had from Nettleship’s second attempt at the theme, a few years later: the oil painting ‘The Forest Fire’ (1899) employed many of the same elements, but without the lion, now giving pride of place to the lioness and her cub (sold at auction by Christie’s London, 6 Oct. 2009). It is fair to say that Nettleship’s rather lurid and melodramatic ways with ill-­assorted zoo animals are harder to appreciate now than they were at the time of his commercial peak. WBY’s poem was probably done briskly; but the poet thought well enough of it to include it in WO, so it cannot be dismissed as a rushed job done for the occasion and then discarded. The blank verse is not of WBY’s best, and the poem’s handling of pictorial details is (as Loiseaux says) flatly enumerative and uninspired. Wanting to find more symbolic weight in Nettleship’s canvas than it actually bears (and perhaps to see more worth in the artist than he really had – see below), the poet is driven to empty, orotund phrase-making about ‘the outer Law’ and ‘the inner living heart’, making little sense (if any), and ending with an appeal to the ‘will’ of ‘the Eternal’. It remains hard to see how WBY could have found much here a matter of satisfaction; but that he did so (for a time)



On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture

409

is a fact with some critical significance. Perhaps the poem is part of a wider attempt by WBY in 1886 to find his own feet in an art that could be symbolic, in the tradition of Blake (who lurked far back in Nettleship’s artistic back-­story, as in those of E.J. Ellis and JBY), while conveying vivid imagery of real things in extreme situations. The poem has to be understood as a statement of ambition, and a (somewhat desperate) casting about for artistic precedent. It is a very long way from any kind of success. ‘Mr. Nettleship’ and WBY. John Trivett Nettleship (1841–1902) was a friend of JBY’s and E. J. Ellis’s in London and a member of their circle of painters calling themselves ‘the Brotherhood’. Nettleship was the brother of the classicist Henry Nettleship and of the philosopher Richard Lewis Nettleship. As a young artist, he had a strong admiration (like JBY and Ellis) for William Blake’s symbolic art, and he was closely associated with pre-­ Raphaelite figures, especially D.G. Rossetti. A lifelong admirer of Browning, he was the author of Essays on Robert Browning’s Poetry (1868, with expanded editions thereafter). WBY’s relationship with Nettleship was primarily a family one, since it depended entirely upon his father and was thus coloured heavily by JBY’s memories, perceptions, and judgements. JBY had known Nettleship since he studied alongside him at Heatherley’s art school and was well aware of his reputation there as an intellectual. However, as W.M. Murphy puts it, ‘Nettleship had the gift, common to religious revivalists and cult leaders, of seeming not to reveal his mind fully, possibly because he himself wasn’t sure what was in it, possibly because there was nothing more to reveal’ (Murphy, 61). A reputation for profundity – which Nettleship seems to have cultivated both within and beyond ‘The Brotherhood’ in the 1870s – was one of the things which the young WBY knew about his father’s friend and associate. By 1886, this was a reputation under a certain amount of strain; but WBY was determined to maintain it in his reception of ‘Refuge’ – perhaps absurdly so. What is more, that determination appears to have carried through to at least 1887, when the young writer made it his business to write appreciative criticism on Nettleship (never published, and now lost). As late as 1899, WBY was anonymously contributing short paragraphs on Nettleship to the Manchester Courier and Lancashire Evening Advertiser. A great deal was to change. In ‘Four Years,’ Book I of The Trembling of the Veil (1921), WBY wrote at some length about Nettleship. It is worth noting how completely by this stage the poet has come to regard Nettleship as someone who has failed in his artistic vocation by never living up to the promise of his early Blakean phase (in this respect, he is being put in explicit parallel with Ellis, and implicitly with JBY himself). WBY remembers how ‘I hated his big lion pictures,’ which seems very much at odds with the enthusiasm of his 1886 poem – a piece that goes wholly unmentioned here (CW 3 141–143): I attempted to restore one old friend of my father’s to the practice of his youth, but failed, though he, unlike my father, had not changed his belief. My father brought me to dine at Wigmore Street with Jack Nettleship, once inventor of imaginative designs and now a painter of melodramatic lions. At dinner I had talked a great deal – too much, I imagine, for so young a man, or maybe for any man – and on the way home my father, who had been plainly anxious that I should make a good impression, was very angry. He said I had talked for effect and that talking for effect was precisely what one must never do; he had always

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On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture

hated rhetoric and emphasis and had made me hate it; and his anger plunged me into great dejection. I called at Nettleship’s studio the next day to apologize, and Nettleship opened the door himself and received me with enthusiasm. He had explained to some woman guest that I would probably talk well, being an Irishman, but the reality had surpassed, etc., etc. I was not flattered, though relieved at not having to apologize, for I soon discovered that what he really admired was my volubility, for he himself was very silent. He seemed about sixty, had a bald head, a grey beard, and a nose, as one of my father’s friends used to say, like an opera-­glass, and sipped cocoa all the afternoon and evening from an enormous tea-­cup that must have been designed for him alone, not caring how cold the cocoa grew. Years before he had been thrown from his horse, while hunting, and broke his arm, and because it had been badly set suffered great pain for a long time. A little whiskey would always stop the pain, and soon a little became a great deal and he found himself a drunkard, but having signed his liberty away for certain months he was completely cured. He had acquired, however, the need of some liquid which he could sip constantly. I brought him an admiration settled in early boyhood, for my father had always said, ‘George Wilson was our born painter, but Nettleship our genius’, and even had he shown me nothing I  could care for, I  had admired him still because my admiration was in my bones. He showed me his early designs, and they, though often badly drawn, fulfilled my hopes. Something of Blake they certainly did show, but had in place of Blake’s joyous, intellectual energy a Saturnian passion and melancholy. God Creating Evil, the deathlike head with a woman and a tiger coming from the forehead, which Rossetti  – or was it Browning?  – had described as ‘the most sublime conception of ancient or modern art’, had been lost, but there was another version of the same thought, and other designs never published or exhibited. They rise before me even now in meditation, especially a blind Titan-­ like ghost floating with groping hands above the tree-­tops. I wrote a criticism, and arranged for reproductions with the editor of an art magazine, but after it was written and accepted the proprietor, lifting what I considered an obsequious caw in the Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran, Bastien-­Lepage rookery, insisted upon its rejection. Nettleship did not mind its rejection, saying, ‘Who cares for such things now? Not ten people’, but he did mind my refusal to show him what I had written. Though what I had written was all eulogy, I dreaded his judgment, for it was my first art criticism. I hated his big lion pictures, where he attempted an art too much concerned with the sense of touch, with the softness or roughness, the minutely observed irregularity of surfaces, for his genius; and I think he knew it. ‘Rossetti used to call my pictures pot-­boilers’, he said, ‘but they are all – all’ – and he waved his arm to the canvases – ‘symbols’. When I wanted him to design gods, and angels, and lost spirits once more, he always came back to the point: ‘Nobody would be pleased’. ‘Everybody should have a raison d’être’ was one of his phrases. ‘Mrs. – ’s articles are not good but they are her raison d’être.’ I had but little knowledge of art, for there was little scholarship in the Dublin art schools, so I overrated the quality of anything that could be connected with my



On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture

411

general beliefs about the world. If I had been able to give angelical or diabolical names to his lions I might have liked them also and I think that Nettleship himself would have liked them better and liking them better have become a better painter. We had the same kind of religious feeling, but I could give a crude philosophical expression to mine while he could only express his in action or with brush and pencil. He often told me of certain ascetic ambitions, very much like my own, for he had kept all the moral ambition of youth, as for instance – ‘Yeats, the other night I was arrested by a policeman – was walking round Regent’s Park barefooted to keep the flesh under – good sort of thing to do. I was carrying my boots in my hand and he thought I was a burglar and even when I explained and gave him half-­a-­crown, he would not let me go till I had promised to put on my boots before I met the next policeman.’ He was very proud and shy and I  could not imagine anybody asking him questions and so I was content to take these stories as they came: confirmations of what I had heard of him in boyhood. One story heard in boyhood had stirred my imagination particularly, for, ashamed all my boyhood of my lack of physical courage, I admired what was beyond my imitation. He thought that any weakness, even a weakness of body, had the character of sin, and while at breakfast with his brother, with whom he shared a room on the third floor of a corner house, he said that his nerves were out of order. Presently he left the table, and got out through the window and on to a stone ledge that ran along the wall under the windowsills. He sidled along the ledge, and turning the corner with it, got in at a different window and returned to the table. ‘My nerves’, he said, ‘are better than I thought.’ Nettleship said to me, ‘Has Edwin Ellis ever said anything about the effect of drink upon my genius?’ ‘No’, I answered. ‘I ask’, he said, ‘because I have always thought that Ellis has some strange medical insight.’ Though I had answered ‘No’, Ellis had only a few days before used these words: ‘Nettleship drank his genius away’. By this stage, Nettleship has become closely involved in WBY’s memory with the other figure of the London ‘Brotherhood’, E.J. Ellis, but as a fellow underachiever, if not the outright betrayer of early genius and insight. The third figure, who receives not a word in this context, is of course JBY. The poet’s adolescent determination to admire a contemporary and associate of his father is one that is almost quixotically in excess of the available facts. As for Nettleship himself, WBY’s admiration of him, like his disappointment in him, can have been of only limited interest. He did enjoy modest commercial success into the 1890s, though he never returned to his (supposed) early Blakean promise. In an interview from 1896, Nettleship remembered ‘The Refuge’ as being painted shortly after 1883; the whole interview shows an artist very much at ease with his status as an established painter of wild animals and someone who has successfully cornered a market (of his pastels, e.g., he remarks that ‘I have done over two hundred in the last five years, and they sell like hot cakes’). As to his inspiration, when asked ‘And how do you create your pathetic and bloodthirsty ideas? Surely some of the scenes are taken from life?’,

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‘ “No; they are entirely from my own imagination,” replied the artist, with an amused smile. “I can get my lions to do absolutely anything” ’ (R. Compton, ‘Amongst the Lions: A Chat with Mr. J.T. Nettleship’, The Idler: An Illustrated Magazine Oct. 1896). In terms of his artistic achievement, the best that could be said for Nettleship was said in an obituary notice (The Magazine of Art, Jan. 1903): His pictures from the beginning of his career as an exhibitor have always been marked by qualities which are only found in the work of men who take an unusual view of their professional responsibilities – who prefer, indeed, to keep aloof from accepted conventions, and to decide for themselves without reference to precedent. There is clear evidence of his independence in the fact that in attaching himself to the small company of animal painters he did not choose the more popular class of subjects in which other artists had made successes. He did not, that is to say, paint pictures which represented animals as actors in some human drama, or as affected by semi-­human emotions. He found the motives he wanted in study of the characteristics of the beasts themselves, and in representing their natural habits and actions. Moreover, he took as his models the animals which have not come under human domination, the larger beasts of prey, fierce and untameable; and he sought habitually to realise all their strenuous energy and ferocity. [. . .] He found nothing artificially interesting in the domestic animal deprived of all power and inclination to protest against the condition of subservience to which it has been reduced. This is perhaps something of a generous estimate. WBY came to agree, though, with the pithier verdict delivered in The Speaker, 5 Mar. 1892: ‘Mr. Nettleship is at his best when he stands most strictly within the precincts of the Zoo.’ Textual and publication history. The poem was published first in the Dublin University Review Apr. 1886 (DUR) and next in WO. WBY did not include it in any future collected edition of his work. Copy-­text: WO.

Y

onder the sickle of the moon sails on, But here the Lioness licks her soft cub

Title] For the painting by J.T. Nettleship, see headnote. The Royal Hibernian Academy, founded in 1823, was described in its second charter (1861) as being for ‘the better cultivation and advancement of the Fine Arts in Ireland’; it was housed and had exhibition space in Middle Abbey Street, Dublin. Exhibitions in the 1880s took place between Mar. and May each year:

daytime admission cost a shilling, with evening admission at the price of a penny. Attendance at this time was around 20,000 visitors per annum. 1. the sickle of the moon] Perhaps cp. S.T. Coleridge (trans.), Schiller Wallenstein (1829), V i 26–26: ‘the sickle of the moon, | Struggling, darts snatches of uncertain light’.



5 10 15

On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture

413

Tender and fearless on her funeral pyre; Above, saliva dripping from his jaws, The Lion, the world’s great solitary, bends Lowly the head of his magnificence And roars, mad with the touch of the unknown, Not as he shakes the forest; but a cry Low, long and musical. A dew-­drop hung Bright on the grass blade’s under side, might hear, Nor tremble to its fall. The fire sweeps round Re-­shining in his eyes. So ever moves The flaming circle of the outer Law, Nor heeds the old, dim protest and the cry The orb of the most inner living heart Gives forth. He, the Eternal, works His will.

4.] Not in DUR. This line matches the prose account of the painting in DUR the previous month (see headnote), but perhaps vanishes here because standards of good taste in poetry were held to be different from those in a prose piece. At any event, WBY reinstated the line for WO. 6. Lowly] Down low DUR. 7–9.] This conceit (which is carried directly from the Mar. 1886 prose account [see headnote]), evidently did not escape sceptical attention. In response to an unidentified correspondent on 11 Mar. 1887, WBY wrote (CL 1, 99): As to the lion and whether a roar may be musical or not I think all uncivilized beast sounds have a certain cadence in them  – Prose and discord are in the main modern

brain products not of the primeval world which had only a heart and no brain. A review of WO in the Evening Mail (13 Feb. 1889) also took issue with this leonine musicality. 9–11.] The dew-­drop image was to serve WBY again, in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), I, 41–42: ‘Her eyes were soft as dewdrops hanging | Upon the grass-­blades’ bending tips’. 12. Re-­shining] A  very unusual word: OED records it in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but this by WBY is one of only two nineteenth-­century instances. 16. works His will] WBY’s headlong plunge into piety here unsurprisingly hits a verbal precedent – cp. Isaac Williams, The Altar (1849), XXI ii, 5: ‘He works His will alike in weal or ruth’.

58

THE MEDITATION OF THE OLD FISHERMAN

THE POEMS

Date and circumstances of composition. The MS carries a date of ‘Jun. 1886’ in WBY’s hand. That summer WBY went to stay with George Pollexfen at Rosses Point, outside Sligo, having just left the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin; it is likely that the poem was composed at Rosses Point, with fishermen near at hand. In his note to the poem in P95 (and after), WBY wrote that ‘This poem is founded upon some things a fisherman said to me when out fishing in Sligo Bay’, and in EPS (1925) he claimed to have written the poem by adding ‘a few lines’ to ‘the words of a not very old fisherman at Rosses Point’. Reception and critical interpretation. The poem was mentioned favourably in some reviews of WO and occasionally in reviews of P95 (it was considered sufficiently interesting to be run in full in the New York Times for 26 Jul. 1896), but the nature of its modern critical reception has not been extensive. However, WBY’s work here is both original and technically assured – it is also interesting in the context of his later writings, in which old age and its attitude towards the present and the past were to be so significant. In one sense, the poem offers a minor anticipation of the three-­centuries-­old hero of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, since the Fisherman here is unreconciled to the world he inhabits, and contrasts it unfavourably with that of his youth. The Jun. weather of st. 1, and the cart transport of the herring catch of st. 2 are in touch with the everyday, though not jarringly so; but it is in st. 3 that WBY strikes what is to become a characteristic note, when his speaker compares a woman (or women – here he wavered in his choice of words) of the present day with those predecessors, ‘proud and apart, | Who paced in the eve the nets of the pebbly shore’ (10–11). The unusual choice of paced anticipates later evocations of stately and authoritative deportment for women in WBY’s writing, while ‘proud and apart’ similarly looks forward to the heroic solitude of later Yeatsian heroic and romantic figures. The distance between such high diction and the actual situation of the speaker is one that WBY establishes deliberately, and is part of the poem’s meaning: the Fisherman has access to something that may be in the past, but is still more potent than whatever is in the present. The gap between this and the more established approaches to such figures, where readers are given a projection of simple pathos, can be seen by comparing this with KT’s later ‘An Island Fisherman’ (Cuckoo Songs [1894]). KT is obviously engaged in an imitation of WBY’s poem, but in a wholly in a sentimental register, using the voice of a man whose daughter is lost to him by marriage (‘Ochone, the childher pass | An’ lave us to our grief, | The stranger took my little lass | At the fall o’ the leaf ’); her fisherman, unlike WBY’s, plays his situation for all the pathos it can yield (‘Ochone! My thoughts are wild; | But little blame I say; | An ould man hunderin’ for his child, | Fishin’ the livelong DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-59



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day’). WBY’s Fisherman may lament the state of present affairs, but he does not have any hint of helpless nostalgia: like Oisin, his memories of the past are the sources of a kind of present defiance and potency. Here (again, a feature that was to prove important for future poems by WBY) the repeated final line in each stanza has a crucial role to play. ‘When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart’ sounds (as it is intended to do) like a conventional folk phrase of retrospect; yet it is not one that figures anywhere in previous Irish fiction writing or local reportage, and in fact the poet is playing a brilliant variation on the cliché of a broken heart. For a heart with a crack in it is not necessarily a heart that has been broken; however distressed by the passing of time, it is still whole. The repetition of the line achieves (for the first time in WBY’s work, though not the last) a sense of undaunted continuity: the Old Fisherman is being faithful to something, and the definition of this something lies in the nature of his perceptions and their articulation. G. Bornstein (one of the very few modern critics who has had occasion to make mention of this poem) writes of ‘the changing manner of [WBY’s] frequent mourning of lost beauty and beauties’, remarking that ‘he learned to replace the early languid rhythm of these lines [9–10]’ (‘W.B. Yeats’s Poetry of Aging’, Sewanee Review 120/1 (Winter 2012), 47): but there is little that could be described as ‘languid’ in the rhythms of this poem, where the poet is finding energy in the shapes and dynamics of his long lines, avoiding entirely the smooth metrical arrangement that would have attached to them in the hands of established poets. (By the same token, he is breaking away entirely in rhythmic and metrical terms from the ballad effects that might more usually have been thought appropriate for this subject.) WBY’s repeated decision to keep the poem free of revisions after 1895 probably indicates a certain satisfaction with it, and the piece is one of his earliest fully achieved lyrics, with strong and productive links to his later work. Text and publication history. A single MS survives, NLI 30421: this is a one-­page ink draft on a single sheet, and it is given a diplomatic transcription in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 216. The poem was published first in the Irish Monthly, Oct. 1886 (IM), then in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888) (PBYI), and next in WO. It appeared with minor revisions in P95, in the ‘Crossways’ grouping of early poems, and was retained without further revision in all subsequent collected editions. Copy-­text: P49.

Y

ou waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play, Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart; In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay, When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.

1. You waves, though you dance by] Small waves, though ye [glance del.] dance ’fore MS; Ye waves, though ye dance ’fore my IM, PBYI, WO. children] childer MS.

2.] Though ye glimmer and glance, though ye purr and ye dart MS; Though ye glow and ye glance, though ye purr and ye dart IM, PBYI, WO.

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5

The herring are not in the tides as they were of old; My sorrow! for many a creak gave the creel in the cart That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold, When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.

10

And ah, you proud maiden, you are not so fair when his oar Is heard on the water, as they were, the proud and apart, Who paced in the eve by the nets on the pebbly shore, When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.

5.] The lines are not heavy, nor heavy the long nets brown MS, IM, PBYI, WO. 6.] Full many a crack had the osier creel on the cart MS. My sorrow! for many]; Ah woe! full many IM, PBYI; Ah me! full many WO. The change to ‘My sorrow!’ for P95 introduces an English translation of the Irish Mavrone (ma bhron), a term much used in the works of e.g. J.C. Mangan, William Allingham, A.P. Graves, and KT. WBY himself employs it later in ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan’. 7.] That carried the fish for the sale in the far-­ away town MS, IM, PBYI, WO. the take] The word here is of Scots origin: OED 3.a., ‘An act of taking or capturing an

animal, or (usually) a number of animals, esp. fish, at one time; the quantity so caught; a catch. Also occasionally: the activity or process of catching fish.’  Cp. A.P. Graves, Irish Songs and Ballads (1880), ‘Gragalmachree’, 2: ‘One day I went fishing, and the take was so good’. 9.] And ah ye proud maidens ye are not so fair when his oar MS, PBYI, WO; Proud maiden, ye are not so fair when his oar IM. 10. as they were] as they were IM, PBYI. 11. the pebbly shore] Perhaps cp. T.L. Beddoes, Poems (1851), ‘Death’s Jest-­Book’ I  i 101–2: ‘The wanton water leaps in sport | And rattles down the pebbly shore’.

59

THE FALLING OF THE LEAVES THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication history. In the one surviving MS  version (NLI 30422), WBY dates his poem ‘July 1886’. This is very plausible, since this single sheet of MS has on its other side ‘Meditation of the Old Fisherman’, which appeared in Oct. 1886 in the Irish Monthly. The first publication was in the Dublin periodical North and South for 26 Feb. 1887 (NS), where the title was ‘Ephemera’. The poem’s next appearance was in WO, and WBY retained it in all collected editions thereafter. Theme and form. The poem is voiced for one of a pair of parting lovers; its autumnal setting, along with its sense of the affliction which ‘our sad souls’ have in common, link it closely to ‘Ephemera’, a poem which also carried the early title of ‘An Autumn Idyll’. The two poems were always linked at the level of publication, and in NS the present poem even has the title ‘Ephemera’: in P95 and thereafter, they appear together in WBY’s running order. Given this, the fact that the 1886 MS title for ‘The Falling of the Leaves’ is ‘Ephemera’ may suggest that the longer poem had not been written by Jul. of that year (and probably not by the time of the NS publication in Feb. 1887); at any rate, there is a sense that the two poems’ titles are to some extent interchangeable, just as their themes and imagery are intertwined. ‘Ephemera’ may be a development of this shorter poem into a different form (meditative blank verse). Certainly, ‘The Falling of the Leaves’ is a lyrical poem in a conventional way, and much closer to music than the speech rhythms of its companion piece. In the fourth section (originally entitled ‘Music for Lyrics’) of his essay ‘Speaking to the Psaltery’ (1908), WBY wrote that ‘Sometimes one composes to a remembered air. I wrote and I still speak the verses that begin “Autumn is over the long leaves that love us” to some traditional air, though I could not tell that air or any other on another’s lips’ (CW 4, 17–18). Which air WBY was remembering (or rather, by 1908, forgetting) is unknown; but this short lyric, with its gently modulated triple rhythms, is in a general way indebted to the example of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, and there may even be a recollection of Moore in the phrasing of the poem itself (see below, and note to 8). Reception and interpretation. This poem seldom receives detailed critical attention. The most sustained close reading comes from F. Kinahan, who pays close attention to the lyric’s way with colours, and asks: ‘It is evident that the lovers in question still feel a tenderness for each other: why, then, must they part?’ Kinahan contends that the poem ‘manages to beguile the reader into believing that the parting of the lovers is a given [. . .] Thus does the poem neutralize the temptation to inquire why the lovers must bid one another farewell,’ since ‘The asking of that question becomes tantamount to asking DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-60

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The Falling of the Leaves

why the seasons change’ (Kinahan, 205–6). H. Adams reads the implied drama here differently, and has less time for the poet’s mastery of this particular kind of romantic verse (41): The poem hides the poet in a mannered technique, the rolling rhythm and alliteration having the effect of distance. We sense that stealth is necessary to him, even as he appears to speak out. The mood is the familiar romantic agony, the sort of love poem better not sent, the message being that the lovers should part at the height of their passion, before its inevitable waning. Since the moment will not stay, sudden annihilation is preferable to slow decay. Yet the effort to construct a dramatic situation within this short poem may be in some ways misplaced: more important is the poem’s generic positioning, and this is within the tradition of melodious lyrical melancholy which was firmly associated with the poems of Thomas Moore. It is fair to say this this is a tradition which WBY never praises at any stage, and which on occasion he deplores – the question for a critic, then, is why he chooses to inhabit it here. On a mundane (but nevertheless relevant) level, it is worth remembering that this was – along with the very different but equally commercial ‘Song of Spanish Insurgents’ – a poem that WBY was able to sell to NS. Beyond this, it is possible to see in the poem an engagement on a generic level – which is not one habitually occupied by WBY as an emerging poet – with themes that had been important to his poetry for some time already. The parting of lovers had been explored as a motif most fully in ‘Love’s Decay’ (1884) and it is central to the near-­twin poem to this one, ‘Ephemera’ (perhaps a rewriting of ‘Love’s Decay’): in these cases, the romantic sadness seems intended to carry quasi-­metaphysical implications (and in ‘Ephemera’ these concern theosophical notions of reincarnation, amongst other things). The drawing-­room lyric has no space for such abstruse conceptions, but they are touched on very indirectly by WBY’s imagery of fallen leaves. This establishes – for the poet himself, though not for any readership at the time – a point of contact with ‘Ephemera’ and ‘Love’s Decay’, and also with the closing tableau of ‘The Seeker’ where the Knight sees how ‘Around my beard in drifts | Lie strewn the yellow leaves – the clotted leaves’ (67–8). The ironic end to romantic quest in that poem is refigured in this one, even though such a thing could hardly be said to be a part of the poem’s proffered meaning. That meaning is, in a way, slight; and it is true to say that for the poem technique is a more important matter. Even the technique, though, is something with a level of meaning, for WBY both inhabits Moore’s poetic idiom and surpasses it: where Moore’s slight mysteries resolve themselves in sentiment, this poem’s sentiment is resolved into a mystery that neither of the lovers can quite comprehend. The result – which perhaps in a way slights Moore – is that the poem feels anything but slight.



The Falling of the Leaves

419

Copy-­text: P49.

A

utumn is over the long leaves that love us, And over the mice in the barley sheaves; Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us, And yellow the wet wild-­strawberry leaves.

5

The hour of the waning of love has beset us, And weary and worn are our sad souls now; Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us, With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.

Title 1895] Ephemera MS, NS; Falling of the Leaves WO. 1. the long leaves] This simple phrase is, in fact, rare in poetry, but makes relatively common appearances in the work of W. Morris, e.g. The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘January’: ‘Bellerophon at Argos’, 89: ‘nought but the long leaves green’; The Life and Death of Jason (1867) X, 327–9: ‘on their heads fell down | The uncapped acorn, and the long leaves brown, | For on that land the sad mid-­autumn lay’; Sigurd the Volsung (1876) III, 1202: ‘Why are the long leaves drooping, and the fair wind hushed o’erhead?’ 2.] And the mice as they dance in the barley sheaves MS. 3. leaves of the rowan] rowen NS. Perhaps cp. R.D. Joyce, Ballads of Irish Chivalry (1872), ‘Ballad of Earl Gerald and his Bride’, 13–16: A fierce wind shaketh every forest bough Save the light branches of the rowan-­tree That shadows o’er their trysting-­ place; and there No light leaf trembles in the troublous air. Charles Johnston, WBY’s friend at the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin (which he attended from autumn 1881 until the end of 1883), cites these leaves in his 1906 memoir ‘Yeats in the Making’ (published in the Boston periodical Poet Lore): ‘To these days of wandering and study he owes the wonderful nature touches that fill his poems . . . I think I could point out the very rowan trees, with their

fringed, delicate leaves, by a roadside near the Dublin mountains, that gave him this image.’ Johnston returned to this when quoting the lines a couple of years later: ‘I think of a long avenue leading up to the Dublin hills, whither we used to wander on school holidays, and where we once watched a red squirrel among the redder rowan berries’ (‘The Poems of W.B. Yeats’, The North American Review, Apr. 1908). 4. wet wild-­strawberry] wet, wild strawberry NS. 8. a kiss and a tear] Cp. (in a much different context) the amorous sentimentality of Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1812), ‘Fanny of Timmol: A Mail-­Coach Adventure’, 37–40: In vain did I whisper ‘There’s nobody nigh;’ In vain with the tremors of passion implore; Your excuse was a kiss, and a tear your reply – I acknowledg’d them both, and I ask’d for no more. Moore’s metre resembles that of WBY’s poem, and while there may well be no specific recollection here, ‘The Falling of the Leaves’ does have a rhythmic movement (triple rhythm, sometimes dactylic and sometimes anapaestic) which is common in Moore’s lyrics. Of this second stanza, T.R. Henn observed ruefully that ‘Sometimes the manner is nearer to Moore than to [William] Morris, even to the clichés’ (Henn, 52). drooping brow] A Victorian commonplace, e.g. John Keble, Lyra Innocentium (1862), ‘Shyness’, 11: ‘The lowly drooping brow, the stammering tongue’.

60

THE STOLEN CHILD

THE POEMS

Date of composition. There is no firm evidence for dating: this is one of the ‘Crossways’ poems in P95 left undated by the poet, and WBY’s earliest extant reference to the poem is in a letter of Oct. 1887 (CL 1, 40), ten months after its first publication. WBY gave work to The Irish Monthly relatively soon after completion: ‘Meditation of the Old Fisherman’, composed in Jun., appeared in the Oct. 1886 issue; and in Oct. WBY began Part I of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, working in that and the following month on his second Dublin University Review article on Sir Samuel Ferguson and the first part of his study of R.D. Joyce for The Irish Fireside: it is reasonable to assume that ‘The Stolen Child’ was not started in the midst of these commitments. It is plausible, then, that was composed in the summer or autumn of 1886. Context. WBY’s headnote to the ‘Changelings’ section in FFTIP gives one context for the poem (CW 6, 12–13): Sometimes the fairies fancy mortals, and carry them away into their own country, leaving instead some sickly fairy child, or a log of wood so bewitched that it seems to be a mortal pining away, and dying, and being buried. Most commonly they steal children. If you ‘over look a child’, that is look on it with envy, the fairies have it in their power. Many things can be done to find out in a child, a changeling, but there is one infallible thing – lay it on the fire with this formula, ‘Burn, burn, burn – if the devil, burn; but if of God and the saints, be safe from harm’ (given by Lady Wilde). Then if it be a changeling it will rush up the chimney with a cry, for, according to Giraldus Cambrensis, ‘fire is the greatest of enemies to every sort of phantom, in so much that those who have seen apparitions fall into a swoon as soon as they are sensible of the brightness of fire.’ Sometimes the creature is got rid of in a more gentle way. It is on record that once when a mother was leaning over a wizened changeling the latch lifted and a fairy came in, carrying home again the wholesome stolen baby. ‘It was the others,’ she said, ‘who stole it.’ As for her, she wanted her own child. Those who are carried away are happy, according to some accounts, having plenty of good living and music and mirth. Others say, however, that they are continually longing for their earthly friends. Lady Wilde gives a gloomy tradition that there are two kinds of fairies – one kind merry and gentle, the other evil, and sacrificing every year a life to Satan, for which purpose they steal mortals. No other Irish writer gives this tradition – if such fairies there be, they must be among the solitary spirits – Pookas, Fir Darrigs, and the like. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-61



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Introducing the poem itself later in this book, WBY writes (CW 6, 196): The places mentioned here are round about Sligo. Further Rosses is a very noted fairy locality. There is here a little point of rocks where, if anyone falls asleep, there is danger of their waking silly, the fairies having carried off their souls. As may be seen from this, WBY was well aware of the extensive context of ‘kidnapping’ stories, where the fairies make away with a mortal child; he was to return to the genre often in his writings on Irish folklore and myth. This poem, though, is his earliest wholehearted engagement with the abduction story tradition in verse. The location in Sligo means that the poem is intimately associated with WBY himself, and his own childhood (though there is a significant literary precedent in W. Allingham’s work: see note to 15). However, since this is the locale of WBY’s childhood memories, it is not entirely irrelevant to consider that one such memory was of the death of his infant brother, Robert Corbet Yeats (Bobbie), which took place in Sligo on 3 Mar. 1873, just before the child’s third birthday, and when WBY himself was seven years old. The recollection of this composed in 1914 for Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1916) bears an oblique (but perhaps important) relation to the much earlier poem (CW 3, 55): My realization of death came when my father and mother and my two brothers and my two sisters were on a visit [to Sligo, where the young WBY was living with his Pollexfen grandparents]. I was in the library when I heard feet running past and heard somebody say in the passage that my younger brother, Robert, had died. He had been ill for some days. A little later my sister and I sat at the table, very happy, drawing ships with their flags half-­mast high. We must have heard or seen that the ships in the harbour had their flags at half-­mast. Next day at breakfast I heard people telling how my mother and the servant had heard the banshee crying the night before he died. It must have been after this that I told my grandmother I did not want to go with her when she went to see old bed-­ridden people because they would soon die. This ‘realization of death’ is not a memory of grief – or of WBY’s grief, at least; instead, it comes close to a memory of a sudden disappearance that can still leave the young siblings capable of being ‘very happy’ in their play. At the same time, it is followed by the story of the adults’ hearing of the banshee – the supernatural harbinger of family deaths – which places the uncanny side by side with the everyday. The result of all this is an aversion on the part of the child WBY to the visible mortality of the old: not so much a wish for eternal youth as a belief (there and then) in its reality. That WBY himself is a child living apart from his immediate family – not ‘stolen’, but happily enough separated from them – adds another layer of complexity to this already involved series of recollections. The immediate world of the Pollexfen house in Sligo in Mar. 1873 is indeed fuller of weeping than either WBY or his younger sister can understand. W.M. Murphy quotes SMY in a letter to WBY of 1922 recalling Bobbie as ‘red-­haired and dark-­eyed’ (Murphy, 84): whether or not this connects with the description of the child in the poem

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as ‘solemn-­eyed’ (43), the detail of the infant’s red hair may well link him to folk superstitions about red-­headedness and supernatural affinities, about which the adult WBY was well-­informed, and which would have been present to some extent amongst the wider circle of the Sligo household. SMY wrote in 1942 to J. Hone about the death of Bobbie, and told him how she and WBY had woken in the night to hear their mother crying out ‘My little son, my little son’. The effect of the loss on WBY’s mother was much more momentous than anything the children could appreciate or imagine: as R. Foster says, ‘Susan Yeats, who thought she heard the banshee cry before her child died, was probably precipitated by the loss into the depression from which she never really returned’ (Foster 1, 21). Certainly, WBY’s later work (especially his writings about Irish folklore) suggest that his mother’s long and painful withdrawal from normal life struck him as being analogous to the stories of fairy abduction which he retold and listed (see D. Toomey’s wide-­ranging essay, ‘Away’, Yeats and Women, 135–167). Much closer to the time of these childhood events, ‘The Stolen Child’ provides a fully worked-­through mythic/folkloric exploration of the fairy world in which death is forever postponed – though at the cost of permanent abduction. Alongside these elements of biographical context – or rather, perhaps, standing so largely in front of them as to make them obscure  – the literary situation of the poem is one which rendered it highly commercial and popular over a number of years. It seems clear that WBY is writing at this point in his career with an eye to the market and to the popular appetite for ‘fairy’ material; he has not as yet become so deeply involved in the quasi-­anthropological interpretations of myth that would later give impetus to his poetry and prose on supernatural subjects. WBY’s own view of the poem, in the run-­up to the publication of WO, has been much noticed by critics. Writing to KT on 14 Mar. 1888, the poet reflected (CL 1, 54–55): I have noticed some things about my poetry, I did not know before, in this process of correction, for instance that it is almost all a flight into fairy land, from the real world, and a summons to that flight. The chorus to the ‘stolen child’ sums it up – That it is not the poetry of insight and knowledge but of longing and complaint – the cry of the heart against necessity. I hope some day to alter that and write poetry of insight and knowledge. Reception and interpretation. The poem was evidently a quick success, and it attracted positive comment in print from an early stage. For J. Todhunter, the poem was one of those that showed a ‘spontaneous singing quality so rare in our self-­conscious modern verse,’ though it remained no more for all this than ‘a charming little poem’ (The Academy, 30 Mar. 1899). There was a persistent tendency for admiration to bypass critical attention, and an interesting appeal to the poem’s supposed simplicity is made in the course of J.M. Hepburn’s otherwise bold discussion of WBY’s early affinities of poetic technique (Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1896): But, wisely as we think, [WBY] has not gone for his models to Erse or Gaelic poetry, nor has he attempted to interweave any Celtic conventions or idioms with the fabric of his rhythm and metre. On the contrary, we should conjecture



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that the chief objects of his admiration have been Lord Tennyson, Mr Swinburne, and Mr Rossetti, the traces of whose influence, though not obtrusive, are palpable enough in his versification. As for his material, he has drawn almost exclusively upon the inexhaustible stock of Irish tradition and legend; and he has imparted to it a fresh beauty, and armed it with a new and potent spell: [quotes from ‘The Stolen Child’.] Does not that captivate and enchant? Does not the music of it haunt the mind and keep ringing in the ears? WBY’s metrical resources here may be deeper (and less derivative) than Hepburn supposed; but the experience that is being reported is essentially that of prosodic innovation, of the kind so successful that it hardly feels new at all. Others shared the sense that this poem was unthreateningly fanciful and enjoyable: ‘Where is there a daintier melancholy than the song of the faeries to the stolen child?’ asked D.M. Jones in The London Quarterly Review (Jul. 1900), while in 1915, F. Reid acclaimed the poem as ‘to my mind as beautiful a lyric as [WBY] ever wrote, as beautiful as any to be found in even the golden age of English poetry’ (Reid, 21). Eventually, the poem’s degree of innovation came into clearer view. R. Lynd quoted the last stanza and pointed out that ‘There is no painting here, no adjective-­work’ and instead a ‘brief collection of simple things’: ‘To read ‘The Stolen Child’ is to realize both that Mr. Yeats brought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius had its birth in a sense of the beauty of common things’ (Old and New Masters [1919]). Inevitably, the pace of innovation in WBY’s later work meant that this was one of those popular poems which tended to be subject to some over-­simplification in modern criticism of the poet. Darker elements in the poem have been noticed, however. The fullest modern reading is given by F. Kinahan, who argues (in relation to WBY’s 1888 letter to KT) that ‘Taken in isolation, the chorus to “The Stolen Child” may indeed fit its author’s description of it as a summons to flight’ and that this holds true of the whole poem up until the final stanza, since if the poem had not included these lines, it ‘would have been no more than a mellifluous nod in the direction of enchantment’. Kinahan views the fairies – with their (slightly later, for WBY) Irish appellation of the sidhe – as untrustworthy, and ‘notorious liars’: ‘Clearly, they are lying to the boy’ (60–61): The first three stanzas are addressed to him directly [. . .] and in these the fairies invite him to leave man’s woe behind and come and join the dance. But in the final stanza they are speaking, not to the boy [. . .] but among themselves, and therefore are speaking more candidly. Once the boy has made his decision to join them, their description of the ‘weeping’ world from which they are taking him undergoes a keen transformation [. . .] The world he inhabits, and from which he is about to be stolen, is a world of the warm hearthside, protective, marked by a glad domesticity. Out of context, the middle lines of the last stanza [44–47] describe a kind of dying. And a reading of them in context confirms them as the epitaph they are. This aspect of the poem (which may derive from biographical elements – see Context) is noticed also by H. Adams, who writes that ‘The faeries sing their song, and it is ominous’:

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‘Even as they entice the human child from the world, they capriciously lament that he will no longer enjoy things in that world’ (Adams, 43). The importance of the poem’s setting in and around Sligo, meanwhile, is insisted upon by N. Grene, who sees ‘The Stolen Child’ as ‘a key poem in Yeats’s appropriation of the local’, and observes how the named places, ‘surface sounds to a reader, were to Yeats depth-­charged with memory and meaning’ (Grene, 80, 82). In general terms, though, modern criticism is perhaps inclined to take the poem for granted as a ‘summons to flight’ and therefore (at some basic level) sentimental fantasy. Its musical subtlety – so much admired in the early years – is in fact part of the poem’s real complexity of effect: an allurement that is one towards death and deprivation, rather than imaginative or spiritual gain. A poem about the childhood landscape of Sligo is also one about a whole domestic world marked by loss, and the metrical intricacy displayed seems intended to present a parallel to this simultaneous celebration and elegy. The ‘summons to flight’ is also a notice to quit, and WBY constructs a poem which moves between verses with no fixed length or rhyme scheme, and quatrain refrains where rhythm moves into a triple, anapaestic-­like mode, followed unexpectedly by a long, broadly (though hardly mechanically) anapaestic, final line. The formal shape shifting is part of a larger sense of change where the substantial and insubstantial are played against one another. Textual and publication history. A three-­page draft in ink, which corresponds closely to the text as first published, is preserved in NLI 30478, and transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 183–184 (MS). The poem first appeared in The Irish Monthly, Dec. 1886 (IM), then in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888) (PBYI) and in the ‘Changelings’ section of the chapter ‘The Trooping Fairies’ in Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) (FFTIP), then WO, P95, and all collected editions thereafter. WBY sent a handwritten copy of the poem to Dr William Frazer (who had earlier commented on a draft of IoS) on 23 Jun. 1888, after the publication of PBYI: this follows the printed text very closely (see CL 1, 77–78 – this version omits a number of lines of the poem, which is transcribed fully in Early Poetry 2, 185–186).



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Copy-­text: P49.

W

here dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

Title] Cp. James Hogg, The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd (1876), ‘The Queen’s Wake’, 337–340: ‘Each glen was sought for tales of old, | Of luckless love, of warrior bold, | Of ravished maid, or stolen child | By freakish fairy of the wild’. WBY was to allow his title to resonate at the end of a paragraph in his article for the Theosophical Society’s journal, Lucifer, after the publication of WO in 1889 (CW 9, 78): ‘They [‘the sociable fairies’] steal children, and leave a withered fairy a thousand, or maybe two thousand years old, for the matter of that, instead. Two or three years ago a man wrote to one of the Irish papers, telling of a case in his own village, and how the parish priest made the fairies deliver up again the stolen child.’ It is possible that WBY also recalls some lines from The Faithful Shepherdess (?1609), a play by John Fletcher which influenced his own 1884 poetic drama IoS (I ii 99–104): For to that holy wood is consecrate A virtuous well, about whose flowery banks The nimble-­footed fairies dance their rounds By the pale moonshine, dipping oftentimes Their stolen children, so to make them free From dying flesh and dull mortality. 2. Sleuth Wood] Of Slewth MS; Slowth Wood PBYI; Slewth Wood, IM, WO, and editions of P95 until P01. A wood along the southern edge of Lough Gill in Co. Sligo, which continues close to Innisfree. In WBY’s youth, this was an oak wood (much of it was cleared in the mid-­twentieth century). The usual name for the wood is Slish Wood, from the Irish slios (steep, sloping), and this is how WBY refers to it in Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, in connection with his teenage ambition to live a Thoreau-­like life on Innisfree (CW 3, 85):

My father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree, and Innisfree was opposite Slish Wood where I meant to sleep. [. . .] I set out from Sligo about six in the evening, walking slowly, for it was an evening of great beauty; but though I  was well into Slish Wood by bedtime, I could not sleep, not from the discomfort of the dry rock I had chosen for my bed, but from my fear of the wood-­ranger. [. . .] However, I could watch my island in the early dawn and notice the order and the cries of the birds. It is not clear why WBY recast the commonly given name ‘Slish’ to ‘Sleuth’. Possibly, a clue is offered in his writings of a few years later (though here, naturally, there is the chance that the author is giving a rationale for his earlier chosen form of the word), when Slish Wood is associated with the ‘Sleuth Hound’: this Scottish term for a species of bloodhound would have been known to WBY from the works of e.g. W. Scott, whose Tales of a Grandfather (1828) mentions ‘These bloodhounds, or sleuth-­hounds’: in IoS II ii 244, the poet uses the term ‘sleuth-­hounds’. There is no evidence for the term being in use in and about Sligo at this time, however. In the first published version of his story ‘The Heart of the Spring’ (The National Observer, 15 Apr. 1893), WBY refers to ‘The woods of Slish away to the south,’ altering this in the version published in The Secret Rose (1897), to ‘The woods of the Sleuth Hound’ (changing this later still to the simple ‘Sleuth Wood’). It may be that, in time, the poet thought Slish Wood had been renamed (so to speak) by his own poem. N. Grene, noting that WBY ‘seems happy to use now one form of the name, now another’, suggests that here “Sleuth’ may have sounded stealthier’ (Grene, 82).

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5 10

There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water-­rats; There we’ve hid our faery vats Full of berries And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

15

Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim grey sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses

3. a leafy island] This could be one of many islands in Lough Gill, including Innisfree: Grene (81) suggests it is Slishwood Island East. 9–12., 24–27., 38–41., 50–53.] These refrain quatrains were not set in italics until P95 and remained in italics for all subsequent editions. 10. [and 25., 39., 51.] the waters and the wild] the woods and waters wild MS, IM, PBYI, WO. 13. glosses| The dim grey sands] Cp. R. Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer I  v. xxii: ‘The moonlight fell, glossing the sable tide’. 15. furthest Rosses] Rosses Point, Co. Sligo, was an important place for WBY, some of whose boyhood was spent there. The name of the seaside village is from the Irish Ros Cheide (‘promontory of the assembly’), and WBY spent time here during visits to his relatives in Sligo, often also staying at ‘Elsinore’, the house of Henry Middleton, by the sea at Rosses; later, he also spent time at the house here of his uncle George Pollexfen. ‘Furthest Rosses’ indicates the most northerly part of the promontory, known as Rinn Point (from the Irish An Rinn, ‘the point’), and the location of the third of the three beaches at Rosses: WBY’s FFYIP note (quoted earlier) refers to here, and in his chapter of The Celtic Twilight (1893), ‘Drumcliffe and Rosses’ (first published in The Scots Observer 5 Oct. 1889), the poet writes in more detail about this part of the area (M, 59):

At the northern corner of Rosses is a little promontory of sand and rocks and grass: a mournful, haunted place. Few countrymen would fall asleep under its low cliff, for he who sleeps here may wake ‘silly’, the Sidhe having carried off his soul. There is no more ready short-­cut to the dim kingdom than this plovery headland, for, covered and smothered now from sight by mounds of sand, a long cave goes thither ‘full of gold and silver, and the most beautiful parlours and drawing-­rooms’. WBY would have assumed that Rosses was familiar to poetry readers on account of William Allingham’s ‘The Faeries’, 23–4: ‘On his stately journeys | From Slieveleague to Rosses’ (though Allingham in fact intends another ‘Rosses’, in Co. Donegal, as WBY later discovered). In the 1889 Scots Observer piece, WBY began by quoting the stanza of Allingham’s poem containing these lines, which he calls ‘the sweet child-­verses’, noting that ‘As befits so delicate and precise a writer, Mr. Allingham has not used any loose poetic licence in the matter of fairy localities’ (M, 454): ‘Columkille’ and Rosses were, are, and ever shall be, please heaven! places of unearthly resort. I have lived near by them and in them, time after time, and, with the sweet child-­ verses ringing in my ears, have gathered any crumbs of fairy lore I could find therein[.]



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We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

30

Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-­Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star,

The further beaches at Rosses Point also offered WBY places of more earthly resort, as recorded in the 1916–17 MS ‘Autobiography’, where he reflects on how as a young man he was ‘tortured by sexual desire’ (Mem, 71): It began when I was fifteen years old. I had been bathing, and lay down in the sun on the sand on the Third Rosses and covered my body with sand. Presently the weight of the sand began to affect the organ of sex, though at first I  did not know what the strange, growing sensation was. 16. foot it] Cp. Ariel’s first song in Shakespeare, The Tempest, I ii 375–380: ‘Come unto these yellow sands, | And then take hands; | Curtsied when you have and kissed,  | The wild waves whist, | Foot it featly here and there, | And, sweet sprites, the burden bear’. The Shakespearean dimension of WBY’s fairies is matched in Standish James O’Grady’s meditation on the mythic foretimes of Irish history in his History of Ireland: The Heroic Period Vol. I (1878), where echoes of The Tempest abound: ‘The glare of bardic light fades away; the broad, firm highway is torn asunder and dispersed; even the narrow, doubtful track is not seen; we seem to foot it hesitatingly,

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anxiously, from stepping-­stone to stepping-­ stone set at long distances in some quaking Cimmerian waste’ (28). 28.-­29.] Glencar Lough is to the northeast of Sligo, at the foot of Ben Bulben on the county border with Leitrim; the waterfall referred to here is known as Glencar, and is about 15 metres high: its waters are often blown up and backwards against the cliff (its name in Irish being Sruth in naghaidh an Aird, ‘the stream against the cliff ’). This feature of the waterfall may prompt WBY’s ‘wandering water’ here. 28. wandering water] Cp. a scene in W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), XI 16–21: But looking up stream, the green river ran Unto their eyes, from out the mountain high, For ’twixt no pass could they behold the sky, Though at the mountain’s foot, far through the plain, They saw the wandering water shine again, Then vanish wholly. 31. scarce could bathe a star] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’, 59–60: ‘to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths | Of all the western stars, until I die’.

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35 40

We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

45 50

Away with us he’s going, The solemn-­eyed: He’ll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal-­chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

34.] We give them evil dreams MS, IM, PBYI, WO. 37.] Of dew on the young streams MS, IM, PBYI, WO. the young streams] Possibly cp. Alfred Austin, At the Gate of the Convent (1885), ‘Prelude’, 41–2: ‘My virgin sense of sound was steeped | In the music of young streams’. 38. Come, O human child MS, IM, WO Come! O, human child PBYI. 44.-­45.] Cp. the final stanza of J.C. Mangan’s ‘The Fair Hills of Eire, O!’:

A fruitful clime is Eirè, through valley, meadow, plain, And the fair hills of Eirè, O! The very bread of life is in the yellow grain On the fair hills of Eirè, O! Far dearer unto me than the tones music yields Is the lowing of the kine and the calves in her fields, In the sunlight that shone long ago on the shields Of the Gaels, on the fair hills of Eirè, O!

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TO – (REMEMBRANCE)

THE POEMS

Date of composition. There is no evidence for an exact date when this poem was composed, but it is likely to have been written fairly close to the time of publication, in the spring or early summer of 1886. Textual and publication history. The textual fortunes of this poem are especially far-­ flung. The earliest text is almost certainly that published in The Irish Monthly, Jul. 1886. However, a different text came to light in the New York Evening Post of 31 Jan. 1921. Here, the poem is preceded by two sentences of introduction: Arthur Elder, in the kindness of his heart, gives us a lift with the following sonnet by one of the loveliest of modern poets. Mr. Elder has the original manuscript, and says it has never been published before: [the text of the poem follows] ‘Mr. Elder’ was in error about the poem never having been published before; but this was indeed a version which differed widely from that in The Irish Monthly thirty-­five years earlier. The 1921 text itself dropped into total obscurity for another fifty years, until K.P.S. Jochum’s republication of it in his ‘An Unknown Variant of an Early Yeats Poem’, Notes and Queries Nov. 1971, 420–421. There, Jochum added that ‘I have some doubts about the New York Evening Post version, since I have not been able to identify the mysterious Arthur Elder and to locate the manuscript’. The manuscript in question remains unlocated, but there is one MS source which lies close to the 1921 publication: this is in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and it has been transcribed in Cornell, Early Poetry 2, 333. On a card stamped with the name Arthur J. Elder, the poem is written out in ink – but this is not in the hand of WBY, and is likely to be in that of Elder himself (Yale). There are four points at which this MS differs from the 1921 printed version, but the likelihood is, even so, that this is what Elder gave to the paper at that time, having transcribed a MS in WBY’s hand that was in his possession. Elder’s identity need not remain ‘mysterious’, either: he is Arthur J. Elder (1874–1948), a painter and etcher who was born in London and was for a time a student of Walter Sickert’s and a member of the Chelsea Arts Club. He left England in 1905 for California and worked in various places in the United States, including a spell as the creator of aerial views (especially of college campuses), employed by the New York art firm W.T. Littig & Co. in 1921. Elder moved in some of the same circles as JBY (the diary of JBY’s artist friend John Sloan in 1906 records meeting Elder, ‘the English artist [. . .] This “chap” is not of the sort that interests me’), and it is entirely possible that he crossed paths with JBY in New York at DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-62

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some stage. WBY’s father was in the habit of giving scraps of MS material by his son to visitors, and it seems at least possible that he gave a piece of paper to Elder which carried this poem. Elder evidently approached the newspaper and succeeded in having the poem printed (JBY was still alive and in New York at this time, so this might perhaps have been with his permission). The genuine MS must have remained with Elder (and is now lost), while his transcription of it went to the newspaper. This hypothesis does not account for the four differences between the Yale card and the 1921 printed text; these, though, might result from misreadings of Elder’s hand, Elder’s misreadings of WBY’s hand, or a combination of both these things (see notes). Supposing that Elder received from JBY a MS of this poem, the question remains of whether it was older or more recent than the text which appeared in The Irish Monthly in 1886. Jochum’s stylistic analysis suggests convincingly that the 1921 text is a revision of the poem as first published; and his opinion that, while later, it is not very much later is also plausible. Certainly, WBY did not include the poem in WO, so any revisions to its text must have been things of the past by 1888 at least; and it seems likely that the revision was not any later than 1887: lines such as ‘where silence holdeth revelry’ are not in a style that WBY adopts much after this time. In the present edition, the 1921 text is used, with the Irish Monthly version also given in full for comparison.



To – (Remembrance)

431

Copy-­text: The New York Evening Post, 31 Jan. 1921. To –

R

emembering thee, I search out these faint flowers Of rhyme; remembering thee, this crescent night, While over buds and over grassblades, bright And clinging with the dew of odorous showers, 5 With purple sandals sweep the grave-­eyed hours Swaying their wings of unreturning flight,

Text in The Irish Monthly July 1886: Remembering thee, I  search out these faint flowers Of rhyme; remembering thee, this crescent night, While o’er the buds, and o’er the grass-­ blades, bright And clinging with the dew of odorous showers, With purple sandals sweep the grave-­eyed hours –  5 Remembering thee, I  muse, while fades in flight The honey-­hearted leisure of the light, And hanging o’er the hush of willow bowers, Of ceaseless loneliness and high regret Sings the young wistful spirit of a star 10 Enfolden in the shadows of the East, And silence holding revelry and feast; Just now my soul rose up and touched it, far In space, made equal with a sigh, we met. 7. honey-­hearted] The phrase occurs twice in A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), in ‘Athens: An Ode’, 269: ‘the live and lyric lightning of thy honey-­hearted words’, and ‘Tristram and Iseult: Prelude’, 254: ‘honey-­hearted pain’. 11.] Cp. Shelley, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, 60–61: ‘So fair a creature, as she lay

enfolden | In the warm shadow of her loveliness’. Title] ‘To – ’ is probably conventional rather than specific, and it is unlikely that WBY is coyly concealing any particular addressee here. If a candidate is needed, then Laura Armstrong might fit the bill (see headnote to Vivien and Time). The Elder MS puts the title itself within double quotation marks, then encloses the entire sonnet within these same marks. This seems more likely to come from Elder rather than WBY, and the quasi-­ dramatic nature of the poem hardly in any case needs further pointing up. The Irish Monthly’s title, ‘Remembrance’, is also flatly conventional. 2. crescent night] The adjective here is OED 1: ‘Growing, increasing, developing’. crescent] current Yale. It is hard to imagine WBY being satisfied at any stage with a phrase like ‘this current night’, and it is much more likely that Elder misreads the letters of ‘crescent’ here. Yet the text appears with ‘crescent night’ in the newspaper (the reading of The Irish Monthly text also, and so WBY’s): this raises the possibility that the newspaper worked from WBY’s MS (see also the variant in 12 later), rather than from Elder’s MS text alone. 6. unreturning flight] With this phrase, and this image for time, cp. Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poems (1884), ‘The Voyage of St. Brandan’, 39: ‘Time’s unheeding, unreturning flight’.

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To – (Remembrance)

  Before mine eyes that long for the lost light Of first love far in memories’ faded bowers. I turn where silence holdeth revelry; 10 And on a ruby throne above the sea,   Of ceaseless loneliness and high regret Sings the young wistful spirit of a star. Just now my soul rose up and touched it; far   In space, made equal with a sigh, we met.

8. memories’] In the absence of a MS by WBY, and of a printed text seen by him, this possessive plural should be regarded as less than certain. The Elder MS  has ‘memories’ without an apostrophe: this may very well be a faithful rendering of WBY’s MS, though in that case the singular possessive, ‘memory’s’, might very well be meant. The New York Evening Post’s decision to adopt the plural in this case just tips the editorial favour of this plural form. faded bowers] Cp. Tennyson, ‘The Sisters’, 11: ‘Fainting flowers, faded bowers’. 10, 12. on a ruby throne . . . spirit of a star] the image of a star on a throne is used by WBY in a revised version (for P95) of ‘The Sad Shepherd’, 5–6: ‘And he called loudly to the stars to bend | From their pale thrones and comfort him’. There is no need to suppose that this parallel puts the present revision much later than 1886, however; and the image would be at home in much poetry by WBY over a long period. 9.] This revision of line 9 in The Irish Monthly text adds an archaic form in ‘holdeth’, but retains the problematic idea of silence holding ‘revelry’: an utterly noiseless form of revelry, which this asks us to imagine, seems incongruous. 10. sea] sun Yale. This is clearly an incorrect reading on Elder’s part, showing (amongst other things) that he was paying little attention to the poem’s rhyme scheme when preparing his transcript.

11–14.] The punctuation of the printed text does not quite make sense here. In terms of syntax, it is the spirit that sings of loneliness and regret; but in the poem as printed in 1921, there is no punctuation at the end of line 12, allowing the impression that the spirit is speaking in the final couplet. Comparison with ‘Remembrance’ shows that this is unlikely to be the case; and the Elder MS does in fact have a full stop at the end of line 12, which has been adopted in the present text. 11. high] huge Yale. The word before this in the MS is illegible; it was perhaps blotted after a first try at transcribing WBY’s word failed, to be succeeded by (the also incorrect) ‘huge’. Again, ‘huge regret’ is not really a Yeatsian phrase in poetry, while ‘high regret’ seems much more possible. 12. Sings] Says Yale. The correct reading is certainly ‘Sings’ (see The Irish Monthly text, line 10, whose ‘Sings’ is being incorporated in this revision). 13–14. far | In space] This formulation of WBY’s matches one in an early poem of George Russell’s: ‘Krisna’ (later ‘Oversoul’) was published in Homeward: Songs by the Way (1894), but would probably have been known to WBY some years before publication. In this poem, in which ‘Thy light of lights’ is set ‘amid | Thy few strange stars’ in a ‘Twilight of amethyst’, the poet addresses ‘The flame of Beauty far in space’ (13). It is likely that Russell took the phrase from WBY’s poem, but possible also that the influence went the other way.

62

THE INDIAN UPON GOD

THE POEMS

Date and text. There is no surviving MS evidence, but it is likely that the poem was composed in summer/early autumn 1886. First published in The Dublin University Review, Oct. 1886 (DUR); repr. in WO, P95, and all collected editions thereafter. The poem carries the date 1886 in P95. Criticism and reception. WBY was pleased by W.E. Henley’s praise for the poem in his Scots Observer review of WO (9 Mar. 1889), which said it ‘conveys a keen criticism of life in its flowing and daintily turned couplets’ (see WBY to KT, 9 March 1889, CL 1, 152). R. Ellmann used this poem to illustrate the idea that ‘Yeats’s fixed policy was to shun the vast religious generalizations which were popular at the end of the nineteenth century’, claiming that ‘The poem would be equally congenial to Hume and Madame Blavatsky’: ‘Hume would say that it meant that all religions were founded on personal prejudice and therefore were false, and Madame Blavatsky would interpret it to mean that all religions . . . sprang from a common and valid instinct’. Ellmann concluded: ‘Yeats would say that he had not written the poem to express either of these dogmas. . . . Primarily the poem meant to him that these creatures were right in imagining their God as like themselves, concrete and personal, while man was wrong when he tried to create his God out of some other substance than humanity’ (Identity, 54). J. Pethica develops this point, writing that the poem ‘acknowledges that individual perception and vision are not only inherently limited and limiting, but also perhaps fundamentally solipsistic’, and noting that ‘turning inward to look for truth’ ‘might hinder rather than enable genuine revelation’ (Holdeman and Levitas, 206). D. Albright mentions Robert Browning’s ‘Caliban upon Setebos’, ‘where Caliban invents a Caliban-­shaped image of God’ as a possible model for WBY’s ideas in the poem (Albright, 418). The specifically Indian dimensions of this poem are addressed by J.A. Lennon, who reads it along with ‘The Indian to his Love’ and sees both as more than simply transmissions of the thought of Mohini Chatterjee, with whom WBY had come into contact in Dublin in 1885: ‘More than recasting Mohini’s spiritual program, these poems illustrate the close knit between sensuality and spirituality popular in both Theosophy and international Vaishnava sects of Hinduism at the time’ (Irish Orientalism, 260). J. Ramazani has claimed that ‘the poem acknowledges that, by its own logic, the poet’s effort to imagine cultural otherness inevitably imposes a cultural self-­image onto the other’ (The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001), 36). Verse form. WBY’s chosen medium, of fourteeners rhymed in couplets, may owe something to his reading of George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-63

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The Indian Upon God

Copy-­text: P49.

I

5 10 15 20

passed along the water’s edge below the humid trees, My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees, My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak: Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky. The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye. I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk: Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk, For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide. A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the Skies, He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me? I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say: Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay, He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

Title] From the Book of Kauri the Indian – | Section V. On the Nature of God DUR; Kanva, the Indian, on God WO. The title’s final form comes in P95, but WBY was still listing the poem under its WO title as late as 23 Nov. 1894 (WBY to T. Fisher Unwin, giving contents list for projected volume Under the Moon, CL 1, 412). Kanva is the name of a sage in a play by the fifth-­century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, Sankuntala, which WBY read in translation. (DUR’s ‘Kauri’ may well represent the name as originally provided in WBY’s submission; this form is found in the MS  of ‘Kanva on Himself ’, where ‘Kanva’ in the title has been deleted in favour of ‘Kauri’.) 2. in evening light] in evening’s rush DUR, WO. 3. moorfowl] Lagopus lagopus, the red grouse (WBY’s word is primarily Scottish in use). 4. grassy slope] A  commonplace, but still perhaps cp. William Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), XII, 126: ‘From grassy slope the Round Tower springs aloft’. 5. circles, and heard] circles; and I heard DUR, WO.

7. beyond the sky] WBY’s phrase is unusual, but the chances are remote that he would have recalled either Edward Bulwer Lytton, Tannhauser (1861), 742, ‘The hope that lives beyond the sky’, or John Bethune (1812–1839), The Bethunes: Or, the Fifeshire Foresters (1863), Conclusion, 33–4: ‘And that starry spark, which shone so clear, | Now lives beyond the sky’. 8. His dripping wing] Perhaps cp. William Lisle Bowles, Poetical Works (1855), ‘The Robin Redbreast’, 5–6: ‘Come, let him share our chimney nook, | And dry his dripping wing’. 11. tinkling tide] Within a year of the publication of WO, WBY’s strange phrase had seemingly caught the attention of the hyper-­prolific minor Victorian poet Frederick William Orde Ward (1843–1922), in his ’Twixt Kiss and Lip (1890), ‘O I Love the Gleam of Golden Hair’, 36: ‘The chime of a tinkling tide’. 12. rain between His] rain within his DUR. 16. sad and soft] Cp. S.T. Coleridge, ‘Christabel’ I, 313–314: ‘Her countenance | Grows sad and soft’.

63

AN INDIAN SONG

THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication history. The poem’s first publication was in Dec. 1886, in the Dublin University Review (DUR). There is no surviving MS and no reference in WBY’s correspondence from this time to provide a certain date of composition; but it may be significant that the poem was not printed in the Nov. number of DUR (where the second instalment of WBY’s essay on Sir Samuel Ferguson appeared) and was not included (alongside ‘Miserrimus’ and ‘From the book of Kauri the Indian’) in the Oct. issue: the poem could well have been composed in Oct. or Nov. When he included the poem (heavily revised from WO) in P95, WBY appended the date ‘1886’. The poem was collected in WO and, in its revised form from P95 onwards (‘The Indian to his Love’) was included in all subsequent collected editions by WBY (edited separately in sequence in the present edition). As late as 1895, however, the poem was reprinted in the United States in its unrevised state, in Edmund Clarence Stedman (ed.) A Victorian Anthology. In a letter to KT of late Oct. 1887, WBY responded to a request for suitable poems for inclusion in a lecture on contemporary Irish poets by the American John James Piatt by suggesting ‘An Indian Song’ as part of ‘my more literary work’ and ‘rather a favourite of my own’ (CL 1, 40). Copy-­text: WO.

O

h wanderer in the southern weather, Our isle awaits us; on each lea The pea-­hens dance, in crimson feather

1. Oh wanderer] Given that a degree of intimacy is supposed between the poem’s speaker and his addressee, this opening phrase is oddly formal, or at least impersonally poetic rather than intimate: cp. M. Arnold’s address in ‘Philomela’ to the nightingale as ‘O wanderer from the Grecian shore’ (5), or R.D. Joyce’s ‘The Waterfall’, where ‘O wanderer, you would deem | That a bright-­eyed monster there  | Rushed out on thee’ (Ballads of Irish Chivalry (1876), 5).

3. the pea-­hens dance] The peacock’s courtship routine (most notable for its display of vividly coloured tail feathers) is often referred to as a dance; however, the dancing is carried out by the males, and not by the females (the peahens). WBY’s mistake almost certainly has its origin in ignorance, but the poet was set against any revision in the light of subsequent information. In a generally hostile notice of WO in the Freeman’s Journal for 1 Feb. 1889, the reviewer (probably WBY’s political DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-64

436

An Indian Song

  A parrot swaying on a tree 5   Rages at his own image in the enamelled sea. There dreamy Time lets fall his sickle   And Life the sandals of her fleetness, And sleek young Joy is no more fickle,   And Love is kindly and deceitless, 10   And all is over save the murmur and the sweetness. There we will moor our lonely ship   And wander ever with woven hands,

opponent J.F. Taylor) highlighted this failing in ornithological accuracy as symptomatic of a lack of ‘strenuous thought and sound judgement’ and was ‘tempted to wish that [WBY] would study the ways of poultry.’ Writing within a couple of days to his mentor John O’Leary, WBY voiced a somewhat haughty indignation (CL 1, 138): The Freeman reviewer is wrong about peahens they dance throughout the whole of Indian poetry. If I had Kalidasa by me I  could find many such dancings. As to the poultry yards, with them I  have no concern – The wild peahen dances or all Indian poets lie. WBY was correct to assert that peafowl may be seen dancing in the works of the great fifth-­ century Sanskrit poet Kalidasa, but incorrect to think them peaheans rather than peacocks: e.g., ‘Pleased on each terrace, dancing with delight, | The friendly Peacock hails thy graceful flight’ (The Megha Dúta Or Cloud Messenger, trans. H.H. Wilson, 2nd edn. (1843), 33). Zoological correctness in verse was certainly possible at this time, though it did not necessarily improve the quality of the poetry: Edwin Arnold’s ‘With Sa’di in the Garden: Or, The Book of Love’ (1888) has one excited dancer exhort another to ‘make the pacing pea-­hens envious!’ (1278). (Perhaps J.F. Taylor knew, and was impressed by, this nicety with regard to ‘pacing’ of Arnold’s when he addressed the wildfowl of WO.) It is possible that WBY was simply unaware of the differences

between peahens and peacocks; at any rate, even though this line was to be revised, the reference to peahens rather than peacocks remained: it is evident from the 1889 letter that any later concession to Taylor would have been unthinkable. However, this whole question, so long forgotten, returns (again in the context of a largely negative estimate of WBY as a poet) in Christopher Ricks’s essay ‘Literature and the Matter of Fact’, where Ricks, with the letter to O’Leary in his sights, says that ‘no amount of high and mighty scorn will undo the fact that a high price is paid by a poetry which invokes poultry and at the same time declares that it has no concern with the poultry yards’ (Essays in Appreciation (1996), 304). For subsequent critical flurries, pacing, and dancing around this point, see Peter McDonald, Serious Poetry (2002), 47–8, and Peter Robinson, Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen (2002), 86–88. 4.-5.] A parrot swaying on a tree | Rages at his own image DUR. 8. sleek young Joy] WBY’s adjectives make for an unusual combination, but they had been used together before to very different effect: cp. Byron, Don Juan Canto I, Dedication, st. 12, 2: ‘Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin’s gore’. 9. deceitless] WBY’s word (‘rare’, according to OED) seems obviously selected for the sake of the rhyme. 12. And wander ever] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Search after Prosperpine’, 6: ‘I wander ever, sad and lone’.



An Indian Song

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Murmuring softly, lip to lip,   Along the grass, along the sands – 15   Murmuring how far away are all earth’s feverish lands: How we alone of mortals are   Hid in the earth’s most hidden part, While grows our love an Indian star,   A meteor of the burning heart, 20   One with the waves that softly round us laugh and dart; One with the leaves; one with the dove   That moans and sighs a hundred days; – How when we die our shades will rove,   Dropping at eve on coral bays 25   A vapoury footfall on the ocean’s sleepy blaze.

13.] Cp. Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), 133–136: Then to this earthen Bowl did I adjourn My Lip the secret Well of Life to learn: And Lip to Lip it murmur’d – ‘While you live Drink!  – for once dead you never shall return.’ 19.] WBY is putting into an amatory context here images that are conventionally martial ones: meteors often figure thus in James Macpherson’s Ossian e.g. XII, (1805 edn., p.  404): ‘Thou wert swift, O Morar! as a roe on the hill; terrible as a meteor of fire’, and in nineteenth-­century Irish poetry, e.g. T.C.

Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘The Old Sword of Ireland’, st. 3, 5–6: ‘Yet still to the foes of thy country the same, | Thy lustre has blazed like a meteor of war’, or R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), 1140: ‘He went forth like a meteor of morning, and the rocks felt the hoofs of his steed’. For martially stirred hearts, cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse, and Other Poems (1882), ‘Athens: An Ode’, 121: ‘Still the burning heart of boy and man alike rejoices’. 21.] Like swarming bees, one with the dove DUR. 24. on coral bays] Cp. Byron, ‘The Island’ II, 2: ‘When Summer’s sun went down the coral bay’.

64

SONG OF SPANISH INSURGENTS THE POEMS

Date of composition. It is impossible to give a firm date for the composition of this poem beyond saying that it must have been written by Mar. 1887. No MS material survives, and there is no reference to the piece in any extant correspondence. On stylistic grounds, it could plausibly be put a good deal earlier than 1887: the unsteadiness of the metre may be experimental, but it may also be more fundamentally unsure of itself, and a rhyme such as ‘bleating’/ ‘beating’ (2, 4), like the reprise of the ‘flocks’/ ‘rocks’ rhyme of 1 and 3 in 9 and 10, may well be indicative of WBY’s lyric technique still in the process of early formation. Spanish names such as ‘Pedro’ and ‘El Jazal’ had been present in WBY’s sprawling and never-­finished dramatic project, which developed between 1884 and 1886, with titles including ‘The Epic of Forests’ (see headnote to [From The Village of the Elms]), and it is possible that this poem evolves from materials from that project (which by 1887 had been abandoned). Context. It may well be in vain to look for a particular Spanish insurgency behind this poem. In the 1880s, Spain was subject to periodic troubles: in Aug. 1883, e.g., there was a military revolt in Badajoz, near the Portuguese border, which received widespread press coverage; and in 1886, Brigadier General Villacampa was reported to be leader of a band of insurgents hiding in a village outside Madrid and to have been wounded after being pursued into the countryside by government forces (Manchester Guardian, 23 Sept. 1886). But any specific connection between such events and WBY’s poem seems unlikely: the poet’s insurgents are, in any case, not army officers in revolt, but a band of militant ex-­shepherds. Doubtless, the phrase ‘Spanish Insurgents’ sounded a faint chord as having been vaguely in the news for some years past, and this was perhaps enough for WBY to give a title to his choric poem of romantic rebels on the run. Publication history. This poem appeared in the short-­lived Dublin paper, North and South on 5 Mar. 1887. It was never republished by WBY and remained obscure until 1985, when J.S. Kelly reprinted it in his “Song of Spanish Insurgents’: A Newly Discovered Poem by Yeats’, YA 3, 179–181. Interpretation. J.S. Kelly’s article is the only critical treatment of the poem to date. He notes that this work ‘turns upon a familiar Yeatsian and indeed Romantic theme whereby men of contemplation are obliged to become reluctant men of action’. However: The simple pastoral-­military dichotomy is troubled by the description of the falcons [. . .] If sheep may safely graze on their hill, field-­mice had better be more careful when they drink, for nature here is red in tooth and claw. And DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-65



Song of Spanish Insurgents

439

when it comes to human drinking, the scenes at the winepress pass beyond the pastoral or even bucolic into an apparent ritual of communal ecstasy. (179) Kelly goes on to consider how the poem steers clear of any direct alignment of the insurgents and Irish nationalist forces, instead dwelling on how ‘eternity mocks the evanescent struggles of time’: The Hill of Falcons is an Iberian version of the Lake Isle, but its dream-­laden stillness is periodically broken not by the linnet’s wings but by a falcon’s strike and the intoxicated shout at the wine vat, its passivity challenged by the ambiguity of ‘the ache and the hunger of battle’ in the heart, and the certain knowledge that peace does not necessarily come ‘dropping slow’ but must be won at sword point. (180) To this it may be added that the poem deploys its verbal resources in what must be a deliberately repetitive way: falcons, flocks, rocks, and mountain seem to be in constant circulation in the first verse, as laughter, then the word ‘laugh’ and the word ‘labourless’ come hard on one another’s heels – treading on each other’s toes, perhaps – later in the poem. The long lines have a broadly anapaestic triple rhythm, but there is little sense that WBY is comfortable here with a metre; rather, there is a feeling that he is composing by ear and not always quite able to bring his rhythms and his verbal resources into line. Copy-­text: North and South.

O

h! would on the hill of the falcons we tended our flocks – The rams and the ewes and the young lambs that follow them bleating – Away and away ’mong the dewberries over the rocks,   With the sun on their wool and the width of their wide foreheads beating. 5 Oh, would that we were with our flocks on the face of the mountain   A-­counting the falcons above us, on wide wings a-­hover,   As they watch for the trembling field-­mice, who steal from the clover To drink of the dew of the spray-­dabbled rim of the fountain.   We have girded our swords, we have girded our swords for our flocks, 10   For the quiet and stillness and peace of the dew-­covered rocks. Rejoicing we gather, rejoicing from tending the vine   And startling with laughter the heart of the dream-­ridden day:

3. dewberries] Blackberry-­like bramble fruits of Rubus caesius: this, the European dewberry, does grow in parts of Spain and Portugal. In

poetry, the most prominent modern appearance of the fruits was in Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1861), ‘Goblin Market’, 12.

440

Song of Spanish Insurgents

Wine-­stainèd and shouting we trampled the press of the wine.   In our hearts is the ache and the hunger of battle; away 15   In the vineyards are brooding the merle and the throstle and jay. We have girded our swords that the land may have silence and peace   And we may have stillness for days of a measureless toil   On the fiery plains of the valley where labourless coil The rivers whose labourless voices will never more cease; 20   But will laugh by our graves as they laugh where our forefathers are,   With a laughter as light as the pulse and the beat of a star.

15. merle] Scottish and poetic term for the blackbird, Turdus merula. throstle] Any of the thrush family of birds (Turdidae). merle and the throstle] For this conjunction, cp. R. Browning, Pippa Passes (1841), IV, 103–104: ‘be day’s apostle  | To mavis, merle, and throstle’.

18. the fiery plains] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), IX, 127–8: ‘dreadful one who reigns | In heaven and the fiery plains’. 21. the pulse and the beat of a star] Perhaps cp. R.W. Buchanan, Undertones (1864), ‘The Satyr’, 251–252: ‘And feeling unto | The sweet pulse of a star’.

65

QUATRAINS AND APHORISMS THE POEMS

Date of composition. Two MSS which contribute to this version and not any previous versions of the material date from after Feb. 1886 and (according to dates written in by WBY) 12 and 13 Jan. 1887. ‘Quatrains and Aphorisms’ is likely, then, to have taken shape as a whole in early 1887. Textual and publication history. This poem incorporates substantial portions of two quatrain-­poems that had been published in the Dublin University Review in Jan. and Feb. 1886 (‘In a Drawing-­Room’ and ‘Life’, edited separately earlier). There are two MSS which have a bearing on the poem as subsequently revised: NLI 30448 (most of which has draft material for ‘Kanva on Himself ’) contains a draft version of st. III (MS1), and WBY’s ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ notebook (NLI 3726) carries on its inside back cover drafts relating to st. VII as well as never-­developed drafts for two further stanzas (MS2, transcribed at the end of the notes). For transcriptions of MS materials, also see Cornell Early Poetry 2, 248–249. The poem was published in WO, but not collected by WBY thereafter. Copy-­text: WO. I

T

he child who chases lizards in the grass, The sage who deep in central nature delves, The preacher watching for the ill hour to pass – All these are souls who fly from their dread selves.

1–4.] This stanza is a revision of the first stanza of ‘Life’ (1886). 2. central nature] WBY’s phrase had its currency from R.W. Emerson, Essays, Orations and Lectures (1848), ‘Art’, 202: ‘This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object, so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle, – the painter and sculptor exhibit in colour and in stone. The power depends on

the depth of the artist’s insight of that object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent the world.’ 4. their dread selves] The phrase is entirely WBY’s, but it may nevertheless be within close earshot of Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), I, 47–8: ‘That men may rise on stepping-­stones | Of their dead selves to higher things.’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-66

442

Quatrains and Aphorisms

5

II Two spirit-­things a man hath for his friends – Sorrow, that gives for guerdon liberty, And joy, the touching of whose finger lends To lightest of all light things sanctity.

10

III Long thou for nothing, neither sad nor gay; Long thou for nothing, neither night nor day; Not even ‘I long to see thy longing over,’ To the ever-­longing and mournful spirit say.

15

IV The ghosts went by me with their lips apart From death’s late languor as these lines I read On Brahma’s gateway, ‘They within have fed The soul upon the ashes of the heart.’



V This heard I where, amid the apple trees,

5–8.] This stanza is almost exactly a repetition of ‘In a Drawing-­Room’ (1886), 5–8; the only substantial alteration is ‘To lightest of all light things sanctity’ (8), which replaces ‘To lightest of light things all sanctity’ in the earlier poem. 9–12.] In MS1, this quatrain has a title, ‘The key stone of truth’: Long thou for nothing neither sad nor gay Long thou for nothing neither night nor day Nor e’en ‘I long to see [you del.] thee [came del.] calm, comrado’ Soft, to the ever-­longing Spirit, say. ‘Comrado’ (line 3) is almost certainly meant to be ‘Camerado’, a word much used by Walt Whitman, meaning ‘comrade’. In the same line, WBY’s deleted ‘came’ and undeleted ‘calm’ may both be attempts to start spelling that word.   This stanza plainly owes something to the teachings of the theosophical envoy to Dublin, Mohini Chatterjee, whom WBY and his friends in the Dublin Hermetic Society hosted in late 1885. A  draft of these lines is on the same MS  leaf as draft of the last stanza of ‘Kanva on Himself ’ suggesting that it was written very shortly after that poem (see Textual

and publication history). For WBY and Chatterjee, see notes to ‘Kanva on Himself ’. 12. mournful spirit] Perhaps cp. Robert Southey, Poetical Works (1838), ‘The Curse of Kehama’ II, 11–12: ‘And is this all? the mournful Spirit said,  | This all that thou canst give me after death?’, or (more prosaically) John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘Laurella’, 418–9: ‘his hectoring done,  | His mournful spirit waxed extremely meek’. 15. Brahma’s gateway] Continuing the strong indebtedness of st. III to the Indian-­derived theosophical doctrines as conveyed to WBY’s Dublin circle by Mohini Chatterjee, this phrase seems to establish a quasi-­doctrinal point of reference for the stanza’s message. 16. the ashes of the heart] Cp. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The Vow of the Peacock (1835) I, 594–597: The light which that young cheek illumed Came from all precious things consumed; Hopes, dreams, ere those bright hues depart, Sent from the ashes of the heart. 17–20.] This stanza revises lines 17–20 of ‘Life’ (1886), reversing the order of the first and the second pair of lines.



Quatrains and Aphorisms

20

Wild indolence and music have no date, ‘I laughed upon the lips of Sophocles, I go as soft as folly; I am Fate.’



VI ‘Around, the twitter of the lips of dust A tossing laugh between their red abides; With patient beauty yonder Attic bust In the deep alcove’s dimness smiles and hides.’

25

VII The heart of noon folds silence and folds sleep, For noon and midnight from each other borrow, And Joy, in growing deeper and more deep, Walks in the vesture of her sister Sorrow.

18. wild indolence] WBY’s phrase here has, unsurprisingly enough, nothing in the way of precedent. That indolence (however Keatsian its provenance) might also be ‘wild’ is an idea that bears little scrutiny; here at least it is less prominent than in ‘Life’, where it occurs in the last line of the poem. 19. the lips of Sophocles] Oddly, this phrase was to be hit on (or perhaps picked up on) by A. Swinburne, in Astrophel, and Other Poems (1894), ‘Elegy’, 126: ‘The honey-­heavy lips of Sophocles’. 21–24.] This stanza had been lines 1–4 of ‘In a Drawing-­Room’ (1886). Here, it is enclosed in quotation marks, and presumably is to be heard as coming from the voice of Fate in st. V. 23. patient beauty] This phrase links the stanza with a poem by Charles Tennyson Turner, Small Tableaux (1868), ‘Decadence of Greece’, a sonnet whose octave seems to have a bearing on st. VI and st. VII as a whole: Young tourist to the land whose hope has passed! Fain would I seek with thee those shores sublime That hear no promise from the lips of Time, Of hours so bright as those He overcast! There is that Athens! still in ruin fair, Though long gone by her intellectual reign; Arcadia waits in patient beauty there, To hear her lingering shepherd’s voice again!

443

25–28.] MS2 has a draft version of this stanza (dated by WBY ‘Jan 13’ [1887]): The [As del.] moon [goes del.] grows quiet in her central sleep For noon and midnight from each other borrow So joy in growing deeper and more deep Robe in vesture of her sister sorrow. ‘Robe’ in the final line here is very probably meant by WBY to read ‘Robes’. 27–28.] Cp. Tennyson, ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, 250–251: ‘Which perfect Joy, perplexed for utterance, | Stole from her sister Sorrow’.   MS2 has drafts of two further stanzas. The first of these (undated) is in pencil. With editorially supplied punctuation, it reads: Things swamp themselves in this our modern day, For we have reasoned all our truths away; Law lost ’neath pyramids of Law lies low: We smiled away our smiling long ago. The second is in ink, and carries the date ‘Jan 12 188 [6 del.] 7’. A  first line which has been deleted may be intended for a title: ‘The end of All’. Again, punctuation here is editorial: Sorrow is sapping all the bonds of men When they [desire del.] shall long for neither life nor death; The worlds will fade like vapours o’er a fen Before Annihilation’s rapturous breath.

66

THE FAIRY PEDANT

THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication. The poem appeared in The Irish Monthly for Mar. 1887 (IM) and was probably composed early in 1887. It was included in WO, but not reprinted thereafter by WBY. The Christmas edition of George Russell’s [AE’s] journal The Irish Fireside (Dec. 1891) did reprint the poem; as with ‘She Who Dwelt Among the Sycamores’, this was done without the author’s cooperation (see CL 3, 274), and the numerous minor variants in its text are not reported here. Criticism and interpretation. Louis MacNeice included this among ‘certain poems [in WO], later suppressed’ where the fairies are ‘trumpery little English fairies, degenerate descendants of Oberon and Titania’ (MacNeice, 63). T. Parkinson classed this poem among the other ‘fairy’ poems which WBY did not reprint from WO in P95 (and thereafter) and said that ‘in the 1895 volume, the fairies were treated as inhuman creatures who were not bothered by human motives. Indeed, their main charm originated in their freedom from human compulsions, whereas in “The Fairy Pedant,” for instance, the fairies are compelled by very human motives – sociability and human curiosity’ (Parkinson, 25–6). On the whole, though, this poem has remained under the critical radar. Its principal interest is not an aesthetic one, but as an indication of how slow WBY was to arrive at a stylistic register where he could make effective poetry from his rapidly increasing interest in Irish fairy lore. As it is, it requires some effort to see how verse such as this could be written in the same year as the first Book of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and a year after work as accomplished as ‘The Stolen Child’. But the development of young poets is sometimes sporadic as well as slow.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-67



The Fairy Pedant

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Copy-­text: WO. Scene: – A circle of Druidic stones. First Fairy.

A

far from our lawn and our levée,   O sister of sorrowful gaze! Where the roses in scarlet are heavy   And dream of the end of their days, 5 You move in another dominion   And hang o’er the historied stone: Unpruned is your beautiful pinion

Title] ‘Pedant’ is not immediately explicable in the context of WBY’s poem. The word is one which he would be capable of using to arresting effect in much later poetry (in ‘Upon a Dying Lady’ III, 4: ‘Pedant in passion’).   Scene] Scene setting:  – A  circle of druid stones. A band of fairies following another who goes whispering to herself. IM.  [Scene] druidic stones] WBY’s unusual ‘druidic’ (replacing IM’s ‘druid stones’) may owe something to R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Flower Feast in Mana’, 305–8: ‘And on the midmost sward, like giant thrones, | Reared by primordial hands, austere and grim, | Spread the great circle of Druidic stones, | High precinct of the Gods’. 1. lawn] Probably in the sense of OED 1.a., ‘An open space between woods; a glade’. Cp. William Allingham, ‘A Lady of the Sea: A Legend of Ancient Erin’, Irish Songs and Poems II, 377: ‘In forest lawn and marshy mead’. However, it is possible that WBY intends OED 3, the archaic term for ‘A kind of fine linen’, ‘An article of dress made of lawn’. levée] WBY’s use of the word is a little odd: it seems closest in meaning to OED 2.a., ‘A morning assembly held by a prince or person

of distinction’, but it is not especially associated with fairies. 3. scarlet] For roses, a relatively uncommon adjective, though one used by Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the Faith (1885), ‘Al-­ Wahdood’, 28–9: ‘gold-­blooming date | And scarlet roses’. Instead of an adjective, WBY may intend OED n. 1.b. as a metaphor, ‘cloth or clothing of the colour described’ (complementing the use of ‘lawn’ to describe fabric or clothing in 1 earlier). 6. historied stone] ‘History’ as a verb in OED is ‘To inscribe or adorn with a pictorial representation of an event or events; to decorate with historical scenes’: but for a less specifically epigraphic use of this verb cp. A. Swinburne, Songs Before Sunrise (1871), ‘Quia Multum Amavit’, 38: ‘earth’s old-­ historied heights’. If WBY has inscription in mind here, there may be some general recollection of Nicholas Poussin’s painting The Arcadian Shepherds (1638–40), in which one of the figures bends over the inscribed stone which two others are engaged in reading. 7. unpruned . . . pinion] Cp. Keats, ‘The Eve of St  Agnes’ (1820), 333: ‘A dove forlorn and lost, with sick unprunèd wing’.

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The Fairy Pedant

  Who wander and whisper alone. All. Come away while the moon’s in the woodland, 10   We’ll dance and then feast in a dairy. Though youngest of all in our good band,   You are wasting away, little fairy. Second Fairy. Ah! cruel ones, leave me alone now   While I murmur a little and ponder 15 The history here in the stone now;   Then away and away will I wander, And measure the minds of the flowers,   And gaze on the meadow-­mice wary, And number their days and their hours – All. 20

You are wasting away, little fairy. Second Fairy.

O shining ones, lightly with song pass,   Ah! leave me, I pray you and beg. My mother drew forth from the long grass   A piece of a nightingale’s egg, 25 And cradled me here where are sung,   Of birds even, longings for aery Wild wisdoms of spirit and tongue.

9. Come away] WBY had used this phrase (meaning ‘come back’ or ‘come here’) three times in ‘The Stolen Child’, published in Dec. 1886. It is common in e.g. Shakespeare, most famously in the song in Twelfth Night IV ii: ‘Come away, come away Death’. 12. You are wasting] You’re wasting IM. little fairy] WBY’s phrase of address here is thoroughly hackneyed, and sufficiently so

for him not to reprint it; but it was not hackneyed enough to prevent KT from using it very shortly afterwards, in her Ballads and Lyrics (1891), ‘The Fairy Babe’, 6 and 16: ‘Sleep, little fairy, sleep’. 13. alone now] alone IM. 15. stone now;] stone – IM. 16. away and away] Cp. KT, Shamrocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diarmid and Grainne’, III, 65: ‘They journeyed away and away’.



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All.   You are wasting away, little fairy.

First Fairy (turning away).

Though tenderest roses were round you, 30   The soul of the pitiless place With pitiless magic has bound you –   Ah! woe for the loss of your face, And loss of your laugh and its lightness –   Ah! woe for your wings and your head – 35 Ah! woe for your eyes and their brightness –   Ah! woe for your slippers of red. All. Come away while the moon’s in the woodland,   We’ll dance and then feast in a dairy. Though youngest of all in our good band, 40   She is wasting away, little fairy.

30. soul] heart IM. pitiless place] Perhaps cp. Sydney Dobell, Poetical Works (1875), ‘Balder: Part the First’, Sc. VIII, 5–6: ‘turn beseeching eyes and vain | Backward and forward from my pitiless place’. 32–36.] These lines influence Dora Sigerson’s short poem ‘I would have wept’, Verses

(1893), esp. 6–8: ‘Ah, woe for your body’s pain! | Therein you must die, and pass | Into dust, without hope of gain’. 33. your laugh and its lightness] Perhaps cp. a moment in a sentimental religious poem by Robert Montgomery, The Sanctuary (1855), ‘The Innocents’ Day’, 23: ‘laughing joyance in its lightness free’.

67

A DAWN-­S ONG

THE POEMS

Publication and date of composition. This poem was published in The Irish Fireside for 5 Feb. 1887. No MS is extant, and any date of composition must be conjectural. Possibly late 1886 to beginning of 1887. Text. The poem was never reprinted by WBY. The text here is from The Irish Fireside.

F 5

rom the waves the sun hath reeled, Proudly in his saffron walking; Sleep in some far other field Goes his poppies now a-­hawking; From the hills of earth have pealed Murmurs of her children talking – My companions, two and two, Gathering mushrooms in the dew.

3–4.] The image of fields of sleep comes from Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ Ode, 28: ‘The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep’. This image occurs in a large number of nineteenth-­ century poems thereafter. When Ezra Pound drew up ‘A Few Don’ts’ in Poetry magazine (1913), he instanced ‘pale, dim fields of sleep’ from a sonnet by Philip Bourke Marston (1850–1887), as an example of something which ‘mixes an abstraction with the concrete’. 4. a-­hawking] WBY here turns a poeticism away from its usual sense and to his own purposes: Sleep goes hawking his poppies like a street seller, while the primary association of ‘a-­hawking’ is with the aristocratic sport. Tennyson liked this form enough to use it three times in his verse-­plays Becket and The Foresters, as well as in ‘Merlin and Vivien’ from Idylls of the King, (to which WBY’s own Vivien and Time had been indebted): ‘this hour | We ride a-­hawking with Sir Launcelot’ DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-68

(92–3). The phrase is prominent also in the refrains of a song in Thomas L. Beddoes’s The Bride’s Tragedy II i: ‘Love’s horn doth blow | And he will out a-­hawking go’. 5–6.] In a letter to an unidentified correspondent of 11 Mar. 1887, WBY quoted these lines, saying ‘I meant by the two lines [.  .  .] that loud continuous confluence of murmurs that I  have heard going up from a wooded mountain at dawn’ (CL 1, 9). 5. hills of earth] In section X of R. Southey’s The Curse of Kehama (1810), ‘Mount-­Meru’, there is ‘the top of Meru mountain  | Which rises o’er the hills of earth  | In light and clouds’ (36–8). Given the importance of Meru in WBY’s much later poetry, this early point of possible contact with the mountain may be relevant. 8. Gathering mushrooms in the dew] WBY’s refrain (and his poem as a whole) might owe something to a folk song from Ulster, known as ‘Gathering Mushrooms’. The song



A Dawn-­Song

10 15

Wake, ma cushla, sleepy-­headed; Trembles as a bell of glass All heaven’s floor, with vapours bedded – And along the mountains pass, With their mushrooms lightly threaded On their swaying blades of grass, Lads and lasses, two and two, Gathering mushrooms in the dew.

20

Wake! the heron, rising, hath Showered away the keen dew drops; Weasel warns him on the path, Half asleep the old cow crops, In the fairy-­haunted rath,

is attested in Co. Antrim in 1955, when it was collected from Robert Cinnamond (1884– 1968), a singer born in Balinderry, who lived close to Lough Neagh. The lyrics of the song as sung by Cinnamond are as follows: Rising early out of bed, Across the fields I steered O When drawing nigh a mower passed by, And a pretty fair maid she appeared O, For her head was bare I do declare, She’d neither hat nor a feather on, And she stooped so low gave me to know It was mushrooms she was gathering O. Chorus O the gathering O, And she stooped so low gave me to know It was mushrooms she was gathering O. Where are you going, says I, my dear, Why are you up so early O? I seen you on the dewy ground Before the sun rose fairly O. Pray modestly she answered me And she gave her head one fetch up, And she says I’m gathering mushrooms For to make my mammy ketchup. Chorus O ketchup O, And she stooped so low gave me to know It was mushrooms she was gathering O.

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Her panting breast on mine she pressed, Her heart was like a feather O, And her lips on mine did gently join, And we both sat down together O. In much later Irish poetry, this song influenced heavily the poem ‘Gathering Mushrooms’ in Paul Muldoon’s Quoof (1984). 9. ma cushla] Anglicized version of the Irish mo chuisle (‘my pulse’ – short for ‘pulse of my heart’ as a term of endearment). It is usually given in nineteenth-­century Irish poetry as ‘acushla’, and is used in this form in poems by both George Russell (AE) and KT. sleepy-­headed] WBY slightly redirects the conventional associations of this towards affection: like the more common ‘sleepy-­ head’, it is usually a term of mild reproach e.g. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870) ‘September: The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’, 954: ‘such sleepy-­headed fools’. 11. heaven’s floor] Something of a commonplace, but cp. W. Morris, Sigurd the Volsung II 1401, ‘And the cloudy flecks were scattered like flames on the heaven’s floor’, and 1451, ‘And the stars grew paler and paler, and failed from the heaven’s floor’. 21. fairy-­haunted] Cp. M. Arnold, Tristram and Iseult 719–20: ‘the fairy-­haunted land  | Away the other side of Brittany’. rath] An Irish fort, often associated with fairies. The word is used commonly in the

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A Dawn-­Song



Dewy-­tongued, the daisy tops – We will wander, I and you, Gathering mushrooms in the dew.

25 30

For your feet the morning prayeth: We will find her favourite lair, Straying as the heron strayeth, As the moorfowl and the hare, While the morning star decayeth In the bosom of the air – Gayest wanderers, I and you, Gathering mushrooms in the dew.

poetry of Thomas Davis, Aubrey DeVere, and William Allingham. 29. the morning star decayeth] Cp. Thomas Moore, ‘How oft has the Banshee cried’, 10–12: ‘Star after star decays,  | Every bright name, that shed | Light o’er that land, is fled.’

30. the bosom of the air] Cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam XII xxiii, ‘Breathed warmth on the cold bosom of the air’, and Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Disbelief of Milcho: Or Saint Patrick’s One Failure’, 552: ‘Troubling the burthened bosom of the air’.

68

ANASHUYA AND VIJAYA

THE POEMS

Date of composition. In P95, WBY appends the date 1887 to this poem. On the final page of the MS, as a detached line, are the words ‘but Mangan was born lived and died in city squares’: this may well indicate that the notebook from which the MS pages are detached was one being used also for notes towards WBY’s essay on J.C. Mangan for The Irish Fireside (pages at the back of one of the MS notebooks used for ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ also carry draft material from this essay). Since the Mangan essay was published on 12 Mar. 1887, it is reasonable to suppose that the poem belongs to early 1887. Context, interpretation, and critical reception. In his note dated 1925 to the ‘Crossways’ section of CP33, WBY wrote: ‘The little Indian dramatic scene was meant to be the first scene of a play about a man loved by two women, who had the one soul between them, the one woman waking when the other slept, and knowing but daylight as the other only night.’ If any more of this play was in fact composed, no trace of it remains. But the ‘scene’ feels largely complete in itself, and WBY’s later memory of its allegorical intent may well reflect its original sense for him as a separate poem in 1887. The piece follows the Indian-­ themed poems of 1886, and like them is indebted in a general way to contact with Mohini Chatterjee (see headnote to ‘The Indian upon God’), as well as to the emphasis on Indian materials in theosophy. Although WBY takes Anashuya’s name from the poet Kalidasa, the poem shows no particular relation to the play in which she appears, and it is spun largely from WBY’s own imagination. The poem’s title in WO, ‘Jealousy’, is not overly allegorical in its direction, and there are numerous touches that suggest (jarringly perhaps) an attempt at realism (the rice-­snatching flamingos, e.g., or Anashuya’s ‘may some dreadful ill befall her quick!’, which survived in the text until 1933). Much of the poem’s effect, however, resides in its oriental scene setting, and it is here that the focus of WBY’s creative attention seems to lie. Arguably, allegory is just another piece of the scenery, but it is likely that WBY felt it was a necessary one. Here, the 1925 note referring of ‘the poems [. . .] upon Indian subjects’ which ‘must have been written before I was twenty’ (a misremembering on WBY’s part) puts the blame for such pieces on his Dublin friend Charles Johnston, an enthusiastic theosophist who was instrumental in introducing the poet to the doctrines of that spiritual movement in the mid-­late 1880s. ‘Every time I have reprinted them’, WBY wrote of the ‘Indian’ poems, ‘I have considered the leaving out of most, and then remembered an old school friend who has some of them by heart, for no better reason, as I think, than that they remind him of his own youth’. In his talk for radio (never broadcast, but published in 1938), ‘I Became an Author’, WBY recalled an early play ‘of somebody’s translations from the Sanscrit, its scene an Indian temple’. In the DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-69

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Anashuya and Vijaya

context of other abandoned early work, this was associated in WBY’s mind with Johnston (by now seven years dead), who ‘admired parts of these poems so much that I doubt if he ever thought I had fulfilled their promise’. Remembering ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’, WBY continued, ‘A fragment, or perhaps all that was written, of the Indian play, I put near the opening of my Collected Poems because when I put it there he [Johnston] was still living, and it is still there because I have forgotten to take it out’ (CW 10, 298). Undoubtedly, WBY’s allegorical ambitions in 1886–7 were shaped by theosophical notions, partly as relayed by Johnston; and the poet was happy to follow the lead of remarks like those at the beginning of A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism (1883), where ‘The real inner meaning of its [Buddhism’s] doctrines has been kept back from uninitiated students, while the outer teachings have merely presented the multitude with a code of moral lessons, and a veiled, symbolical literature, hinting at the existence of knowledge in the background’. The ‘fragment . . . of the Indian play’ has its ‘veiled, symbolical’ aspects, some of which could be taken by Johnston and other fellow disciples as theosophical; at the same time, it is well able to function on much more conventional terms. In a review of WO in the Evening Telegraph (Dublin), 6 Feb. 1889, Anashuya’s song was quoted with approval, and the whole poem was declared a ‘charming dramatic sketch, which will attract attention’. For the Saturday Review, 9 Mar. 1889, the poem was ‘wellnigh flawless’. Readers wholly ignorant of any esoteric allegory could find enough drama in the poem: Rosa Mulholland, whose piece on WO from the Melbourne Advocate was reprinted in the Irish Monthly for Jul. 1889, wrote that ‘there is prisoned lightning in the little floating cloud of pure poetry, named “Jealousy” ’, and appreciated WBY’s portrait of Anashuya with ‘the arrow of jealousy in her heart’, saying that ‘Except for the savage words “may panthers end him,” she is sweet all through [. . .] We get but one flash of the lightning with which the floating cloud is charged as it sails past us, to burst elsewhere, as we feel assured’. For all its enthusiasm, such a reading might well have encouraged WBY to change the title from ‘Jealousy’ to something more visibly Eastern. John Todhunter, in his review of WO for the Academy, 30 Mar. 1889, drew attention to the affinities with Kalidasa, noting that the poem ‘has caught something of the delicate spirit of the Sakuntala’. Criticism has largely passed over the poem in silence. There has been occasional speculation about what WBY might have written had he continued the poem as a play: P.S. Sro, ‘Yeats and Mohini Chatterjee’ (YA 11, 61–76) puts this in the context of WBY’s intellectual contact with the Indian theosophical emissary to Dublin, remarking that ‘Yeats’s focus on jealousy is intriguing, especially in the light of Mohini Chatterjee’s counsel to give up all desires’; he goes on to wonder, ‘Did Yeats intend to dramatise the ill effects of a possessive desire through Anashuya and Vijaya?’, but has to conclude that ‘There is no answer’, since ‘Yeats did not complete the play’ (68). The poem is also discussed in Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (2008) 258–260, where ‘Yeats’s Anashuya is a young priestess and lover who senses that her lover loves another [. . .] But, in this incomplete version, we do not find out if her suppositions are correct’ (258): Lennon claims that WBY here ‘brings the two sensibilities of eros and agape seamlessly together’ (260). Textual and publication history. The single surviving MS  source, NLI 30453, is three pages that have been removed from an exercise book, with continuous composition of



Anashuya and Vijaya

453

the poem on both sides by WBY (MS). There is no title, so it is possible that this was the beginning of a play; on the other hand, composition ends on the upper part of the final page, and there is no sign of anything to follow (while there is a line of prose further down, related to WBY’s essay on J.C. Mangan). The MS is reproduced and transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 190–201. As a poem, ‘Jealousy’ appeared first in WO; it was reprinted in P95 (as ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’), and included in all collected editions thereafter. Copy-­text: P49.

A little Indian temple in the Golden Age. Around it a garden; around that the forest. ANASHUYA, the young priestess, kneeling within the temple.

5 10

Anashuya. Send peace on all the lands and flickering corn. – O may tranquillity walk by his elbow When wandering in the forest, if he love No other. – Hear, and may the indolent flocks Be plentiful. – And if he love another, May panthers end him. – May we two stand, When we are dead, beyond the setting suns, A little from the other shades apart, With mingling hair, and play upon one lute.



Viyaja [entering and throwing a lily at her]. Hail! hail, my Anashuya.



Anashuya.

No, be still.

Title.] Anashuya and Damitri MS Jealousy WO. Setting description] A  little Indian temple, in the centre [a] grotesque idol, Anashuya kneeling before it MS; SCENE: A little Indian temple in the Golden Age. Around it a garden; around that again the forest. ANASHUYA, the young princess, kneeling within. WO, P95. Anashuya] WBY takes this name from a drama by the Indian poet Kalidasa, Sakuntula; here, her name is (in Monier’s translation, which he read) Amasuya. The name means ‘uncomplaining’. Vijaya] A common name in Hindu mythology and literature, meaning ‘victorious’. 2. walk by his elbow] beside him go, WO. 3. When wandering in the forest] As in the woods he wanders WO.

5.] Be plenty. – If he gives another love, WO. 6–9.] Cp. WBY’s lines from Mosada, III 59–61: ‘Is it your message, stars, that when death comes | My soul shall touch with his, and the two flames | Be one?’ 7. beyond the setting suns] Like many other nineteenth-­century poets, WBY here adapts Wordsworth’s phrase from Lyrical Ballads (1798), ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, 98: ‘Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns’. 11. Vijaya] Damitri MS, passim. The name Damitri (which appears often to have been altered by WBY from ‘Bamitri’) has no obvious Sanskrit or Hindu mythological source. S.D. entering] her lover, entering WO. No] Nay, WO.

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Anashuya and Vijaya



I, priestess of this temple, offer up Prayers for the land.



Vijaya.

15

Anashuya. By mighty Brahma’s ever-­rustling robe, Who is Amrita? Sorrow of all sorrows! Another fills your mind.



Vijaya.

20 25

Anashuya [sings, coming out of the temple]. A sad, sad thought went by me slowly: Sigh, O you little stars! O sigh and shake your blue apparel! The sad, sad thought has gone from me now wholly: Sing, O you little stars! O sing and raise your rapturous carol To mighty Brahma, he who made you as many as the sands, And laid you on the gates of evening with his quiet hands. [Sits down on the steps of the temple.] Vijaya, I have brought my evening rice; The sun has laid his chin on the grey wood, Weary, with all his poppies gathered round him.



Vijaya. The hour when Kama, full of sleepy laughter,

I will wait here, Amrita.

My mother’s name.

13. I will wait here, Amrita] Pray on, and I will wait you, Amrita. WO. Corr. to I  will wait WO Proofs (Texas). Amrith in Sanskrit means ‘immortality’, and is associated with a divine drink akin to nectar; the female name deriving from this, Amrita, originates from North India. WBY may have found the association between Amrita and immortality in Thomas Moore’s note to his line ‘Truth’s immortal tree’, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Language of Flowers’: ‘The tree called in the East Amrita, or the Immortal’, or ‘The Light of the Haram’, 333–335: ‘the divine Amrita tree  | That blesses heaven’s inhabitants  | With fruits of immortality’. 14. Brahma] One of the three principal Hindu gods with a direct bearing on the creation, the running and the ultimate destruction of the world (the others are Vishnu and Shiva). Brahma has a special association with the world’s creation but, since that creation is an event in the past, he is not a widely worshipped deity like Vishnu (whose task of

preservation is one that continues). WBY’s characters’ habit of swearing by Brahma is therefore unusual (probably inadvertently so, on the poet’s part). It is also possible that WBY is confusing Brahma with Brahman, in Hinduism the highest principle of divine power in the universe. 14–17.] Anashuya. Draw you near, and ’neath yon pillar Stand you. By Brahma’s ever-­rustling robe, Who is Amrita? Woe! ah, woe is me! Some other fills your mind. WO. 16. mother’s] sister’s MS. 19, 20–23. you] ye WO. 20. Sigh . . . O sigh] Smile . . . O smile MS. 24^25.] For now the sun hangs on the wood world’s rim MS (this line is not del., but the later line 24 has been squeezed in above it, by which it is probably intended to be replaced). 26. Kama] In WO, WBY adds a note: ‘The Indian Cupid’ [‘The Indian Eros’ P95]. In



Anashuya and Vijaya



Rises, and showers abroad his fragrant arrows, Piercing the twilight with their murmuring barbs.

30 35 40

Anashuya. See how the sacred old flamingoes come, Painting with shadow all the marble steps: Aged and wise, they seek their wonted perches Within the temple, devious walking, made To wander by their melancholy minds. Yon tall one eyes my supper; chase him away, Far, far away. I named him after you. He is a famous fisher; hour by hour He ruffles with his bill the minnowed streams. Ah! There he snaps my rice. I told you so. Now cuff him off. He’s off! A kiss for you, Because you saved my rice. Have you no thanks?

45

Vijaya [sings] Sing you of her, O first few stars, Whom Brahma, touching with his finger, praises, for you hold The van of wandering quiet; ere you be too calm and old, Sing, turning in your cars, Sing, till you raise your hands and sigh, and from your carheads peer,

Hindu religious thought, Kama is both a principle and a deity: the primary significance of Kama is that of the principle of desire (though this is by no means so one-­ dimensional as sexual desire), but as a deity Kama (or Kamadeva) is in some ways comparable with the classical Cupid or Eros. Kama is sometimes depicted with bow and arrows (often tipped with different flowers, which presumably informs WBY’s ‘fragrant arrows’ in 27). In choosing this ‘Cupid’ depiction of Kama, WBY in fact sidesteps the theosophical understanding of Kama, in which arrows and ‘sleepy laughter’ are notable for their absence. Ch.5 of A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism is entitled ‘Kama Loca’, this being a state on the other side of life, ‘the region of desire, not the region in which desire is developed to any abnormal degree of intensity as compared with desire as it attaches to earth-­life, but the sphere in

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which that sensation of desire, which is a part of the earth-­life, is capable of surviving’. full of sleepy laughter] with a sumptuous smile WO, P95. 29. old] Above this word in MS, WBY has written two other possibilities, ‘sad tall’. 31. Aged] Sedate del. aged MS. 34. eyes] wants MS. chase him away] swiftly chase him WO-­P24. 37. ruffles] Perhaps cp. KT, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885), ‘The Dreamers’, 28–9: ‘A small wind ruffles with fingers slow | The grasses’. 41. Sing you of her] Sing of our [kiss del.] love MS. 42–45.] you] ye WO. 45. from] o’er WO. carheads] P33 and after: car heads WO-­ P29. The word is WBY’s coinage for the purpose here, and must mean the frontal driving-­positions of the ‘vans’, or chariots.

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Anashuya and Vijaya



With all your whirling hair, and drop many an azure tear.



Anashuya. What know the pilots of the stars of tears?

50 55

Viyaja. Their faces are all worn, and in their eyes Flashes the fire of sadness, for they see The icicles that famish all the North, Where men lie frozen in the glimmering snow; And in the flaming forests cower the lion And lioness, with all their whimpering cubs; And, ever pacing on the verge of things, The phantom, Beauty, in a mist of tears; While we alone have round us woven woods, And feel the softness of each other’s hand, Amrita, while –



Anashuya [going away from him]. Ah me! you love another, [Bursting into tears.] And may some sudden dreadful ill befall her!

60

Vijaya. I loved another; now I love no other. Among the mouldering of ancient woods

46. With all] Corr. from With your WO Proofs (Texas). whirling hair] This image seems to have influenced Francis Thompson, Sister Songs (1895), II, 110–111: ‘Starry buds tangled in the whirling hair  | That flames round the Phoebean wassailer’. drop many an azure tear] drop through space an azure tear WO. WBY revised to ‘drop many an azure tear’ in P95, retaining this reading in all texts until PW06 and CWVP08, when he revised it to ‘drop tear upon azure tear’; but the revision was not incorporated in the poem’s next appearance (in P12), and remained unadopted in all editions of Poems up to and including P24; in 1925, EPS continued to carry the unrevised line, and this was retained in all subsequent editions. 52. And in the] They see in WO. 53^54.] Expiring in the flames the [owl del.] ounce and deer | Hiding behind their paws in fierce equality MS.

55.] The spirit ^phantom^ beauty in [her del.] a mist of tears MS. 57. hand] hands WO. 59.] And may some dreadful ill befall her quick! WO-­P29. 59^60.] Leave me forever, I would learn to die MS. 60–64.] Like you in all things, saving only this That she is dark as you are fair, and lives Among the mouldering ^dripping^ of ^the^ mellow woods And lives along the prowling times of night. I brood upon her name, for but late She teased me for the love that now is yours. MS. 62–65.] You live, and on the border of the village she, The daughter of the grey old wood-­cutter, Amrita. This same eve she watched me pass. WO.



Anashuya and Vijaya



You live, and on the village border she, With her old father the blind wood-­cutter; I saw her standing in her door but now.



Anashuya. Vijaya, swear to love her never more.

65

Vijaya. Ay, Ay.

70 75

Anashuya. Swear by the parents of the gods, Dread oath, who dwell on sacred Himalay, On the far Golden Peak; enormous shapes, Who still were old when the great sea was young; On their vast faces mystery and dreams; Their hair along the mountains rolled and filled From year to year by the unnumbered nests Of aweless birds, and round their stirless feet The joyous flocks of deer and antelope, Who never hear the unforgiving hound. Swear!



Vijaya. By the parents of the gods, I swear.



Anashuya [sings]. I have forgiven, O new star!

WBY was quickly dissatisfied with these lines: several copies of WO annotated in his hand contain stabs at revision, the most extensive of which is in the Pierpont Morgan copy of WO: You live upon the village border, she Amrita daughter of the grey wood-­cutter, And this same eve she stood to watch me pass. 64.] The copy-­text here has ‘Vijaya, swear to her love never more’, but this is almost certainly a misprint, and the text of all other printings has been followed here. 66–68.] The ‘parents of the gods’ on their ‘Golden Peak’ in ‘sacred Himalay’ probably reveal WBY’s debt here to Kalidasa. In the translation of Sakuntula by Monier Williams (1855), Act VII, the King asks ‘what is that range of mountains which, like a bank of clouds illumined by the setting sun, pours down a stream of gold?’, to be answered, ‘Great Prince, it is called “Golden-­peak,” and is the abode of the attendants of the god of Wealth’:

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There Kásyapa, the great progenitor Of demons and of gods, himself the offspring Of the divine Maríchi, Brahma’s son, With Aditi, his wife, in calm seclusion, Does holy penance for the good of mortals. Monier Williams annotates ‘Golden-­peak’ as ‘A sacred range of mountains lying along the Himalaya chain, and apparently identical with, or immediately adjacent to Kailasa, the paradise of Kuvera, the god of Wealth’. R. Ellmann (Man and the Masks 68) suggests that WBY is alluding here to the secret Tibetan masters of Madame Blavatsky (‘Koot-­Hoomi’ and ‘Morya’). 71. mountains rolled] mountains upward rolled MS. 73. stirless feet] Perhaps cp. a sentimental poem by J. Noel Paton, Spindrift (1867), ‘Annie’s Grave’, 7: ‘And soft green moss haps tenderly her cold and stirless feet’. 74. antelope] antelopes WO.

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80

Maybe you have not heard of us, you have come forth so newly, You hunter of the fields afar! Ah, you will know my loved one by his hunter’s arrows truly, Shoot on him shafts of quietness, that he may ever keep A lonely laughter, and may kiss his hands to me in sleep.



Farewell, Vijaya. Nay, no word, no word;

I, priestess of this temple, offer up 85 Prayers for the land. [Vijaya goes.] O Brahma, guard in sleep The merry lambs and the complacent kine, The flies below the leaves, and the young mice In the tree roots, and all the sacred flocks Of red flamingoes; and my love, Vijaya; 90 And may no restless fay with fidget finger Trouble his sleeping: give him dreams of me.

82. A lonely] P29 and after. An inner WO-­P24; A lonely laughter, that he may kiss hands EPS. 85–89.] WBY’s old schoolfriend, Charles Johnston, quoted these lines in a review of PW06 as verses that ‘bring back into the memory the time when we sought a pathway through the mazes of Eastern lore, gloating over the Light of Asia, the Song Celestial and the tales of the Great War’ (North American Review, Apr. 1908, 187). 85.] Prayers for the land, [my duty when the sun | Sinketh as now del.] MS. 86. and the complacent kine] and all the kine complacent WO.

88. all the] all thy WO. 89. flamingoes] CP33; flamingo WO-­P29. 90. And may no] May never WO. The MS has [May never del.] And may no. fay with] Pitri’s P95. In Sanskrit, Pitri means ‘father’, and it is often used for a spirit of a dead ancestor. WBY’s decision in 1895 to bring the name into use for what is essentially a fairy was one he did not adopt in any subsequent version of the poem. fidget] WBY’s meaning here, of ‘fidgeting’, is sufficiently rare to remain unattested in OED.

69

KING GOLL

THE POEMS

An Irish Legend

Date of composition. Composed 1886–1887. Editors and critics of WBY have been unanimous in giving the date of composition for the poem as 1884; this derives ultimately from the poet’s wife GY, whose list of dates of composition was the foundation for the datings given in an appendix to R. Ellmann’s Identity; this in turn informed later criticism, biography, and editions. The most recent attempt at a full chronology, Appendix A. to W.K. Chapman, Yeats’s Poetry in the Making (2010), incorporates the Identity datings in full, and therefore the evidence supplied by GY. Chapman allows that ‘Mrs Yeats could be uncertain, even imprecise, in dating the composition of her husband’s lyrics’, but adds that her records constitute ‘the most comprehensive and authoritative index yet assembled on the making of Yeats’s poems’ (229). It is true that GY is often an indispensable witness, but it is also true that her most accurate and valuable work on dating concerns poems written once she herself was in constant contact with the poet, and that she is less inclined to offer dates beyond those of publication in periodicals for poems composed decades before she and her husband met. ‘King Goll’, with ‘Ephemera’, stands at the very beginning of the list GY gave to Ellmann (a carbon copy of this, evidently retained by GY, is NLI 30166). Both the poems here carry the date ’1884’. This is the sole evidence for 1884 as the composition date for either poem: on the difficulties regarding ‘Ephemera’ (which is likely to date from 1887), see the introductory note to that poem; for ‘King Goll’, also, a dating of 1884 is in itself highly problematic. If GY derived her dating ultimately from the word of her husband, it is difficult to see how or for what original purpose the date for these two poems was elicited from him; another list, for a ‘Selected Poems’ which is almost certainly SP29 (NLI 30128), carries GY’s dates for poems, and only one of the four ‘Crossways’ poems there, ‘The Sad Shepherd’, is dated (but as 1886, whereas WBY himself published a date for that poem as 1885), and a fifth, ‘Ephemera’, is crossed out, it too going undated at this stage). So, one of the ‘1884’ poem-­datings was not available to GY while her husband was alive, but was recorded and passed on by her some years after his death: this does not disprove her dates, but nevertheless needs to be borne in mind. More seriously, WBY himself did not take the opportunity to assign a date to ‘King Goll’ (or to ‘Ephemera’) in the P95 ‘Crossways’ section, where other early poems do receive appended dates (possibly, with the intention of showing his readership how early they really are: ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’ and ‘The Song of the Sad Shepherd’ are dated to 1885, ‘The Indian upon God’ and ‘The Indian to his Love’ to 1886, and ‘Anashuya and Vijaya’ to 1887). In this context, the decision not to give ‘King Goll’ a date, while it may not in itself be indicative (‘The Stolen Child’, e.g., though probably DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-70

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from 1886, goes similarly undated, as do the poems written closer to the time of WO’s publication) is still worth considering: either (if the poem was indeed from 1884) WBY decided not to reveal the very early date (and never revealed it afterwards), or he saw no need to append a date for the reason that it was not remarkably out of line with the dates of composition of its companion poems. 1884 does seem extremely early for this poem: it was the year when WBY was writing work like Vivien and Time, Love and Death, and IoS; his purely lyric work at this period was still prone to significant elements of clumsiness (something not to be seen in ‘King Goll’) but was also, like his longer experiments, largely free of Irish subject matter, and thoroughly unconversant with Irish myth. Were ‘King Goll’ to have been written in 1884, it would have been both a major breakthrough in terms of technique and a momentous beginning on Irish mythic material. Yet neither the breakthrough nor the new thematic beginning was to be followed up in WBY’s writing until at least 1886. WBY did not meet John O’Leary, the major catalyst in his turn towards Irish themes, until 1885, the year during which he also first encountered KT, who was herself then only beginning to take up Irish subject matter, and in 1885, he was publishing as much as he could in the friendly pages of the Dublin University Review – not just IoS, but poems like ‘The Seeker’, Mosada, and the ‘Epilogue’ that later became ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’. In 1886, the same journal was still WBY’s major outlet, and he published poems of the (not very distinguished) calibre of ‘In a Drawing-­ Room’ and ‘Life’ there, along with the clumsy allegory-­poem ‘The Two Titans’ and a purely occasional piece like ‘On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy’. Would WBY have let a poem of the quality of ‘King Goll’ lie on the stocks in 1885 and 1886? As far as the documentary record is concerned, there is absolutely no mention of the poem until 25 Jun. 1887, when WBY writes to KT that ‘I shall send today ‘King Goll’ to Miss O’Leary’ (CL 1, 23). While this suggests that KT was already familiar with the poem, it does not offer any clues about how long the poem had been in existence. Thereafter, the poem is mentioned quite frequently by WBY; just as importantly, the poem is revised often between its first appearance in The Leisure Hour and subsequent outings, in PBYI and WO, then subsequently for P95 and P99. Busy reviser as WBY was, it would be unusual for him to find this much to do, and this often, to a poem that had been written first in 1884, languishing from 1884 to 1887 without any attempt to find publication (even in places that were unfailingly welcoming to WBY), and without mention in correspondence, or any surviving MS traces. There are many MSS of the poetry produced by WBY from 1884 onwards; but in not one MS source from these years is there any sign of ‘King Goll’: the first surviving MS is one given to KT in 1887. The present edition assumes that GY (and perhaps even WBY at some point) was mistaken in assigning 1884 as the date of composition for this poem. It is not, of course, possible to assign it an exact date, in the absence of firm evidence; however, circumstantial evidence would suggest that a version had been seen by KT before Jun. 1887, and the fact that WBY was in Ireland until late Apr. (last seeing KT on 3 Apr.) may suggest that he gave her a copy of the poem on or before that date. WBY’s first major engagement with poetry and the subject matter of Irish myth and history had come in the autumn of 1886, when his articles on ‘The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson’ had appeared, and this seems a likely time at which he might have begun reading Eugene O’Curry, whose Lectures on the



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Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History (1878) give ‘King Goll’ its subject. Certainly, the articles announce a new direction for WBY himself: in the first, Ferguson’s ‘special claim to our attention is that he went back to the Irish cycle, finding it, in truth, a fountain that, in the passage of centuries, was overgrown with weeds and grass, so that the very way to it was forgotten of the poets; but now that his feet have worn the pathway, many others will follow, and bring thence living waters for the healing of our nation, helping us to live the larger life of the Spirit, and lifting our souls away from their selfish joys and sorrows to be the companions of those who lived greatly among the woods and hills when the world was young’ (CW 9, 3–4). This sounds very much like the agenda of a poet who is himself moving into the territory he describes, and ‘King Goll’ would fit comfortably into the Ferguson-­inspired ambitions which WBY is formulating here. One piece of evidence for an earlier dating has been the existence of a portrait of WBY as King Goll by JBY. There are three versions of this: the first, a rough study in pastels; the next, the engraving which accompanied the poem’s first publication (see Publication history); and the third, a version in oils which remained in the Yeats family and was hung on the poet’s walls in later life. The date of this JBY artwork may have some bearing on the question of the dating of his son’s poem. W.M. Murphy dates the illustration to 1885 (Murphy, 573), but his evidence for this rests solely on a letter from nearly forty years later. WBY mentioned the painting in his discussion of art, youth, and age with OS, writing to her on 24 May 1924 (InteLex, 4556): I write for boys and girls of twenty for I am always thinking of myself at that age – the age I was when my father painted me as ‘King Goll’, [quite insane, del.] tearing the strings out [of] a harp, being insane with youth, but looking very desirable – alas no woman noticed it at the time – with dreamy eyes and a great mass of black hair. It hangs in our drawing room now a pathetic memory of a really dreadful time. WBY’s habits of numerical accuracy are lax at the best of times, and it should in any case be clear enough that here he is not speaking literally about ‘boys & girls of twenty’ (nineteen year-­olds, like those who have reached twenty-­one, are presumably not being ruled out); but he does remember being that ‘age’ when JBY worked on the King Goll portrait; and it may just be relevant that WBY was (strictly speaking, though of course the poet is not speaking strictly here) twenty years old between 13 Jun. 1885 and the same date in 1886. This very literal interpretation of the 1924 letter would be the only way to date JBY’s efforts as early as 1885 (and, by implication, would argue for the poem as having been written by then); but it seems much more reasonable to suppose that WBY remembers being about twenty when the portrait was made. Another circumstantial factor bearing on the dating is that JBY used his son as a ‘model’ (something WBY insisted on in a letter from much nearer the time: see Publication history): why the illustration had to be done in 1885 or earlier, thus requiring someone to model for it at short notice, years ahead of any prospect of publication or consequent agreement to the provision of an illustration, would be a mystery, and one out of keeping with JBY’s habits at this time. A plausible conjecture is that WBY secured an agreement to publication from The

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Leisure Hour in early 1887, that agreement was then rapidly sought from the magazine for an illustration (which would have brought an additional (and much-­needed) fee), and that JBY thereafter set promptly to work. The present edition’s tentative dating for the poem’s composition, then, is one between autumn 1886 and spring 1887. Sources. WBY’s note announces the source of his poem as being the account of King Goll in Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on The Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History, Delivered at the Catholic University of Ireland during the Sessions of 1855 and 1856 (1861). O’Curry (1794–1862) was an important figure in the modern history of Irish scholarship, whose pioneering work on a number of significant MSS (in the collections of TCD and elsewhere) put in place the Irish-­language foundations for the later work of (amongst others) Standish J. O’Grady. O’Curry’s Lectures contains a great deal of information about early and mythic history as found in the Irish sources, but WBY’s note to this poem in The Leisure Hour is the earliest evidence for his knowledge of the work. It is unlikely that WBY made an especially close study of O’Curry’s volumes: in The Trembling of the Veil (1922), he remembered only ‘the dry pages of O’Curry and his school’ as having furnished O’Grady with the raw materials required by a writer without Irish (CW 3, 183). In 1937, preparing his (in the event, never published) ‘Dublin Edition’ of Works for Scribner’s, WBY wrote in a ‘General Introduction’ that it was only once he met with the writings of O’Grady that he found the Irish material he needed; before then, however, he had found O’Curry heavy going: ‘[John] O’Leary had sent me to O’Curry but his unarranged and uninterpreted history defeated my boyish indolence’ (CW 5, 205). It is not at all clear that at the stage of the publication of this version of the poem WBY had any sure grasp of its supposedly historical subject, and his note in fact conflates two figures named Goll: the youth of fifteen mentioned in the passage which he quotes from O’Curry, and the better-­known warrior Goll Mac Morna, leader of the Fenians in Connaught. If WBY had access to Kuno Meyer’s 1885 edition of the Cath Finntraga (‘The Battle of Ventry’, a volume that might have been available to him in John O’Leary’s collection), he could have come across the young Ulster warrior (whose age in this Irish history is given as thirteen rather than fifteen). Offering himself for single combat with an enemy who can kill five hundred opponents at a time, the young fighter announces himself to Finn, who sees him leading a small troop of battle-­eager youngsters (Cath Finntraga, 24): ‘Stay with me, O son,’ said Finn, ‘that I may know whose is this young varied troop which I  behold, the fairest of appearance that I  have ever seen in the world.’ And thereupon they approached them, and the son of the king of Ulster let down his right knee before the king of the fiann, and greeted him modestly and sensibly. And he was answered in the same way, and Finn asked tidings of him who they were and where their home was. ‘Emain Macha is our home,’ said the boy, ‘and I myself am called Goll the son of the king of Ulster, and those other youths whom ye see are my foster-­brothers.’ This Goll does not go mad, but fights long and heroically, dying alongside his opponent eventually, when they are covered by the waves. It is possible that WBY’s initial



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inspiration was neither the young Ulster Goll nor Goll Mac Morna, but the mythic King Sweeney of the twelfth-­century poem Buile Shuibne, who also went mad as a result of battle and subsequently wandered through Ireland, sometimes in the form of a bird. If WBY was able to draw on this material, it was almost certainly through its use in Samuel Ferguson’s Congal (1872), where Shuibne (Sweeny) goes mad in the course of the battle of Magh Rath. While O’Curry himself may have been conflating the Glen Bolcainn of the Buile Shuibne with his ‘Glen-­na-­Gealt, or the Glen of the Lunatics’, WBY could have drawn on the Ferguson account (which he knew) in attempting to convey the onset of madness in Goll. Ferguson’s account, itself heavily compressed from the Irish source material, is provided here (Congal (1872), IV, 445–482):

To Sweeny, as the hosts drew near, ere yet the fight should join, Seemed still as if between them rolled the foam-­strown tawny Boyne: And as the swiftly-­nearing hosts consumed the narrowing space, And arrow-­flights and javelin-­casts and sword-­strokes came in place, Through all the rout of high-­raised hands and wrathful glaring eyes, Erc’s look of wrath and lifted hand before him seemed to rise; Through all the hard-­rebounding din from breasts of Gaels and Gauls, That jarred against the vault of heaven, when clashed the brazen walls, Through all the clangorous battle-­calls and death-­shouts hoarse and high, Erc’s shriller curse he seemed to hear and Erc’s despairing cry. Much did the hapless warrior strive to shake from breast and brain The illusion and the shameful wish fast rising, but in vain; The wish to fly seized all his limbs; the stronger dread of shame Contending with the wish to fly, made spoil of all his frame. His knees beneath him wavered, as if shaken by the stress Of a rapid-­running river: his heart, in fear’s excess, Sprang to and fro within him, as a wild bird newly-­caged, Or a stream-­ascending salmon in a strong weir’s trap engaged. Room for escape the field had none: and Sweeny there had died Perforce in front; his shame unknown; his name a word of pride To all his race, for many a feat of valour nobly done, And much renown from conquered Chiefs in former battles won; But that the terror in his soul at length to madness grew, And, with a maniac’s strength of ten, he burst the rear rank through, And fled in presence of both hosts. So light and swift he ran, It seemed as if exalting fear had left, of all the man, Only the empty outward show. Then many cried to slay The flying Chief; but Ardan stood between: “Insane ones, stay Your idle impious shafts,” he cried; “no coward’s flight is here; But sacred frenzy sent from Heaven. The wings of vulgar fear Ne’er lifted weight-­sustaining feet along the airy ways In leaps like these: but ecstasies there be of soul, that raise Men’s bodies out of Earth’s constraint; and, so exalted, he

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Acquires the sacred Omad’s name, and gains immunity From every earthly violence. ’Twas thus Wood Merlin gained His seership on Arderidd field: else Britain had remained Still unenriched of half her lore. So, turn you, and engage Your spears where men who fly you not, await your juster rage.”

B. Foley, in ‘Yeats’s ‘King Goll’: Sources, Revision, and Revisions’ (YACTS 4 (1986), 17–32) musters numerous possible sources and parallels, and argues that WBY ‘was intentionally conflating two or more legends, drawing from each whatever attracted him, since in none of his possible sources do we find a figure who exhibits all of the characteristics of Yeats’s “Goll” ’ (22). At this first published stage, ‘King Goll’ is far less dependent on any source (despite the note) than it is on WBY’s imagination; as the poem developed in subsequent published versions, the poet added layers of source detail in a process best summarized by F. Kinahan: ‘The poet knew relatively little about Goll when he began to write about him, but he was willing to learn’ (‘A Source Note on ‘The Madness of King Goll’’, YA 4, 189–194, 189). Publication history. This was WBY’s first poem to appear in an English periodical, in The Leisure Hour for Sept. 1887: WBY had expected it to be published earlier, but reported to John O’Leary in a letter of 12 Jul. 1887 that it had been ‘crowded out’ of the Aug. number (CL 1, 27). Alongside the poem itself (which, with its prefatory note, took up most of a page) there was a full-­page reproduction of JBY’s portrait (for which WBY was the model) of ‘King Goll’: the seated figure here tears with his left hand the strings of the harp that rests on his knee. The dating of this picture is obviously of relevance to the question of the dating of the poem itself (see Date of composition), but there is no evidence that JBY started work much in advance of the poem’s publication: it seems likely that he worked on it in the first half of the summer of 1887. The version used by The Leisure Hour differs from that identified as a ‘preliminary sketch’ in R. Schuchard, The Last Minstrels (which also reproduces JBY’s first version as Plate 1): initially, Goll simply plays, rather than tears, the strings of a harp that is held in his left (rather than his right) hand. The model remains, however, very clearly WBY himself. It is hard to believe that readers of The Leisure Hour were not being invited to identify Goll with the poet; JBY had after all earlier furnished Mosada with a portrait of the author, his son. WBY was inclined to point out that he was no more than an affordable (because free) ‘model’: writing to John McGrath on 19 Jan. 1893, he confirmed (CL 4, 939): The picture you speak of was done from me and is probably like though it was not intended as a portrait. Be sure I would never have had myself painted as the mad ‘King Goll’ of my own poem had I thought it was going to turn out the portrait it has. I was merely the cheapest and handiest model to be found. The poem’s next version was that published the following year in PBYI, separately edited in the present edition.



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Copy-­text: The Leisure Hour, Sept. 1887. [Goll or Gall lived in Ireland about the third century. The battle wherein he lost his reason furnished matter for a bardic chronicle still extant. O’Curry, in his “Manuscript Materials of Irish History,” thus tells the tale: “Having entered the battle with extreme eagerness, his excitement soon increased to absolute frenzy, and after having performed astounding deeds of valour he fled in a state of derangement from the scene of slaughter, and never stopped until he plunged into the wild seclusion of a deep glen far up the country. This glen has ever since been called Glen-­na-­Gealt, or the Glen of the Lunatics, and it is even to this day believed in the south that all the lunatics of Erin would resort to this spot if they were allowed to be free.”]

I

was a wise young king of old;   Mine was the throne in Eman’s hall, Of purple and of heavy gold;   And mine was every trophied wall, 5 The horns and shields and wild swan’s pinions;   And with a rule serene and mild I ruled o’er all my fair dominions,   A gentle yet a kingly child;

Note] WBY quotes from Eugene O’Curry, 316, largely accurately (O’Curry’s final phrase is not ‘to be free’ but ‘to be at large’). The lines preceding the quotation help to make it clear that this Goll is not the same person as Goll Mac Morna: Tidings of the invasion were soon carried into Ulster also; and Goll, the son of Fiacha Foltleethan, king of that province, a youth of fifteen, obtained leave from his father to come to Fionn’s assistance, at the head of a fine band of young volunteers from Ulster. Young Goll’s ardour, however, cost him rather dear [. . .] 2. Eman’s hall] A  reference to Emain Macha, the seat of the Ulster kings. The form ‘Eman’ is standard in Ferguson, and in De Vere, and is used also in the work of R.D. Joyce: see e.g. Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘Deirdre’s Lament for the Sons of Usnach’, 49: ‘Woe to Eman, roof and wall!’, Aubrey De Vere, The Foray of Queen Maeve (1882), I, 493: ‘I rule in Eman and this Uladh

realm’, R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Flower Feast in Mana’, 19: ‘From Eman’s hall and Tara’s level shade’. 4. trophied wall] Cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Wine-­Cup is Circling’, 3–4: ‘the trophied wall,  | Where his sword hangs idly shining’. WBY’s line here shadows, perhaps coincidentally, another line of Moore’s, in ‘’Tis night, the spectred hour is nigh’, 9: ‘And mine was every blissful night’. 5. wild swan’s pinions] Cp. A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse and Other Poems (1882), ‘A Dark Month’, 854: ‘strong as a wild swan’s pinions’. 6. serene and mild] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, The Foray of Queen Maeve and other Legends of Ireland’s Heroic Age (1882), ‘The Sons of Usnach’ II, 35: ‘the morning shone, serene and mild’, and KT, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885), ‘Olivia and Dick Primrose’, 2: ‘With sweet mute lips and eyes serene and mild’. 8. a kingly child] Perhaps cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘Tasso’s Coronation’, 4: ‘a kingly child of song’.

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And every whispering Druid said, 10   Bending low his pious head, “He brings the peaceful age of gold” – (They will not hush, the leaves that round me flutter – the beech leaves old). Upon his knees by my footstool   There cried a herald, “To our valleys 15 Hath come a sea-­king masterful,   That he may fill his hollow galleys. Help! Help! And hurl him from our coast   To his own ice!” I gathered round me, Ere fall of evening, my mailed host, 20   And when tumultuous feet enwound me Fell on the pirates by the deep,   And they inherit the great sleep. These hands slew many warriors bold – (They will not hush, the leaves that round me flutter – the beech leaves old).

9, 12.] whispering . . . will not hush] Perhaps cp. a short poem by Augusta Webster, A Book of Rhyme (1881), ‘The Whisper’: Some one has said a whispered word to me; The whisper whispers on within my ear. Oh little word, hush, hush, and let me be; Hush, little word, too vexing sweet to hear. And, if it will not hush, what must I do? The word was “Love”; perchance the word was true: And, if it will not hush, must I repine? I am his love; perchance then he is mine. 12. leaves that round me flutter] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870) I, ‘March: Atalanta’s Race’, 517: ‘The rose-­leaves flutter round me in the night’. 15, 21. a sea-­king . . . pirates] These look very much like Viking raiders, though WBY possibly intends (as later versions of this poem specify) more otherworldly invaders such as the undersea powers of the Fomoroh. Samuel Ferguson, in Book IV of his Congal (1872), just before the battle in which King Sweeney runs mad (and which may very well have a part to play in the formation of WBY’s

frenzy-­ stricken Goll), has King Domnhal address his Firbolg allies (IV, 162–3): ‘Firbolg and Gael in one accord; all Erin in a band | Against the robbers of the sea and traitors of the land.’ 16. hollow galleys] While the primary sense here is that the ships have capacious holds, ready to be filled with plunder, WBY also echoes a standard Homeric epithet for ships: see e.g. W. Cowper, The Iliad of Homer (1793), XII, 572: ‘The Grecians to their hollow galleys flew’. 17. hurl him from our coast] Perhaps cp. Joseph Cottle, Alfred (1850), XI, 485–6: ‘Should heaven our efforts bless, and we the Danes | Hurl from our land’. 19. my mailed host] Cp. Gerald Griffin, Poetical Works (1843), ‘The Isle of Saints’, 61–64: ‘Not ours the zeal for pomp – for power – | Boastful threat, the bearing vain  – |The mailed host  – the haughty tower  – |The pomp of war’s encumbered plain’. 23. warriors bold] This inversion is a very common one, and effectively a verse cliché, but it is especially marked in W.H. Drummond’s Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), see e.g. ‘The Lay of the Combat of Conn’, VII, 16: ‘The



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25 But slowly as I shouting slew,   And trampled on the bubbling mire, In my most secret spirit grew   A fever and a whirling fire: I paused – the stars above me flashed, 30   And shone around the eyes of men; I paused – and far away I dashed   O’er hill and heath and spongy fen, And crumpled in my hands the staff   Of my long spear, with scream and laugh, 35 And song that down the valleys rolled – (They will not hush, the leaves that round me flutter – the beech leaves old). And now I wander in the woods   When summer gluts the golden bees, Or in the autumn solitudes 40   Arise the leopard-­coloured trees, Or when along the wintry strands   The cormorants shiver on their rocks, I wander on and wave my hands,   And sing and shake my heavy locks. 45 The wild boar knows me, by one ear   I lead along the woodland deer, And young hares brook my harmless hold – (They will not hush, the leaves that round me flutter – the beech leaves old).

eastern warriors bold’ and ‘The Lay of Patrick Exhorting Ossian to Attend to his Psalmody’, 7–8: ‘You face no more the battle’s rage, | Nor join with warriors bold’. 26.] Cp. Shelley, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, 40–41: ‘Trampling to a mire of blood  | The adoring multitude’. WBY certainly knew these lines, and they return much later in his work, in ‘the dolphin’s mire and blood’ of ‘Byzantium’ (1930). ‘The bubbling mire’ of 1887 is likely to be bubbling with blood: cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lady of the Lake XI, 9–10: ‘The crosslet’s points of sparkling wood, | He quenched among the bubbling blood’. 28. a whirling fire] Cp. William Sharp, Poems (1884), ‘Sospitra’, 208–9: ‘And all the vast vault of the sky | Seemed one great mass of whirling fire’. 38. gluts] The meaning is OED 1.a, ‘To feed to repletion’, though the verb is, as OED notes,

‘Chiefly reflexive or passive’. WBY’s use here is relatively unusual, but also strongly reminiscent of Keats, ‘Ode to Melancholy’ (1820), 15: ‘Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose’. 39. autumn solitudes] Cp. T.C. Irwin, Sonnets on the Poetry and Problems of Life (1881), ‘The apples ripen. . . ’, 8: ‘The autumn solitude of the sea day’. 44. shake my heavy locks] The hairstyles of J. Macpherson’s Ossian feature many heavy locks: see e.g. (among frequent instances) The Poems of Ossian (1805 edn.), Comala, p.  220: ‘O gentle breeze, lift thou the heavy locks of the maid’, Carric-­Thura, p.  415: ‘he returned in the fair blushing of youth, with all his heavy locks’, Temora Bk. IV, p.  120: ‘She comes with bending eye, amid the wandering of her heavy locks’. Behind the whole line, also, there is a general reminiscence of

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As once within a little town 50   That slumbered ’neath the harvest moon, I passed a tip-­toe up and down,   A murmuring a mountain tune, Of how I hear on hill-­heads high   The tramping of tremendous feet, 55 I saw this harp all songless lie,   Deserted in a doorway seat, And bore it to the woods with me.   Of some unhuman misery Our married voices wildly trolled. 60 (They will not hush, the leaves that round me flutter – the beech leaves old). And toads and every outlawed thing   With eyes of sadness came to hear From pond and fallen tree – me sing   The song of outlaws and their fear; 65 And as I sang my soul was free   Of fever. Now the strings are torn And I must wail beside the sea

Shakespeare, Macbeth IV.iii. 50–51: ‘Never shake | Thy gory locks at me’. 49–50. a little town | That slumbered] Cp. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 35–9: What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-­built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be [. . .] 54.] Perhaps cp. Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), III, 103–5: ‘ for all the night, around their echoing camp,  | Was heard continuous from the hills, a sound as of the tramp | Of giant footsteps’, and IV, 405–6: ‘So wide, so deep, so terrible, so spreading, swift and fast,  | With tempest-­ tramp from Congal’s camp the adverse columns passed’. 58. some unhuman misery] WBY’s first use of ‘unhuman’, in the sense of OED 2., ‘Not limited by human qualities or conditions; superhuman’ (first citation from 1782) or 3., ‘Not pertaining to mankind’ (first citation from 1861), had been in an abandoned poem that

does (unlike this one) almost certainly date from 1884, ‘When to its end o’er-­ripened July nears’, 84: ‘Unhuman sorrow and unhuman glory’. WBY had probably picked up this unusual word from Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘In a Cathedral Close’, 41–2: ‘the child’s glad eyes  | Your joy unhuman shall control’. ‘Unhuman misery’ in this line looks like a deliberate appropriation and reversal of Dowden’s phrase. WBY had still not finished with the word, for he uses it three times in ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889 version, composed from 1887–8), at I, 173, II, 134, and III, 56. 59. trolled] OED ‘troll’, 10.a., ‘To sing (something) in the manner of a round or catch; to sing in a full, rolling voice; to chant merrily or jovially.’ OED’s citations include George Eliot, Romola (1861) I ch.9: ‘He could touch the lute and troll a gay song’. 66. Now the strings are torn] Reading the text alone here, it is quite likely that one would assume these harp-­ strings had been torn by accident, or by neglect over the course



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  Or pace and weep in woods forlorn, For my remembering hour is done; 70   Or fling my laughter to the sun, In all his evening vapours rolled – (They will not hush, the leaves that round me flutter – the beech leaves old).

of time: it is JBY’s accompanying illustration which has Goll himself tear the strings. In the next (WO) publication of the poem, WBY removes altogether any reference to the torn strings; it returns with the ‘kind wires’ ‘torn and still’ of the version in P95 and after. It is worth remembering, all the same, that

in none of the versions of this poem does WBY’s text indicate explicitly that King Goll deliberately tears the strings of his harp (or, later, the ‘wires’ of his tympan). 68. in woods forlorn] Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), IX, 910: ‘To live again in these wild woods forlorn’.

70

[‘HOW BEAUTIFUL THY COLOURS ARE . . . ’] THE POEMS

Date and context. These lines appeared in the journal edited by John O’Leary, The Gael, 23 Apr. 1887. They will have been written in order to give an essay its poetic illustration, and most probably very quickly. They occur in a piece on ‘Finn Mac Cumhaill’ which WBY contributed (and of which only a fragment has been preserved). After relating the story of how Finn comes into possession of the knowledge carried by the salmon of wisdom, WBY writes: ‘He was now admitted into the order of Fenians – the Irish “Table Round” – and to prove his mastery of verse, composed a poem to May Day, the day, perhaps, of his initiation, which has come down to us. I give here a somewhat hasty, though fairly literal version of it, in rhyme: – ’ (CW 9, 47). Source. WBY works from the translation by John O’Donovan of ‘The Boyish Exploits of Finn Mac Cumhaill’ in Transactions of the Ossianic Society for the Year 1856 (1859). This is the same volume in which WBY read the translation of Michael Comyn’s Oisin in the Land of Youth that was to be the primary source for ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. On pp. 302 and 303, the Irish text and O’Donovan’s English translation appear; the translation here reads:

May-­day delightful time! how beautiful the colour! The blackbirds sing their full lay, would that Laighaig were here The cuckoos sing in constant strains, how welcome is the noble Brilliance of the seasons ever; on the margin of the branchy woods The summer swallows skim the stream, the swift horses seek the pool, The heath spreads out its long hair, the weak fair bog-­down grows. Sudden consternation attacks the signs, the planets in their courses running exert an influence: The sea is lulled to rest, flowers cover the earth.

In a note, O’Donovan writes about this short poem: The words of this fragment, which was considered to be the first composition of Finn, after having eaten the salmon of the Boyne, is [sic] very ancient and exceedingly obscure. The translation is only offered for the consideration of Irish scholars, for it is certain that the meaning of some of the lines are doubtful. The poem obviously wants some lines at the end; and Mr. Cleaver states, that the remaining portion of the manuscript is so defaced as to render it totally illegible. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-71



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Later, in 1899, Douglas Hyde wrote about this early Irish poem in his A Literary History of Ireland: From Earliest Times to the Present Day (275): Occasionally we meet with touches of nature poetry of which the Gael has always been supremely fond. [Quotes O’Donovan’s version, setting it out as prose] The language of this poem is so old as to be in parts unintelligible, and the broken metre points to the difficulties of transmission over a long period of time, yet he would be a bold man who would ascribe with certainty the authorship of it to Finn Mac Cumhaill in the third century [. . .] And yet all the history of these people is known and recorded with much apparent plausibility and many collateral circumstances connecting them with the men of their time. How much of this is genuine historical tradition? It is difficult to decide at present. Form and treatment. WBY employs here a version of rhymed fourteeners in two abab quatrains. This is probably intended to give the verses an air of antiquity, since it is essentially a lyric variation on the fourteener couplets to be found in George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad (as well as, closer to home, Samuel Ferguson’s Congal [1872]). Working entirely from O’Donovan’s halting version, the poet turns it into an effective poem. Copy-­text: The Gael 23 Apr. 1887.

H 5

ow beautiful thy colours are, oh marvellous morn of May, The black-­birds pour their copious lays; would Leigha were here, The cuckoos sing unceasingly; how welcome day by day The gay and noble seasons; the summer swallows shear The streams beside the branchy wood, the horses seek the pool, The heather spreads her long loose hair; the frail marsh-­cottons grow, The far bewildered planets pour on all an influence cool, And seas are lulled in quietness, and lavish blossoms blow.

2. copious lays] Perhaps cp. W. Cowper, trans. of Milton, ‘To Giovanni Battista Manso, Marquis of Villa’, 12: ‘the patron of his copious lays’. 6. the frail marsh-­ cottons] Marsh-­ cotton is Eriophorum angustifolium, known also as bog-­cotton (O’Donovan’s ‘bog-­down’). This rare form of the name turns up in William

Allingham, ‘The Lady of the Sea: A  Legend of Ancient Eire’, 62–64: ‘No whiter to the autumnal wind  | Marsh-­ cotton waves on rushy moor | Than flowed his hair and beard’. WBY read Allingham’s Irish Songs and Poems (1887), and mentioned this poem in a Providence Sunday Journal piece, ‘The Bard of Ballyshannon’, in Sept. 1888 (see CW 7, 73).

71

THE BALLAD OF MOLL MAGEE THE POEMS

Date of composition. Possibly composed in spring 1887 and before 18 May of this year. WBY wrote to KT on 18 May to let her know that he had just sent John O’Leary a review of her new volume, Shamrocks, for The Gael. It is very likely that along with this review he gave O’Leary two ballads for publication: one, which is now lost, drew on material from Sligo and seems to have concerned the sufferings of a woman who still lived in a local asylum; the other was almost certainly ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’. The lost poem was ultimately rejected by O’Leary, and a letter from WBY to him of 13 Jun. admits that ‘one of the ballads is certainly morbid (the woman about whom it is, is now in the Sligo madhouse or was there some while since).’ The other ballad is also (WBY implies) one that O’Leary found unsuitable, though he defends it against the charge of morbidity: ‘However I do not think the Howth one morbid though now on thinking it over I quite agree with you that neither are suitable for a newspaper’ (CL 1, 19). O’Leary’s opinions probably came to WBY by way of his sister Ellen in a letter of 23 May. Textual and publication history. There is no surviving MS  material that relates to the poem. Despite its apparent rejection, it is possible that the ballad did, in the event, appear in the pages of The Gael (many numbers of which are now lost). Although Ellen O’Leary’s 23 May letter to WBY (and his subsequent letter to John O’Leary the next month) suggest rejection, it is clear that the greater editorial objections were to the now lost ‘Sligo’ ballad. ‘The Howth one’ was perhaps not so finally put from The Gael’s door, and it is possible that the O’Learys had thoughts of resurrecting it much later in the year: another letter to WBY from Ellen O’Leary, of 20 Nov. 1887, tells the poet that ‘we shall do nothing to Molly Magee until you tell us’ (see note, CL 1, 20). No copies of The Gael for the relevant time have yet been located; but in 1908 KT gave information to WBY’s first bibliographer, Allan Wade, that this poem had in fact appeared in The Gael. WBY included it in WO, retained it with some revisions in the ‘Crossways’ section of P95, and in all subsequent collected editions thereafter. Origins. In PW06 WBY wrote that ‘I took the story [. . .] of “The Ballad of Moll Magee” from a sermon preached in the chapel at Howth if I remember rightly’, repeating the claim in CWVP08. The poet lived with his family at Howth (on the coast outside Dublin) from 1881–1884, and this was a period during which (according to his much later reminiscences) WBY would often spend time listening to his mother’s conversations at home with local people, many of them from the fishing community. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1916), WBY gave an account of his mother at Howth (CW 3, 78): When I think of her, I almost always see her talking over a cup of tea in the kitchen with our servant, the fisherman’s wife, on the only themes outside our DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-72



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house that seemed of interest – the fishing-­people of Howth, or the pilots and fishing-­people of Rosses Point. She read no books, but she and the fisherman’s wife would tell each other stories that Homer might have told, pleased with any moment of sudden intensity and laughing together over any point of satire. There is an essay called ‘Village Ghosts’ in my Celtic Twilight which is but a record of one such afternoon, and many a fine tale has been lost because it had not occurred to me soon enough to keep notes. The prose piece, ‘Village Ghosts’ in The Celtic Twilight (but first published in 1889) contains a number of stories from Howth local tradition; it also contains a reference to ‘the priest, father S—, a noted antiquarian’ (M, 11). This is Fr John F. Shearman (1830–1885) (probably the source of the name of WBY’s hero in his novel John Sherman) in one of whose sermons, presumably, the story of Moll Magee was produced. It would have been very odd for WBY or his family to have been attending the chapel in Howth to hear this or any other sermon, but the narrative could easily have been carried into the Yeats household by any number of Mrs. Yeats’s acquaintances in the village. Shearman was Curate at Howth until 1883, and so had left by the time WBY was eighteen. In J. Hone’s biography, there is mention of this poem as being ‘associated with the years at Howth’, and the anecdote that ‘He [WBY] told Agnes Tobin that he was seventeen when he wrote the ballad, but no doubt it was often rewritten before it appeared [in WO] five years later’ (Hone, 36). WBY knew Agnes Tobin (1864–1939) from 1904 (when he first met her in San Francisco) until at least 1915 (when he was last in contact with the Californian writer): his recollection is likely to have been made, then, a good twenty or thirty years after the event. It is highly unlikely that the ballad was in fact composed in anything like its published form in 1882–3 (and the absence of MS material suggests that there was no lengthy rewriting process involved), but it is entirely possible that WBY heard the story at that time, making use of it in his 1887 composition. The story itself is broadly in keeping with the kinds of story included in ‘Village Ghosts’ where (albeit with the addition of a supernatural element) episodes of domestic violence and infant death are recounted. Sources. The most potent literary source for this poem is also the least specific: there can be no doubt that WBY’s ballad is influenced heavily by Wordsworth, even though no one poem is a dominant source. Although the poem was not composed until later, the Howth stories from which it drew inspiration were being heard by the poet at a time when he was also receiving his first taste of Wordsworth. From the beginning, this exposure was tempered by JBY’s dislike of the English poet, which had in the past been sufficiently intense (or at least, intensely expressed) to cause personal awkwardness between him and Edward Dowden. In daily breakfasts in the Dublin studio after their commute from Howth, Wordsworth seems to have been more often dismissed by JBY than read with approval to his schoolboy son (as were Shakespeare, Shelley, and others). In Reveries Over Childhood and Youth, WBY recalls something of the tone of these pre-­school-­ day paternal tutorials (CW 3, 81): He [JBY] disliked the Victorian poetry of ideas, and Wordsworth but for certain passages or whole poems. He said one morning over his breakfast that he discovered in the shape of the head of a Wordsworthian scholar, an old and

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greatly respected clergyman whose portrait he was painting, all the animal instincts of a prize-­fighter. WBY does not think it worth his while to say more about these ‘passages or whole poems’, but it seems likely that they included the less manifestly didactic items in Lyrical Ballads: with ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’ as a focus, one might wonder whether JBY perhaps found a poem such as ‘The Thorn’ suitably free from ‘the poetry of ideas’. In much later years, JBY was still inclined to remind his son about the dangers of admiring Wordsworth (‘Wordsworth was malign [. . .] These people could not get away from their own self-­importance’ (letter of 24 Mar. 1909), and WBY enjoyed one transatlantic denunciation of the poet so well that he read it aloud to the assembled company of one of his Woburn Buildings ‘at homes’ (letter to JBY, 19 Dec. 1915). Yet the father’s continuation of his warnings and denunciations so far into the adulthood of his pupil suggests he felt there was an abiding need for such things; and it is likely that the teenage WBY read more Wordsworth than his father was either aware of or approved. An anecdote relating to these years in J. Hone’s biography may be revealing (Hone, 34): JBY would rail against Tennyson and Wordsworth, but probably these two poets received more of WBY’s youthful admiration than he would have admitted at the time to his father’s face. Fifty years afterwards he was asked, ‘Whom did you venerate as a young man, Mr. Yeats?’ His answer came without hesitation, ‘Tennyson’. On the question being repeated by the enquirer, who had not expected this answer, the reply was the same with the addition of ‘Wordsworth’. It is likely that WBY kept such admirations largely to himself, and adopted his father’s opinions when amongst an audience: his school contemporary W.K. Magee [‘John Eglinton’] remembered that in these years ‘on the whole he did not like’ Wordsworth, who ‘was for him as he said ‘too much of the rural dean’’ (Mikhail 1, 33). ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’, whatever its immaturities, seems designed to steer clear of JBY’s disapproval of the moral, high-­minded, and oratorical Wordsworth, keeping much closer to the starker and less self-­comforted world of Lyrical Ballads. A suggestive parallel, if not a source, is offered by a poet much more ‘Victorian’ than Wordsworth, in Adelaide Anne Procter’s poem, ‘Requital’ (Legends and Lyrics [1861]). Here an angel takes the form of a child but wanders the streets in foul weather, shut out from all the houses: ‘She beat her wings | At each window pane, | And pleaded for shelter | But all in vain’ (13–16). The one door that finally opens belongs to a woman who is plainly outcast from society (see note to 21). In the morning, the angel has gone, ‘Having kissed the woman | And left her – dead’ (58–60). The situation seems an inverse image of that in ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’, and it is quite likely that WBY knew the poem: Procter was greatly admired by KT, but also at the time more generally celebrated. Critical reception and interpretation. Like many of WBY’s early ballads, this poem is often effectively overlooked in the process of comparison with other, much later exercises by WBY in the form. However, John Todhunter’s review of WO singled the poem out as ‘a successful descent from the cloudlands of fantasy to the real world’ (The Academy, 30 Mar. 1889). In



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early reception, the poem was sometimes mentioned with approval, but it was also vulnerable to critical amusement. Appreciative reactions included that of The Bookman, where a reviewer of P95 observed (with slightly odd recourse to a Breton parallel) that ‘Rudeness is not repellent to him [WBY], and such ballads as “Moll Magee” are fashioned not after literary models, but rather after the rough chanting chronicles that, to this day, give recent and current affairs impressiveness sung by the wandering bards of Brittany’ (Jan. 1896). When the laureateship was vacant in 1895, one newspaper brought the poem forward as the occasion for some arch remarks at the poet’s expense (Glasgow Herald 14 Dec. 1895): Perhaps one ought to beg the pardon of Mr. W.B. Yeats for not mentioning him in the same breath with Mr. Davidson and Mr. Watson – Mr. Yeats of the ‘blue Celtic fire’ (whatever that may be) and of ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee,’ with ‘My father was a poor fisher With shore lines in the say; My work was saltin’ herrings The whole of the long day.’ Yet I suspect that the putting forward of Mr. Yeats in this connection is one of those amiable little suggestions which, like that for the appointment of a Royal Prince as Lord-­Lieutenant, we are perpetually making by way of ‘redressing Irish grievances’ and atoning for Drogheda. [. . .] I think we may, in the meantime, leave Mr. Yeats industriously ‘saltin’ herrings by the say’. Later, the poem could be produced as evidence of the non-­‘Celtic’ blind alley WBY had been fortunate not to follow: Scribner’s Magazine 47 (1910) mentions ‘some of Mr. W.B. Yeats’s less Celtic verses, where he has more or less unwittingly parodied good William Wordsworth’, giving this poem as ‘a case in point’. Where it has noticed the poem, modern criticism has largely taken a similar course. R. Ellmann claimed that WBY was ‘aiming at a folk ballad, though the simplicity does not ring true, especially in an inversion like ‘fisher poor’ ” (Man and the Masks, 139–140). More recent criticism makes the same assumptions: J. Leerson (Romance and Imagination [1997], 170) places Moll Magee among the ‘quaint characters’ of Irish ballad tradition, and N. Grene speaks of ‘the patronizing sentimentality of poems such as “The Ballad of Moll Magee” ’ (Grene, 10). This is fleshed out in a reading such as that of H. Vendler, who writes that the poem ‘emphasizes, as it takes up the Wordsworthian theme of the forsaken woman, the feelings of a speaker rather than a plot’: ‘Moll may resemble a Wordsworthian character, but her poem lacks one of the chief characteristics of Wordsworthian lyrical ballads, the dependence of the plot on a psychological change in the speaker or observer. . . . Here we see no such alteration: throughout, Moll Magee remains unchanged in mind (a fact symbolized by the near-­identity between her first utterance and her last)’ (Vendler, 112–113). While she is certainly right to see the Wordsworthian elements here, Vendler is wrong to associate these with signs of ‘psychological change’ (and Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’ must be an important influence, in which the ‘change’ in the reporter is of far less interest – it

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is, in fact, of a bathetic nature – than the unchanging and unchangeable grief of the dead child’s mother). Interpreting WBY’s poem is not made any easier by measuring it against his later achievements in ballad form; but his specific intentions were, in any case, perhaps not entirely clear even to himself. That said, it is possible to read the poem with certain biographical facts in mind. The poem’s associations with Howth are also, in part, associations with Susan Yeats, WBY’s mother; and this is so not just in terms of the story’s provenance but at the level of theme, for the death of an infant was something of which the Yeats family (like most others of the time) had had immediate experience. Robert Corbet Yeats had died just before his third birthday in 1873, and Jane Grace Yeats died at a little more than ten months old in 1876. The toll this took on Susan Yeats was in all likelihood a factor in her psychological decline through WBY’s teenage years. That the poet remembered her as being comparatively happy in Howth is interesting, but it is also suggestive that when he chooses a story from that period he selects a tale of infant death and maternal suffering. The role of Moll’s husband, moreover, is hardly an honourable one; like the men in the prose piece ‘Village Ghosts’, he is placed far from any possible sympathy. The poem offers comfort of a kind to Moll Magee – at least, in so far as the dead child is granted by God the welcome she herself can no longer have – yet its Wordsworthian bearings acknowledge a grimmer reality in the world before death. It is tempting to see WBY’s choice of influence here as something of a studied rebuke to his father’s literary views – but in the process, it may contain beneath the surface the more personal rebuke to him that WBY would not have been able to consciously articulate. At all events, it is difficult to agree that the poem is in any way merely sentimental or conventional, for all its sentiment, and all its convention. Copy-­text: P49.

C

ome round me, little childer; There, don’t fling stones at me Because I mutter as I go; But pity Moll Magee.

5

My man was a poor fisher With shore lines in the say;

1. childer] This old form of ‘children’ is a correct dialect form, but also a conventional aspect of dialect in literary representations of the speech of e.g. poor fishing communities: it is to be found in Irish, Scottish, and English poems in the nineteenth century. It was used most widely by A.P. Graves in his poems on Irish subjects, and is to be met with in his most famous poem, ‘Father O’Flynn’, 26: ‘All the young childer are wild for to play wid you’.

5.] My husband was a fisher poor WO. WBY’s revision to ‘man’ shows a decision to play up, rather than moderate, the poem’s dialect elements. 6. shore lines] Ropes connecting a net at sea with the shore. say] Sea: WBY here attempts to reproduce the pronunciation of the English word as heard in parts of Ireland. A  contemporary writer of Irish dialect verse, Jane Barlow



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My work was saltin’ herrings The whole of the long day.

10

And sometimes from the saltin’ shed I scarce could drag my feet, Under the blessed moonlight, Along the pebbly street.

15

I’d always been but weakly, And my baby was just born; A neighbour minded her by day, I minded her till morn.

20

I lay upon my baby; Ye little childer dear, I looked on my cold baby When the morn grew frosty and clear.



A weary woman sleeps so hard! My man grew red and pale,

(1857–1917), finds the same spelling: Ghost-­ Bereft (1901), ‘A Weather Prophet (Achill Irish, Summer, 1894)’, 59: ‘ay, she’s drowned in the say lyin’ bright there and blue’ and 136: ‘The sun’s self ’ill be lost o’er our heads afore ever he drops in the say’. 7. saltin’ herrings] The later nineteenth century saw a significant increase in the market for herring from Irish fisheries. The trade centred on salt-­cured herring, and Howth was an established location for the salting and shipping of catches. Herring salting would have been taking place in Howth at the time the Yeats family was resident there, and it continued in the years afterwards. In the salting shed (as in line 9), fish would be cleaned and then salted, before being packed into wooden barrels to be transported (a barrel would hold from 600 to 1000 fish). A dialect poem (from the Isle of Man, and not Ireland) by T.E. Brown, Collected Poems (1900), ‘The Manx Witch’, has ‘these sheds where the herrin’ is saltin’’ (1374). 9–12] Times from the saltin’ shed, Along the pebbly street,

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Home in the blessed moonlight I scarce could drag my feet. WO. Here, both diction and metre in WO are deliberately roughened, to be smoothed somewhat in revision for P95. 11. blessed] Although WBY does not make this blessèd in any printing, he intends here the dissyllabic pronunciation. 20.] In the frosty mornin’ clear WO. 21. a weary woman] Cp. A. Procter, Legends and Lyrics (1861), ‘The Requital’, 43–48: A weary woman, Pale, worn, and thin, With the brand upon her Of want and sin, Heard the Child Angel And took her in. (See also Sources.) 22.] My husband stood up pale WO. WBY’s revision here rejects ‘husband’ (as in 5) in favour of the more realistic diction of ‘man’, but leaves the poet (who does not elect to change his rhyme-­word) to find three new syllables. ‘Grew red and pale’ seems to risk a comic moment of sudden complexion

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The Ballad of Moll Magee



And gave me money, and bade me go To my own place, Kinsale.

25

He drove me out and shut the door, And gave his curse to me; I went away in silence, No neighbour could I see.

30

The windows and the doors were shut, One star shone faint and green, The little straws were turnin’ round Across the bare boreen.

change, but it is not entirely unprecedented: cp. W. Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1876), III, 180: ‘And red and pale waxed Gudrun’, and Coventry Patmore, The Unknown Eros (1878), II, 23: ‘dreams that turn him red and pale’. 24. Kinsale] Moll’s ‘own place’ is a long way (155 miles as the crow flies) from Howth, though it also has strong associations with the fishing trade. Kinsale (from the Irish Clonn tSáile, ‘head of the tide’) is in Co. Cork. 25. He drove me out] He drove me forth WO. 29.] These shut windows and doors recall Procter’s scenario in her ‘Requital’ (see above), and are in many ways also conventional enough as a quick method of conveying the reality of social exclusion. Yet in the poem they are contrasted with God ‘openin’ wide his door’ (50), and there is obviously some element of design in WBY’s shut/open distinction. As a mother who has lost an infant in tragic circumstances, Moll is paralleled by the Mrs. Nolan who features in WBY’s Howth-­based ‘Village Ghosts’ (M, 12): One night a Mrs. Nolan was watching by her dying child in Fluddy’s Lane. Suddenly there was a sound of knocking heard at the door. She did not open, fearing it was some unhuman thing that knocked. The knocking ceased. After a little the front door and then the back door were burst open, and closed again. Her husband went to see what was wrong. He found both doors bolted. The child died. The doors were again opened and closed as before. Then Mrs. Nolan remembered that she had

forgotten to leave window or door open, as the custom is, for the departure of the soul. These strange openings and closings and knockings were warnings and reminders from the spirits who attend the dying. Whereas in ‘Village Ghosts’ windows and doors must be opened in order for the soul of the dead child to depart, in the poem they must be opened for the grieving mother to come to a shelter where, ultimately, God can also come in, bringing along the spirit of the lost infant. 30. one star shone] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Legends of St. Patrick (1872), ‘St. Patrick and the Imposter’, 141–143: ‘evening lay upon the level sea  | With roses strewn like bridal chamber’s floor: | Within it one star shone’. With WBY’s ‘green’, cp. also Shelley, Prometheus Unbound III iv 3: ‘A light, like a green star’, Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Music and Moonlight (1874), ‘Am I not Princess great?’, 21–22: ‘Joying in yon green star, | So pure, so high!’, and KT, Shamrocks (1887 – the book WBY had been reviewing for The Gael when he probably sent O’Leary also the MS of this poem), ‘After Rain in May’, 15: ‘One clear green star’s in the gold afar’. 31.] The turning of straws in the wind carried, according to WBY, supernatural meaning. In FFTIP (1888), he writes: ‘When the wind makes the straws and leaves whirl as it passes, that is the faeries, and the peasantry take off their hats and say. ‘God bless them’’ (CW 6, 11). 32. boreen] A lane or small, narrow road (from the Irish, bóithrín).



The Ballad of Moll Magee

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I went away in silence: Beyond old Martin’s byre I saw a kindly neighbour Blowin’ her mornin’ fire.

40

She drew from me my story – My money’s all used up, And still, with pityin’, scornin’ eye, She gives me bite and sup.



She says my man will surely come, And fetch me home agin; But always, as I’m movin’ round, Without doors or within,

45

Pilin’ the wood or pilin’ the turf, Or goin’ to the well, I’m thinkin’ of my baby And keenin’ to mysel’.

50

And sometimes I am sure she knows When, openin’ wide His door, God lights the stars, His candles, And looks upon the poor.

55

So now, ye little childer, Ye won’t fling stones at me; But gather with your shinin’ looks And pity Moll Magee.

33–36.] I went away in silence: Beyond old Martin’s wood, A-­blowin’ of her mornin’ fire, I saw a neighbor good. WO 41. my man will surely come] my husband sure will come WO. 45.] A-­pilin’ wood or pilin’ turf WO. 47. thinkin’] thinking WO. 49. she] This indication of the sex of the dead child may touch (however subliminally) on Susan Yeats’s loss of an infant daughter in 1876. 50.] God as the supreme host here provides the poem with its crowning image of acceptance and hospitality. It is unlikely that WBY ever came into contact with an evangelical hymn (publ. 1816) by one ‘Igdalia’, ‘The Invitation’, but the opening of its second verse gives a

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good instance of this trope (The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle 24 (1816)): Large his heart, supremely gracious, Lo! he opens wide the door; See his table – how capacious! Richly furnished for the poor! WBY would certainly have known, however, the biblical verse which this hymn takes as its epigraph, Genesis 24.31: ‘Come in, thou blessed of the Lord: wherefore standest thou without?’ openin’] opening WO. 51. His candles] In Estrangement: Pages from a Diary Kept in 1909 (1926), WBY complains of the persistence of ‘the old dislike of farce and dialect’, and remembers: ‘Years ago, Dr. Sigerson said of the last verse of my ‘Moll Magee’, ‘Why candles? Surely tapers?’’ (CW 3, 342).

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HOW FERENCZ RENYI KEPT SILENT THE POEMS

Hungary, 1848

Date of composition. Perhaps Apr. to May  1887. In his first surviving letter to John O’Leary, WBY asks ‘Is there any news from John Boyle O’Reilly’ (CL 1, 20); the ‘news’ sought is that of the fate of poems sent to the editor of the Boston newspaper, the Pilot, by O’Leary on WBY’s behalf (see Publication history). This letter was sent from London on 13 Jun. 1887; WBY had moved with his family from Dublin to London in Apr. If the poems had been left with O’Leary before the departure from Dublin, this piece must have been written by then; if not, it must have been written in London before early Jun., and sent to O’Leary from there (though no record of this is extant). The very earliest date after which the poem could have been composed is that of the publication of the news piece, ‘A Hungarian Hero of ’68’, in the Pall Mall Gazette (17 Sept. 1886), but that autumn seems unpromising as a date of composition: WBY was then living in Dublin, publishing Mosada and writing his first critical pieces (on Sir Samuel Ferguson), as well as seeing much of the O’Leary circle and developing plans for PBYI. All of this might, arguably, make the idea of a nationalist piece on Hungary interesting as far as WBY was concerned, but there is no trace of the poem in any surviving correspondence from then, nor do WBY’s other writings of the time allude to European parallels for Irish nationalist struggles. In London, between Apr. and Jun., WBY probably began attending meetings hosted by William Morris in Hammersmith (the first reference by WBY to these meetings relates to one on 26 Jun., but it is very likely that there was contact with the Morris circle during Apr. and May). Amongst the attending members of Morris’s Socialist League at this time were the Fabians Edith Nesbit and her husband Hubert Bland; Nesbit’s poetry at this time included a piece drawing on the Renyi story, ‘The Ballad of Splendid Silence’, composed in 1886 (see Sources). It is entirely possible that WBY saw (or more likely heard of) this poem in Apr. or May and decided to compose something marketable on the same subject (though in a strikingly different generic mode) for himself then, sending it on to O’Leary for an Irish nationalist audience in Boston, which would perhaps have been open to such European nationalist parallels as those which it contained. Publication history. The poem first appeared (without the five italicized lines at the beginning) in Boston, in the newspaper the Pilot for 6 Aug. 1887. This publication was the foremost Catholic daily in the United States, with strong links both to the Church and to the Irish American community. The newspaper’s editor at this time was John DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-73



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Boyle O’Reilly (1844–1890), the son of a schoolmaster in Co. Meath, and a veteran Fenian comrade of O’Leary’s. He served with the British 10th Hussars regiment, until he was court-­martialled after recruiting Irish soldiers to the Fenian cause, and came to the United States as an escaped Australian convict in 1869. From 1889 until 1892, the Pilot featured columns on literary matters by WBY, but this was the only poem of his to appear in its pages. O’Reilly was himself the author of four volumes of verse, but he evidently favoured WBY as a critic rather than as a poet suitable for his readership: in Feb. 1888, WBY reported sending him two further poems, but nothing came of this (CL 1, p. 51). This poem was next published in WO, though WBY had been willing to consider dropping it from the collection at a stage when the publisher Keegan Paul was pressing considerations of length: he wrote that ‘If it comes to lightening the ship I will hardly know what to throw over board – the “Seeker” for one thing I fear and “Farencz Renyi” ’ (letter to KT, 11 Apr. 1888, CL 1, 59). The poem’s next publication came in the ‘A Celtic Christmas’ seasonal supplement to The Irish Homestead in December 1900. Like ‘The Fairy Pedant’ the following Christmas, and ‘She Who Dwelt Among the Sycamores’ two years later, this poem was included on the initiative of the paper’s literary editor, George Russell, rather than at WBY’s instigation. (It makes a decidedly odd inclusion in any festive collection of poems, and to judge from WBY’s eventual expression of his disapproval to Russell in December 1902 [CL 3, 277], the poet is very unlikely indeed to have been involved in the business of republication.) Although the poem had been banished from WBY’s collections, not appearing in P95 or P99, it made yet another public appearance on 24 Dec. 1904, in the pages of The United Irishman, the nationalist paper of Sinn Fein’s Arthur Griffiths. Here, too, there is very strong cause to suspect that WBY was involved at no stage of the republication; rather, Griffiths himself chose to recycle a piece which had direct bearing on the Hungarian theme to which this particular issue was largely devoted. Griffiths himself had recently published a book entitled The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland, so the availability of WBY’s Hungarian poem on nationalist themes in WO (or perhaps rather in its Irish Homestead version) played into his hands, and he reprinted it along with a preface and afterword to locate it squarely in his Irish/Hungarian scheme. Griffiths begins by sketching the Renyi story itself, with a suitably melodramatic ending: ‘Suddenly he halted, his lips opened – his splendid silence was broken by the awful laugh of a maniac’. Introducing WBY’s piece, Griffiths says that ‘Mr. Yeats has written a poem on this tragic and glorious episode in Hungary’s fight for freedom, which is not to be found in any collected editions of his works’, quoting then the opening five-­line address to the ‘nation of the bleeding breast’. After the poem, Griffiths ends with a swipe at WBY himself, invoking Alexander Petofi (discussed elsewhere in the issue as Hungary’s ‘patriot poet’, and compared directly to Thomas Davis): A small thing is any sacrifice the artist can make for his country when it is set beside the sacrifice of Francis Renyi. Will Ireland fifty years hence cherish Yeats in her heart as Hungary cherishes Petofi? It is for him to decide. The fashion of London’s anaemic critics or the Petofi of the Hungary of the West?

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How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent

For a full discussion of the United Irishman publication, see W. Gould, ‘How Ferencz Renyi Spoke Up, Part Two’, YA 3 (1985), p. 199–205. Sources and parallels. The narrative material out of which this poem is built appeared first in the newspaper Le Petit Parisien for 29 Aug. 1886: before this time, there seems to be no evidence for the story of Renyi. The French account incorporates its own reason for this long silence – that Renyi had been an inmate of a lunatic asylum since 1848, and had only now died – but the lack of material from before 1886, over decades when anti-­Austrian propaganda seized on numerous stories of the cruelty of the imperial forces, and in particular that of General Haynau, casts a certain amount of suspicion on the historical reality of the narrative. The French article is entitled ‘Histoire d’un Fou’, and ascribed to ‘Jean Frollo’ [Charles-­Ange Laissant (1841–1920), at this time a Boulangiste political journalist, and thus much opposed to Austro-­Hungarian interests]. Within three weeks, an abridged translation of the article appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette: A Hungarian Hero of ’48 Hungarian papers announce the death of old Ferencz Rényi, a hero of one of the most terrible episodes of the Hungarian War of Independence in 1848. For thirty-­six years Rényi has been a lunatic in a Buda-­Pesth asylum, and the history of his sufferings is recorded after his death by the Petit Parisien. Ferencz Rényi was a young schoolmaster of twenty-­seven years at the beginning of the war, proud, handsome, and full of buoyant life. His pupils adored him, and he was always welcome among the villagers, whether he came with his violin to play to their dances or whether his voice was heard among the patriots chanting the praise of their country. He lived with his mother and sister, and was engaged to a bright young Hungarian girl, when the Government, after proclaiming the independence of the country, called all good patriots to arms. Ferencz left his school and enlisted in the ranks. One day, after having fought valiantly at the head of a detachment of soldiers, he was taken prisoner by the Austrians. Brought before General Haynau, Rényi refused to indicate the place where the rest of his regiment lay hidden. On learning that his home was in a neighbouring village the general sent for the mother and sister, and brought them into the room where the prisoner was kept. ‘Now give me the information I  require, if the lives of these two women are dear to you,’ said General Haynau to him. Rényi trembled, his eyes filled with tears, but he remained silent. ‘Do not speak, my son,’ cried the old mother, ‘do your duty, and think not of me, for at the best I have only a few days to live.’ ‘If you betray your country,’ added his sister, ‘our name will be covered with shame, and what is life without honour? Do not speak, Ferencz. Be calm; I shall know how to die.’ Rényi remained silent, and a few minutes later the two women were dead. Another trial was to come. General Haynau sent for Rényi’s future wife, who was weaker than his mother and sister. With wild cries the girl flung herself at her lover’s feet, pleading: ‘Speak, speak, Ferencz. See, I am young. I love you; do not let me be killed. You will save



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yourself and me if you speak out. When you are free we will go far away and be happy. Speak, my Ferencz, and save your future wife.’ She took his hands, clinging to him as a drowning man clings to his last support. The young Hungarian was choked with tears, but suddenly he pushed the girl aside and turned away. Once more she cried to him, but he did not heed her. Then the soldiers seized her. ‘Be cursed,’ she shrieked, ‘be cursed, you who let me die; you who kill me; who are my assassin.’ Rényi remained silent. The girl was shot, and the prisoner was taken back into his cell, but his reason had fled, and he was dismissed. Some friends found him and gave him a shelter; till after Hungary was once more suppressed and peace established, they obtained a place for him in the asylum in which he has recently died. This version of the story was widely recycled elsewhere in the British and international press, and is likely to have been read by WBY. In the longer French account, there are more anti-­Austrian flourishes, as well as an explicit condemnation of Haynau’s character: The man in command there had acquired a sinister reputation. This was a species of wild beast, drunk on blood. He was called Haynau, and was the General. It was he who, one day, staged in full public view the flogging with canes of some unfortunate women, whose only crime was that they were patriots; and it was also he who, it is said, had cut-­off human heads put into cannons as missiles. His memory, though, was destined to be forever execrated by the whole world. Rényi’s fate, unclear in the English version, is still rather murky in the French, which offers the reflection that ‘He was allowed to live; but out of mercy, he ought rather to have been killed!’ and adds the hackneyed melodramatic description of how, when found wandering the roads after having been released by the Austrians, ‘His hair, black just the night before, had become entirely white’. Confusion in the last sentence of the Pall Mall Gazette version, however, is clarified by the original French (which it mistranslates): ‘Then, when Hungary was suppressed, and peace returned – that sad peace which follows disasters, and is made out of blood and grief – a place was secured for this wretched madman at the asylum in Buda-­Pesth.’ The first poem in English on the Renyi story was not WBY’s, but one written by Edith Nesbit: her ‘The Ballad of Splendid Silence: In Memoriam Ferencz Renyi’ was published after WBY’s poem (in her Leaves of Life [1888]), but probably written before it: when reprinted in Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism 1883–1906 (1908), the author dates this work as 1886. It cannot be shown positively that WBY read Nesbit’s poem; circumstantial evidence, though, establishes that he was attending Fabian and Socialist gatherings hosted in Hammersmith by Morris during 1887, and is therefore likely to have met Nesbit and her husband Hubert Bland there: any discussion of contemporary Austria-­Hungary might well have given rise to mention of the Renyi story or Nesbit’s ‘Ballad’. Both WBY and Nesbit were working from the same English source text, so the numerous points of close similarity between the poems are easily accounted for; the sharp difference between

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the two poetic forms – Nesbit writing in ballad form, with largely anapaestic three-­beat quatrains, the second and fourth lines rhyming, and WBY choosing to cast the story in rhymed pentameters, incorporating a good deal of dramatic speech – may be significant. For Nesbit, the choice of form is well-­suited to the political emphasis of the narrative:

He loved the Spirit of Freedom, He hated his country’s wrongs, He told the patriots’ stories, And he sang the patriots’ songs.

The form, register, and vocabulary of this would be for WBY reminiscent of nothing so much as the ballad poetry of Thomas Davis and Young Ireland – the very tradition which Arthur Griffith would later produce as a reproach of WBY when the poem was reprinted in 1904 (see Publication history). Nesbit’s long (five-­stanza) peroration is also full of political rhetoric, in which ‘our Liberty’ ‘shall live’ by a list of thirteen distinct kinds of virtuous suffering, including ‘years of madness and silence’, ‘torments her children have suffered’, and ‘the blood that her martyrs will give’. Finally, there is a stanza of prophetic uplift:

In the silence of tears, in the burden Of the wrongs we some day will repay, Live the brothers who died in all ages For the Freedom we live for to-­day!

Aside from its five introductory lines (which were not included in the first publication), WBY’s poem avoids this register altogether; and even in the added introduction, national suffering takes precedence over any kind of revolutionary struggle. It is perhaps worth noting, also, that WBY avoids the use of the word ‘patriot’ in this context: Renyi is a ‘dreamer’ (11), and rather than revolutionary sprightliness and what Nesbit calls ‘young life’s promise’, WBY’s captive Renyi has a ‘spirit’ which ‘has grown old’ (17). These differences between the poems, whether or not they stem from an informed decision on WBY’s part to take a radically divergent path from that followed by Nesbit, do give a sense of how this work is taken by the Irish poet in a less than predictable direction. Fascination with the Renyi story had not yet been exhausted, however, for in Oct. 1893 Michael Field (the pseudonym of the writers Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley) staged a drama entitled A Question of Memory (published in 1893 and again, in revised form, in 1918). In this play, the Renyi story is considerably changed and, despite Haynau’s taking his customary role of pantomime villain, there is little in the way of political rhetoric, and more of a psychological focus. One parallel which may well have a direct bearing on WBY’s poem is from much closer to home than Hungary, and it does link the piece with 1848 and Ireland. Mary Eva Kelly (1830–1910) was a prominent contributor of patriotic verse to Thomas Davis’s The Nation in the late 1840s. One poem of hers offers a striking parallel to the situation in the Renyi story, where a mother emboldens her son in patriotic self-­sacrifice and death. The



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first stanza of Kelly’s ballad indicates that the ‘Patriot Mother’’s son is being interrogated by British forces in 1798, just as Renyi is interrogated by Haynau in 1848:

The Patriot Mother A Ballad of ’98



“Come, tell us the names of the rebelly crew Who lifted the pike on the Curragh with you; Come, tell us their treason, and then you’ll be free, Or right quickly you’ll swing from the high gallows tree.”



“Alanna! alanna! [my child! my child!] the shadow of shame Has never yet fallen on one of your name, And, oh, may the food from my bosom you drew In your veins turn to poison if you turn untrue.



“The foul words, oh, let them not blacken your tongue, That would prove to your friends and your country a wrong, Or the curse of a mother, so bitter and dread, With the wrath of the Lord – may they fall on your head!



“I have no one but you in the whole world wide, Yet, false to your pledge, you’d ne’er stand at my side; If a traitor you lived, you’d be farther away From my heart, than if true you were wrapped in the clay.



“Oh, deeper and darker the mourning would be For your falsehood so base, than your death, proud and free – Dearer, far dearer, than ever to me, My darling, you’ll be on the brave gallows tree.



“’Tis holy, aghra [my love], from the bravest and best – Go! go! from my heart, and be joined with the rest; Alanna machree! O alanna machree! [child of my heart] Sure a ‘stag’ [informer] and a traitor you never will be.”



There’s no look of a traitor upon the young brow That’s raised to the tempters so haughtily now; No traitor e’er held up the firm head so high – No traitor e’er showed such a proud, flashing eye.



On the high gallows tree! on the brave gallows tree, Where smiled leaves and blossoms, his sad doom met he! But it never bore blossom so pure or so fair As the heart of the martyr who hangs from it there!

It is entirely possible that WBY recalled this poem in 1887 when he approached the story of Renyi. Kelly (who was generally better-­known as ‘Eva of The Nation’) had collected

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her poems in a volume published in the United States in 1877, but had returned to Ireland from Australian exile with her husband Kevin Izod O’Doherty (who was MP for Meath North) in 1885: she was a friend of John O’Leary (to whom she was also related by marriage). She returned to Australia in 1888, however, when O’Doherty felt unable to continue in politics after the defeat of the 1886 Home Rule Bill. It may be significant that the one likely allusion to ‘The Patriot Mother’ in WBY’s poem (see note on 1) comes in the lines added between Aug. 1887 and the preparation of the final text for WO in 1888; but at any rate, the O’Leary circle was one in which both Kelly and her husband were very well known, and their doings in 1887–8 were doubtless the subject of discussion. Another poem which, though it seems to have no direct influence on WBY’s piece, will nevertheless have been known to the poet is Samuel Ferguson’s ‘Hungary: August, 1849’ (in his Lays of the Western Gael (1865)). This (for Ferguson, rare) poem on a political topic is cast in aabb quatrains of galloping triple rhythm, and is partly fired by enthusiasm for the Hungarian cause, addressing the ‘God of freedom’ with great martial excitement (‘Freedom thunders her hymn in the battery’s voice – | In the soaring hurrah – in the blood-­stifled moan’ [10–11]), but turns with diplomatic even-­handedness to consider the need not to blame the Russian soldiers unduly for their forced actions: ‘Stay! stay! – in thy fervour of sympathy pause, | Nor become inhumane in humanity’s cause’ (29–30). Oddly, Ferguson sees the war mainly as a conflict between ‘Russian and Magyar’ (37), without mention of the Austrians until General Haynau is named in the final couplet, which attempts to combine expostulation with resignation: ‘What! Haynau victorious! – Inscrutable God! | We must wonder, and worship, and bow to thy rod’ (47–48). Criticism and interpretation. The poem was mentioned in one Dublin review of WO, when the Evening Telegraph remarked on how in it ‘we read the Irish writer’s feeling and sympathy with the struggle for Irish nationality’ (6 Feb. 1889), but otherwise little contemporary reaction is recorded. Criticism in general has had very little to say about this poem, due largely to its relative obscurity in the WBY oeuvre. H. Orel, in The Development of William Butler Yeats 1885–1900 (1968) characterized the poem as an ‘inchoate world of emotions, of splendid final gestures, of directionless energy’ which might ‘hold a reader’s attention without engaging his intellect’ (12). For R.F. Foster, the poem is ‘a patriotic piece which implicitly paralleled Hungarian and Irish nationalism, and echoed Davis as well as Browning’ (Foster 1, 56). A critical argument concerning the importance of Renyi’s silence in more general uses for silence in WBY’s early work appears in Michael McAteer, ‘Silence as Disturbance in W.B. Yeats’s “How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent” ’, C.C. Barfoot, A.J. Hoenselaars and W.M. Verhoeven (eds.), Silence in Irish Literature (2017), 23–34. Text. The copy-­text here is WO, supplemented by changes made by WBY in the copy now in the Pierpont Morgan library (Morgan). Readings peculiar to the Pilot are recorded in the notes, while the numerous changes in punctuation and lineation, which are a feature of the Irish Homestead text (IH), were taken up and added to by the text in United Ireland (UI), and in each case most unlikely to have come from WBY, are more selectively recorded.



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W 5

e, too, have seen our bravest and our best In prisons thrown, and mossy ruin rest Where homes once whitened vale and mountain crest; Therefore, O nation of the bleeding breast, Libations, from the Hungary of the West.



Before his tent the general sips his wine, Waves off the flies, and warms him in the shine. The Austrian Haynau he, in many lands

Title and subtitle] The Hungarian revolution lasted from Mar. 1848 until Oct. 1849, and was aimed at securing independence for Hungary from the Austrian Empire. A short-­lived republican government was formed in 1849 under the leadership of Louis Kossuth. The revolution was crushed by Austria with the help of significant forces from Tsar Nicholas I  of Russia. In her article on ‘Our Poets’ for The Irish Monthly (Oct. 1889), Rosa Mulholland saw parallels with Ireland even in WBY’s subtitle: ‘Why have we “Hungary, 1848” instead of “Ireland, 1798”? “Hung’ry, 1848,” does, in truth, read so Irish as to be startling at first sight; however, this is no tale of the famine, but a scene from Hungarian history’ (370). ‘How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent’ as a title is reminiscent of Robert Browning’s habits in titling poems – e.g. ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ and Pacchiarotto, And How He Worked in Distemper (1876). 1. our bravest and our best] The phrase is conventional enough, but it contains an echo which may well be significant in this context, of a ballad by the Young Ireland writer Mary Eva Kelly which first appeared in Thomas Davis’s The Nation. Here, a mother tells her son, speaking of death for Ireland: ‘’Tis holy, aghra [my love], from the bravest and best – | Go! go! from my heart, and be joined with the rest’. See Sources and parallels. 2. In prisons thrown] Morgan. To prisons go Pilot, WO; To prison go IH, UI. 4. nation of the bleeding breast] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Roisin Dubh: Dirge’, 7–8: ‘O kind is sleep to the eyes that weep, | And the bleeding breast’.

5. West.] WO West! IH, UI. 8. The Austrian Haynau] Julius Jacob Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Freiherr von Haynau (1786–1853) was a leading general in the Austrian army during the Italian and Hungarian insurrections of 1848. In 1848, he was in Italy, but he became the Austrian supreme commander during the war of 1849, in the course of which a number of atrocities committed by forces of the empire were attributed to him, notably the flogging of women and the execution of thirteen senior resistance figures in Arad. There was widespread opposition to Austria in Britain, with Haynau a particular focus of dislike: at a public meeting in London of Oct. 1849, the general was described as ‘that bloody minister who shot prisoners in cold blood, proclaimed death to every man, woman, or child who dared even to insult one of his soldiers, and who hanged up the ministers of religion’; his cruelty to women in particular was denounced: ‘The latest intelligence told of a noble lady condemned to sweep the streets of Temesvar for that crime; and another lady, immediately after the harrowing event of her husband’s suicide, was brought forth and publicly flogged’ (The Times, 9 Oct. 1849). Haynau’s notoriety spread quickly across Europe, and when in 1850 he made a visit to England, he was set upon by a crowd led by draymen from the Barclay and Perkins Brewery in London’s Bankside. This incident caused diplomatic trouble between Britain and the Austrian Empire, but support for his attackers was very widespread in both political circles and in the media, and the events of 1850 were long remembered, especially

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Famous, a man of rules, a victor. Stands 10 Before him one well guarded, with bound hands; Schoolmaster he, a dreamer, fiddler, first In every dance, by children sought. ‘Accurst, Thy name is?’   ‘Renyi.’  ‘Of?’    ‘This village.’    ‘Good! Hiding the rebels worm in yonder wood 15 Or yonder mountains. Where? Thou shalt be free – Silence! Thou shalt be dead!’ Now suddenly The spirit of young Renyi has grown old. He turns where, hung like drops of dripping gold, Flashing and flickering with ever-­undulant wing 20 About a sun-­flushed dove-­cot, cooing, cling Innumerable pigeons. Not on these He muses. He a brown farm-­house sees, Where shadow of cherry, and shadow of apple trees, Enclose a quiet place of beds box-­bordered, bees, in anti-­imperial and socialist circles. (For a detailed account of media reaction to Heynau and the Bankside incident, see László Kürti, ‘The Woman-­ Flogger, “General Hyena”: Images of Julius Jacob von Haynau [1786– 1853], Enforcer of Imperial Austria’, International Journal of Comic Art 16/2 [Fall 2014], 65–90.) By the 1880s (and indeed up to at least the First World War), Haynau was well-­ known as the type of savage repression in the cause of imperial force; a particular feature of his bad reputation was his supposed fondness for the arbitrary and the cruel. 14. worm] WO; swarm Pilot; worms IH. The WO reading is awkward, and evidently struck Russell as awkward enough to be a misprint requiring correction for IH. The Pilot reading is attractive, as seeming to make smoother sense: there is no second chance for the reading at 83, however (‘Where worm the rebels’), because in the Pilot WBY’s text did not repeat this phrase. WO’s intransitive ‘worm’ is awkward, and would have to be something close to OED v. 9a. or 10a. in meaning: ‘To move

or progress sinuously like a worm’, ‘To burrow in so as to hurt or destroy’. Since WBY did not correct ‘worm’ in the proofs or any of the surviving copies of WO, and since ‘worm’ is similarly untouched at 83, it must be concluded that ‘swarm’ is a correction originating editorially with the Pilot and not WBY. 18. dripping] liquid Pilot. 19. ever-­undulant wing] Cp. John Todhunter, Laurella, and Other Poems (1876), ‘A June Day’ 7–8: ‘when martins at gleeful feud,  | Gleam past in undulant flight.’ 20. sun-­flushed] Cp. Christina G. Rossetti, A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), ‘The months: A  Pageant’, 154–5: ‘strawberries  | Sun-­flushed and sweet’. 21–2.] Morgan. The doves whose growing forms [form IH, UI] he’d watched. Not these | He numbers. WO, IH, UI. 22–23.] WO. He, with flowering currant trees, | Ringed round and fondled, a brown farm house sees Pilot. He a brown farm house sees | Enclose a quiet place [l. 23 absent] IH, UI. 24.] [Absent] IH, UI.



25 30 35

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Hives, currant bushes. There his kin are. High Above, the woods where with the soft mild eye Of her he loved fixed on him full of light, Often he had bent down some bough all bright With berries. Placid as a homeward bee, Glad, simple – nay, he sought not mystery, Nor, gazing forth where life’s sad sickles reap, Searched the unsearchable – why good men weep; Why those who do good often be not good, Why they who will the highest sometimes brood, Clogged in a marsh where the slow marsh clay clings,

25. hives] The desirability of beehives for the idyllic cottage-­garden is notable in WBY’s early work. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ includes ‘a hive for the honey bee’ (3); but another parallel is found in WBY’s novel John Sherman (wr. 1888, publ. 1891), when the hero dreams of a perfect existence with his beloved: ‘Now they would be married, they would live in a small house with a green door and new thatch, and a row of beehives under a hedge’ (John Sherman and Dhoya, 150). F. Kinahan draws the parallel between this passage and the poem, remarking of Renyi that ‘when he is threatened with death, his first thoughts are of the contented life he will have to leave behind’ (Kinahan, 183). 28. had] hath UI. 28–29. all bright  | With berries] Cp. Wordsworth, Peter Bell: A  Tale (1819) II, 106–7: ‘Grasping a hawthorn branch in hand,  | All bright with berries ripe and red’. 29. homeward bee] Cp. James Hogg, Works of the Ettrick Shepherd (1876), ‘A Boy’s Song’ 11: ‘there to trace the homeward bee’. 30. Glad, simple] Possibly cp. a contemporary poem by the popular writer of religious fiction Elizabeth Rundle Charles (1828–1896), whose Songs Old and New appeared in 1887: in ‘The Shadow of Death and “The Shadow of Dying” ’, Charles counsels against the fear of death by instancing ‘the wide-­seeing glance of the sages, | And the glad, simple trust of the child’ (21–22). 32. the unsearchable] Cp. Milton, Samson Agonistes, 747–8: ‘What th’unsearchable dispose  | Of highest wisdom brings about’. This abstraction also has a Wesleyan cast: cp.

Charles Wesley, Hymn 141, first verse: ‘With glorious clouds encompass’d round | Whom angels dimly see, | Will the Unsearchable be found | Or God appear to me?’, or John Wesley, ‘Who in the Saviour Sent confides’, 5: ‘By faith the Unsearchable he knows’. why good men weep] Cp. Robert Montgomery, The Sanctuary (1855), ‘Tuesday before Easter’, 5: ‘Where good men weep, and Virtue droops in shade’. 35. clogged] The verb here is that of OED 4: ‘To encumber or impede as clay or other sticky matter by adhesion’. slow marsh clay clings] Cp. Mortimer Collins, The Inn of Strange Meetings and Other Poems (1871), ‘A Poet’s Philosophy’, sect. II st. 11, 1–3: ‘But we have mortal form, material tissue; | And as the heavy centuries come and go,  | Closer the clay clings, wearier human woe’. There is a possible personal connection between WBY and Collins: although the writer died in 1876, WBY would have been aware of his daughter Mabel Collins, a prominent theosophical writer, who in 1887 hosted Madame Blavatsky at her home in Upper Norwood in London. It was here WBY paid a visit on 6 May, armed with a letter of introduction from Charles Johnston. Blavatsky liked to keep visitors waiting, so WBY loitered for some time on that afternoon before being granted an audience, as he recalled long afterwards in The Trembling of the Veil (1922): ‘I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she said, three followers left . . . and as one of the

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Abolished by a mire of little things, Untuned by their own striving. If one such Were here, he would turn death into a crutch; But this one – this one. Now his head drops low, 40 Drops on his bosom, somber, moist and slow. ‘Choose!’ Restless Haynau’s fingers tapping go. This sullen peasant spoils the good sunshine, This sullen peasant spoils the good red wine. He whispers to a soldier, who goes out – 45 A neighbouring cricket lifts his shrilly shout Reiterant. A bird goes by the tent, A lizard crawls – the two men gaze intent, As though they’d vowed to measure all its ways. Returns that soldier in the evening rays 50 Half hid. He brings the peasant’s only kin, Two women, withered one and small and thin, Bent low with toil and hoariest years. The other Of middle age. ‘His sister here and mother.’ The soldier thus, and Haynau – ‘Peasant, speak 55 If these be precious.’ ‘I am old and weak,’ That ancient mother cries, ‘speak not, my son.

three followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I  was kept a long time kicking my heels’ (CW 3, p.  153). It is tempting to wonder whether WBY might have taken down Mortimer Collins from the bookshelves in that room to pass the long wait; had he done so, ‘A Poet’s Philosophy’ might have caught his eye by virtue of its title, and perhaps by the prominent appearance there of Shelley (albeit given the execrable rhyme of mêlée). The connection seems tenuous; yet it may be remarked that more than thirty years later, while writing The Trembling of the Veil, WBY also composed ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, where the ‘golden grasshoppers’ of section I  might just have a long-­ distance connection to the reference to Anacreon which ends this very stanza of

Mortimer Collins’s poem: ‘More sluggishly the poet’s pulses stir  | Than when the gay Greek [Anacreon] wore the golden grasshopper’ (5–6). 43. good red wine] Cp. Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘Gareth and Lynette’, 1160: ‘bread and baken meats and good red wine’. 46. Reiterant] A rare word, placed prominently in the line here. Cp. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poems (1844), ‘A Drama of Exile’, 747: ‘And here, reiterant, in the wilderness’. bird] boy IH, UI. 52. hoariest years] Cp. Byron, Marino Faliero (1821), II i 316: ‘the hoariest years of vicious men’, and A. Swinburne, Studies in Song (1880), ‘Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor’ 197: ‘from earliest even to hoariest years’. 56. That] The UI.



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I’m weak, and by the hands shall hold each one Of my dead children soon, whate’er betide, For I am old and weak.’ And at her side 60 The sister: ‘Sell thy country, and the shame Of traitor evermore is on our name.’ Haynau, the man of system, lifts his hand Serene. They’re led away, and where a band Of soldiers ranked is on a grassy spot, 65 A score of yards off underneath a willow, shot.

‘Now hath he kith or kin, or any friend?’ A soldier answers: ‘By the camp’s far end I saw a girl afraid to be too near, Afraid to be too far.’ ‘Ay, bring her here!’

70 Time goes. The flakèd fire of evening crawls Along the tents, the fields, the village walls. The hare hath laid asleep her frolic wits, And every flower above its shadow sits. ‘On this embroidered cloud,’ the sun hath said, 75 ‘A little will I lay my weary head, Among the gold, the amber, and the red.’ A careful field-­mouse finds a fallen crumb; Now steps draw close, he hides beneath a drum. That maiden bring they. When the tall red deer 80 In trouble is, the doe will linger near. A peasant pale and pretty, her eyes for fear, Like small brown moths, a-­tremble. ‘Renyi say Where worm the rebels, or my bullets lay The young one with the others.’ Renyi’s pale 85 But speechless, and the maiden with long wail Flings her before him. ‘Save thyself and me.

64. ranked] drawn Pilot. 65. underneath] Morgan. ’neath Pilot, WO, IH, UI. 70. flakèd] flicked IH [partly corrected to flakéd in UI]. OED flaked b. ‘Marked with flakes or streaks’. 72. frolic wits] Possibly cp. William Mason, Works (1811), ‘Ode: On Expecting to Return to Cambridge, 1747’, 38: ‘frolic Wit, and Humour shy’. 77. fallen] falling UI. 77–78.] Absent in Pilot.

81. pale and pretty] young and fair Pilot. for fear] with fear UI. 82–86.] Like small brown moths, a-­ tremble ceaselessly. ‘Now answer, if this life be dear to thee, Where in the woods or hills the rebels be?’ White, Renyi silent stands; that maiden sweet

492

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Speak, Ferencz, speak. We love each other. See, I am so young. Dost thou no longer know, Beloved, how two little years ago   90 I came the first time to thy village school? Thou hast forgotten. On the oaken stool I sat me down beside thee, and I knew So little. As the months passed by we grew To love each other. In my prayer-­book still   95 The violets are that on the wooded hill We gathered. Ferencz, nay, I must not die: I am to be your wife. A village high And lost and far in yonder hills I know; There far away from all we two will go, 100 And be so happy.’ To his hands she clings, With cries and murmurs. Suddenly he flings Away her clinging hands, and turns. She throws Her arms around his feet. The signal goes From Haynau’s lifted fingers – two draw nigh 105 And seize her, and thus floats her quivering cry: ‘Assassin, assassin! thou who let’st me die, I curse thee – curse thee!’

In terror flings her at her lover’s feet. ‘Ah, Ferencz, speak and save thyself and me!  Pilot 89. two little years ago] Cp. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868) III, 70: ‘Four little years ago’. 96–7.] We gathered. Ferencz, do not let me die. | I was to be your wife Pilot. 100. hands] hand Pilot, UI. This eye-­catching agreement between the first periodical text and the last is almost certain to be nothing more than a coincidence. A  misprint independently in each case may be suspected: the girl clings to Renyi’s hands, and not his hand, in the Pall Mall Gazette account. 105. quivering cry] Cp. Shelley, ‘Rosamund and Helen: A Modern Eclogue’ (1819), 1142–3: ‘a long quivering cry | Burst from my lips’.

106. Assassin, assassin!] Assassin, my assassin! Pilot, WO, IH. This correction is made in a copy of WO presented by WBY to E.J. Ellis (now in Reading University Library); the line is untouched in Morgan, but its rhythmic superiority to the WO text argues for its incorporation: it is also adopted by R. Finneran in CW 1. In wishing that WBY had chosen an Irish mode for this story, Rosa Mulholland saw in this curse ‘a jar in the beauty of the tragedy’: ‘We may reasonably believe that an Irishwoman would have consented to death for the honour of so brave a lover. If someone would take up such an incident, place it in Ireland in ’98, and make the woman worthy of the trust of man, we might have a dramatic poem which would be worth all the fairies to be found in Tir-­na-­n-­Og.



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Renyi silent stands, And she is dragged to where the willow bands With quiet shade its ever-dewy plot. 110 Noise! and a flash, a momentary blot. So ends a brain – a world! The smoke goes up, Creeping along the heavens’ purple cup, Higher and higher gold with evening light; It seems to fondle, with a finger bright 115 And soft, one glimmering star. Renyi has cast His bonds away, sore struggling. Now at last Haynau, thine hour has come, thy followers far Under the willow. Nay, to yonder star, Yon bauble of the heavens, he lifts his hands,

Perhaps Mr. Yeats will think of it’ (The Irish Monthly, Oct. 1889). 109. ever-­dewy plot] ever dewy-­plot Pilot, WO; ever dewy plot IH, UI. Despite the agreement of the two printed texts with WBY’s direct authority (and the failure to correct in Morgan), the present edition emends to the obvious ‘ever-­ dewy’, replacing WBY’s mistaken hyphenation (detected and removed by IH (and after it UI)) in the nonsensical ‘dewy-­plot’. 114–117.] It seems to fondle with a finger bright And soft, one glimmering star  – with power vast; Young Ferencz Renyi bursts his bonds – at last, Haynau, has thine hour come [. . .]  Pilot 114–5. bright  | And soft] Cp. Shelley, ‘Rosamund and Helen’, 831–3: ‘the light serene | Of smiles, whose lustre bright and soft | Beneath lay undulating there’, and Thomas Moore, Works (1841), ‘Still when daylight’, 1–2: ‘Still when daylight o’er the wave | Bright and soft its farewell gave’. 116–118.] These lines are marked in the right margin of the Ellis copy of WO; while this

may mean that WBY had thoughts of possible deletion by May  1889, they remain in Morgan (which postdates the Ellis copy), albeit with one verbal change. 117. thine hour has come] Cp. J.C. Mangan, in H.R. Montgomery (ed.), Specimens of the Early Native Poetry of Ireland (1846), ‘The Ruins of Donegal Castle’, 9–10: ‘Fair fort! thine hour has come at length, | Thine older glory has gone by’. The phrase ‘Thine hour has come’ has a place in some melodramatic fiction in the mid-­nineteenth century, but Mangan’s poem (reprinted in e.g. the Dublin University Magazine in 1847) was its most prominent poetic occurrence before WBY. (The phrase occurs again at the climax of WBY’s ‘The Secret Rose’.) WBY’s meaning here is not entirely clear: is this the hour of Haynau’s victory over the insurgents, and the ‘Now’ the time of the narrative, or is the hour that of Haynau’s death (1853), so that ‘Now’ is a generalized time post-­Haynau? The reference in 118 to the general’s followers being ‘Under’ [or ‘Beneath’] ‘the willow’ implies the latter: ‘Beside’ is more ambiguous. 118. Under] Morgan Beneath Pilot; Beside WO, IH.

494 120

How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent

And over tillage fields and pasture lands, And where this hill rises and this vale dips, He rushes, rolling a mad laugh out of his lips.

120.] Possibly cp. Samuel Ferguson, Poems (1880), ‘Conary’, 462: ‘On dewy meads and fresh-­ploughed tillage land’. 121–122.] Text as corrected in Morgan. Where lies the cow at peace beside her calf,  | He rushes, rolling from his lips a madman’s laugh Pilot, WO, IH. The present text accepts WBY’s revision of the ending in Morgan. (Cornell Early Poetry 2 and CW 1 both read ‘the hill’ and ‘the vale’.) With madman’s laugh cp. R. Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868) X, 581–2: ‘Come, a monster-­laugh,  | A  madman’s laugh’, and Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), 4533: ‘together with a madman’s laugh’. It should be said that this revision

creates certain areas of awkwardness likely to have been removed had the poem continued into future editions. ‘And where’ at the beginning of 121 sits uncomfortably after the ‘And over’ of 120: the present edition supplies a comma at the end of 120 (‘lands,’) as partial compensation for this. More importantly, WBY’s revised final line replaces the alexandrine of the printed texts with a more irregular rhythm; while arguments could be advanced for the dramatic effect of this, it is still uncharacteristic of WBY’s practice at the time and reads more as a first attempt at a revision rather one that has been fully achieved.

73

LOVE SONG

THE POEMS

From the Gaelic

Date of composition. Probably before Jul. 1887. WBY included this poem in PBYI (1888), but it was shown in MS to John O’Leary in a letter of 5 Aug. 1887, and was probably published in O’Leary’s journal The Gael later that month [no copy of the magazine for this date has yet come to light]. The poem appears in WBY’s article ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ in The Leisure Hour Nov. 1889; it is likely that it was present in the article when this was being written in the summer of 1887, especially since the punctuation here differs from that in PBYI. WBY refers to the article being composed in a letter to KT of 1 Jul. 1887 (CL 1, 25). Source. In his letter to O’Leary, WBY writes: ‘I enclose a poem from the Gaelic made from a prose version given by Walsh in the introduction to his book of poems.’ In his Irish Popular Songs, (1847), Edward Walsh included a translation of one stanza from a poem by Éamonn Ó Riain (Edmund O’Ryan), ‘Éamonn an Chnoic’(‘Edmund of the Hill’). The version is not strictly speaking prose, as WBY claims, but is set out in lines as follows (Walsh, 20–21):

My hope, my love, we will proceed Into the woods, scattering the dews, Where we will behold the salmon, and the ousel in its nest, The deer and the roe-­buck calling, The sweetest bird on the branches warbling, The cuckoo on the summit of the green hill; And death shall never approach us In the bosom of the fragrant wood!

In the summer of 1887, WBY was reading for and composing his piece on ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ (which he did not succeed in placing until 1889, when it appeared in the Nov. issue of The Leisure Hour). There, WBY wrote of Walsh (CW 9, 97–8): Edward Walsh, born in Londonderry in 1805, a militiaman’s son, had all along a hard time of it – first overworked schoolmaster of Cork, afterwards overworked schoolmaster of Spike Island. Nevertheless, he did manage to bring out two small collections of translated popular songs, Gaelic and English side by side. ‘We remember,’ writes his latest editor, ‘(though now forty years since), following Walsh in the twilight of an autumn evening, drinking in the odd chords that came from the little harp that lay on his left arm as he wandered, lonely DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-74

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Love Song

and unknown, by the then desert Jones’s Road, or reposed himself on one of the seats that at the time were outside the walls of Conliffe House.’ Passionate, wild songs were they, well-­nigh Oriental in their ardour, that he loved to sing to the little harp on his left arm. A simple and spontaneous thing was this peasant poet-­craft. The man who wrote love-­songs really was in love. The man who wrote laments really was unhappy. Poor dead Gaelic men, how many centuries ago did they sing the funeral song above you, and here are your passions and sorrows crying from Edward Walsh’s little harp! WBY goes on to relate the meeting of Walsh and the rebel John Mitchel, then on his way to deportation, and makes a point of how Walsh’s efforts helped inspire the literary work of the Young Ireland movement, ‘that gathered his and his fellow-­workers’ poems from old newspapers and magazines or readerless volumes, and printed them in thousands with new and worthy companions’ (CW 9, 98). Discussing ‘the lover in the old ballad’, WBY writes that ‘In his more sentimental moods he sings like the lover in the Munster peasant song, whereof I make this version’, quoting his version of Walsh in full, and commenting: ‘Than which same pastoral aspiration I know nothing more impossibly romantic and Celtic’ (CW 9, 98–99). Publication history. WBY did not collect this poem after its appearance in PBYI. Although the text contained in ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ was published after PBYI, it is likely to have been completed before (probably in the summer of 1887), and its few differences, all in punctuation, may well derive from the copyediting in The Leisure Hour. WBY did return privately to the poem in 1910, when he made a change to its text in a copy of PBYI which he inscribed ‘Lady Gregory from W B Yeats Dec 5. 1910’ (see note to 4). Copy-­text: PBYI.

M

y love, we will go, we will go, I and you, And away in the woods we will scatter the dew; And the salmon behold, and the ousel too, My love, we will hear, I and you, we will hear,

3. ousel] Walsh’s word, which WBY retains, refers to the European blackbird, Turdus merula. It is more usually ‘ouzel’, and had a prominent poetic role in the 1840s in Tennyson, Poems (1842), ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’, 93: ‘The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm’. 4.] In his alteration to the text in AG’s copy of PBYI, a volume dedicated to her by hand on

‘Dec. 5 1910’, WBY changed this line to: ‘My love, I and you, we will hear, we will hear’ (volume now in Woodruff Library, Emory University). Had the poem been reprinted by WBY at any time subsequent to this, it is possible he would have caused this alteration to be made; it was not reprinted, however, and there is no evidence for his intention to reprint it. The



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5

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The calling afar of the doe and the deer. And the bird in the branches will cry for us clear, And the cuckoo unseen in his festival mood; And death, oh my fair one, will never come near In the bosom afar of the fragrant wood.

variant is thus essentially a private thought, expressed some twenty-­three years after the poem’s composition, rather than part of any project of revision for eventual publication; it is not incorporated in the present text.

7. the cuckoo unseen] Cp. John Wilson (1785– 1854), Poetical Works (1858), ‘Address to a Wild Deer, in the Forest of Dalness, Argyllshire’, 113: ‘The cuckoo unseen is repeating his note’.

74

SHE WHO DWELT AMONG THE SYCAMORES THE POEMS

A Fancy

Date of composition. The poem as it survives is probably a revision of earlier material, which was made in 1887. WBY’s sonnet was first published in The Irish Monthly in Sept. 1887. There is no evidence for a date of composition, but WBY himself seems to have told F. Reid that its original (and subsequently lost) version was from as early as 1881–2 (Reid, 20–21): This poem, Mr. Yeats told me, he wrote in its first form when he was sixteen, and the reason why he has never reprinted it is that he came to consider later that he had spoiled it when he rewrote it as a sonnet. I do not know what its lost first version may have been, but as it stands it seems to me wholly delightful. There is a suggestion of the Pre-­Raphaelite school in its minute detail, and it has an adorable freshness and naïveté, a kind of happy innocence, a kind of delicate bloom upon it, that is characteristic of many of the early pieces. Context. WBY’s letter to KT seems to offer this poem (along with ‘The Stolen Child’ and ‘The Meditation of the Old Fisherman’, which WBY considers ‘more widely understandable’) for use in an account of his work in a lecture on Irish poets to be given by her friend John James Piatt in the United States. In a letter to Ellen O’Leary of 3 Feb. 1889, WBY wrote of this poem (CL 1, 140): You ask me what is the meaning of ‘she who dwelt among the sycamores’. She is the spirit of quiet. The poem means that those who in youth and childhood wander alone in woods and in wild places, ever after carry in their hearts a secret well of quietness and that they always long for rest and to get away from the noise and rumour of the world. WBY grew to dislike the poem, as is evident in the account of his anger at its unauthorised reappearance in the Irish Homestead in 1902, in a letter to AG of 12 Dec. 1902 (CL 3, 274): I don’t like that Sycamore poem I think it perfectly detestable and always did and am going to write to Russell to say that the Homestead mustn’t do this kind of thing any more. I was furious last year when they revived some rambling old verses of mine [‘The Fairy Pedant’] but forgot about it. I wouldn’t so much mind if they said they were early verses but they print them as if they were new work. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-75



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499

Textual and publication history. A single MS survives, which predates the published text (NLI 30452): this is printed in the notes. After appearing in The Irish Monthly in Sept. 1887, the poem was included in WO. In addition to The Irish Monthly text (IM), there are two other versions: WBY’s transcription in a letter to KT at the end of Oct. 1887 (KT: see CL 1, 40), and a text published in The Irish Homestead’s ‘A Celtic Christmas’ supplement in Dec. 1902. This appeared without WBY’s permission, and a letter from George Russell indicates that WBY had written to him to protest about this in Dec. 1902 (see CL 3, 277). In his reply, Russell explained that ‘The Editor just before the paper was going to printers regretted that he had nothing of yours, and it was I who was the culprit for I remembered this little poem which I read years ago [. . .] Personally I think [it] a most beautiful poem [. . .] I love your early work and think this poem a wonderful little portion of soul.’ The poem was never subsequently reprinted by WBY. Copy-­text: WO.

A

little boy outside the sycamore wood   Saw on the wood’s edge gleam an ash-­grey feather;

Earlier draft MS. A  single sheet of MS  differs widely from the printed texts. This is unlikely be the Ur-­version of the poem mentioned by F. Reid, since it is already a sonnet; however, it is certainly earlier than the printed text. The poem in MS is wholly unpunctuated, and is given here with light editorial punctuation supplied: Once I followed a ring dove From the hill through a wooded pass Where grew the tall great hearted grass That the sleepy landrails love. Onward ever went the dove, 5 Onward went the dove, and I Following it I know not why, Following from the hill above. Sitting between two great green rocks, Like a burning lamp in the pass’s gloom 10 I saw a tiny maiden, weaving at a loom; Brown as brown oak-­leaves were her locks. I stood still, and she spoke these words to me: ‘I am lone quiet, and I weave thy destiny.’ 4. landrail] The landrail is the corncrake, crex pratensis; this word (not used elsewhere by WBY) occurs in William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864) XII.17–18: ‘the landrail’s hoarse crake-­crake | Still keeps the meadows and cornfields awake’. The word may also provide a line between WBY’s poem and a

sonnet by Aubrey DeVere in his A Song of Faith (1842), entitled ‘The Landrail’: Dear, wakeful bird! I bid thine accents hail, When, like the voice of May, thy startling note Comes wandering up the moonlight, grassy, vale; Or hill of springing corn, or reedy moat. Dearer I love thee than the classic throat, Melodious, of the poet’s nightingale; When her aerial numbers wildly float, Like fairy music, o’er some haunted dale. ’Tis thine to wake a sweeter harmony; Thrilling the viewless chords of memory: To come upon the heart in silent hours, Touching each trembling pulse deliciously; Recalling vows of youth, Hope’s budding flowers, And visions of pure love in amaranthine bowers! Title: One Irish poetic landscape with sycamores is that at the beginning of William Allingham’s Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), I, 19: ‘The cornstacks seen through rusty sycamores’. WBY’s title may contain a verbal recollection of the opening of Wordsworth’s poem, ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways.’ 2. an ash-­grey feather] W. Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung (1876) uses the epithet ‘ash-­grey’ five times (three of these to describe snakes).

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She Who Dwelt Among the Sycamores

  A kid, held by one soft white ear for tether, Trotted beside him in a playful mood. 5   A little boy inside the sycamore wood   Followed a ringdove’s ash-­grey gleam of feather. Noon wrapt the trees in veils of violet weather, And on tiptoe the winds a-­whispering stood. Deep in the woodland paused they, the six feet 10   Lapped in the lemon daffodils; a bee In the long grass – four eyes droop low – a seat   Of moss, a maiden weaving. Singeth she: ‘I am lone lady Quietness, my sweet,   And on this loom I weave thy destiny.’

7. trees] woods KT. violet weather] This phrase seems to have impressed KT, who much later made use of it in her own poetry, first in in Evensong (1922), ‘The Blue Maids’, 5–6, ‘And all around is holy ground  | And blue and violet weather’, and next in Twilight Song (1927), ‘The Voyage’, 15–16: ‘There will be rose and violet weather | Under the trees of paradise’ and 28: ‘Glad in the rose and violet weather’. When he wrote the phrase, it is just possible that WBY had come across the recently-­published Selections from the Poetical Works of Mortimer Collins (1886), where a lyric ‘I and my Sweetheart’ has the line ‘Vanished is youth’s gay violet weather’ (11). 10. Lapped in the lemon daffodils] Cp. Spenser, The Faerie Queene III vi 46 [describing the Gardens of Adonis]: ‘Lapped in flowres and pretious spycery’. Shelley uses ‘lapped in’ twice with negative connotations, in The

Cenci III ii 85–6 (‘now sleeps | Lapped in bad pleasures’) and Prometheus Unbound I 425–6 (‘the Gods the while | Lapped in voluptuous joy’), and once in an erotic context, in The Revolt of Islam VI xxxvii, ‘lone recess, where lapped in peace did lie | Our linkèd frames’. The nearest the OED will come to conceding adjectival status to ‘lemon’ is its sense 5. ‘quasi-­adj. short for lemon-­coloured’. 13. lone Lady Quietness] Samuel Ferguson’s aisling-­ poem, ‘The Forester’s Complaint’ (Lays of the Western Gael [1865]) opens with ‘Through our wild wood-­walks here,  | Sunbright and shady,  | Free as the forest deer,  | Roams a lone lady’. Cp. WBY’s own subsequent ‘Maid Quiet’. 14. weave thy destiny] A general reminiscence here of Thomas Gray, ‘The Bard’, 48: ‘And weave with bloody hands the tissue of thy line’ and 49–50: ‘Weave the warp and weave the woof, | The winding-­sheet of Edward’s race’.

75

THE PROTESTANTS’ LEAP

THE POEMS

Date of composition. Probably composed first in Jun. 1887. The poem appeared in The Gael, a weekly Gaelic sports paper edited by WBY’s mentor John O’Leary, on 19 Nov. 1887. WBY, who was by then living in London, sent a version (finished that day) to O’Leary on 13 Jun. 1887, after the editor had rejected two earlier ‘Ballads’ (one of which seems to be lost, the other being ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’) in May: ‘I enclose’, he wrote, ‘a ballad on another Sligo story, something like Douglas Hyde though not suggested by him for I have long had it in my mind’ (CL 1, 19–20). This version is likely to have differed from that published in Nov. By the summer, O’Leary had lost his copy (along with those of the earlier two poems), as he seems to have admitted to the poet shortly after WBY’s letter of 12 Jul., which asks ‘Would you kindly let me have, the two poems you did not care for, back as I did not keep a copy of either’ (CL 1, 27). When WBY learned that all three poems were mislaid, he told O’Leary that ‘I have I find a copy though an imperfect one of my poem. Will I, as Miss Kavanagh suggests work it up and send it to you. Or will we wait to see if the old copy turns up’ (5 Aug. 1887, CL 1, 31). WBY’s reassembly of his poem probably took place between the end of Aug. and Nov. Sources. WBY draws on an incident recounted in W.G. Wood-­Martin, History of Sligo, County and Town (1882), III, 384–5: Cope’s [sic] mountain, with its fearful precipices (bordering the valley of Glencar) is the scene of the alleged ‘Protestant leap.’ The legend connected with it is as follows: – A detachment of Colonel Hamilton’s troops (garrisoned in Manorhamilton during the war of 1641) was making a raid into Sligo, and obtained a guide, who stipulated, in return for a certain sum of money, to enable the party to fall on the Irish unawares, at the close of the evening. ‘Accordingly he led them up the mountain, directing them to halt a little short of the precipice, of the existence of which they had not the most remote idea, while he himself moved forward to ascertain if all was favourable among the Irish, in which case he was to give them a signal, by dropping his cloak, to rush on to the work of havoc. The cloak was dropped, on perceiving which, rushing forward with eager haste, they reached the verge of the precipice, where, unable to check themselves, the rear pressing on the front rank, every man of the detachment was hurled down that fearful abyss. . . . Their deceitful guide had dropped the cloak just on the edge of the abyss, towards which they accordingly rushed, and he, stepping aside, either made his way down the mountain again, or remained DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-76

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The Protestants’ Leap

to gloat over the destruction of his victim.’ It is almost needless to add that there does not appear to be the slightest substratum of truth in the legend, particularly if it be remembered that many of Hamilton’s troopers were men who had escaped from Sligo, and were well acquainted with its environs. Copes mountain, which has a summit of 452 metres, overlooks Glencar near Sligo, and is notable for its many rocky outcrops, with dangerous sheer escarpments on both its northern and southern sides: modern hillwalkers report it as a place requiring caution, especially in conditions of poor visibility. Sir Frederick Hamilton (1590–1647), who had built a castle in Manorhamilton (previously Cluainín Uí Ruairc) Co. Leitrim in 1634, was active in the campaign against the Irish rebellion of 1641; the English garrison, under Hamilton’s command, sacked Sligo, and burned Sligo Abbey, on 1 Jul. 1642. In the note which accompanies this poem in The Gael, almost certainly written by WBY, ‘two versions of a legend’ are mentioned and characterised as ‘the protestant and ascendancy one’ and ‘the authentic and peasant one’. However, WBY’s poem is the only trace of any such a ‘protestant’ angle on the incident: in his 12 July letter to O’Leary, WBY explains how ‘The Protestants’ Leap’ might appear to be written ‘from the other side than Hyde’s’ [i.e. from the ‘protestant’ perspective, as opposed to Douglas Hyde’s more ‘peasant’ view in his ‘A Ballad of ’98’]: ‘Of course’, WBY reassured the editor, ‘that is not so, The Cromwellian being used dramatically alone. My note will state the old legend and point out the place of its happening’ (CL 1, 27). Although Hyde’s poem is not a direct source, WBY is clearly aware of it, and it is not impossible that ‘The Protestants’ Leap’ was composed (or partly composed) in deliberate contrast to ‘A Ballad of ’98’. It is known that Douglas Hyde’s ballad appeared in The Gael, probably in the issue for 18 Jun. 1887 (though no copy of the paper for this date survives); Ellen O’Leary had told WBY about the poem’s forthcoming publication on 29 May, while he first sent The Gael his own poem on the theme on 13 Jun. Hyde’s ballad was subsequently reprinted in PBYI (1888). Hyde changes the incident’s historical setting to 1798 and the aftermath of the Irish rebellion then, and begins with a portrait of a survivor of ‘the storms of Ninety-­ eight’ (1–8):

Who is it sits on the stone so grey By the side of the sounding sea? Who is it that mutters from day to day – Like the wind in a withered tree?



Who is the man with the long white beard, And the mien so stern and high, With the pale white face, and the lips indrawn, And the fire of a restless eye?

This survivor, whose land and family have been laid waste by the English, relates his story of revenge, telling how he gave ‘the Captain’ of a troop false intelligence of an imminent Irish attack, then led the soldiers towards the place (‘Glanagall’) where he



The Protestants’ Leap

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claimed the Irish were encamped, sending them all instead in the darkness over the cliff to their deaths, having misled them with his forward torch (53–56):

They saw him not, they heard him not, They only saw the light; And on they dash, and crash, and crash, Go down into the night.

Hyde dwells much on the detail and drama of this fatal plunge, making it the climax of the speaker’s revengeful excitement; WBY chooses to omit narration of the ‘leap’ itself, perhaps in order to distinguish further his treatment of the story from that offered by Hyde. WBY’s later use of the story. Although this poem was not reprinted (WBY did not include it in WO), the narrative material was revisited in a story, ‘The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows’. This piece was first printed in The National Observer for 5 Aug. 1893, and subsequently included in WBY’s The Secret Rose (1897). For an edited text and full annotation of the story, see M, 118–121 and 325–328. Textual and publication history. The printed version in The Gael suffered much for its not having been proofread, and Ellen O’Leary wrote to WBY on 20 Nov. 1887 in apology: ‘To my great annoyance and John’s they put your poem in “The Gael” without letting us know. . . . In they stuck the ballad with all its misprints’. WBY himself seems to have published in The Gael for 23 Nov. a letter of arch reproach (quoted in The Irish Monthly in 1891, which commented on how ‘Instead of angry remonstrance, showing that he belonged to the “genus irritabile”, the poet pretended not to recognise his own verses through the disguise of so many printer’s blunders’): ‘I write to correct a mistake. The curious poem in your issue of the 19th inst. was not by me, but by the compositor, who is evidently an imitator of Browning. I congratulate him on the exquisite tact with which he has caught some of the confusion of his master. I take an interest in the matter, having myself a poem of the same name as yet unpublished’ (CL 1, 42–43). It is possible to correct many of the misprints by reference to WBY’s surviving MS material, although the MS  from which the poem was actually set does not survive. NLI 30340 contains drafts of the beginning and the end of the poem. ‘The Protestants’ Leap’ was never reprinted by WBY and vanished until its discovery in the fragmentary files of The Gael by J.S. Kelly (see his ‘Aesthete among the Athletes: Yeats’s Contributions to The Gael’, YAACTS 2 (1984), 75–143). Kelly offers a text corrected both from MS and by conjecture; this is followed exactly by R. Finneran in CW 1. The present text largely follows this restoration, though with some further changes in punctuation and one emendation. The lack of a surviving MS from which the compositor worked means that correction of the text in The Gael must be largely a matter of conjecture. Whereas WBY’s drafts are usually deficient in punctuation, the printed text is in fact over-­supplied in this regard – a surfeit which seems most unlikely to have come from WBY himself. MS readings are given in Kelly’s ‘Aesthete among the Athletes’, 124–127, and more fully in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 334–342. The text as printed in The Gael is reproduced in Kelly, 121–2.

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The Protestants’ Leap

Copy-­text: The Gael, 19 Nov. 1887. (Lug-­na-­Gall, Sligo) The Cromwellian Speaks

M

alformed our guide as from a failing tribe,   Harried and starved as suits earth’s crazy rust,

Note in The Gael. On publication, the poem was followed by a note, signed ‘ED. GAEL’: in fact, O’Leary as editor is almost certain to have reproduced the prose sent to him by WBY after 12 Jul., when the poet wrote of how ‘I hope you will let me see a proof especially as I  have a rather important note to add’ (CL 1, 27). The note as printed seems to preserve several idiosyncrasies and errors of spelling which are characteristic of WBY (‘massacreing’, ‘incorruptable’); the text below silently corrects these, along with some Irish and English words and names (‘Glen-­car’, ‘cranoque’, ‘Spencer’). Lug-­na-­Gall is a very grey cliff overlooking that Glencar lake, where Dermot and Grania had once a crannóg (whereof the remnants were found some years back.) Concerning this cliff are two legends, or rather two versions of a legend. This the protestant and ascendancy one. Certain papists, at their old massacring habit again, did hurl at dead of night, by main force, upon the stones beneath, many mild martyrs who were protestants. This the authentic and peasant one! Certain Cromwellian protestants, at their old massacring habit again, rode forth at dead of night, priest and rebel hunting, and being met, below the mountains, by a peasant who volunteered as guide, were led into space, all save one, over this precipice of Lug-­ na-­ Gall which, interpreted, means the Protestants’ Leap. Beneath, in the debris, some years ago, were found old rusty sabres.   It was not so long since Spenser had written of the people – ‘out of every corner of the woods and glyns they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked

like anatomies of death, they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves: They did eat the dead carrions, happy where they could find them; yea, and one another soon after: insomuch as the very carcases they spared not to scrape out of their graves.’ And during the interval, England had not ceased this planting – as the ‘Times’ would have phrased it  – the ‘institutions of that more civilized country” instead of our “slovenly barbarism.’ Therefore I  have made the guide one whose incorruptible heart moved in a body corrupted by generations of famine, suffering, fear, and foiled projects. One of those whose fruitless lives have saved Ireland at any rate from the modern worship of success. (A crannóg is a small wooden dwelling over water. The quotation from Edmund Spenser is taken from his A View of the Present State of Ireland (wr. c. 1598); although he does not preserve all of its spellings, it seems likely that WBY quotes from A.B. Grosart’s edition, The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser (1882).)   Title] The Gael has ‘Lug-­na-­Gal’, regularized here as ‘Lug-­na-­Gall’: its meaning is ‘The steep place of the foreigners’. In both MS versions of the opening, the only title is WBY’s attempt at ‘Loquitur the Cromwellian’ (meaning ‘The Cromwellian speaks’, though both the Latin and English words are radically misspelled in MS). Robert Browning’s poem ‘The Glove’ (in his Dramatic Romances (1842)) is subtitled ‘Peter Ronsard loquitur’. 1–8.] A  MS  draft opening (as a numbered eight-­ line stanza) runs as follows



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505

Tiller of sordid cliffs, the strong man’s jibe,   All over grey from sitting in the dust. 5 On his pale eyes and forehead moist with hair,   Hanging like red iron drippings down a rock, Fell from his pinewood torch a smoky flare.   Fifty and twain by many a mountainous block. Clotted in clay and on the hill’s edge laid, 10   With horses breathing heavily, we wound Skyward along a path turf-­cutters made;   Sound from four hundred hooves, from us no sound.

Rolled over us the clouds in grisly smoke,

(partially corrected and repunctuated in this transcription): 1 Over our grey guide’s forehead fell the flare – As heavenward rode we round the mountain shoulder – From his pine torch, his forehead moist with hair Hanging like red iron drippings on a boulder. As rode we on the path turf-­cutters made My horse breathed heavily, for all that day, God’s torch, I’d chased the idolator, while stayed My comrades, lounging their dull hours away. 3. sordid] An unusual adjective for cliffs: WBY intends something akin to OED 2.b., ‘of places, houses, etc.’, emphasising poverty and bareness of resource, with a possible precedent in Shelley, Adonais xxxviii: ‘the sordid hearth of shame’. as suits earth’s crazy rust] as fits the world’s mere rust MS. 4.] All grey from sitting in the scorching dust MS. The uncorrected state of this line suggests that the MS  version was revised by WBY in another state, now lost, before printing. ‘Scorching’ makes it plain that the guide has been sitting by a fire; in ‘The Curse of the

Fires and of the Shadows’, it is made clear that the man’s condition is related to the burning of Sligo Abbey: ‘The eyes of the troopers were dazzled, and for a while could see nothing but the flaming faces of saints and martyrs. Presently, however, they saw a man covered with dust who came running towards them’ (M, 118–119). 6. like red iron] Cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), ‘Summer in Auvergne’, 7: ‘Those rust-­red iron hills’. 7. pinewood torch] Edmund John Armstrong (1841–65: a poet educated at TCD, whose early death boosted his reputation as a prodigy) provides the only other poetic use of this item, in Poetical Works (1877), ‘Glendalough: A Story of Wicklow’, 444–5: ‘Wherefore does she turn | The pinewood torch to every pallid face?’ WBY was aware of Armstrong as a poet in his father’s generation at Trinity, and mentions him in a biographical account of John Todhunter for the American journal The Magazine of Poetry in Apr. 1889 (CW 9, 87). 9.] Plunged in the clay or on the mountain laid MS. 13.] hooves MS; hoofs The Gael. WBY’s MS  spelling reflects the desired sound here, thus avoiding a dissonant echo with ‘turf ’ in the preceding line. The change in spelling is almost certain to have been made by The Gael’s editor or compositor.

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The Protestants’ Leap

  When moonless, starless, stood we on the height 15 Gazing, and vaguely through the darkness broke   From a low dusky pool a pallid light. Above the bats went shrilling to and fro;   The bubbles from the eels arose, and slipped Poolward dull frogs luxurious; in the slow 20   Water his flame the grey guide whispering dipped. He had one shoulder low, one shoulder high,   And he was lame. We might have known him then, No minor minion: Belial, Moloch, aye,   Or Satan murmuring in his favourite den 25 To the grey slime. Thus he: ‘Along the brown   Mould follow me, nor hold ye silence deep, The rebels where I lead ye laid them down

16. dusky pool] Cp. Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), IV 498: ‘the mire of Liffey’s dusky pool’. pallid light] The phrase is a commonplace one, and may be suggested to WBY here by recollection of the lines of Edmund John Armstrong which is possibly behind line 7 (see note). But it may be significant that it occurs also near the beginning of a poem by Edward Dowden which has a general (though inverse) relation to WBY’s narrative scenario. Dowden’s ‘The Top of a Hill Called Clear: (In sight of the Celestial City)’, in his Poems (1876) is a first-­person lyric in which the speaker stands on a precipice in quasi-­ religious transports (‘from this height | A man might cast himself in joy’s despair, | And find unhoped, to bear him lest he fall, | Swift succouring wings, and hands angelical’ (10–13)). While WBY’s phrasal echo of Dowden’s ‘the days | Of pallid light’ (1–2) may be no more than a coincidence, he did know the book (and of course Dowden); ‘The Protestants’ Leap’ might be read as an historical and narrative alternative to the romantic fantasies of Dowden’s lyric. In the light of this, it is tempting to connect WBY’s adjective here to some lines on one MS leaf of the poem (B2v of NLI 30340), which read: ‘Man of the pallid brain

and tepid heart | Who sends on every day thy brains to school’, and seem otherwise to bear no relation to the poem itself. 17. shrilling] A  Spenserian word: The Faerie Queene I  V vi: ‘A shrilling trompet’, and xxxiii: ‘sharpe shrilling shriekes’; with WBY’s verb, cp. Tennyson. ‘Morte D’Arthur’ (1842), 201–2: ‘like a wind, that shrills | All night, in a waste land’. ‘Shrill bats’ feature in W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘March: Atalanta’s Race’, 136: ‘For now the shrill bats were upon the wing’. 23. Belial] A devil whose name comes from the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and occurs in the New Testament at 2 Cor. 6:15: a byword for wickedness in much Puritan discourse, and in Milton’s Paradise Lost II, 111–112: ‘For dignity composed and high exploit: | But all was false and hollow’. Moloch] Another devil, deriving from a near-­eastern god in the Hebrew scriptures, who demands bloody sacrifice of his worshippers. See Milton, Paradise Lost I, 392–3: ‘Moloch, horrid king besmeared with blood | Of human sacrifice’. WBY’s spelling in MS (carried over into The Gael text) is the unusual ‘Molock’. 25–6.] Along the down  | Follow me now, no need for silence deep MS.



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  Weary, and they are very fast asleep.’ Awhile the heavens touching dew-­bright mould, 30   Round us, who in our saddles spurring bent, Lay level as, ’neath God’s imminent finger rolled,   Our fifty hearts brimmed over with content. Then down a dripping way we spurred together,   The grey guide rose a form of flying mist, 35 As over mountain laurel, over heather,   The grey guide leading ever on more swift, Went we, and loosed the sword in the long sheath,   For near the idolators we surely came; The flashing of the flint fires underneath 40   Our hoofs made an interminable flame, The ground sloped ever steeper and more steep,   More headlong we, our raiment in the wind Beyond our shoulders ’gan to roar and leap,   And bellowed all the blue bare world behind. * * * * 45 Senseless for many moments, I lay still,   Then I arose, on knees and fingers propped; My weary horse had fallen; with a will   He the spare dew-­bright grasses near me cropped. I thrust one foot forth, and found emptiness – 50   It swung on an abyss before my gaze; Blackness, a thousand feet down, more or less,   And a waste water’s few, far tranquil rays

28.] A  quatrain in MS, which comes overleaf from this line, may have been intended to follow (here with conjectural punctuation supplied): My horse was tired, their fresh and their whole band God gave unto the powers who reign below; But me he covered with his secret hand Because I wreak heaven’s rapine to and fro. 34.] The grey guide seemed a form of pallid mist MS.

44. bare world] bare earth MS. 50. on an abyss] over an abyss The Gael. The MS  reading here is probably ‘on an abyss’ (thus Kelly, ‘Aesthete among the Athletes’, 127; Cornell Early Poetry 2 reads ‘or an abyss’). The Gael text is unmetrical, and the present text is emended from the MS reading. 53. lidless eye] A  commonplace, but one that WBY would use again later, in ‘Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation’, 4: ‘To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun’.

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The Protestants’ Leap

As from a lidless eye, and here and there   A sound of torrents in the invisible woods, 55 Else silence. Once a meteor’s fickle flare,   That slanted, slipping from the starry broods, Showed the mild mountains, mournful in their shrouds;   Showed the dim river, like a wandering spark; Showed where the ash wood on the pine wood crowds; 60   Showed a far eagle brooding on the dark.

54. invisible woods] cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘St. Patrick and the Childless Mother’, 105: ‘While roared far off the vast invisible woods’. 55.] One MS  version continues differently from this point (given here with conjectural restorations and punctuation): Else silence. Gone the whole troop: do they tear Their flesh with coals for shoes and flames for hoods? Or did the mere death penalty suffice For slackness? In mid while of their descent, The demon wings like those of flitter mice Fell wide, and bore him to his element sin gaze, Boasting with all the souls he won that night But I now full of zeal did slay and chase I burnt nine heathen in a wood, so my soul[’s] light; Flames still before the still eternal ^ineffable^ face.

55.] Once a [blue del.] meteor’s fickle flare  | showed the pale mountains in their vapour hoods’ MS. Another alternative MS conclusion seems to run from this point (here with conjectural restorations and punctuation: see Cornell Early Poetry 2, 337 for diplomatic transcription): I saw the undulant valley far and wide; I saw three ravens stooping through the air; I saw the furled seas of loftier air; I saw this raven floating in the pride: Gone all the fifty men – they only were [. . .] Showed the mild mountains mournful in their shrouds; I saw the sea line lorn in citron light; I saw red sirens in a surge of clouds; I saw an eagle brooding on the height. 60. a far eagle brooding] Cp. Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), V, 572–3: ‘halfway up the sky, | Sailed the far eagle’. Perhaps also cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘To Power’, 14: ‘An eagle brooding o’er the world’s wide heart’.

76

EPHEMERA

THE POEMS

Date of composition. It is likely that the poem was composed after Feb. 1887. Modern editions and commentaries all give a date of composition in 1884, but this is probably incorrect. Although dated by GY as ‘1884’ in a TS chronology of the dates of composition of the poems, which she made for the use of R. Ellmann (who subsequently incorporated these dates in an appendix to his Identity), there are grounds for dating this poem rather later than Yeats’s nineteenth year. With only one undated MS of the poem, in fair copy on a detached sheet of paper (NLI 30348), GY’s dating is the sole evidence that exists for 1884 composition. The poem is unusually mature for such an early date and stylistically has more in common with WBY’s work in 1887 and later; had it been written in 1884, it is unlikely that Yeats would not have published it in the Dublin University Review, where much of his writing (including IoS) appeared in the course of 1885, nor put it in print in one of the growing number of outlets that were becoming available to him through 1885–6. In fact (as noted earlier), the poem does not appear in print until WO; and in Feb. 1887 WBY was able to publish a different poem (‘The Falling of the Leaves’) under the title of this one – a strong suggestion that this poem had not then been composed. GY’s ‘1884’ may be a slip for 1887, since she also assigns ‘The Madness of King Goll’ to 1884 in the same TS (directly after ‘Ephemera’), this being a poem which was published in Sept. 1887, then again in PBYI (1888), before appearing in WO: here, too, the hypothesis that Yeats neither sought nor obtained publication for the piece for three years after its composition seems extremely unlikely. ‘Ephemera’’s original subtitle was ‘An Autumn Idyll’: this was the phrase used by WBY as the title for ‘The Falling of the Leaves’ in a MS dated by him ‘July 1886’ (NLI 30422); but by the time that poem appeared in North and South (26 Feb.1887), it carried the title ‘Ephemera’. These two poems seem in important respects to be interconnected – each concerns the saddened parting of lovers, who take their leave of one another in a setting of decaying autumn leaves – but clearly this interconnection extended to their sharing not only subject matter, but for a time a title. It is worth noting, too, that WBY kept these two poems together in the ‘Crossways’ section of P95 and later collected editions (with ‘The Falling of the Leaves’ always immediately preceding ‘Ephemera’). The present edition assumes that ‘The Falling of the Leaves’ was written first and that ‘Ephemera’ represents a later and more ambitious development of its theme under the short poem’s first title. While it is impossible to know whether the poem was composed by the time of the appearance in print of the shorter piece, it is reasonable to suppose that WBY wrote it after Feb. 1887 and then took the earlier title for use in his newer poem, along with its still earlier MS title as the subtitle, and then DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-77

510 Ephemera gave the shorter poem its final title of ‘The Falling of the Leaves’. A further piece of circumstantial evidence for a date of composition in 1887 is the fact that a fair copy MS of ‘Ephemera’ (see Textual and publication history) seems to be on paper from the same exercise book as the poem ‘Girl’s Song’, also from 1887. Reception and interpretation. This poem seldom attracted critical attention in early decades, and does not feature largely in modern criticism of the poet. Early approval came in J. Todhunter’s review of WO (The Academy, 30 Mar. 1889): Mr. Yeats can write graceful and delicate blank verse; and in the short idyllic poem ‘Ephemera’ he also handles it very skilfully. Here a pair of lovers, in an autumn wood, discourse of passion and its inevitable waning. The man pleads for new adventure in love, the woman for constancy. There is no immaturity in these lines. The sentiment finds its expression easily and perfectly. In a passing mention, The Bookman contrasted WBY’s poems of ‘fairyland’ with ‘the very human “Ephemera’ (Dec. 1895), though The Speaker’s review of P95, noting how many poems had been jettisoned by the author, felt that ‘one would willingly replace ‘Ephemera’ [. . .] by some of the old friends from the earlier volumes’ (4 Jan. 1896). By 1915, F. Reid could use the poem only as an illustration of the poet’s early romantic melancholy: “The hour of the waning of love’ inevitably draws near, bringing with it pensive autumnal thoughts, memories of a dead spring and summer’, ‘Then, for poor consolation, the lovers in their loneliness turn to each other by the sad lake’s border’ (Reid, 76–77). In modern criticism, though the poem is seldom examined, there has been some illuminating attention to both themes and technique. On the former, E. Larrissy has read ‘Ephemera’ as ‘another poem about that prime pair of contraries, Joy and Sorrow’: ‘The lovers have moved from the one to the other.[. . .] And they possess, as it were, the right attitude: they have taken this fact to heart.’ This account of the romantic situation converges with more esoteric matters, since ‘That in itself offers promise for future joy [. . .] Metempsychosis is the destiny of the soul in eternity’ (Larrissy, 57–58): The soul that realises this will treat this life as many lives in miniature, with all the loves and contrariety (‘Hate on and love’) that this implies. [. . .] Appropriately enough, the poem is full of images of borders and boundaries [.  .  .] temporal as well as physical boundaries were traditionally magical in Celtic mythology and might mark a point where the supernatural would intervene. The poem’s generic position within the blank verse dialogue tradition is a starting point for H. Vendler’s detailed reading, which sees in its balance of narration and actual dialogue some signs of apprentice immaturity, but also an increasing mastery on the poet’s part (Vendler, 246): Yeats does not trust conventional dialogue to bear the whole emotional burden of the poem: although ‘Ephemera’ opens and closes with dialogue, a narrator

Ephemera

511

[. . .] takes over the poem in lines 13–20, as if, in order to interpret the lovers’ speeches, we need to be helped by a verbally visualized setting aided by editorial metaphors. [. . .] The blank verse, with its mournful Tennysonian cadence, lies as far as possible from the energetic blank verse of the English stage. The narrator’s additive syntax links together its observations with languid ‘and’s’ that set everything on the same visual plane. [. . .] Yeats is not constructing his blank verse in this fashion out of inadvertence: he is giving it a Pre-­Raphaelite flatness of perspective, so that the figures – leaves, rabbit, the lake, the lovers – become two-­dimensional, rather than realistic in volume. It is clear that the poem’s WO version is a more complex affair than the truncated version of P95 and after  – though this is not to suggest that it is necessarily better. The earlier ending attempts to address a difficulty which is – artistically speaking – better left mysterious and unsolved: that is, it allows the beloved to answer the male lover’s claim that ‘other loves await us’ (21). It seems likely that this declaration is intended to carry implications of spiritual reincarnation as well as more mundane future romances; but the female lover is perhaps unable to accept either of these far-­off prospects. Instead, she seems to bring together both love and the whole natural world as manifestations of the unlasting – as ‘ephemera’, that is – which are mocked by the ‘cry’ of ‘Eternity’. This response is a bleakly visionary one, but it is perhaps too big for its poem (as WBY’s revision acknowledges), promoting a scenario of romantic melancholy to one of spiritual or philosophical apocalypse. After P95, the poem becomes a more simply defined thing and may be read even as an exercise in seasonal scene-­setting for a particular mood of mixed regret and weariness. The resigned parting of lovers is a scenario with an evident appeal for WBY, but one which is perhaps at times difficult to bring fully under artistic control. The shriller emotions of the 1884 dialogue poem, ‘Love’s Decay’, where esoteric speculation also intrudes without any clear reason, show how far WBY had come in being able to select and understate such things by the time of ‘Ephemera’; and it could be argued that ‘Ephemera’ rewrites the earlier poem, in one of WBY’s earliest acts of re-­imagining through revisiting of earlier work. Textual and publication history. A MS draft of the poem survives (NLI 30348), which is a fair copy of the poem in ink. The page (folded to make four) is detached from an exercise book and matches the paper on which a MS of ‘Girl’s Song’ is drafted. A transcription is included in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 187. The poem was published in WO, then incorporated with revisions in the ‘Crossways’ section of P95, and retained in that position by WBY in all later collected editions.

512 Ephemera Copy-­text: P49.

‘Y

our eyes that once were never weary of mine Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids, Because our love is waning.’

` And then she: ‘Although our love is waning, let us stand 5 By the lone border of the lake once more, Together in that hour of gentleness When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep. How far away the stars seem, and how far Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!’ 10

Pensive they paced along the faded leaves, While slowly he whose hand held hers replied: ‘Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.’



The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves Fell like faint meteors in the gloom, and once

Title: Ephemera  | An Autumn Idyll MS, WO. Strictly, ‘ephemera’ is a singular noun, though often employed as a plural in modern usage. Yeats may intend a plural sense here, describing the lovers, the fallen leaves, or even the stars. If the latter, the astrological notebook containing positions of stars and planets, called the ephemeris (pl. ephemerides) may be exerting some pressure on the title. 2. Are bowed  .  .  .  lids] Lie now half hidden under pendulous lids MS, WO; Are bowed in sorrow under their trembling lids PW06, CWVP08. 3–5. P95] Veiled in a dreamy sorrow for their love That wanes.’ ‘Ah, wistful voice,’ replied the other, ‘Though [like del. our MS] our sad love is fading, let us yet Stand by the border of the lake once more’ MS, WO. In WBY’s annotated copy of WO in the Pierpont Morgan library, lines 4 and 5 are revised to:

A-­waning.’ ‘Wistful voice’ replied the other, ‘Though our sad love is waning,’ 5. border of the lake] WBY may be taking this use of ‘border’ from e.g. R. Southey, Madoc (1803), XXI 192: ‘Along the level borders of the lake’, or Wordsworth, ‘A Farewell’, 23: ‘Whom from the borders of the Lake we brought’. In MS1 of IoS (1884), WBY writes of ‘how to the border of the lake the swans come’. 10. fading] faded del. fading MS. 11.] While slowly answered he whose hand held hers – MS, WO. 12–14.] Revised thus in P95 and after. ‘Often has passion worn our wandering hearts,| Earth’s aliens. Why so sorrowful? Our souls| Shall warm their lives at many a rustling flame. MS, WO. These lines give the poem’s first published version strong overtones of the theme of reincarnation: see note on 21 later. They also echo lines from a poem of 1884 by WBY, ‘Love’s Decay’, 87–90: Rapture of alien laughter Breaking the sloth of woods with many a cry

513

Ephemera

15 20

A rabbit old and lame limped down the path; Autumn was over him: and now they stood On the lone border of the lake once more: Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes, In bosom and hair.

‘Ah, do not mourn,’ he said, ‘That we are tired, for other loves await us;

God gave the gypsy children, and thereafter Passion of wandering Wandering hearts] Yeats gives a stock phrase something of a fresh inflection, of a kind of spiritual peregrination, crossing the two dominant previous usages: religious waywardness had been an association in eighteenth-­century hymns, e.g. Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) Hymn 6 (‘Jesus is gone above the skies’): ‘He knows what wandering hearts are here’, while Romantic poetry had used the phrase for inconstancy in love: e.g. Mary Tighe, Psyche (1805) 37–8: ‘That anxious torture may I  never feel,| Which, doubtful, watches o’er a wandering heart’, and Thomas Moore, ‘The Ring’ (1801): ‘No – other nymphs to joy and pain| This wild and wandering heart hath moved;| With some it sported, wild and vain,| While some it dearly, truly, loved.’ 14. faint meteors] Cp. Shelley, Hellas 175–7: ‘If his prayer| Be granted, a faint meteor will arise  | Lighting him over Marmora.’ Meteors appear in a poem by William Allingham which bears general relevance to the setting and theme of ‘Ephemera’; ‘The Shooting Star’ was published in Allingham’s Songs Ballads and Stories (1877): Autumnal night’s deep azure dome Darken’d the lawn and terrace high. Where groups had left their music-­room For starry hush and open sky, To watch the meteors, how they went Across the stately firmament. As Walter paced with Josephine, The loveliest maid of all he knew,

Touch’d by the vast and shadowy scene, Their friendly spirits closer drew, Beneath the dim-­lit hollow night, And those strange signals moving bright. “A wish,” said Walter, – “have you heard – Wish’d in the shooting of a star, Fulfils itself?” “Prepare your word,” Said Josephine; “there’s nought to mar The shining chance.” “And may I tell?” “O no! for that would break the spell.” But now a splendid meteor flew, And ere it died the wish was made, And won: for in a flash they knew The happy truth, so long delay’d, Which months and years had never brought, -­ From this bright fleeting moment caught. 15. Cp. Keats, The Eve of St Agnes, 3, ‘The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass.’ 16. Autumn was over him: cp. the opening phrase of WBY’s ‘The Falling of the Leaves’ (once itself entitled ‘Ephemera’), ‘Autumn is over the long leaves that love us’. Yeats placed the two poems together in P95 and thereafter. 17. lake once more] sullen lake MS, WO. 20. ‘Ah, do not mourn,’ he said] Then he: ‘Let us not mourn MS, WO. 21. other loves await us: the idea here may be simply that the poem’s protagonists are both young, and therefore have other loves waiting for them in the future; it may also be that they have other mortal existences after this present one, in which other loves will be found. A  sense of ‘eternity’ involving reincarnation may argue for a date of composition after Yeats’s introduction to Esoteric Buddhism in

514 Ephemera

Hate on and love through unrepining hours. Before us lies eternity; our souls Are love, and a continual farewell.’

1885, and possibly after his meeting in Dublin with Mohini Chatterjee in Apr. 1886. 24. The poem ends here in P95 and all editions thereafter. In WO, there are ten further lines: He spake once more and fondled with his lips That word of the soul’s peace – ‘Eternity.’ The little waves that walked in evening whiteness, Glimmering in her drooped eyes, saw her lips move And whisper, ‘The innumerable reeds I know the word they cry, “Eternity!” And sing from shore to shore, and every year They pine away and yellow and wear out,

And ah, they know not [And  – ah they know not MS], as they pine and cease, Not they are the eternal – ’tis the cry.’ WO The lines from ‘The little waves. . . ’ to the end were marked for deletion very soon after they were first published, in a copy of WO given to E.J. Ellis and inscribed ‘corrections in this book made| at my dictation| May 7, 1889| W.B. Yeats’ (Reading University Library). WBY’s Morgan changes cannot be so precisely dated, but here the final line is changed to ‘The cry is the eternal, if not they.’ R. Ellmann commented on WBY’s omission of the lines of the original ending as ‘curious’: ‘The version published in The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) ends on a note of scepticism about reincarnation; but by 1895, in a new edition of his poems, Yeats removed the sceptical lines’ (Identity, 303).

77

THE FAIRY DOCTOR

THE POEMS

Date of composition and context. WBY included the poem as a postscript, dated ‘Monday’ [15 Aug. 1887] to a 13 Aug. letter sent from Rosses Point to KT (CL 1, 33–5) (KT). The poem appeared in The Irish Fireside for 10 Sept. 1887 (Irish Fireside in notes) and subsequently in WO. It was not later collected by WBY. In his letter, WBY tells KT that he has ‘been making search for people to tell me fairy stories and found one or two’ and introduces the poem with ‘I enclose these trivial verses the first fruits of my fairy huntings’. WBY had arrived at Sligo from Liverpool on 11 Aug. to stay with George Pollexfen and work concertedly on his new narrative poem ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. WBY’s mother suffered her first stroke in London on 11 Aug., and word of this is likely to have reached Sligo by the weekend of the poem’s composition. Text: The copy-­text is WO, with one emendation deriving from a later MS revision by WBY (see note to 11).

Title] In FFTIP (1888), WBY included a section on ‘Witches, Fairy Doctors’ (CW 6, 17–18): Witches and fairy doctors receive their power from opposite dynasties; the witch from evil spirits and her own malignant will; the fairy doctor from the fairies, and a something  – a temperament  – that is born with him or her. The first is always feared and hated. The second is gone to for advice, and is never worse than mischievous. The most celebrated fairy doctors are sometimes people the fairies loved and carried away, and kept with them for seven years; not that those the fairies love are always carried off  – they may merely grow silent and strange, and take to lonely wanderings in the ‘gentle’ places. Such will, in after-­times, be great poets or musicians, or fairy doctors; they must not be confused with those who

have a Leanhaun shee [leannán sídhe], for the Leanhaun shee lives upon the vitals of its chosen, and they waste and die. William Allingham uses the term ‘fairy-­ doctors’ in Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), glossing the term: ‘A recognised functionary in many rural districts: he counteracts the mischiefs wrought by fairies.’ Unlike Allingham, WBY gives his Fairy Doctor a certain amount of otherworldly agency of his own (see the final stanza). Allingham’s lines put the Fairy Doctor firmly in the context of the superstitious beliefs of the peasantry (IV, 127–131): Our dame believed, Firmly as saints and angels she received, In witchcraft, lucky and unlucky times, Omens and charms, and fairy-­ doctors’ rhymes To help a headache, or a cow fall’n dry. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-78

516

The Fairy Doctor

T

he fairy doctor comes our way   Over the sorrel-­covered wold – Now sadly, now unearthly gay,   A little withered man, and old. 5 He knows by signs of secret wit   The man whose hour of death draws nigh, And who will moan in the under pit,   And who foregather in the sky. He sees the fairy hosting move 10   By hearth or hollow or rushy mere, And then his heart flows full of love,   And full his eyes of fairy cheer.

Writing about Allingham in the Providence Sunday Journal for 2 Sept. 1888, WBY complained that ‘The people of Ireland seem to Mr. Allingham graceful, witty, picturesque, benevolent, everything but a people to be taken seriously’ and added that ‘This want of sympathy with the national life and history has limited his vision, has driven away from his poetry much beauty and power  – has thinned his blood’; of the Landlord in Laurence Bloomfield, WBY remarked that ‘He, too, does not take seriously the people over whom he rules  – they are all children, the misguided, the Celts’ (CW 7, 77). 1.] In KT, a word is deleted after ‘The fairy doctor’, which may be ‘hop[s]’; this is then followed by ‘comes’. 3. sadly . . . gay] Cp. Lady Sydney Morgan, The Lay of an Irish Harp (1807), ‘the Drawing Room’, 4: ‘So coldly pleas’d, so sadly gay’. 4. A little withered man] WBY’s phrase inevitably calls up Allingham’s most famous lines (which the young poet himself quoted), ‘The Faeries’, 3–4: ‘We daren’t go a-­hunting  | For fear of little men’. 5. secret wit] Cp. Spenser, The Faerie Queene IV iv xxxix: ‘shewing secret wit’. 8. foregather] This word, with its meaning of ‘To gather together, assemble’ is identified by

OED (1. intr.) as ‘chiefly Scottish’. It occurs often in the work of Robert Burns, e.g. ‘On Tam the Chapman’, 2: ‘Wi’ Death forgathered by the way’. 9. fairy hosting] OED in 1899 declared ‘hosting’ ‘Obs.’ (a. ‘The raising of a host or armed multitude; hostile encounter or array, raid; an encampment; (formerly, esp. in Ireland) a military expedition’): however, the word had been used four times in Samuel Ferguson’s Congal (1872), where it is part of the first phrase in the entire poem (I, 1): ‘The Hosting here of Congal Claen’. Aubrey De Vere uses the word, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Foray of Queen Maeve’, 533: ‘[Queen Maeve] Came down with all the hosting of her kings’. WBY is here the first poet to substitute specifically supernatural for martial associations, and he uses the word again prominently in the title of ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ (1893), the opening poem of WATR. 10. rushy mere] Cp. Jean Ingelow, Poems (1885), ‘Speranza’, 23: ‘While through moist meads draws down yon rushy mere’. 11. flows] is KT, Irish Fireside; fills WO. WBY changes this to ‘flows’ in his copy of WO (Pierpont Morgan Library), and the present edition emends the line accordingly.



The Fairy Doctor

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Cures he hath for cow or goat   With fairy-­smitten udders dry – 15 Cures for calves with ’plaining throat,   That sickening near their mothers lie; And many a herb and many a spell   For hurts and ails and lover’s moan – For all save him who pining fell, 20   Glamoured by fairies for their own. Now be courteous, now be kind,   Lest he may some glamour fold Closely round us, body and mind –   The little withered man, and old.

15. calves] calf KT, Irish Fireside. ’plaining] OED’s definition (‘Now poet. and rare’), ‘plaintive, mourning, lamenting’ cites this line as an example, though WBY’s ‘plaining throat’ seems to be attempting something less poetical than rurally everyday. 16.] Staggering with languid eye KT, Irish Fireside. 17.] [Herbs he hath del.] Many herbs and many a spell KT; And many herbs and many a spell Irish Fireside. 19.] For all save he who pining KT, Irish Fireside. 20. glamoured] This use of the verb (OED a. ‘to charm, enchant’) is relatively unusual, although it becomes more common after the

poem’s date of composition. ‘Glamoured’ was identified as ‘a most expressive Scotch phrase’ in 1835 (J.P. Kennedy, Horse-­shoe Robinson). One precedent for WBY comes in Ferguson’s Congal (1872), III, 559: ‘above the wrack, before their glamoured eyes’. 22. glamour] OED n.1, ‘magic, enchantment, spell’. Like ‘glamoured’ above, the word is of Scottish provenance: it was ‘introduced into the literary language by Scott’ (OED). With WBY’s ‘some glamour’, cp. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘Tristram and Iseult’, II, 548: ‘What, has some glamour made me sleep?’ 21–2.] Greet him courteous, greet him kind, | Lest some glamour he may fold KT, Irish Fireside.

78

GIRL’S SONG

THE POEMS

Date of composition. In a letter to H.H. Sparling, dated 10 Sept. 1887, WBY says that he has recently written ‘a short romance of ancient Ireland’ (CL 1, 36): this is very likely to be a reference to the short story ‘Dhoya’, which would not appear in print for another three years. The poem would not have been added to the story between 1887 and 1891, since it has an important role to play in the original narrative; WBY plucked it from his story for inclusion in WO, adding the title ‘Girl’s Song’ for the occasion. Context. In ‘Dhoya’, an ancient Irish giant, who has been abandoned by the seafaring Fomorians for whom he had laboured, wanders disconsolately through the unpeopled country until he is joined by a woman from the sidhe, who has left her people in order to become his consort. They live together happily, but then a man of the sidhe comes to reclaim the woman; Dhoya defeats him in a fight, but he transforms himself into a bundle of reeds, and escapes. Returning to his fairy lover, Dhoya hears her sing the song, after which WBY writes (JS, 187–188): And when she saw him she cried, ‘An old mortal song heard floating from a tent of skin, as we rode, I and mine, through a camping-­place at night.’ From that day she was always either singing wild and melancholy songs or else watching him with that gaze of animal reverie. After this, the man of the sidhe returns and challenges Dhoya to a chess match, beating him and taking away the woman. Dhoya, in fury, rides through the country until he plunges into the ocean. Textual and publication history. A fair copy of the poem survives as NLI 30342, and is transcribed in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 187 (MS). The poem first appeared in WO, though it had been written for the short story ‘Dhoya’, and was published there in WBY’s John Sherman and Dhoya in 1891 (JS). The story was reprinted in vol. 7 of CWVP08.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-79



Girl’s Song

519

Copy-­text: CWVP08.

F

ull moody is my love and sad,   His moods bow low his sombre crest, I hold him dearer than the glad,   And he shall slumber on my breast. 5 My love hath many an evil mood,   Ill words for all things soft and fair, I hold him dearer than the good,   My fingers feel his amber hair. No tender wisdom floods the eyes 10   That watch me with their suppliant light – I hold him dearer than the wise,   And for him make me wise and bright.

Title] This is the title in WO only; in ‘Dhoya’, the lines feature without a title. It is retained in the present edition as the only title to have been carried by this piece when printed by WBY outside the context of a work of fiction. 1. Full moody] This archaic-­sounding phrase is employed also  – whether or not by coincidence  – by William Allingham, Life and

Phantasy (1889), ‘When I  was young and fresh and gay’, 2: ‘Full moody oft I went’. 5. evil] JS, CW08 ruthless MS, WO. 10. light] gaze del. light MS. 12. wise and bright] Perhaps cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘Nature’s Labels: A  Fragment’, 5–6: ‘Boobies have looked as wise and bright | As Plato or the Stagirite’.

79

[‘WHEREVER IN THE WASTES OF WRINKLING SAND’] THE POEMS

Context, and date of composition. These nine lines of blank verse are found in a letter from WBY to KT of 1 Jul. 1887. This is the second part of a longer letter (the first part is dated 25 Jun.) in which WBY passes on various pieces of London literary gossip, asks KT about current projects, and reports a certain amount of summer boredom, made worse by the very warm weather. The whole is infused with playful (slightly vicious) humour at the expense of the likes of H.H. Spurling and the newly met William Sharp. In the first (Jun.) instalment, WBY high-­spiritedly adapts the Marlowe (and Shakespeare) line ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight’ to produce the comically ill-­natured ‘None ever hate aright | Who hate not at first sight’. In the second part of the letter, WBY cheers himself up with the thought of being able to procure a cheap crossing soon from Liverpool to Ireland (using his family connections with the Pollexfen-­owned Sligo Steam Navigation Company) and continues (CL 1, 24): I do not think I shall ever find London very tolerable – it can give me nothing. I am not fond of the Theatre – literary society bores me – I loathe crowds and was very content with Dublin though even that was a little too populous but I suppose [Poem follows] Running into verse is not at all common in WBY’s correspondence; but there is no reason to disagree with the verdict of the editors of CL 1 that the lines ‘were probably composed by WBY for the occasion’. If the verses are effectively being improvised on the page, it is interesting that WBY still subjects them to a degree of revision, so that they resemble a poetic draft rather than simply verses inserted into a letter. The conception which underlies the lines, that of WBY’s journey (a journey soon, he hopes, to lead him back to Ireland) as a kind of desert trek, where a caravan makes its way under direction from ‘the master of the pilgrimage’ (7)) is almost certainly offered in a spirit of light-­ hearted irony. This being so, it is tempting to read the more pompous moments (e.g. 4–5, with its broken-­backed and stilted syntax and diction) as parody – perhaps of the kind of ‘literary society’ that WBY longs to flee.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-80



[‘Wherever in the Wastes of Wrinkling Sand’]

521

Copy-­text. Letter to KT 25 Jun. and 1 Jul. 1887 (Huntington Library), transcribed CL 1, 24 and Cornell Early Poetry 2, 480; edited version in UM, 89. The text here corrects spellings and supplies punctuation.

W 5

herever in the wastes of wrinkling sand, Worn by the fan of ever-­flaming time, Longing for human converse, we have pitched A camp for musing in some seldom spot Of not unkindly nurture, and let loose To roam and ponder those sad dromedaries Our dreams, the master of the pilgrimage Cries, ‘Nay, the caravan goes ever on: The goal lies further than the morning star.’

1.] The first word of the MS, here taken as ‘Where’, could also be ‘When’: see Cornell Early Poetry 2. wastes] worlds del. wastes MS. sand] [sand del.] [heat del.] sand MS. 3. we have] man has del. we have MS. 6. dromedaries] The MS  spelling, ‘dromendaries’, may indicate WBY’s favoured pronunciation of this word. 7. our dreams] The MS  shows that WBY clearly intends to end the sentence with

‘dreams’. In altering this, the present edition presumes that this clarity was more of an act of inattention on the writer’s part, and in so doing is in accord with G. Bornstein’s version in UM, which also places a comma here. 9. star] Cornell Early Poetry 2, reading ‘star’, notes that ‘The mark transcribed as a period at the end may be an ‘s’’: CL 1 reads ‘stars’.

80

A LOVER’S QUARREL AMONG THE FAIRIES

THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication history. It is not possible to give a date of composition for this poem: WBY never published it in a periodical, and no MS material survives; there is no reference to the poem in any of the extant correspondence. It was included by the poet in WO, but is likely to have been composed either in the summer of 1887 or shortly thereafter. The first of WBY’s poems on fairy themes angled towards a sentimental or (broadly speaking) children’s market was ‘The Priest and the Fairy’, written before Apr. 1886; this never appeared in a periodical, but two later ‘fairy’ poems by WBY had found a market: ‘The Fairy Pedant’ was published in The Irish Monthly in Mar. 1887, and ‘The Fairy Doctor’ (written in Aug.) appeared in The Irish Fireside in Sept. This poem could well be intended by WBY for the same market, and it is possible that it was offered for publication after the two successful attempts; but, for whatever reason, it never appeared in any journal. After WO, the poem was not included again by WBY in any collection of poems. Like those other ‘fairy’ poems, its inclusion in WO is more puzzling than its excision from subsequent collected volumes; F. Kinahan’s suggestion that WBY ‘could afford to include’ such poems ‘among the works that appeared in his first volume of poetry’, since ‘they were not likely to mar the reputation of a writer who, in 1889, had little reputation to speak of ’ is not entirely convincing (Kinahan, 222). It is difficult to believe that WBY saw any real artistic value in a work like this one; yet the presence of a textual correction in the Pierpont Morgan copy of WO (line 27) suggests that the poet did (however briefly) entertain the possibility of keeping these verses within the early canon of his work. Interpretation. The poem attempts light social comedy using the fairies, and to do so it inhabits one of the key motifs of WBY’s use for fairy material, that of the abduction of a human child. The generic distance travelled here from e.g. ‘The Stolen Child’ is immense (‘hand in hand’ in line 2 – whether intentionally or not – recalls the earlier poem, and its ‘With a fairy, hand in hand’); but it is certainly distance travelled in the wrong direction, and a journey which WBY did not pursue any further, at least in verse. The main point of amusement seems to be the weary familiarity of the ‘Girl Fairies’ with the tiresome child-­abducting ways of their fairy menfolk. The band of quarrelling male and female fairies resembles those of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which must be WBY’s remote model (‘Cranberry Fruit’, ‘Coltsfoot’ and ‘Mousetail’ would be at home in that play), and WBY is very close here to a thoroughgoing appropriation of the Irish fairies to standard late Victorian sentimental make-­believe.

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Copy-­text: WO.

A moonlit moor. Fairies leading a child. MALE FAIRIES

D

o not fear us, earthly maid!   We will lead you hand in hand By the willows in the glade,   By the gorse on the high land, 5 By the pasture where the lambs   Shall awake with lonely bleat, Shivering closer to their dams   From the rustling of our feet. You will with the banshee chat, 10   And will find her good at heart, Sitting on a warm smooth mat   In the green hill’s inmost part. We will bring a crown of gold,   Bending humbly every knee, 15 Now thy great white doll to hold –   Oh, so happy would we be!

1. earthly maid] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘May: The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, 356–7: ‘the warrior said, | Turning about unto an earthly maid’. 9. the banshee] From the Irish, bean sidhe, woman of the fairy mound: this female spirit, found in Irish and Scottish folklore traditions, was thought to foretell by her piercing cry a death in the family. WBY’s short fiction and his various writings on folklore often refer to this figure, who features also in a good deal of nineteenth-­century Irish poetry. An account from about the time of this poem is given by Lady Wilde (Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), Vol. 2, 260): Sometimes the Banshee assumes the form of some sweet singing virgin of the family who died young, and has been given the

mission by invisible powers to become the harbinger of coming doom to her mortal kindred. Or she may be seen at night as a shrouded woman, crouched beneath the trees, lamenting with veiled face; or flying past in the moonlight, crying bitterly: and the cry of this spirit is mournful beyond all other sounds on earth, and betokens certain death to some member of the family whenever it is heard in the silence of the night. The light tone of this poem (where she can be chatted with, and is ‘good at heart’) is far from this standard account of the banshee, a figure treated elsewhere with more respect by WBY. 12.] An allusion to the mounds in which the fairies were thought to live, whose name in Irish, sidhe, is the same as that used for the fairies themselves.

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Ah! it is so very big,   And we are so very small! So, we dance a fairy jig 20   To the fiddle’s rise and fall. Yonder see the fairy girls   All their jealousy display, Lift their chins and toss their curls,   Lift their chins and turn away. 25 See you, brother, Cranberry Fruit –   Ho! ho! ho! the merry blade! – Hugs and pets and pats a newt,   Teasing every wilful maid. GIRL FAIRIES Lead they one with foolish care, 30   Deafening us with idle sound – One whose breathing shakes the air,   One whose footfall shakes the ground. Come you, Coltsfoot, Mousetail, come!   Come I know where, far away, 35 Owls there be whom age makes numb;   Come and tease them till the day. Puffed like puff-­balls on a tree,   Scoff they at the modern earth – Ah! how large mice used to be 40   In their days of youthful mirth! Come, beside a sandy lake,   Feed a fire with stems of grass; Roasting berries steam and shake –   Talking hours swiftly pass! 45 Long before the morning fire   Wake the larks upon the green. Yonder foolish ones will tire   Of their tall, new-­fangled queen.

37. puff-­balls] OED, puffball 1.a: ‘Any of various gasteromycete fungi characterized by a globose fruiting body which on the rupturing

of the outer wall (peridium) at maturity discharges a cloud of powdery spores.’



A Lover’s Quarrel Among the Fairies

They will lead her home again 50   To the orchard-­circled farm; At the house of weary men   Raise the door-­pin with alarm, And come kneeling on one knee,   While we shake our heads and scold 55 This their wanton treachery,   And our slaves be as of old.

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THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN AND HOW A DEMON TRAPPED HIM

THE POEMS

Date and background of composition. The poem was substantially complete by Nov. 1887, but it is not possible to say exactly when it was begun: certainly, composition had started in earnest by Oct. 1886, continuing through 1887. The year 1886 was when KT remembered this poem as having its genesis; and her recollection (made eight years afterwards) ascribes the inspiration to someone other than the poet himself (Outlook (New York), 30 Jun. 1894): I think it was in 1886 that Mr. Alfred Perceval Graves, who had kept his sweet Irish singing-­note loyally through many years of English life, suggested to Mr. Yeats and myself that we should join him in writing a volume of poetical tales from the Irish to be called ‘Tales from Tara’. I  elected to do ‘Diarmuid and Grainne’; Mr. Yeats, ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’. This was not a story ever told by WBY himself, but there is no reason to doubt that KT is remembering the correct year for the poem’s beginnings. There is no record of when WBY first read his main literary source for the poem, Michael Comyn’s ‘Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youth’ (see Sources), but the Oisin theme itself was available to WBY in more general ways, and might have been noticed by the poet before his encounter with that particular source. In The Dublin University Review (DUR) for Aug. 1885, WBY would have read an article by the author and Parnellite politician Justin Huntly McCarthy (1856–1936) on ‘The Irish Language and Literature’. Here, in the course of his argument that Irish heroic source material should prove just as important for young Irish writers as any classical texts had been hitherto, McCarthy insisted that ‘what I should like all Irishmen, and especially all young Irishmen, to remember is, that Ireland would not lack poetical literature of the finest and of the noblest, even if the hexameters of the singer of Smyrna [Homer] had never been rendered in the language of Oisin’ (43). McCarthy’s crowning instance of suitable material for such a purpose is the tale of Oisin in the Land of Youth: ‘Nor must I forget that wonderful story of the adventures of Oisin in the Land of Youth, a legend which for phantasy, for the magic of poetic imagination, and for sweet sadness, has not, to my mind, its superior among all the legends of the earth – all that I, at least, am acquainted with’ (46). If this did supply WBY with the hint for an Irish theme, it was not one taken up until just over a year later, in Oct. 1886 (the same month as the private publication of Mosada), when WBY began work on the poem. There may be DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-82



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signs of WBY’s initial involvement with the Oisin material in the one surviving letter of his from 1886 (probably late summer) to a school contemporary F.J. Gregg, written from Rosses Point in Co. Sligo (where WBY was staying with his uncle George Pollexfen); this ends with a declaration that ‘the only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart’ (CL 1, 8). By the next summer (1887), WBY had written the first two parts of his poem, reporting in a letter to KT of 25 Jun. a reading of the material in front of friends in London (including John Todhunter): ‘I read my “Oisin” which was very well received especially the second part the third remains still little more than commenced’ (CL 1, 23). WBY spent the rest of the summer of 1887 again at Rosses Point, and could write to KT on 17 or 24 Sept. that ‘I hardly know when I leave as I greatly want to finish “Oison” first [. . .] “Oison” goes ahead famously the country helps one to think’ (CL 1, 37). Part III of the poem continued to give WBY trouble, and on 25 Oct. he wrote to KT that ‘he [Oisin] has been very obdurate had to be all rewritten once – the third part I mean – but has gone very well today I may finish this week’ (CL 1, 38). It was not until 18 Nov. 1887 that WBY was able to announce to KT that the poem had ‘come to an end – nothing now remaining but the copying out’, going on to give an account of the vicissitudes in the final months of composition (CL 1, 41): This finishing of Oisin is a great relief  – never has any poem given me such a trouble  – making me sleepless a good deal, it has kept me out of spirits and ­nervous – the thing always on my mind – these several weeks back. It seems better now than when I was working it out. I suppose my thinking so badly of it was mainly because of colds and head aches mixing themselves up with the depression that comes when one idea has been long in the mind, for now it seems one of my successes. Two days ago it seemed the worst thing I ever wrote. A long poem is like a fever – especially when I am by myself as I am down here. This to me is the loneliest place in the world. Going for a walk is a continual meeting with ghosts for Sligo for me has no flesh and blood attractions – only memories and sentimentalities accumulated here as a child making it more dear than any other place. It is, of course, extremely likely that changes continued to be made to the text throughout 1888 up until the arrival of the final proofs for WO on 14 Nov. of that year. Sources. Modern criticism has some treatments of the sources for WBY’s poem (see e.g. F. Kinahan), and the earliest study is that of R.K. Alspach, ‘Some Sources of Yeats’s The Wanderings of Oisin’, PMLA 58/3 (Sept. 1943), 849–866 (Alspach in notes). In WO, WBY cites no sources for his poem. However, the question of source material was soon raised, in a review in the Spectator for 27 Jul. 1889: ‘We wish that Mr. Yeats had told us the source from which he got the material of this somewhat strange poem’. The reviewer quoted I, 176–188 and III, 173–180, saying that ‘There is something weird, for instance, about the following lines’ and adding that ‘we are curious to know whether they are wholly the writer’s own’. WBY sent a reply, published in the following week’s edition (CL 1, 176–7): In a kindly notice of my volume of poems, your reviewer asks where I got the materials for ‘The Wanderings of Oisin.’ The first few pages are developed from

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a most beautiful old poem written by one of the numerous half-­forgotten Gaelic poets who lived in Ireland in the last century. In the quarrels between the saint and the blind warrior, I have used suggestions from various ballad Dialogues of Oisin and Patrick, published by the Ossianic Society. The pages dealing with the three islands, including your reviewer’s second quotation, are wholly my own, having no further root in tradition than the Irish peasant’s notion that Tir-­u-­ au-­oge [sic] (the Country of the Young) is made up of three phantom islands. As the poet claims here, the largest proportion of source-­reliant material is to be found in the poem’s first part, while the confrontations between Oisin and Patrick are developed from Irish dialogue poems. WBY’s major literary source was a translation which appeared in Transactions of the Ossianic Society Vol. 4 (1859) (Trans. Oss. Soc). This was a learned publication, and the volume was dedicated to a series of ‘Fenian Poems’ edited by John O’Daly. The Irish quatrain-­poem Laoi Oisin ar Thir na nÓg was included, along with an English translation (in parallel) in unrhymed verse. The Laoi Oisin situates itself in a tradition of Oisin and Patrick dialogue poems, recorded from the Middle Ages onwards, and it may well draw upon older materials that no longer survive. The Trans. Oss. Soc. translation was by Brian Ó Lunaigh (Brian O’Looney); O’Looney (1828–1901) was from Co. Clare, but his career was a scholarly and literary one, and he held a number of prominent positions in the Irish-­language and antiquarian circles of Dublin from the 1870s onwards. Amongst what WBY calls the ‘various ballad dialogues of Oisin and Patrick’ is the Caoidh Oisin a n-­Diagh na Feinne (‘The Lamentation of Oisin after the Fenians’), a poem in over 200 quatrains, translated by Standish H. O’Grady in Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 3 (1857), which consists largely of the complaints of Oisin as he nears the death for which Patrick offers him spiritual counsel (Lamentation). The ‘Lay of Oisin in the Land of Youths’ as the Laoi Oisin ar Thir na nÓg was translated (Lay in all notes below), although presented as a ‘Fenian’ poem, was claimed by O’Looney to be of mid-­ eighteenth-­century origin. According to O’Looney, it was the work of the Irish writer Micheál Coimín (Michael Comyn), who lived from c. 1680–1760, and it was probably written around 1750. Comyn, from a landowning Irish family in Co. Clare, wrote prose fiction as well as verse, but all his works remained (until 1859) in manuscript circulation only. O’Looney assigns the Lay this authorship in his preface to the translation: From the fourteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century, we have another class of poems and romantic tales, which exhibit a later stage of the language, but which are well worthy of attention. My own conviction is that the Ossianic poem on the ‘Land of Youth’ is of this last class and date, and from the testimony of many corroborating facts supported by the result of an inquiry which I instituted at your suggestion, I believe it to have been written by the learned Michael Comyn . . . about the year AD 1749. This ascription to Comyn is largely circumstantial, however: the personal papers of this author were destroyed after his death, and the Lay was only identified as his in some oral re-­tellings. Later scholars have cast doubt on the attribution and have found just as



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plausible a dating of the poem to the middle decades of the nineteenth century. For WBY though, whose knowledge was probably limited to the prefatory material by O’Looney, this was a poem of the eighteenth century, based on materials that stretched back much further in time. Its relatively recent authorship, nevertheless, might have inclined him not to make particular mention of it as a source in the first publication of his own poem. Although WBY knew the Lay, it is possible that this was not his first encounter with its story. In a much less scholarly and antiquarian mode, for example, Patrick Kennedy’s Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866) included the Oisin story as ‘The Old Age of Oisin’ (241–2): After the final battle of Gavra the only surviving warrior, Oisin, son of Fion, was borne away on the Atlantic waves by the Lady Niav of resplendent beauty, and for a hundred and fifty years he enjoyed her sweet society in the Land of Youth below the waters. Getting at last tired of this monotony of happiness, he expressed a wish to revisit the land where his youth and manhood had been spent, and the loving Niav was obliged to consent. She wept bitterly on seeing him mount the white steed, and warned him that if his feet touched earth, he would never see her nor Tir-­na-­n-­Oge again, and that his strength would be no more than that of a newly-­born child. Alas! Fion and his heroes were scarcely remembered on the plains and by the streams of Erinn. The fortress of Almain was a mound and moat overgrown with docks and thistles, and moss had covered the huge casting-­stones of the Fianna. Where strong mounds and ditches once secured armed warriors from their foes, he found unchecked entrance, and prayers and hymns recited and sung in stone buildings surmounted by cross and spire. He saw fewer spears and many more sickles than in the days of Fion, and near the Pass of Wattles (Dublin) he found Patrick the missionary raising a lowly house of worship. As he sorrowfully rode up the Glen of Thrushes (Glann-­a-­Smoll), a crowd of men striving to raise a huge stone on a low wagon, craved his aid. Stooping, he heaved the mass on to the car, but in doing so the girth snapped, the saddle turned round, away flew the white steed, and the last of the heroes lay on the hill-­side, a grizzly-­haired, feeble man. He was conveyed to Bal a’ Cliath, and St. Patrick gave him a kind reception, and kept him in his house. Many an attempt did he make to convert him to Christianity, but with little success; and the conferences generally ended with Oisin’s laments for the lost heroes. The saint, pitying the desolation of the brave old man, would then introduce some remark on past events, which would be sure to draw from the bard a rhymed narrative of a Fenian battle, or hunting, or invasion by the king of the world – at least of Greece – or an enchantment worked on Fion or Fergus by some Danaan Druid, such as the ones just told. The winding up would be a fresh lament over his own desolate state, and the faded glories of the once renowned Fianna. WBY was making use of Kennedy in the summer of 1888 (see letter to Douglas Hyde, 11 Jul. 1888, CL 1, 81), but almost certainly knew this book before then: Kennedy’s account,

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which is in a register far from the heroic, may inform WBY’s poem, especially in its treatment of the contrast between the saint and the old man (it is worth remarking, too, that Kennedy (like Sir Samuel Ferguson) uses ‘Danaan’ adjectivally, a habit for which WBY would be notable.) Oisin-­related material made its way into contemporary poetry, and WBY knew one version of it in Aubrey De Vere’s book Legends of St. Patrick (1872). Here, De Vere weighs in of the Christian side of the argument between the pagan hero and Ireland’s patron saint. Oisin’s conversion – not itself wholly at odds with some of the monastically inflected source material – offered WBY an excellent instance of the de-­paganizing against which his own version could react (The Legends of St. Patrick (1872), ‘St. Patrick and Oisin’, V: Oisin’s Vision’, 25–68): Patrick, of me they noised a tale,   That down beneath a lake A hundred years I lived, unchanged,   For a Faery Lady’s sake: They said that, home when I returned,   The men I loved were dead; And that the whiteness fell that hour   Like snow upon my head. A song of mine, a dream in youth,   That tale misdeemed for true: Far other dream was mine in age:   A dream that no man knew. For though I sang of things loved well,   I hid the things loved best: Patrick, to thee that later dream   At last shall be confessed. On Gahbra’s field my Oscar fell:   Last died my father, Fionn: The wind went o’er their grassy mounds;   I heard it, and lived on. I loved no more the lark by Lee,   Nor yet the battle-­cry; And therefore in a dell, one day,   I laid me down to die. The cold went on into my heart:   Methought that I was dead: Yet well I knew that angels waved   Their wings above my head. They said, “This man, for Erin’s sake   Shall tarry here an age,



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Till Christ to Erin comes – shall sleep   In this still hermitage: That so, ere yet that great old time   Is wholly gone and past, Her manlier with her saintly day   May blend in bridal fast. And since of deadly deeds he sang   Above him will we sing The Death that saved: and we from him   Will keep the gadfly’s wing. For him an age, for us an hour,   Here, like a cradled child, Shall sleep the man whose hand was red,   Whose heart was undefiled.” The approach, with its willed binding together of Ireland’s ‘manlier’ and ‘saintly’ identities, is perhaps a kind of religious whimsy; but it is for that reason an element that stiffens the anti-­Christian (and utterly unwhimsical) resolve of WBY’s portrait of Oisin. WBY certainly knew De Vere’s book, which he mentions in his first Boston Pilot piece (3 Aug. 1889) (CW 7, 10). Some years later, in his Introduction to A Book Of Irish Verse (1895), WBY puts emphasis on De Vere as a Roman Catholic writer; in the process, he finds himself using an Oisin-­derived metaphor of ‘enchanted islands’, with a hint of his own ‘Island of Forgetfulness’ in Book III, while not letting go of the (possibly sectarian) impulse to face down the saintly in the name of the heroically sword-­wielding (CW 6, 106): The poetry of Mr. Aubrey de Vere has less architecture than the poetry of Ferguson and Allingham, and more meditation. Indeed, his few but ever memorable successes are enchanted islands in grey seas of stately impersonal revery and description, which drift by and leave no definite recollection. One needs, perhaps, to perfectly enjoy him, a Dominican habit, a cloister, and a breviary. Closer to the spirit of the story, Standish J. O’Grady’s account of Oisin’s adventures and his encounter with St. Patrick was also known to WBY. O’Grady offers Oisin’s rebukes to the saint as a defiant defence of the heroic, pre-­Christian world which Oisin represents, and of which he is the sole survivor (History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878), Ch. XII, 36–38): ‘O son of Calpurn of the crosses, hateful to me is the sound of thy bells and the howling of thy lean clerics. There is no joy in your strait cells; there are no women among you, no cheerful maids. ‘You have practised magic against the Fianna. At the sound of your bells they grow pale. At the howling of your clerics they became like ghosts; they melted into the air. When we marched against our enemies every step that we took could be heard through the firmament. Now all are silent; they have melted into the air. I, too, linger for a while, a shadow; I shall soon depart.

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‘I took no farewell of Fionn nor of any of the Fenians; they perished far away from me. Out of the west, out of the sea, riding on a fairy steed, shod with gold, came a lady seeking a champion. Brighter than gold was her hair, like lime her fair body, and her voice was sweeter than the angled harp. ‘I set her before me on the steed. The sea divided before us, and arched above us. We descended into the depths. A fawn flew past me, whom two hounds pursued; a fair girl ran by with an apple of gold; a youth with drawn sword pressed behind. I knew not their import. ‘Three hundred years I lived in the Tirnanōg, in the land of the ever young, the isles of the blest; but, far away I heard the hateful clanging of thy bells (the thought of my comrades come over me like a flood), and I  returned to fade away beneath thy spells, O son of Calpurn. ‘How stood the planets when power was given you, that we should grow pale before your advent. Withered trees are ye, blasted by the red wind. Your hair, the glory of manhood, is shaven away; your eyes are leaden with much study; your flesh wasted with fasting and self-­torture; your countenances sad. I hear no gleeful laughter; I see no eyes bright and glad; and ever the dismal bells keep ringing, and sorrowful psalmody sounds. ‘Life is a burden to you, not a pleasure. It is the journey of one travelling through desolate places hastening homeward. ‘Not such, not such, was our life, O cleric; not such the pleasures of Fionn and the Fianna. The music that Fionn loved was that which filled the heart with joy and gave light to the countenance, the song of the blackbird of Letter Lee, and the melody of the Dord Fian, the sound of the wind in Droum-­derg, the thunders of Assaroe, the cry of the hounds let loose through Glen Rah, with their faces outward from the Suir, the Tonn Rury lashing the shore, the wash of water against the sides of ships, the cry of Braan at Knock-­an-­awr, the murmur of streams at Slieve Mish, and oh, the blackbird of Derry Carn. I never heard, by my soul, sound sweeter than that. Were I only beneath his nest! ‘We did not weep and make mournful music. When we let our hounds loose at Locha Lein, and the chase resounded through Slieve Crot, there was no doleful sound, nor when we mustered for battle, and the pure, cold wind whistled in the flying banners of the Fianna of Erin; nor yet, in our gentle intercourse with women, alas, O Diarmait; nor in the banqueting hall with lights, feasting and drinking, while we hearkened to the chanting of noble tales and the sound of the harp and the voice. ‘How, then, hast thou conquered, O son of Calpurn.’ Oisin’s journey to the third island is WBY’s original addition to the Ossianic material of his sources. The story of heroic sleepers awaiting their re-­awakening is traditional, and probably best known in its Arthurian inflection, where the king and his knights lie asleep under the hills until the day of the kingdom’s greatest peril. Alspach (863) adduces Alfred Nutt’s Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail (1888), where reference is made to Arthur and his knights sleeping in the Eildon Hills in general relation to Irish mythic motifs (123). Although WBY knew and did some copying work for Nutt, and



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was familiar with his folklore research, the composition of this part of the poem (mostly in the autumn of 1887 in Sligo, though the conception of the third island might easily be from before this) predates Nutt’s book. The location given by Nutt, however, puts the story in greater proximity to Walter Scott. Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which was published in a second edition in 1885, relates the Eildon Hills (near Melrose in the Scottish lowlands, a place especially associated with the author) to stories of ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ – Thomas of Erceldoune, a figure also, like Oisin, taken away into the fairy world by an otherworldly royal lover. Scott’s version of the story may well influence WBY’s narrative: in particular, the motif of the sounded horn: (Scott, 115–116): Thomas of Erceldoune, during his retirement, has been supposed, from time to time, to be levying forces to take the field in some crisis of his country’s fate. The story has often been told of a daring horse-­jockey having sold a black horse to a man of venerable and antique appearance, who appointed the remarkable hillock upon Eildon hills, called the Lucken-­hare, as the place where, at twelve o’clock at night, he should receive the price. He came, his money was paid in ancient coin, and he was invited by his customer to view his residence. The trader in horses followed his guide in the deepest astonishment through several long ranges of stalls, in each of which a horse stood motionless, while an armed warrior lay equally still at the charger’s feet. ‘All these men,’ said the wizard in a whisper, ‘will awaken at the battle of Sheriffmoor.’ At the extremity of this extraordinary depôt hung a sword and a horn, which the prophet pointed out to the horse-­dealer as containing the means of dissolving the spell. The man in confusion took the horn, and attempted to wind it. The horses instantly started in their stalls, stamped, and shook their bridles, the men arose and clashed their armour, and the mortal, terrified at the tumult he had excited, dropped the horn from his hand. A voice like that of a giant, louder even than the tumult around, pronounced these words: – ‘Woe to the coward that ever he was born, That did not draw the sword before he blew the horn!’ A whirlwind expelled the horse-­ dealer from the cavern, the entrance to which he could never again find. Whether or not WBY was familiar with this version of the story, he certainly knew other tellings of encounters with sleeping kings and their entourages. KT’s poem ‘Waiting’, in Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885) is an account of Fionn, who waits with the Fenians to come to the world again: A giant I, of a primeval race,   These, great-­limbed, bearing helm and shield and sword, My good knights are, and each still awful face   Will one day wake to knowledge at a word – O’erhead the groaning years turn round apace. Here with the peaceful dead we keep our state;   Some day a cry shall ring adown the lands; “The hour is come, the hour grown large with fate.”

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  He knows who hath the centuries in His hands When that shall be – till then we watch and wait. KT’s note to the poem underscores its political implications, while adding religious sentiment (Louise de la Vallière, 71): This poem treats of a legend well known among the peasantry of the north of Ireland, which recounts how a band of Irish warriors of the primeval time lie in armour, and frozen in a deathly sleep, in one of the hill-­caverns of the Donegal highlands, there to await the hour of Ireland’s redemption, when they will come forth to do battle for her under the leadership of the giant Finn. The legend further prophesies that in the hour of victory the phantom knights and their leader will be claimed by Death, from whom they have been so long withheld, that they will receive at last burial in holy earth, and that the hill-­cavern will know them no more. In his Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), WBY included a story by T. Crofton Croker, ‘The Story of the Little Bird’ (1827), in which a monk is tempted away from his monastery by the singing of a bird, and follows it until (he believes) nightfall. On returning, he finds that he has been away for 200  years; he receives absolution from one of the brothers and dies. This minor parallel to Oisin’s situation might have underscored for WBY the Irish mythic tradition of the miraculous lapse of time, which will be realised fully in the fate of the hero in Part III. Tir na nOg. WBY’s poem is largely set in a place beyond the world of mortals, located somewhere over the sea. In his treatment of this otherworldly realm, WBY draws upon and adapts a wide range of Irish sources, in which there is a land of youth, or of the young, most often referred to as Tir na nOg. In the prefatory material to his translation of Lay, Brian O’Looney offered WBY a detailed account of many of the elements of this mythic otherworld in Irish tradition (Trans. Oss. Soc. IV, 230–231): In this poem we have an account of Tir na n-­Doine maithe (Land of the good people), the Elysium of the Pagan Irish as related to St. Patrick by Oisin, when he returned to Erin after a lapse of more than three hundred years, which he spent in the enjoyment of all bliss, with his charming spouse, the gold headed (haired) Niamh. While Oisin sojourned in the paradise of perpetual youth, it was (it seems falsely) said of him that he was dead, but as those who enter the ‘Land of the Just’ can never die, so Oisin lived until he returned to relate the  history of his adventures, and of this happy Elysium. The inhabitants of the eastern countries believed that in the west there was a happy final abode for the just which was called Tir na n-­Doine maithe (Land of the good people.) This Elysium is supposed to be divided into different states and provinces, each governed by its own king or ruler, such as Tir na n-­Og (Land of youth) Tir na m-­Beo (Land of the living) and Tir na m-­Buadha (Land of virtues) and several others. According to traditional geography and history the ‘Land of Youth’ is



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the most charming country to be found or imagined, abounding in all that fancy could suggest or man could desire, and bestowing the peculiar virtue of perpetual youth, and hence the name. In the ‘Land of Virtues,’ or as some call it the ‘Land of Victories,’ (but the latter name I suppose to be a mis-­translation, as I have never heard of a battle or strife in this country); it is all peace, tranquility and happiness. As there is no conflict there can be no victory – and there is no virtue to be desired which is not to be had on entering this country! The ‘Land of Life’ is supposed to give perpetual life to the departed spirits of the just. These are supposed to be located somewhere about the sun’s setting point, and have means of approach, chiefly through the seas, lakes and rivers of this world, also through raths, duns and forts. Although O’Looney claims more divisions than three, his tripartite map of the Irish otherworld here was probably a suggestive one for WBY, who adopts e.g. the Land of Victories, adding to it the battles and strife that O’Looney cannot find there. O’Looney goes on to provide details of various supposed locations for entrances to Tir na nOg, including one in the sea between Liscannor and Lahinch in Co. Clare, near the cliffs of Moher (231): The white breaking waves, which are always seen in this part of the Bay, are said to be caused by the shallowness of the water over this enchanted little city, which is believed to be seen once in seven years, and of which, it is observed, that those who have seen it shall depart this world before the lapse of seven years to come; but it is not supposed that those persons die, but change their abode, and transmigrate from this world of toil, into the Elysium of the just, i.e. Tir na n-­Og (‘Land of Youth,’) where they shall, at once, become sportive, young and happy, and continue so for ever. Transmigration was a concept applied to the myth a few years earlier by Nicholas O’Kearney, also writing about (although he did not specify it) Comyn’s Lay, as ‘this very curious poem, which pretty fully elucidates the Irish pagan doctrine of the metempsychosis as believed by the druids.’ O’Kearney, who claims that ‘The traditions relative to the enchanted islands on the Irish coasts are so firmly believed by the people that they actually imagine to have seen them’, goes on to speculate on the links between these otherworldly realms and a global system of mythic belief (The Battle of Gabhra, Trans. Oss. Soc., Vol. 1 [1854], 26–7): We need not be surprised that the orientals believed that there were places of abode for creatures of a rational nature under the waters of the ocean, but much less when we learn the belief of the Firbolg race that the places of the just after death were in our creeks and lakes, to which the water supplied a fitting atmosphere [.  .  .] There is a curious coincidence, in many respects, between the substance of the above extracts and the traditions still found among the Irish, relative to the pagan doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the least

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remarkable of which may have been the notion that the passage to Tir na nOg was through a narrow cave in one of our lake islets. Less speculative, and brisker, was the summary of the otherworld given by P.W. Joyce, in a note to his Old Celtic Romances: Translated from the Gaelic (1879), 410: The ancient Irish had a sort of dim, vague belief that there was a land where people were always youthful, and free from care and trouble, suffered no disease, and lived for ever. This country they called by various names: – Tir-­na-­ mbeo, the land of the [ever-­]living; Tir-­na-­nog, the land of the [ever-­]youthful; Moy-­Mell, the plain of pleasure, etc. It had its own inhabitants  – fairies; but mortals were sometimes brought there; and while they lived in it, were gifted with the everlasting youth and beauty of the fairy people themselves, and partook of their pleasures. As to the exact place where Tirnanoge was situated, the references are shadowy and variable; but they often place it far out in the Atlantic Ocean, as far as the eye can reach from the high cliffs of the western coast. Here also, although he is claiming no specific division into three, Joyce supplies the hint of a tripartite arrangement. The earliest published account of Tir na nOg from WBY himself comes in John O’Leary’s short-­lived periodical The Gael, where he places Oisin’s long enchantment not in Tir na nOg at all, but on the mythic mid-­Atlantic island of Hy Brasil (‘Finn MacCool’, The Gael 23 April 1887 [CW 9, p. 49]). Since he was already engaged with his poem on Oisin at this time, it is interesting that he avoids mentioning Tir na nOg specifically, even in the context of giving a brief summary of (essentially) the content of his own narrative poem. By 1888, in his edition of FFTIP, WBY was ready to go into much more detail, including the tripartite division central to his own (now forthcoming) poem (CW6, 20–21): T’Yeer-­Na-­N-­Oge* There is a country called Tír-­na-­n-­Og, which means the Country of the Young, for age and death have not found it; neither tears nor loud laughter have gone near it. The shadiest boskage covers it perpetually. One man has gone there and returned. The bard, Oisen, who wandered away on a white horse, moving on the surface of the foam with his fairy Niamh, lived there three hundred years, and then returned looking for his comrades. The moment his foot touched the earth his three hundred years fell on him, and he was bowed double, and his beard swept the ground. He described his sojourn in the Land of Youth to Patrick before he died. Since then many have seen it in many places; some in the depths of lakes, and have heard rising therefrom a vague sound of bells; more have seen it far off on the horizon, as they peered out from the western cliffs. Not three years ago a fisherman imagined that he saw it. It never appears unless to announce some national trouble. There are many kindred beliefs. A Dutch pilot, settled in Dublin, told M. De La Boullage Le Cong, who travelled in Ireland in 1614, that round the poles



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were many islands; some hard to be approached because of the witches who inhabit them and destroy by storms those who seek to land. He had once, off the coast of Greenland, in sixty-­one degrees of latitude, seen and approached such an island only to see it vanish. Sailing in an opposite direction, they met with the same island, and sailing near, were almost destroyed by a furious tempest. According to many stories, Tír-­na-­n-­Og is the favourite dwelling of the fairies. Some say it is triple – the island of the living, the island of victories, and an underwater land. *‘Tír-­na-­n-­óg’, Mr  Douglas Hyde writes, ‘ ‘The Country of the Young’, is the place where the Irish peasant will tell you geabhaedh tu an sonas aer pighin, ‘you will get happiness for a penny’, so cheap and common it will be. It is sometimes, but not often, called Tir-­na-­hóige, the ‘Land of Youth’. Crofton Croker writes it, Thierna-­na-­noge, which is an unfortunate mistake of his, Thierna meaning a lord, not a country. This unlucky blunder is, like many others of the same sort where Irish words are concerned, in danger of becoming stereotyped, as the name of Iona has been, from mere clerical carelessness. WBY’s unlikely excursus into Irish in his footnote suggests at least that his composition of an Oisin poem had taken him (if only perhaps with Douglas Hyde’s assistance) into some measure of proximity with the Gaelic sources for this otherworld. As regards the tripartite division (where ‘Some say. . . ’ must be taken as including the poet WBY amongst that select few), it is worth noting that while the first two of WBY’s islands are present here, the third is aligned not with sleeping (as in his poem) but with an ‘underwater’ condition: since Part III had been completed by the end of 1887, this must be counted as a deliberate departure from his own narrative. It may be that WBY was keen to establish the third island as imaginatively his own, and not a part of the inherited narrative tradition. Tir na nOg also had more modern Fenian credentials, being the subject of a poem by the celebrated John Keegan Casey (1846–1870), who after imprisonment for his part in the 1867 rebellion was a noted public speaker and propagandist for non-­ constitutional nationalism. Casey’s ‘Song of Golden-­Haired Niamh’, subtitled ‘An Ossianic Lay’, appeared in his A Wreath of Shamrocks (1867):

Oh! come with me to Tirnan-­og; There fruit and blossoms bend each tree, Red sparkling wine and honey flow, And beauty smiles from sea to sea. Your flowing locks will ne’er turn gray, No wrinkles on your forehead come, Nor burning pain nor grim decay, Across the threshold of your home. So haste away to Tirnan-­og, My white steed waits in golden sheen;

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A diadem shall crown thy brow, And I will be thy bridal queen.

The poem continues in a similar vein, with Niamh offering Oisin the delights of luxury and fine company, martial valour, and feminine beauty, leading to a final invitation:

O Oisin of the powerful hand! First in the chase, first in the war, Over our sweet and glorious land Thy gallant deeds were borne afar. Loch Leine is deep, but deeper still In Niamh’s soul thy image dwells; Then turn thee westward from this hill To where the sun-­hued billow swells.

Oisin. Oisin, whose Irish name means ‘the little deer’, is the son of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, the principal figure amongst the Fenians. He is both a Fenian warrior and a poet in Irish tradition, and is a significant contributor to the store of poetic material associated with Fenian mythology. In Standish J. O’Grady’s History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878), Oisin is the subject of an elegiac paragraph which effectively sets the scene for WBY’s treatment of this figure (35): But what shall we say of Oiseen, better known by his North British appellation, the poet and historian of the Fianna, the reviler of Patrick, the sorrowful mourner, the last of all the giant brood, withering away a white-­haired shadow in scholastic cells, in mind and body the mere ghost of the once mighty Ossian, ever wondering whither had departed his comrades, and how any power was able to smite them with decay. O’Grady’s allusion to the ‘North British appellation’ serves to indicate a very important context for Oisin in the later eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, for Oisin is also the Ossian of the Scottish James Macpherson (1736–1796), whose versions of Fenian stories, based on originals which he claimed to have read and heard in Scots Gaelic, first appeared in 1761 and reached completion with his international best-­seller The Works of Ossian (1765). Ossian became an enormously famous and influential work all over Europe and remained so until well into the nineteenth century. Purporting to offer the epic works of a Scottish, rather than Irish, ancient culture, Ossian was from almost the beginning highly controversial in Irish circles, and numerous antiquarians, scholars, and men of letters questioned or openly denied its claims to authenticity. (Macpherson himself never produced the supposed Gaelic originals upon which his narratives were based.) Irish writers were not slow to reclaim the Fenian hero, and a significant blow against Ossian was struck by Charles O’Conor in his Dissertation on the Origins and Antiquities of the Ancient Scots (1775). Irish antiquarians continued to produce the evidence for the priority of the Irish rather than Macpherson’s claimed Scottish texts, along



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with much research on the early culture of Ireland that fed into the Fenian narratives, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the Irish bid for possession of the stories of Finn and Oisin was generally understood to be the stronger. One of the results of the scholarly backlash against Macpherson was eventually the founding of the Ossianic Society, whose publications in the 1850s consolidated and extended the work in this area of previous generations of Irish scholars. A sense of the orthodoxy which it seemed reasonable to claim on this question is to be had from Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 5 (1860), 178: Every candid and impartial literary person, who has taken the trouble of investigating the subject of the authenticity of the Poems of Ossian, as published by Macpherson, has been convinced that they were fabricated by him for the most part, and were founded on the fragments of the compositions of the Irish Bard, Oisin, which were conveyed to the highlands of Scotland from time to time by the Irish Shanachies [story-­tellers]. They were there committed to memory by the story-­tellers, and recited as they had been in Ireland. By the 1880s, the Ossian controversy was very old news, but it was not forgotten; and the name of WBY’s hero was, though certainly Irish, not entirely unfamiliar in literary circles. The ghost of the century-­old controversy still lingered, and an early review of WO from Scotland reveals a continuing (if now rather more good-­natured than before) instance of Scottish/Irish rivalry (Glasgow Herald, 12 Mar. 1889, 4): That the name of Ossian is still a spell to rouse the poetic spirit in the Celtic imagination, in the glens of the Scottish Highlands and in the wilds of Ireland, is ever receiving some new proof. The latest is the publication of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’, a poem, by W.B. Yeats, in whose veins, if we are not mistaken, flows the blood and burns the fire of the true Irish Celt, to whom poetry is life. The Oisin of the poem is, of course, our own familiar Ossian, whom the Irish people claim as their own along with Finn or Fingal, whose associates and followers were called the Feinne or Finians in Ireland and Fingalians in Scotland. Perhaps it would not be inaccurate to say that Oisin was as much Scotch as Irish, and that Ossian was as much Irish as Scotch. The whole race being Celtic, they were practically a single people [. . .] With perhaps some degree of Unionist mischief, The Irish Times in its review of WO grumbled: “Oisin’ for ‘Ossian’ (though the former is, perhaps, right) is a piece of pedantry unworthy of Mr. Yeats’ (4 Mar. 1889). As far as his literary existence is concerned, the Irish Oisin is found first in the collection of tales and poems entitled the Acallam na Senórach (The Colloquy of the Ancients), composed (or possibly compiled) in the early thirteenth century. By WBY’s time, Oisin was a centrally important figure in the Fenian stories, then well on the way to another phase of recycling and recirculation. Oisin’s status as the legendary author of the poems in the Fenian cycle is significant, insofar as it aligns him with an imaginative endeavour inherited (ultimately) by WBY himself.

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Oisin and St. Patrick. Standish H. O’Grady’s introduction to Fenian material in Trans. Oss. Soc. gives a detailed picture of the hero as belated poet and chronicler, with Saint Patrick as his interlocutor and antagonist (Vol. 3, 16–17): The Fenian compositions, then, consist of prose tales and of poems. It is lawful to call them collectively ‘Fenian,’ since the deeds and adventures of the Fenian warriors are equally the theme of the tales and of the poems; but to these latter alone belongs the name ‘Ossianic,’ for Oisin is principally regarded as their author, whereas the prose tales are not attributed to him. The poems are known among the peasantry of the Irish districts as ‘Sgeulta Fiannuigheachta,’ Stories of the Fenians; and moreover as ‘Agallamh Oisin agus Phadruig,’ the dialogue of Oisin and Patrick; for Oisin is said to have recited them to the Saint in the latter days, when, the glory of the Fenians having departed for ever, he alone of them survived; infirm, blind, and dependent upon the bounty of the first Christian missionaries to Ireland. We do not learn whether these pious men eventually succeeded in thoroughly converting the old warrior-­poet; but it is plain that at the time when he yielded to the Saint’s frequent requests that he would tell him of the deeds of his lost comrades, and accordingly embodied his recollections in the poems which have descended to us, the discipline of Christianity sat most uneasily upon him, causing him many times to sigh and wearily to lament for the harp and the feast, the battle and the chace, which had been the delight and the pride of the vanished years of his strength. These indications of a still untamed spirit of paganism St. Patrick did not allow to pass uncorrected, and we find his reproofs, exhortations, and threats interspersed throughout the poems, as also his questions touching the exploits of the Fenians (vid. the Battle of Gabhra); and whatever period or author be assigned to the Ossianic poems, certainly nothing can be better or more naturally expressed than the objections and repinings which the aged desolate heathen opposes to the arguments of the holy man. The significance of the Oisin/St. Patrick confrontation was widely seen as the mythic representation of a contrast between pre-­Christian and Christian Ireland, one made possible by the exceptionally long lifespan of a prominent Fenian hero and poet. Explaining this lifespan was, it was generally agreed, partly the reason for the stories of Oisin’s centuries-­long dalliance in Tir na nOg. There is evidence for the story of an Oisin who lives beyond his era in Irish texts, as there is for his Fenian companion Caolite, who features in dialogue with Patrick in the Acallam na Senórach. For both these figures, an unnaturally long lifespan was required precisely to enable contact between the pagan and Christian eras, and as a means of passing on the older history to the newer age. The implausibility of this was taken advantage of by those who wished to press the claims of Macpherson’s Ossian against Irish materials, as when Hugh Blair mocked the Irish Gaelic sources – late corruptions, as he saw it, of the Scots Gaelic originals (A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), xxv-­xxvi):



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From the whole tenor of the Irish poems, concerning the Fiona, it appears, that Finn Mac Comnal flourished in the reign of Cormac, which is placed, by the universal consent of the senachies, in the third century. They even fix the death of Fingal in the year 286, yet his son Ossian is made contemporary with St. Patrick, who preached the gospel in Ireland about the middle of the fifth age. Ossian, tho’ at that time, he must have been two hundred and fifty years of age, had a daughter young enough to become wife to the saint. On account of this family connection, Patrick of the Psalms, for so the apostle of Ireland is emphatically called in the poems, took great delight in the company of Ossian, and in hearing the great actions of his family. The saint sometimes threw off the austerity of his profession, drunk freely, and had his soul properly warmed with wine, in order to hear, with becoming enthusiasm, the poems of his father-­in-­law. The underpinnings of such arguments were soon undone by scholarship, but the sarcasm continued to rankle for Irish antiquarians in the mid-­nineteenth century. Explaining the need for a long-­lived representative of the pagan culture to have converse with the saint, J.H. Simpson offered the narrative situation of the Irish sources as a species of common sense (Poems of Oisin, Bard of Erin (1857), 3–4): Besides, as has been already suggested, by means of an imaginary dialogue, a poet living several centuries after Oisin might seek to connect, and put into a form more likely to insure their preservation, poems which in his days were known to be songs of Oisin. It seems to me that nothing is more likely than that the early Christian clergy should endeavour, when they saw how their flocks delighted in songs about their pagan ancestors, to convey the first principles of Christianity by means of a dialogue between their old blind bard Oisin and St. Patrick. A dialogue of this description would both interest and instruct the people, and would be all the more likely to rivet their attention if it formed, as it were, a thread upon which their beads of song were strung. More philosophically speculative explanations were also on offer, and one possibility which probably chimed with WBY’s own interest in theosophy and eastern tradition saw the survivals of pagan figures into a subsequent age as examples of a kind of transmigration of souls through the ages. This was already familiar enough to be mentioned by Thomas Moore (The History of Ireland (1835) I, 52): [. . .] the greater infusion of orientalism into the theology of the Irish, arose doubtless from the longer continuance of their intercourse with the East. How large a portion of the religious customs of Persia were adopted by the Magi or Druids of Ireland, has already been amply shown [. . .] The favourite tenet as well of Druidism as of Magism, the transmigration of the soul,* which the Druids of Gaul are thought to have derived from the Massilian Greeks, might

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have reached them, through Ireland, from some part of the east, at a much earlier period; this favourite doctrine of all Oriental theologies, from the Brachmans of India to the priests of Egypt, being found inculcated also through the medium of some of the traditions of the ancient Irish. Moore’s note to this is: * The prevalence, among them, of a belief in the transmigration of the soul, may be inferred from the fable respecting Ruan, one of the colony that landed in Ireland, under Partholan, some two or three centuries after the Flood. Of this ancient personage, it was believed that he continued to live, through a long series of transmigration, till so late as the time of St. Patrick, when, having resumed the human shape, he communicated to the saint all he knew of the early history of the island, and was then baptized and died. WBY would have been introduced to modern discussion of Oisin and Patrick’s meeting across the ages in the first volume of Trans. Oss. Soc. (1854), where Nicholas O’Kearney introduced his translation and commentary for the bardic verses on the Battle of Gabhra. Here, O’Keaney made use of the Lay (though he did not name it, or suggest anything of its relatively modern status as a text) in terms that echoed Moore (21): This account of Tir na n-­Og, and Tir na m-­Beo, the Elysium of the pagan Irish, i.e. the Islands of the Happy of eastern writers, and of Oisin having returned to life after a lapse of three hundred years or upwards, so as to meet St. Patrick, and narrate the history of Fenian achievements, is, probably, the remnant of history that best explains the docrine of the transmigration of souls. Since one calling himself Oisin returned from Tir na n-­Og, and related a portion of Irish history, no doubt it was believed by the pagans of his day that he was the real Oisin who had again assumed the human shape. O’Kearney calls Lay ‘this very curious poem,’ claiming that it ‘pretty fully elucidates the Irish pagan doctrine of metempsychosis as believed by the druids’ (25). In case of any doubt, O’Kearney assures his readers that ‘It is doubtful if St. Patrick ever saw the real Oisin, but only some druid or old seanchaidhe [storyteller], who believed himself to be Oisin revived, in virtue of the druidical doctrine of metempsychosis, or transmigration of the spirit into other bodies’ (28). That a confrontation between paganism and the Church carried contemporary overtones in the 1880s is certain. This is clear even from the distance of 1913, when JBY wrote that ‘I remember hearing John O’Leary say, that he as a Fenian hated priests, as a class’ (letter to Ruth Hart, 22 Nov. 1913). The Fenians, old and new. The term ‘Fenian’ is taken by WBY to denote a member of the warrior-­band of Finn, the fianna. The word is partly formed from fianna, but partly also from the name Féni, referring to the legendary Goidels, who were thought to have come to Ireland from continental Europe, and to have established themselves there as landowners: the Féni were thus taken as an anciently-­established order of true Irish, who



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had never had any kind of connection with Britain. The formation of the word ‘Fenian’, therefore, is actually a bringing together of two distinct etymological roots. In WBY’s time, its widespread use was relatively modern, and seems to have begun with the antiquarian Charles O’Conor (1710–1791), who in an attack on the authenticity of Macpherson’s Ossian in his Reflections on the History of Ireland during the Times of Heathenism (1786) referred to ‘Fin Mac Cumhal and his Fenian heroes’ (240). The fellow antiquarian to whom O’Conor’s book was addressed, General Charles Vallancey (1725–1812), also made use of ‘Fenian’ (in the same volume in which O’Conor’s Reflections were collected), connecting it in his wayward scholarship to the ancient Phoenecians, whom he identified with the legendary Féni: for Vallancey, ‘The most ancient Irish dialect is called Bearla na Feine or Beacna na Fene, which means the dialect of the Fenians, the tongue of the Fenians’ (Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis, vol. 2 (1868), 62). This pretended etymology did not at first find any foothold; but the use of ‘Fenian’ in relation to Finn (and the Ossianic tradition) was available for Walter Scott, who in The Antiquary (1816) referred to ‘the tales of the bare-­arm’d Fenians’. The word was relatively little used, however, until the middle of the nineteenth century, when it was resurrected in the United States by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who identified themselves as the Fenian Brotherhood. One prominent American Fenian (an exiled Young Irelander, from Dublin), John Savage (1828–1888), gave a tub-­thumping account of the term in his Fenian Heroes and Martyrs (1868), 100: Since the Fenian Brotherhood have become famous, a power on the earth, and a terror to English ministers and excited Parliamentarians, there have been many speculations as to the origin, meaning and appropriateness of the designation – Fenian. [. . .] The era of the Fiann (Feean) that is the Fenian period, was one of the most romantic and glorious in the records of ancient Ireland, and an account of the Fenian Brotherhood, who then made it so [. . .] will doubtless be interesting in itself, as well as furnishing the origin of the designation now so widely recognized as synonymous with Irish liberty. Savage repeats the conflation of Féni and fianna, along with the association with Finn, and asserts that although in origin ‘the Fenians seem to have done nothing but hunt and fight’, they became ‘the standing military force, the national militia’ of ancient Ireland (101). In his article, ‘Finn MacCool’, published in O’Leary’s The Gael for 23 Apr. 1887, WBY wrote (CW 9, 48): These Fenians, of whom before long Finn became the chief, having around him Ossian, Oscar, Dermot, Caoilte, and many more, were the Militia of Ireland; their duties, the defence of the country against Alban and African pirates, the protection of the Ardrigh, at this time the famous Cormac Mac Art, in whose reign Tara was at its greatest splendour; but far from this luxury in the vast forests, the Fenians lived rudely and simply as Cuchulain of old; while those around them sought to be architects of kingdoms, of armies, of splendour, they longed only to be the architects of themselves, to be braver than any, and

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generous beyond dreams. Homeless, in winter they were quartered on the people; in summer they slept on the earth they loved – that earth they were ever wont to kneel down and kiss before they entered the battle. They sought to be that which Cuchulain and his followers were without seeking – men of nature. They were chivalrous; the primeval men were heroic. History knows of nothing more important than this brotherhood, for the wave of their influence swept on through Wales with her Arthurian Knights, on over Britain, over Europe, till joining with the worship of the Virgin, surging in from the east, it became mediaeval chivalry, that dim seeking for a light departed in the morning of the world. Critical reception. This centrepiece of WO was, as it seemed to WBY nearly a year before eventual publication, ‘an Irish poem and about my best’ (letter to Stephen Gwynn, 24 Jan. 1888, CL 1, 44). Early reception in public was sometimes positive, if cautious. As WBY said on publication, ‘‘Oisin’ seems to divide my readers more than anything else’. In the same letter, he announced that ‘Prof. Dowden likes it best so does William Morris [. . .] The rest for the most part do not take to it – finding it, I imagine, uncouth’ (letter of 30 Jan. 1889, CL 1, 129). Dowden’s letter had been sent on 28 Jan, and said that ‘I decidedly think the “Wanderings of Oisin” the best thing in the volume’; there was also the advice, though, that ‘you must not be surprised or greatly care if the public only shows a liking within certain narrow limits for such a poem as your Oisin’ (LTWBY 1, 4). WBY had hoped for a review from William Morris; this did not forthcome, but decades later the poet remembered how ‘Morris at a chance meeting at Holburn Viaduct had praised [WO] to me and said, ‘it is my kind of poetry’, and would have said much more had he not caught sight of one of the decorated iron lamp-­posts then recently, I believe, set up by the Corporation, and turned upon it with frenzy, waving his umbrella’ (Mem., 21). From JBY’s London circle, the painter J.T. Nettleship also dispatched fulsome praise, telling WBY that ‘the title poem of your book is a new birth in poetry; it has come at the right time because it had to come; criticism of it would be futile, because it is a real creation which must stand or fall by its own nature’. The closest thing to criticism in the letter was the remark that ‘I suppose you think the 2d and 3d parts stronger than the first, and it reads as if there had been a pause in you after the first part was written, there is a difference in tissue’ (LTWBY, 5). WBY took a close interest in how the book was received, and naturally many of the reviews had things to say about WO’s prominent title-­poem. The poet kept a collection of press-­cuttings (now NLI 31087), containing a full record of his book’s early fortunes in the public prints. In The Manchester Guardian 28 Jan. 1889, ‘The chief poem’ [of WO] ‘is very unequal’: No one has handled these extraordinarily fascinating Irish legends thoroughly well yet in English verse except the Laureate in his wonderful ‘Voyage of Maeldune’. But Mr. Yeats comes next, we think, and is far above the smooth but rather nerveless verse of Mr. Aubrey De Vere. And nearly all his work, though the roughness is seldom absent long, is full of promise. He has much to learn, but with a good choice of subjects and such hard work in self-­correction as



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the Laureate himself has applied, we might have some excellent poetry from Mr. Yeats one of these days. While some assessments, such as the Dublin Freeman’s Journal, were hostile (‘a jumble of confused ideas in a mess of verbiage’ [4 Mar. 1889]), most found good points to commend. The Irish Times of 4 Mar. 1889 gave generous space to a summary of the poem, which it said was ‘a really fine one’: The story is told in a high romantic strain, with an exuberance of picturesque imagery, full now of the surge and thunder, now of the soft sounds and voices of the sea. It is a poem that is far better on a second reading than on a first, and this is caused by the very originality and luxuriance of Mr. Yeats’s treatment, which taxes the reader’s attention more than a mere ordinary commonplace style of poetry. A family friend was prompt in his public praise: in his review of WO (The Academy, 30 Mar. 1889), John Todhunter obligingly gave plenty of space to the poem, even though he allowed himself the remark that ‘Mr. Yeats is seen at his best in the shorter pieces’. His attention to the metrical variety of WBY’s undertaking is notable: The poem is in three parts, each in a metre appropriate to the subject  – the first in free octosyllabics, the second in Keatsian decasyllabic couplets, the third in quatrains of long-­lines anapaestic and dactylic verse. In the Keastian verse Mr. Yeats is evidently much less at ease. There are good bits of imaginative description in all three sections, perhaps the finest being that of the enchanted heroes lying asleep in the Island of Forgetfulness with great owls sidling about their prostrate bodies and nestling in their beards and hair. Here the long, sleepy gallop of the heavy-­footed anapaests is most effective. The whole poem is drenched in youthful fantasy, pleasant and winning; and the reader is borne easily along from vision to vision. One prominent review, in the Pall Mall Gazette of 12 Jul. 1889, which was unsigned, was by Oscar Wilde, who said of WBY that ‘when he is at his best he is very good’: If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he has at least something of that largeness of vision that belongs to the ethical temper. He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of Celtic mythology. He is very naïve, and very primitive, and speaks of his giants with the awe of a child. [. . .] when all is said, it is impossible not to feel [. . .] the presence of the true poetic spirit. Not all the published praise was this insightful, and the enthusiasm of Rosa Mulholland, transmitted from Australia to Ireland in the pages of The Irish Monthly (Jul. 1889), declared that ‘The most dramatic part of the poem, which is full of beauty, is the ending [. . .] There is a touch of unconscious humour in the easy way in which the aged warrior

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intends to dispose of Perdition, but none the less, his simple good faith and forlorn age are full of pathos as he departs’. In general, WBY had good reason to feel broadly satisfied by the initial reception of the ambitious long poem, and within three years, it was being referred to as ‘one of the most imaginative and beautiful of its class in English poetry’ (Saturday Review, 22 Oct. 1892). Since almost all modern criticism is based on the heavily revised version which began with P95, discussion of major critical approaches to the poem will be found in the editorial material for the post-­1895 version, separately edited in volume 2. However, one modern critic has written at length, and insightfully, about WBY’s 1889 version. F. Kinahan gives a detailed and contextually informed reading in Ch.3 of his Yeats, Folklore and Occultism, seeing the 1889 work as ‘a symbolic poem that is neither pagan nor Christian but esoteric’ (Kinahan, 107): his conclusion here, that ‘Whatever the beauties of the islands, they cannot offer Oisin more than approximations of the strong and varied emotions of humanity, and what he rediscovers in Ireland are experiences more intense and individualized than any the sidhe can offer’, is an important reading of this crucial early poem (Kinahan, 120). Textual and publication history. There are two MS sources for the poem, which extend as far as the beginning of Part III; there are no surviving MS sources for almost all of Part III itself. MS1: A small exercise book holds the earliest surviving drafts, from the beginning of the poem up to I, 337. On the first page is the date, ‘October | 1886’, followed by WBY’s name and address (at 10, Ashfield Terrace). Upside down at the foot of this page, WBY has written in pencil, ‘Talent perceives Difference, | Genius unity’, dating the inscription ‘April | 1887’. If this date has any special relation to the composition of the poem, it is unknown: Apr. of 1887 was the month in which WBY moved from Dublin to London, where his father had taken lodgings at 6 Berkeley Road, Regent’s Park. The poet’s efforts in jotting down his aphorism are visible in the MS, where the first line reads initially ‘Talent perceives unity’, and the second ‘Genius unity’. WBY cancels ‘unity’ in his first line to replace it with ‘Difference’, then strikes out the second line altogether, starting again with ‘’Genius perceives unity’, then deleting ‘perceives’. The draft of the poem is in ink and, although there are places where revision occurs in ink on the page, most revisions are in pencil: it is unlikely to be a first draft, and more likely to be WBY’s attempt at a first fair copy early in the process of composition. The book is NLI 3726, where it is bound with another notebook containing material for the 1895 revision of the poem. MS1 is reproduced with transcriptions in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 28–73. MS2: A second notebook takes up directly from the point at which MS1 leaves off, covering I, 338-­III, 4. This again contains a draft in ink, with pencil revisions. Inside the front cover, WBY enters his Dublin address of 10, Ashfield Terrace, so this must have been inscribed before Apr. 1887 (see above). Also on the inside cover there are three remarks on the poem, entered in a much less formal hand (though still that of WBY). Just above the name and address is ‘above | badly used’, then below the ownership details ‘To and fro too often | repeated’ and ‘Peak and pine’. In the printed text, ‘to and fro’ appears at I, 365, II, 154, 193, and 205; an odd use of ‘above’ occurs at I, 33–4



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(‘And ’tween his ears, above his mane, | A golden crescent lit the plain); ‘peak and pine’ occurs twice, at I, 93 and 382 (see notes). The notebook has also been used by WBY for miscellaneous composition, which starts at the end of the volume, upside down and continuing from the back. Between the end of the ‘Oisin’ drafts and the last of this material, there are six blank pages. The pages at the back of the notebook contain, along with drafts for WBY’s article on J.C. Mangan in The Irish Fireside 12 Mar. 1887 (CW 9, 39–44), drawings, drafts of the poem ‘The Protestants’ Leap’ (publ. in The Gael, 19 Nov. 1887; but a version sent off by WBY in Jun. 1887), and two lists of poems towards the eventual WO volume. It is likely that WBY was using this notebook in the first half of 1887 both for the ongoing composition of ‘Oisin’ and these more various purposes, carried out at the back in order to allow composition of the poem to continue uninterrupted at the front. The notebook is in the John J. Burns Library, Boston College, MS.1986.054, Box 16. MS2 is reproduced with transcriptions in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 74–123. The poem was published as the title piece in WO in 1899. A set of page proofs for WO survives, now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas. Seven pages are marked ’1st rev.’, and three ’2nd rev.’ (Proofs Texas). Almost as soon as it was published, WBY began to make corrections to a number of individual copies, five of which are listed here: Ellis: WBY made numerous revisions in Edwin J. Ellis’s copy of WO. On the contents page, in WBY’s hand, is the following: ‘corrections in this book made | at my dictation | May 7, 1889 | W B Yeats’. The book is now in the Special Collections of the University of Reading. Williams: WBY inscribed a copy to ‘A.M. Williams Esq. with the author’s compliments’ (now in Williams Irish collection, Providence Public Library, Rhode Island). Williams was the editor of The Providence Sunday Journal, to which WBY was a regular contributor between 1888 and 1891. Garnett: A  copy now in the Firestone Library, Princeton University is inscribed by WBY ‘Edward Garnett | from W.B. Yeats | Sept 12 | 1890’. Garnett (1868–1937) was at this point working for T. Fisher Unwin, the publisher of WO. Skipsey: A copy of WO (listed in the Spring 2014 Modern Literature catalogue of Peter Harrington Booksellers (London), item 420) bears the dedication ‘To the poet of the North Countrie, | Joseph Skipsey, | with the authors | kind regards.’ Joseph Skipsey (1832–1903), a Northumbrian poet, was in 1889 working as custodian of the Shakespeare birthplace in Stratford on Avon: WBY met him in summer 1889, and mentions him in his Boston Pilot column of 3 Aug. 1889 (dated 10 Jul.): ‘I did meet the other day  .  .  . a Mr  Skipsey. He is from the coal country – a strange nursing mother for a poet – and taught himself to write by scribbling with a piece of white chalk on the sides of coal shafts and galleries’ (CW 7, 11). WBY goes on to recount a conversation with Skipsey concerning James Clarence Mangan: ‘Himself a peasant, he turned for the moment’s inspiration to the country where poetry has been a living voice

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among the people.’ This copy of the book was sent to Skipsey in the autumn of 1889: a letter to him from WBY, dated 7 Oct. begins: Ever since I saw you in spring I have been saying to myself ‘I must write and thank Mr Skipsey for his book and send him mine’ But somehow I have put off and off. At first I did not know where you were and then when I did somehow I let week after week go by. A copy of ‘Oisin’ has been lying in this corner ready addressed to you for a month or more. For this letter, and more on Skipsey, see Gordon Tait, ‘Joseph Skipsey, the ‘peasant poet’, and an unpublished letter from W.B. Yeats’, Literature and History 25/2 (2016), 134–149. WBY’s perplexing choice of archaic spelling for his dedicatory inscription to the copy may be a recollection of a poem title in R.D. Joyce’s Ballads of Irish Chivalry; Songs and Poems (1872), 152: ‘The Prince of the North Countrie’. Morgan: A  copy of WO now in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, appears to have been kept for some time by the poet as a text in which he could record intended revisions. WBY made a note inside: ‘This copy not to be lent as I have made corrections etc. in it that I do not [wish del.] want to lose’. The book seems nevertheless to have been lost, until discovered by GY, who came across it in the bookshops of Charing Cross Road in 1942. In Mar. 1949 she gave the book as a gift to WBY’s Macmillan editor, Thomas Mark ‘in gratitude for his many years of sensitive care in helping W.B. Yeats’s work through the press’ (inscription by GY). The many corrections contained in these volumes cannot be compared against any published revision by WBY of the 1889 text: the wholesale rewriting of the version in P95 (presented separately in the present edition) supersedes them. In the present text of the 1889 poem and the notes provided, readings from these presentation copies are used and recorded in two ways: where they represent a clear correction by WBY to errors in the printed text (often in more than one copy), they are accepted as such, and the text is emended accordingly (with an accompanying note giving details of the authority); where they are rather attempts to re-­write phrases, lines, or groups of lines, the proposed changes are noted, and emendations are made in some cases.



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Copy-­text: WO. The Wanderings of Oisin and How a Demon Trapped Him Part I The Island of the Living PATRICK

O

isin, 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

5

’Tis sad remembering, sick with years, The swift innumerable spears, The long-­haired warriors, the spread feast;

Part I] Book I Morgan. The Island of the Living] This translates the Irish Tír na mBéo, one of several imagined lands traditionally inhabited by the Tuatha Dé Danaan after their defeat at the hands of the Milesians. 2. blind and hoary] old and hoary MS1. In Lay, St. Patrick tells Oisin, ‘Thou art old, withered, and hoary’ (25). J.C. Mangan’s ‘The Nameless One’, 49–52 has: ‘And lives he still, then? Yes! Old and hoary | At thirty-­nine, from despair and woe,  | He lives enduring what future story  | Will never know.’ Cp. also John Stuart Blackie, Lays of the Highlands and Islands (1872) ‘Glencoe: A  Historical Ballad’, 32–5: ‘Many a song did the harper sing | Of Ossian blind and hoary, | That made the old oak rafter ring | With the pulse of Celtic story’. 3. the bad old days] This inversion of the phrase ‘the good old days’ turns around a cliché, rather than itself as yet being one. ‘The good old days’ was in circulation since at least the earlier eighteenth century (it is used e.g. by

Daniel Defoe in 1727), and it is part of the rhetorical repertoire of nineteenth-­ century Irish poetry: Robert Dwyer Joyce (1830– 1883) (exiled in the United States from 1866, an Irish writer for The Nation and Fenian sympathiser, and brother of the author of Old Celtic Romances P.W. Joyce) deploys the phrase in Ballads of Irish Chivalry (1872), ‘The Banks of Anner’, 25–6: ‘May Heav’n be with the good old days,  | The days so light and airy’. 4. trapped of] A very archaic piece of diction, rare outside Middle English. 7. long-­haired warriors] A general reminiscence of Homer’s epithet for the Achaean warriors, usually translated as ‘long-­haired’; but also perhaps an echo of a poem on a Homeric subject by the well-­known Scottish painter Sir J. Noel Paton (1821–1901), Ulysses in Orgygia (1867), 1–5: ‘Was it in very deed, or but in dream, | I, King Odysseus, girt with brazen spears,  | Princes, and long-­haired warriors of the Isles,  | Sailed with the dawn from weeping Ithaca, | To battle round the god-­built walls of Troy’.

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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,

11. Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair] The three hounds of Finn: Bran and Sgeolan had originally been human, but their mother Uirne (Finn’s aunt), was changed into a dog before their birth. In Lay, ‘There were there Sgeolan and Bran,  | Lomaire’, and WBY adopts this number and (very nearly) this spelling for the dogs: Patrick Kennedy’s Literary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866), ‘The Youth of Ossian’, has a higher number: ‘Brann, Sceoluing, Lomaire, Brod, and Lomulath’. In Lamentation, Oisin says that ‘It is a dark grief to me not to see Sgeolan | Following the cries of the Fenians’, and S.H. O’Grady’s note to these lines gives more detail (Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol.3, 262–3): Next to Bran, Sgeolan was the most favourite hound of Finn MacCumhail. The following is the first stanza of a division of a poem on the battle of Knockanaur, called “The names of the hounds and staghounds which the Fenians had on leaving Knockanaur,” in which are given the names of 294 hounds: There were Sgeolan and Bran, Lomaire, Brad, and Lon-­luith; Five hounds foremost in chace and exploits, That never used to separate from Finn. 12. a morning misty] Cp. John Banim, The Celt’s Paradise (1821), Second Duan, 131: ‘In the morning misty hour’. WBY included Banim’s work amongst his Representative Irish Tales (1891), where he called The Celt’s Paradise

‘a poem on the beautiful old Irish legend of Teer-­nan Oge, the Gaelic Island of the Blest; a subject that has moved a number of writers, Gaelic and English-­speaking, to make their best verses, but wholly unsuitable for Banim’s realistic faculty’ (CW 6, 43). (For another possible verbal echo, see note to I, 279 below.) 15. Lough Laen] Lough Leane (Irish Lough Léin) in Killarney, Co. Kerry is meant here, though it is located far from the scene of the battle of Gabhra referred to in the next line. WBY is following Lay: ‘We were hunting on a misty morning | Nigh the bordering shores of Lough Léin’ (O’Looney’s note identifies this with the Lough in Killarney). The two locales are also brought together in a couplet by Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poems (1884), ‘The Vale of Shanganah’, 16: ‘From the waves of the west to the cliffs of Ben Hader,  | By Glengarriff ’s lone islets  – Lough Lene’s fairy water’ (Ben Hader, as MacCarthy’s note adds, is the Hill of Howth, near the site of Gabhra.) In Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol.4 an Irish poem is translated as ‘The Chase of Lough Lean’, and begins with Oisin saying: ‘We proceeded, such of the Fians as survived, | After the battle of the great slaughter, | Till we reached the verdant plain,  | On the banks and borders of Lough Lean.’ WBY printed the short love-­poem ‘The Outlaw of Loch Lene’ (1861) by the Cork poet J.J. Callanan (1795–1829) in his anthology A Book of Irish Verse (1895), and included it in his list of poems with ‘a distinct character . . . neither rhetorical nor sentimental, nor of flaccid technique’ in a letter to the Dublin Daily Express of 26 January 1895 (CL 1, 430).



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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

16. Gavra’s green] Gabhra, close to Garristown in Co. Dublin, was traditionally the scene of the Fenians’ last catastrophic battle, when (supposedly in AD 284) they suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the Irish king Cairbre, in the course of which Ossian’s son Oscar was killed. In a note in P95, WBY glosses: ‘Gavra – The great battle in which the power of the Fenians was broken.’ Both Sir Samuel Ferguson and Aubrey De Vere use the form Gavra. In Ferguson’s The Cromlech on Howth: A Poem (1864) (later ‘Aideen’s Grave’ in his Lays of the Western Gael), reference is made to Aideen, the wife of Oscar: ‘rapt in her battle car, | At Gavra, when, at Oscar’s side, | She rode the ridge of war’ (62–64). WBY praised this work in 1886: ‘Of all the lesser poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson there is none more beautiful than that on the burial of Aideen, who died of grief for the death of Oscar, and whose grave is the cromlech at Howth’ (CW 9, 25). Ferguson’s note on Gavra is as follows: Gabhra, pronounced Gavra, has been identified by the learned archaeologist, Dr. John O’Donovan, with an extensive, but now almost obliterated, earthen enclosure, lying immediately under, and to the west of, the Hill of Tara, the ancient residence of the Irish kings in Meath. The Battle of Gavra, fought between the monarch Cairbre and Moghcorb, king of Munster, aided by Ossian, has remained, as Henri Martin, the French historian, observes, “as famous in the histories of Ireland as the struggles of the Couravas and the Pandavas in the traditions of India.” Here the heroes who followed in the train of Ossian were exterminated, and the power of the Fenian military bands was broken. A century later, Christianity penetrated into Ireland, and the historian above quoted adds: “Nous

inclinons à penser que Fingal, Ossian, Oscar, ont existé aussi bien que Roland; que Gavra est authentique comme Roncevaux. Le reste est l’oeuvre de l’imagination bardique. Un vaste cycle poétique s’est formé sur les Finiens à la fois en Irelande et en Ecosse, absolument dans les mêmes conditions que le cycle d’Arthure et Merlin s’est fait en Galles et en Bretagne.” In the Irish Ossianic history of the Battle of Gavra is an affecting picture of the death of Oscar and the grief of his father. (The bees in I, 14 of this poem may recall ‘The humming of the noontide bees’ in Ferguson’s poem (21), a line quoted in WBY’s 1886 article.) Aubrey De Vere’s Inisfail: A lyrical chronicle of Ireland (1863) also had a note on Gavra: The publications of the Ossianic Society have made us familiar with Fionn MacCumhal (the Fingal of McPherson), chief of the far-­famed Irish militia, instituted in the third century to protect the kingdom from foreign invasion. Its organisation rendered it an army of extraordinary efficiency; but, existing as a separate power, it became in time as formidable to the native sovereigns as to foreigners. The terrible battle of Gavra was its ruin. In it Oscar, the son of Oisin (or Ossian), and consequently the grandson of Fionn, fell in single combat with the Irish king Carbry, and nearly his whole army perished with him, A.D. 284. To this day Fionn and Oisin are household names in those parts of Western Ireland in which the traditional Gaelic poetry is recited. 19. forest house] Cp. Keats, Endymion (1818), III, 470–1: ‘the mazy forest-­house | Of squirrels, foxes shy, and antler’d deer’. 20. sleek as any granary mouse] The phrase ‘sleek as a mouse’ features in an eighteenth-­century

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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 meed Scarce worthy of a hoof gold-­shod. For gold his hooves and silk his rein, And ’tween his ears, above his mane,

poem (sometimes attributed to John Gay), ‘A New Song of New Similies’ (in which all of the many similes are intended to be recognized as clichés). ‘Sleek’ is also likely to recall Robert Burns’s celebrated ‘sleekit’ in ‘To a Mouse on Turning her up in her Nest with the Plough, Nov. 1785’, 1: ‘Wee sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie’. 21. fields of waving fern] Cp. Samuel Ferguson, ‘The Cromlech at Howth’ (‘Aideen’s Grave’), 3–4: ‘We leave her, ’mong the fields of fern, | Between the cliff and wave’, and R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Return to Eman’, 529: ‘the green grass amid the waving fern’. 22. Oscar’s pencilled urn] Ferguson’s ‘The Cromlech at Howth’ (‘Aideen’s Grave’) has: ‘The great green rath’s ten-­acred tomb | Lies heavy on his urn, | A cup of bodkin-­pencilled clay  | Holds Oscar, mighty heart and limb  | One handful now of ashes grey’ (l75–9). In a note to these lines, Ferguson comments: Notwithstanding the rudeness of the material, we are often surprised by the degree of elegance exhibited in the ornamentation of some of the sepulchral urns of the Irish. They are either formed of stone or of unglazed pottery, covered with delicate pattern-­work, traced with a point on the wet clay. The same type of pattern constitutes the ornament on those clay vases which preceded the glazed earthenware

of more cultivated nations. In these urns, sometimes not more than three or four inches in diameter, were preserved the ashes of persons for whom vast sepulchral mounds, inclosing great stone chambers, were erected. Burial by cremation was not wholly disused in Ireland until after the introduction of Christianity. 23. the hornless deer] In Lay, there is ‘A hornless fawn leaping nimbly’; commenting on the same image in WATR, WBY mentions ‘the hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all retellings of Oisin’s journey to the country of the young.’ ‘Hornless’ creatures also featured in modern English mythic poetry: Tennyson’s ‘The Holy Grail’ in Idylls of the King presents ‘hornless unicorns’ alongside ‘Crack’d basilisks and splinter’d cockatrices’ (714–15). 30. pastern pressed the sod] The pastern is in fact ‘The part of a horse’s foot between the fetlock and the hoof ’ (OED pastern n 2.a.). JBY noted in his annotations to a copy of WO: ‘But no horse “presses the sod” with his “pastern” but with his hoof’ (accompanying this with an illustrative sketch). 31. an earthly meed] Perhaps in contrast to the sentiments of Jean Ingleow’s sonnet ‘Work’ (1863), 12: ‘Work is its own best earthly meed’. 32. hoof gold shod] Cp. W. Morris, Grettis Saga (1862), ‘The Lament of Oddrun’, 203–4: ‘Din was there to hear | Of the hoofs gold-­shod’.



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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.

38. Eman’s hall] Emain Macha was in Irish tradition the royal seat of the Ulster king Conchobar MacNessa and the Red Branch knights, and was thus important in the Ulster Cycle of tales. Located in Co. Armagh, and now known as Navan’s Fort, the site is a large circular earthwork, containing two monuments, an Iron Age ring barrow, and a mound. 39–53.] WBY adapts here the description of Niamh and her horse given in Lay: ’Twas not long till we saw, westwards, A fleet rider advancing towards us, A young maiden of most beautiful appearance, On a slender white steed of swiftest power. We all ceased from the chase, On seeing the form of the royal maid; ’Twas a surprise to Fionn and the Fianns, They never beheld a woman equal in beauty. A royal crown was on her head; And a brown mantle of precious silk, Spangled with stars of red gold, Covering her shoes down to the grass. Redder were her cheeks than the rose, Fairer was her visage than the swan upon the wave, And more sweet was the taste of her balsam lips Than honey mingled thro’ red wine. A garment wide, long, and smooth, Covered the white steed; There was a comely saddle of red gold, And her right hand held a bridle with a golden bit.

Four shoes well shaped were under him, Of the yellow gold of the purest quality; A silver wreath was on the back of his head, And there was not in the world a steed better. 41–2.] In his copy of WO, JBY noted here two parallels: W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Lord of the Isles’ (1815) I, iii, 6: ‘The dew that on the Violet lies | Mocks the dark lustre of thine eyes’, and Robert Montgomery, The Omnipotence of the Deity: A Poem (1834), I, 169–70: ‘And the bright dew-­bead on the Bramble lies | Like liquid rapture upon Beauty’s Eyes’. WBY knew or had access to both works, but, the lines in Lay above are his direct source. 44. stormy sunset] A  short poem in William Sharp’s 1884 volume, Poems, has ‘Stormy Sunset’ for subtitle (‘Across th’ ensanguined sea the sun | Sinks slowly through the blood-­red west’), but WBY had already used the ‘lips’/ ‘ships’ rhyme in IoS II iii 289–290: ‘With all his ships | I saw him from sad Dido’s shores depart, | Enamoured of the waves’ impetuous lips’, and before that in his sonnet ‘Behold the Man’, 8–10: ‘As o’er the sea from love-­sick Dido’s stair | Passed long ago the wanderer’s white-­sailed ships, | Enamoured of the waves’ impetuous lips.’ ‘Doomed ships’ may owe something to the arresting phrase ‘doomed lips’, which occurs in Lady Wilde, Poems of Speranza (2nd edn., 1871), ‘The Prisoner: Christmas, 1869’, 47 (see also notes to III, 149 and 214 below). In his story, ‘The Twisting

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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.

of the Rope and Hanrahan the Red’ WBY writes of the woman being wooed by his protagonist: ‘and still the girl’s blushes came and went like a stormy sunset’ (The National Observer 24 Dec. 1892; later included in The Secret Rose). For detailed engagement with this image, and the large circle of associations that arise from it, see W. Gould, ‘Lips and Ships, Peers and Tears: Lachrimae Rerum and Tragic Joy’, YA 18, 15–57. 45. citron tincture] OED citron n, 3: ‘The pale yellow or greenish yellow colour of the rind of a citron (or lemon)’. In his copy of WO, JBY underlined ‘citron’, and wrote: ‘citron fruit ? or what? yellow? or brown? what colour is “citron”?’ ‘Tincture’ was criticized by John O’Leary; responding to this in a letter to him of 3 Feb. 1889 (CL 1, 138), WBY maintained: ‘ “Tincture” and “Cincture” are used by me quite correctly. See Webster’s dictionary it says tincture primarily is “A tinge or shade of colour; as a tincture of red” and cincture is “that which encompasses or encloses”.’ 46. cincture] See WBY in note above. Niam’s hairband is here given a poetical name more commonly associated with encircling ties farther down the body: see e.g. S.T. Coleridge, Christabel I, 248–252: ‘she unbound  | The cincture from beneath her breast: | Her silken robe, and inner vest, | Dropt to her feet, and in full view,  | Behold! Her bosom and half her side’ (WBY’s ‘Down to her feet’ at 47 may indicate some recollection here of the passage).

47. white vesture] Cp. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poems (1844), ‘Lady Geraldine’s Courtship’ 93–95: ‘with the flowing | Of the virginal white vesture gathered closely to her throat, | And the golden ringlets in her neck just quickened by her going’. 48. woven crimson] Cp. Keats, ‘The Eve of St  Agnes’, 265: ‘A cloth of woven crimson, gold, and jet’. 49. many a figured creature strange] Bulwer Lytton’s lines in Fables in Song (1874), ‘The Master at Home’ II, 15–18 share part of WBY’s colour scheme in addition to his adjectival inversion: ‘Then forth there came, from out of a vine  | That round an elm did range  | Her garlands green and globes of wine, | A little creature strange’. 50. birds that on the seven seas range] Cp. A. Swinburne, Studies in Song (1880), ‘By the North Sea’, 163–4: ‘Time-­forgotten, yea since time’s creation,  | Seem these borders where the sea-­birds range’. seven seas] Corrected in Proofs Texas from ‘wild seas’. 53. As her soft bosom rose and fell] R.W. Buchanan’s Undertones (1864) includes ‘Pygmalion the Sculptor’, where some lines prefigure WBY’s description of Niam, bringing to the rising and falling bosom both ‘dewily’ and ‘lips’, as well as the light-­ effects of sun on these: ‘Her eyes were vacant of a seeing soul, | But dewily the bosom rose and fell,  | The lips caught sunrise, parting’ (Part 3, 241–4).



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PATRICK

Oisin, thou art half heathen still! OISIN

55 60 65 70

‘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

63–80.] WBY is following here the exchange between Niamh and Fionn in Lay: “Who art thou, thyself, O youthful princess! Of fairest form, beauty, and countenance, Relate to us the cause of thy story, Thine own name and thy country.” “Golden-­headed Niamh is my name, O, sage Fionn of the great hosts, Beyond the women of the world I  have won esteem, I am the fair daughter of the King of Youth.” “Relate to us O amiable princess What caused thee to come afar across the sea – Is it thy consort has forsaken thee, Or what is the affliction that is on thyself?” “’Tis not my husband that went from me, And as yet I have not been spoken of with any man,

O! king of the Fianna of highest repute, But affection and love I have given to thy son.” “Which of my children [is he] O blooming daughter, To whom thou hast given love, or yet affection – Do not conceal from us now the cause, And relate to us thy case, O woman.” “I will tell thee that, O Fionn! Thy noble son of the well-­tempered arms, High-­spirited Oisin of the powerful hands, Is the champion that I am now speaking of.” 63. Oscar’s pencilled urn] See note to I, 22. 68. Fin] Finn was the father of Oisin (in Irish Fionn mac Cumhaill, Finn the son of Cumhall). 71. deed-­doers] W. Morris was to adopt this term in his translation of Beowulf (1895) (‘loathly deed-­doer’, XV, 974).

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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.’

72. Niam] In Irish mythology, Niamh was the daughter of the god Aengus, a king in the land of the young, and his queen Edain. The name itself is from the Irish níam, meaning brightness: in ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’ (publ. 1903), WBY writes of ‘Niamh, whose name means brightness or beauty’ (CW4, 68). G. Bornstein sees evidence here of WBY’s association of Niam with Shelley’s ‘star image for love’: ‘By making Oisin pursue an ideal woman named brightness, then, Yeats associated him with the list of Shelleyan lovers ranging from the youth of Alastor to Rousseau in The Triumph of Life who also destroy themselves by such a quest’ (Bornstein, 25). WBY’s spelling here (departing from the orthodox Irish Niamh, which is used in Lay) has the effect of indicating a disyllabic (and incorrect) pronunciation. The spelling employed in Lay is ‘Niamh’, but ‘Niam’ is used in P.W. Joyce’s version. Although a correct sounding of the name might approximate to Nee-­av, it is likely that the more emphatic two-­syllable version WBY intends is closely represented by his orthography here. The spelling in MS1 is at first ‘Niamh’, then the final h is crossed out, with ‘Niam’ written immediately thereafter (and subsequently). JBY queried the spelling and pronunciation his copy of WO: ‘but is not “Niam” (Niambh) pronounced Neev as one syllable? Not Nee-­am?’ Perhaps partly as a result of this criticism, WBY was to adopt the form ‘Neave’ for P95, though with further changes of mind thereafter.

76. fluted] WBY’s use of this word is unusual, since Niam’s voice, though doubtless melodious, is not actually singing here. The intention may be to align her with the sound of birdsong (for which the verb is more commonly used); one poem in which it is not a bird but a woman who ‘fluted’ is D.G. Rossetti, Poems (1881), ‘Beauty and the Bird’, 1: ‘She fluted with her mouth as when one sips’ (see also note to II, 19). In Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Salome’, 13–14, such an alignment is explicit: ‘And with beseeching eyes, and bird-­speech soft,  | She fluted: “Give me here John Baptist’s head” ’. goblin rare] WBY’s departure from ‘goblin’s’ usual meaning (‘A mischievous and ugly demon’ OED) is in accord with his more general early practice of using it as a synonym for a fairy. The word is used in this way by Samuel Ferguson, e.g. Congal (1872) III, 166–7: ‘the brood | Of goblin people shun the light’. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862), which would inevitably sound here for readers of WBY’s phrase, retains connotations of the grotesque in its ‘goblin men’, though also using the word to denote fairies more generally. WBY’s use of ‘goblin’, alongside description of Niam’s physical beauty, is nevertheless extremely unusual: no hint at inner ugliness is intended, but at the same time the word’s potential for irony in implication is not fully under control. 77–8. ne’er  | Been spoken of with any man] O’Looney appends a note here in Lay: ‘i.e., I have not been betrothed to any man’.



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  ‘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,’   85 She said; ‘for he is fair above All men, and stronger of his hands, And drops of honey are his words, And glorious as Asian birds At evening in their rainless lands.   90 Full many bowing kings besought me, And many princes of high name. I ne’er loved any till song brought me To peak and pine o’er Oisin’s fame.’ There was, oh Patrick, by thy head,   95 No limb of mine that was not fallen In love. I cried, ‘Thee will I wed, Young Niam, and thou shalt be callen Beloved in a thousand songs. Before thy feet shall kneel down all 100 My captives, bound in leathern thongs,

81–2. beguiled | Of Ossian] WBY’s construction is curious: to beguile of is ‘to deprive of by fraud, to cheat out of ’ (OED beguile 2), but what Fin means here is closer to enamoured of, as in WBY’s source in Lay at this point: ‘What is the reason that thou gavest love . . . To my own son?’ 88–9.] In his copy of WO, JBY underlines ‘Asian’ and ‘At evening’, and comments: ‘why at evening? There are no Birds I fancy in any rainless parts of Asia. Certainly no very beautiful ones.’ 93. peak and pine] Proverbial, after Shakespeare, Macbeth I  iii. 22, ‘shall he dwindle, peak and pine’. Inside the front cover of MS2, with two other comments on words and phrases ‘too often repeated’ (see Manuscript materials), WBY has written ‘Peak and pine’. The phrase occurs again at I, 382. 94. by thy head] WBY alters the ‘By that hand on thee’ of Lay to a formula found twice in R.D. Joyce’s Deirdre (1877): ‘Now, by thy head! | And by thy father’s hand’ (‘The Soujourn in Alba’, 596–7), ‘Fergus still blood-­ red | With shame turned unto Naisi, “By thy

head! | O Naisi, here this tangled knot thou seest” ’ (‘The Return to Eman’, 456–8). 94–6.] Cp. Lay: ‘There was not a limb of me but was in love | With the beautiful daughter of the glossy hair’. 96. thee will I wed] Cp. Sigurd’s declaration in W. Morris, Sigurd the Volsung (1870), III, 194–5: ‘O live, live, Brynhild beloved! And thee on the earth will I wed, | And put away Gudrun the Niblung – and all those shall be as dead’. 97. callen] the word is underlined in JBY’s copy of WO, presumably as a query. WBY’s invented archaism for called strains philology for the sake of a rhyme: Middle English callen (as in Chaucer) is the third person plural form of call, and does not mean ‘called’. In a bawdy Chaucerian pastiche amongst his juvenilia (‘Women ben full of ragerie’), Alexander Pope uses callen correctly, when two women ‘stoppen . . . and callen out’ (13). 100. leathern thongs] Cp. John Dryden, Aeneid, VII, 1010–11: ‘Light demi-­lances from afar they throw, | Fastened with leathern thongs’.

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105

And praise thee in my western hall.’ ‘Oisin, thou must away with me To my own kingdom in the sea – Away, away with me,’ she cried, ‘To shores by the wash of the tremulous tide, Where the voice of change is the voice of a tune, In the poppy-­hung house of the twilight fluted; To shores where dying has never been known, And the flushes of first love never have flown;

102–127.] WBY compresses the following passage from Lay: “Obligations unresisted by true heroes O generous Oisin I put upon thee To come with myself now upon my steed Till we arrive at the ‘Land of Youth.’ “It is the most delightful country to be found, Of greatest repute under the sun Trees dropping with fruit and blossom And foliage growing on the tops of boughs. “Abundant, there, are honey and wine And everything that eye has beheld, There will not come decline on thee with lapse of time, Death or decay thou wilt not see. “Thou wilt get feasts, playing, and drink, Thou wilt get melodious music on the harp strings, Thou wilt get silver and gold, Thou wilt get also many jewels. “Thou wilt get, without falsehood, a hundred swords; Thou wilt get a hundred satin garments of precious silk, Thou wilt get a hundred horses the swiftest in conflict, And thou wilt get a hundred with them of keen hounds. “Thou wilt get the royal diadem of the ‘King of Youth,’ Which he never yet gave to any person under the sun, ’Twill protect thee both night and day, In battle, in tumult, and in rough conflict.

“Thou wilt get a fitting coat of protecting mail And a gold headed sword apt for strokes, From which no person ever escaped alive Who, once, saw the sharp weapon. “Thou wilt get a hundred coats of armour and shirts of satin, Thou wilt get a hundred cows and, also, an hundred calves, Thou wilt get a hundred sheep, with their golden fleeces, Thou wilt get a hundred jewels not in this world. “Thou wilt get a hundred virgins gay and young Bright, refulgent, like the sun, Of best form, shape, and appearance, Whose voices are sweeter than the music of birds. “Thou wilt get a hundred heroes most powerful in conflict, And also most expert in feats of agility, In arms and armour waiting on thee In the ‘Land of Youth’ if thou wilt come with me. “Thou will get everything I promised thee And delights, also, which I may not mention, Thou wilt get beauty, strength, and power, And I myself will be thy wife.” 105. wash of the tremulous tide] Perhaps cp. Samuel Rogers, Poetical Works (1875), ‘Human Life’, 693 (describing Venice): ‘With light reflected on the tremulous tide’; also perhaps cp. William Sharp’s, The Human Inheritance (1882), ‘The Sea-­Wrack’, 3: ‘the long wash of the tide’.



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And a hundred steeds, tumultuous-­footed, There shalt thou have, and a hundred hounds That spring five paces in their bounds, No mightier creatures bay at the moon; And a hundred robes of the softest silk, And a hundred calves, and a hundred sheep Whose long wool whiter than sea-­froth flows; And a hundred swords and a hundred bows; And honey, and oil, and wine, and milk, And always never-­anxious sleep; And a hundred maidens wise and young, And sweeter of voice than the pleasant birds, And swifter than the salmon herds; And a hundred youths, whose limbs are strung In a vigour more than mortal measure, And floating-­haired and proud in strife; And thou shalt know the immortals’ leisure, And I be with thee as thy wife.’

130

We rode beyond the furze and heather, And stood beside the sea together; Then sighed she softly, ‘Late! ’tis late! Mount my white steed, for the fairy state Lies far.’ I mounted, and she bound me In triumph with her arms around me,

116. sea-­froth] Cp. Robert Browning, Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), 918–9: ‘esteem the silken company  | So much sky-­scud, sea-­ froth, earth-­thistledown’. 122. salmon-­herds] WBY’s collective noun is (for the sake of rhyme) incorrect: most common collective nouns for salmon are run, bind, and draught. 123–4. whose limbs are strung | In a vigour more than mortal measure] Cp. Gilbert West, The Odes of Pindar (1753), Pythian I, 4: ‘the nervous Arm with manly Vigour strung’. 125. floating-­haired] Floating hair is poetically common, but almost always a feminine feature: e.g. in James Macpherson’s Ossian, Temora Book VII the female warrior Sul-­Malla removes her helmet to reveal ‘her floating hair’. WBY’s addition here of ‘floating-­haired’ to his source in Lay as an attribute of the young men announces the

559

influence of S.T. Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, 50: ‘His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ 128–137.] WBY here adapts and elaborates two stanzas from Lay: On the back of the steed we went together, Before me sat the virgin; She said: “Oisin let us remain quiet, Till we reach the mouth of the great sea.” Then arose the steed swiftly, When we arrived on the borders of the strand He shook himself then to pace forward, And neighed three times aloud. 128.] the furze and heather] Perhaps cp. George Darley, Poems (1850), ‘The Wild Bee’s Tale’, 61–2: ‘O’er the broom and furze and heather | That betuft the mountain-­side’. 133. her arms around me] WBY’s rhymes here (‘bound me’, ‘enwound me’) risk bringing the

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And, whispering to herself, enwound me; 135 And when the white steed felt my weight, He shook himself for travelling, And neighed three times. When, wondering Near by, the Fenians saw, and knew That I would go with her, they grew 140 Mournful, and gathered on the sands; They wept, and raised lamenting hands. When I had stooped and tenderly Had kissed my father, long-­armed Fin, And the Fenians all had wept with me, 145 We rode across the oily sea, For the sparkling hooves they sank not in; And far behind us, slowly round The Fenians on the human ground Closed in the misty air profound. 150 In what far kingdom do ye go, Ah, Fenians, with the shield and bow? Or are ye phantoms white as snow,

verse close to the movement of poor Victorian poems like Gerald Massey, The Ballad of Babe Christabel, (1855), ‘Sweet-­and-­Twenty’, 9–12: ‘In white arms of love she wound me, | And I lookt up in her smile: | In warm arms of love she bound me, | As the sea takes some blest isle’. 137–144.] WBY here omits much of the parting of Oisin and Fionn in Lay – ‘a melancholy story | [. . .] The parting of the father from his own son’  – along with Oisin’s more detailed sorrow in which ‘the Tears flowed down my cheeks’, and his recollections of life with Fionn and the Fenians. WBY also compresses the parting embrace and kiss: in Lay, ‘I kissed my father sweetly and gently, | And the same affection I got from him’. 143. long-­armed Fin] The epithet Lámhfhada, meaning ‘of the long arm’, belongs more usually to the Irish god Lugh, and probably connotes expertise with a spear. It is used in Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), V, 373–4 in this sense: ‘as strong-­cast javelin, sent | From palm of long-­armed warrior’

145. the oily sea] This phrase occurs in the title-­poem of William Sharp’s first book, The Human Inheritance (1882): ‘the oily sea was freaked | With lines such as a stagnant pool is streaked’ (608–9). There is no evidence that WBY had read this, but he certainly knew of Sharp at the time of composition; although he was to develop a high regard for the writings of Sharp’s female alter ego, Fiona Macleod, a first meeting with the author in 1887 did not go well: WBY ‘hated his red British face of flaccid contentment’ (letter to KT, 25 Jun. 1887 (CL 1, 24)). In W. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1870) (which WBY did read), the Prologue, 229–30 has ‘the oily waters of the bay | Scarce moving’. 146. sparkling hooves] Cp. Thomas Beddoes, Poems (1851), Death’s Jest-­Book I ii 64: ‘With sparkling hoof along the scattered sands’. Perhaps cp. also Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (1879), IV, 499–500: ‘Kantaka sprang forth | With armed hoofs sparkling on the stones’. 149. misty air] Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), I, 594–5: ‘As when the Sun new risen | Looks through the horizontal misty air’.



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Whose lips had life’s most prosperous glow, O ye with whom, in sloping valleys And down the dewy forest alleys, I chased with hounds the flying deer, With whom I hurled the hurrying spear, And heard the foeman’s bucklers rattle, And broke the heaving ranks of battle? And Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair, Where are ye with your long rough hair? Ye go not where the red deer feeds, Nor tear the foemen from their steeds. PATRICK

165

Bard Oisin, boast not of thy deeds Nor thy companions. Let them rest, The Fenians. Let their deer-­hounds sleep. Tell on, nor bow thy heathen crest In brooding memory, nor weep. OISIN

170

On, on, we galloped o’er the sea. I knew not if days passed or hours, For fairy songs continually

155. dewy forest alleys] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Ballads, Romances and Songs (1861), ‘The Death of O’Donnell’, 53–4: ‘Six champions of might from that green forest alley  | Bear him on thro’ each wild glade and torrent-­ bound valley’. Cp. also Keats, Endymion (1818), IV, 133: ‘About the dewy forest’, and M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘The Strayed Reveller’, 263: ‘From the dewy forest-­coverts’. 156. the flying deer] A common phrase in poetry, but especially notable in James Macpherson’s Ossian (e.g. Fingal Book V: ‘She and the maids of the bow pursue the flying deer’). In his Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), William Hamilton Drummond included the short poem, ‘The Lay of Patrick Exhorting Ossian to Attend to his Psalmody’, near the end of which Ossian declares (39–40): ‘Far more harmonious chimes I hear | When hounds pursue the flying deer’.

158. foeman’s bucklers] Cp. James Hogg, The Works of the Ettrick Shepherd (1872), ‘Queen Hynde’, 4, 937: ‘Now on his foeman’s buckler bang’d’. ‘Foeman’ (here and in 163 below) is a poeticism which WBY might first have encountered in W. Scott, e.g The Lady of the Lake (1810), Canto V st. x: ‘the stern joy which warriors feel  | In foemen worthy of their steel’. 167. heathen crest] Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Bridal of Triermain Canto II, st. ii: ‘from a Saxon knight to wrest | The honours of his heathen crest!’ 168. brooding memory] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), Legends of the Saxon Saints, ‘Caedmon the Cowherd: The First English Poet’, 282–3: ‘While brooding memory, step by step, retraced | Its backward way’.

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Sang Niam, and their dewy showers Of pensive laughter – unhuman sound – Lulled weariness; and closely round My human sadness fay arms wound. On, on! and now a hornless deer

172–3. dewy showers | Of pensive laughter] The meteorological emphasis of WBY’s metaphor may owe something to similar weather in a line of George Eliot’s poem ‘The Legend of Jubal’ (1874), 681: ‘Sudden came showers of laughter on that lake’. 173. unhuman sound] ‘Unhuman’ is a rare word, but it is used by Edward Dowden in Poems (1876), ‘In the Cathedral Close’, 41–2: ‘the child’s glad eyes  | Your joy unhuman shall control’. WBY’s meaning here is somewhere between that of OED Unhuman 2. ‘Not limited by human qualities or conditions; superhuman’ and 3. ‘Not pertaining to mankind’. Cp. Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘The Fairy Thorn’, 41–2: ‘Soft o’er their bosom’s beating – the only human sound – | They hear the silky footsteps of the silent fairy crowd’. 175. human sadness] Cp. Shelley, ‘Prince Athanase: A Fragment’, 21: ‘If with a human sadness he did groan’. 176–8.] Lay has the following stanza: We saw also, by our sides, A hornless fawn leaping nimbly, And a red-­eared white dog, Urging it boldly in the chase. Deer make appearances throughout Celtic myth. Oisin’s mother, Sadhbh, was at one stage transformed into a deer by a Druid whom she had refused to marry. Fionn encountered her in this form on a hunt, when the hounds Bran and Sceolan detected that she was human; Fionn therefore did not kill her, but brought her to his home, where she regained human shape (albeit temporarily, since she was to be turned into a deer again, this time by Fear Doirich). In his note to the poem ‘The Desire of Man and Woman’ in The Dome (Jun. 1897), WBY explained the opening couplet (‘Do you not hear me calling,

white deer with no horns? | I have been changed to a hound with one red ear’) with reference to Oisin: ‘In the old Irish story of Usheen’s journey to the Islands of the Young, Usheen sees amid the waters a hound with one red ear, following a deer with no horns; and other persons in other old Celtic stories see the like images of the desire of the man, and of the desire of the woman “which is for the desire of the man,” and of all desires that are as these.’ WBY takes ‘red-­ eared’ in Lay in an unusual sense, as indicating that the hound possesses only one red ear; if there is an ambiguity in Lay, it is not present in P.W. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances (1879), where ‘a white hound with red ears’ is seen (389). When ‘The Desire of Man and Woman’ was reprinted as ‘Mongan Laments The Change That Has Come Upon Him And His Beloved’ in WATR, WBY wrote that ‘My deer and hound are properly related to the deer and hound that flicker in and out of the various tellings of the Arthurian legends, leading different knights upon adventures, and to the hounds and to the hornless deer at the beginning of, I think, all tellings of Oisin’s journey to the country of the young. The hound is certainly related to the Hounds of Annwvyn or of Hades, who are white, and have red ears, and were heard, and are, perhaps, still heard by Welsh peasants following some flying thing in the night winds; and is probably related to the hounds that Irish country people believe will awake and seize the souls of the dead if you lament them too loudly or too soon, and to the hound the son of Setanta killed, on what was certainly, in the first form of the tale, a visit to the Celtic Hades.’ How much of this might have been in WBY’s mind a decade earlier, when composing WO, is unclear. 176. hornless deer] WBY changes Lay’s ‘fawn’ for the sake of the rhyme; in so doing, he produces the phrase used in



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Passed by us, chased of a phantom hound All pearly white, save one red ear; And now a maid, on a swift brown steed Whose hooves the tops of the surges grazed, Hurried away, and over her raised

W.H. Drummond’s Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), where the poem ‘The Lay of the Chase of Slieve Guillin’ has Oisin tell St Patrick about Finn’s hunt after this creature (which again turns out to be a supernatural woman bent on enchantment): ‘he spied a young doe on the heath-­clad green | With agile spring draw near:  | On Sceolan and Bran, his nimble hounds, | He whistles aloud, and away he bounds | In chase of the hornless deer’ (6–10). 177. chased of] MS1 has ‘of ’ inserted in lighter ink with a caret above the original line. This is an uncommon construction: it is used, however, by W. Morris in The Life and Death of Jason (1867), XIII, 380: ‘Doubting that she was chased of some dread thing’. 179–187.] WBY compresses four stanzas of Lay here: We beheld also, without fiction, A young maid on a brown steed, A golden apple in her right hand, And she going on top of the waves. We saw after her, A young rider on a white steed, Under a purple, crimson mantle of satin, And a gold-­headed sword in his right hand. “Who are you two whom I see, O gentle princess, tell me the meaning, That woman of most beautiful countenance, And the comely rider of the white steed.” “Heed not what thou wilt see, O! gentle Oisin, nor what thou hast yet seen, There is in them but nothing, Till we reach the land of the ‘King of Youth.’ ” 179–184.] WBY’s 1899 WATR note continues: ‘I got my hound and deer out of a last

century Gaelic poem about Oisin’s journey to the country of the young. After the hunting of the hornless deer, that leads him to the seashore, and while he is riding over the sea with Niam, he sees amid the waters – I have not the Gaelic poem by me, and describe it from memory  – a young man following a girl who has a golden apple, and afterwards a hound with one red ear following a deer with no horns. This hound and this deer seem plain images of the desire of man “which is for the woman,” and “the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man,” and of all desires that are as these. I  have read them in this way in “The Wanderings of Usheen” or Oisin, and have made my lover sigh because he has seen in their faces “the immortal desire of immortals.” A solar mythologist would perhaps say that the girl with the golden apple was once the winter, or night, carrying the sun away, and the deer without horns, like the boar without bristles, darkness flying the night.’ The Old Irish stories known as the Echtrai (‘Adventures’) included the Adventure of Conle (or Connla): a son of the High King Conn Cétchathach (Conn of the Hundred Battles), Conle is tempted away from his companions by a beautiful woman, invisible to everyone else, who throws him a golden apple; this apple makes him pine after her, until finally she takes him away from the world in a ship of glass to her supernatural home in ‘The Plain of Delight’. WBY’s source in Lay probably alludes to this story, and WBY himself mentions it ten years later, in his Fortnightly Review piece of 1898, ‘The Broken Gates of Death’, where he adduces ‘Conla when he sailed with a divine woman in a ship of glass to “the ever-­living, living ones” ’ (CW 9, 406). The figure of the

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185 190 195 200

An apple of gold in her tossing hand; And following her at a headlong speed Was a beautiful youth from an unknown land. ‘Who are the riding ones?’ I said. ‘Fret not with speech the phantoms dread,’ Said Niam, as she laid the tip Of one long finger on my lip. Now in the sea the sun’s rim sank, The clouds arrayed them rank on rank In silence round his crimson ball. The floor of Eman’s dancing hall Was not more level than the sea, As, full of loving phantasy, We rode on murmuring. Many a shell That in immortal silence sleeps And dreams of her own melting hues, Her golds, her azures, and her blues, Pierced with soft light the shallowing deeps, When round us suddenly there came A far vague sound of feathery choirs. It seemed to fall from the very flame Of the great round sun, from his central fires.

beautiful girl with a golden apple itself is likely to derive ultimately from Greek myth, and the story of Atalanta and Hippomanes: there, it is the young man Hippomanes who throws golden apples to the girl, in order to distract her from the race against him which she is successfully running and which, should she be defeated in it, brings her hand as its prize. 182. apple of gold] In changing Lay’s (and P.W. Joyce’s) ‘a golden apple’, WBY echoes a line of J. C. Mangan, whose version of Owen Roe O’Sullivan, ‘A Lullaby’, has ‘I’ll give thee that glorious apple of gold’ (9). 188. on my lip] WBY is not straining unduly for the rhyme here: this poeticism – ‘lip’ for ‘lips’  – is a fairly common one, and occurs several times in the work Robert Browning, and others. 189. sun’s rim] Cp. S.T. Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, 199: ‘The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out’.

195–6.] Perhaps cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘I’ve a Secret to Tell Thee’, 4–5: ‘Some shore where the Spirit of silence sleeps; | Where summer’s wave unmurmuring dies’. 196. immortal silence] Cp. Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742), IX, 548–9: ‘Immortal Silence! where shall I begin? | Where end?’ 197. melting hues] Cp. John Keble, Miscellaneous Poems (1869) ‘To the Memory of John Leyden’, 11–12: ‘And melting hues of moonlight loveliness, | And fairy forms’. 199.] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Reticence’, 21: ‘Often shallow, pierced with light’ and W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), XIV, 501: ‘To push across the shallowing sea’. 201. feathery choirs] feathery heads del. MS1. 203. his central fires] Cp. R. Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), XII, 156–9: ‘There was light within,  | A  yellow light, as when the autumnal sun, | Through travelling rain and mist | Shines on the evening hills: | Whether from central fires effused. . . ’.



205 210 215 220 225

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The steed towards the music raced, Neighing along the lifeless waste; And, as the sun sunk ever lower, Like sooty fingers many a tree Rose ever from the sea’s warm floor, And they were trembling ceaselessly, As though they were all beating time Upon the centre of the sun To the music of the golden rhyme Sung of the birds. Our toil was done; We cantered to the shore, and knew The reason of the trembling trees, For round each branch the song-­birds flew, Or clung as close as swarms of bees, While round the shore a million stood Like drops of frozen rainbow light, And pondered in a soft vain mood On their own selves in the waters white, And murmured snatches of delight; And on the shores were many boats With bending sterns and bending bows, And carven figures on their prows

207.] Cp. WBY’s much later use of the same image in ‘The Tower’ II, 2–3: ‘where  | Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth’. It is unlikely that WBY had read the ode by Thomas Warton, ‘The Crusade’ (1777), in which there is ‘many a demon, pale of hue, | Doom’d to drink the bitter dew | That drops from Macon’s sooty tree’ (79–81); yet it is possible that he did so, especially since the poem’s opening lines seem to resonate with I, 192–3 (‘Eman’s dancing hall | Was not more level than the sea’: cp. Warton, 2–3: ‘Nimbly we brush’d the level brine,| All in azure steel array’d’). For all the clarity of the image here, Oisin’s familiarity with sooty fingers is not necessarily in key with his aristocratic life. 208. sea’s warm floor] sea’s red floor MS1. 215. the trembling trees] A  poetic commonplace, and nowhere more so than Denis Florence MacCarthy’s recent Poems (1884), ‘The Tidings’, 50: ‘the gladsome breeze thro’ the trembling trees’.

219. drops of frozen rainbow light] This line is a later addition between 217 and 219 in MS1. Shelley’s Queen Mab I, 54 has ‘lines of rainbow light’, while Thomas Moore twice has ‘drops of light’: Loves of the Angels, ‘First Angel’s Story’, 333–4: ‘Those vivid drops of light, that fall | The last from Day’s exhausted urn’, and ‘Spirit of Joy’, 15: ‘Attempts to catch the drops of light’. WBY uses ‘rainbow light’ in another poem in WO, ‘Street Dancers’ (prob. composed in 1888), 33: ‘Dropping liquid rainbow light’. 222. snatches of delight] Cp. Spenser, ‘Epithalamion’, 362: ‘To filch away sweet snatches of delight’. 225. carven] A  piece of medieval revival diction, common in Victorian poetry, with its precedents in Keats (‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, 95: ‘Garlanded with carven imag’ries’) and E.B. Browning (Aurora Leigh, IV 171: ‘A screen of carven ivory’). The term is used by Aubrey De Vere, Poems (1884), ‘Bede’s Last

566 230 235

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Of bitterns and fish-­eating stoats, And swans with their exultant throats. Among them ’lighting from our steed, Maid Niam from a little trump Blew one long note. From over reed And river, fern and flowery clump, Ere long an answering whisper flew, A whisper of impetuous feet Among the woodland grasses sweet, And ever nearer, nearer grew; And from the woods there rushed a band Of youths and maidens hand in hand, And singing, singing all together.

May’, 65: ‘carven imagery of flower or fruit’; it is employed often by William Allingham, in e.g. Fifty Modern Poems (1865), ‘Abbey Asaroe’, 3: ‘The carven stones’ and Flower Pieces (1888), ‘A Gravestone’, 6: ‘wild flowers, carven sharp’. The term was a particular favourite of Edward Dowden’s: Poems (1876), ‘In the Cathedral’, 5: ‘carven tomb’, ‘Edgar Allen Poe’, 13: ‘carven dreams’, and ‘A Day of Defection’, 2: ‘carven and clear’. WBY will employ the word again much later, in ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ 77: ‘carven stone’. 226. stoats] Queried in JBY’s marginalia, with the suggestion ‘otters?’ Although stoats can eat fish, their diet is mainly rodents and small mammals. 232. an answering whisper] Cp. A. Swinburne, A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems (1884), ‘On the Verge’, 19: ‘Never breath of answering whisper’. 234. woodland grasses sweet] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Sojourn in Alba’, 142–4: ‘Now in the pleasant afternoon the feet | Of the great tribe had pressed the grasses sweet | Of the fair sunny woodland’. 236. And from the woods there rushed a band] From the woods’ borders rushed a band MS1. 237. youths and maidens hand in hand] hand and hand MS1. ‘Youths and maidens’ is a commonplace phrase (see e.g. Coleridge, ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ 608–9: ‘Old men, and babes, and loving friends,  | And youths and

maidens gay!’), but cp. its occurrence in R.D. Joyce’s Deirdre (1877), ‘The Return to Eman’, 416–419: ‘nor where morning’s beam | Paints first with gold the pine-­tops, shall we see | The youths and maidens in light revelry | Dance at the Beltane time with nimble feet’. Joyce’s use of ‘Paints’ here also prefigures WBY’s habits, which caused JBY’s patience to snap (see note to I, 453). In Songs Unsung (1883), the popular contemporary poet Lewis Morris (1833– 1907) included ‘Three Breton Poems’, in the second of which, ‘The Foster Brother’, a trip on (white) horseback ends in an otherworldly place (which turns out, however, to be a land beyond the grave): ‘And lo, within a land they were, a land of mirth and pleasure,  | Where youths and maidens hand in hand danced to a joyous measure’ (93–4). WBY’s sole reference to this lesser Morris is a scornful one, in a letter to The Bookman of Nov. 1892, urging the claims of Swinburne and William Morris to the vacant Laureateship, where he numbers this Welsh poet and antiquarian amongst ‘all kinds of perfectly absurd people’, and refuses ‘to take seriously him of whom it has been said that he calls himself “of Pembryn,” to be distinguished from his namesake of Parnassus’ [i.e. William Morris] (CL 1, 326). 238.] And singing some old song together MS1. In KT’s Shamrocks (1887), which WBY reviewed for The Irish Fireside 9 Jul. 1887 (CW 9, 65–7), ‘The Story of Aibhric’ 143–4



240 245 250 255

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Their brows were white as fragrant milk, Their robes were all of yellow silk, Trimmed round with many a crimson feather; And when they saw my earthly dress, They fingered it and gazed at me, And laughed like murmurs of the sea. But Niam, with a sad distress, Bid them away and hold their peace; And when they heard her voice, they ran And knelt them, every maid and man, And kissed, as they would never cease, Her fingers and her garments’ hem. Now in the woods, away with them, Went we to find their prince's hall On in the woods, away with them, Where white dewdrops in millions fall; Or in the woods, away with them, Where tangling creepers every hour Blossom in some new crimson flower;

has ‘And she was singing, singing – hark! how she sings | With a passion of woe!’. 239^240.] From cows that crop emanias heather MS1 (with query mark entered in the left margin). Emania is another name for the Ulster palace of Emain Macha (see note to ‘Eman’s hall’ I, 38 above). 244. murmurs of the sea] Perhaps cp. Dora Greenwell, Stories That Might Be True (1850), ‘Time’, 47–9: ‘How may I  reach the sunset isles that lie | Far Westward, where the murmurs of the Sea | Rise ever gently’. 245. sad distress] A common phrase in poetry, but rendered unusual by WBY’s addition of the indefinite article: more usually, the connotations are religious ones (in e.g. poems and hymns by John Wesley and Isaac Watts). 246. Bid] Past tense; but WBY uses the more conventional ‘bade’ not far later, at I, 267. 248. knelt them] An archaism, perhaps from W. Scott: cp. The Lay of the Last Minstrel V xxix, 10–12: ‘like ghosts they glide | To the high altar’s hallow’d side | And there they knelt them down’. 250. her garments’ hem] WBY incorporates an image most commonly associated with

Christian narrative, from Matthew 9:20–21 (‘a woman which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment. For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I  shall be whole’) and 14: 36 (‘besought him, that they might only touch the hem of his garment, and as many as were touched, were made perfectly whole’). The verbal motif had already been incorporated in a non-­religious context by W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870) III, ‘The Story of Rhodope’, 558–9: ‘no woe or cry, | If so I may, shall stain my garments’ hem’. 251. away with them] we passed with them del. MS1. 252. prince’s hall] prince’s palace del. MS1. 256.] Where hung the roses purple [?chalace] del. Where drops of dew in millions fall MS1. With WBY’s revised version of the line, perhaps cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1840), ‘The wreath you wove’, 5–6: ‘If every rose with gold were tied, | Did gems for dewdrops fall’. 257. crimson flower] Cp. Tennyson, Song from The Princess, ‘Now falls the crimson petal, now the white’.

568 260 265 270

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Or in the woods, away with them, Where trees made sudden cavern-­glooms By roots that joined above our plumes – Or in the woods, away with them! And once a sudden laughter sprang From all their lips, and once they sang Together, while the dark woods rang, And rose from all their distant parts, From bees among the honey marts, A rumour of delighted hearts. And while they sang, a singer laid A harp of silver in my hands, And bade me sing of earthly lands; And when I sang of human joy They hushed them, every man and maid. Oh, Patrick, by thy beard, they wept,

259. cavern glooms] Cp. R. Southey, Madoc (1805), XVII, 34: ‘through the entrance of the cavern gloom’, and William Allingham, Poems (1850), ‘In the Train’, 9–10: ‘Swiftly with dismaying shriek  | Down through the cavern gloom we roll’. 266. honey marts] WBY’s archaism here is an awkward coinage, since ‘mart’ always implies a place of trade, and not just production. 267. a rumour] Thus WO (and subsequent editions), and thus WBY’s MS  for revised version in P95. However, MS1 (which has this line twice, first cancelled after 265, then in the published position) seems to have ‘murmour’. It is possible that ‘rumour’ is meant here (in each case, an initial ‘m’ could be ‘r’), but it is also possible that WO prints ‘rumour’ for ‘murmur’, and that WBY bases all further revision on the misprint. ‘Rumour’ arguably adds needless complication to WBY’s lines, where ‘murmur’ is more accurate and straightforward; but MS1 offers neither unequivocal evidence nor by itself sufficient grounds for any emendation; and rumour certainly satisfied WBY thereafter. 269. a harp of silver] Cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867) IX, 61: ‘Whereto was hung a harp of silver white’. WBY may

be alluding to the harp played by the god Aengus Og (Aengus the Young) in Irish myth, which is sometimes made of silver (as in e.g. AG’s later account in Gods and Fighting Men, where Aengus plays ‘a silver harp with strings of red gold’). Cp. WBY’s later ‘The Harp of Aengus’. A related harp is that belonging to the god Dagda (the father of Aengus) of the Tautha De Danaan, which could play three different strains: of gaiety, sorrow, and sleep. It is possible that WBY is also aware of lines in a juvenile poem associated with Shelley (though rejected as his by Edward Dowden and others), ‘The Wandering Jew’ (published first in 1875 ed. R.H. Shepherd, and next in an edition from The Shelley Society in 1887), 905–8: ‘A superhuman sound  | Broke faintly on the listening ear, | Like to a silver harp the notes, | And yet they were more soft and clear’. 271.] And when I sang my Song of joy MS1. 272. man and maid] maid and boy del. MS1. 273. by thy beard] A  variant on the invented archaism ‘By my beard!’ as an oath: amongst various nineteenth-­century uses of this is W. Morris’s ‘It lacks something, by my beard!’ in the Prologue to The Earthly Paradise (1870), 1064.



The Wanderings of Oisin

275 280

And one came close, a tearful boy. ‘A sadder creature never stept Than this strange bard,’ he cried, and caught The harp away. A dolorous pool Lay ’neath us; of its hollow cool No creature had familiar thought Save deer towards noon that water sought. Therein the silver harp he hurled, And each one said, with a long, long sigh, ‘The saddest harp in all the world!’

285 290 295

And now still sad our troop drew nigh A firwood house, all covered over With antlers and the shaggy skin Of many a slaughtered forest rover. We passed the portals, and within, One hand beneath his beardless chin, There was a wondrous young man sitting. Within his other hand were flitting Around a sceptre of all lights, Wild flames of red and creamy whites, Wild flames of red and gold and blue; And nigh unto him each one drew, And kissed the sceptre with hot lips, And touched it with his finger-­tips.

276. strange] same del. MS1. 276–7. caught  | The harp away] WBY’s diction here (‘caught away’ for took or snatched from) may echo that of Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘The Holy Grail’, 57–8: ‘the holy cup  | Was caught away to heaven’. 282. a long, long sigh] Cp. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘The Forsaken Merman’, 101–5: ‘And anon there breaks a sigh, | And anon there drops a tear, | From a sorrow-­clouded eye,  | And a heart sorrow-­laden,  | A  long, long sigh’. The phrase occurs twice in John Banim’s The Celt’s Paradise (1821), Fourth Duan 35–6: ‘My life on earth was a long, long sigh  | Of hopes and fears, of hopes and fears’, and 101–2: ‘Beauty! – The bard’s eternal theme,  | His long, long sigh, his ceaseless dream’.

569

286. shaggy skin] Cp. John Dryden, Aeneid VII, 926: ‘About his shoulders hangs the shaggy skin’. 287. forest rover] Perhaps cp. with an image in the work of the Scottish collier-­poet David Wingate (1828–1892), whose popular Poems and Songs (1882), ‘Lochranza’ Part 4, 29–30 has: ‘No doe today delights the eye, | No antlered forest rover’. 288. passed the portals] Cp. Byron, The Corsair (1814) I, xiv, 4: ‘He passed the portal, crossed the corridor’. 296. hot lips] Commonly with erotic meaning in nineteenth-­century poetry, as e.g. Tennyson, ‘Oenone’, 199–200: ‘my hot lips pressed | Close, close to thine’. Cp. also Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, 1968: ‘Hot lips have been before thee in the cup’.

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300 305 310

With a clear voice the young man cried, ‘’Tis joy makes swim the sappy tide, And “Waken, courtiers of the morn!” Cries to the sluggard seeds of corn, And stirs the young kid’s budding horn, And makes the infant ferns unwrap, And for the peewit paints his cap. For joy the little planets run Round us, and rolls the unwieldy sun. If joy were nowhere on the earth There were an end of change and birth; The universe herself would die, And in some urn funereal lie Folded like a frozen fly.

298.] Swift and clear the [young del.] [fair del.] young King cried MS1. 299. sappy] OED 2.a. ‘Full of vitality’. 300. courtiers] [courtiers del.] minions MS1. 300^301.] In woods that wave beneath the morn del. MS1. 302. young kid’s budding horn] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Winning of Amarac’, 100: ‘And grasped the bright-­backed offspring of the morn | By one pink ear and by one budding horn’. 304. for the peewit paints his cap] The peewit is the lapwing (Vanellus vanellus), resident in much of Ireland. The bird’s head has a crest of dark feathers. 305. the little planets run] ‘Run’ is a common poetic verb for planetary motion, as in e.g. W.M. Praed, Poems (1844), ‘The Bridal of Belmont: A  Legend of the Rhine’, 348–9: ‘How fast the twinkling planets run, | From age to age, about the sun’. 308. change] death del. MS1. 308^309.] And life would cease in wood and thicket del. MS1. After this in MS1 come eight further cancelled lines: And all the universe would lie Folded like a frozen fly And slumber in its funeral urn And nothing change and all be grey

As when the [?] housewife is away The hearth Then stranger warrior why so sad And stern the sad alone are wicked 309. The universe herself would die] Cp. James Montgomery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘The Thunder Storm’, 29–20: ‘At the judgment of his eye | All the universe would die’. 310. some urn funereal] For this inversion, cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1885), ‘Sophocles’, 13–14: ‘Her eyes upon an urn funereal pressed | By both her marble hands’. WBY may well be influenced here by lines in a poem by the Irish poet Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823–1892), Versicles (1856, repr. 1882), ‘The Vine Song’, 35–8: ‘Oh! when this heart has ceased to blow, | Oh! when its love has failed to burn, | Scatter it still in its wit-­ bright glow  | Into some cup’s funereal urn’. (Irwin, who had been a contributor to the Dublin University Magazine, published three volumes in the 1880s, and was living in poverty in Dublin, in the district of Rathmines, close to Harold’s Cross, where the Yeats family lived from 1884–7; Douglas Hyde admired his work, and praised it in the Irish Monthly in Mar. 1888.) 311. Folded] Folden MS1. WBY presumably means like a fly preserved in amber.



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‘The soul is a drop of joy afar. In other years from some old star It fell, or from the twisted moon Dripped on the earth; but soon, ah! soon, To all things cried, “I am a slave! Trickling along the earth, I rave; In pinching ways I toil and turn.” But, warrior, here there is no law; The soul is free, and finds no flaw, Nor sorrow with her osprey claw.

312–318.] WBY’s conceit of the soul as ‘a drop of joy’ here may be indebted to T. Beddoes, Poems (1851), The Second Brother I  ii 119–20: ‘thou dost squeeze eternity | Into this drop of joy’. 312. joy afar] joy. Afar Ellis. 313. some old star] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Versicles (1856), ‘The Return’ IV, 3–4: ‘Perchance their dreams from spheres of light  | Float toward us on this green old star’. 314. twisted] horned del. MS1. 317. along the earth] This odd construction (though fitting enough for a drop of liquid) has a parallel in D.F. MacCarthy, Poems (1884), ‘The Price of Freedom’ (addressed to ‘Man of Ireland, heir of sorrow’), 10–12: ‘Is it for this God gave you birth. | With the spectre look of famine | Thus to creep along the earth?’. The poem continues with a consideration of the Irishman as a ‘slave’ (cp. I, 313), 41–8: ‘Not as beggars lowly bending, | Not in sighs, and groans, and tears, | But a voice of thunder sending | Through thy tyrant brother’s ears! | Tell him he is not thy master, | Tell him of man’s common lot, | Feel life has but one disaster, | To be a slave, and know it not!’ WBY’s phrase is likely to contain some recollection Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1822), II ii 7–8: ‘where some cloud of dew | Drifted along the earth-­creeping breeze’. 321. osprey claw] WBY’s choice the osprey here (Pandion haliaetus) is slightly unusual when considered in a specifically Irish setting, since ospreys were not to be seen in Ireland (and had not been there since at least the early nineteenth century). The osprey

was more characteristically depicted in a Scottish context (as most recently in William Sharp, Poems (1884), ‘The Haunt of the Osprey, Western Highlands’); one Irish literary sighting comes in R.W. Buchanan, Ballads of Life, Love, and Humour (1882), ‘The Faery Reaper: Ireland’, 37–8: ‘the water-­ eagle  | O’erhead is flying’, identified in the author’s note as the osprey. WBY may have a generally heraldic impact in mind, in which the bird’s powers of clear sight are emphasised: there had been heraldic ospreys in R.D. Joyce’s Deirdre (1877), where there are four such uses, e.g. ‘The Welcome to the Mansion of Keth’, 303–4: ‘Their silken banner fluttering in the van | With the great Osprey worked in gold thereon’. One other use of the image in Joyce’s poem is more concrete: ‘The Feast in the House of Feilmid’, 99–100: ‘Sharp eyes she had, each speck and fault that saw, | And face as yellow as an osprey’s claw’. Generally, however, the osprey has no strong presence as an Irish bird; Aubrey De Vere emphasised English associations for the osprey: Poetical Works (1844), ‘The Spanish Armada and the English Catholics’, 4: ‘Long as o’er English cliffs the osprey soars’; another of De Vere’s sonnets, ‘Queen Elizabeth’, 4–5 compared its subject to ‘The rock-­ throned Osprey, glancing sternly round  | Through sun-­ lit air, unshaken by a sound’. WBY’s later poem ‘The Unappeasable Host’, in using the term ‘ger-­eagle’, draws specifically upon Leviticus 11:18 (‘geir eagle’ in the King James Bible, meaning in fact a species of vulture): five

572 325 330 335 340

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Then, warrior, why so sad and stern, For joy is God and God is joy?’ Among the ringing halls a shout Arose from every maid and boy, And through the doors, a rushing rout, Swept on the dance’s linkèd flow, In every brain a wizard glow. Beside the sea, where, hushed and slow, The murmuring birds in solemn pomp Passed a-­tiptoe up and down In a long and shadowy row, We hushed the singing and the romp, And, gathering on our brows a frown, Whispered to the sea whose flow Eat away the sloping sod, ‘God is joy and joy is God. Everything that’s sad is wicked – Everything that fears tomorrow Or the wild grey osprey sorrow.’

verses before this, also in the list of unclean birds, the osprey is included by name (‘the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the osprey’). 322. sad and stern] Cp. Shelley, ‘Ode to Liberty’, 112: ‘To talk in echoes sad and stern’, and Aubrey De Vere, ‘To the Most Fair’, 9: ‘a mourner sad and stern’. 328. wizard glow] a fever glow MS1. Cp. Tennyson, In Memoriam cxx 189: ‘The wizard lightnings deeply glow’. 329. hushed and slow] to and fro MS1: a note on the cover page of MS2 is ‘To and fro too often repeated’. Cp. D.G. Rossetti, ‘The Blessed Damozel’, 93–4: ‘which his voice  | Shall pause in, hushed and slow’. 332. shadowy] solemn del. MS1. 337. God is joy and joy is God] Perhaps cp. John Wesley, Hymn XXX (‘Spirit of Power, ’tis thine alone’), 36: ‘And joy in God is joy in Thee’. Albright (405) notes that WBY later uses the phrase ‘God is joy’ in a 1902 passage of his play Where There is Nothing IV ii: ‘God is joy, and will accomplish all joyful things’ (Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, 1126).

340. grey osprey sorrow] WBY’s ‘grey’ attaches primarily (and naturally) to the osprey, but its close proximity to the abstract noun ‘sorrow’ recalls the dismissive effect of attaching this adjective to another abstract noun in ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, 4: ‘Grey truth’. The phrase ‘grey sorrow’ appears in only two Victorian poems, each of which WBY might have read: the heavily prolific English poet George Barlow (1847–1914) had a Swinburnian poem, ‘What Shall Be: A Song of Weariness’, in his Song-­Spray (1882), where ‘grey sorrow’ is joined by aspects of image (e.g. the Rose and the femme fatale) and diction which seem to foreshadow Yeatsian habits of the 1890s and later: ‘Ineffable desire and splendid grace | Of her tumultuous face | And all the urgent rapture of her wings  | Whereto grey sorrow clings’ (61–64). Another occurrence is in an Irish-­devoted volume by the engraver, political activist and poet W.J. Linton (1812– 1897), whose propagandist verses in Ireland for the Irish (1867) included ‘Revenge’, with its gloating rhetorical demand: ‘Who mock’d grey sorrow’s smart?’ (14).



345 350 355

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Then onward through the winding thicket We danced to where within the gloom Hung, like meteors of red light, Damask roses in the night, And sang we lightly to each bloom As we kissed each rose’s head; Sang we softly in the dance, With a swift and friendly glance – Sang we softly, ‘On the dead, Fall the leaves of other roses, On the dead the earth encloses. Never, never on our graves, Heaved beside the glimmering waves, Shall fall the leaves of damask roses; For change and death they come not near us, And all the listless hours fear us, And we never fear the morrow Or the wild grey osprey sorrow.’

343.] WBY’s image of meteors is close to that in ‘Ephemera’ 14 (’like faint meteors in the gloom’) and may, like it, owe something to sources in Shelley and Allingham (see note). Here, however, the meteors seem to be static; in poetry (as in nature), meteors are more commonly seen moving, as e.g. the ‘red meteor’ in William Hamilton Drummond, Ancient Irish Minstrelsy (1852), ‘The Lay of Moira Borb’ 13–14: ‘Like the red meteor of the night | That shoots across the vale’. WBY’s effect can be compared with Dryden’s translation of Aeneid II, 156: ‘Then flaming meteors, hung in air, were seen’. 344. Damask roses] OED damask 2d.: ‘Apparently, originally the Rosa gallica var. damascena, a tall shrub with semi-­double pink or light-­ red (rarely white) flowers, cultivated in the East for attar of roses’. Damask roses are common in the rhetoric of love poetry, though a twist to their usual decorative function which occurs in a poem by James Clarence Mangan may be relevant to WBY here; in his ‘Love’, 8: ‘the damask Rose ascends her throne on happy Beauty’s cheek’; but the short poem ends with ‘O! If Hades could but speak | What a world of ruined souls would curse the sheen of Beauty’s cheek! (15–16).

345. sang we] This inversion, which WBY repeats structurally in the passage, is an unusual one, but it had been tried before, in Tennyson’s ‘Audley Court’, 73: ‘So sang we each to either’. 346. each rose’s head] Cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads (1866), ‘St. Dorothy’ 149: ‘And plucked-­out petals from a rose’s head’. 348. friendly] shining del. MS1. 350–1.] Cp. Edmund Gosse, New Poems (1879), ‘Greece and England’, 15–17: ‘Bloomed there richer, redder roses | where the Lesbian earth encloses | All of Sappho?’ 353. glimmering waves] The phrase is not unknown, but perhaps cp. Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Oasis’, 3: beside the glimmering wave of life’. 355. they come] may come Ellis, Morgan. 356. listless] Cornell Early Poetry 2 transcribes ‘little’ in MS1 here, though it is possible to read WBY’s word as ‘listles’. For ‘listless hours’ cp. Wordsworth The Excursion (1814) I, 258–9: ‘These occupations oftentimes deceived | The listless hours’, and III, 136: ‘Beguiling harmlessly the listless hours’; also cp. Shelley, ‘To Harriet’, 68: ‘listless hours unprofitably roll’. 358.] MS1 ends here; MS2 contains the draft of the poem from this point on.

574 360 365 370 375

The Wanderings of Oisin

Then on among the windless woods, The ever summered solitudes, The many-­coloured dancers rushed, Till on the central hill we hushed Once more the dance’s linkèd flow, And, gathered in a panting band, Flung on high each waving hand, And sang unto the starry broods. In our raised eyes there flashed a glow Of milky brightness to and fro, And thus our song arose: ‘Ye stars, Across your wandering ruby cars Shake the loose reins! Ye slaves of God, He rules you with an iron rod, He holds you with an iron bond, Each one woven to the other, Each one woven to his brother, Like bubbles in a frozen pond. But we, oh rolling stars, are free. The ever-­winding wakeful sea,

359. windless woods] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), IV, ‘February’, ‘Bellerophon in Lycia’, 1604: ‘And in the windless woods the acorn fell’. 360. summered] WBY’s use is unusual, though OED does record this adjectival form, citing Anna Seward, Memoir of the Life of Dr. Darwin (1804), 337: ‘the ever-­ summered gales’. One of the (rare) instances of this word in poetry comes in T.C. Irwin, Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘The Grape and the Star’, 44: ‘Its summered summit’ [of a tree]. 363. dance’s linkèd flow] WBY slightly adapts the conventional phrase ‘linked dance’ (as in e.g. William Sotheby, Italy and Other Poems (1828), ‘On an Orange tree in Rome’, 15–16: ‘the Graces, that in linkèd dance | Join hand in hand’). 365. each waving hand] Cp. Laetitia E. Landon’s description of dancing spirits, Literary Remains (1841), ‘Petrarch’s Dream’, 38–9: ‘As the summer came to greet | Each waving hand’. 368. milky] mirrored MS2.

371. slaves of God] Although the phrase may derive from the use of ‘slaves’ as a term of contempt in the context of religious orthodoxy, common in e.g. the earlier Shelley, its use in this phrase is found only in the work of R.W. Buchanan, where it occurs several times, e.g. Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Last Faith’, 16–17: ‘The blind priest raves, and all the slaves of God | Shriek their approval!’ 373. iron bond] WBY’s instant variation on the commonplace ‘rules you with an iron rod’ of 372 has a precedent in the work of Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘The Chain of Gold’, 29: ‘For falsehood is an iron bond’. WBY deprecated Lover’s poetry in ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ (The Leisure Hour, Nov. 1889, CW 9, 108). 377.] But we | Oh mariners of heaven are free del. MS2. 376–8.] A  poem by the Manchester poet John Critchley Prince (1808–1866), whose 2-­volume Poetical Works appeared in 1880, offers some  – perhaps coincidental  – points



The Wanderings of Oisin

380 385 390

That hides us all from human spying, Is not so free, so free, so free. Our hands have known no wearying tool, Our lives have known no law nor rule; Afar from where the years are flying O’er men who sleep, and wake, and die, And peak and pine we know not why, We only know that we were glad Aforetime, and shall not grow sad Or tired on any dawning morrow, Nor ever change or feel the clutches Of grievous Time on his old crutches, Or fear the wild grey osprey sorrow.’

395

Oh, Patrick, on that woody shore A hundred years I chased the boar, And slew the badger and the deer, And flung the joyous hunting-­spear! Oh, Patrick, there a hundred seasons I loved and sang, and in long wassails I laughed at Time’s unnumbered treasons, And twice a hundred were the vassals

of convergence with these lines. In ‘Contrition’, Prince mentions ‘The ever-­wakeful sea’ (30), along with ‘He who lit the stars  | And bade the planets roll’ (21–2), while near the beginning of his poem he speaks of ‘Fancy’s bubble thoughts’ (5). WBY nowhere mentions Prince, but this indigent alcoholic poet was not entirely obscure in the 1880s, when R.A.D. Lithgow’s The Life of John Critchley Prince (1880), along with the Poetical Works, were in circulation. 383. the years are flying] Cp. Horace, Odes 2.14, 1–2: ‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume | labuntur anni’, well-­known lines that make their way into e.g. Thomas Moore’s ‘Spring and Autumn’ (’Every season hath its pleasures’), 17–18: ‘Thus may we, as the years are flying, | To their flight our pleasures suit’. 385. peak and pine] Proverbial, used also at 93 earlier (see note). 388. dawning] wakeful del. MS2.

575

389.] the ^restless^ clutches MS2. 392. woody shore] Cp. William Blake, Poetical Sketches, ‘Edward the Third’ Sc. 6, 29: ‘some woody shore’. 397. loved] laughed del. MS2. wassails] WBY’s diction here is deliberately archaic: OED wassail 1.a: ‘A salutation used when presenting a cup of wine to a guest, or drinking the health of a person’. 398 Time’s] Morgan time’s WO. 399. twice a hundred] WBY’s poetic archaism has precedents in W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lord of the Isles, VIII, 2: ‘twice a hundred islands’, W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870) II, ‘May: The Writing on the Image’, 15: ‘twice a hundred years and ten’, and William Cowper, The Iliad of Homer (1789) VIII, 266–7: ‘a hundred Trojans in the field  –  | Ay, twice a hundred’. were the vassals] fiery vassals del. MS2.

576 00 4 405 410 415

The Wanderings of Oisin

That followed my keen hunting-­call – For love they followed one and all! Oh, Patrick, there a hundred years, At evening, on the glimmering sands, These now o’erworn and withered hands, Beside the piled-­up hunting-­spears, Wrestled among the island bands! Oh, Patrick, for a hundred years We went a-­fishing in long boats With bending sterns and bending bows, And carven figures on their prows Of bitterns and fish-­eating stoats! Oh, Patrick, for a hundred years The gentle Niam was my wife! And now have fallen on my life Two things that ’fore all things I hate, Fasting and prayers. PATRICK



Tell on.

OISIN Ay, ay! For these were ancient Oisin’s fate,

403. glimmering sands] Cp. Edmund John Armstrong, ‘To Wicklow’ (wr. 1861), 51–5: ‘The pure sweet perfume of the summer air | At rosy dawn, the heaving ocean-­wave | That breaks in playful spray on glimmering sands,  | Bearing low whisperings from distant lands | Of those who never may return’. (Armstrong (1841–1865) was a contemporary of JBY and Edward Dowden at TCD, and is mentioned in this connection by WBY in a 1889 biographical notice of John Todhunter (CW 9, 87): Armstrong’s Poetical Works appeared in 1877.) 404. o’erworn] Cornell Early Poetry 2 reads ‘out-­ worn’ in MS2 here, but WBY has written ‘oerworn’. The sense is that of ‘Overworn’ (OED adj. 2: ‘Esp. of a person: worn out or exhausted

by age, work, etc.’): cp. Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, 135: ‘O’erworn, despised, rheumatic, and cold’ and Sonnet 63, 2: ‘With time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn’. 408–11.] WBY’s near-­repetition of 223–6 (for notes, see earlier) is not present in MS2: it may be intended, like repeated passages elsewhere in the poem, to suggest Homeric style. 416. Fasting and prayers] Cp. Luke 2.37: ‘And she [Anna] was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the Temple, but served with fastings and prayers night and day’, and 1 Cor. 7.5: ‘Defraud you not one the other, except with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer, and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your inconstancy’.



420 425 430 435 440

The Wanderings of Oisin

577

Loosed long ago from heaven’s gate, For his last days to lie in wait. When once beside the shore I stood, A sea-­worn waif came floating by. I drew it forth; the staff of wood, It was of some dead warrior’s lance. I turned it in my hands; the stains Of war were on it, and I wept, Remembering how along the plains, Equal to good or evil chance, In war the noble Fenians stept. Then softly to me Niam came, And caught my hands and spake no word, Save only many times my name, In murmurs like a frighted bird. We passed in silence o’er the mead, By woods of moss, by lawns of clover, And once more saddled the white steed, For well we knew the old was over, And rode and stood beside the shore. I heard one say, ‘Within his eyes The human sadness dawns once more;’ I saw not who; ’neath other skies My dreams were living. Now the hoof

421.] A [wave del.] worn wrief came [swimming del.] ^floating^ by MS2. waif] WBY uses the word with something of the technical meaning of OED 1 a. Law: ‘A piece of property which is found ownerless and which, if unclaimed within a fixed period after due notice given, falls to the lord of the manor; e.g. an article washed up on the seashore’. 423. warrior’s lance] Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lady of the Lake IV, iv, 8: ‘can rouse like the warrior’s lance’. 427–8.] or evil chance  | In war, the WO. The punctuation adopted in the present text is that of WBY’s corrections in Morgan; the comma in 425 is also deleted in Princeton and Skipsey. Fenians] Fians MS2.

430. spake no word] A common heroic archaism, but one especially favoured by Aubrey de Vere, in whose Poetical Works (1884) it occurs on seven separate occasions. 433. passed in silence] rode together del. MS2. Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Foray of Queen Meave: Or, The Tain Bo Cualgné’, V, 649: ‘then passed in silence by’. 436. well we knew] each one knew del. MS2. 438. Within his eyes] Though now unusual, in fact a fairly common poetic phrase: precedents in poets probably known to WBY include some in R. Southey’s The Curse of Kehama, Byron’s The Siege of Corinth, and W. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise. 439. human sadness] see note to 176 above.

578

The Wanderings of Oisin

445 450 455

Pressed on the ever-­trembling roof Of murmuring ocean, and behind us The isle loomed largely in the light Of languid evening that entwined us. The faeries moved among the fountains, The rivers, and the wood’s old night. Some danced like shadows on the mountains; And others sat them by the sea, Each forehead, like an obscure star, Bent low above each hookèd knee, And sang, and with a dreamy gaze Watched the old sun that in sea-­ways Half slumbered with his saffron blaze; And as they sang, the painted birds Beat time with their bright wings and feet. Like drops of honey came their words Thus on the waters, far and sweet, And fainter than a young lamb’s bleat.

442–3. ever-­trembling roof Of ocean] Cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867) XIV, 386: ‘beneath our trembling roof of sea’. 443.] murmuring ocean] Cp. Willam Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), XII 331–2: ‘the human discontent in murmuring motion | Round every limit, like the murmuring ocean’. 443.] [Of ocean [of the trembling roof del.] fragile dome Of sea god manahans dim home As we rode on the Isle behind us Loomed largely in the [misty del.] light del.] MS2. Manannan (Manannán MacLir) is god of the sea, mentioned in all four principal cycles of Irish mythic narrative. WBY decides not to name the god at this point in the poem, reserving him for the second part of the narrative: see note to II, 165. William Hamilton Drummond, Clontarf: A Poem (1822) I, 350–1 pictures the sea with ‘sponge and coralline, | And urchin’s fragile dome’.

445. languid evening] Perhaps cp. Mary Robinson, Poetical Works (1824), ‘Elegy to the Memory of Werter’, 5–6: ‘When languid evening, sinking to repose,  | Her filmy mantle o’er the landscape throws’. 446.] A fairy band beyond the fountains MS2. 449.] Another band beside the sea del. And others sang beside the sea del. MS2. 447. old night] cp. Milton, Paradise Lost I, 543: ‘chaos and old night’. 449^50.] And over each a drooping tree MS2. 452. dreamy gaze] saffron blaze del. MS2. Perhaps cp. R.W. Buchanan, Undertones (1864), ‘Polypheme’s Passion’, 616: ‘To lift thy dreamy gaze from the soft sod’. 455. the painted birds] JBY underlined ‘painted’ in his copy, and wrote there: ‘O, let us have done with “the painted birds” (pictaeque volucres) Nature does not “paint,” – nor “gild” either,  – nor even “silver.” ’ The Latin words are from Aeneid IV, 525, rendered by Dryden as ‘parti-­colour’d fowl’ (the general meaning seems to be ‘colourful’, with ‘painted’ used as a metaphor for this – evidently, to JBY’s displeasure). WBY would already have known



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60 4 ‘Swift are the years of a warrior’s pride;   It passeth away, and is heard of no longer. In honour soon by his master’s side   Sits a younger and a stronger. His toothless hound at his nerveless feet, 465   The warrior dreams in an aged leisure Of the things that his heart still knows were sweet –   Of war, and the chase, and hunting, and pleasure; And blows on his hands in the fire’s warm blaze;   In the house of his friend, of his kin, of his brother. 470 He hath over lingered his welcome; the days,   Grown desolate, whisper and sigh to each other. ‘But never with us where the wild fowl chases   His shadow along in the evening blaze, Will the softness of youth be gone from our faces, 475   Or love’s first tenderness die in our gaze. ‘A storm of birds in the Asian trees   Like tulips in the air a-­winging, And the gentle waves of the summer seas   That raise their heads and wander singing,

the phrase from Shelley, ‘Alastor’ (1816), 465: ‘Or painted bird, sleeping beneath the moon’. 460.] [Mutable years hath del.] Short are the years of a warrior’s pride MS2. warrior’s pride] Cp. Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes, 192: ‘On what foundation stands the warrior’s pride?’ and Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872) IV, 716: ‘to aggrandize a single warrior’s pride’. 464. nerveless] OED adj. 1.b: ‘Of the body or its parts: lacking energy, weak, listless, limp’. Cp. Keats, ‘The Fall of Hyperion: A  Dream’, 323: ‘His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead’. 467. war, and the chase] Cp. W. Cowper, The Task I, 608: ‘War and the chase engross the savage whole’. 468. warm blaze] chill blaze MS2. 473. evening blaze] A fire made after nightfall, as in W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lady of the Lake IV, xiv, 3–4: ‘The evening blaze does Alice raise, | And Richard is fagots bringing’. 475. die in] cease from MS2.

476–80.] MS2 begins with the cancelled line, ‘Full soon is the rose in his crimson slain’ before continuing to 481: on the facing verso, WBY drafts the passage thus: [Away in The birds in ^among^ the shadowy Indian trees del.] Bright birds that tremble in the trees Of India like tulips winging And the languid waves of summer seas That raise their heads and wander singing By age’s weariness are slain 476. a storm of birds] Possibly cp. Thomas Aird, Poetical Works, 1878, ‘A Winter Day: Morning’, 28–9: ‘all heaven is filled | With a wild storm of birds!’ 479. wander singing] WBY’s slightly odd conceit here may be a maritime twist on the conventional diction of the sentimental Irish ballad, such as ‘The Hills of Connemara’ by John Keegan Casey in A Wreath of Shamrocks (1866),

580

The Wanderings of Oisin

80 4 By age’s weariness are slain,   And the long grey grasses, whose tenderest touches Stroked the young winds as they rolled on the plain,   The osprey of sorrow goes after and clutches, And they cease with a sigh of “Unjust! Unjust!” 485   And “A weariness soon is my speed,” says the mouse, And the kingfisher turns to a ball of dust,   And the roof falls in of his tunnelled house. ‘But never the years in the isle’s soft places   Will scatter in ruin the least of our days, 490 Or the softness of youth be gone from our faces,   Or love’s first tenderness die in our gaze. ‘Old grows the hare as she plays in the sun,   And gazes around her with eyes of brightness; Ere half the swift things that she dreamt on were done, 495   She limps along in an aged whiteness. And even the sun, the day’s castle-­warder,   That scares with his bustle the delicate night, And shakes o’er the width of the sea-­world border   The odorous weight of his curls of light,

25–6: ‘O’er Clifden’s slopes our mountain girls | Now wander singing blithely’. WBY mentioned Casey amongst ‘many another name’ in ‘the blue ballad books’ ‘dear wherever the Irish are’ in his piece ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ for The Leisure Hour of Nov. 1889 (CW 9, 106–7). 481.] And the grasses that stooped with tenderest touches MS2. grey grasses] Cp. Shelley, Alastor (1816), 10: ‘the grey grass and bare boughs’, and A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882) I, 763: ‘the grey grass rough as old rent hair’. tenderest touches] Cp. John Banim, The Celt’s Paradise (1821), Second Duan, 47: ‘I felt a cheek of tenderest touch’. 482.] The youth of the winds that [sigh del.] rolled on the plain MS2. the young winds] Cp. Shelley, ‘The Sensitive Plant’ I, 2: ‘And the young winds fed it with silver dew’. Perhaps also cp. John Keegan Casey, Reliques of John K. Casey (1878), ‘Come, darling, come again’, 5: ‘Come when the young winds whisper low’.

485. a weariness] a weary now del. MS2. WBY’s use of ‘a weariness’ (OED n.3: ‘Something that wearies’) may recall Ecclesiastes 12.12: ‘of making many books no end, and much study a weariness of the flesh’. 488. soft] OED Soft adj. I.1.c. ‘Pleasing to the eye; free from ruggedness or asperity’. 495. limps along] Cp. Keats, ‘The Eve of St  Agnes’ (1821), 3: ‘The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass’. 496. the day’s castle-­warder] the day castle’s warder WO. Corrected thus in Ellis: although the correction is not made in any of the other presentation copies of WO, it makes better sense than the printed phrase; in MS2, the words ‘that mighty’ are deleted and replaced with ‘the days castles warder’ (the last letter of ‘castles’ is very faint, and has possibly been partly erased). WBY’s correction in Ellis is adopted in the present text. 498. sea-­world] Cp. KT, Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems (1885), ‘King Cophetua’s Queen’, 81–2: ‘Like a sea-­world at noon the



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00 5 Like a bride bending over her mirror adorning,   May sleep in the end with the whole of his fate done, And the stars shall arise and say in the morning,   As they gaze at each other, “Oh, where is that great one?” ‘But never the years in our isle’s soft places 505   Shall blow into ruin our musical days, Or the softness of youth be gone from our faces,   Or love’s first tenderness die in our gaze.’ 510

The singing melted in the night; The isle was over now and gone; The mist closed round us; pearly light On horse and sea and saddle shone. Part II The Island of Victories

N

ow, man of crosiers, phantoms drew around Once more – the youth and lady, deer and hound; Half lost in vapour, shadows called our names, And then away, away like spiral flames.

sweet shades grew | Green, through the pale leaves streamed the strong gold light’. 499.] With WBY’s ‘odorous  .  .  . light’ cp. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh, ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’, 850–1: ‘spicy rods, such as illume at night | The bowers of Tibet, and send forth odorous light’. 500. bending over] hanging over del. MS2. 506. be gone] die out del. MS2. 508–511.] The singing melted in the night The isle’s last vestige far off blinked The mist closed round in pearly light Round ^on^ horse and sea and [saddle del.] shadows winked MS2 508. melted in the night] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘May: The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, 755: ‘Until the dusk had melted into night’. 509.] over now and gone] ‘Over and gone’ is a near-­ tautology common in

nineteenth-­ century poetry, often used of weather conditions, e.g. Wordsworth, ‘Written in March, While Resting at the Foot of Brother’s Water’ (1801), 20: ‘the rain is over and gone!’ Part II] Book II Morgan 1.] And now once more the phantoms gathered round MS2. man of crosiers] WBY consistently prefers this spelling of crozier in the poem. In Lamentation, this is one of the forms of address from Oisin to Patrick, e.g. ‘cleric of the croziers’ (269), ‘O Patrick of the white croziers’ (285). 3. half-­lost] half hid MS2. half-­lost in vapour] Cp. Byron, Don Juan Canto I st. 218,: ‘Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour’. 4. away, away] away they ran del. MS2.

582 5 10 15 20

The Wanderings of Oisin

‘These forms?’ ‘Vex not with speech the phantoms dread.’ And now sang Niam, swaying her bright head And her bright body – now of fay and man; Things done ere God first was or my old line began; Wars shadowy, vast, exultant; fairy kings Wedding the queens of earthly lands with rings Of sea-­sprung pearl, and queens of fairy lands Taking the mortal warriors by the hands; How such a warrior never turned his gaze On the old sorrows of his human days. They love and kiss in islands far away, Rolled round with music of the sighing spray, Those warriors of a long-­forgotten day, Happy as children with unwithering lips, Unlanguid as the birds’, in proud companionships; They walk on shores unseen of oaring galleys,

spiral flames] Cp. J. C. Mangan, ‘Love’, 6: ‘the Soul of Love in spiral flames would mount for ever higher’ (see also note to I, 344). 5. vex not with speech] ‘Vex not’ is a common injunction in poetry, as e.g. in Tennyson’s ‘The Poet’s Mind’ (‘Vex not thou the poet’s mind’), deriving ultimately from Shakespeare, and especially from Kent in King Lear V iii 314: ‘Vex not his ghost’. 6. sang Niam] young Niam Ellis, Morgan. 7. body – now of] body sang of Ellis, Morgan. 7–13.] Once more sang Niam swaying her bright form Of things that ere my ancient line was born Were [was del.] [vast and del.] shadowy ^vast^ exalted ^fairy^ kings Who wedded [earthly queens del.] the queens of earthly lands with rings Of sea sprung pearl [and del.] or queens of faery land Who took a mortal ^earthly^ warrior by the hand MS2 8.] WBY makes this line (unlike the version in draft) an alexandrine. It is a pentameter again in the revision made in both Ellis and Morgan: ‘Before God was or my old line began’.

9. shadowy, vast] Cp. Robert Browning, Paracelsus (1838), III, 923: ‘Two sorts of knowledge; one – vast, shadowy’. 13.] Who took an earthly warrior by the hand MS2. such a warrior] such a one MS2. 15^16.] Those warriors of a long forg[otten] del. MS2. 16. Rolled round] The phrase, placed at the beginning of the line, echoes Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’, 7: ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course’. sighing spray] ocean spray MS2. 17.] Line deleted by WBY in Morgan. 18. unwithering] unb[l]anc[h]ing MS2. 19. Unlanguid] WBY’s coinage, unrecorded in OED. Mortimer Collins (1827–1876) had written of the ‘languid bird | Amid the boughs abiding’ in his ‘A Greek Idyll’ (The Inn of Strange Meetings (1871)), but this seems to be the sole (and obscure) instance of avian languidness in poetry. A more probable influence on WBY’s odd choice of negative here is Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos Eaters’, 5: ‘All round the coast the languid air did swoon’. birds’] birds WO: WBY supplies the needed apostrophe in Ellis; the correction



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Or wrestle with their peers in dewy valleys. So sang young Niam, swaying her bright head, No longer glad as on that morning, sped To join his brothers in the home of years A hundred seasons; for a sound of tears Floated in all her singing. Half entranced I lay, as over sea the light hooves glanced Flashing – I know not were it hours or days, Yet dimly deem I that the morning rays Shone many times among the glimmering flowers In Niam’s hair – when rose a world of towers And blackness in the dark. The sea roared round, Crazed with its own interminable sound, And when the white steed saw what blackness gleamed, He shivering paused, and raised his head and screamed. But Niam with her hands caressed his ears, And called him sweetest names and soothed his fears. Nearer the castle came we. A vast tide, Whitening the surge afar, fan-­formed and wide,

made in Morgan is a revision of the whole line (perhaps to avoid its being a hexameter) to ‘Unlanguid as the birds’ companionships’. companionships] This unusual plural perhaps recalls, in connection with birds, D.G. Rossetti’s sonnet ‘Beauty and the Bird’, 4–5: ‘Till her fond bird, with little turns and dips, | Piped low to her of sweet companionships’ (see also note to I, 76). 27. the light hooves glanced] our tall steed pranced MS2. Cp. Aubrey DeVere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘St. Thomas of Canterbury’ I ii 98: ‘Hark, hark, the light hoofs dancing in the court’. 28. were it] was it MS2. 30. glimmering flowers] The phrase occurs in J. Noel Paton, Poems by a Painter (1861), ‘To the Summer Wind’, 39–40: ‘Through the glimmering flowers  | Of the ocean bowers’ (see also note to I, 7). 32. in the dark] in the night MS2. roared] rolled WO. In Ellis and Morgan, WBY revises ‘rolled’ to ‘roared’, and the present text is emended accordingly. WBY’s holograph in MS2 continues:

[T]he sea hissed round As though some nameless [secret del.] memory always ground The demons of the surge in their vast fields Below and made them toss and shake their shields These lines are marked by WBY in the margin, and on the facing verso leaf he writes ‘The sea rolled round  | Crazed with its own interminable sound’. 37. sweetest] WBY began to write ‘by sweet’ here, before cancelling and writing ‘sweetest’, MS2. soothed] smoothened MS2. 38.-­47.] Nearer the castle came we. A vast tide [Sprang del.] Dull gleaming like a sea snake swelled in pride Spewed on the ocean with a sullen pride Round [^out of^ del.] ^forth^ from the bowels of that castle’s black Old basalt pillars marred of many a hack And hew from swords primeval shadowy swung

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Sprang from a gateway walled around with black Basaltic pillars marred with hew and hack By mace and spear and sword of sea-­gods, nails Of some forgotten fiend. Now none assails That old, sea-­weedy, squared, three hundred feet Uplifted gateway. With the flashing beat

Or spears the demons of the ocean flung Ere ^ever^ man was thrice a hundred feet Sprang through the vapour; MS2 38. vast tide] Cp. M. Arnold, ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ (1853), 616–17: ‘as the vast tide | Of the bright rocking Ocean’. 40–41. black  | Basaltic pillars] Perhaps cp. W.H. Drummond, The Giant’s Causeway (1811), III 242–3, and 246–7: ‘gushing dense and strong, | The black basaltic deluge pours along [.  .  .] by the rapid shock  | Of frigid waters changed to pillared rock’. D.G. Rossetti’s ‘The Burden of Nineveh’ features ‘pillars of basalt’ (124), while William Sharp’s ‘The Caves of Staffa’ (Poems (1884)) has ‘the green Atlantic seas wash past | The mighty pillars of basalt’ (1–2). Cp. also A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), ‘Summer in Auvergne’, 29–32: ‘Higher than the pillared height  | Of that strange cliff-­side bright  | With basalt towers whose might | Strong time bows down’. 41. hew and hack] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘The Wanderers’, 616–17: ‘Nought was it now but hew and hack | And stumble’. 42.] By mace and sword of sea-­gods, and by nails Ellis By mace and sword of sea-­gods and by the nails Morgan. The WO text is not emended in the present edition, though WBY was evidently not happy with this line. 45.-­6. flashing beat | Of Danaan hooves] WBY’s slightly awkward mixture of aural and visual here, while primarily influenced by rhyming needs, is also a way of complicating the potential simplicity of ‘beat of hooves’ or ‘flashing hooves’ through combination. WBY would not have been pleased to know that, although it sounds as though it is a commonplace, the

only poetic user of ‘flashing hoofs’ had been Denis Florence MacCarthy, who liked the phrase enough to use it twice in his Poems (1884): in ‘Alice and Una: A  Tale of Ceim-­ An-­Eich’, 150: ‘From his flashing hoofs who shall lock the eagle homes of Malloc’, and in his centenary poem in honour of Daniel O’Connell, 177: ‘With eyes of fire and flashing hoofs outflung’. Danaan] WBY’s first use of ‘Danaan’ in the poem [misspelled ‘Danian’ in MS2). The Tuatha Dé Danaan [literally, the god-­people of Ana] are the race of pre-­christian gods in Ireland. In a note to The Cromlech at Howth (1864), Sir Samuel Ferguson gave the gloss: ‘The Irish annalists ascribe the introduction of Druidism and Necromancy to a nation from the North of Europe, called the Tuatha De Danaan, who are said to have invaded and occupied the island.’ In the line to which his note refers (8: ‘The Danaan druids sleep’), Ferguson gives ‘Danaan’ [an Irish proper noun, in the genitive], an English adjectival force which WBY goes on to adopt. The word, particularly once it is used wrongly in this way as an adjective, is liable to call up Homeric echoes, since in Homer one common term for the Greeks is the Danaoi, usually rendered in translation as the Danaans. There is no connection between this and the Irish term, but the temptation to find (or at least suggest) one was strong in the nineteenth century: in Ferguson’s later note to his ‘The Danaan druids sleep’ line, in Lays of the Western Gael (1865), he writes (241): Irish historic tradition abounds with allusions to the Tuatha-­de-­Danaans, i.e., the god-­tribes of the Danaans, an early race of conquerors from the north of Europe,



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Of Danaan hooves we urged our way between Two walls, a roof, a flood: there trembling green Of surging phosphorus alone gave light. At last the moon and stars shone, and a flight Of many thousand steps. On either side, Fog-­dripping, huge, enthroned above the tide, Sat forms of stone; between the lids of one The imaged meteors had shone and run, And had disported in the eyes still jet For centuries, and stars had dawned and set. He seemed the watcher for a sign. The other Stretched his long arm to where, a misty smother,

versed in music and poetry, as well as in the other then reputed arts of civilised life. They are said to have reached the shores of the Baltic from Greece by the same route supposed by the pseudo Orpheus to have been taken by the Argonauts, and by which Homer also seems to have conducted Ulysses. A  Greek taste, however derived, is certainly discoverable in the arms and monuments ascribed to this people. Popular mythology regards this race of fairies and demons as of Danaan origin. 46. urged our way] OED urge v. III 6.c. ‘To press or pursue (one’s flight, way, the chase); to hasten or accelerate (one’s pace, etc.)’. Cp. J.J. Callanan, Poems (1861), ‘The Revenge of Donal Comm’, 293: ‘All silently he urged his way’. 49–55.] At last shone forth the moon and stars. A flight Of many thousand steps arose like night For darkness sat on either side Colossal pedestalled above the tide Two forms of stone. [On the de withered eyes del] ^between the lids of^ one Upraised, the mirrored ^imaged^ meteors [had dawned and set del] ^had run^ And had disported in the eyes still jet [And del] ^For^ centuries, [the del] ^and^ stars had dawned and set. MS2.

50. On either side] Sat either side WO. The change WBY made in Ellis and Morgan copies has been adopted in the present edition. 50–60.] This scene resembles that in WBY’s abandoned Spenserian poem, ‘When to its end o’er ripened July nears’, 181–195. 51. huge, enthroned above] pedestalled above WO. This change, made in Ellis and Morgan is adopted in the present edition. ‘Pedestalled’ is a favourite term of Robert Browning’s: it occurs nine times in his poetry (e.g. in Balustion’s Adventure (1886), 2459–60: ‘So stands a statue: pedestalled sublime  | Only that it may wave the thunder off ’), but the word is otherwise extremely rare. 52. Sat forms] Huge forms WO. The change here, made in Ellis and Morgan, is in line with WBY’s alteration to 50, and is adopted in the present edition. With ‘huge forms’, perhaps cp. Shelley, The Witch of Atlas (1821), 510: ‘mighty wakes | Of those huge forms’. 53. meteors had shone] Cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam (1817) I, st. 26: The earliest dweller of the world, alone, Stood on the verge of chaos. Lo! Afar, O’er the wide wild abyss two meteors shone, Sprung from the depth of its tempestuous jar: A blood-­red Comet and the Morning Star Mingling their beams in combat. 57. Stretched] Raised MS2.

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The stream churned, churned, and churned, his lips apart, As though unto his never slumbering heart 60 He told of every froth-­drop hissing, flying. We mounted on the stair, the white steed tying, To one vast foot, froth-­splashed, with curved toes lying Half in the unvesselled sea. We’d mounted far; So much remained that on the evening star 65 I thought the end had rested, when these words From high above, like feathers of young birds That fan the pulses of delighted air, Came swimming sadly down the mighty stair. ‘My brothers and my sisters live and thrive, 70 And chase the wild bee homeward to his hive   Afar in ancient Eri,

smother] OED smother n. 2.b., ‘A confused turmoil or welter of foam or water’. Cp. John Todhunter, The Banshee and Other Poems (1888), ‘The Coffin Ship’, 1–3: ‘Storm, and the moon like a waif, | Homeless, the baffled phantom of hope, | In a smother of hurrying rack’. 58.] The stream churned, churned, and churned. His lips were rolled apart, WO. The stream [rolled del.] churned ever on lips rolled apart MS2. This extremely cumbersome alexandrine in WO was shortened by WBY in Morgan and Ellis, and the change is incorporated in the present text. 59. never slumbering heart] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Foray of Queen Maeve: Or, The Tain Bo Cualgné’, 127: ‘mightier far, with never slumbering hearts’, and R. Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810), VII 132–4: ‘rouse his slumbering heart, | And make him yet put forth his arm to raise | The thunder’. 62. To one [prone del.] unmeasured foot. We’d mounted far MS2. 63. unvesselled] The word appears to be WBY’s coinage. 67. the pulses of delighted air] Cp. Arthur O’Shaughnessy, Lays of France (1874), ‘The

Lay of Yvenec’, 300: ‘In all the pulses of the air’, and also perhaps cp. Lanan Blanchard (1803–1845), Poetical Works (1876), ‘A Poet’s Bride’, XIV 15–16 [on birds]: ‘But all that moved in the delighted air,  | Stilled at their melodies and grew more fair’. 69–92.] These lines are marked as ‘Italic’ in Morgan, though in none of the other copies of WO amended by WBY. 70. chase the wild bee] Cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Adopted Child’, 10: ‘they chase the bee o’er the scented thyme’. chase] trace MS2. 71. Afar] At home MS2. Eri] Ireland. This is one Irish form of the name ‘Eriu’ (modern Irish, ‘Eire’, anglicized form ‘Erin’) which belonged to a tutelary goddess who came to personify the country. In the twelfth-­century Lebor Gábala [The Book of Invasions], this goddess is promised that the land will be named after her by Amairgrin, the poet of the invading Milesians. WBY’s spelling in MS2 is ‘Eary’, giving (along with the rhymes) an indication of his intended pronunciation; in Proofs Texas (here and at II 92, as well as III, 213) the spelling is corrected to ‘Eri’ from ‘Earie’. The form ‘Eri’, though revised in spelling later, was fairly common in



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By lakes and meadow lands and lawns afar, Where goes to gaze the restless-­footed star   Of twilight when he’s weary. 75 ‘They murmur like young partridge in the morn, When they awake upspringing; with loud horn   They chase at noon the deer. When the earliest dew-­washed star from eve hath leant, Then muse they on the household wool intent, 80   Or carve a dreadful spear. ‘Oh, sigh, awake and go you forth for me; Flutter along the froth-­lips of the sea,   And go you close to them. From sleeper unto sleeper murmur you. 85 If they still slumber, touch their eyelids blue,   And shake their coverlet’s hem, ‘And tell them how I weep, until they weep; Then, mounted on a heron, o’er the deep   Return when you are weary, 90 And tell me how my kindred’s tears are welling, And one whom you will go to without telling,   Say how he weeps in Eri.’ 95

Crashed on the stones, upon the glimmering stones, Our tread, as rose and fell the liquid tones Of knitted music. Oft the fond repining

WBY’s writings (including some poems) into the 1890s. See notes on ‘Eri’ in ‘Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected from the Irish Novelists’, and ‘Mourn – And then Onward’. 73. goes to gaze] goes ^to gaze^ MS2. This reversal of the usual idea of star-­gazing (so that it is stars who gaze at people, rather than vice versa) comes in Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam (1818), VII st. xxvii, 4: ‘The eternal stars gaze on us!’ 74. twilight] morn MS2. 78–80.] They muse at eve before my father’s tent | Or weave they on the household wool intent | Or [round del.] carve a dreadful spear MS2. 85. eyelids blue] each eye of blue ^eyelids blue^ MS2. WBY’s decision in composition here

removes the possibility of a painful touch directly to the blue eyes, though at the cost of suggesting blue eye make-­up. But cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘A Ballad of Life’, 8: ‘Sorrow had filled her shaken eyelids’ blue’. 94. liquid tones] Perhaps cp. James Montgomery, Works (1850), ‘The World before the Flood’, II, 190–1: ‘music floats,  | In liquid tones so voluble and wild’. Perhaps also cp. Alfred Hayes, The Last Crusade and Other Poems (1887), ‘The Storming of Nazareth’, 276–7: ‘the liquid tones  | Of woman’ [for another possible echo from the same book, see note on 100 later].

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Flowed on anew, and oft, anew declining, Sobbed into silence. We had mounted feet Full many more, when peered a maiden sweet Down on us with her eyes like funeral tapers. 100 Her face seemed fashioned all of moonlit vapours, So pale! And sounds of wonder her lips uttered, As like a ruddy moth they waved and fluttered. To eagles twain that, full of ancient pride, Stood lonely, with dim eyeballs on each side, 105 With chain sea-­rotted, round her middle tied, Chained was she. On their wings the hundredth year Scarce left a whitening feather, grey and sere; And through their eyes no light of moon or day Smote on their brains that dwelt remembering aye. 110 And thus, my late-­lost Niam, didst thou say: ‘I bring thee a deliverer from far away, Oh maiden.’ ‘Are ye spirits of the sea, Or of the flaked clouds?’ ‘Not so, for we Come from the Isle of the Living.’ ‘Then get ye 115 Once more unto your flowers, for none may fight, With hope, mine enemy. As he by night Goes dropping from his eyes a languid light,

99. eyes like funeral tapers] Cp. (along with the rhyme on ‘vapours’) Thomas Hood, Whims and Oddities (1826), ‘A Valentine’, 3–6: ‘Those cruel eyes, like two funereal tapers, | Have only lighted me the way to death.  | Perchance, thou wilt extinguish them in vapours, | When I am gone’. 100. moonlit vapours] Perhaps cp. Alfred Hayes, The Last Crusade and Other Poems (1887), ‘The Burial of Saint Louis’, 120–1: ‘the wreaths | Of moonlit vapour’. Hayes (1857–1936) achieved some success with his poetry, and was to be reviewed favourably by Oscar Wilde, amongst others; he became an associate of Richard Le Gallienne in the 1890s. Neither this nor the possible echo earlier at 94 is at all conclusive, but it is possible that WBY saw a copy of the newly published The Last Crusade in 1887 before composing these lines.

103, 104.] Order of these lines is reversed in MS2. 103. ancient] aged MS2. 108. light] beams MS2. 109. on] through del. MS2. 110. late-­lost] [long del.] lost [now del.] lost MS2. When WBY finally arrives at ‘late-­lost’, he echoes Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), XII, 1–2: ‘Tears of the widower, when he sees | A late-­lost form that sleep reveals’. 113. flaked clouds] Perhaps cp. Henry Ellison (1811–1880), The Poetry of Real Life (1851), ‘Evening Thoughts, Written Near Geneva’, 1–2: ‘in the sky | Yon lazy-­flaked clouds hang stilly’. WBY’s ‘flaked’ (like Ellison’s) is disyllabic. 117. languid light] Cp. Tennyson, ‘Lady Clara Vere de Vere’, 59: ‘The languid light of your proud eyes’. WBY’s adjective is close in sense



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The demons of the wilds and winds for fright Jabber and scream. Yet he, for all his bold 120 And flowing strength, with age is subtle-­souled. None may beguile him, and his passions cold Long while, are whips of steel.’ ‘Is he so dread?’ Said Niam. ‘Ay, and huge. Where ye have led A jubilant life among the leaves, return, 125 Young warrior.’ ‘Nay,’ I answered, ‘my hands burn For battle.’ ‘Fly thee from a thing so dread. It brings no shame upon a human head To fly a spirit,’ Niam weeping said. Though from beseeching they desisted not, 130 They stirred my spacious soul in me no jot – My soul, once glory of its ancient line, Now old and mouselike. For an answering sign I burst the chain. Still earless, nerveless, blind,

to OED 3.b.: ‘faint, dull, not vivid’. On the verso leaf of MS2 facing this, WBY writes some lines on a steep diagonal, in which ‘languid’ and ‘unlanguid’ feature [partially re-­ punctuated and reconstructed here]: A feverish spirit closed in languid flesh, Weary of the rolling world, Weary of my spirit’s lightness, Weary of your meteor hurled O’er the sea, unlanguid brightness, Weary ere its flame was furled In the ocean’s vapoury whiteness, Turn I to a love out-­loved. 120. subtle-­souled] Cp. Shelley, Peter Bell the Third, V, 6–7: ‘He was a mighty poet – and | A subtle-­ souled psychologist’, and A. Swinburne, Songs of the Spring Tides (1880), ‘On the Cliffs’, 300 and 306: ‘God’s daughter, subtle-­souled’. 121–122. His passions and his angers long grown cold | Are whips of steel del. MS2. 123. Where ye have led] When ye have led WO. The change adapted in the present text is one

made by WBY consistently in Ellis, Garnett, Williams, and Skipsey. 125. hands] limbs del. MS2. 126. a thing so dread] WBY may have picked up this phrase from John Todhunter, Alcestis: A Dramatic Poem (1879), III iii 103–4: ‘O life, life, life! Art thou a thing so dread | That we must dress thee in fantastic tales?’ 129. Though from] Those maidens del. MS2. 130. spacious soul] This unusual phrase features three times in the work of T.C. Irwin: in Songs and Romances (1878), ‘Summer Wanderings’, 29: ‘An April heart, a spacious soul’, and ‘A Glance at Herrick’, 12: ‘our Shakespeare’s spacious soul’; and in Versicles (1856, repr. 1882), ‘Shakespeare’s Drinking Bowl’, 4: ‘that cast across his spacious soul’. 132. for an answering sign] Cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Siege of Valencia’, IX, 57: ‘To stream above me, for an answering sign’. 133. burst the chain] In many ways a commonplace functional phrase; but WBY may

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Rolled in the things of the unhuman mind, Wrapt round in some dim memory, it seemed – Still earless, nerveless, blind, the eagles dreamed. And up the stair we toiled to a high door, Wherethrough a hundred horsemen on the floor Basaltic, might have passed. We held our way And stood within the hall. A misty ray Clothing him round, I saw a seagull float Drifting on high, and with a straining throat Shouted and hailed him. Still he hung content, For never mortal cry so far hath sent. Not e’en thy God could have thrown down that hall; Stabling his unloosed lightnings in that stall,

be alert here to echoes of moments of melodramatic emancipation in the context of national struggle. Aubrey De Vere’s Poetical Works (1884) collected a sonnet ‘To Charles Eliot Norton: On Reading his ‘Vita Nuova’ of Dante, March 28th 1860’, in which the United States ‘early burst the chain weak nations bear  | Weeping’ (12–13). In Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poems (1884), ‘The Voice and Pen’ 5–7: ‘What burst the chain far over the main, | And brightened the captive’s den? | ’Twas the fearless pen and the voice of power’. Less metaphorically charged is Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, where in ‘The Holy Grail’ (1869), 804: ‘I burst the chain, I sprang into the boat’. 133, 136. earless, nerveless, blind] touchless, sightless, blind MS2. 133. earless] WBY may have taken this word from Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (1803), 4: ‘Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den’. A. Swinburne’s Songs Before Sunrise (1871) has similar liberationist impetus in ‘A Marching Song’, 76–7: ‘These eyeless times and earless, | Shall they not see and hear?’ In W. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘October: The Man Who Never Laughed Again’, a ‘Song’ has the lines: ‘think of these  | That stand around as well-­ wrought images, | Earless and eyeless as these trembling trees’. 139. Basaltic] This word brings Ossianic associations in its connection with the Giant’s

Causeway in Co. Antrim (a site associated in legend with Finn), whose basalt forms had been widely described in topographic poetry (including that of W.H. Drummond) since the eighteenth century. WBY’s Miltonic inversion, beginning a line, had in fact occurred already in Philip James Bailey, Festus (1877), IX, 1076–7: ‘long columnar jetty, and pillared pier  | Basaltic, crystal-­capped’ (referring to the Giant’s Causeway). We held our way] From this point, MS2 reads: A [skull-­like del.] dragonish head Of gaping basalt stones from the phosphorous bed Of unknown waters [were the del.] fished for eyes as drip Of vapour [drops fell del.] dropping slow from tooth and lip; Such was the door. 141. seagull] sea mew MS2. 144.] WBY’s word order is slightly confusing here: the meaning is, ‘For a mortal has never sent a cry so far’. MS2’s indefinite article before ‘mortal’ only marginally reduces the confusion: ‘For never a mortal sound so high hath sent’. 146.] Or built it. Stabling his lightnings in their stall MS2. 146. unloosed lightnings] By what may be a coincidence, WBY’s image and phrasing repeat that used in a poem by T.D. Sullivan



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He had gone whispering forth with cumbered heart, As though His hour were on Him. To the part More distant strode we. On the floor lay slime, Greenish and slippery. Time after time The netted marks of crawling scales sea-­sprung Some new, some printed when the place was young, Grey in the midst like a small rivulet’s flow, The captives’ footsteps written to and fro; And where our footfall ’lighted last there came A momentary gleam of phosphorous flame. Feebler and feebler shone the misty glare. Who brought us found a torch, and, with its flare Making a world about her, passed from sight Awhile, and came again, a second light Burning between her fingers, and in mine Laid it and sighed – a sword whose wizard shine Not loaded centuries might vapour. Ran Deep sunken on the blade’s length, ‘Mananan!’ Sea-­god, that once, to give his slaves content,

(1827–1914), the Parnellite (but later anti-­ Parnell) MP who was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1885–6, and who had written the words to ‘God Save Ireland’ in 1867. His Poems (1882) includes ‘Dunboy’, 7–9: ‘They shall soon know our worth | When our men sally forth | Like lightnings unloosed to the fray’. 151. The netted marks] We saw the marks Ellis. WBY makes no attempt to change the text here in any of the other marked copies of WO. sea-­sprung] WBY’s unusual phrase has a precedent in James Montgomery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘The Pelican Island’, V, 44: ‘Throughout this commonwealth of sea-­ sprung lands’. 152. Some new] We saw, some new WO. The deletion of the first words in Ellis and Morgan is another instance of WBY eliminating the poem’s occasional alexandrines (see also 156, 168, 195, 198, 227 and 239 below). 154. written] going MS2.

156. gleam of phosphorous] glimmer of vague phosphorous WO. WBY’s change in Ellis and Morgan is adopted in the present text. 157. shone] fell MS2. Feebler and feebler shone] Cp. Joseph Cottle, Alfred (1850), I, 252–3: ‘while her torch | Feebler, and feebler shone’. 161. fingers] hands del. MS2. 163. vapour] Probably OED vapour v. 2b., ‘To cause to pass away in the form of vapour’. Cp. John Donne, ‘The Expiration’, 1–2: ‘So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, | Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away’. 164. sunken] graving del. graven del. MS2. blade’s length] shining MS2. For Standish O’Grady’s use of ‘graved’ in describing the sword inscription, see note on 165. 165. slaves] soul MS2. It is tempting to see slaves as a misprint here: MS2’s ‘soul’ makes more sense, and is in keeping with the eventual revision of these lines in P95 (‘who in a

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Sprang dripping, and, with captive demons sent From the whole seven seas, those towers set

deep content’). However, none of the copies or proofs of WO which WBY annotated carries any correction to this word. 164. ‘Mananan!’] The Irish sea-­god Manannán Mac Lir, sometimes associated with the Tuatha Dé Danaan, but also having more ancient associations, features in all four of the major Irish cycles of ancient myth. The figure’s identity is linked closely to the Irish Sea (his name means ‘Son of the waves, of the Isle of Man/ Irish Sea’), and he rides across water in his chariot as though it were dry land. The sword of Manannán is Frecraid [the Answerer]: it can strike through any armour, and always deals a mortal blow. Lugh Lámfhota [Lugh of the Long Arm], the leader of the Tuatha Dé Danaan and in some traditions Manannán’s foster-­son, brings this sword with him from Tír na mBéo [the Island of the Living]. Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland vol. 2 (1880) mentions ‘Fraygarta, the sword of Mananan’, which shines ‘like glittering diamond . . . and on its starry sides there were graved verses in Ogham’ (279). Manannán’s principal dwelling is Emain Ablach [Emain of the Apples], an island imagined off the coast of Scotland. The Irish god has some attributes which resonate both with the demon WBY’s Oisin is shortly to encounter and with the cyclical nature of the encounter itself: he is a shape-­ shifter, able also to change colours, and the livestock he keeps can be eaten on one day only to return, alive and well, on another. Manannán features in some nineteenth-­century Irish poetry. With the spelling adopted by WBY, he is in R.D. Joyce’s Deirdre (1877), ‘The Feast in the House of Feilimid’, 217–18: ‘Since Mananan, the Sea-­god, first upthrew | The wild isle’s stony ribs unto the blue’, and in ‘The Capture of the Fomorian Galleys’ 220–33, where a description of his sword, as taken up by Naisi, might have influenced WBY: And as with curious eyes the hero gazed On the gold hilt that bright with diamonds blazed,

A spirit voice through his whole being ran, That seemed to say, “The gift of Mananan! Take it, and fear not!” Then with eager hand He grasped the hilt, and plucked the dazzling brand From the soft earth, and from the tent withdrew Into the light, and looked with wonder new On the great blade whereon was picturèd All shapes that live and move in Ocean’s bed. Long time he gazed upon its mimic sea, Then whirled the weapon round full joyously O’er his proud head in circles of bright flame That made the night breeze whistle as it came. Joyce’s Blanid (1879) mentions Manannán in connection with ‘Mana’ (probably the Isle of Man, though it is almost certain that the god took his name from the island, and not vice versa), where a castle ‘by magic might uphurled’ is ‘Built . . . by Mananan of old’ (‘The Taking of Mana’, 177–8). Another version of Manannán with which WBY is likely to have been familiar is that given in Samuel Ferguson’s Congal (1872). In Book III, 150–175, the poet Ardan informs Congal on the subject of the sea-­god: King, thou describest by his bulk and by his clapping cloak A mighty demon of the old time, who with much dread and fear Once filled the race of Partholan; Manannan Mor Mac Lir, Son of the Sea. In former times there lived not on the face Of Erin a sprite of bigger bulk or potenter to raise The powers of air by land or sea in lightning, tempest, hail, Or magical thick mist, than he; albeit in woody Fail Dwelt many demons at that time: but being so huge of limb,



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Rooted in foam. There mightier masters met To rule more mighty men, and to the world 170 Shouted. With fire of hair about her swirled, The stranger watched the sword; but Niam far, Scared of its glittering like a meteor star, Stood timidly. Lest they should see some sight Of fear, I bade them go; and for the fight 175 Anointing, torch jammed down between the flags, Waited. Above, in endless carven jags,

Manannan had the overward of the coast allotted him, To stride it round, from cape to cape, daily; and if a fleet Hove into sight, to shake them down a sea-­fog from his feet; Or with a wafture of his cloak flap forth a tempest straight Would drive them off a hundred leagues; and so he kept his state In churlish sort about our bays and forelands, till at last Great Spanish Miledh’s mighty sons, for all he was so vast And fell a churl, in spite of him, by dint of blows, made good Their landing, and brought in their Druids: from which time forth, the brood Of Goblin people shun the light; some in the hollow sides Of hills lie hid; some hide beneath the brackish ocean-­tides; Some underneath the sweet-­well springs. Manannan, Poets say, Fled to the isle which bears his name, that eastward lies halfway Sailing to Britain; whence at times he wades the narrow seas, Revisiting his old domain, when evil destinies Impend o’er Erin: but his force and magic might are gone: And at such times ’tis said that he who, ’twixt twilight and dawn,

Meets him and speaks him, safely learns a year’s events to be. Ferguson here makes use of the tradition that Manannán was driven out with the Tuatha Dé Danaan by the Milesians, and associates him with the Isle of Man. It is possible that Ferguson’s conception of the sea-­god as the divinity in attendance whenever ‘evil destinies  | Impend o’er Erin’ influences WBY in his giving to Oisin Manannán’s sword for an allegorical (and perhaps politically allegorical) combat here. 168. in foam] in foam and clouds WO. The words ‘and clouds’ are del. in Ellis, Garnett, Morgan. 168–170.] In MS2 (where the lines are difficult to decipher) WBY has: Among the clouds, and there were more mighty masters, Sea-­zoned, star-­headed; mightier masters met To rule over mightier men, and to the world Shouted. Familiar with the sword, the stranger curled Before me on the flags. On the (otherwise empty) verso leaf facing, WBY has written ‘The lackies of the sun’. 172.] Watching its glittering like an angry star MS2. meteor star] Cp. Keats, Endymion (1820), II, 230: ‘Out-­ shooting sometimes, like a meteor-­star’.

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Lifted the dome, where face in carven face Melted and flowed; and in the self-­same place Hour after hour I waited, and the dome Windowless, pillarless, multitudinous home Of faces, watched me, and the leisured gaze Was loaded with the memory of days Buried and mighty. Thence I journeyed not Till the far doorway grew a burning blot Of misty dawn; when, circling round the hall, I found a door deep-­sunken in the wall, The least of doors; beyond the door a plain, Dusky and herbless, where a bubbling strain Rose from a little runnel on whose edge A dusky demon, dry as a withered sedge, Swayed, crooning to himself an unknown tongue. In a sad revelry he sang and swung, Bacchant and mournful, passing to and fro His hand along the runnel’s side, as though

180. windowless] Unwindowed MS2. For ‘windowless’, perhaps cp. Shelley, ‘Julian and Maddolo’, 101: ‘A windowless, deformed and dreary pile’. 182–3. Days| Buried] Cp. Keats, Endymion (1820), II, 7: ‘honey-­dew from buried days’. The lines immediately following (8–10) may have a bearing on WBY’s scene: ‘The woes of Troy, towers smothering o’er their blaze, | Stiff-­holden shields, far-­piercing spears, keen blades, | Struggling, and blood, and shrieks’. 187–188. a plain  | Dusky and herbless] Shelley has ‘midnight’s dusky plain’ in ‘Rosalind and Helen’(1819), 1044; he also uses ‘herbless plain’ four times: in the ‘Dedication’ to The Revolt of Islam (1819), 56: ‘Like bright Spring upon some herbless plain’; in ‘Orpheus’ (1820), 69: ‘Blackened with lichens, on a herbless plain’ and 104: ‘upon a desert herbless plain’; and ‘Music’ (1821), 5–6: ‘Like a herbless plain, for the gentle rain, | I gasp’. 189. a little runnel] Cp. Wordsworth, ‘Guilt and Sorrow’, 540: ‘Across the pebbly road a little runnel strayed’. 190. A dusky demon] A  dusk demon WO A dusky demon MS2. The present text assumes a misprint in WO, and emends accordingly.

It is just possible that WBY made a change from ‘dusky’ to avoid direct repetition from two lines above (‘Dusky and herbless’); but this part of his poem is rich in such repetitions (cp. ‘carven jags’ and ‘carven face’ in 176 and 177 earlier), and it seems unlikely that WBY would decide to avoid adjectival repetition merely by jettisoning the last syllable of ‘dusky’. ‘A dusky demon’ was almost certainly the intended original reading which had been misprinted in WO (though it is worth recording that neither the ‘2nd. rev.’ proofs for that book, nor the surviving annotated copies of it, have any correction of the error). 193. Bacchant] As an adjective, this is defined by OED as ‘Bacchus-­ worshipping, wine-­ loving’, citing Byron, Don Juan III, lxiii, 24: ‘Over his shoulder, with a Bacchant air’; it is relatively rare, however. WBY may have noticed the word’s remarkable prominence in the works of T.C. Irwin, where it is used on no fewer than nine separate occasions, e.g. Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘Winter and Wine’, 23: ‘Sweet dreams of love float o’er the heart, rich bacchant hours roll after’. 194. the runnel’s side] Cp. W. Scott, Marmion (1808), VI, xxx, 13–17: ‘She stooped her by



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595

The flowers still grew there. Far on the the sea’s waste; Shaking and waving vapours vapours chased; Dawn passioned; fed with a faint green light, Like drifts of leaves, immovable and bright Hung the frail loftier cloudlets. Turned he slow – A demon’s leisure. Eyes first white as snow, Kingfisher colour grew with rage. He rose Barking. Along the herbless plain, with blows Mingling of sword and war-­axe, while the day Gave to the noon, and noon to eve gave way, We trampled to and fro. When his mind knew The dead god’s sword, to many forms he grew, Evading, turning; once did I hew and hew

the runnel’s side,  | But in abhorrence backward drew; | For, oozing from the mountain’s side | Where raged the war, a dark-­red tide | Was curdling the streamlet blue’. 195. Far on the] Ellis, Morgan. Moved beyond him WO. 197–200.] Dawn passioned; [a]bove the moving clouds the moon Above the rose-­red clouds in a white swoon Lay and around her fed with a faint green light Like ^drift of ^ laurel leaves [the clouds lay bright del.] immovable and bright MS2. 197. passioned] WBY uses the word very unusually here: the sense is closest to OED v.3 intrans.: ‘To show, express, or be affected by passion or deep feeling. Formerly esp: to grieve.’ Cp. Keats, ‘Lamia’ (1820) I, 13–14: ‘By a clear pool, wherein she passioned | To see herself escaped from so sore ills’. In William Sharp’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1887), the verb occurs strikingly (and in a context of interest to WBY): ‘of necessity there can be few of us who, in the words of [Prosper] Mérimée, so passion for this passion as did Shelley’ (98). faint green light] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘May: The Story of Cupid and Psyche’, 492–7: ‘Now underneath the world the moon was gone, | But brighter

shone the stars so left alone,  | Until a faint green light began to show  | Far in the east, whereby did all men know, | Who lay awake either with joy or pain, | That day was coming on their heads again’. 198. leaves] Ellis, Morgan. laurel leaves WO. 199–208.] WBY’s description of the demon’s shape shifting owes much to Homer’s Odyssey Book IV, 455–8, where Menelaus and his companions attempt to lay hands on Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea. In George Chapman’s translation (which WBY read): And in rusht we, with an abhorred crie: Cast all our hands about him manfully, And then th’ old Forger, all his formes began: First was a Lion, with a mightie mane; Then next a Dragon; a pide Panther then; A vast Boare next; and sodainly did straine All into water. Last, he was a tree, Curld all at top, and shot vp to the skie. (The Whole Works of Homer (1616), The Fourthe Booke of Homers Odysses, 627–634.) 201. Kingfisher colour] WBY’s expression for the colour blue here associates the demon with the first in a series of fauna and flora. 202.] Barking like an awakened wolf MS2. 203–4.] A  general reminiscence here of Milton, Paradise Lost I, 742–3: ‘from morn | To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve’.

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A fir tree roaring in its leafless top, Once held between my arms, with livid chop And sunken shape, a nine days’ corpse sea-­dashed – Forms without number! When the live west flashed With surge of plumy fire, lunging I drave Through heart and demon spine, and in the wave Cast the loose bulk, lest Niam fear him dead; And they who to a far-­off place had fled, Hoping and fearing, brought me wine and bread. The seashine on our faces, we our way Held to the towers with boasting songs and gay. With witchery and unguents from the flowers That lackey the worn moon in midnight hours, Feeding white moths around some Eastern shrine, They healed my wounds; and on the skin supine Of wolves, of boreal bears, we quaffed the wine Brewed of the sea-­gods, from huge cups that lay Upon the lips of sea-­gods in their day, And on the skins of wolves and bears we slept;

212. lunging] lounging MS2, WO: the likelihood of this being a misprint in WO which reproduces WBY’s own misspelling is greatly increased by the form of revision in P95 (and all editions up to and including 1924) to ‘I lunged and drave’. The present text emends accordingly. I drave | Through heart and demon spine] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Sons of Usnach’ VI, 206–7: ‘[Conal Carnach] drave through Ilian’s side,  | Knowing him not, the sword’. 214. Cast] Fling MS2. lest Niam fear him dead] i.e. lest Niam should be afraid of him even when he was dead. 215. far-­off] far [high del.] off MS2. 216. Hoping] Boasting del. MS2. 217. seashine] Cp. A. Swinburne, Studies in Song (1880), ‘By the North Sea’, 175: ‘Streak on streak of glimmering seashine’, and Songs of the Springtides (1880), ‘Thalassius’, 475–6: ‘when brighter sea-­wind blew  | And louder sea-­shine lightened’. 218.] with boasting ^songs^ proud and gay MS2. 219. unguents] holy unguents MS2.

220. That lackey the worn moon] that lackey to the moon MS2. the worn moon] This image stayed with WBY for the later poem ‘Adam’s Curse’, 31: ‘A moon, worn as if it had been a shell’. Possibly cp. Edwin Atherstone (1788–1872), Israel in Egypt (1861), XXIII, 276: ‘Like worn moon through dense fog’, and The Fall of Nineveh (1878), XXVIII, 41–2: ‘nor, till dawn,  | Will rise ev’n the worn moon’. 223–4. the wine | Brewed of the sea-­gods] If F. Kinahan is correct in seeing the influence of Kennedy’s ‘The Fellow in the Goat-­Skin’ (see note on 256), WBY’s ‘Brewed’, along with ‘cups’ and the ‘lay’/’day’ rhyme, may show the subliminal influence of that story’s account of its hero’s recovery, with WBY’s upgrading of the original menu still carrying a trace of the earlier, more workaday, fare: ‘the princess and all her maids of honour to wait on him, and pity him, and give him gruel, and toast, and tay of all colours under the sun.’ (Patrick Kennedy, The Fireside Stories of Ireland (1870), 113.) 226.] And on the wolf skins and the skins of bears we slept MS2.



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And when the sun in flagrant saffron stept, Rolling his wheel, we sang beside the deep The spacious loves, the anger without sleep Of ancient warriors, labours of the strong. Patrick, before thy craft dies each old song. Thou flatterer of the weak, in what strange clime Shall they turn wroth or pluck the wings of Time? Hopeless for ever, they alone shall seek And never find, though ye in music speak. Ay, Oisin knows, for he is of the weak. Blind and nigh deaf, with withered arms he lies Upon the anvil of the world. PATRICK

The skies Darken; the Heavens are angry. OISIN

227. the sun in flagrant] Morgan the sun in all his flagrant WO. It is clear that WBY wished to get rid of the alexandrine form in the printed text of this line: in the two copies of WO where alterations to this end are made, however, he makes two different alterations. In Ellis, the first two words of the line ‘And when’ are del.; while in Morgan, the words ‘all his’ are del. The present edition follows the Morgan alteration, as likely to be the later of the two. 228. Rolling his wheel] Cp. A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), 832–3: ‘Between the wheel of the sun | And the flying flames of the air’. WBY’s apparently iconographic image here may simply conflate that of the sun’s chariot with the chariot’s wheels; it is possible that the poet was influenced here by the tarot card featuring the Wheel of Fortune, in which a spoked wheel is situated in the sky, often surrounded by clouds, as though it were the sun. we sang] O then Ellis.

To my mind,

229. The spacious] We sang of the spacious Ellis. 230. labours] Ellis, Morgan the labours WO. 232. Thou flatterer] Ellis, Morgan Liar and flatterer WO. 233.] The movement of this line is repeated much later by WBY in ‘The New Faces’, 4, with the similarly monosyllabic ‘Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time’. 234–5.] Cp. Matthew 7.7: ‘Seek, and ye shall find’. 237. with withered arms] Cp. Dryden, ‘Of the Pythagorean Philosophy, From the Fifteenth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses’, 351–3: ‘his slackened sinews sees, | And withered arms, once fit to cope with Hercules, | Unable now to shake, much less to tear, the trees’. Also perhaps cp. Shelley, Queen Mab VII, 264–5 [of an oak tree]: ‘As in the sunlight’s calm it spreads | Its worn and withered arms on high’. 239.] Darken; Heaven is angry. Cease! OISIN Unto my mind WO.

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Old and remembering, what avails the wind And lightning flash for ever? PATRICK

Cease and hear. God shakes the world with restless hands. More near The darkness comes. A cloud hangs overhead – A hush. Ah, me! it hangs to strike us dead. 245

A prayer of MONKS without. ‘Trembling, on the flags we fall, Fearful of the thunder-­ball, Do with us whate’er thou wilt, Great our error, great our guilt.’

The present text is emended in line with the identical corrections made in Ellis, Garnett, Morgan. 242. with restless hands] with twitching hand MS2. Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Death of Copernicus’, 112–14: ‘More late I knew | A hoary man dim-­eyed with restless hands  | A  zealot barbed with jibe and scoff still launched  | At priest and kings’. 242–3.] Can ye hear | Outside my monks bow down upon the flags in fear  | Weeping and singing MS2. 244. hangs] waits MS2. A prayer of MONKS] Ellis, Garnett, Morgan. A Song of MONKS WO. 245–9.] A longer version of the monks’ prayer is in MS2: From pleasant places of the earth, Luxurious laughter, feasting, and mirth, We live where the desolate waves are hurled In clouds on the desolate cliffs of the world. Each a horsehair shirt hath on, And many nosters said since dawn; Trembling on the flags we fall, Fearful of the thunder-­ball, Yet do with us whate’er thou wilt, Great our errors, great our guilt.

Also in MS2 is a fragment of an alternative opening: From the quiet stars that glow and glance To these sad souls that enter first Through the winds of circumstance, All is a mere moody verse Singing seraphim rehearse, Moving in a stately dance Before the highest [. . .] For an alternative diplomatic transcription of these passages, see Early Poetry 2, 115 and 119. 244^245] ‘Each one a horsehair shirt hath on, | And many Pater nosters said since dawn. WO. These lines are del. Ellis, Garnett, Morgan. 246. thunder-­ball] OED n. ‘(a) the electric phenomenon called a fire-­ ball or globe-­ lightning; (b) poet. a thunderbolt’. Cp. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound IV, 355: ‘caves cloven by the thunder-­ball’. 247–8.] Ellis, Garnett, Morgan. Yet do with us whate’er thou wilt, | For great our error, great our guilt.’ WO. 248. great our guilt] Perhaps cp. Isaac Watts, Works (1810), Hymn 111, 1–4: ‘Lord, we confess our numerous faults, | How great our guilt has been! | Foolish and vain were all our thoughts, | And all our lives were sin’.



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OISIN 250

Saint, dost thou weep? I hear amid the thunder The horses of the Fenians – tearing asunder Of armour – laughter and cries – the armies’ shock. ’Tis over; far with memory I sway and rock. Ah, cease, thou mournful, laughing Fenian horn!

249–51: The horses of the Fenians! [The fall asunder del.] tearing asunder  | Of armour! shouting and blare of horns!  | Wailing and laughter! Now the armies shock! MS2. A  compressed version follows: ‘I hear amid the thunder | The horses of the Fenians, and asunder | I hear the armour falling – and then horns’ MS2. 249–53: Ellis and Morgan have extensive revisions of these lines. Morgan is probably later than Ellis, but both copies show WBY in unfinished processes of revision, and presenting himself with differing alternatives. The present edition reprints the text here as it stands in WO, but it is clear that WBY was unsatisfied with the lines, and intended rewriting them. In the text as revised for P95, the lines read: Saint, do you weep? I hear amid the thunder The Fenian horses – armour torn asunder – Laughter and cries: the armies clash and shock – All is done now – I see the ravens flock – Ah, cease, you mournful, laughing Fenian horn! This incorporates elements of both Ellis and Morgan revisions, taking them a stage further. It is not possible to arrive at a composite version of the corrections made at this earlier stage without presenting a text about which WBY evidently remained uncertain. The details of the revisions being tried out in the two annotated copies are nevertheless interesting. Against the printed text in Ellis, WBY first revises 249–51 to: ‘The Fenian horses,

tearing of arms asunder  | Laughter and cries I  hear, the armies’ shock.  | All is done now; I  see the ravens flock’. At the bottom of the page, the poet redrafts 249–53 as: ‘Saint dost thou weep, I hear in the thunder | The horses of the Fenians, a tearing asunder | Of armour, and laughter, and cries, and a shock | Of Armies, – ’Tis over, I sway me and rock | With memory far, – Oh the Fenian horn!’. In Morgan, 250–52 are first altered to ‘The Fenian horses, tearing of arms asunder  | Laughter I  hear and cries  – the armies’ shock  | Done now! With memory I  sway and rock’ [against ‘Done’ in 252 WBY writes ‘or gone now’ in the margin]; at the bottom of the page, WBY adds ‘or thus’: ‘The Fenian horses, tearing of arms asunder | Laughter I hear and cries – the armies shock | And pass – with memory I sway and rock’. 251. shock] OED n.3, 1. a.; ‘Military. The encounter of an armed force with the enemy in a charge or onset’. Cp. Shakespeare, Richard III V.v.46: ‘this doubtful shock of arms’. WBY uses the noun, but may perhaps remember the word used as a verb in Dryden’s Aeneid XII, 673: ‘And now both armies shock in open field’ (see the first of the two MS2 drafts above, and last revision of Morgan, where a verb seems likely to be intended). 252.] Not thunder alone: with memories I sway and rock MS2. This line was ultimately abandoned in revision, but it is later echoed strikingly in the context of ‘memories’ in WBY’s ‘The Cold Heaven’ 8–9: ‘Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro | Riddled with light’.

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Three days we feasted, when on the fourth morn I found, foam-­oozy on the vasty stair, Hung round with slime, and whispering in his hair, That demon dull and unsubduable, And we once more unto our fighting fell. And in the eve I threw him in the surge, To lie there ’till the fourth day saw emerge His healèd shape; and for a hundred years So warred, so feasted we. No dreams, no fears, No languor, no fatigue; an endless feast, An endless war. The hundredth year had ceased. I stood upon the stair; the surges bore A beech bough to me, and my heart grew sore, Remembering how I paced in days gone o’er, At Eman, ’neath the beech trees, on each side, Fin, Conan, Oscar, many more, the tide Of planets watching, watching the race of hares

254. Three days we feasted] F. Kinahan (89) suggests a parallel for the interval between fighting and feasting here in Patrick Kennedy, The Fireside Stories of Ireland (1870), and its story ‘The Fellow in the Goat-­Skin’: ‘Herein the hero fights a giant, rests for three days, fights another giant, rests for three days, fights a third giant and then rests once more. The intervals of rest between Oisin’s clashes with the demon cover the same length of time . . . and the rewards visited on the two are likewise similar.’ on the fourth morn] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Slaying of Curoi and the Revenge of his Minstrel’, 296–7: ‘Three days the feast went on; on the fourth morn | The glad hawks shook their wings’. 255. foam-­oozy] foam oozing MS2. vasty] WBY’s poeticism derives from Shakespeare, Henry IV Pt.1, III i 51: ‘call spirits from the vasty deep’. 256.] Not present in MS2. 257. unsubduable] Cp. Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘Gareth and Lynette’, 837: ‘The last a monster unsubduable’. Perhaps cp. also a

highly-­charged allegorical moment in Shelley’s Queen Mab, V, 19–22: ‘Shall spring all virtue, all delight, all love, | And judgement cease to wage unnatural war | With passion’s unsubduable array.  | Twin-­sister of religion, selfishness!’ 259. threw] flung del. MS2. 263. endless feast] Though there is unlikely to be any question of allusion here, WBY’s phrase echoes Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850), XLVII, 9: ‘And we shall sit at endless feast’. 265–6.] I  stood upon the stairway and [there swam wave-­borne del.] the surges bore  | A beech [tree in the water del.] bough to me and [I saddened del.] my heart grew sore MS2. 269. Fin, Conan, Oscar] For Finn, see note to I, 68. Conan is probably Conán mac Morna (sometimes, Conán Máel [the bald]), a Fenian warrior later referred to by AG as ‘Conan of the Bitter Tongue’: another, lesser-­ known warrior in some of the Fenian cycle is Conán mac Lia, a former enemy who ultimately joins Finn; Oscar is the son of Oisin.



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Leap in the meadow. On the misty stairs, Immediate, mournful, white with sudden cares, Holding that horse long seen not, Niam stood. I mounted, and we rode across the lone And drifting greyness. Came this monotone Rising and falling, mixed inseparably, Surly and distant, with the winds and sea: –

‘Age after age I feel my soul decay Like rotted flesh, and stone by stone my hall 280 Gathers sea-­slime and goes the seaward way, Thundering, and the wide useless waters fray My pillars towards their fall. ‘Last of my race, three things I rule alone – My soul, my prey, and this my heapèd pile. 285 I pace remembering. From my misty throne I bellow to the winds when storms make moan, And trample my dark isle.

‘With all in all the world I battle wage. The strongest of the world, to snatch my prey,

271. meadow] valley MS2. the misty stairs] Cp. A. Procter, Legends and Lyrics (1866), ‘The Golden Gate’, where ‘up the misty stair’ is an important, and recurring, phrase: ‘Dark shadows gather thickly round, and up the misty stair they climb’ (1); ‘Yet up the misty stair they climb, led onward by the Angel time’ (6); ‘But let the Angel take thy hand, and lead thee up the misty stair’ (17). Procter’s well-­known book, Legends and Lyrics, would have been recalled for many Victorian readers of poetry by the title of WBY’s 1892 volume, The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics. 278. I feel my soul] my brain and soul del. MS2. 280. the seaward way] Cp. R. Southey, Poetical Works (1838), ‘The Ebb Tide’, 15: ‘Fast flow thy waters on their seaward way’, and W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘November’, ‘The Story of Rhodope’, 224: ‘Slowly along the seaward way he passed’.

283–7.] These lines are the first of the song’s three stanzas in MS2, with a subsequent mark to indicate the change of position as in the WO ordering. 283. Last of my race] Cp. W. Scott, Marmion (1808), VI, xxix, 7–8: ‘Last of my race, on battle-­plain, | That shout shall ne’er be heard again!’ 285. my misty throne] Cp. W. Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), V, ii, 17–23: ‘The Chief, whose antique crownlet long  | Still sparkled in the feudal song, | Now, from the mountain’s misty throne, | Sees, in the thanedom once his own, | His ashes undistinguish’d lie, | His place, his power, his memory die: | His groans the lonely caverns fill’. 287. my dark isle] Perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Prologue’, ‘The Three Woes’ 1: ‘That Angel whose charge is Eire sang thus o’er the dark isle winging’. 289. snatch] win del. MS2.

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290 Came to my tower as age dragged after age. Light is man’s love and lighter is man’s rage – His purpose drifts away.’ 295 300

It died afar. Grey sleet those towers hid And thickened all the whirling air. Then did Lost Niam mourn and say, ‘Ah, love, we go To the Island of Forgetfulness; for lo, Isles of the Living and of Victories, Ye have no power.’ ‘And, Niam, say, of these Which is the Isle of Youth?’ ‘None know,’ she said, And on my bosom laid her weeping head.

291. is man’s] his swift del. MS2. 294.] As with a wind low drooping, but then did MS2. the whirling air] Perhaps cp. T.C. Irwin, Pictures and Songs (1880), ‘Christmas Eve’, 27: ‘jovial light through the white whirling air’. 298. And, Niam, say, of these] And of these MS2. 299. ‘None know’] Niam’s ignorance does not accord well with the fact that the King of the Young is her father, as she announced in I  72–3 earlier. F. Kinahan (114) points this out: ‘Inasmuch as Niamh had earlier identified herself as the daughter of the King of the Young, the ignorance she expresses concerning the whereabouts of his kingdom is

an obvious inconsistency’. He suggests (124) that WBY ‘may have been confusing Tir na mBeo (the Land of the Living) and Tir na nOg  – not that there is any real distinction between them in the folklore’. WBY changed the island asked about by Oisin to ‘the Island of Content’ for P95. 300.] After this line, MS2 has three additional lines, heavily deleted: While waves had built all the sea’s floor wide, First laughter, then a raging rampant tide, And passions at the word wherewith they died.



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Part III The Island of Forgetfulness

F

led foam underneath us, and round us a wandering and milky smoke, High as the saddle-­girth, covering away from our glances the tide;

Part III] Book III Morgan. The metre WBY adopts for this section of the poem could be broadly described as a rhymed hexameter in triple rhythm. The closest near-­ contemporary parallel is that of Tennyson’s ‘The Voyage of Maeldune’, whose hexameters are more consistently cast in one kind of triple rhythm (the anapaestic) than those of WBY, who allows lines to take dactylic as well as anapaestic rhythmic identities; Tennyson also rhymes his lines in couplets, where WBY (except for early lines in draft) adopts the abab quatrain rhyme-­ pattern. The influences here are also Swinburnian: one possible model for WBY is Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866)). As one reviewer said, ‘there is a suspicion of not unsatisfactory imitation of Mr. Swinburne in “The Island of Forgetfulness” ’ (The Graphic 16 Mar. 1889). Long lines with triple rhythms are not at all uncommon in later nineteenth-­century verse, and while undoubtedly there were poets (including Swinburne, Tennyson, and many others) who took some pains to understand their lines in terms of prosodic scansion and then to understand their scansion in terms of prosodic tradition or prosodic innovation, it would not be safe to assume that the young WBY is amongst their number. WBY’s prosody (the term itself is perhaps too presumptive in some ways) is one that is learned by practice and imitation, and tested in the reading voice (initially, to intimate audiences such as that constituted by JBY). In this respect, his early metrical practice is very distinct from that of a deeply learned and deliberate innovator such as G.M. Hopkins, or one like Robert Bridges; and prosodic analysis of his verse may prove less critically informative than it is technically ingenious. However, a finely nuanced and ambitious analysis of WBY as a deliberating prosodist in

late Victorian and early Modernist contexts is to be found in H. Sullivan, ‘How Yeats Learned to Scan’, YA 21, 3–37, where the long lines of Book III are examined as aspects of a more or less technical experiment on the poet’s part. 1–4.] MS2 has drafts of only these lines, headed ‘Canto III’, after which WBY ceases to use this notebook for composition of the poem. At this stage, the long lines seem to have been written as couplets, unlike the stanzaic abab of the published poem. The extant drafts in MS2 run as follows (with spelling and punctuation partially editorial): Now the surges showery-­headed boiled around our way and broke, And the spray hid all the water in a wandering milky smoke, And the dog and the red-­eared dog in the dusk of the waters [raced del.] chased The deer as of olden [times del.] ages, and the youth and the lady raced On the running sea, and a placid light from the apple fell On the spray as it hung in the air and the froth as it rose and fell I looked on those that followed ^went after^, that flowed in that old ride, [The del.] ^And^ The ^endless^ omnipotent hoping of wizards I saw in their faces and sighed. The drafts of Part III from here onwards (which must have been in another notebook) are no longer extant. 1. Fled foam] WBY’s opening inversion may owe something to A. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon (1865), where all of 391–393 is relevant to the poem: ‘Peleus the Larissaean, couched with whom  | Sleeps the white sea-­bred wife and silver-­shod, | Fair as fled foam, a goddess’.

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The deer and the hound, the lady and youth, from the distance broke; The immortal desire of immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.

5

I mused on the chase with the Fenians, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair, And never a song sang Niam, and over my fingertips Came now the sliding of tears and sweeping of mist-­cold hair, And now the warmth of sighs, and after the quiver of lips.

10

Were we days long or hours long in riding, when rolled in a grisly peace, An isle lay level before us, with dripping of hazel and oak?

3.] WBY refers back here to I, 176–188: see notes. 4. The immortal desire of immortals] The phrase ‘immortal desire’ is a rarity, and it is not likely that WBY would have remembered (if he ever encountered) its occurrence in a sub-­Tennysonian patriotic British war poem by James Drummond Burns (1823–1864), whose Memoir, and Remains (1869) included ‘The Charge of the Seven Hundred’, 21–2: ‘they felt their blood tingle | With immortal desire’. However, the idea of never-­ending desire as a troubling aspect of the gods’ immortality is explored in a poem by W.S. Landor, which WBY knew in later life and could well have encountered first in his youth. Landor’s Hellenics (1859) includes the short dramatic poem ‘Peleus and Thetis’, in which the immortal Thetis tells her mortal lover: ‘Immortal is thy love, immutable’ (52), and he replies ‘Ages shall fly | Over my tomb while thou art flourishing  | In youth eternal, the desire of gods’ (63–65), before Thetis responds with: ‘I bless thy words | And in my heart will hold them; Gods who see | Within it may desire me, but they know | I have loved Peleus’ (68–71). The possible relation here to the situation of Oisin and Niamh is suggestive. In his late poem ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ (1938), in which ‘Man-­picker Niamh leant and sighed | By Oisin in the grass’ (5–6), a reference to Peleus and Thetis (‘Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped, | Peleus on Thetis stares’ [25–26]) is primarily indebted to a painting by Poussin (then known as ‘Peleus and Thetis’) in the National Gallery of

Ireland; but it may well be that the first connection between the Greek myth and Oisin and Niamh came here, albeit a connection likely to have been forgotten by the poet by 1938. Also relevant is Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus’ (1860), another poem about the erotic union of a mortal with an immortal, in which the immortal (though, unlike Oisin at this point, ageing) speaker is left ‘maimed, | To dwell in presence of immortal youth, | Immortal age beside immortal youth,  | And all I  was, in ashes’ (20–23). we saw in their faces, and sighed] Cp. Byron, Mazeppa (1819), VI, 1: ‘We met – we gazed – I saw, and sighed’ and 13: ‘I saw, and sighed – in silence wept’. 6. never a song] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, Ballads and Sonnets (1881), ‘Alas! So Long’, 11: ‘though days and years have never a song’. Rossetti’s poem is another which hinges on the illusion of eternally protracted youth (‘Ah! dear one, we were young so long, | It seemed that youth would never go’ (1–2)), contrasted with the consequences of age (‘Ah! dear one, I’ve been old so long, | It seems that age is loth to part’ (9–10)). 8. the warmth of sighs] Possibly cp. Hartley Coleridge, Poems (1851), ‘Prometheus: A  Fragment’, 151–3: ‘a lump of ice which you might thaw  | With the kind warmth of sighs, and hard I  strove  | To put away my immortality’. 10. with dripping of hazel] dripping with hazel WO. WBY corrected this phrase in Ellis and Morgan (though in Ellis the ‘of ’ is subsequently deleted); although Proofs Texas make



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And we stood on a sea’s edge we saw not; for whiter than new-­washed fleece Fled foam underneath us, and round us a wandering and milky smoke.

15

And we rode on the plains of the sea’s edge – the sea’s edge barren and grey, Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees, Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

20

But taller the trees grew and closer, immense in their wrinkling bark; Dropping – a murmurous dropping – old silence and that one sound; For no live creatures lived there, no weasels moved in the dark – Long sighs arose in our spirits, beneath us bubbled the ground.



And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow night, For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun, Ceased on our hands and our faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light, And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one.

25

Till the horse gave a whinny; for, cumbrous with stems of the hazel and oak, Of hollies, and hazels, and oak trees, a valley was sloping away From his hooves in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they lay.

no change to this phrase, it is likely that it is a correction rather than a revision, and that the deleted ‘of ’ in Ellis represents an attempt to revise a correction. 11. sea’s edge] This was changed in Proofs Texas to ‘land’s edge’, with the change then cancelled and marked ‘stet’; ‘sea’s edge’ is carried through to the printed text. WBY’s phrase may remember A. Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), VIII, 464: ‘And stood between the sea’s edge and the sea’. In the same line in proof, ‘not; for’ is changed to ‘not, for’. 15. doubling landward] WBY’s primary sense of ‘doubling’ here is OED v. 8.a., ‘To bend . . . over, so as to bring the two parts into contact parallel; to fold; to bend  .  .  . so as to bring distant parts into proximity’, but ‘landward’ raises the possibility of his using the verb with the nautical resonance of OED v. 9 a., ‘To sail or pass round or to the other side of (a cape or point), so that the ship’s course is, as it were, doubled or bent upon itself ’. 16. rest from the moan of the seas] Cp. the arrival of the Argonauts at Cyzicum in W.

Morris’s The Life and Death of Jason (1867), V, 25–29: ‘So, as they touched the shore, a champion tall  | Drew nigh, and bade them name themselves withal;  | And when he heard, he cried: “O heroes, land,  | For here shall all things be at your command;  | And here shall you have good rest from the sea.” 21. hollow night] The phrase is not unknown in nineteenth-­ century verse, and occurs in R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Tears of Blanid’, 148: ‘dumb as the hollow night in their despair’, and William Allingham, Flower Pieces (1888), ‘The Shooting Star’, 11: ‘Beneath the dim-­lit, hollow night’. 22. gleams of the world] Cp W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘February’: ‘The Hill of Venus’, 615–617: ‘grew thin  | That lovely dream, and glimmered now through it  | Gleams of the world cleft from him by his sin’. 24. the stars were blotted] Cp. R. Southey, Madoc, Part Second, III, 427–8: ‘when the moon | Was gone, and all the stars were blotted out’. 28. mighty and naked and gleaming] In Proofs Texas WBY changes the text to this wording

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More comely than man may make them, inlaid with silver and gold, Were arrow and shield and war-­axe, arrow and spear and blade, And dew-­blanched horns, in whose hollows a child of three years old Could sleep on a couch of rushes – round and about them laid.

35

And each of the huge white creatures was huger than fourscore men; The tops of their ears were feathered, their hands were the claws of birds, And, shaking the plumes of the grasses and the leaves of the mural glen, The breathing came from those bodies, long-­warless, grown whiter than  curds.

40

So spacious the wood was above them, that He who has stars for His flocks Could fondle the leaves with His fingers, nor go from His dew-­   cumbered skies; So long were they sleeping, the owls had builded their nests in their locks, Filling the fibrous dimness with long generations of eyes.



And over the limbs and the valley the slow owls wandered and came, Now in a place of star-­fire, and now in a shadow place wide; And the chief of the huge white creatures, his knees in the soft star-­flame, Lay loose in a place of shadow – we drew the reins by his side.

45

Golden the nails of his bird-­claws, flung loosely along the dim ground; In one was a branch soft-­shining with bells more many than sighs

from the original ‘mighty naked gleaming’: the copy-­editor queries this, with ‘Why restore the superfluous ands?’ WBY retained this change nevertheless. 35. mural glen] WBY seems to have in mind some kind of walled-­in effect here: the sense is between OED mural adj. 2.a., ‘fixed, placed or executed on a wall’ and 2.b., ‘growing against and fastened to a wall’. However, this use of ‘mural’ is idiosyncratic. 38. nor go from] Corrected thus in Proofs Texas from ‘nor lean from’. A query on the proofs here reads, ‘Why not lean – better sense & verse’. 40. fibrous dimness] ‘Fibrous’ is an important word for Blake, and occurs on ten occasions in his Prophetic books, including The Book of Thel, IV, 3–4: ‘She saw the couches of the dead,  & where the fibrous roots  | Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists’. 42. star-­fire] Cp. William Sharp, The Human Inheritance (1882), II, ‘Youth’s Inheritance’ 538–9: ‘he watched her eyes  | Reflect the panting star-­fire in the skies’.

46. a branch soft-­shining with bells] The bell-­ branch of Celtic mythology: in his note to WO in P95, WBY says this is ‘A legendary branch whose shaking cast all men into a gentle sleep’. The mythic motif has associations of access to otherworldly experience. The oldest form of this legend comes in the eighth-­century Immram Brain, The Voyage of Bran, where the hero wakes to find a branch of silver with white blossoms at his side and later is given a silver branch by a beautiful woman, who will lead him to her supernatural domain. A later appearance of the branch was known to WBY from Standish H. O’Grady’s translation of the tale, ‘How Cormac Mac Airt Got His Branch’ in Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 3, which begins (213): Of a time that Cormac, the son of Art, the son of Conn of the hundred battles, that is, the arch-­king of Erin, was in Liathdruim, he saw a youth upon the green before his Dun, having in his hand a glittering fairy branch with nine apples of red



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In the midst of an old man’s bosom; owls ruffling and pacing around, Sidled their bodies against him, filling the shade with their eyes.



And my gaze was thronged with the sleepers – no, neither in household   of Can, In a realm where the handsome are many, or in glamours by demons flung, Are faces alive with such beauty made known to the salt eye of man, Yet weary with passions that faded when the sevenfold seas were young.

50

gold upon it. And this was the manner of that branch, that when any one shook it wounded men and women with child would be lulled to sleep by the sound of the very sweet fairy music which those apples uttered; and another property that branch had, that is to say, that no one on earth would bear in mind any want, woe, or weariness of soul when that branch was shaken for him, and whatever evil might have befallen any one he would not remember it at the shaking of the branch. WBY substitutes bells for apples; but the relation between the two things had already been established in Eugene O’Curry’s On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), in the course of which the same story is translated from another source (in the Book of Fermoy): here, O’Curry mentions ‘apples (or balls) of red gold’, ‘And when he shook it, sweeter than the world’s music was the music which the apples produced’ (III, 317). O’Curry’s summary of the available sources leads to the following conclusion (III, 319): I scarcely need say any more to prove that the Craebh Ciúil, or Musical Branch, was an instrument indicative or symbolic of repose and peace, and used by those who were qualified by station or profession to command it. The particular form or parts of the Musical Branch we now have no means of discovering; but, from the qualities ascribed to the branches of the poet Sencha and of king Cormac, we may assume that it resembled, in effect at least, if not in shape, the silver crescent of the Turks, with its gently tingling bells, or that

which, copied from it, some years ago had a place in British military bands. WBY draws on this motif later in ‘The Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novelists’ (1890), ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897), and ‘The Harp of Aengus’ (1900). soft-­shining] WBY’s compound has precedent in William Sharp, The New Minnesinger (1875), ‘The Crescent Moon’, 16: ‘Of those soft-­shining eyes’. 48. Sidled their bodies] WBY’s transitive use of ‘Sidled’ is a rarity: OED 1.a., which comes closest to his effect, is intransitive: ‘To move or go sideways or obliquely; to edge along, as in a furtive or unobtrusive manner, or while looking in another direction; to make advances in this manner’. 49. Can] In P95, the word becomes ‘cann’, glossed by the author in that edition as ‘A kind of chieftain’. 50. glamours by demons flung] OED ‘glamour’ 1: Magic, enchantment, spell; as in the phrase to cast the glamour over one’, citing Allan Ramsay’s note to his Poems (1721): ‘When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o’er the eyes of the spectator.’ 52. Yet weary] Corrected thus in Proofs Texas from ‘Yet skinny’. when the sevenfold seas were young] The concept of ‘the seven seas’ is extremely ancient, and the idiom is attested as early as a Sumerian hymn of 2300 BC: it was in common use in Arabic and European medieval writing.

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And I gazed on the bell-­branch, sleep’s forebear, far sung of the Sennachies. I saw how those slumberers, grown weary, there camping in grasses deep, Of wars with the wide world and pacing the shores of the seven seas, Laid hands on the bell-­branch and swayed it, and fed of unhuman sleep.

60

Snatching the horn of Niam, I blew forth a lingering note; Came sound from those monstrous sleepers, a sound like the stirring of  flies. He, shaking the folds of his lips and heaving the pillar of his throat, Watched me with mournful wonder out of the wells of his eyes.



I cried, ‘Thou art surely a warrior, forgetting his famous line, And even the names of his fathers, and even the works of his hands? A good name is goodly to hear of, and a good name surely is thine. Worthy’s thy questioner, Oisin, he from the Fenian lands.’

65

Half open his eyes were, and held me, dull with the smoke of their dreams; His lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came; Then he swayed in his fingers the bell-­branch, slow dropping a sound   in faint streams, Softer than snowflakes in April, and piercing the marrow like flame.



53. Seannachies] In Irish, a seanchai is a teller of traditional tales (seanchas being ‘old lore’). By the nineteenth century, the term was as commonly Scottish as Irish in reference: in 1863, J.F. Campbell’s Popular Tales of the Western Highlands noted that ‘A Shanachie means a teller of old tales and traditions’. 54. grasses deep] WBY’s inversion here creates an echo of Jean Ingelow’s long poem, ‘The Four Bridges’ (Poems: First Series [1877]), 646: ‘Wetting thy steps in dewy grasses deep’. This could be confidently treated as a coincidence, were it not for the context of Ingelow’s line, in stanzas describing the attempt to awaken a lady from deep sleep: ‘I saw the moon on her shut eyelids shine | . . . The fringed lids dropped low, as sleep-­oppressed’ (627, 637), ‘Then from her stainless bosom she did take | Two beauteous lily flowers that lay therein, | And with slow-­ moving lips a gesture make, | As one that some forgotten words doth win’ (649–52).

56. unhuman] The word is rare in this sense (OED 3: ‘Not pertaining to mankind’), but had been used by Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘In the Cathedral Close’, 41–2: ‘The dew-­drench’d flowers, the child’s glad eyes  | Your joy unhuman shall control’. 62. the names of his fathers] Perhaps cp. James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian (1805 edn.), ‘Cath-­Loda’, Duan Second, 319: ‘Call the names of his fathers from their dwellings old!’ the works of his hands] Cp. Psalm 111: 7: ‘The works of his hands are verity and judgement’. 67. slow dropping] Cp. WBY’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (composed by Dec. 1888), 9: ‘peace comes dropping slow’. WBY probably recalls Tennyson’s ‘The Lotos-­Eaters’, 10–11: ‘A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke,  | Slow-­ dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go’.



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Wrapt in the wave of that music, with weariness more than of earth, The moil of my centuries filled me; and gone like a sea-­covered stone Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories of the   whole of my mirth, And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone. In the roots of the grasses, the sorrels, I laid my body as low; Sad Niam came near me, and laid her brows on the midst of my breast; And the horse was gone in the distance, and years after years ’gan their  flow; Square leaves of the ivy moved over us, binding us down to our rest. And, man of the many white crosiers, a century there I forgot – How the fetlocks drip blood in the battle, when the fallen on fallen lie  rolled; How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron’s plot, And the names of the demons whose hammers made armour for Conor   the old. And, man of the many white crosiers, a century there I forgot; That the spearshaft is made out of ashwood, the shield out of osier and  hide; How the hammers spring on the anvil, on the spearhead’s burning spot; How the slow blue-­eyed oxen of Fin low sadly at evening tide.

69. more than of earth] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, ‘Sonnet: To his Lady Nina, of Sicily’, 5–6: ‘thy courtesy  | And worth, more than of earth, celestial’. 70. moil] OED 1: ‘Turmoil, confusion, tangle; confusion of sound, hubbub. Also: trouble, vexation.’ 73. sorrels] Wild sorrel is a traditional source of natural sustenance in Irish poetry and is included in Samuel Ferguson’s Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘The Fair Hills of Ireland: Old Irish Song’, 21: ‘The cresses on the water and the sorrels are at hand’. In Proofs Texas the copy-­editor comments on the line, ‘This about the grass is very awkward’: WBY made no change. 79. falconer follows the falcon] Cp. WBY’s much later ‘The Second Coming’, 2: ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer’. Falcons and hawks occur in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, 1196–7: ‘Thise

fauconers upon a fair river,  | That with hir haukes han the heron slayn.’ 80.] Conor here is Conchubar, King of Ulster; in the Red Branch cycle of stories, his sword is forged by the smith Culann, who is associated also with an early episode in the career of Cuchulain: there the hero, still named Setanta, comes across a feast organized for Conchubar by Culann, and in gaining access he kills the hound who guards Culann’s fortress at Cuailgne, becoming known from then on himself as Cuchulain [‘the hound of Culann’]. WBY’s plural, ‘demons’, is not therefore in accord with the story: it was retained in the texts of the poem until SP29. 84. oxen of Fin] Possession of cattle is a common attribute of kings and heroes in early Irish myth, and the stealing of cattle is a major theme in various tales: Finn’s oxen here are to be seen in that context.

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But in dreams, mild man of the crosiers, driving the dust with their throngs, Moved round me, of seamen or landsmen, all who are winter tales; Came by me the kings of the Red Branch with roaring of laughter and  songs, Or moved as they moved once, love-­making or piercing the tempest   with sails. Came Blanid, Mac Nessa, Cuchulin; came Fergus who feastward had slunk,

86. winter tales] OED gives ‘winter tale’ as ‘n. Obs. an idle tale’: WBY probably has the phrase from the title of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (where the meaning is closely similar). 87. kings of the Red Branch] The Ulster cycle of stories was often referred to in the nineteenth century as the Red Branch cycle. This cycle (parts of which were first recorded in the eighth century) concerns the kingdom of Ulster: the Irish Craebruad refers to a red branch, or timber beam, and is the name of one of King Conchubar’s palaces in the cycle. WBY’s use of ‘kings’ is unusual in this context: for Samuel Ferguson, Aubrey De Vere, and R.D. Joyce, the customary phrase is ‘Red Branch knights’. The ‘kings’ WBY has in mind here are Conchubar himself, and other heroes of the Ulaid, including Cuchulain: one name for this race was the Clanna Rudraige. in which the word ruad (red) was commonly identified. In Proofs Texas a comma is inserted after ‘Red Branch’, but this does not make its way into the printed text. 89. Blanid] In Proofs Texas, the line opens with ‘Blanid the unwished’; this is then altered in correction to ‘Blanid, MacNessa’. In his note in P95, WBY identifies Blanid as ‘The heroine of a beautiful and sad story told by Keating’. Blanid anglicizes the Irish Blaithine, the wife of Cu Roi, a king of Munster in the Ulster cycle; she is a lover of Cuchulain and, in the version contained in Geoffrey Keating’s (Seathrun Ceitinn (c. 1569-­c. 1644)) History of Ireland (Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, c. 1634), helps Cuchulain to kill her husband, subsequently being killed in revenge by Cu Roi’s

poet Feircheirtne, who flings her (along with himself) off a cliff. The story is also contained in R.D. Joyce’s poem Blanid (1879). Mac Nessa] The Red Branch King Conchubar Mac Nessa (son of Ness, the daughter of Eochaid Salbuide (‘the yellow heel’)). Cuchulin] WBY’s first reference to a figure who would go on to play a central role in his later work, the Ulster hero Cuchulain. He is present in the list here by virtue of being the dominant hero of the entire Ulster cycle, but WBY removes him from the line in P95 and thereafter. Fergus who feastward had slunk] Fergus mac Roich, one of the kings of the Ulster cycle, and an important character in the Tain Bo Cualigne. In a note in P95, WBY writes of Fergus that ‘he was the poet of the Red Branch cycle, as Usheen was of the Fenian’: in connection with Barach (90), he writes that he ‘enticed Fergus away to a feast, that the sons of Usna might be killed in his absence. Fergus had made an oath never to refuse a feast from him, and so was compelled to go, though all unwillingly.’ In his Notes to WATR (1899), WBY writes about Fergus as ‘the son of Roigh, the legendary poet of “the quest of the bull of Cualge,” as he is in the ancient story of Deirdre, and in modern poems by Ferguson. He married Nessa, and Ferguson makes him tell how she took him “captive in a single look” [. . .] Presently, because of his great love, he gave up his throne to Conchobar, her son by another, and lived out his days feasting, and fighting, and hunting. His promise never to refuse a feast from a certain comrade, and the mischief that came by his promise, and the



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Cook Barach, the traitor; and warward, the spittle on his beard never dry, Came war-­borne Balor, as old as a forest, his vast face sunk Helpless, men lifting the lids of his weary and death-­pouring eye.

95

And by me, in soft red raiment, the Fenians moved in loud streams; And Grania walking and smiling, sewed with her needle of bone. So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures   of dreams, In a long iron sleep, as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone.



vengeance he took afterwards, are a principal theme of the poets.’ 90. Barach] Barach was one of the Red Branch knights who, in the story of Deirdre, persuaded Fergus to leave Deirdre and the children of Usna, whom he was guarding, in order to attend a feast at Emain Macha; once Fergus left them, his wards were murdered on the orders of Conchubar. warward] This heroic archaism seems to be WBY’s coinage. 91. Balor] A king of the Fomorians, who had an eye with the power of evil, opened only on the field of battle: this could defeat an entire army, and the services of four men were required in order for it to be opened. Alspach (865) identifies WBY’s debt here to Standish O’Grady, History of Ireland: Critical and Philosophical Vol. 1, (1881), 120: ‘Balor, sleepy with age, was with difficulty brought into the battle. Nine giants with hooks lifted like a portcullis the vast lid of his petrifying eye. At the first glance whole ranks of the Tuatha De Danān were converted into stones’; also Vol. 2, 93: ‘Balor  .  .  . with his Gorgon eye converted armies into stones. Ten giants it required to raise the lid, for in age, the monster became inert and comatose.’ In his note in P95, WBY calls Balor ‘The Irish Chimaera, the leader of the hosts of darkness at the great battle of good and evil, life and death, light and darkness, which was fought out on the strands of Moytura, near Sligo.’ 93. soft red raiment] ‘Soft raiment’ occurs four times in W. Morris’s The Earthly Paradise,

and occurs also in Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, ‘A Ballad of Death’, 6: ‘Make thee soft raiment out of woven sighs’. 94. Grania] The betrothed of Finn, who ran away with Diarmid and was pursued by the angry king: this is the subject of the narrative Toraigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghrainne [The pursuit of Diarmid and Grania]: WBY was familiar with its translation by Standish Hayes O’Grady. WBY’s note in P95 goes into some detail: ‘A beautiful woman, who fled with Dermot to escape from the love of aged Finn. She fled from place to place over Ireland, but at last Dermot was killed at Sligo upon the seaward point of Benbulben, and Finn won her love and brought her, leaning upon his neck, into the assembly of the Fenians, who burst into inextinguishable laughter.’ The centerpiece of KT’s Shamrocks (1887) was her poem ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’. 96. iron sleep] OED iron adj. 7: ‘Chiefly poet. Designating an extremely deep sleep, as that of death.’ a fish  .  .  .  dumb as a stone] That a fish should be ‘dumb’ is not remarkable, since it would not be expected to speak in the normal course of things; WBY returns, however, to this concept in his much later poem, ‘All things can tempt me’, 10: ‘dumber and deafer than a fish’. Fish almost speak (but manage only to ‘mean’) in Isaac Watts’s paraphrase of Psalm 148 (Works (1810)), 31–2: ‘While the dumb fish that cut the stream | Leap up, and mean his praises too’.

612 100

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At times our slumber was lightened. When the sun was on silver or gold; When brushed with the wings of the owls, in the dimness they love   going by; When a glow-­worm was green on a grass leaf, lured from his lair in the  mould, Half wakening, we lifted our eyelids, and gazed on the grass with a sigh, So watched I when, man of the crosiers, at the heel of a century fell, Weak, in the midst of the meadow, from his miles in the midst of the air, A starling – like them that foregathered ’neath a moon waking white as   a shell, When the Fenians made foray at morning with Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.

105

I awoke – the strange horse without summons out of the distance ran, Thrusting his nose to my shoulder – he knew in his bosom deep That once more moved in my bosom the ancient sadness of man, And that I would leave the immortals, their dimness, their dews dropping sleep.

110

Oh, hadst thou seen beautiful Niam wail to herself and blanch, Lord of the crosiers, thou even hadst lifted thy hands and wept; But, the bird in my fingers, I mounted, mindful only to launch Forth, piercing the distance – beneath me the hooves impatiently stept.

115

I cried, ‘Oh, Niam! oh, white one! if only a twelve-­houred day I must gaze on the beard of Fin, and move where the old men and young In the Fenians’ dwellings of wattle lean on the chessboards and play,

100. lifted our eyelids] Cp. 92 above: the purpose (and efficacy) of this echo are not certain. gazed on the grass] Possibly cp. Thomas Hood, Works (1863), ‘The Plea of the Midsummer Faeries’, 228–9: ‘Pity it was to see them, all so pale,  | Gaze on the grass for a dying bed’. WBY’s phrase only just veers away from what would be the usual (and in this context comic-­bathetic) notion of grazing on grass, missing it by only a consonant. 101. heel of a century] WBY uses a rare sense of ‘heel’, OED n. 7: ‘The latter or concluding part of a period of time’. Cp. Tennyson, ‘The Window: Or, The Songs of the Wrens’ (1871), Winter’, 5–6: ‘The frost is here | And has bitten the heel of the going year’.

102. weak, in] In Proofs Texas the comma is removed in correction; it is, however, carried through to the printed text. 103. foregathered] WBY’s intransitive verb has most of its precedents in Scots writing. 104. Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair] See note on I, 11. 108. dews dropping sleep] This, together with ‘slow dropping’ in 67 earlier and the ‘dwellings of wattle’ in 115, is echoed in WBY’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ 5–7, where ‘peace comes dropping slow,  | Dropping from the veils of the evening’. 112. Forth] Corrected thus in Proofs Texas from ‘Out’. 115. Fenians’] Fenian’s WO. The apostrophe here is almost certainly misplaced, and the word appears as ‘Fenians’’ in P95 and thereafter.



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Ah, sweet to me now were even bald Conan’s slanderous tongue!



‘Like me were some galley forsaken far off in Meridian isle, Remembering its long-­oared companions, sails turning to threadbare  rags; No more to crawl on the seas with long oars mile after mile, But to be ’mid the shooting of flies and flowering of rushes and flags.’

120

Their motionless eyeballs of spirits grown mild with mysterious thought, Watched her those seamless faces from the valley’s mural girth As she murmured, ‘Oh, wandering Oisin, the strength of the bell-­ branch is naught, For moveth alive in thy fingers the fluttering sadness of earth.

125

‘Then go through the lands in the saddle, and see what the mortal men do, And softly come to thy Niam over the tops of the tide; But weep for thy Niam, oh Oisin, weep; for if only thy shoe Brush lightly as hay-­mouse earth’s pebbles, no more shalt thou be by my  side.

130

‘Oh, flaming lion of the world, oh, when wilt thou turn to thy rest?’ I saw from a distant saddle; from the earth she made her moan – ‘I would die like a small withered leaf in the autumn, for breast unto  breast We shall mingle no more, nor our gazes empty their sweetness lone



116. bald Conan’s slanderous tongue] Conán mac Morna (sometimes, Conán Máel [the bald]): see note to II, 271. 120. flags] OED flag 1.a: ‘One of various endogenous plants, with a bladed or ensiform leaf, mostly growing in moist places. Now regarded as properly denoting a member of the genus Iris (pseudacorus) but sometimes (as in early use) applied to any reed or rush.’ 125. the mortal men] Corrected thus in Proofs Texas from ‘what mortal men’. 126–8.] Niam’s warning to Oisin compresses her triple injunction in Lay: “Remember O Oisin! what I am saying, If thou layest foot on level ground, Thou shalt not come again for ever To this fine land in which I am myself. “I say to thee again without guile,

If thou alightest once off the white steed, Thou wilt never more come to the ‘Land of Youth,’ O golden Oisin of the warlike arms! “I say to thee for the third time, If thou alightest off the steed thyself, That thou wilt be an old man, withered, and blind, Without activity, without pleasure, without run, without lea. 129. turn to thy rest] Cp. Tennyson, ‘A Dirge’, 3: ‘Fold thine arms, turn to thy rest’. 131. breast unto breast] Cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘October’, ‘The Story of Acontius and Cydippe’, 943–945: ‘That they this side of fair hope’s death | Might yet have clung breast unto breast, | And snatched from life a little rest’.

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135

‘In the isles of the farthest seas where only the spirits come. Were the winds less soft than the breath of a pigeon who sleeps on her nest, Nor lost in the star-­fires and odours the sound of the sea’s vague drum? Oh, flaming lion of the world, oh, when wilt thou turn to thy rest?’

140

The wailing grew distant; I rode by the woods of the wrinkling bark, Where ever is murmurous dropping – old silence and that one sound; For no live creatures live there, no weasels move in the dark – In reverie forgetful of all things, over the bubbling ground.

133. farthest seas] Possibly cp. W. Bowles, Poetical Works (1855), ‘The Sylph of Summer’, 82–5 [where a departing voyager loses sight of his homeland as it sinks beneath the horizon]: ‘How many anxious morns shall rise,  | How many moons shall light the farthest seas | O’er what new scenes and regions shall he stray, | A weary man, still thinking of his home’. only the spirits come] Possibly cp. Philip Bourke Marston, Wind-­Voices (1883), ‘Dream Moonlight’, 3: ‘Where spirits come in dreams to laugh or weep’. Of itself, this would be an exceedingly tenuous verbal connection, and very doubtful; but Marston’s whole sonnet comes into thematic contact with this part of the poem, and WBY had been reading at least Marston’s fiction in Sligo in the summer of 1887 when composition was in progress (see his letter to KT, 13 August 1887, CL 1, 33). Marston (1850–1887) was part of the London circle of William Sharp, D.G. Rossetti, and Swinburne; WBY was certainly aware of his work, and ‘Dream Moonlight’ is by no means alien to the atmosphere the poet was trying to create in Part III of his narrative poem: Dream-­moonlight, which for me sometimes makes bright And fair and wonderful the vales of sleep, Where spirits come in dreams to laugh or weep, Is, more than that which floods the actual night, A secret, subtle message to the sight. Sometimes it shines upon a pale dream-­deep, Or on untrodden fields no reapers reap, Or some unscaled and inaccessible height; –

Sometimes it falls ’twixt branches of dream-­trees, Where the soft light and shade divinely blend. O fair dream-­moonlight, which dost give surcease To this sore heart from memories that rend, If death were but to languish in thy peace How could one stay and battle to the end? Twenty-­ three years later, WBY mentioned Marston slightingly in a letter to Mabel Dickinson, as ‘a bad poet who has certainly made many people sentimental’ (17 Aug. 1910: InteLex 1411); but this minor sonnet’s consonance with the imagery and other content of WBY’s poem seems more than coincidental. 135. star-­fires] Cp. Thomas Moore, Lalla Rookh (1817), ‘The Fire-­Worshippers’, 1787: ‘Sights that will turn your star-­fires cold’, and Samuel Lover, Songs and Ballads (1858), ‘Seranade’, 21–2: ‘For when the pale dawn advances,  | Tremulous star-­fires decay’. 136–140 and 141–4.] WBY largely repeats 17–20 and 13–16 above (see notes); Oisin’s way back takes him in correct reverse order through the poetic landscape of his outward journey. 140. reverie forgetful of all things] WBY’s ‘reverie’ is OED 4.b: ‘The fact or state of being lost in thought or daydreaming’. The word is common in poetry, often with an adjective following it (‘reverie profound’, e.g., is a nineteenth-­ century commonplace); WBY’s phrase is close in effect to the almost exactly contemporary expression used by Albert Moll in his study Hypnotism (1890), IV, 193: ‘There is often reverie independent of the will’.



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And I rode by the plains of the sea’s edge, where all is barren and grey, Grey sands on the green of the grasses and over the dripping trees, Dripping and doubling landward, as though they would hasten away Like an army of old men longing for rest from the moan of the seas.

145

And the winds made the sands on the sea’s edge turning and turning go, As my mind made the names of the Fenians. Far from the hazel and oak I rode away on the surges, where high as the saddle bow Fled foam underneath me, and round me a wandering and milky smoke.

150

Long fled the foam-­flakes around me, the winds fled out of the vast, Snatching the bird in secret, nor knew I, embosomed apart, When they froze the cloth on my body like armour riveted fast, For Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.

155

Till fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-­mown hay Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; Later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away, From the great grass-­barnacle calling, and later the shore-­weeds brown.

143. doubling landward] Corrected thus in Proofs Texas from ‘doubling to landward’. 147. saddle bow] ‘The arched front part of a saddle’ (OED). 148. Fled] Corrected thus in Proofs Texas from ‘Flew’. 149. foam-­flakes] Cp. Tennyson, ‘A Dream of Fair Women’, 39: ‘Crisp foam-­ flakes scud along the level sand’. The phrase is not uncommon in poetry, but cp. Lady Wilde, Poems by Speranza (2nd edn. 1871), ‘The Prisoners: Christmas 1869’, 11–12: ‘fearless and free | As the foam-­flakes that dash on the land’. 150. embosomed apart] OED 2.a: ‘to be enclosed, enveloped in, closely surrounded with (woods, foliage, mountains, etc.); poet., to be ‘wrapped’ in (slumber, happiness, beauty, etc.)’: none of these usages includes WBY’s highly unusual ‘apart’. 152. keened] The verb ‘keen’ (to bewail, from the Irish caoinim, ‘wail’) entered English in the nineteenth century, and was still relatively rare even in Anglo-­Irish poetry. It is most prominent in the title-­poem of John Todhunter’s The Banshee (1888), where it is repeated several times in the form ‘Keening, keening!’ 153. fattening] WBY’s figurative use here is closest to OED 3. trans. ‘To enrich (the soil)

with nutritious or stimulating elements; to fertilize.’ the winds of the morning] Cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Cid’s Departure into Exile’, 30: ‘And the winds of the morning swept off the tear’. Also cp. James Montgomery, Poetical Works (1850), ‘The World Before the Flood’, Canto VII, 45: ‘Odours abroad the winds of morning breathe’. goose 156. grass-­barnacle] The barnacle-­ [branta leucopsis] winters on the coast of the west of Ireland. In folklore, the fact that the bird was not seen in summer gave rise to the legend that it bred mysteriously from the sea. An early witness to this belief is Giraldus Cambrensis (in his Topographia Hiberniae (c. 1188), XI, ‘Of barnacles, which grow from fir timber, and their nature’): There are likewise here many birds called barnacles, which nature produces in a wonderful manner, out of her ordinary course. They resemble the marsh-­ geese, but are smaller. Being at first gummy excrescenses from pine-­beams floating on the waters, and then enclosed in shells to secure their free growth, they hang by their beaks, like seaweeds attached to the timber. Being in

616

The Wanderings of Oisin

160

If I were as I once was, the gold hooves crushing the sands and the shells Coming forth from the sea like the morning with red lips murmuring a song, Not coughing, my head on my knees, and praying, and wroth with the bells, I would leave no saint’s head on his body, though spacious his lands were and strong.



Making way from the kindling surges, I rode on a bridle-­path, Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattles and wood-­work made, Thy bell-­mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the rath, And a small and a feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade,

process of time well covered with feathers, they either fall into the water or take their flight in the free air, their nourishment and growth being supplied, while they are bred in this very unaccountable and curious manner, from the juices of the wood in the sea-­water. I  have often seen with my own eyes more than a thousand minute embryos of birds of this species on the seashore, hanging from one piece of timber, covered with shells, and already formed. No eggs are laid by these birds after copulation, as is the case with birds in general; the hen never sits on eggs in order to hatch them; in no corner of the world are they seen either to pair, or build nests. (Thomas Wright (ed.), The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis (1863), The Topography of Ireland (trans. Thomas Forrester), 36.) According to W.G. Wood-­Martin, something of this medieval belief still persisted in the County Sligo of the nineteenth century (History of Sligo, County and Town (1882), vol. 2, 376): Some of the country people still firmly believe that the barnacle goose, which breeds in the high northern latitudes, i.e. Iceland, Lapland, &c., but is a winter visitant to our sea-­coast, is really propagated from the cirriped marine testaceous animal so often found adhering to the wooden piles and hulls of vessels; but in this idea they were not singular, for in former times even learned writers gravely affected the same. Probably the delusion first arose from the designation

“barnacle” being common to both. It was long, however, before truth prevailed, and the absurd doctrine of the generation of these sea-­fowl was finally refuted. WBY’s ‘grass-­ barnacle’ seems uncommon: it may derive from the fact that the goose’s customary diet is grass. The bird makes a reappearance in WBY’s late poetry: see ‘High Talk’ (1938), 11. 159. wroth with] A common enough archaism, but perhaps cp. Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall’, 149: ‘Weakness to be wroth with weakness!’ 160. strong] A  query from a copy editor in Proofs Texas remarks, ‘Rather a far-­fetched adjective’: WBY made no change. 161. kindling surges] WBY’s figurative use of ‘kindling’ is unusual: it is likely he intends to convey a red colour in the waves, with a sense closest to OED kindle 5.b. intr., ‘To become glowing or bright like fire’. Cp. R. Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810), VII, 60: ‘The orient . . . Kindles as it receives the rising ray’. While ‘the kindling dawn’, like ‘the kindling air’ (used by Shelley in Prometheus Unbound III ii 79: ‘As thy chariot cleaves the kindling air’) and ‘the kindling sky’ (found in the Yeats circle in John Todhunter’s Forest Songs (1881), ‘A Phantasy’, 7: ‘I saw in the kindling sky’) is a commonplace, kindling waves are less often seen: an instance comes in R.W. Buchanan’s Balder the Beautiful: A  Song of Divine Death (1877), IX ii, 9–10: ‘Brighter and fairer all around | The kindling waters shone’. 162. of wattles  .  .  .  made] The phrase is used again by WBY in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 2: ‘of clay and wattles made’.



165

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617

Or weeding and ploughing with faces a-­shining with much toil wet; And in this place and that place, with bodies unglorious, their chief   tains stood, Awaiting in patience the straw-­death, crosiered one, caught in thy net – Went the laughter of scorn from my mouth like the roaring of wind in a  wood.

163. rath] The Irish rath (or raith) is a ring fort, an enclosure of roughly circular form, with earthen walls. In his A History of our Own Times (1880), the writer and anti-­ Parnellite MP Justin McCarthy (1830–1912) notes that ‘The ‘good people’ still linger around the raths’ (vol. 4, 231). The term is common in nineteenth-­century Irish writing (much used in both Aubrey De Vere and William Allingham), but it is especially so in the poetry of Thomas Davis: in Poems (1846), ‘My Home: A  Dream’ conjoins the term with ‘cairn’ in a way close to WBY here: ‘On its brink is a ruined castle, stern | The mountains are crowned with rath and cairn’ (11–12). Cp. also Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), Inisfail III, ‘The Changed Music’, 3–4: ‘Pursues no more by field or shore | From rath to cairne, the ruined rout’. 164. populace] In his review of WO in the Pall Mall Gazette (12 Jul. 1889) Oscar Wilde quoted 141–164 with praise, but with the reservation that ‘In one or two places the music is faulty, the construction is sometimes too involved, and the word ‘populace’ in the last line is rather infelicitous’. mattock and spade] This phrase was in use since at least the sixteenth century (see e.g. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus IV iii 11: ‘dig with mattock and with spade’); in nineteenth-­century poetry, it is to be found in R. Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868), X, 960–961: ‘the common life, | Mattock and spade, plough-­tail and wagon-­shaft’ and W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870), ‘October: ‘The man who never Laughed Again’, 602: ‘Mattock and spade he too with him did bear’. The phrase occurs in Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘Owen Bawn’, 28: ‘hammer and trowel, and mattock and spade’.

166. bodies unglorious] Both the inversion, and the use of a very rare adjective in ‘unglorious’ (to mean inglorious), give Oisin’s speech here an archaic note. 167. straw-­death] A  natural death, in bed. Cp. Robert Burns, ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’ (1787), 63: ‘a fair strae-­death,  | By loss o’ blood, or want o’ breath’. In his notes to Lamentation, Standish H. O’Grady writes that ‘It is probable that Oisin had seldom witnessed death except upon the battle-­ field, and was therefore ignorant of its symptoms when produced by mere decay. Many centuries after the Fenian epoch it was considered an extraordinary thing for a man, not being in the church, to meet any but a violent death, and the Annals of the middle and later ages generally notice such an event, saying that such an one met with “death upon the pillow,” and often adding it was a matter of surprise to all men’ (Trans. Oss. Soc. Vol. 3, 284). crosiered one] Recalling Oisin’s opening address to Partick at the beginning of Part II, ‘man of crosiers’. For ‘crosiered’, cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘King Ethelbert of Kent and Saint Augustine’, 408: ‘The strong brow mitred, and the crosiered hand’. (De Vere’s Legends of the Saxon Saints (1879), where the poem first appeared, is one of the modern books which, like his earlier Legends of St. Patrick (1872), stands in the background of WBY’s saint-­and-­pagan dialogue). 168. laughter of scorn] WBY makes a noun of a common verbal phrase, ‘laugh to scorn’, first used in English Bible translations such as that of Coverdale (1540), which has its currency through the King James Bible, where it is commonly employed (e.g. Psalm 22, 7: All

618 170 175 180

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And because I went by them so huge and so speedy, with eyes so bright, Came after the hard gaze of youth, or was lifted an old man’s mild head. And I rode and I rode, and I cried out, ‘The Fenians hunt wolves in the  night, So sleep they by daytime.’ A voice cried, ‘The Fenians a long time are dead.’ A whitebeard stood hushed on the pathway, the flesh of his face as   dried grass And in folds round his eyes and his mouth, he sad as a child without milk; And the dreams of the islands went out of me, and I knew how men pass, And their hounds, and their steeds, and their loves, and their youth,   and their eyes soft as silk. And wrapping my face in my hair, I murmured, ‘In old age they ceased,’ And my tears were large like to berries, and I murmured, ‘Where white   clouds lie spread On Crevroe or on broad Knockfefin, with many of old they feast On the floors of the gods.’ He cried, ‘Nay, the gods a long time are dead.’

they that see me laugh me to scorn’). ‘Laugh to scorn’ also occurs twice in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. 170. gaze of youth] For a probably coincidental occurrence of this rare phrase, cp. Felicia Hemans, Works (1839), ‘The Forest Sanctuary’, Part 2, 434–5: ‘as when thy radiant sign | First drew my gaze of youth’. mild head] Cp. William Allingham, The Music Master: A Love-­Poem (1860), 212: ‘She bows her mild head near the alter-­rail’. 172. by daytime] Cp. D.G. Rossetti, The Early Italian Poets (1861), trans. of Cavalcanti, Sonnet 20, 1: ‘I come to thee by daytime constantly’; also cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878), ‘A Song in Season’, 103: ‘Joy by daytime’ and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), ‘A Dark Month’, 140: ‘Ghosts that walk by daytime’. 173. whitebeard] An old man with a white beard: cp. Shakespeare, Richard II III. ii. 108: ‘Whitebeards have armed their thin and hairless scalps’, and William Allingham, Irish Songs and Poems (1887), ‘A Stormy Night: A  Story of the Donegal Coast’, XV, 3: ‘Whitebeard Father, trembling Mother’. (WBY quoted this poem of Allingham’s in articles for United Ireland in

1891 and The Bookman in 1895: see CW 9, 150 and 266.) 175. went out of me] were gone out of me Morgan. WBY’s thought of revision here seems to damage the line’s rhythm, and does not occur in any of the other annotated copies: for P95, the line is revised in such a way as to make it more regularly anapaestic in character. 179. On Crevroe or on broad Knockfefin] Crevroe is from the Irish, Craobh ruadh [older Irish spellings include Craebruad and Craeb Ruad] lit. ‘Red Branch’, the lodgings of the Red Branch knights at Emain Macha. This was one of three palaces of the king Conchubar MacNessa: its name derives from the large roofbeam supporting the hall. As first identified by McGarry, 61–2, Knockfefin is Sliabh-­na-­mBan Femhinn, mountain of the women of Femen, modern Slievenamon, Co. Tipperary (Femen was a plain in Tipperary, between Cashel and Clonmel). There are a number of mythological associations, including with the enchantment of Finn MacCool, and the home of the Dagda’s son Bobh Derg, at Sid ar Femen. WBY’s conjunction of these two place names derives from J.C. Mangan’s translation of an Irish Jacobite aisling poem by John MacDonnell, ‘Claragh’s Dream’: ‘To



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619



And shivering and lonely, and longing for Niam, I turned me about, The heart in me longing to leap like a grasshopper into her heart, And rode on till over the world’s rim floated the sea’s old shout, And mixed with the sound of that roarer the sound of two stumbling apart.

185

With sweating, with staggering, they lifted and shouldered a sack full of  sand,

the halls of Mac-­Lir, to Creevroe’s height,  | To Tara, the glory of Erin, | To the fairy palace that glances bright | On the peak of blue Cnocfeerin’. This poem was included in Celtic Irish Songs and Song-­Writers: A Selection ed. Charles MacCarthy Collins (1885). they feast] they fast WO: corrected thus in Ellis, Garnett, Williams, Skipsey, and Morgan. In Proofs Texas, ‘they fast’ is corrected to ‘they range’  – oddly, since the corresponding rhyme-­position word (‘ceased’ in 177) remains unaltered. It is possible that it was this uncompleted act of revision at proof stage which, on not being followed through by WBY, inadvertently permitted the original misprint to stand. For P95 and after, the reading is ‘they feast’. 182. The heart in me] WBY’s conventional diction here is picked up, in a suggestive context, by John Todhunter’s poem ‘A Fenian’s Return’, published posthumously in his From The Land of Dreams (1918). The poem is ‘Inscribed to the Memory of John O’Leary’, and so may have been composed soon after O’Leary’s death in 1907; its setting, however, is that of 1885, when the exiled Fenian returned to Ireland. From the Land of Dreams gathers together poems from all points in Todhunter’s career, and an author’s preface claims that of the previously uncollected poems ‘most are new’; but it is conceivable that ‘A Fenian’s Return’ was written well before it could be inscribed to O’Leary’s memory, perhaps in the years when Todhunter was closest to the Yeats family in Bedford Park. Whatever its date, the poem’s congruence with WBY’s version of the return of Oisin to Ireland, in the political context of John O’Leary’s return from exile, is striking. ‘The heart of me’ comes in the poem’s sixth stanza:

The wind wails o’er the bog, and in the pine-­trees, With an Irish note of sorrow, soft and wild, And old memories of dead days come with its wailing, Till the heart of me is weeping like a child. WBY’s Oisin has a longing at this point for Niam rather than Ireland; but Todhunter’s (probable) echo of WBY shows how the register of nostalgia can carry a specifically Fenian inflection. ‘The Fenian’s Return’ is the sixth poem in a sequence, ‘Dreams in Exile’: its final poem, the seventh, is entitled ‘Tir N’An Og’. 184. roarer] The sea: cp. Shakespeare, The Tempest I.i.16: ‘What cares these roarers for the name of King’? 185–192.] The version of Oisin’s touching the earth and putting on all his mortal years is given differently in Lay: rather than seeing men struggling with a sack full of sand, Oisin helps members of ‘a great assembly . . . Three hundred men and more’ to lift ‘a large flag of marble’. Lay narrates events thus: [Oisin] ’Tis a shameful deed, that it should now be said, And the number of men that is there, That the strength of the host is unable To lift a flag with great power. If Oscur the son of Oisin lived, He would take this flag in his right hand, He would fling it in a throw over the host – It is not my custom to speak falsehood. I lay upon my right breast, And I took the flag in my hand, With the strength and activity of my limbs I sent it seven perches from its place!

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But prone on the pathway, prone struggling, they lay ’neath the sand-­   sack at length. Leaning forth from the gem-­studded saddle, I flung it five yards with   my hand With a sob – for men waxing so weakly, a sob for the Fenians’ old strength.

With the force of the very large flag, The golden girth broke on the white steed; I came down full suddenly, On the soles of my two feet on the lea. No sooner did I come down, Than the white steed took fright, He went then on his way, And I, in sorrow, both weak and feeble. I lost the sight of my eyes, My form, my countenance, and my vigour, I was an old man, poor and blind, Without strength, understanding, or esteem. WBY’s source for the sack full of sand comes in a coda to the prefatory matter in Lay, (Trans. Oss. Soc. 232–3). Here, John O’Daly mentions a version of the Oisin legend featuring ‘the cavern of the grey sheep’, ‘a large cave which is situated at Coolagarronroe, Kilkenny, near Mitchelstown, in the county of Cork’. He quotes a letter he has received on the subject from ‘a native of the district’, Mr. William Williams of Dungarvan: Oisin went into the cave, met a beautiful damsel, after crossing the stream, lived with her for (as he fancied) a few days, wished to revisit the Fenians, obtained consent at last, on condition of not alighting from a white steed, with which she furnished him, stating that it was over 300  years since he came to the cave. He proceeded till he met a carrier, whose cart, containing a bag of sand, was upset; he asked Oisin to help him; unable to raise the bag with one hand, he alighted, on which the steed fled, leaving him a withered, decrepid, blind old man. (This story is also quoted in full in the brief account of ‘The Lay of Oisin in the Land of

Youth’ given by Henry Charles Coote in The Folk-­Lore Record Vol. 2 (1879), 15–16.) A sack (though a sack of oats, not sand) features also in the version preserved in John Hawkins Simpson’s Poems of Oisin Bard of Erin (1857). In a section entitled ‘Oisin Returns from the Youthful City’, where ‘the enchantress’ gives Oisin a horse and an embroidered cloth, ‘telling him that, whenever he dismounted, he must be sure to put the cloth under the horse, and by that means the horse would be obliged to stand still’, Oisin meets ‘a man driving a horse laden with a sack of oats; by some accident the sack fell down, and the man called to Oisin to get off his horse and help him to lift the sack. The giant [Oisin] was vexed to see that the man was so weak: he jumped down and put up the sack for the man. Whilst he was doing this his enchanted steed vanished, – for he had forgotten all about the embroidered cloth – and directly he became old and blind’ (190–191). 186. prone struggling] prone with struggling Ellis. 188. the Fenians’ old strength] Oisin’s repeated ‘sob’ in this line establishes a firmly pagan style of heroic conduct, distinct from the sentimental modernity of a tear in the eye; but the ‘old strength’ may carry more contemporary (and subversive) overtones. The phrase occurs strikingly in Tennyson’s Laureate poem, written at the command of the Prince of Wales, ‘Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen’ (1886), whose second stanza runs: May we find, as ages run, The mother featured in the son; And may yours for ever be That old strength and constancy Which has made your fathers great



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621

190

The rest thou hast heard of, crosiered one – how, when divided the girth, I fell on the path, and the horse went away like a summer fly; And my years three hundred fell on me, and I rose and walked on the earth, A creeping old man, full of sleep, with the spittle on his beard never dry.



How the men of the sand-­sack led me to Shaul, with its belfry in air – Sorry place, where for the swing of the war-­axe in my dim eyes the   crosier gleams; What place have Caolte and Fin, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair?

195

In our ancient island State, And wherever her flag fly, Glorying between sea and sky, Makes the might of Britain known; Britons, hold your own! 190. summer fly] Cp. R.D. Joyce, Deirdre (1877), ‘The Palace Garden’, 336: [the trout] ‘sparkling upwards catch the summer fly’ and Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien (1859), 256: ‘called herself a gilded summer fly’. 191. my years three hundred fell on me] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, The Foray of Queen Meave and Other Legends of Ireland’s Heroic Age (1884), ‘The Children of Lir: An Ancient Irish Romance’, II, 405–7: ‘Soon as they left the wave, and trod the shore | The weight of bygone centuries on them fell:  | To human forms they changed’. 192. full of sleep] Cp. A. Swinburne, A Song of Italy (1867), 519–20: ‘raised and gave thee life to run and leap  | When thou wast full of sleep’ and Jean Ingelow, Poems (1888), ‘Supper at the Mill’, 230: ‘his eyes are full of sleep’. WBY uses the phrase again in ‘When You Are Old’, 1: ‘old and grey and full of sleep’. the spittle on his beard] Perhaps cp. R. Burns, ‘Death and Doctor Hornbrook’ (1787), 59–60: ‘I wad na mind it, no that spittle | Out-­owre my beard’. 193. Shaul] Saul, in Co. Down (Irish Sabhall Phadraig, the barn of Patrick), near Downpatrick, where Patrick was said to have established his community; supposedly the site of

the first Christian church in Ireland and the place of the saint’s death in 461. 195. Caolte] The Fenian warrior Cailte mac Ronain, who was steward to Finn and is here presented as a comrade of Oisin. A contemporary literary appearance of this figure known to WBY was in KT, Shamrocks (1887), ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’, IV, 41 (as Cailte). On the character of Caolte, Standish J. O’Grady’s summary is one which may influence WBY’s larger perspective on the Fenian heroes and their relation to the early Irish Christian culture of the monks (History of Ireland: Critical and Philosophical (1881) Vol. 1, 353): Coelte Mac Ronan, Coelte son of Ronan, is the nephew of Finn, being his sister’s son. He is one of the greater Fian heroes, slender, and renowned for his swiftness. He and Ossian alone survived of all the Fiana Eireen, but while Ossian, a withered elder, is taken possession of by the monks, and encouraged to relate the historyof his people, Coelte, after the destruction of the Fians, entered the host of the Tuatha De Danan, and lived immortal and invisible in the island. He stormed the enchanted fortress of the gods of the Erne at Assaroe, and entered himself into its possession, where he dwelt for many centuries. He, too, however, is once or twice represented as visiting St. Patrick, and relating histories. In the ideas attached to Coelte and Ossian, we see a great historical truth.

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Speak, thou too art old with thy memories, an old man surrounded   with dreams. PATRICK

200

Where the flesh of the footsole clingeth on the burning stones is their  place; Where the demons whip them with wires on the burning stones of wide  hell, Watching the blessed ones move far off, and the smile on God’s face, Between them a gateway of brass and the howl of the angels who fell.

With the ascendancy of the new order, with its love of scholarship and learning, the monks began to feel an interest in the history of their country and of the bardic literature. This tendency finds dramatic expression in the introduction of Ossian into the monasteries. On the other hand, the bardic and ethnic traditions continued amongst the hereditary bards, and thus Coelte, in his second avatar, is found not amongst the monks, but amongst the Tuatha De Danan, the chief object of loving interest after the heroes to the non-­ Christian portion of the community. WBY’s familiarity with this account is made more likely by the fact that he uses one of O’Grady’s stories about Caolte in 1893, when writing ‘The Host’ (later ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’); this story occurs on the page that follows. The tale of Caolte’s driving away former gods from Assaroe is compressed for use by WBY in ‘The Secret Rose’ (1896), 16. 196. thou too art old] Perhaps cp. R.W. Buchanan, Undertones (1864), ‘Penelope’, 148–9: ‘But thou, thou too, art old, dear lord  – thy hair  | Is threaded with the silver foam’. 197. footsole] This term for the sole of the foot is found in William Allingham, Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland (1864), IV 194–6: ‘nor, if secure  | Of footsole-­ place where painfully he wrought,  | Would Manus grumble’ and W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870)

III, ‘September: The Death of Paris’ 270: ‘A dreary road the weary foot-­sole wears’. on the burning stones] The references here and in the remainder of the poem to burning and flaming stones recall the language of John O’Daly’s translation of ‘The Dialogue of Oisin and Patrick’ (Agallamh Oisin agus Phadraic), included in the Trans. Oss. Soc. 1859, where Patrick tells Oisin (probably in relation to Fionn, though the context is unclear), ‘Well I  am aware  | Where he is [stretched] on a flag-­stone and a twist in his head’ (43), and ‘Fionn and the Fenians are now [lying] | Sorrowful on the flag-­stone of pains’ (45). In P95, WBY adds a note which suggests that Partick’s and Oisin’s conceptions of Hell are at cross-­purposes, with the Christian notion of ‘burning’ not in accord with the pagan idea of an eternal cold: ‘In the older Irish books Hell is always cold, and this is probably because the Fomoroh, or evil powers ruled over the north and the winter. Christianity adopted as far as possible the Pagan symbolism in Ireland as elsewhere, and Irish poets, when they became Christian, did not cease to speak of ‘the cold flagstone of Hell’’. 198. wide hell] It is just possible that WBY takes up this phrase from a poem by Swinburne, ‘The Armada’, which first appeared in the Fortnightly Review for Sept. 1888 (the proofs for WO arrived at Bedford Park on 6 Sept. 1888): ‘The master whose mercy fulfils wide hell till its torturers tire’ (92) (the poem



The Wanderings of Oisin

623

OISIN

Put the staff in my hands; I will go to the Fenians, thou cleric, and chant The war-­songs that roused them of old; they will rise, making clouds   with their breath Innumerable, singing, exultant – the clay underneath them shall pant, And demons, all broken in pieces, be trampled beneath them in death.

205

And demons afraid in their darkness – deep horror of eyes and of wings, Afraid their ears on the earth laid, shall listen and rise up and weep Hearing the shaking of shields and the quiver of stretched bowstrings, Hearing hell loud with a murmur, as shouting and mocking we sweep.

210

We will tear out the red flaming stones, and will batter the gateway of brass And enter, and none sayeth ‘nay’ when there enters the strongly armed  guest; Make clean as a broom cleans, and march on as oxen move over young  grass; Then feast, making converse of Eri, of wars, and of old wounds, and rest.



PATRICK 215

On the red flaming stones without refuge the limbs of the Fenians are tost; No live man goes thither, and no man may war with the strong spirits wage; But weep thou, and wear thou the flags with thy knees, for thy soul that   is lost,

was reprinted in Poems and Ballads: Third Series in 1889, after the publication of WO.) 200.] a gateway of brass] Cp. Psalm 107: 16: ‘For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder.’ The allusion comes again in 209. 202. war-­songs] In Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1888), there is discussion of the ancient Irish ‘Ross-­catha [Rosc-­catha], or battle-­hymn’ as ‘the great war-­song to which the warriors marched to battle, and which inspired them with the heroic madness that braved death for victory’ (276). 205. deep horror] Cp. Thomas Moore, Poetical Works (1841), ‘The Genius of Harmony: An Irregular Ode’, 74: ‘Mid the deep horror of that silent bower’. 206. Afraid their] Corrected thus in Proofs Texas from ‘Afraid with their’.

207. quiver of stretched bowstrings] WBY’s ‘quiver’, which is OED n.2 (‘An act of quivering; a quivering movement’), puns on the quivers containing the Fenians’ arrows. 208. loud with a murmur] ‘Murmur’ here is the archaic OED 1.a., ‘expression of discontent or anger’, though even in this sense ‘loud’ is an unusual adjective. Perhaps cp. Edwin Atherstone, The Fall of Nineveh (1868), III, 91–2: ‘He ended; and sounds dissonant – the voice | Applauding, the loud murmur censuring,  – rose’ and XIII, 775–6: ‘Man unto man spake angrily; and turned  | Upon the priest fierce faces; murmuring loud’. 209. and will] we will Morgan. 212 wounds, and rest] Morgan wounds and rest WO. 214. strong spirits] Patrick’s phrase for Hell’s demons here repeats that used in Lady Wilde’s poem in the Fenian amnesty campaign of late

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The Wanderings of Oisin



For thy youth without peace, and thy years with the demons, and the   godless fires of thine age. OISIN

220

Ah me! to be old without succour, a show unto children, a stain, Without laughter, a coughing, alone with remembrance and fear, All emptied of purple hours as a beggar’s cloak in the rain, As a grass seed crushed by a pebble, as a wolf sucked under a weir.



I will pray no more with the smooth stones: when life in my body has   ceased – For lonely to move ’mong the soft eyes of blest ones a sad thing were – I will go to the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast, To Fin, Caolte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.



1869, ‘The Prisoners: Christmas, 1869’, 47–8: ‘From these doomed lips the strong spirits’ pleading | Soared up from man’s bar to God’s throne’. See also notes to I, 44 and III, 149. 216.] For thy youth without peace, for thy years with the demons, the fury of thine age Ellis. WBY’s excessively long line here (still long in the attempted revision in Ellis) will be revised away for P95. 217–218. without] WBY’s repeated ‘without.  .  .  ’ clauses here echo Oisin’s series of ‘without’s in the ‘Dialogue of Patrick and Oisin’, where the Irish word gan (without) is used thirteen times in eight lines. O’Daly’s translation in Transactions Vol. 4 is: It is a good claim for me on thy God To be among his clerics, as I am; Without food, without clothing or music, Without bestowing gold on bards. Without the cry of the hounds or of the horns, Without guarding harbours or coasts; For all that I have suffered for lack of food, I forgive heaven’s king in my will Without bathing, without hunting, without Fionn, Without courting generous women, without sport, Without sitting in my place, as was due,

Without learning feats of agility or fighting. 219. purple hours] WBY’s ‘purple’ is OED adj. 3 fig., ‘Characterized by richness or abundance; splendid, glorious’. Cp. Thomas Gray, ‘Ode on the Spring’, 1, 4: ‘The rosy-­bosomed Hours | . . . | Wake the purple year’. beggar’s cloak] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘Alexander the Great’ II i 91–2: ‘The Indian Seer  | Who scorns both kingly throne and beggar’s cloak’. 221. the small stones] Oisin refers here to rosary beads (though anachronistically, since the rosary was a fourteenth-­century introduction to Christian devotions). 222. soft eyes] Possibly cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam Canto II st. 22, ‘those soft eyes of scarcely conscious thought’. blest] best WO: corrected thus by WBY in Ellis, Skipsey, and Morgan. 223. at feast] A  common enough piece of pseudo-­medieval diction in Victorian poetry, this phrase is a particular favourite of Aubrey De Vere’s, who uses it on seven occasions, e.g. Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Foray of Queeen Maeve’, I, 463–4: ‘Again at feast | Ailill made question of the Red Branch Knights’. 224.] The roll-­call of WBY’s last line combines Part II, 271, ‘Finn, Conan’ and Part I 11 and 25, ‘Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair’, with Part III, 195, ‘Caolte and Fin, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair’.

82

KING GOLL (THIRD CENTURY) THE POEMS

Date of revisions. The first major revision to this poem, which had appeared originally in Sept. 1887 in The Leisure Hour (see separately edited version, ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’), was for Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland (1888). The origins of PBYI are in late 1886: on 15 Dec. of that year, WBY was present at John O’Leary’s house for an early editorial discussion of the book’s contents and contributors, along with KT, Douglas Hyde, Rose Sigerson, and J.F. Taylor. The book itself was not published until 1 May 1888, by which time WBY’s ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’ had already appeared in The Leisure Hour. The wholesale differences between that version and the PBYI text result from WBY’s thoroughgoing revision, which was probably either complete or well-­advanced by late 1887; the poem’s single surviving MS is a copy given by the poet to KT, quite possibly in 1887, which was evidently revised (perhaps at proof stage) before PBYI appeared. WBY undertook further revision when preparing the poem for inclusion in WO: this took place before 14 Nov. 1888, when he took delivery of the final proofs for WO, but not necessarily after the publication of PBYI in May, since WBY delivered copy for WO to Kegan Paul on 12 Mar. that year. The proofs of WO preserved in Texas (which were the book’s final proofs) show that major revisions to the PBYI poem had, for the most part, taken place before the WO text was set. It seems likely that the revisions from the version of PBYI to that of WO took place in the first half of 1888. Sources. In 1887, WBY printed a passage from Eugene O’Curry, Lectures on the Manuscript Materials of Ancient Irish History, Delivered at the Catholic University of Ireland during the Sessions of 1855 and 1856 (1861) as the source of what was at that stage ‘An Irish Legend’ (as the poem was subtitled): Goll or Gall lived in Ireland about the third century. The battle wherein he lost his reason furnished matter for a bardic chronicle still extant. O’Curry, in his ‘Manuscript Materials of Irish History,’ thus tells the tale: ‘Having entered the battle with extreme eagerness, his excitement soon increased to absolute frenzy, and after having performed astounding deeds of valour he fled in a state of derangement from the scene of slaughter, and never stopped until he plunged into the wild seclusion of a deep glen far up the country. This glen has ever since been called Glen-­na-­Gealt, or the Glen of the Lunatics, and it is even to this day believed in the south that all the lunatics of Erin would resort to this spot if they were allowed to be free.’ For contextual discussion of WBY’s note, see ‘King Goll: An Irish Legend’. Removing the note for PBYI, WBY in fact carried further the confusion between O’Curry’s young Goll DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-83

626

KING GOLL

(who was not a king) and Goll Mac Morna, who was the leader of the Fenians in Connaght (see note on Clan Morna, 3). Publication history. The poem appeared in PBYI, between KT’s ‘Shameen Dhu’ and T.W. Rolleston’s ‘The Spell-­Struck’, some thirty pages after the first piece by WBY in the volume, ‘The Stolen Child’, and thirteen before the next of his four contributions, ‘The Meditation of the Old Fisherman’ (his last piece, ‘Love Song: From the Irish’ was the final item in the book). A second impression of PBYI was issued in 1890, and in 1891, WBY described the book thus, in an appreciation of the recently deceased Rose Kavanagh (CW 7, 42): In 1888, a number of her poems were included in Poems and Ballads of Young Ireland, a little volume which has had a sale sufficient at any rate to warrant its present new and cheaper form. It was planned out by a number of us, including Miss Rose Kavanagh, Miss Katharine Tynan, Miss Ellen O’Leary, Dr. Todhunter and Dr. Douglas Hyde, the Gaelic scholar, with the aim, I hope not altogether unfulfilled, of adding another link, however small, to the long chain of Irish song that unites decade to decade. The poem’s next outing, in revised form, came with WO. WBY was to engage in further radical revision of the poem for P95 and after; that version is separately edited in Vol. 2. Textual history. The one surviving MS is in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas (MS). This was in the possession of KT, and evidently formed part of the materials for PBYI. The poem occupies the rectos of four pages that have been removed from a notebook (presumably, by WBY himself); on the verso of the last page, KT has written, ‘Autograph Copy for Poems & Ballads of Young Ireland 1888’, signing with the initials ‘K.T.H.’: this means that she was writing at some point after her marriage to Henry Hinkson in 1898. The MS differs at numerous points from the text as published in PBYI, though it carries numerical markings which suggest strongly that it was indeed a part of the copy for the volume as a whole: the changes concerned might well have been carried out at proof stage, either by WBY or under his instruction. For a full transcription of the MS, see Cornell Early Poetry 2, 214–216. The text of the poem in WO did not receive more than two substantive corrections at proof stage (see notes on 8 and 13), though WBY made eight other small corrections, preserved in the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas (Proofs (Texas)). In one of the surviving annotated copies of WO, however, WBY made further changes to the text of the poem, clearly intended for further revision. This copy is in the Pierpont Morgan Library (Morgan). The changes made by the poet in Morgan are incorporated in the present text. In the event, further revision of the poem was to prove more of a substantial rewriting for its next appearance in P95, so most of the Morgan changes were superseded.

KING GOLL



627

Copy-­text. WO.

M

ine was a chair of skins and gold,   Wolf-­breeding mountains, galleried Eman, Mine were clan Morna’s tribes untold,   Many a landsman, many a seaman. 5 Chaired in a cushioned otter skin,   Fields fattening slow, men wise in joy, I ruled and ruled my life within,   Peace-­making, mild, a kingly boy.

2. Wolf-­breeding] Hazely MS. galleried Eman] WBY’s ‘Eman’ refers to Emain Macha, the seat of the Ulster kings. The form ‘Eman’ is standard in Ferguson, and in De Vere, and is used also in the work of R.D. Joyce: see e.g. Samuel Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865), ‘Deirdre’s Lament for the Sons of Usnach’, 49: ‘Woe to Eman, roof and wall!’, Aubrey De Vere, The Foray of Queen Maeve (1882), I, 493: ‘I rule in Eman and this Uladh realm’, R.D. Joyce, Blanid (1879), ‘The Flower Feast in Mana’, 19: ‘From Eman’s hall and Tara’s level shade’. With ‘galleried’, cp. T.C. Irwin, Irish Poems and Legends (1869), ‘St. Patrick and Aengus’, 164: ‘While the court of the Emperor crowded each galleried tower’. 3.] Mine were long lagging rivers cold MS. And streams, wide-­watering, salmon-­shoaled, PBYI. clan Morna] This clan of the Fianna, the rivals of the other major clan grouping, the clan Baiscne (whose leader was Fionn Mac Cumhaill), had Goll Mac Morna as its chieftain. This is in fact a different Goll from the one described in Eugene O’Curry in relation to a story of the Battle of Ventry harbour, which gave WBY the source for his narrative (and part of which he had quoted in the Leisure Hour version in 1887). There have been disagreements about the extent to which WBY’s conflation of two different Golls is intentional, and the question is perhaps impossible to decide; but that there is a conflation here cannot be doubted. Goll Mac Morna, unlike his princely young Ulster

counterpart, is an experienced warrior and chieftain: in Patrick Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866), he is identified as ‘the best warrior in Connaught’ (216), ‘himself an amalgamation of Ajax and Diomed’ (222): this classical parallel was taken up later by Douglas Hyde, who referred to Goll Mac Morna as ‘the Ajax of the Fenians’ (A Literary History of Ireland: From Earliest Times to the Present Day (1899), 258). 4. landsman] In WBY’s sense here (OED 2 (a), ‘One who lives or has his business on land: opposed to seaman’), this word dates from the late seventeenth century. 5.] WBY seems to be imagining a throne upholstered with otter skin. Archaeology offered the poet no hints when it came to royal fashions in upholstery, but otter skin as a material was relatively rare and, if used, would more likely be a clothing material. A  recent bog discovery led Robert MacAdam to report in 1861 a preserved cloak made from the sewn-­together pelts of otters, setting this in context: ‘That otter-­skins were considered of value in ancient times is evident from one of the Welsh laws of Howel Dha, (in the 10th century), in which the skin of an ox, a deer, a fox, a wolf, and an otter, are all valued at the same price, that is, eight times as dear as the skin of a sheep or goat. [. . .] There are early notices of the export of otter-­ skins, among other peltry, from Ireland’ (Ulster Journal of Archaeology, vol. 9 (1861), 299). a] the MS, PBYI. 8.] A  gracious, gentle, kingly boy. MS, PBYI: corr. from this in Proofs (Texas). ‘Kingly boy’

628

KING GOLL

And every whispering old man said, 10 Bending low his fading head,   ‘This young man brings the age of gold.’ (They will not hush, the leaves a-­flutter round me – the beech leaves old). Splashed all with clay and journey dull,   A herald cried out, ‘To our valleys 15 Has come a sea-­king masterful   To fill with cows his hollow galleys.’ From rolling valley and rivery glen,   With horsemen hurrying near and far, I drew at evening my mailed men,

makes its way into KT, Poems (1901), ‘The Legend of St. Austin and the Child’, 53–4: ‘What lineage high and fine  | Is yours, O kingly boy’, and into AE (George Russell), The Earth Breath and Other Poems (1896), ‘The Child of Destiny’, 21: ‘Night like a glowing seraph o’er the kingly boy’. 9. whispering] mumbling MS, PBYI. 9, 12.] whispering . . . will not hush] Perhaps cp. a short poem by Augusta Webster, A Book of Rhyme (1881), ‘The Whisper’: Some one has said a whispered word to me; The whisper whispers on within my ear. Oh little word, hush, hush, and let me be; Hush, little word, too vexing sweet to hear. And, if it will not hush, what must I do? The word was “Love”; perchance the word was true: And, if it will not hush, must I repine? I am his love; perchance then he is mine. 12. leaves a-­ flutter round me] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Earthly Paradise (1870) I, ‘March: Atalanta’s Race’, 517: ‘The rose-­leaves flutter round me in the night’. 13–16] With all his colours journey-­dull, Cried a herald, “Peace with thine: Southward a sea-­king masterful Whips to the sea the cows and swine.” PBYI. 13. Splashed all with clay] Cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lay of the Last Minstrel III,

25–26: ‘That warrior’s steed, so dapple-­gray, | Was dark with sweat, and splashed with clay’. 14. A herald cried out] Morgan Cried a herald PBYI, WO. The line was to be more radically revised for P95. 15, 21. a sea-­king . . . pirates] These look very much like Viking raiders, though WBY possibly intends (as later versions of this poem specify) more otherworldly invaders such as the undersea powers of the Fomoroh. Samuel Ferguson, in Book IV of his Congal (1872), just before the battle in which King Sweeney runs mad (and which may very well have a part to play in the formation of WBY’s frenzy-­ stricken Goll), has King Domnhal address his Firbolg allies (IV, 162–3): ‘Firvolg and Gael in one accord; all Erin in a band | Against the robbers of the sea and traitors of the land.’ 15. Has come a] Morgan Comes a PBYI, corr. from Southward a Proofs (Texas), Comes a WO. 16.] Has driven away [? Can Aggar’s] kine. MS. hollow galleys] While the primary sense here is that the ships have capacious holds, ready to be filled with plunder, WBY also echoes a common Homeric epithet for ships: see e.g. W. Cowper, The Iliad of Homer (1793), XII, 572: ‘The Grecians to their hollow galleys flew’. 17. rivery] A rare word: OED adj. 2., ‘That contains many rivers or streams’. 19. mailed men] Perhaps cp. A. Swinburne, Poems and Ballads: First Series (1866), ‘Laus Veneris’, 216–217: ‘between the rows  | Of



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20 And under the blink o’ the morning star,   Fell on the pirates by the deep, And they inherit the great sleep.   These hands slew many a seaman bold. (They will not hush, the leaves a-­flutter round me – the beech leaves old). 25 But slowly as I shouting slew   And trampled in the bubbling mire, In my most secret spirit grew   A fever and a whirling fire. I paused – white stars above me shone, 30   And shone around the eyes of men; I stood still – then ran on and on   Over the heath and spongy fen, Crumpling in my hands the staff   Of my long spear with scream and laugh 35 And song that down the valleys rolled. (They will not hush, the leaves a-­flutter round me – the beech leaves old). And now I wander in the woods,   Where summer gluts the golden bees; Or in autumnal solitudes

beautiful mailed men’. (WBY is here altering a phrase from the poem’s Leisure Hour version, ‘mailed host’). 20.] Immured in silence like a star MS. 21. pirates] pirates del. robbers MS, robbers PBYI. 23. a seaman] robbers MS, PBYI. 26.] Cp. Shelley, ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, 40–41: ‘Trampling to a mire of blood | The adoring multitude’. WBY certainly knew these lines, and they return much later in his work, in ‘the dolphin’s mire and blood’ of ‘Byzantium’ (1930). ‘The bubbling mire’ is likely to be bubbling with blood: cp. W. Scott, Poetical Works (1841), The Lady of the Lake XI, 9–10: ‘The crosslet’s points of sparkling wood, | He quenched among the bubbling blood’. 28. a whirling fire] Cp. William Sharp, Poems (1884), ‘Sospitra’, 208–9: ‘And all the vast vault of the sky | Seemed one great mass of whirling fire’.

29.] Morgan. I  paused  – the stars above me shone, PBYI, WO. WBY’s revision in Morgan only partially anticipates his revision for P95. 31.] Morgan. I  paused  – and far away rushed on, PBYI, WO. WBY makes a different revision to this line for P95. 33. Crumpling] Morgan And crumpled PBYI, WO. This change is not part of the revision for P95. 35. valleys] valleys MS, valley PBYI. 38. Where] When MS, PBYI. gluts] The meaning is OED 1.a, ‘To feed to repletion’, though the verb is, as OED notes, ‘Chiefly reflexive or passive’. WBY’s use here is relatively unusual, but also strongly reminiscent of Keats, ‘Ode to Melancholy’ (1820), 15: ‘Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose’. 39. autumnal] the autumn MS, PBYI.

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40   Arise the leopard-­coloured trees; Or where along the wintry strands   The cormorants shiver on their rocks, I wander on and wave my hands,   And sing and shake my heavy locks. 45 The grey wolf knows me; by one ear   I lead along the woodland deer, And hares run near me growing bold. (They will not hush, the leaves a-­flutter round me – the beech leaves old). Once, while within a little town 50   That slumbered under the harvest moon, I passed a-­tiptoe up and down,   Murmuring a mountain tune Of how I hear on hill-­heads high   A tramping of tremendous feet. 55 I saw this harp all songless lie   Deserted in a doorway seat, And bore it to the woods with me.   Of some unhuman misery

44. shake my heavy locks] The hairstyles of J. Macpherson’s Ossian feature many heavy locks: see e.g. (among many instances) The Poems of Ossian (1805 edn.), Comala, p.  220: ‘O gentle breeze, lift thou the heavy locks of the maid’, Carric-­Thura, p.  415: ‘he returned in the fair blushing of youth, with all his heavy locks’, Temora Bk. IV, p. 120: ‘She comes with bending eye, amid the wandering of her heavy locks’. Behind the whole line, also, there is a general reminiscence of Shakespeare, Macbeth IV.3. 50–51: ‘Never shake  | Thy gory locks at me’. 47. And hares run near me] [And hares del.] The hare runs [round del.] by me MS, The hare runs by me PBYI. 49.] Time was, as in a little town, MS, PBYI. 49–50. a little town | That slumbered] Cp. Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, 35–9: What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-­built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be [. . .]

50. under] Morgan ’neath PBYI, WO. WBY makes a different revision to this line for P95. 52. Murmuring] A-­murmuring MS. 54.] Perhaps cp. Samuel Ferguson, Congal (1872), III, 103–5: ‘ for all the night, around their echoing camp,  | Was heard continuous from the hills, a sound as of the tramp | Of giant footsteps’, and IV, 405–6: ‘So wide, so deep, so terrible, so spreading, swift and fast,  | With tempest-­ tramp from Congal’s camp the adverse columns passed’. 58. some unhuman misery] WBY’s first use of ‘unhuman’, in the sense of OED 2., ‘Not limited by human qualities or conditions; superhuman’ (first citation from 1782) or 3., ‘Not pertaining to mankind’ (first citation from 1861), had been in an abandoned poem from 1884, ‘When to its end o’er-­ripened July nears’, 84: ‘Unhuman sorrow and unhuman glory’. WBY had probably picked up this unusual word from Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘In a Cathedral Close’, 41–2: ‘the child’s glad eyes | Your joy unhuman shall control’. ‘Unhuman misery’ in this line looks like a deliberate appropriation and reversal of Dowden’s phrase.



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  Our married voices wildly trolled. 60 (They will not hush, the leaves a-­flutter round me – the beech leaves old). And toads, and every outlawed thing,   In solemn reverie rose to hear From pools and rotting leaves, me sing   The song of outlaws and their fear. 65 My singing sang me fever-­free;   My singing fades, the strings are torn; I must away by wood and sea   And lift an ulalu forlorn, And fling my laughter to the sun 70   – For my remembering hour is done – And I in whirling fire am rolled. (They will not hush, the leaves a-­flutter round me – the beech leaves old).

59. trolled] OED ‘troll’, 10.a., ‘To sing (something) in the manner of a round or catch; to sing in a full, rolling voice; to chant merrily or jovially.’ OED’s citations include George Eliot, Romola (1861) I ch.9: ‘He could touch the lute and troll a gay song’. 62. In solemn reverie] MS, PBYI, Morgan. With eyes of sadness WO. WBY in WO reverts to the reading of his 1887 The Leisure Hour version; still uncertain, he made the change back to ‘In solemn reverie’ in Morgan, but this line, with the rest of the final stanza, was to be much more radically rewritten for P95. 65. fever-­free] Perhaps cp. George Barlow, Poems and Sonnets (1871), ‘My Love’, 28: ‘a forehead fever-­free’. 67.] And I must wail beside the sea MS. 68.] And in the manless woods forlorn MS. lift] lilt PBYI: this was a misprint, and an errata slip was inserted in some copies of the first edition, and in the second impression of 1890, making the correction to ‘lift’.

ulalu] ululu PBYI. WBY retained ‘ulalu’ in all versions of the text from WO onwards, but ‘ululu’ is the more usual form. The word describes ‘A wailing cry; a wail of lamentation’ (OED), and may derive from the Irish uileliúgh. Although he could have come across it in H.D. Thoreau’s Walden, where ‘screech-­owls take up the strain, like mourning women their ancient u-­lu-­lu’, WBY knew the word best from Thomas Davis, Poems (1846), ‘The Burial’, where it functions as a kind of refrain, e.g. 14–15: ‘Ululu! ululu! wail for the dead. | Green grow the grass of Fingall on his head’, 18–19: ‘Ululu! ululu! soft fall the dew  | On the feet and the head of the martyred and true’, 38–39: ‘Ululu! ululu! wail for the dead! | Ululu! ululu! here is his bed’. 69. And] Or PBYI. 71. And I in whirling fire am] Morgan In all his evening vapours PBYI, WO. In the rewriting of the final stanza for P95, this line was to disappear.

83

A LEGEND

THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication history. No date can be firmly established for this poem’s composition. When the poem was sent to The Vegetarian for publication in Nov. 1888, it might well have been on the poet’s hands for some time: it was probably in the version of WO submitted to Kegan Paul in Mar. 1888. In terms of style (as well, perhaps, as those of the Sligo-­specific subject matter) the poem could easily belong to 1887. It was the poet’s brother Jack who was instrumental in placing the poem with the Vegetarian, submitting it as an embedded text with plentiful illustrations – essentially, as a piece of artwork, rather than simply a poem. This appeared in the 22 Dec. 1888 issue of the journal: it is reproduced in Foster 1, 66–67. By the time of its appearance, WBY already had the proofs for WO, where the poem was published in Jan. 1889. It was never reprinted by WBY. Source and interpretation. WBY’s note beneath his title (not present in The Vegetarian) directs the audience to Co. Sligo and a tradition that beneath Lough Gill there lies a flooded city. Contemporary evidence for the story comes in vol. 1 of W.G. Wood-­Martin, History of Sligo, County and Town (1882), where ‘a plain, now overspread by the waters of Lough Gill’ is the site of ‘the original town’; ‘islets now studding the bosom of the lake’, Wood-­Martin goes on, ‘are but the crests of verdant knolls which formerly adorned its green expanse’, adding that ‘the remains of houses or buildings are said to be visible at the bottom of the lake on a sunshiny day’ (51). More detail (along with hints of a distinctly spiritous context for the legend) is offered in Wood-­Martin’s second volume (379–380): A mythical submergence of the ancient town of Sligo has been recounted. Very many years ago a peasant, who lived on the borders of Lough Gill, had occasion at midnight (on 23rd Jun.) to draw water, and, approaching the margin of the lake, observed the ‘cool shining mirror’ receding onwards. Although astonished at the phenomenon, the peasant continued to walk through a totally unknown country, and entered a stately city with magnificent streets and buildings. Of the beings there to be seen the nearest started forward to seize the intruder, who quickly turned and fled. There is the authority of Burns for stating that ‘a running stream they dar’ na’ cross’; but these were genuine Irish spirits; for, despite an admixture of the watery element, they remained potent enough to keep up the chase on land. The fugitive strained every nerve, and finally succeeded in bursting through the cabin door, and, on recovering consciousness, was lying on the bed, the only memento of this wonderful escape being a curiously-­shaped bottle, having a pungent odour, and which had been taken (as alleged when recounting the adventure) from off the table of a mansion in DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-84



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the buried city; so that there appears to have been some grounds for the story, though, like ‘the baseless fabric of a dream,’ both the peasant and the fairy city of Lough Gill have alike vanished from human ken. WBY is clearly aware of the local legend of a sunken city, though he may not have known that it replaced an older Irish myth about the origins of Lough Gill, in which the maiden called Gile was drowned on the plain, and the spring in which she met her end – fortified by the tears of one of her rival lovers – rose to engulf the land around. In the poem, it is a fully peopled city that is brought to destruction. Jack Yeats’s drawings make the setting very distinctly an eighteenth-­century one, and WBY’s cast of characters are also drawn from recent, rather than any kind of mythic history. This somewhat mechanically structured poem begins and ends with a creator God, ‘maker of the stars and worlds’, whose sublimity meets with sharp contrasts in the behaviour of the local professor, mayor, and bishop, none of these the kind of ‘patient men and good’ on whom His creation depends. These ‘props’ fail through their different forms of impatience – with ‘shallow thoughts’, ‘talking of the poor’, and with the (misunderstood) scoffing of ‘the wicked’ – and as a result a saddened creator sheds the tear that makes a lake out of the city. As a parable, WBY’s poem seems to make the point that established authorities are unable to comprehend the world (the consequences of this, which presumably take ‘The boys, the women, the old men’ down along with the authorities, seem a little disproportionate; but WBY is presumably thinking on a cosmic rather than a local scale by this stage). Text. Only one variant from The Vegetarian is recorded here (the others are matters of punctuation and capitalization): the setting of the text in the journal, like the drawings, is the work of Jack Yeats. Copy-­text. WO. A drowned city is supposed to lie under the waters of Lough Gill.

T

he Maker of the stars and worlds   Sat underneath the market cross, And the old men were walking, walking,   And little boys played pitch and toss. 5 ‘The props,’ said He, ‘of stars and worlds   Are prayers of patient men and good.’

Author’s note] Only in WO. WBY’s ‘drowned city’ seems to overstate the size of the community, with its ‘market cross’ and ‘guard house’. His ‘city’ may indicate the lingering influence (otherwise invisible in the poem) of the best-­ known poem on the urban Atlantis theme, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The City in the Sea’ (1845).

1. the stars and worlds] Perhaps cp. Isaac Watts, Works (1810), Hymn 167, 5–6: ‘Earth and the stars and worlds unknown | Depend precarious on his throne’. 4. pitch and toss] A  game (sometimes played at crossroads) in which a coin is thrown at a mark in the ground by each player. The

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The boys, the women, and old men,   Listening, upon their shadows stood. A grey professor passing cried, 10   ‘How few the mind’s intemperance rule! What shallow thoughts about deep things!   The world grows old and plays the fool.’ The mayor came, leaning his deaf ear –   There was some talking of the poor – 15 And to himself cried, ‘Communist!’   And hurried to the guard-­house door. The bishop came with open book,   Whispering along the sunny path; There was some talking of man’s god, 20   His god of stupor and of wrath. The bishop murmured, ‘Atheist!   How sinfully the wicked scoff!’ And sent the old men on their way,   And drove the boys and women off. 25 The place was empty now of people.   A cock came by upon his toes; An old horse looked across a fence,   And rubbed along the rail his nose. The Maker of the stars and worlds 30   To His own house did him betake, And on that city dropped a tear,   And now that city is a lake.

player whose coin ends up nearest the mark then tosses each of the other coins, keeping all those that land heads-­up. 8. upon their shadows stood] An apparently clumsy formulation, but cp. Robert Leighton, Records and Other Poems (1880), ‘The River in Calm’, 5–6: ‘freighted barks | Resting upon their shadows’. 15. Communist!] The word seems unexpectedly specific for WBY at this point of his career (and it is distinctly incongruous in a setting designed to feel much older than the later nineteenth century); but he would have been familiar with its use from meetings he attended in the circle of William Morris from

mid-­1887 into 1888, meeting there a number of Fabian-­associated figures, and politically literate artists including G.B. Shaw. 17. The bishop] That bishop The Vegetarian. 19–20.] It is unclear exactly what WBY wishes to convey in the narrative here. ‘Man’s god’ may imply there is talk of God being the invention of mankind, and taking on therefore the ‘stupor’ and the ‘wrath’ of degenerate humanity. 26. upon his toes] Cp. John Dryden’ s version of Chaucer, Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), ‘The Cock and the Fox’, 665–6: ‘This Chanticleer, of whom the story sings, | Stood high upon his toes, and clapped his wings’.

84

DOWN BY THE SALLEY GARDENS THE POEMS

Date of composition. The poem was probably written in early 1888, though it is not possible to be certain about whether it was included by WBY in the material for WO which he sent to Kegan Paul in early Mar., or whether it was added at some point before he sent a MS copy (along with ‘To an Isle in the Water’) to KT in late Sept. (see CL 1, 97). The MS copy has ‘1888’ entered in WBY’s hand – though this could perhaps indicate the year of its sending rather than its composition. WBY had been staying in Sligo in Oct. and the first half of Nov. 1887, and it is possible that it was then he heard the song which he decided to use. Sources. WBY’s title and note for WO are explicit on the matter of this poem’s origins lying in a popular song. In the letter to KT of late Sept. 1888, WBY says the poem ‘is made out of three lines of verse I picked up in Sligo – old Irish verse’ (CL 1, 97). There is no reason to distrust this; and Ballysodare in Co. Sligo was certainly a place where WBY was often to be found (it was the location of the mills belonging to the Pollexfen family), to whose villagers he was in the habit of talking. Identifying exactly the song which might have been sung to WBY is not straightforward, partly because the lyrics to traditional airs are subject to such extensive variations over time, and between different locales. Nevertheless, whatever was sung to the poet at Ballysodare must have derived from a ballad generally known as ‘You Rambling Boys of Pleasure’; this was in a circulation wider than just Ireland by the middle of the nineteenth century, although its origins (whatever their date) are Irish ones. Numerous printed records remain, from various printers of nineteenth-­century broadsheet ballads: inevitably, these contain numerous (sometimes wide) variations. It would appear that the ballad gained in length as the century went on, beginning usually as a three-­stanza affair; a version printed in London between 1780 and 1812 (Bodl. Harding B 17 (250b)), though it cannot be called the ‘original’, reflects at least an early phase in the ballad’s life:

You rambling boys of pleasure, Who in roving take delight, It’s true I am a gay rover, And in roving take great delight; I fixed my mind on a fair maid, But oftentimes she did me slight, My mind was ne’er right easy, But when my love was in my sight.



The second time I saw my love, I thought her heart it had been mine, DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-85

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Down by the Salley Gardens



Her graceful and handsome face, I thought her quite divine; But gold’s the root of evil, Altho’ it bears a glittering hue, Causes many a lad and lass to part, Let their hearts and minds be ne’er so true.



There’s one thing more I do disdain, That’s to be called a runaway, Yet in this country born and bred, And Cupid will not set me free; I leave my love behind me, Alas! and alas! what shall I do? Must I become a rover, Into the land I never knew.

By c. 1850, six-­stanza versions were being printed; in the edition from Manchester later, it is possible that the fifth and sixth stanzas are variants on a single one. The third stanza introduces in what is almost certainly a misprint ‘valley [for salley] gardens’ (these were sometimes misunderstood by printers of versions later in the century, appearing as ‘Sally’s gardens’), while the final stanza makes it explicit that the unwilling emigrant misses Dublin (Bodl. Harding B 11 (3222A):

You rambling boys of pleasure, Give hear unto these lines I write, It’s true I am a rover, And in roving I take great delight; I placed my mind on a handsome girl, Who oftentimes did me slight, But my mind was never easy, But when my love was in my sight.



The first time that I saw my love, I really thought her heart was mine, Her graceful and her handsome face, I thought that she was quite divine. Curst gold is the root of evil Altho’ it shines with a glittering hue, It causes many a lad and lass to part, Let their hearts and minds be ere so true.



Down by yon valley gardens, One evening as I chanced to stray, It’s there I saw my darling, I took her to be the queen of May. She told me to take love easy, Just as the leaves grow on the trees, But I being young and foolish,



Down by the Salley Gardens



To her then I did not agree.



There is one thing more that grieves me, That to be called a runaway, To leave where I was bred and born. O Cupid, can’t you set me free, To leave my love behind me Alack and alas what shall I do? Must I become a rover into The land I never knew?



When I am sitting o’er my quart And no one around me but strangers all, I will think upon my own true love, When I am boozing far away, Where I could have sweethearts plenty, And flowing bowls on every side. Let fortune never daunt you love, For we are young and the world is wide.



I wish it [? for I] was in Dublin, And my own true love along with me, And money to support us, And keep us in good company; Where I could have sweethearts plenty, And flowing bowls on every side, Let fortune never daunt you love, For we are young and the world is wide.

637

Although ‘Sally’s gardens’ appear in numerous versions, the (presumably correct) ‘sall[e] y garden[s]’ gains ground, as e.g. in the version of Bodl. Firth c. 18 (237): ‘Down by yon sally garden, | One evening as I chanced to stray’; while the ‘I wish I was in Dublin’ line also becomes ‘I wish I was in America’ in several of these versions. Plainly, the folksong had many incarnations, while its point of origin remains obscure. H.E. Shields, ‘Yeats and the ‘Salley gardens’’, Hermathena Autumn 1965, 22–26 cites several versions; in the 1960s, the singer Robert Cinnamond claimed that the song was of Co. Antrim origin (his recording of 1968 may be heard on www.rte.ie/archives/exhibitions/1981-­proinsias-­o-­ conluain/615594-­the-­ramblin-­boys-­of-­pleasure/, along with a radically different version [though also claiming Co. Antrim roots] from as far away as New Brunswick.) A version of the ballad startlingly close to WBY’s ‘extension’ was unearthed by the poet’s son, Michael B. Yeats, in ‘W.B. Yeats and Irish Folk Song’, Southern Folklore Quarterly 30/2 (Jun. 1966), 158. This is a version preserved in the NLI’s P.J. McCall ballad collection (MS vol. 6, p. 3):

Down by the Sally Gardens my own true love and I did meet; She passed the Sally Gardens, a tripping with her snow-­white feet. She bid me take life easy, just as leaves fall from each tree; But I being young and foolish with my true love would not agree.

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Down by the Salley Gardens



In a field by the river my lovely girl and I did stand And leaning on her shoulder I pressed her burning hand, She bid me take life easy, just as the stream flows o’er the weirs But I being young and foolish I parted her that day in tears.



I wish I was in Banagher and my fine girl on my knee And I with money plenty to keep her in good company. I’d call for a liquor of the best with flowing bowls on every side Kind fortune ne’er daunt me, I am young and the world’s wide.

McCall’s note, which says that the ballad is copied from memory, claims that he heard these lines about 1875 (when he was only fourteen); his transcription does not date from then, and there must be a possibility that knowledge of WBY’s poem influenced the details of his recollection. The first two stanzas here would suggest that WBY heard considerably more than ‘three lines’ from the old woman of Ballysodare. The ‘I wish I was in’ line here specifies Banagher, in Co. Offaly; but the version might well have travelled to Co. Sligo, while the metre remains broadly in line with other versions of ‘You rambling boys’. If WBY adopted quite a few of the words, he did on the other hand make decisive changes to the metre. Here, a different folk-­song, ‘Going to Mass last Sunday’, might perhaps be relevant. This ballad was proposed as a source by Colin O’Lochlainn, Anglo-­Irish Song-­Writers (1950), and mentioned again as such by Roger McHugh in his edition of WBY’s Letters to Katharine Tynan (1953); its opening lines are:

Going to Mass last Sunday, my love she passed me by I knew her mind was altered by the roving of her eye I knew her mind was altered to a lad of higher degree For it’s Molly, lovely Molly, your looks have wounded me.

Short of a miraculous interview with the old peasant woman herself, it is impossible to determine exactly what the ‘old song’ was that WBY ‘Re-­sung’. Reception. The poem quickly became something of an anthology-­piece. In 1892, it was included by KT in her Irish Love-­Songs, and went on to feature in e.g. A.P. Graves, The Book of Irish Poetry (1915). However, its most dramatic success was as a song. The Irish composer and folk-­song collector Herbert Hughes (1882–1937) set the poem, using the traditional air of ‘The Maids of Mourne Shore’, in 1909; and this became the most popular setting thereafter (other settings included one by Ivor Gurney and John Ireland, while Hughes’s air is the basis for a setting by Benjamin Britten). The song remains firmly in the musical repertoire. The poem’s widespread success in this form (ironically, returning to whilst replacing the original musical status which the words enjoyed) both pleased and bemused WBY. In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley of 25 Sept. 1935, WBY reported that ‘The Free State Army march to a tune called “Down by the Salley Garden” without knowing that the march was first published with words of mine, words that are now folklore’ (InteLex 6363). By no means all the words concerned originated with WBY (see above), but the popular setting was in fact widely associated with his work. WBY’s ability to appreciate the settings of Hughes or others was perhaps not very great, as an anecdote (from 1948) by Oliver St John Gogarty indicates (Mikhail 2, 310):



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How, it may be asked, can a poet have a musical ear and yet be, as Yeats was, completely tone deaf? Many tales are told of Yeats’s tone deafness. [. . .] Yeats was bored by music, which he did not trouble to understand, and he was bored worse by the extenuation of words for the sake of the music. Compton Mackenzie, the Scotch novelist and patriot, told me that when he had attended a concert in Dublin with Yeats (it was on some official occasion, the Tailteann Games, I think), they had entered the box just as John McCormack was singing Yeats’s ‘Down by the Salley Gardens.’ Mackenzie drew Yeats’s attention to the song. Yeats listened for a moment and then when he had at last caught a word or two, remarked, ‘Oh, the deadly audibility of the fellow.’ Copy-­text: P49.

D

own by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; She passed the salley gardens with little snow-­white feet.

Title. An Old Song Re-­sung WO. This is not an unprecedented title, and it continued in use after WBY’s first publication of the poem: it served sometimes to describe a traditional piece of verse parodied in such a way as to fit it for contemporary political purposes. A prominent example was in the Pall Mall Gazette for 20 Mar. 1893, when the traditional Irish poem ‘The Shan Van Vocht’ was adapted to become a sardonic commentary on contemporary Irish political disagreements; another, anti-­ Gladstone ‘Old Song Re-­ Sung’ also did the rounds of the newspapers in the same year. This may have played a part in winning WBY away from his original title when republishing the piece in P95. In WO, WBY provides a note: This is an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballysodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself. For P95 and subsequent collected editions, this note becomes: ‘An extension of three lines sung to me by an old woman at Ballysodare’. Ballysodare, on the Owenmore river, is about four miles south of Sligo town. The family of WBY’s

mother Susan, the Pollexfens, owned the Mills here, and WBY was a frequent visitor. Many years later, WBY returned to these first circumstances of his inspiration for the poem: in his script for a BBC broadcast of 10 Apr. 1932, he recalled: An old woman at Ballisodare sang me a song of which I have forgotten everything except this refrain,

She bid me take life easy As the leaves grow on the tree.

and that suggested to me the following poem which I  call ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’. It is well known because an Irish musician called Hughes set it to a fine air. I  wish I  could sing it to you instead of speaking it. A  salley garden is a place where willows grow. (CW 10, 236.) Another broadcast of 17 Mar. 1934 has WBY say that the poem ‘is an elaboration of two lines in English somebody sang to me at Ballysodare, County Sligo’ (CW 10, 249). 1, 2. salley] Willow (in the genus Salix); properly speaking, a low-­ growing willow. The Irish form, saileach, is probably responsible for the prevalence of ‘salley’ in Irish English

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Down by the Salley Gardens



She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

5

In a field by the river my love and I did stand, And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-­white hand. She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

(rather than ‘sallow’, which is more common in England). For its use in Irish poetry, cp. Gerald Griffin, Poetical Works (1843), ‘Old Times! Old Times!’, 1–4: Old times! Old times! When I was young and free, And heard the merry Easter chimes Under the sally tree. 2. snow-­white feet] This phrase occurs in the McCall collection ballad (see Sources). If indeed this was heard first by McCall in 1875, then it is a fairly simple case of appropriation by WBY. If, however, McCall’s own recollection was coloured by his knowledge of WBY’s poem, another parallel may be relevant  – cp. Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poems (1884), ‘The Arraying’, 9: ‘We come to bathe thy snow-­white feet’. Of course, McCarthy might himself have heard and retained this from the same version of the ballad; and in any case the phrase seems to

have its way prepared by conventional diction in Irish poetry: cp. e.g. Edward Walsh, ‘The Fairy Nurse’ (included by WBY in A Book of Irish Verse (1895)), 11–12: ‘Within our magic halls of brightness,  | Trips many a foot of snowy whiteness’ (after a ‘snow-­white fleece’ in l.2). 3. bid] This past tense would more usually be ‘bade’. Many versions of ‘You rambling boys of pleasure’ favour both ‘bade’ and ‘told me’. 6. snow-­white hand] This is much more conventional than the snow-­ white feet of 2. above. WBY is following his own first stanza in a parallel manner, but he would have been aware of M. Arnold’s Iseult in Poems (1885), ‘Tristram and Iseult’, I, 74: ‘Iseult of the snow-­ white hand’. 8. full of tears] This appears to be an original phrase applied by WBY to his raw material. The phrase itself is common, but perhaps cp. Robert Browning, Pauline (1833), 229: ‘Altered and worn and weak and full of tears’.

85

THE BALLAD OF FATHER O’HART THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication history. Completed probably in early 1888. WBY reported to KT in a letter of 12 Feb. 1888 that ‘Sparling is going to put “Father John O’Hart” in the “Edition de luxe” of his book’ (CL 1, 49): this was the second edn. of H.H. Sparling’s Irish Minstrelsy (the first edn. was publ. in autumn 1887), and it appeared in 1888. WBY (who knew Sparling through the William Morris circle) had written to the editor from Sligo on 10 Sept. 1887 to tell him how ‘I am deep in antiquities trying to grub up some pearls out of that muddy well of clan squabbles that made up our Sligo history’ (CL 1, 36), possibly referring to his reading of the source-­text for the poem (see below). It is possible, then, that work on the poem began before the end of 1887, but at all events the ballad was completed by Feb. 1888; in this month, as well as having the poem accepted by Sparling, WBY also included it in a family MS miscellany (MS), ‘Ye Pleiades | A Monthly Magazine | Edited by E.C. Yeats’ (NLI 12161): the text of this illustrated fair copy is very close to that printed subsequently in Irish Minstrelsy (IM). In Sept. 1888, the poem was included by WBY in FFTIP. WBY was pleased when the poem was reprinted in a Sligo Independent review (about which he told John O’Leary with some pride (CL 1, 105)), but the ballad was not to be included in WO, waiting until CK for inclusion in one of WBY’s volumes of poetry. It remained in collected editions thereafter, though from P95 onwards WBY positioned it in the ‘Crossways’ section, as one of its suite of four late 1880s ballads. Source: WBY makes use of Fr Terence O’Rorke, History, Antiquites, and Present State of the Parishes of Ballysadare and Kilvarnet in the County of Sligo (1878), which he probably read in Sligo in 1887: Refusing, as Catholics, to take the oath of supremacy, the brothers Hart had to look about for some Protestant friend to serve secretly as trustee of the estate for them – a service which kind-­hearted and high-­minded Protestants frequently performed at the time for Catholic owners of property, to enable them to evade the penal laws. There lived then, on the townland of Cartron, which adjoins Cloonamahon, a Protestant gentleman called Betteridge, with whom the Harts were on terms of constant social intercourse and the closest friendship; and this man they pitched upon to act. On being applied to, the obliging neighbor was only too happy, he said, to be able to do a good turn for friends so loved; but having received all the powers and papers from the Harts, Betteridge proceeded to Dublin, and treacherously took the property to himself in reality as well as in form. The wretch was not proof against the temptation of robbing friends by DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-86

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due form of law; and when taunted with the villainy, coolly replied, that he had himself a son, for whom he felt more love and concern than for the children or the brother of Charles Hart. But neither father nor son was any the better for the ill-­gotten estate. On the contrary, the acquisition seemed only to bring them bad luck. [Betteridge sells the property on to a Mr. Rutledge.] [. . .] Mr. Rutledge at first had no reason to rejoice for having the broad acres of Charles and Doctor Hart, for the estate was not long in possession when the new owner had to lament the death of an only son – one of the most promising young men in Ireland – who was killed by a fall from a horse on the old road through Cloonamahon, at a spot that is still called Cloghin na Phooka (Ghost’s rock), from the deceased being believed to haunt the place. Later, however, Mr. Rutledge was somewhat consoled for this heavy affliction by marrying his three daughters to three highly respectable husbands [. . .] Two traits of Dr. Hart are handed down by tradition of the people, which serve to show the sensibility and amiability of his nature. First, he felt strongly for birds confined in cages, and caused as many of the little prisoners as possible to be restored to liberty. And a beautiful legend informs us that all the birds of the country, to requite the kindness of their benefactor, assembled on the occasion of the bishop’s death, and kept chaunting his requiem all the time the corpse was waking. Secondly, he set his face firmly against those ‘keeners’ or professional criers, who were commonly employed at that time at wakes and funerals. [. . .] But that Dr. Hart had no objection to a reasonable manifestation of real grief we learn from his own case; for, on a brother or sister dying, he gave way so far to feeling as to shed abundant tears; and when some friends ventured a gentle remonstrance, and reminded the bishop of his own condemnation of the ‘keeners,’ the reply was: ‘When I weep it is nature forces me; but when those wretched people cry, it is they that force themselves, in spite of nature.’ Most probably, it is owing to the action of Dr. Hart that – though the race of ‘keeners’ is far from extinct in other places – there is not the smallest vestige of them and their disgusting arts in the parishes of Ballysadare and Kilvarnet. (199–207.) Text: The poem remained largely stable in text throughout its many reprintings by WBY in various collected editions.



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Copy-­text: P49.

G

ood Father John O’Hart In penal days rode out

WBY’s notes: Coloony is a few miles south of the town of Sligo. Father O’Hart lived there in the last century, and was greatly beloved. These lines accurately record the tradition. No one who has held the stolen land has prospered. It has changed owners many times. FFTIP. Father O’Rourke is the priest of the parishes of Ballisodare and Kilvarnet, and it is from his learnedly and faithfully and sympathetically written history of these parishes that I have taken the story of Father John, who had been priest of those parishes, dying in the year 1739. Coloony is a village in Kilvarnet. Some sayings of Father John’s have come down. Once when he was sorrowing greatly for the death of his brother, the people said to him, ‘Why do you sorrow for your brother when you forbid us to keen?’ ‘Nature,’ he answered, ‘forces me, but ye force nature.’ His memory and influence survives, in the fact that to the present day there has been no keening in Coloony. He was a friend of the celebrated poet and musician, Carolan. FFTIP. This ballad is founded on the story of a certain Father O’Hart, priest of Coloony, Sligo, in the last century, as told by the present priest of Coloony in his most interesting History of Ballisodare and Kelvarnet. The robbery of the lands of Father O’Hart was one of those incidents which occurred sometimes though but rarely during the time of the penal laws. Catholics, who were forbidden to own landed property, evaded the law by giving some honest Protestant nominal possession of their estates. There are instances on

record in which poor men were nominal owners of immense estates [unnumbered acres CK]. CK, P95-­P29. Title] The Priest of Coloony IM, FFTIP Father O’Hart CK. In his ‘Notes on Writers’ at the end of IM, Spurling says of WBY that he ‘Has lived a good part of his life in Sligo, in which county Colooney, the village his given poem dates from, is situated’ (509). 2. penal days] The so-­called penal laws in Ireland are associated especially with the period of Protestant Ascendancy in the eighteenth century. Amongst various anti-­Catholic laws, Roman Catholics were debarred from public offices and voting. In terms of property law, there were numerous legal obstacles which were (in theory – for enforcement was often at the discretion of local magistrates) placed in the way of Catholic landholders. Under the Parliament of Ireland’s Popery Act (1703, 2 Ann c. 6), the imposition upon older Irish law of the English principle of primogeniture was tailored to provide the right of sole inheritance for any heir who would convert to the Church of Ireland, regardless of other heirs who remained Roman Catholics. It was also, until 1778, illegal for Catholics to purchase any lease of longer than thirty-­one years, and no Catholic was permitted to inherit lands belonging to a member of the Church of Ireland. The anti-­Catholic thrust of the penal laws was matched by their application (in e.g. the ban from public office) on Presbyterians. Roman Catholic emancipation in 1829 brought the bulk of the Irish penal laws to an end. WBY’s phrase here, at the beginning of his ballad, inevitably brings to bear a well-­ known poem of Thomas Davis, ‘The Penal Days’, which gives some idea of both the continuing potency of this historic wrong in the

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To a shoneen who had free lands And his own snipe and trout.

5

In trust took he John’s lands; Sleiveens were all his race;

nationalist imagination of nineteenth-­century Ireland, and of the degree to which this could be employed as part of the Young Ireland movement’s narrative of whiggish nationalist progress; WBY’s ballad, on the other hand, has no time for the forward march of history, and is much more concerned with the ancient rights in ‘old customs’. Davis’s poem was included in his Poems (1846): Oh! weep those days, the penal days, When Ireland hopelessly complained. Oh! weep those days, the penal days, When godless persecution reigned; When, year by year, For serf, and peer, Fresh cruelties were made by law, And, filled with hate, Our senate sate To weld anew each fetter’s flaw. Oh! weep those days, those penal days – Their memory still on Ireland weighs. They bribed the flock, they bribed the son, To sell the priest and rob the sire; Their dogs were taught alike to run Upon the scent of wolf and friar. Among the poor, Or on the moor, Were hid the pious and the true – While traitor knave, And recreant slave, Had riches, rank, and retinue; And, exiled in those penal days, Our banners over Europe blaze. A stranger held the land and tower Of many a noble fugitive; No Popish lord had lordly power, The peasant scarce had leave to live: Above his head A ruined shed,

No tenure but a tyrant’s will – Forbid to plead, Forbid to read, Disarmed, disfranchised, imbecile – What wonder if our step betrays The freedman, born in penal days? They’re gone, they’re gone, those penal days! All creeds are equal in our isle; Then grant, O Lord, thy plenteous grace, Our ancient feuds to reconcile. Let all atone For blood and groan, For dark revenge and open wrong; Let all unite For Ireland’s right, And drown our griefs in freedom’s song; Till time shall veil in twilight haze, The memory of those penal days. 3–4.] To a shoneen in his freelands,  | With his snipe marsh and his trout. IM, FFTIP. WBY glosses shoneen on the page in FFTIP as ‘upstart’, but a separate note goes into more detail: Shoneen is the diminutive of shone (Ir. Séon). There are two Irish names for John  – one is Shone, the other is Shawn (Ir. Seághan). Shone is the ‘grandest’ of the two, and is applied to the gentry. Hence Shoneen means ‘a little gentry John,’ and is applied to upstarts and ‘big’ farmers, who ape the rank of gentleman. 6. Sleiveens] On the page in FFTIP WBY provides the gloss ‘Sleiveen  – i.e. mean fellow’, and in his longer note writes: Sleiveen, not to be found in the dictionaries, is a comical Irish word (at least in Connaught) for a rogue. It probably comes from sliabh, a mountain, meaning primarily a mountaineer, and in a secondary



The Ballad of Father O’Hart



And he gave them as dowers to his daughters, And they married beyond their place.

10

But Father John went up, And Father John went down; And he wore small holes in his shoes, And he wore large holes in his gown.

15

All loved him, only the shoneen, Whom the devils have by the hair, From the wives, and the cats, and the children, To the birds in the white of the air.

20

The birds, for he opened their cages As he went up and down; And he said with a smile, ‘Have peace now’; And he went his way with a frown.



But if when anyone died Came keeners hoarser than rooks, He bade them give over their keening; For he was a man of books.

25

And these were the works of John, When, weeping score by score, People came into Coloony; For he’d died at ninety-­four.

sense, on the principle that mountaineers are words than anybody else, a rogue. I  am indebted to Mr. Douglas Hyde for these details, as for many others. Whether or not by Douglas Hyde, WBY was misinformed here, and his rather desperate ingenuity on the subject of mountains was in vain: Sleiveen is derived from the Irish word slí (a way, a means), and not from sliabh (a mountain). 7. And he gave them] He gave them MS. 15.] From their wives, and their cats, and their children, IM, FFTIP. 16. the white of the air] Perhaps cp. Michael Field, Bellerophon (1881), ‘The Halcyons’,

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21: ‘And white day broods on the white of ocean’. 20. And he went his way] And he went on his way MS And went on his way IM And went his way FFTIP. 22. keeners] For Irish performers of professional lamentation, see the remarks of O’Rorke in Sources. hoarser than rooks] hoarse as the rooks MS. Perhaps cp. R. Southey, Poetical Works (1838), Joan of Arc VIII, 658: ‘The hoarse rook breathes his melancholy note’. 27. Coloony] Colooney CP50. WBY spelled the name as Coloony consistently in all published versions, and this is reflected in the copy-­text, P49.

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30

There was no human keening; The birds from Knocknarea And the world round Knocknashee Came keening in that day.

35

The young birds and old birds Came flying, heavy and sad; Keening in from Tiraragh, Keening from Ballinafad;

40

Keening from Inishmurray, Nor stayed for bite or sup; This way were all reproved Who dig old customs up.

30. Knocknarea] This is WBY’s first use in verse of a place name of some personal and imaginative importance. From the Irish Cnoc na Riabh (Hill of the stripes), Cnoc na Riaghadh (Hill of executions) or Cnoc na Riogha (the Hill of the Kings), Knocknarea in Co. Sligo is a large hill to the west of Sligo town. For WBY, the hill’s mythic association with Queen Maeve of Connaught was significant (the cairn at the top of the hill, which dates from the third millennium BC, was known as Maeve’s Cairn). Knocknarea’s greatest point of prominence in WBY’s published poetry comes with WATR, when it features in the first line of the book’s opening poem, ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’. 31. round] near MS. Knocknashee] From the Irish Cnoc na Sidhe (Hill of the Fairies) is another hill in Co.

Sligo, among the Ox Mountains, southwest of Ballysodare. 33–36.] This stanza was added first in CK. 35. Tiraragh] A  townland in Co. Sligo, which lies between the coast and the Ox Mountains. 36. Ballinafad] A  village in Co. Sligo on the Moy estuary, from the Irish Béal an Átha Fada (the Mouth of the Long Ford). 37. Inishmurray] An island about four miles off the Co. Sligo coast, associated with Saint Muireadhach, and a place of pilgrimage with remains of early monastic buildings. At the time of the poem’s composition, it had a population of about one hundred, but has been uninhabited since the mid-­twentieth century. 38. bite or sup] bit and sup IM bit or sup FFTIP. For the phrase ‘bit and sup’ (later ‘bite and sup’), see OED sup n.1 P1: ‘a little food and drink’.

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THE PHANTOM SHIP

THE POEMS

Date of composition. The poem was composed in early 1888. WBY mentions this poem in a letter to KT of 14 Mar. 1888 as something that ‘may suit the Providence Journal’, and asks for the editor’s address (CL 1, 55). It is likely that the poem was recently composed at this time, and it may well have been written with an eye to finding a ready market. WBY’s address, at the end of the poem in its only surviving MS version, is Eardly Crescent, South Kensington, where he moved in May 1887, and which he left ten days after the letter to KT. Context and interpretation. The ghostly ship, crewed by the dead, is a staple of nineteenth-­century supernatural fiction and poetry. The most influential form of the story attaches to the legend of the Flying Dutchman; in poetry, numerous tales in verse took their lead both from this and from Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Mostly, a tale is recounted that involves contact at sea with a phantom ship, the zombie-­ like crew of which sometimes attempt to communicate with the living; in WBY’s version, it is the ghostly vessel that comes from the sea into port, the dead coming back into direct contact with those still alive. WBY was probably aware of a number of poems situated squarely within the ‘phantom ship’ genre, and such passages as these from W. Scott which address the theme (Rokeby (1813), Canto 2, xi, 25–36):     that Phantom Ship, whose form Shoots like a meteor through the storm; When the dark scud comes driving hard, And lowered is every topsail-­yard, And canvass, wove in earthly looms, No more to brave the storm presumes! Then, ’mid the war of sea and sky, Top and top-­gallant hoisted high, Full spread and crowded every sail, The Demon Frigate braves the gale; And well the doomed spectators know The harbinger of wreck and woe. Nineteenth-­century Irish poets also touched on the genre, and one such poem, by Thomas Moore, was probably known to WBY (Poetical Works (1841), ‘Written on Passing Deadman’s Island, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Late in the Evening, September 1804):

See you, beneath yon cloud so dark, Fast gliding along a gloomy bark? DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-87

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Her sails are full, – though the wind is still, And there blows not a breath her sails to fill!



Say, what doth that vessel of darkness bear? The silent calm of the grave is there, Save now and again a death-­knell rung, And the flap of the sails with night-­fog hung.



There lieth a wreck on the dismal shore Of cold and pitiless Labrador; Where, under the moon, upon mounts of frost, Full many a mariner’s bones are tost.



Yon shadowy bark hath been to that wreck, And the dim blue fire, that lights her deck, Doth play on as pale and livid a crew As ever yet drank the churchyard dew.



To Deadman’s Isle, in the eye of the blast, To Deadman’s Isle, she speeds her fast; By skeleton shapes her sails are furled, And the hand that steers is not of this world!



Oh! hurry thee on, – oh! hurry thee on, Thou terrible bark, ere the night be gone, Nor let morning look on so foul a sight As would blanch for ever her rosy light!

H.W. Longfellow’s ‘The Phantom Ship’ perhaps offers a model for WBY’s story of the ship coming in to land, rather than being encountered on the sea (Birds of Passage (1858)):

In Mather’s Magnalia Christi, Of the old colonial time, May be found in prose the legend That is here set down in rhyme.



A ship sailed from New Haven, And the keen and frosty airs, That filled her sails at parting, Were heavy with good men’s prayers.



“O Lord! if it be thy pleasure” – Thus prayed the old divine – “To bury our friends in the ocean, Take them, for they are thine!”



But Master Lamberton muttered, And under his breath said he, “This ship is so crank and walty, I fear our grave she will be!’



The Phantom Ship



And the ships that came from England, When the winter months were gone, Brought no tidings of this vessel Nor of Master Lamberton.



This put the people to praying That the Lord would let them hear What in his greater wisdom He had done with friends so dear.



And at last their prayers were answered: It was in the month of June, An hour before the sunset Of a windy afternoon,



When, steadily steering landward, A ship was seen below, And they knew it was Lamberton, Master, Who sailed so long ago.



On she came, with a cloud of canvas, Right against the wind that blew, Until the eye could distinguish The faces of the crew.



Then fell her straining topmasts, Hanging tangled in the shrouds, And her sails were loosened and lifted, And blown away like clouds



And the masts, with all their rigging, Fell slowly, one by one, And the hulk dilated and vanished, As a sea-­mist in the sun!



And the people who saw this marvel Each said unto his friend, That this was the mould of their vessel, And thus her tragic end.



And the pastor of the village Gave thanks to God in prayer, That, to quiet their troubled spirits, He had sent this Ship of Air.

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Longfellow departs in a major way from the Flying Dutchman model, and composes a story in which the anxieties of those on land are set at rest (albeit with woeful news) by the ghosts of those who have been lost on the now phantasmal ship. Cotton Mather in his Magnalia Christi (1702) is (as Longfellow says) the literary source for a story relating to a

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ship that sailed from New Haven in Jan. 1646 on an attempted trade voyage to England, but failed to reach its destination. In Mather’s account, the prayers of those who had sent the ship for news were answered in summer 1647, when a ship was seen to sail north through the harbour, against the wind, for half an hour before vanishing again into thin air. This was quickly declared a providential message from God, and entered New Haven local history as the story of ‘the Phantom Ship’. Longfellow’s version is both historically specific and (perhaps uniquely, in the phantom ship genre) attuned to this providential Protestant view of supernatural affairs. WBY was always inclined to disparage Longfellow: in ‘What is ‘Popular Poetry’’ (first publ. 1902) he claimed that ‘Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it’ (CW 4, 7). Nevertheless, he had read Longfellow, and this poem might well be seen as fitting the bill both as an influence on WBY’s ‘The Phantom Ship’ and as a good example of what WBY found problematic in the American poet’s work. That Longfellow’s poem carries a specifically Protestant charge may not be irrelevant to WBY’s treatment in his poem of the purgatorial state made explicit near the end on the lips of a ‘pale priest’. W. Gould (‘Yeats and the Flying Dutchman’, YA 20, 263–286) argues that the poem is heavily influenced by Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship (1839). Although this popular fiction might indeed, as he claims, have influenced Mosada, Gould’s main evidence for its relevance to ‘The Phantom Ship’ rests on the poem’s relation to purgatorial experience, and the claim that ‘Marryat’s novel merely confirmed Yeats’s distinct locus of attention, a legend of Purgatory’ (275). Purgatory is certainly mentioned in the poem (31), but the reference to it is put into the mouth of a priest, whose interpretation of events might not be without some influence from his professional life. Early on, Rosa Mulholland (in a Melbourne Advocate article which was reprinted in The Irish Monthly in Jul. 1889) quoted the line on purgatory in her remark that ‘ “The Phantom Ship”, though it might have sailed in the track of the “Ancient Mariner”, has an Irish touch’. From ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ onwards, poems in this genre had a purgatorial dimension to the supernatural encounters they narrated: this is true of the poem quoted as ‘an analogue, but not, I think, a source’ by Gould, John Boyle O’Reilly’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’ (Songs from the Southern Seas (1873)), and true too of another Irish poem Gould does not mention, T.C. Irwin’s ‘The Phantom Ship’, (Irish Poems and Legends (1869)), where skeletons on board the ghostly vessel plead to the living for deliverance (‘Oh! Save us from this doomed life of death, good human soul, | Let us rest in the deep’) in ways that clearly suggest some kind of purgatorial situation. For WBY, however, as for Longfellow, there is no suggestion of the dead requiring intercession of any kind from the living, and the only mention of Purgatory is from the ‘pale priest’ who seeks to interpret the vision, rather than anything said or done by the phantoms themselves. The poem was not WBY’s first foray into the supernatural ship genre. His earlier piece, written and abandoned probably in 1884, ‘A sound came floating. . . ’ made use of many standard features of the genre only (and rather abruptly, in the final lines) to debunk them as the imaginings of ‘Poor simple folk’ (28) whose awe of the supernatural causes them to fail in heeding the cries of the shipwrecked who were in fact ‘Mortal as they’ (29). Between 1884 and 1888, much had changed: while the advances in WBY’s verse technique were marked (the early poem is in a blank verse by turns lumpen and limping, while ‘The Phantom Ship’ is written in skillfully-­handled couplets in triple rhythm), the poet’s attraction to



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the supernatural had also increased, though his distance from the beliefs (whether merely credulous or deliberately church-­led) of ‘Poor simple folk’ remained important. Publication history. The poem appeared in The Providence Sunday Journal of 27 May 1888 (PSJ), and was subsequently included in WO. It was not collected or reprinted by WBY thereafter. Textual history: One MS for the poem survives: this is NLI 30451, a two-­page draft on a folded single sheet which has been detached from a notebook. A diplomatic transcript is provided in Cornell Early Poetry 2, 217–218. Light revision seems to have taken place between PSJ publication and WO, but none of the copies of WO with alterations in WBY’s hand show any authorial revisions, perhaps indicating that the poet decided soon after publication of WO not to keep the poem amongst those pieces likely to be reprinted in future. Copy-­text: WO.

F 5

lames the shuttle of the lightning across the driving sleet, Ay, and shakes in sea-­green waverings along the fishers’ street; Gone the stars and gone the white moon, gone and puffed away and dead. Never storm arose so swiftly; scarce the children were in bed, Scarce the old and wizen houses had their doors and windows shut. Ah! it dwelt within the twilight as the worm within the nut. ‘Waken, waken, sleepy fishers; no hour is this for sleep,’ Cries a voice at roaring midnight beside the moonless deep.

1. the shuttle of the lightning] It is a remarkable coincidence that this conceit, and this exact phrase, is used in another poem first published in 1888. In Eugene Lee-­ Hamilton, Imaginary Sonnets, ‘Rozier the Aeronaut to Benjamin Franlkin’, 1–3: ‘In the cloudy loom  | The dazzling shuttle of the lightning ran  | Incessant to and fro’. Lee-­Hamilton’s volume was not published until autumn 1888; and it is highly unlikely that he would have laid eyes upon the Boston Pilot. 5. wizen] wizened PSJ; the PSJ reading makes better sense, but WBY does not correct ‘wizen’ in the WO proofs (Texas), and ‘wizen’ is also the reading in the MS. The word is possible as an alternative to wizened, and OED records several nineteenth-­ century instances, though these all relate to human features rather than to buildings. 6. worm within the nut] WBY’s rhyme-­obliged swerve from the expected ‘worm within the

bud’ failed to inspire any imitation in future, by himself or others. 7. ‘Waken, waken] Cries a voi[ce] del. MS. 8. roaring midnight] moonless midnight del. MS. ‘Moonless midnight’ resurfaces many years later in the opening line of ‘To Dorothy Wellesley’ of 1938; here, WBY could be indebted to e.g. W. Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel I  xxi 12: ‘Moonless midnight, or matin prime’, or Shelley, The Revolt of Islam XI 64: ‘Woe! Woe! That moonless midnight’. moonless deep] Perhaps cp. Philip Bourke Marston, Song-­Tide, and Other Poems (1871), ‘Prelude’, 46–7: ‘As one who, waking from a dreamless sleep,  | Hears the complaining of a moonless deep’. WBY had read Marston’s short fiction in 1887, and must have read at least enough of his poetry to enable him (more than twenty years later) to tell Mabel Dickinson that Marston was ‘a bad poet who has certainly made many people sentimental’ (Letter of 17 Aug. 1910, InteLex, 1411).

652 10 15 20 25

The Phantom Ship

Half dizzy with the lightning there runs a gathering band – ‘Watcher, wherefore have ye called us?’ Eyes go after his lean hand, And the fisher men and women from the dripping harbour wall See the darkness slow disgorging a vessel blind with squall. ‘Bring the ropes now! Stand ye by now! See, she rounds the harbour clear. God! They’re mad to fly such canvas!’ Ah! what bell-­notes do they hear? Say what ringer rings at midnight; for, in the belfry high, Slow the chapel bell is tolling as though the dead passed by. Round she comes in stays before them; cease the winds, and on their poles Cease the sails their flapping uproar, and the hull no longer rolls. Now a scream from all those fishers, for there on deck there be All the drowned that ever were drowned from that village by the sea; And the ghastly ghost-­flames glimmer all along the taffrail rails On the drowned men’s hands and faces, on the spars and on the sails. Hush’d the fishers, till a mother calls by name her drownèd son; Then each wife and maid and mother calls by name some drownèd one. Stands each grey and silent phantom on the same regardless spot – Joys and fears in their grey faces that the live earth knoweth not; Down the vapours fall and hide them from the children of a day,

9. Half dizzy] Listen del. dizzy MS, Now half dizzy PSJ. Perhaps cp. M. Arnold, Poems (1885), ‘Balder Dead’ 3, 506: ’Mine eyes are dizzy with the arrowy hail’. 15, 16.] The first words of these two lines are each entered in the left-­hand margin of the MS, suggesting that WBY added them in order to preserve the poem’s typical line-­ rhythms, where a stressed syllable begins the line. 16. chapel bell is] chapel bells [a[re] del.] MS. as though the dead passed by] Cp. the epigraph (from Klopstock’s Odes) to Robert Montgomery, Poetical Works (1854), ‘The Departed Year’: ‘In silent night the vision of the dead passed by  –  | I  saw our friends all pass – | And oh! in silent night I saw the open graves – | I saw th’ immortal host!’ 17. in stays] OED stays 2.a: ‘said of a ship when her head is being turned to windward for the purpose of tacking’. Cp. Thomas Hood, Works (1862), ‘A Sailor’s Apology for Bow-­ Legs’, 42–3: ‘The devil sink the craft!  | And wasn’t she tremendous clack in stays!’

poles] WBY here uses the nautical term for the ship’s masts (OED pole 1.c). 21. taffrail] taffra[il] del. rusty MS, taffrel PSJ. A  taffrail is ‘The aftermost portion of the poop-­rail of a ship’ (OED); it is pronounced as the PSJ spelling. 24. calls by name] calls unto del. MS some] her del. MS. 25. regardless spot] WBY’s adjective for the position occupied on the ship by the ghosts is difficult, but may be OED regardless 1. Obs.: ‘Unregarded . . . not worthy of regard’. 26. the live earth] This is an expression favoured by A. Swinburne: see e.g. Erechtheus: A Tragedy (1876), 840–841: ‘she reared the birth  | Fire-­begotten on live earth’, and Tristram of Lyonesse (1882), III, 270: ‘the live earth and the living sea’. 27. children of a day] The phrase may possibly have its source in R.B.W. Noel, The Red Flag and Other Poems (1872), ‘Palingenesis’, 261: ‘we poor senseless children of a day’. It may be, though, that the line enabling WBY’s phrase here is Keats, ‘When I  have



The Phantom Ship

30

And the winds come down and blow them with the vapours far away. Hang the mist-­threads for a little while like cobwebs in the air; Then the stars grow out of heaven with their countenances fair.



‘Pray for the souls in purgatory,’ the pale priest trembling cries.

653

* * * *

Prayed those forgotten fishers, till in the eastern skies Came olive fires of morning and on the darkness fed, By the slow heaving ocean – mumbling mother of the dead.

fears that I may cease to be’, 9: ‘fair creature of an hour’. 30^31.] No break PSJ. Although there is a break in the MS text, there are also on the facing verso the words ‘no break’. WBY did not attempt to remove the break in the WO proofs. 31. Pray for] Pray ye for MS. 32.-­34.] All those long forgotten fishers, till in the eastern [western del. MS] skies Came the olive fire of morning, and on the darkness fed, Prayed beside the ocean, the old mumbling mother of the dead. MS, PSJ.

33. Came] Rose corr. to Came WO proofs (Texas). 34. the slow heaving ocean] Cp. Aubrey De Vere, A Song of Faith (1842), ‘Gougaun Barra’, 9–10: ‘To the shore  | Dark waters rolled, slow heaving, with dull moan’, and William Allingham, Fifty Modern Poems (1865), ‘Invitation to a Painter’: ‘Far across the tide, slow-­heaving, rich autumnal daylight sets’ (a few lines earlier, Allingham has a ‘horizon, touched with clouds and phantom sails’: his poem is written in the same metrical form as ‘The Phantom Ship’, with the lines sharing a rhythmic template with those of WBY).

87

STREET DANCERS

THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication history. There is no surviving MS  for this poem and no reference to it in WBY’s correspondence, so any date of composition must be conjectural. The poem’s London setting does not mean that it must have been composed in London, but WBY was living there in 1888, when he was gathering poems for WO (in which ‘Street Dancers’ was first published). More than a year after the publication of WO, the poem appeared in The Leisure Hour (LH) for Mar. 1890, accompanied by a half-­ page illustration in which three children – a boy and a girl, dancing to music played on a whistle by an older boy – are outside a lighted public house, glanced at by a man who is walking away from them along the pavement. The poem was immediately reprinted from The Leisure Hour in the Leicester Chronicle for Mar. 8 1890, but it was not put into print again by WBY. Text. It has been customary to accept the LH text as a revision of the text of WO: both VE and R. Finneran in CW 1 take it as a copy-­text. However, it is not at all clear that the differences between WO and the 1890 periodical version reflect authorial changes. The fact that the punctuation becomes heavier rather than lighter is not characteristic of WBY, and two of the changes to phrases for LH make little sense (see notes to 21 and 63). The same periodical was later to reprint another poem by WBY a year after the book in which it appeared was published, when in Aug. 1896 it printed ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ from P95 (publ. Aug. 1895): here, house style altered e.g. WBY’s ‘pavements gray’ to ‘pavements grey’. In the case of ‘Street Dancers’, there is no proof that any of the 1890 variants originate outside the editorial offices, with the possible exception of a word changed in line 11. There is, however, a set of revisions to the poem made by WBY himself, in the copy of WO in the Pierpont Morgan Library (Morgan). These are the only changes made to this poem in any of the copies of WO annotated by the poet; while they may postdate Mar. 1890 (and line 11 might just indicate that they do), it is worth noting that none of the revisions coincide with points of divergence between the LH text and that published in WO. In a curious composite text, CW 1 uses The Leisure Hour version as copy-­text, supplementing it with the readings from Morgan: this creates a poem which can hardly have existed in WBY’s mind at any stage. For the present edition, WO is the copy-­text, supplemented by the Morgan revisions; readings from The Leisure Hour are recorded in the notes.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-88



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S 5

inging in this London street To the rhythm of their feet, By a window’s feeble light Are two ragged children bright – Larger sparrows of the town, Nested among vapours brown. Far away the starry mirth Over hangs the wooded earth.

10

If these merry ones should know, Dancing by the window glow, Starry laughter, woodland leisure, Would they foot so fleet a measure? Ah no!

15

Maybe now in some far lane, Dancing on the moon’s broad stain, Watched of placid poplar trees, Children sing in twos and threes. Hush! hush! hush! on every lip

1. street] street, LH. The comma is redundant, in terms of both sense and rhythm. 4. ragged children] Poor urban children, on account of their state of dress, were commonly referred to as ‘ragged’ in the mid-­nineteenth century, and from the 1840s, educational charities established ‘ragged schools’ for their education. In poetry, E.B. Browning wrote of ‘Ragged children, with bare feet’, and ‘Ragged children, hungry-­eyed’ (Last Poems (1862), ‘A Song for the ragged Schools of London’, 49, 53). 5. sparrows of the town] OED sparrow 1.d ‘A chirpy, quick-­witted person; used spec. of a Londoner’. 6.] Morgan. Nested ’mong the vapours brown WO, LH. 7. starry mirth] This phrase stuck long in the memory of two of WBY’s friends and fellow-­ poets. AE used it in The Divine Vision and Other Poems (1904), ‘The Feast of Age’, 11–12: ‘Come, let us mingle in the starry mirth  | Around the shrine’, and KT in The Holy War (1916), ‘The Only Son’, 9–10: ‘She heard amid the starry mirth | Rumour of dreadful things on earth’.

10–11.] Footing in the feeble glow, | Of a wide wood’s leafy leisure WO; Footing in the feeble glow, | Of a wide wood’s starry leisure LH. In Morgan, WBY begins by deleting 10–11, revising to ‘Dancing by the window glow, | Starry laughter, [woody del.] woodland leisure’. The single-­word change in LH from ‘leafy’ to ‘starry’ is the sole point in that text where authorial revision might seem likely: this is made more likely still by WBY’s introduction of ‘Starry’ to the line as revised in Morgan. ‘Starry’ was, however, a word already present in the poem (at 7 and 54), and if this helped suggest it to WBY when making changes in Morgan, it could possibly also have influenced a careless setter of the text for LH. wide wood’s leafy leisure] Cp. Thomas Dermody, The Harp of Erin (1807), ‘More Wonders! An Heroic Epistle to M.G. Lewis Esq. M.P., 99–100: ‘Oft, in youth’s dreamy summer, have I  strayed  | Delighted through the wild wood’s leafy shade’. In W. Morris’s fiction The House of the Wolfings (1890), verses in Ch. 17 include ‘the wild wood’s leafy roof ’ (‘Hail be thy mouth, beloved’, 11).

656

Street Dancers

20

Lies a chubby finger-­tip, As there floats from fields afar Clamour of the lone nightjar.

25

If these merry ones should know, Dancing by the window glow, Other people’s mirth and pleasure, Would they foot so fleet a measure? Ah no!

30

Maybe in some isle of isles, In the south seas’ azure miles, Dance the savage children small, Singing to their light footfall. Hush! hush! hush! they pause and point Where a shell, the seas anoint, Dropping liquid rainbow light, Rolls along the sea-­sands white.

19.] WO. Lies a chilly finger tip LH. WBY leaves the WO version of this line untouched in Morgan; it is hard to see how ‘chilly’ can be justified in this scene otherwise untroubled by cold, and the nightjar which the children hear in 21 is a summer bird, present in Britain from only Apr. until Sept. It seems likely that the setting process for LH saw a slip here, with WO’s ‘chubby’ being misread and then set as ‘chilly’. If this is so, it may cast some suspicion over the reading ‘starry’ for ‘leafy’ in 11; but certainty on this matter is not possible. 28.] WO. South Sea’s LH. The correction for geographical specificity here is more likely to have come from the editorial side of LH than from WBY. azure miles] Perhaps cp. Alfred Hayes, The Last Crusade and Other Poems (1887), ‘The Death of Saint Louis’, 754–756: ‘the same sun | Which, smiling o’er a thousand azure miles | Of winking wavelets, lit the crystal belt’. 29. children small] This inversion is also prominent in E.B. Browning’s ‘A song for the Ragged Schools in London’ (see note to 4): ‘But these others – children small | Spilt like blots about the city’ (45–46), ‘children small, | Blue-­eyed, wailing through the city’ (125–126).

32.] Where a shell the seas anoint LH. The removal of WO’s comma here is a definite improvement, but there is no firm evidence for WBY being the agent of this, and he leaves it untouched in Morgan. 33. rainbow light] This phrase is so common in nineteenth-­century poetry as to be a cliché. However, it may be another phrase that remained in the memory of AE (see note on 7 above), in whose ‘Carrowmore’ (first collected as ‘The Gates of Dreamland’ in The Divine Vision (1904)) it appears when ‘the Land of Youth lies gleaming, flushed with rainbow light and mirth’ (19). The phrase entered AE’s poem at some point between 1898 and 1904, in the wake of extensive consultation with WBY: when Russell sent a version to WBY in 1898, he was met with the response that it ‘goes to pieces at the end’ (CL 2, p. 182), and so reworked its final stanza to produce ‘the Land of Youth lies gleaming far beyond our earthly strife’ (to WBY’s satisfaction) for its first publication (in The Internationalist, Mar. 1898). ‘Rainbow light’ came afterwards, perhaps in allusion to WBY’s early (and by then long unprinted) poem. See CL 2, p. 188.



Street Dancers

35

If these merry ones should know, Dancing by the window glow, Other people’s mirth and pleasure, Would they foot so fleet a measure? Ah no!

40 45

Maybe now a Bedouin’s brood Laughing goes in wildest mood, Past the spears and palm-­stems dry, Past the camel’s dreaming eye. Hush! hush! hush! they pause them where Bows the Bedouin’s whitening hair – Peace of youth and peace of age, Thoughtless joys and sorrows sage.

50

If these merry ones should know, Dancing by the window glow, Other people’s mirth and pleasure, Would they foot so fleet a measure? Ah no!

55 60

Others know the healing earth, Others know the starry mirth; They will wrap them in the shroud, Sorrow-­worn, yet placid browed. London streets have heritage Blinder sorrows, harder wage – Sordid sorrows of the mart, Sorrows eating brain and heart.



If these merry ones should know, Dancing by the window glow,

42. palm-­stems] For a contemporary use of this comparatively rare term, cp. Evelyn Douglas, Phantasmagoria (1887), ‘The Ethiopian Forest’, 5: ‘Where great serpents round the palm-­ stems tangled’. 43. camel’s dreaming eye] WBY’s odd image here owes everything to the demands of rhyme, but in the process it warps Matthew 19: 24, ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for

657

a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’. 47.] joy LH sorrow LH. 59. sordid sorrows] Cp. Fanny Kemble, Poems (1883), ‘To Shakespeare’, 7: ‘From sordid sorrows thou hast set me free’. 60. eating brain and heart] Morgan; sapping brain and heart WO, LH. Perhaps cp. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, IV st. 26, 5–6: ‘their will has wove | The chains which eat their hearts’

658 65

Street Dancers

All the healing earth may treasure, Would they foot so fleet a measure? Ah no!

63.] Of the healing earth May-­treasure LH. The periodical revision here makes no easy sense (there is no reason why the dancing children should not experience the month of May); the

WO reading (unchanged in Morgan) is more straightforward (the dancing children are so situated that they will not know all that may be treasured on the earth).

88

TO AN ISLE IN THE WATER

THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication history. In a letter to KT of Sept. 1888, WBY wrote that ‘I enclose a couple of lyrics of my own for your opinion’, mentioning specifically ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ as one of these (CL 1, 97). In her memoir The Middle Years (1916), KT identified ‘To an Isle in the Water’ as the second poem referred to, and a single leaf bearing fair copies of each of these two poems survives (Special Collections, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa): this is signed by WBY and dated 1888. WBY mentioned the two poems together again when approached by KT in 1892 for suggestions of possible inclusions in her anthology Irish Love-­Songs: ‘You might perhaps give from Oisin “to an Isle in the Water” and an “old song resung” [‘Down by the Salley Gardens’] for they are more obviously Irish than my recent attempts at love poetry’ (CL 1, 288). The poem was first published in WO, and retained by WBY in subsequent collections: in all of these, it was printed in direct sequence to ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’. In a BBC broadcast of 10 Apr. 1932, WBY read out the poem with some introductory observations (which apply both to it and to ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’): ‘Perhaps you will think the little verses I am now going to read to you rather empty, but they still seem to me good in their unpretending way. In each case it was someone else’s thought I took up and elaborated.’ See note on 13–14 for one such possible taking-­up in the poem. (The text of WBY’s broadcast (preserved in NLI 30117) is edited with commentary by W. Gould, ‘W.B. Yeats’s “Poems about Women: A Broadcast” ’, Toomey (ed.) Yeats and Women 384–402.) Criticism and reception. F. Kinahan, pointing out that this early poem was subject to almost no subsequent revision by WBY, gives a useful account of how the short lyric works (187): It manages the effect that it strives for primarily through its manipulation of images of light. The first stanza shows the woman moving in the circle shed by firelight, her body half in light and half in shadow. The third verse at first sets her face in full light, the encircling halo sent out by the candles she carries, then shortly thereafter locates her in a contrasting darkness, ‘in the gloom’. This working of slight variations on a simple original pattern not only makes for an effective word picture, but lends romance to the least romantic of domestic chores and transforms them into actions that touch chords; a woman setting a table ceases to be a housekeeper and becomes instead the bearer of food and of light. [. . .] She is also nothing if not ‘shy’, and the fact that her shyness is like that of a rabbit implies the possibility of imminent flight. Thus the undertrace DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-89

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To an Isle in the Water

of anxiousness in these stanzas, the implied concern of a narrator who, content to ‘go’ to the island at an earlier point in the poem, speaks instead of wanting to ‘fly’ to it by the time the poem concludes. The English composer Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979) published her 1912 setting of the poem in 1920. Copy-­text: P49.

S

hy one, shy one, Shy one of my heart, She moves in the firelight Pensively apart.

5

She carries in the dishes, And lays them in a row. To an isle in the water With her would I go.

10

She carries in the candles, And lights the curtained room, Shy in the doorway And shy in the gloom;



And shy as a rabbit,

2. shy one of my heart] WBY adapts a conventional-­ looking (if in fact rare) formula here: see e.g. Emmeline Stuart-­Wortley, London at Night (1834), ‘Reconciliation’, 13: ‘dear one of my heart’. WBY’s line was itself to be adapted by Padraig Pearse, Poems of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood (1916), ‘The Dirge of Oliver Grace’, 9–10: ‘Is it for thee, young noble one of my heart, | The bean sidhe hath sorrowfully wailed?’ 10. room,] room; WO, P95. 11.] Writing in his draft memoirs of 1916 about the early influence on his poetic habits of E.J. Ellis, WBY recalled (Mem., 30–31): [.  .  .] his technical criticism of the work of others was profound, and no detail too slight for his philosophy. I  still had the intellectual habits of a provincial, and fixed my imagination on great work

to the neglect of detail [. . .] but I learned for the first time that I might find perfect self-­expresion in the management of a cadence. He complained that ‘Shy in the doorway’ in one of my early poems was abominable, because ‘Shyin’ was the name of a Chinaman, and though I did not alter the line I acquired a more delicate attention to sound. 13. shy as a rabbit] In his 1932 broadcast, WBY gives these lines as an instance of ‘someone else’s thought that I took up and elaborated’: I asked a man who pretended to know Irish to tell me the meaning of the words ‘Shule, shule, shularoon’  – they are the burden of a well-­known Irish ballad. He said they meant ‘Shy as a rabbit, helpful and shy.’ They meant nothing of the kind, he was a liar, but he gave me the theme



15

To an Isle in the Water

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Helpful and shy. To an isle in the water With her would I fly.

of a poem which I call ‘To an Isle in the Water’. (WBY included ‘Shule Aroon’ in his A Book of Irish Verse (1895) where, presumably with the benefit of more expert advice, he correctly translated the refrain ‘Suibhal, suibhal, suilhal a ruin’  – ‘pronounced’, according to his note there, ‘Shoo-­il, shoo-­il, shoo-­il a rooin’  – as ‘Move, move, move, O treasure’.) Though WBY was well enough acquainted with rabbits to

need no further prompting here, there is a parallel in R.B.W. Noel, Beatrice and Other Poems (1868), ‘As a Tale that is Told’, 7: ‘At hand shy rabbits nibbling sit’. But WBY’s line is more likely to be itself an enabling parallel for Lionel Johnson, Poetical Works (1915), ‘In England’, 90: ‘Shy rabbits with quick fears’. 16.] WBY’s diction here is wholly conventional, but perhaps cp. Wordsworth, Poems (1815), ‘To a Sky-­Lark’, 10–11: ‘Had I  the wings of a Faery, | Up to thee would I fly’.

89

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE THE POEMS

Date of composition. Composition probably began just before Christmas in 1888, though it is possible that the poem was not finished until some point in 1889 or 1890. At the close of a letter to KT, in a section written on ‘Tuesday’ (i.e. Christmas Day) 1888, WBY introduces the two stanzas then finished (CL 1, 120–121): Here are two verses I made the other day. There is a beautiful Island of Innis free in Lough Gill Sligo. A little rocky Island with a legended past. In my story [John Sherman] I make one of the characters when ever he is in trouble long to go away and live alone on that Island – an old day dream of my own. Thinking over his feelings I made these verses about them – From this point, until the poem’s publication nearly two years later, there is no surviving mention of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by WBY. There is an account by the poet’s sister SMY, written much later, which also seems to put composition of the poem in Bedford Park. The only indication of date is ‘one evening’, and there is no mention of the Christmas season (letter of 17 Jun. 1930, quoted in Foster 1, 79): In Bedford Park one evening, Helen Acosta and Lolly painting and I there sewing – Willy bursting in having just written, or not even written down but just having brought forth ‘Innisfree’, he repeated it with all the fire of creation and his youth – he was I suppose about 24. I felt a thrill all through me and saw Sligo beauty, heard lake water lapping, when Helen broke in asking for a paint brush – she had not even pretended to listen. None of us knew what a great moment it was. The recollection of ‘lake water lapping’ is actually linked to a stanza which was not written when WBY sent his Christmas letter to KT: either the third stanza was composed very shortly after the letter, or SMY had forgotten (more than forty years later) that it had not originally been part of the poem. Context. The letter to KT offers some hints as to the poem’s first contexts for WBY. One is specific, in the reference to the ongoing novella John Sherman (1891). There, the hero (who bears some resemblance to WBY) is in London, and homesick for Sligo (‘Ballah’) (JS, 122–123): Delayed by a crush on the Strand, he heard a faint trickling of water near by; it came from a shop window where a little water-­jet balanced a wooden DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-90



The Lake Isle of Innisfree

663

ball upon its point. The sound suggested a cataract with a long Gaelic name, that leaped crying into the Gate of the Winds at Ballah. [.  .  .] He was set dreaming a whole day by walking down one Sunday morning to the border of the Thames  – a few hundred yards from his house  – and looking at the osier-­covered Chiswick eyot. It made him remember an old day-­dream of his. The source of the river that passed his garden at home was a certain wood-­bordered and islanded lake, whither in childhood he had often gone blackberry-­gathering. At the further end was a little islet called Inniscrewin. Its rocky centre, covered with many bushes, rose some forty feet above the lake. Often when life and its difficulties had seemed to him like the lessons of some elder boy given to a younger by mistake, it had seemed good to dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and burning a few years out, rowing to and fro, fishing, or lying on the island slopes by day, and listening at night to the ripple of the water and the quivering of the bushes – full always of unknown creatures – and going out at morning to see the island’s edge marked by the feet of birds. The Chiswick eyot is a small island in the river Thames, near Chiswick Mall. Willows had long been cultivated here for baskets (used in the market gardens), so osier beds were in evidence during WBY’s time in London. WBY changed ‘Inniscrewin’ (an invented name) for ‘Innisfree’ in the next edition of the novella (as part of vol. 7 in CWVP08: this was the story’s last publication in the author’s lifetime). Sherman remembers the river in Sligo, the Garavogue, which runs from Lough Gill, where the island called Innisfree is located. These fictional details match fairly closely WBY’s later accounts of the genesis of the poem. Another, less specific, context for the poem is also contained in the 1888 letter to KT. Here (again, on ‘Tuesday’ [25 Dec.]) WBY discusses in some detail his dissatisfaction (and that of JBY) with a recently-­published poem of KT’s, ‘The Ballad of Courcey of Kinsale’; perhaps to ease the intensity of the critical atmosphere, he allows that his own work suffers from parallel failings (CL 1, 119): The want of your poetry is, I think, the want of my own. We both of us need to substitute more and more the landscapes of nature for the landscapes of Art. I myself have another and kindred need – to substitute the feelings and longings of nature for those of art. [.  .  .] We should make poems on the familiar landscapes we love not the strange and rare and glittering scenes we wonder at – these latter are the landscapes of Art, the rouge of nature – The poem is a very personal ‘landscape of nature’, but it stands in marked contrast to a lot of the symbolic landscapes of much early work by WBY, partly for this very reason, and partly because it makes a point of precise localized description. In The Trembling of the Veil (1921), WBY recast John Sherman’s experiences as his own  – which of course in the first place they had probably been  – remembering his life in London, when he was working on his early journalism and writing in the

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British Museum, cut off from much social (and any potentially romantic) contact (CW 3, 139–140): Sometimes I  told myself very adventurous love-­stories with myself for hero, and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I  heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-­window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem ‘Innisfree’, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I would not have written that first line with its conventional archaism – ‘Arise and go’ – nor the inversion in the last stanza. WBY’s remarks on the poem’s style are heavily coloured by retrospect, and it cannot be assumed that the poem as composed in the late 1880s was written according to a stylistic agenda: the poet’s ‘I only understood vaguely’ comes closer to the truth, and even then he is obliged to give instances of his failures of understanding. Later still, speaking in a BBC broadcast from Belfast on 8 Sept. 1931, WBY recalled (CW 10, 224): When I was a young lad in the town of Sligo I read Thoreau’s essays and wanted to live in a hut on an island in Lough Gill called Innisfree, which means Heather Island. I wrote the poem in London when I was about twenty three. One day in the Strand I heard a little tinkle of water in a shop window a little jet of water balancing a ball on the top; it was an advertisement, I think, of cooling drinks, but it set me thinking of Sligo and lake water. Although the location of the shop-­window display has moved from Fleet Street back to the Strand (where it was located in John Sherman – though the distance between the two is not great, and Fleet Street in any case leads into the Strand), WBY’s account is essentially the same. The details turn up again in WBY’s final radio broadcast, recorded in London on 29 Oct. 1937, where the poet adds that ‘The sound of that water made me homesick’, and remembers that ‘Out of that homesickness I made the most popular of my poems’, when ‘I wanted to go back to Sligo and live on an island in the lake’ (CW 10, 290). The connection between this poem, homesickness, and recollections of being ‘a young lad’ is essential to understanding its context at the time of composition. (Later, the poem took on multiple contexts: amongst other things, it became WBY’s most popularly celebrated piece, and presented him with the embarrassment of being provided for in his maturity (so to speak) by a product of his youth.) At the end of 1888, WBY’s adolescence was in the much more recent past, and his memories of it and its locations were correspondingly sharper. Sligo town, and the nearby Lough Gill with its islands (including



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the island called Innisfree), were associated with WBY’s relations with his mother’s family, the Pollexfens: having been for periods of his childhood semi-­adopted by his Pollexfen grandparents, he graduated in later adolescence (and for long afterwards, in fact) to being a dependent companion of his uncle, George Pollexfen. One incident which the poet remembered and retold years later has a particular bearing on Lough Gill and Innisfree. In Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1916) WBY gave an account of an ambitious nocturnal hike, which he undertook in the summer of 1885 or 1886 (CW 3, 84–85): I told him [George Pollexfen] I was going to walk round Lough Gill and sleep in a wood. I did not tell him all my object, for I was nursing a new ambition. My father had read to me some passage out of Walden, and I planned to live some day in a cottage on a little island called Innisfree, and Innisfree was opposite Slish Wood where I meant to sleep. I thought that having conquered bodily desire and the inclination of my mind towards women and love, I  should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wisdom. There was a story in the county history of a tree that had once grown upon that island guarded by some terrible monster and borne the food of the gods. A young girl pined for the fruit and told her lover to kill the monster and carry the fruit away. He did as he had been told, but tasted the fruit; and when he reached the mainland where she had waited for him, he was dying of its powerful virtue. And from sorrow and from remorse she too ate of it and died. I do not remember whether I chose the island because of its beauty or for the story’s sake, but I was twenty-­two or three before I gave up the dream. I set out from Sligo about six in the evening, walking slowly, for it was an evening of great beauty; but though I was well into Slish Wood by bedtime, I could not sleep, not from the discomfort of the dry rock I had chosen for my bed, but from my fear of the wood-­ranger. Somebody had told me, though I do not think it could have been true, that he went his round at some unknown hour. I kept going over what I should say if found and could not think of anything he would believe. However, I could watch my island in the early dawn and notice the order of the cries of the birds. I came home next day unimaginably tired and sleepy, having walked some thirty miles partly over rough and boggy ground. For months afterwards, if I alluded to my walk, my uncle’s general servant [. . .] would go into fits of laughter. She believed I had spent the night in a different fashion and had invented the excuse to deceive my uncle, and would say to my great embarrassment, for I was as prudish as an old maid, ‘And you had a good right to be fatigued’. It is not only the ‘general servant’ who may be excused a measure of sceptical irony here at the young WBY’s expense; the middle-­aged WBY who writes the account is also partly in on the joke, as his readers too ought to be. What he chooses specially to remember, though, is as intimately connected with poetry as it is with life – perhaps more so. The lake and its island, the myths buried in the geography, and the difficult presence of everyday reality in the shape of the wood-­ranger, all contribute to a complex and significant

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landscape in which WBY’s early poetry is seen to be taking shape. The significance of H.D. Thoreau’s Walden, too, is emphasised, and here it is admitted that the book dominating the young WBY’s ambitions was first selected for and read to him by JBY. On WBY’s awareness of the various myths attaching to Innisfree, see notes. Sources. Aside from his own knowledge of Innisfree and Lough Gill, WBY drew upon literary sources in writing his poem. One of these is H.D. Thoreau’s Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854), and for detailed analysis of the specific indebtedness, see notes to 3–4. Another literary source is H.G. Wood-­Martin’s History of Sligo: County and Town (2 vols., 1882); it is entirely possible that a copy of this was owned by George Pollexfen, and that the poet could have remembered reading parts of it while in Sligo. Wood-­Martin offers a vivid and poetically charged reconstruction of Lough Gill and ‘The Prehistoric appearance of the County’ (Vol. 1, 67): Sligo was a land of lakes as well as of forests; they were thickly scattered over the face of the country lakes of irregular shape, connected by stagnant shallows, ‘now land, now lake, and shores with forest crowned’ [Milton, Paradise Lost, IX, 17.] They were all rendered beautiful by the surrounding woodland, yet the beauty of each was distinct in kind. Some of the lakes are studded with islands rising mounds, on which birch and oak stand side by side with pine and beech. On these islands were the huts of the aborigines, at a sufficient distance from the mainland to render their isolation a means of safety; for in a retreat of this nature they were secure from their enemies and from prowling wolves, and with their canoes run up on the beach, could feel secure from surprise. Other lakes were broad sheets of water; the majority, however, of small size, half marsh, half water, fringed with forest and abounding in fish. On these lakes the huts of the aborigines, with their conical roofs, would appear as if floating on the water; the inmates who are neither fishing nor engaged in the chase, might be supposed to lounge lazily about on the staging, or to occupy themselves in forming weapons, or in mending their birch canoes or wicker-­work cots moored near the hut. The lake-­dweller from vegetable fibre made nets, with which he obtained an ample supply of fish from the waters around him; but sometimes have been found traces of grain coarsely ground, seeds, beech and hazel nuts, the remains of quadrupeds, birds, and fish, attesting the indiscriminate nature of his appetite. Thinking of early inhabitants, Wood-­Martin conjures up the Firbolg people, before the invasion of the Tuatha De Danaan, and equips one with a ‘cot’ (OED n.3 ‘Irish: A small roughly-­made boat, used on the rivers and lakes of Ireland; a “dug-­out” ’), creating a picture of peace and quiet industry, a calm broken only by the sounds of local fauna and other livestock (Vol. 1, 62–63): Beautiful, indeed, must have been the sylvan scenery around Lough Gill in primeval days, when the slanting rays of the setting sun shone on the variegated tints of the autumnal foliage, and the sombre pines of the dense forests; the desolate appearance of the landscape might chance to be enlivened by the solitary



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cot of a Firbolg seen in pursuit of fish; the eagle on outspread wing watching his quarry beneath, or the distant howl of the wolf might fall upon the ear from the verge of the neighbouring thickets. Not a wave, not a ripple, on the surface of the waters, and the sun playing strange freaks of mirage on its bosom. After a long, warm day, deer and wild cattle stand knee-­deep in the water to cool themselves, whilst one herd lows across to another from their watery resting-­place. The trout and salmon are rising with eddying splash; the swift and swallow dart after their insect food with skillful swoop; and birds of prey wing their way homeward to the mountain cliffs. A general influence on WBY’s conception of the scene here seems likely; for more specific points of potential intersection with Wood-­Martin, see notes on Title, 3 and 7. In 1905, Arthur Symons proposed a source for WBY’s poem in one of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies, though this was in the context of an essay in depreciation of Moore’s gifts as a poet, and not perhaps with any wholehearted intent to suggest that WBY had worked consciously on the basis of the Moore lyric. Symons commented (Fortnightly Review, Apr. 1905): There is an ‘Irish Melody’ of Moore which begins: Oh! had we some bright little isle of our own, In a blue summer ocean, far off and alone, Where a leaf never dies in the still blooming bowers, And the bee banquets on through a whole year of flowers. The idea has been repeated by another Irishman, Mr. Yeats [quotes 1–4] No two poems could be more exactly comparable: the resemblances are as striking as the differences; and the differences might teach in one lesson all that distinguishes what is poetry from what is not poetry. And further, if you will compare the versification of these two poems, or indeed any other poems of the two writers, you will see how cheap, for the most part, were Moore’s rhythmical effects. Moore’s poem is further in mood from WBY’s than Symons suggests, and is an exercise in slightly mawkish romantic sentiment (concluding with the wish that ‘Our wish should resemble a long day of light, | And our death come on, holy and calm as the night’ (19–20)) which is a long way removed from the mood of ‘The Lake Isle’. Reception and interpretation. WBY’s most enduringly popular poem established its popularity quickly, and was often mentioned with approval in reviews. A privately communicated expression of praise from early on meant much to the young poet: from Samoa, R.L. Stevenson wrote to WBY on 14 Apr. 1894 (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson ed. S. Colvin (1911), IV, 254–5): Dear Sir, – Long since when I was a boy I remember the emotions with which I repeated Swinburne’s poems and ballads. Some ten years ago, a similar spell was

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cast upon me by Meredith’s Love in the Valley [. . .] It may interest you to hear that I have a third time fallen in slavery: this is to your poem called the Lake Isle of Innisfree. It is so quaint and airy, simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart – but I seek words in vain. Enough that ‘always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds on the shore,’ and am, yours gratefully, Robert Louis Stevenson. WBY’s letter of thanks (24 Oct. 1894) was perhaps never read by Stevenson, who died on 3 Dec. (CL 1, 405): I need hardly tell you that your praise of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ has given me great pleasure. After all it is the liking or disliking of one’s fellow craftsmen, especially of those who have attained the perfect expression one does but grope for, which urges one to work on – else were it best to dream one’s dreams in silence. The poet lost little time in disseminating Stevenson’s praise, and the gist of the admiring letter was repeated in United Ireland on 1 Sept. 1894 (‘One of Mr. Yeats’s latest admirers is Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, the celebrated novelist, who has just written him from his far-­away home in Samoa to say that his poetry has taken him ‘captive’, ‘a remarkable tribute from such a critic’). Very soon, KT was also incorporating Stevenson’s approval (this time allowing its specific reference to the poem rather than WBY’s work as a whole), for an American audience (Outlook (New York), 20 Oct. 1894): Lovers of poetry look to this young man [WBY] with great hope. He is as surely a poet as Keats or Shelley, and has the art of not only seeing his fairy world of imagination, but of making us see. Mr. Stevenson is one of the latest readers to be glamoured by his ‘Lake Island of Innisfree’. What a mirage of poetry is this in the waste desert of the world! WBY cared enough about Stevenson’s praise to send the letter to AG on 1 Jan. 1909, for her to preserve in her copy of CWVP08: ‘Like all the treasures I fear to lose it should be at Coole’ (CL 5, 377). Many years later, WBY professed himself against the public circulation of private praise, writing to condemn ‘the growing habit of quoting private letters as advertisements for books’. The eminent poet told his correspondent how ‘When I was a young man of twenty seven or twenty eight my publisher Fisher Unwin asked me for a letter of praise sent me by Stevenson who had just died’, and told him that ‘I refused, and I do not think there was a writer in my set who would not have refused’ (to Mervyn Wingfield, 1 Dec. 1938, InteLex 7348). In J.M. Hone’s 1943 study, the Stevenson praise was quoted, with the note that ‘Yeats would never allow his publishers to quote the letter’ (Hone, 77). Reviewers’ admiration drew attention to the poem’s rhythmic qualities. The poet’s ‘manipulation of rhythm is often surprising, sometimes even masterly; and his songs are apt to haunt you with an odd insistence, after the same fashion as he himself is haunted by the lapping waters round the Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (rev. of Book of the Rhymers’ Club, The Academy 26 Mar. 1892). This became a peak of technical achievement which, for



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some critics, the poet did not quite scale again. One double-­edged appreciation is representative of this view (The Athenaeum, 8 Mar. 1902): [WBY] is a master of those sad and sighing rhythms that breathe upon the polished mirror of a hidden pool. In one of his lyrics this romantic quality attains to an exquisite perfection of utterance. That is one of those poems which do not lose their magic with use, for it holds in its subtle music a mood that never grows old, corresponding to a mood that sleeps in every spirit, ready to be aroused and to pace in pathetic silence through the echoing chambers of consciousness. For another such cry of passionate remembrance we would gladly give all the plays Mr. Yeats has written and all the plays he seems determined to write. Much of the early public praise for the poem saw it as quintessentially Irish. In the words of The Saturday Review, ‘Mr. Yeats is a Celt to the heart’s core’, since ‘His vision of human life is Celtic, and so is his vision of external nature’, and in this poem ‘the very atmosphere of the Irish lake country is rendered with marvellous fidelity’ (7 Mar. 1896). Similarly, in The Speaker, this was ‘the most characteristically Celtic poem of our time’ (18 Apr. 1896). The same essentialism was expressed by R. Ashe-­King: ‘The very soil of Ireland is to the Irish peasant, ‘dear as the ruddy drops that visit his sad heart’, and in exile he is ever wistful with the yearning expressed in one of the most exquisite of Mr. Yeats’s poems, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’’ (The Bookman Sept. 1897). American reception, too, was widely enthusiastic, and for the New York Times (11 Jun. 1904), ‘ Such a poem as Mr. Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ is imperishable’, since ‘By sheer force of its lyric genius it must of necessity make its author talked about in the same way a hundred years hence as Keats is talked of today’. By 1915, it was a simple truism for F. Reid to call this ‘the best known of all [WBY’s] poems’ (Reid, 47). WBY himself was seldom entirely pleased by his early poem’s good fortune (though he was doubtless grateful for the benefits brought him by this). ‘I enclose a note from “Boy Scouts” organization which explains itself ’, the poet wrote to E.M. Lister in 1911, telling him to ‘Do what you think best’, and reflecting wryly: ‘Imagine Innisfree as a marching song – poor island’ (letter of 28 July 1911, InteLex 1691). ‘A man has just sent me from Australia, in the evident belief that I would like it, an article which he has written commending that dammed [sic] Inisfree’, WBY told T. Sturge Moore, in a letter of 4 Oct. 1907 (InteLex 669). ‘Please don’t think’, the poet informed a young correspondent, ‘ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is better than all the other poems, for I don’t’ (letter to Ruth Watt, 7 Dec. 1929, InteLex 5322). WBY’s own loss of relish for his most famous piece came, in time, to be shared by the younger generations of the 1930s and 1940s. In the period when WBY was producing some of his most original and challenging poetry, this poem could appear to his readers also as a relic from a bygone age. In the 1920s, St. John Ervine wrote of how ‘The very great beauty that is in [WBY’s] work does not stir you: it saddens you’, making this poem his prime example (Some Impressions of my Elders (1922), 271–272): Innisfree, the beauty of which has not been diminished by familiarity, does not sound glad: it sounds tired. The poet’s wish to return to the lake island is not

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due to any pleasurable emotion, but to weariness and exhaustion: he dreams of the island, not as a place in which to work and to achieve, but in which to retire from work and achievement that has not brought with it the gratification for which he hoped; and the final impression left on the mind of the reader is that the poet is too tired and disappointed to do more than wish he might go to Innisfree. One reads the beautiful poem in the sure and certain belief that Mr. Yeats will not ‘arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,’ but that he will remain where he is. By 1941, Louis MacNeice felt the need to defend the poem against his own sceptically anti-­romantic generation of young poets, and at the same time to insist on its actual (rather than synthetic, or made for export) Irishness (MacNeice, 56–57): [WBY] himself said that Innisfree was his first properly Irish poem. It is a poem which owing to its popularity is often nowadays unfairly despised. Thus Mr Stephen Spender writes of it very contemptuously in The Destructive Element as a poem which ‘calls up the image of a young man reclining on a yellow satin sofa’. Mr Spender can write this because he knows that when Yeats wrote Innisfree, he was consorting with the indolent aesthetes of London’s fin de siècle. But Innisfree actually was a protest against London. I see no reason to disbelieve Yeats’s own statement that at the time when he wrote it, he was longing for County Sligo. And County Sligo is not a Never-­Never Land. The poem is a mannered poem and, in a sense, escapist, but the escape which Yeats here hankers for is not merely a whimsical fiction; it is an escape to a real place in Ireland which represented to him certain Irish realities. Modern criticism of WBY cannot avoid the poem, but it seldom examines the ‘Irish realities’ that MacNeice saw there; and, encouraged by the poet’s own impatience with his most famous lyric, it often accords more or less perfunctory attention to the poem on its way towards other, more apparently challenging, Yeatsian material. However, the effort to see this well-­known piece afresh has paid dividends. F. Kinahan writes of ‘the contrast not between wisdom and dullness, but between homelessness and home’, and of how while WBY ‘set out to depict a setting filled with harmony’, ‘it is careful working on the poet’s part to see that the harmony is palpable’ (Kinahan, 189: see also note to 1. below). For H. Adams, the poem is ‘a startling statement’; and although he may be the first (and conceivably the last) reader to have been startled by it, Adams nevertheless provides useful insights about the lyric’s place in the young WBY’s development (54): Its powerful rhythm is the young poet’s way to express a deep feeling we have not yet heard. Up to this point we have been presented with all those mythological and/or mystical poems in which the poet has rarely spoken forth in a voice that has not seemed evasive. Here he turns oratorical and assertive. This may still be escapism, but it is as personal an utterance as the poet can make at this point.



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Another reading of the poem which adds significantly to the possibilities of critical engagement is that of N. Grene, for whom ‘Beyond any literal geography, the lake isle stands for the self within the self, the isolation of the island contained within the containedness of the inland lake’ (87). Some academic articles have addressed the poem in detail. Of these, H. Merritt’s ‘Rising and Going: The ‘Nature’ of Yeats’s ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’’, English 47 (Summer 1998), 103–109, establishes biographical perspectives on WBY’s creative relation to Innisfree, informed by the versions of the various Irish legends pertaining to the island, and pursues the implications of the thought that, for the adolescent poet, ‘Sexuality and Sligo did not mix’ (107). P.D. McDonald, in ‘A Poem for all Seasons: Yeats, Meaning, and the Publishing History of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” in the 1890s’, Yearbook of English Studies 29 (1999), 202–230, examines the poem’s place in WBY’s relations with W.E. Henley at the National Observer, claiming that ‘the meaning of ‘The Lake Isle’ in the context of the Observer is neither fully determined by, nor separable from an understanding of its function as a component of the mutually acceptable version of Ireland and Irishness negotiated between Yeats and Henley in the early 1890s’ (211). The article extends this analysis to the other places of publication for the poem in the decade (228): Depending on the form in which they happened to come across it, readers of the 1890s could have found a judiciously ‘literary’ celebration of the West of Ireland uneasily entangled in an otherwise hostile ‘political’ portrayal of its destitution, or a short lyric asserting the new purist imperatives of a young group opposed to the English poetic establishment, or a poetic accompaniment to an illustration of an ancient Irish legend, or a particularly clear expression of Arnoldian Celticism, or an especially ‘fine’, but also fortunately topographical, example of the latest achievements of Irish poetry in English. Although this is in fact quite a narrow range of critical options (for many more were evidently available), and probably overrates the dependence of any reader upon the merely bibliographical circumstances of a text, the article is valuable and informative. A reading of the poem in terms of WBY’s various lakes and waters in his work of the 1880s and 1890s, along with consideration of Wood-­Martin’s importance for the poem, is given in P. McDonald, ‘Yeats’s Early Lake Isles’, Review of English Studies 70/294, Apr. 2019, 312–331. Textual and publication history. Apart from the lines in WBY’s letter to KT (given in notes), no MS of this poem from before its publication survives. It was published first in The National Observer, 13 Dec. 1890 (NO) and next appeared in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892). WBY then included it in CK, and it was published in ‘The Rose’ section of P95, and all collected editions thereafter. Over the years, WBY generated a number of MS versions of the poem for friends and collectors, but none of these shows any significant divergence from the printed text.

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Copy-­text. P49.

I

will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

MS] The earliest version of this poem is found in a letter from WBY to KT begun on 21 Dec. 1888, and finished on 25 Dec. (see Date of composition). The text of the eight lines is as follows (CL 1, 121): I will arise and go now and go to the island of Innis free And live in a dwelling of wattles  – of woven wattles and wood work made, Nine bean rows will I have there, a yellow hive for the honey bee And this old care shall fade. There from the dawn above me peace will come down dropping slow Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the household cricket sings. And noontide there be all a glimmer, midnight be a purple glow, And evening full of the linnets wings. This MS version of the poem found its way into print as early as 1915, when it was reproduced in F. Reid’s W.B. Yeats: A Critical Study. Title] Innisfree is a small island in Lough Gill, Co. Sligo. The island lies on the south side of the Lough, and close to the shore; it is uninhabited, and wooded with oak and willow. As a boy and a young man, WBY was familiar with Lough Gill and its surroundings, and would have seen Innisfree often from the woods of the Hazelwood estate and from Slish Wood (‘Sleuth Wood’ in his poem ‘The Stolen Child’). When the poet wrote about his youthful wanderings in the woods by Lough Gill in 1921 (see Context), he remembered some myths attaching to the island. He may very well have been aware of these in the 1880s, through various routes (including oral ones); but there is a likelihood that he had read of them in Wood-­Martin’s History of Sligo. The ‘story in the county history’, as WBY later calls it, is as follows (Vol. 1, 64): On the islet [Innisfree], though small in size, grew the most luscious of fruit,

which was, however, exclusively reserved for the use of the deities, who had placed a great monster or dragon as guard on their orchard. The daughter of the chief of the district required her lover, a young warrior named Free, to procure for her some of the forbidden fruit as a proof of his affection and valour. Free landed on the isle, succeeded in slaying the monster placed to guard the trees; but on regaining the frail canoe in which he had obtained access to the island, weak and exhausted by his exertions, and feeling need of refreshment, he tasted some of the stolen fruit. The effect on mortal constitution was fatal. He had but just strength to row to the shore, when he fell dying at the feet of his mistress. He exerted his remaining powers sufficiently to acquaint her with the cause of his fate, and the damsel, filled with remorse, immediately herself ate of the stolen fruit, and fell dead across his corpse. The two lovers were buried in the island which had proved so fatal to them. In the eighth-­century Irish text Táin Bó Fraích (The Cattle-­Raid of Fráech) the hero is at one stage sent magical life-­prolonging rowan berries, which are guarded by a dragon. Fráech defeats this monster, though he is gravely wounded in the process, and requires supernatural help in his recovery. This seems to be an analogue for the story provided (though with a tragic twist) by Wood-­ Martin. The strong tinge of Romeo and Juliet supplied by Wood-­Martin was likely to have chimed with the young WBY’s romantic reveries, and it may well in turn condition the poem, where practical self-­sufficiency is shadowed by the costs of personal isolation. (WBY returned to the legend in 1893, in another Innisfree poem, ‘The Danaan Quicken Tree’, which he never collected.) An illustration, entitled ‘Innisfree’ and placed over lines from the poem’s last stanza, by ‘J. B. Yeats’ which appeared in The Leisure



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Hour for Aug. 1896 may have some bearing on the Yeats family’s knowledge of the Irish story. In this, a warrior dressed in supposedly Irish fashion stands in the foreground, his faithful hound in the shadows just behind him; the warrior leans on his spear which he grasps in both hands, its pointed tip angled vertically to point into the sky. The illustration is the work of the poet’s father JBY, who described it in the same year in a letter as one of ‘an Irish longhaired chief in chain armour stalking slowly along using his spear as a staff and leaning heavily on it, an Irish wolf hound following him, its tail between its legs, the place a wood of oak trees black with forest darkness’ (JBY, Letters from Bedford Park ed. W.M. Murphy (1972), 32). Is this perhaps the warrior Fráech, preparing to make his perilous raid on the island as in the ‘old county history’? Wood-­Martin seems to have made some connection between the name of Innisfree and the character Fráech, but if WBY ever thought along these lines, he came to associate the island’s name with heather, so that its name combined the Irish words inis (island) and fraoch (heather): in his 1931 broadcast (see Context above), he spoke of ‘an island in Lough Gill called Innisfree, which means Heather Island’ (CW 10, 224). This derivation of the name was available in the work of P.W. Joyce (The Origin and History of Irish Names of Places (1875), 519): The common heath  – erica vulgaris  – is denoted by the word fraech; as may be expected, it enters extensively into names, and oftener as a termination than otherwise. [.  .  .] As a termination it takes the form  – free, which explicitly representes the pronunciation of the genitive, fraeigh. Inishfree, a small island in Lough Gill, is called by the Four Masters Inisfraeich, heathy island; and there are islands of the same name off the coast of Donegal, and elsewhere. WBY’s youthful fantasy of Thoreau-­like self-­ sufficiency on the island  – his home-­grown products there making good, perhaps, the legendary history of a poisonous crop – was never realized, and it is not clear that the poet in later life was entirely confident of Innisfree’s exact

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location in the Lough (on one trip to Sligo in company with GY, he is said to have rowed on the water with her in search of the island, but had to turn back without locating it). During a Dublin interview with the visiting Japanese writer Shotaro Oshima in 1938, WBY played down the whole question of the island’s precise location (Mikhail 2, 236): As for the Isle I  loved metaphysics. I  thought there was only one Innisfree, but there seem to be two Innisfrees in Lough Gill. It was no less than fifty years ago and in London that I wrote ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree.’ It didn’t matter, however, whether it was a real island or not. Nevertheless, in the poet’s lifetime the island became famous principally through its association with the poem. WBY accepted its fame more or less stoically, and shared the wry amusement of his family as it became increasingly associated with him and his work. A letter from SMY to WBY of 1 Sept. 1938 reveals something of this: Lily tells her brother that ‘I hear that the Land commission have bought the Hazelwood property excluding Innisfree’: ‘The woods and house are I  think to be used by the Forestry Dept – but Innisfree – will be put up notices  – this way to the “bee glade  – because of the bee, anyone interfering with the bee will be severely dealt with”, “The beans must not be eaten. They are the property of the Land Commission” etc., – etc.’ (LTWBY 2, 604). The island’s prominence in Ireland’s cultural history was maintained through the twentieth century and into the twenty-­first: and from 2013, the first two lines of WBY’s poem were printed on a page of every Irish passport. 1. I will arise and go] The diction is that of the King James Bible, e.g. Luke 15.18: ‘I will arise and go to my father’: R. Ellmann commented ‘The fact that the first line [.  .  .] echoes the New Testament [.  .  .] is symptomatic of the traditional, almost religious stateliness of the verse’ (Identity, 22). This is one of a number of possible New Testament echoes (cp. also e.g. Acts 9.6: ‘the Lord said unto him, Arise and go unto the city’), but the formula is found in the King James Old Testament as

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Nine bean-­rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-­bee, And live alone in the bee-­loud glade.

well, e.g. Genesis 35.3: ‘Let us arise and go up to Bethel’, and 43.8: ‘and we will arise and go’. The phrase was used quite commonly in nineteenth-­century verse, though largely in religious contexts. One secular poem which uses the phrase is E.B. Browning, Poems (1844), ‘Grief ’, 13–14 (of a ‘monumental statue’): ‘Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: | If it could weep, it could arise and go’.  (WBY may echo this poem of Browning’s in a fragment from 1884, ‘[And Helen’s eyes]’.) The phrase is also important in terms of its sound, and F. Kinahan offers an ambitious reading of this aspect of the poem’s technique, examining how ‘there can be few instances in English literature in which a borrowed line became so tightly worked into the piece for whose sake it was borrowed’. Kinahan lists the ‘three dozen accented phonemes in the poem’, and shows that although ‘the Biblical phrase contains only twelve of them’, eight of these same twelve – ‘I will arise and go’  – account for almost half the sounds in the poem’ (Kinahan, 188). and] The first of eight and’s in the twelve-­line poem; the conjunction almost disappears from the third stanza (occurring only in 9), though its absence in the last three lines of the poem is balanced by the strong position of its rhyme, ‘stand’, in line 11. Hilaire Belloc commented (On (1923), 215): Of the modern masterpieces there is one – the best known of all, perhaps  – where ‘and’ does an enormous amount of work, which is the poem of Innisfree. It gives the rhythm as well as the mystery. I  should like to see what the fools who are for cutting out ‘and’ would make of that poem. The poem’s opening line exerted a powerful influence on one of the first people to read it, KT. In her Ballads and Lyrics (1891), Tynan had a poem entitled ‘To Inishkea’: ‘I’ll rise and go to Inishkea  | Where many a one will weep with me’ (1–2), ‘I’ll rise and go to

Inishkea | O’er many a mile of tossing sea’ (25– 6). Although this appeared after WBY’s poem in The National Observer, it was still ahead of his work’s publication in The Book of the Rhymers’ Club and CK: in 1891, then, it would not have been guaranteed recognition as a homage. 2. build] built Selected Poems (New York) 1921 and Poems (Cuala Press) 1935. In each instance, this should probably be regarded as a misprint. of clay and wattles made] Cp. ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), III, 162–163: ‘Much wondering to see upon all hands, of wattles and wood-­work made,  | Thy bell-­mounted churches’. This had been written by the time the poem was composed; but later, cp. ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1895), I, 248–9: ‘A beautiful young man dreamed within  | A  house of wattles, clay, and skin’  – lines which may allude back to the present poem. 3. Nine bean-­rows] WBY’s untypical application of market-­gardening detail marks the poem’s point of intersection with a text sometimes mentioned by the poet in connection with its conception, H.D. Thoreau’s Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1854). There, in giving an account of his plans for self-­sufficiency by a secluded lake, Thoreau writes of ‘my beans, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted’, claiming that ‘I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I  wanted’ (168). It appears from WBY’s own subsequent accounts (see headnotes above) that his early contact with Thoreau’s book was by way of JBY – possibly, indeed, it was read to him by his father. Some flavour of JBY’s own opinions on Thoreau may be had from remarks in his letters. In Aug. 1911, he wrote that ‘Thoreau writes like an immortal, he had nothing great to say, but he says it with the finest dignity and reticence’ (Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats (1917), 30); and in Jan. 1916, JBY mentioned Thoreau in a passage which has bearing on his early relationship with his son, suggesting (albeit in retrospect) some understanding of



The Lake Isle of Innisfree

the importance for him of ‘solitude’ (Passages from the Letters of John Butler Yeats, 47–48): A man on his death-­bed or after he has been snubbed by his wife may enjoy a few moments of solitude, the rest of his life is a noisy self-­deserving gregariousness. He fears solitude as a child fears the dark, indeed it is a universal dread which one must learn to conquer. A poet learns his lesson generally by finding himself early in life shunned, he is odd. [. . .] In America they make war on solitude. It must not be. A  glimpse of it frightens them and breaks their hearts with pity. [. . .] People are never themselves except in solitude; here [i.e. in America] people are expected to be above themselves. This is being constantly dinned into our ears. Emerson was among the offenders. Thoreau reacted and tried, I  think, to be below himself; and often people, socialists, anarchists, and humbler humourists are below even human nature. Before the poem was written, WBY was aware of the ‘Fellowship of the New Life’, run in Reigate by Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (‘Michael Field’); this society, he told KT in a letter of 31 May 1887, ‘seeks to carry out some of the ideas of Thoreau and Whitman’ (CL 1, 18). On 16 Jan. 1904, on his American lecture tour, WBY spoke at the University of Notre Dame on ‘poetry, Sligo, Innisfree, and Thoreau’s writings’ (CL 3, 518). H. Bloom, mentioning Walden as a ‘reputed source’ for the poem, contrasts Thoreau’s peace in solitude, a ‘mark of the power of mind over outward sense’, with what is ‘missing in Yeats’s plangent but drifting poem’ (Bloom, 113).   a hive for the honey bee] WBY is likely to have had a general rather than any detailed sense of the significance of bees in early Irish literature; but they were said in some sources to have come from heaven, and their honey to be accordingly charged with otherworldly virtues. WBY here speaks in terms of cultivation, of apiary, rather than merely noticing the wild bee. Though Thoreau did not stretch to beehives of his own at Walden Pond, his practical spirit

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perhaps still colours WBY’s line. Wood-­Martin, too, may exercise a subliminal influence, since his account of the past state of Innisfree (see Sources above) includes a consideration of the ‘aborigine’ there who ‘had probably, too, the same fondness for drinks sweetened with wild honey, which in later ages gave to bee-­keeping an important place in Brehon law’ (Wood-­ Martin Vol. 1, 68). In the 1887 poem, ‘How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent’, the central character ‘a brown farm-­house sees, | Where shadow of cherry, and shadow of apple trees, |Enclose a quiet place of beds box-­bordered, bees, | Hives, currant bushes’ (22–25).   The image relates also to the fictional context of JS, where the hero thinks ‘Now they would be married, they would live in a small house with a green door and new thatch, and a row of beehives under a hedge’ (JS, 150). 4. the bee-­ loud glade] Replacing the 1888 ‘this old care shall fade’ (see MS above), this phrase provides a metrical match for ‘the deep heart’s core’ (12): this may suggest that it was written around the time that the third stanza was added to the poem’s original two. The amplified sound of bees may, as well, owe something to Walden (though it seems less likely than the bean-­rows to be a conscious allusion on WBY’s part). In his chapter ‘The Bean-­Field’, Thoreau remembers hearing the distant sound of civic military performances when ‘On gala days the town fires its great guns’ (Walden, 173–174): It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbours, according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavouring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favourable breezes told no tale, I  knew that they had got the last drops of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared.

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5

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

5. for peace comes dropping slow] ‘Dropping’ here and in the following line gives an effect tried out by WBY in an untitled poem of 1885, where ‘The dew comes dropping | O’er elm and willow’ (1–2); in a draft of ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ from 1887, there is ‘drip  | Of vapour [drops fell del.] dropping slow from tooth and lip’ (see note to ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), II, 139); and in ‘Street Dancers’ (prob. composed in 1888), there is ‘a shell, the seas anoint, | Dropping liquid rainbow light’ (32–33). 6. WBY’s line is remarkable for its rhythmic adventurousness: two of the definite articles (in ‘the veils’ and ‘the morning’) might seem metrically redundant (and are not strictly needed in terms of syntax), yet they are vital to this rhythmic effect. The effect is essentially original; but WBY is certainly influenced by some Irish poetry in English with which he had come into contact, and an important critical account of this is provided in M. Campbell, Ch.2, ‘The Ruptured Ear: Irish Accent, English Poetry’. Campbell draws attention to Thomas MacDonagh’s Literature in Ireland (1916), where ‘the chanting quality’ in WBY’s verse was praised as being ‘joined to a wandering rhythm caught from Irish traditional music’: ‘For not only does something of the word reverence of chanted speech unstress the lyric beat of this poetry, but something of the musical quality of chant lightens and changes the weight of its speech verse’ (MacDonagh, 52). 7. a purple glow] In his 1931 broadcast, WBY said: ‘I think there is only one obscurity in the poem; I speak of noon as a ‘purple glow’;

I  must have meant by that the reflection of heather in the water’ (CW 10, 224). Again, the broadcast of 1937, he said that ‘there is nothing hard to understand except that I  speak of noon as ‘a purple glow’’, and explained that ‘The purple glow is the reflection of the heather’ (CW 10, 290). This is commonsensical, and entirely plausible; but ‘purple glow’ in 1888 was already so common a poetic phrase as to have become something of a cliché in the description of heather. WBY’s natural observation also has literary influences at work. The phrase ‘purple glow’ occurs in e.g. W. Scott, The Lady of the Lake (1810) (Poetical Works (1841)), III, xxiv, 3–6: Rushing, in conflagration strong, Thy deep ravines and dells along, Wrapping thy cliffs in purple glow, And reddening the dark lakes below. More recently, W. Allingham’s Rhymes for the Young Folk (1887) had used the phrase, in ‘Seasons’, 23–24: ‘the great slopes of heather | One broad purple glow’. In Wood-­Martin’s History of Sligo, a flourish of Lough Gill scene-­painting produces something that has close points of contact with WBY’s phrasing: ‘The sun now begins to sink; masses of purple light, edged with flame, float in an ocean of duller purple; in the west all is aglow’ (Vol. 1, 63). 8. linnet’s] linnets’ NO. The small bird the linnet ((Carduelis cannabina, of the finch family) sings while in flight. WBY’s adjustment of the number is in keeping with the singular forms of ‘the honey bee’ and ‘the cricket’: one standing for more than one.



10

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677

I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

9–12.] This final stanza attracted curious praise in a review of the 1900 edition of WBY’s A Book of Irish Verse (Morning Post, 10 Mar. 1900): That is admirable poetry, but there is nothing specially Irish about it. At this particular time in the history of the race there are many who have felt the emotion which inspired it. Mr. Yeats was merely very fortunate in that it fell to his lot to give it expression in this form. A much more perceptive critique came from the friend of WBY’s youth, Charles Johnston, who quoted the stanza with admiring commentary on its technique (‘Yeats in the Making’, Poet Lore [Washington] 1 Jan. 1906): One must linger over the vowel sounds, hear their mingled harmony, and steep oneself in the rhythmic progression of the words, before the full beauty is perceived, the full measure of delight is gained. Then one will find that something wonderful is added to the fineness and remoteness of the mood, the subtle and delicate selection of words, and the beauty of the images [. . .] There is an added music for the inner ear, which no other poet has so finely and constantly rendered. 9. for always night and day] It would be ironic if there were an echo here of George Eliot, and unthinkable that any such echo should be a conscious one; both WBY and JBY deprecated the novelist and poet, so the coincidence here with a line of verse in Eliot’s The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1878), ‘How Lisa Loved the King’, 226–227: ‘For always, night and day, her unstilled thought | Wandering all o’er its little world’, should not be taken too seriously. On the other hand, both Yeatses, father and son, did read a good deal of Eliot (including her poetry) in order

to inform their disapproval, so an accidental echo resulting from these readings is not altogether impossible. 10.] Perhaps cp. Tennyson, ‘Morte D’Arthur’, 70–71: ‘I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,  | And the wild water lapping on the crag’. WBY’s line returned to haunt KT, Irish Poems (1908), ‘The Quiet House’, 7–8: ‘So peaceful with the song of birds,  | The water lapping on the shore’. by] on NO, Book of the Rhymers’ Club. 11. the pavements grey] WBY came to disapprove of his inversion in this phrase; but he had probably forgotten that the inversion was not entirely his own. Cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical Works (1884), ‘The Legend of Saint Alexis’, III, 471–472: ‘Between those columned ranges twain that blot | With evening shades the glistening pavements grey’. 12. in the deep heart’s core] With ‘heart’s core’ cp. Shakespeare, Hamlet III ii 78: ‘In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart’. In nineteenth-­ century poetry, ‘heart’s core’ is so widespread as to be a cliché of poetic diction: so much so, that A. Swinburne uses the phrase (along with thickly jammed runs of stressed syllables) in his parody of Robert Browning, in ‘John Jones’s Wife’ III, ‘On the Sands’ (The Heptalogia (1880)), 102–4: ‘yet some vein might be | (Could one find it alive in the heart’s core’s pulse, cleave | Through the life-­springs’). One user of the cliché whose poem WBY did read was Edward Dowden, Poems (1876), ‘Love Tokens’, 8: ‘All shame deserts my blood to the heart’s core’. ‘To the heart’s core’ is also common in nineteenth-­ century prose, especially in religious or devotional contexts. One poetry-­related use which WBY probably read was that in an essay on ‘The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson’, praising ‘Lament for Thomas Davis’ in The Irish Monthly (Aug. 1884), 399: ‘How truly patriotic it is, how musical in its sorrow, how

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Irish to the heart’s core in feeling, illustration, flow, and diction!’ The phrase’s metrical effect in WBY’s poem, its crowding together of three strong stresses, is perhaps more distinctive than any dimension of purely verbal allusion; M. Campbell notices this as ‘a trick picked up by Yeats’ from Samuel Ferguson’s Irish translation ‘Cean Dubh Deelish’, 6: ‘Letting her locks of gold to the cold wind free’ (Campbell, 11; Ferguson, Lays of the Western Gael (1865)). The erotic focus of Ferguson’s poem (a poem which WBY would indeed have known) makes its possible relation to the celibate fantasy of ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ an interesting one; yet the particular metrical effect here could just as easily come from somewhere further from the poet’s Irish scene, and closer to his English home. Many readers of poetry would first encounter this

emphatic three-­stress ‘foot’ by reading Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’; and there are signs beyond the metrical ones that this poem sank deep into Yeats’s creative memory: Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight, Alone and palely loitering; The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing. Other three-­stress feet in the poem are in the lines ‘And made sweet moan’ (24), ‘I love thee true’ (28), ‘On the cold hill side’ (36 and 44); ‘And no birds sing’ is repeated as the final line (48). Many instances of the three stress ‘foot’ could be found elsewhere; but Keats’s poem may be an especially important one for the young WBY, and its relation to the present poem, while partly subliminal, is also a consequential one.

90

IN THE FIRELIGHT

THE POEMS

Date and context of composition. In a letter to Ellen O’Leary, dated 3 Feb. 1889, WBY includes this poem (without a title) as ‘a little poem written last night . . . It is not very good but you know the youngest is always the best loved’ (CL 1, p. 140). In the letter, WBY offers the poem as complementary to ‘She Who Dwelt Among the Sycamores’, since it has ‘something of the same feeling’: in the other poem, he explains, ‘those who in youth and childhood wander alone in woods and in wild places, ever after carry in their hearts a secret well of quietness and [. . .] always long for rest and to get away from the noise and rumour of the world.’ Immediately below the poem, however, WBY continues with ‘Did I tell you how much I admire Miss Gonne? She will make many converts to her political belief. If she said the world was flat or the moon an old caubeen tossed up into the sky I would be proud to be of her party.’ Text: The poem did not appear in print until Mar. 1891, when it was published in The Leisure Hour. Variants from WBY’s 1889 letter are given here (as MS). WBY did not republish the poem. Copy-­text: The Leisure Hour.

C

ome and dream of kings and kingdoms, Cooking chestnuts on the bars – Round us the white roads are endless, Mournful under mournful stars.

5

Whisper lest we too may sadden, Round us herds of shadows steal –

1. kings and kingdoms] Perhaps cp. the angels in John Keble, The Christian Year (1866), ‘Fifth Sunday in Lent’ 38–9: ‘who love the ways to view  | Of Kings and Kingdoms here’. 2. chestnuts] WBY’s spelling in MS (here and in 12), ‘chesnuts’, perhaps indicates his pronunciation of the word. 3. the white roads are endless] Cp. Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850), XIII, 316–17: ‘or paced

the bare white roads  | Lengthening in solitude their dreary line.’ 5. Whisper lest] Whisper or MS. sadden] For this instransitive use, cp. R. Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), xxxix, 8–9: ‘Better be merry with the fruitful grape | Than sadden after none’. 6. shadows steal] Perhaps cp. W. Morris, The Life and Death of Jason (1867) IX 31–2: ‘thou mayst see armed shadows steal | Down to the quays’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-91

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In the Firelight



Care not if beyond the shadows Flieth Fortune’s furious wheel.

10

Kingdoms rising, kingdoms falling, Bowing nations, plumèd wars – Weigh them in an hour of dreaming, Cooking chestnuts on the bars.

8. Flieth Fortune’s furious wheel] Passes Fortune’s flying wheel MS.

9. Kingdoms rising, kingdoms falling] Kingdoms falling, kingdoms rising MS. 10. Bowing nations] Bowing servants MS.

91

THE OUTLAW’S BRIDAL

THE POEMS

Ireland, 16**

Date of composition, and context. Perhaps composed in 1889; but this poem, which is preserved in a single MS, cannot be given any very definite date. It is certainly from before Sept. 1891; but from how long before this is not clear. The MS contains another poem, which follows on in context directly from ‘The Outlaw’s Bridal’: this is the piece called ‘A Fairy Song’, which appeared on its own in the National Observer for 12 Sept. 1891, with a subtitle explaining that it was ‘Sung by “the Good People” over the outlaw Michael Dwyer and his bride, who had escaped into the mountains’. The note may refer back to this poem, and seems to provide otherwise missing details about its dramatic/ historical setting; but Michael Dwyer (1772–1825) does not belong to the seventeenth century specified in WBY’s MS subtitle for the ballad itself. Dwyer was a United Irishman who took part in the Rebellion of 1798, and was transported after Emmet’s Rebellion of 1803 (dying in Australian exile). Although Dwyer had certainly been an outlaw, as a central figure in the 1798 guerrilla campaign waged in the Wicklow mountains, his life does not otherwise fit the situations outlined in WBY’s ballad: he did marry at the height of the campaign, but WBY’s luridly dramatic tale of unintentional fratricide finds no echo in his life. KT wrote a poem entitled ‘The Grave of Michael Dwyer’ for PBYI (1888), and it is possible that this either dissuaded WBY from pressing any further with his poem, or gave him the hint for the later ‘A Fairy Song’. ‘The Grave of Michael Dwyer’ first appeared in The Nation 9 Jan. 1886. In one stanza, KT mentions’ Dwyer’s life on the run with his wife Mary:

Sweet the days when you and your Mary Love and laughter knew, Up in the clouds of that mountain eyrie. If you had been less true, Never gray sorrow had gloomed on you.

Some years later, KT contributed a biographical piece on Dwyer to the American periodical The Gael, which gave a summary of his career, centred on his time as an outlaw (Jan. 1903): He fought through the Rebellion, and escaping without a wound, he retired at its close to the fastnesses of the Wicklow mountains, and from thence waged a guerilla warfare on the Government men and loyal inhabitants. Legend and story gathered thick upon his track. But he was not by any means lawless and DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-92

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bloody as it is the way of outlaws to be. He had been as a boy and young man excellently well-­conducted and, as a guerilla chief, he seems to have remained simple, God-­fearing, gentle and affectionate. [. . .] He and his men and Mary Dwyer lived in the caves of the mountains. These they had stocked with provisions, and lined against the cold with moss and herbage. Their principal retreat of this kind, their home in fact, was in the Glen of Imaal, a purple mountain gorge where the thrushes sing all day long. The entrance to the cave was hidden by a great sod, and here the outlaws rested and fed during the days, while at night they took to the mountains. It is unlikely that KT here offers a significantly different account of Dwyer than that with which she was working in 1888; and perhaps her depiction of the outlaws as living underground and conducting nocturnal forays played some role in WBY’s association of Dwyer with closeness to the fairy world. KT’s 1903 article concludes by pointing out that ‘The career of Michael Dwyer fascinated Mr. Parnell, who knew the topography of all his fights and adventures’. The historical Dwyer, then, had some kind of politically resonant meaning in the late nineteenth century, and WBY’s poem may well be attempting to make use of this. We should take the Ballad’s subtitle, however, at face value as giving the poem a seventeenth-­century setting: this being the case, it seems to be aligned with a poem like ‘The Protestants’ Leap’ (also seventeenth-­century and Irish in setting, and also a literary ballad). In the case of that piece, though, there is much more historical grounding for its narrative; ‘The Outlaw’s Bridal’ offers almost nothing in the way of specifics, and even its subtitle gives only ‘Ireland’ as a location, and ‘16**’ as a date. Nevertheless, it is possible that the ballad is intended by WBY as another exercise in the mode of ‘The Protestants’ Leap’: that narrative poem was published in John O’Leary’s The Gael in Nov. 1887, and it is likely that ‘The Outlaw’s Bridal’ (whether or not WBY intended it for O’Leary) is later than this. In the absence of any direct evidence, dating has to rely on an assessment of the poem’s maturity of style. Here, it can be noted that WBY’s handling of both narrative and verse form appears to be a little in advance of the (often very awkward) ‘The Protestants’ Leap’; there is still, on the other hand, a good deal of deliberate archaism and some residual awkwardness in the straining for rhymes. Part of the poem’s style may be attributed to WBY’s attempt to write a Romantic-­influenced ballad, indebted at certain points to Walter Scott (see notes), but part is still a sign of imperfectly mastered apprenticeship. Were the ballad to survive on its own, there might be a strong case for dating it 1887–1888; but the addition of the lyric which eventually became ‘A Fairy Song’ must complicate this. The present edition very tentatively gives the date of composition as 1889, but both earlier and later dates remain real possibilities. ‘Rogues and Rapperies’. The poem seems to relate to one of WBY’s abandoned projects of the early 1890s, and it may in fact be the earliest sign of the poet’s literary interest in this scheme. In a letter of 1 Jul. 1890, WBY wrote to KT to tell her that ‘I shall get the editing of a book of reprints of lives of one or two such men as Fighting Fitzgerald I think’, adding that ‘These books do not really pay as well as articles but they help one to make up subjects that are afterwards of great use’ (CL 1, 221–222). WBY here refers to a series published by Fisher Unwin, the Adventure Series, for which he evidently envisaged a



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volume of accounts of Irish outlaws: these would have been drawn from other published works (though it is possible that, as with others of his compilations such as those relating to folklore and myth, WBY thought of including work of his own). Evidence of his research on the topic may be seen in an article WBY published in United Ireland on 12 Sept. 1891, ‘A Reckless Century: Irish Rakes and Duellists’ (CW 9, 139–142), which tells several eighteenth-­century stories with the conclusion that ‘If the sword be strong it will make the better ploughshare when the day of peace is at hand’, and that ‘Their swords were strong, at any rate, though they were not turned often enough, or persistently enough, towards the enemies of their country’. WBY sent an Introduction for the projected volume to Unwin on 17 Oct. 1892, and in a further instalment of material with a list of contents sent in Feb. 1893 included chapters on both ‘Rogues and Rapperies’ and ‘Michael Dwyer’ (CL 1, 354). It is likely that the whole project was an attempted turning towards commercial viability of the narrative experiment begun (but not finished) in ‘The Outlaw’s Bridal’. The Adventure Series book, too, was never completed. Copy-­text. NLI 30456 (MS) has six pages of a corrected fair copy in ink, carrying the full surviving text of the poem, followed by an early version of ‘A Fairy Song’. For reproduction and transcription, see Cornell Early Poetry 2, 466–474. An edited version is included in UM, 80–82. The present version corrects spelling and supplies some punctuation.

D

ost thou not fear an outlaw’s mournful love, To be always with him, young lowland daughter, Who slew his brother by the western water, A dweller with ravens on the hills above? 5   Dost thou not fear an outlaw’s cave Where are no yielding pillows for thy head, An outlaw’s arms and heather for thy bed   And in the end an outlaw’s grave?

Title. ‘Bridal’ is OED 1., ‘A wedding-­feast or festival; a wedding’. The word was rare by this time, but WBY would have known Walter Scott’s ‘Lochinvar’ (Marmion V xii), 17–18: ‘O come ye in peace here, or come ye in war | Or to dance at our bridal, young lord Lochinvar?’ A  closer-­ to-­ hand revival of the term comes at the beginning of KT, ‘The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne’, 5: ‘The bridal was at noontide of the morrow’ (Shamrocks (1887)). 1. mournful] dreadful del. MS. mournful love] Not an uncommon phrase, but perhaps cp. Aubrey De Vere, Poetical

Works (1884), ‘A Churchyard’ 8: ‘Retreats of mournful love, and vain desire’. 2. To be always with him] He whom the angels curse del. MS. lowland daughter] The subtitle’s ‘Ireland’ notwithstanding, this not overly Irish phrase recalls the lowlands of the Border Ballads rather than Irish geography. 3–4.] The storm the famine and the freezing water  | Blown round my cabin on the hills above? del. MS. 3. the western water] Cp. Gerald Griffin, Poetical Works (1843), ‘Matt Hyland’, IV, 80: ‘A seaman on the western water’ and VI, 280: ‘And sent him o’er the western water’.

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The Outlaw’s Bridal

Dost thou not fear the tireless bandog’s hate 10 Tracking our way by every sandy fountain Tracking our way along the heathery mountains, Awaking to an undivided fate   My steel-­worn brows and thy soft head? Dost thou not fear the tireless bandog’s yell? 15 To pass from love to loveless heaven or hell,   From dreams of dalliance to the dead? And thou shalt fear him in each kiss and see His slouching phantom in the golden morning, And fear him when beside some pool adorning 20 Thy body, to make it beautiful for me.   Dost thou not fear, dost thou not fear The mushroom-­dotted grass at chilly dawn, Where are no dolphined fountains, no smooth lawn,   And pleasant house to give you cheer? 25 Maiden, dost thou not fear a love so lone? No eyes of friends to see thy soft hair flowing, For they are dead my old companions; blowing, Blowing, the winds are through each white breast-­bone;   In dewy wood or on bare hill 30 The sword or arrow found them, and they ceased. The raven of their flesh has made a feast   And the strong eagle ta’en his fill.

Yea, wilt thou have an outlaw’s mournful love? Then up, spring up before me on the saddle:

9. bandog’s] In OED, a bandog is ‘orig. A dog tied or chained up, either to guard a house, or on account of its ferocity; hence gen. a mastiff, bloodhound.’ The word is very rare after the seventeenth century, but it occurs in the work of W. Scott, e.g. Poetical Works (1841), Rokeby, III xix 15–16: ‘As bandog keeps his master’s roof  | Bidding the plunderer stand aloof ’. 10. sandy fountain] Cp. Shelley, ‘Julian and Maddalo’, 442–443: ‘whose heart a stranger’s tear might wear  | As water-­drops the sandy fountain stone’. 20. body] In MS  above this undeleted word, WBY writes ‘form’.

22. mushroom-­dotted] By what might be presumed coincidence, cp. Walter Thornbury, Historical and Legendary Ballads and Songs (1876), ‘Two country Houses: 1, Ladywell’, 16: ‘In the mushroom-­dotted mead’. However, there is a possibility that WBY echoes another poem from the same book in 1892– 1925 texts of his ‘To Ireland in the Coming Times’, 13: ‘starry candles’ (see note). 23. dolphined] fish-­filled del. MS. 28. each white breast-­ bone] Cp. Tennyson, Idylls of the King, ‘Gareth and Lynette’, 1346– 7: ‘High on a nightblack horse, in nightblack arms,  | With white breast-­bone, and barren ribs of death’.



The Outlaw’s Bridal

35 As I have ridden far, let Brian paddle His tired hooves in the streams; I have thy glove   Still on the fore of my steel cap. But hark, dost thou not hear the bandog’s bay Rolling among the hollows far away, 40   Rolling along the mountain gap? On! On! They overtake us. Leap thy best Now Brian, over the dark ravine thy furthest Leap thou! Cling close beloved, now thou earnest Long days of love or an eternal rest. 45   Kiss me, lest thou should’st find the last. We’re safe; hear how the great stones clashing fall Below us from the ravine’s ragged wall   Clanging – we loosed them as we passed. On! On! Now are they miles and miles away. 50 Where the slow surges shore-­ward march we wander Loose-­reined along the grey sea sands. There yonder I slew my brother, mingling in mere play   Our swords; the fever of the fight Fell on us, and I slew. He was the first 55 And last of all my band; now am I curst   Of God by noon and morn and night, And all who go with me are ever lost, And pass out to the grave-­world sorrow-­laden, And ah, dost thou not fear God’s curses, maiden? 60 Thine eyes give answer, my sad life wrath-­tossed   Thou sharest here, in heaven or hell. Cling close beloved, that I may feel thy peace Near to my soul where day by day increase   The ever-­starless whirlwinds fell. 65 The sea sands pass. The gathering mountains close, Close gathering round us. Yon our pathway lieth. The slow morn dawns; our twisted shadow flieth Along with us; the cloud-­washed mountain goes   Sheer to the plain a thousand feet. 70 – Tread softly now, have I not called thee best Of steeds, and from great Brian named thee? West   White Equinoctial billows beat.

72.] Away the [northern del.] wandering billows beat del. MS.

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Below the moonlight frets a forest’s gloom; Often above the thunder’s roar and rattle 75 The war gods talking of my land’s long battle; Here where on man’s worn spirit falls a doom   Of sadness from the monstrous clouds He is so near to, is our lime-­stone cave. Here will we live, far off from shield and glaive, 80   Far off from tedious warrior crowds.

79. glaive] OED n. 3. ‘A sword;  esp.  a broadsword. archaic and poetic.’ The word is found in W. Scott, Ivanhoe II iv 53: ‘To maintain

the honour of his English ancestry with the glaive and brown-­bill, the good old weapons of his country’.

92

IN CHURCH

THE POEMS

Date of composition and publication history. Probably composed Apr. 1889. WBY wrote this poem specifically for publication in The Girl’s Own Paper, where it appeared on 8 Jun. 1889. This weekly publication of the Religious Tract Society (which also published The Leisure Hour, whose editor William Stevens was a Yeats family friend) was founded in 1880, and in the late 1880s was commissioning illustrations from both JBY and Jack Yeats. In the Spring of 1889, WBY was asked to compose poems for illustrations in the magazine, and wrote two of these (the present poem and ‘A Summer Evening’) to order. In a letter to KT of 21 Apr. 1889, WBY told her how the ‘Tract Society are full up with drawings and as a result my father has sold but little lately’, and ‘Accordingly the family “swalley whole” (to use a Sligo term), is unusually greedy’: one remedy for this situation was that, if there was no present demand for art work from the family, WBY should write poetic copy instead, so ‘I have written two sets of verses to illustrations sent to me by the tract society’ (CL 1, 160–161). In the letter, WBY copies out his poem in full, adding ‘You see how proud of myself I am for having been so business like.’ This and its companion piece were never intended by WBY for future publication outside the pages of the paper that commissioned them. Copy-­text: The Girl’s Own Paper.

S

he prays for father, mother dear, To Him with thunder shod, She prays for every falling tear In the holy church of God.

1.] The sentimental register established immediately here is copied from e.g. A.P. Graves, Irish Songs and Ballads (1880), ‘Maureen, Maureen’, 17–18: ‘Oh Maureen! Maureen! for your love only | I left my father and mother dear’. 3. every falling tear] WBY’s ear for sentimental religious idiom is acute enough here to bear comparison with the sincerely real thing, e.g. the minor religious poet Richard Wilton,

Lyrics Sylvan and Sacred (1878), ‘Thoughts for New Year’s Day’, 41–2: ‘The blood which quiets every fear | And brightens every falling tear!’ 4. the holy church of God] In the margin of his letter to KT, WBY writes against this: ‘The spiritual church of course’. The thought for this note perhaps crossed his mind either to make plain his own, poetic and heterodox, understanding of a ‘church’, or to calm any DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-93

688

In Church

5

For all good men now fallen ill, For merry men that weep, For holiest teachers of His will, And common men that sleep.

10

The sunlight flickering on the pews, The sunlight in the air, The flies that dance in threes, in twos, They seem to join her prayer –

15

Her prayer for father, mother dear, To Him with thunder shod, A prayer for every falling tear In the holy church of God.

anxieties on KT’s part that he might be claiming a special place for this (presumably Protestant) church over her own Roman Catholic version. 6. merry men that weep] WBY’s slightly clumsy use of the medieval and pseudo-­ medieval phrase ‘merry men’ (recalled probably from the ballad ‘Sir Patrick Spens’) is given a possibly mischievous twist by an allusion to A. Swinburne (not the kind of poet proper for readers of the Girl’s Own Paper), Poems and Ballads (1866), ‘Laus Veneris’, 147: ‘the flesh of men that weep’.

8. common men that sleep] The line may seem awkwardly pitched, to the extent that these sleeping men appear to have been brought in for the sake of a rhyme. Perhaps, however, cp. Swinburne again, Poems and Ballads (1866) ‘Ilicet’, 33: ‘Farewell; as men that sleep fare well’. Since there are two possible echoes of irreligious poems by Swinburne in the course of a single stanza, the chances of WBY’s being subtly allusive here are increased. 11. the flies that dance] Perhaps cp. W. Blake, Milton (1804), pl. 26, 2: ‘thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance and sport in summer’.

93

A SUMMER EVENING

THE POEMS

Date of composition. Probably composed Apr. 1889. For the circumstances of the composition of this poem, commissioned by the Religious Tract Society for The Girl’s Own Paper, see headnote to ‘In Church’. Composed at the same time as ‘In Church’, this poem appeared a few weeks later, in the issue for 6 Jul. 1889. Like ‘In Church’, the poem was not intended by WBY for any future printing apart from that of its original appearance. Copy-­text: The Girl’s Own Paper.

T

he living woods forego their care, Their dread of autumn’s mortal wing, And shake their birds upon the air, And like a silver trumpet ring.

5

The giddy bee’s complacent croon, Where long grey grasses bow and bend, In all its honey-­thickened tune Has no word of the sulphurous end.

10

The sunflowers weave a golden clime, As though their season has no date,

1. living woods] Possibly cp. a moment in a long poem by the artist William Bell Scott, The Year of the World (1846), I iv, 208–9: ‘the kind sunbeams shoot no more though the stems | Of the living woods’. 2. mortal wing] Perhaps cp. James Hogg, Works of the Ettrick Shepherd (1876), ‘Queen Hynde’ I, 399: ‘pestilence on mortal wing’. 5. giddy bee] Cp. George Darley, Poems (1850), 14: ‘the sun-­streak’d giddy bee’. 6. grey grasses] Perhaps cp. the conclusion of a lyric by Aubrey De Vere (also about a night in summer), Poetical Works (1884), ‘Song’, 23–4: ‘Ere yet the misty herds  | Leave warm ’mid the grey grass their dusky bed’.

8. the sulphurous end] It is not quite clear what WBY means here: probably, the yellow colour of autumn leaves is intended. ‘Sulphurous’ is probably closest to OED 2.b., ‘Applied to thunder and lightning, hence to thundery or sultry weather’. While OED 3.a. is hardly the primary meaning in this line (‘Pertaining to sulphur or brimstone as an adjunct of hell or the infernal regions’), WBY’s use of ‘end’ somewhat confusingly calls up the ghost of such a sense. 9.] Cp. W. Blake, Songs of Innocence (1789), ‘Ah! Sunflower, weary of time’, 3–4: ‘Seeking after that sweet golden clime  | Where the traveller’s journey is done’. DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-94

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A Summer Evening



Nod to the iron shoes of Time, And play with his immortal hate.

15

And maiden, be thou mirthful too, Lay down the burden of thy race, For God is walking in the dew, An evening presence fills the place.

20

The hollow woodlands feel Him there, And dread no more foul autumn’s wing, And shake their birds upon the air, And like a silver trumpet ring.

12. immortal hate] Cp. Milton, Paradise Lost I, 107: ‘And study of revenge, immortal hate’. 14.] Burdens laid down as well as taken up are common in the rhetoric of religious verse, but here WBY may wish to sound a contrast with the strenuous exhortation of e.g. Charles Wesley, Poetical Works (1868), ‘Come, O my

soul, the call obey’, 2: ‘Take up the burden of thy Lord!’ 15.] Cp. Genesis 3.8: ‘And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God, amongst the trees of the garden’.

94

THE BALLAD OF THE FOXHUNTER THE POEMS

Date of composition. Aug.–Oct. 1889. While he was staying in Oxford in Aug. 1889, WBY began work on a ballad which KT had encouraged him to give to the quarterly East and West; KT was a contributor to the magazine often in 1889, and had hopes of a regular slot there. John O’Leary was making a visit to London that month, and WBY wrote to him from Oxford on 8 Aug., mentioning that he was reading Knocknagow by O’Leary’s old friend in the Fenian movement, Charles Kickham (CL 1, 180). In fact, the poet was already thinking about adapting part of Knocknagow for a poem. In a letter to KT after 6 Aug., WBY told her he was reading Kickham (for the project that would eventually become his American book, Representative Irish Tales in 1891), but also that ‘the poem for East & West will have to elbow out “the Countess” ’ [he had been composing material for The Countess Kathleen on his evening walks after a full day’s copying on behalf of the publisher Alfred Nutt in the Bodleian]: ‘I will begin thinking on the matter tomorrow and probably may get started on Sunday’ (CL 1, 178). On 14 Aug., WBY reported to KT, ‘Have started poem for you but made little progress’ (CL 1, 181); however, progress was made eventually, so that in a letter of 23 Oct. he could write that ‘I corrected proofs of East & West ballad so I dare say the next number will contain it’ (CL 1, 193) and on 6 Nov. he reported to KT that ‘My ballad is in East & West’ (CL 1, 195). Source. WBY makes use, as he records in notes to the poem, of a well-­known novel by Charles Kickham, Knocknagow: Or, The Homes of Tipperary (1873). Charles J. Kickham (1828–1882) was a journalist and associate of the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s who became an important figure in the Fenian movement in the 1860s. In 1863, he became an editor of the Irish People, along with John O’Leary: the two remained closely associated, and he was arrested alongside O’Leary when the paper was forcibly closed in 1865. Sentenced to fourteen years in prison, he was released on grounds of ill health in 1869, in the immediate wake of Gladstone’s 1868 premiership, which saw British moves towards pacification of Fenian sentiments. Knocknagow is a fiction set in the landscapes of nineteenth-­century rural Ireland, which reports in detail on many of the tensions, abuses, and injustices that marked the world of Irish landowning and tenancy. In the incident chosen by WBY from late in the novel, an aristocratic landowner who meets his end becomes something of a symbol for a whole class whose love for the land is not matched by a sense of community in its care. WBY’s note suggests he believed that Kickham here was faithfully reporting local tradition. Kickham’s treatment of the incident

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-95

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The Ballad of the Foxhunter

leaves little doubt as to his own view of the landlords whose seats were in places like old Mr. Somerfield’s ‘Woodlands’ (Knocknagow, 491–494): ‘How I should like to be able to call such noble old trees as those my own,’ Grace observed. Eva admired the trees, too, and the undulating lawn, and the woods around, but she could not see what good it would do her to be able to call them her own. ‘It must be that Mr. Kearney was right last night when he said the old gentleman would be out with his hounds to-­morrow or after. There is the horn sounding,’ said Mr. Lowe. ‘Yes, I can see the pack, and the huntsman mounted before the door, from where I am,’ returned Richard Kearney, who had walked on a little further than the rest. They were in the avenue at Woodlands, waiting for Dr. Kiely, who had walked on to see his patient, leaving his carriage at a turn in the avenue not far from the house, though not in view of it. Richard and Mr. Lowe walked in from the road, and were now chatting with the ladies in the carriage. ‘I wonder, if he be recovered, why papa is delaying so long,’ said Grace. ‘Can you see papa coming, Richard?’ ‘No, he’s not coming,” returned Richard. There’s something going on I can’t make out. The doctor is standing with several others near the hounds; but I see no one mounted but the huntsman.’ ‘I’ll walk down and see,’ said Mr. Lowe. ‘And perhaps I  ought to bid Mr. Somerfield good-­bye after accepting of his hospitality.’ Dr. Kiely was astonished to find his patient in a chair on the lawn, propped up with pillows. His son, a tall, cadaverous-­looking man with grizzled hair and beard, stood on one side of the chair, and a saintly looking though somewhat spruce young clergyman at the other. Two graceful young ladies stood a little apart, looking very sad and interesting, but not altogether oblivious of the handsome young clergyman’s presence. ‘Blow, Rody, blow,’ muttered the poor old invalid. And the horn sounded, and the woods gave back the echo. ‘O sweet Woodlands, must I  leave you?’ exclaimed the old foxhunter in tones of the deepest grief. ‘You’re going to a better place,’ said the clergyman, impressively. ‘Yoix! Tallyho!’ cried the invalid, faintly. ‘Blow, Rody, blow.’ ‘Don’t ax me, sir,’ returned the huntsman, after putting the horn to his lips and taking it away again; ‘my heart is ready to burst.’ ‘O sweet Woodlands, must I leave you?’ his master exclaimed again. ‘My dear sir,’ the clergyman repeated, stooping over him and placing his gloved hand gently upon his shoulder, dear sir, you are going to a better place.” The invalid turned round and looked earnestly into the young clergyman’s face, as if he had until then been unconscious of his presence.



The Ballad of the Foxhunter

‘You’re going to a better place; trust me, you’re going to a better place,’ the clergyman repeated fervently. ‘Ah !’ replied the old foxhunter, with a sorrowful shake of his head, and looking earnestly into the parson’s face ‘ah! by G –, I doubt you!’ The parson’s look of consternation brought a grim smile into the hard features of Mr. Sam Somerfield, as he adjusted his father’s night-­cap, which was displaced by the effort to turn round to look at his spiritual director. The dying foxhunter seemed to drop suddenly into a doze, from which a low fretful whine from one of the hounds caused him to awake with a start. ‘Poor Bluebell; poor Bluebell,’ he murmured. The hound named wagged her tail, and coming close to him, looked wistfully into his face. The whole pack followed Bluebell, waving their tails, and with their trustful eyes appeared to claim recognition, too, from their old master. But his head drooped, and he seemed falling asleep again. He roused himself, however, and gazed once more upon the fine landscape before him, and again called upon the huntsman to sound the horn. The huntsman put it to his lips, and his chest heaved as he laboured for breath but no sound awoke the echoes again. ‘God knows I can’t, sir,’ he cried at last, bursting into tears. The huntsman’s emotion moved the two young ladies to tears, and they came nearer to their grandfather’s chair, and looked anxiously into his face. Dr. Kiely laid his finger on the old man’s wrist, and turned to whisper something to his son, who was still standing by the chair. But the doctor drew back, as if the eye of a murderer were upon him. Mr. Sam Somerfield’s face was ashy pale and his lips livid, while a baleful light glared from under his shaggy brows, which were dragged together in puckered folds. His daughters, too, were terrified, and wondered what could have brought that shocking expression into their father’s face. But guided by his eyes they turned round and saw that Mr. Lowe was standing near them: then they understood that terrible look. The young girls gazed upon the woods and groves and undulating meadows, just as their grandfather had done. And the expression in the bright eye of youth and in the dimmed eye of age was the same. ‘Ah,’ said the younger girl, as her sister’s eyes met hers, ‘it is a sweet place.’ Turn round, young ladies, and look through that arched gateway to yon sloping hillside, speckled with white sheep, upon which the sun shines so brightly. There were many happy homes along that green slope not many years ago. There is not one now. You remember the last of them the old farm-­house in the trees, with its cluster of corn-­stacks; and the square orchard, that looked so pretty in the spring-­time; and the narrow boreen leading to the road between tangled wild roses and woodbines? You remember the children who peered shyly at you from under their brown arms when you rode by upon your pretty ponies? You remember what a rage your papa was in when the man who lived there refused to give up the old lease; and how he swore when the old lease had

693

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expired, and the ‘scoundrel’ – that was the word – refused to go until the sheriff and the police and military drove him away? To be sure, his father, and grandfather, and great-­grand-­father had lived there before him. He paid your papa fifty gold guineas every year, and was willing to pay half as many more if he were allowed to toil on there to the end of his days; though old people remembered when that productive little farm was covered with furze and briers, with patches of green rushes here and there in the marshy places. Well, he should go; and the children – but what do you care for such things ? We merely meant to remind you that, to that poor man and his wife and children, their place, too, was ‘a sweet place.’ ‘I suppose,’ thought Mr. Sam Somerfield, ‘he came here purposely to watch till the breath is out of him, in order that I may be hunted without an hour’s delay.’ Then fixing his eyes upon the old man with a look in which pity and hatred seemed blended, he continued, ‘What right had he to take such a lease? He cared only for himself. Why wasn’t it my life he got it for? He might have died, and died an old man, twenty years ago. And I wish to heaven he did die twenty years ago, before my heart was rooted in it.’ An old blind hound, lying on a mat near the door, raised his head, and uttered a long dismal howl The whole pack took up the cry; and, as it passed like a wail of sorrow over the hills, the old foxhunter fell back in his chair dead! The huntsman threw himself from his horse; and, with the help of two or three other servants, carried his old master into the house. ‘O papa, poor grandpapa is gone!’ the young girls exclaimed, flinging their arms round their father’s neck. He bent down as they clung to him, looking quite helpless and stupefied. But, when he saw the horse from which the huntsman had dismounted, walk to a square stone near the end of the house, and stand quietly beside it, and thought that ‘old Somerfield’ would never mount his hunter from that stone again, the tears ran down his hard, yellow cheeks, and fell upon his children’s hair. The doctor and Mr. Lowe walked back to the carriage in silence, much affected by what they had seen. Manuscript, text, and publication history. Two notebook leaves (NLI 30423) contain MS versions of the first three and the last two stanzas (at least one leaf, presumably containing the middle six stanzas, has been lost); these are probably a version of the poem intended for dispatch to East and West (the poet’s address is appended) but replaced, in the event, by a fairer copy (with the possibility that the middle of the poem was in a good enough state to be sent without further copying-­out). This MS is transcribed in Early Poetry 2, 288–9 (MS). The poem appeared in East and West in Nov. 1889 (EW), but was reprinted in United Ireland for 28 May 1892 (UI), just ahead of its publication in CK. WBY’s revision of his CK text for P95 was substantially stable through all editions of P to P24, and in EPS (1925). Within two years, major revision took place, resulting in the text of P27 and all collected editions thereafter: this later version of the poem is presented separately in the present edition.



The Ballad of the Foxhunter

695

Copy-­text: EPS.

‘N

ow lay me in a cushioned chair And carry me, you four, With cushions here and cushions there, To see the world once more.

5

‘And some one from the stables bring My Dermot dear and brown, And lead him gently in a ring, And gently up and down.

10

Now leave the chair upon the grass: Bring hound and huntsman here, And I on this strange road will pass, Filled full of ancient cheer.’

15

His eyelids droop, his head falls low, His old eyes cloud with dreams; The sun upon all things that grow Pours round in sleepy streams.

20

Brown Dermot treads upon the lawn, And to the armchair goes, And now the old man’s dreams are gone, He smooths the long brown nose.

Title: The Ballad of the Old Fox-­hunter MS, EW, CK; The Ballad of the Old Fox-­hunter  | (An incident from Kickham’s ‘Knocknagow’) UI. WBY’s note: This ballad is founded on an incident  – probably in its turn a transcript from Tipperary tradition  – in Kickham’s ‘Knocknagow.’ CK Founded on an incident, probably itself a Tipperary tradition, in Kickham’s Knocknagow. P95 onwards. 2. you] ye MS, EW, UI, CK. 3.] Over the door-­step into the air, UI. 5–8.]

And of my servants some one go, Bring my brown hunter [here del. MS] near, And lead him slowly to a ring, My Lollard old and dear. MS, EW. stables] stable UI, CK. 7.] And lead him slowly to a ring, EW. 9. upon the] down on the MS, EW. 13. falls] droops MS, EW. 16. in] his EW. sleepy streams] the phrase was later used by KT, Irish Poems (1908), ‘Lullaby: After the Russian’, 37–8: ‘Drowsiness in sleepy streams | Falls like rain or the moonbeams’. 17–18.] His Lollard lead they round the lawn, | And by the chair he goes, EW.

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And now moves many a pleasant tongue Upon his wasted hands, For leading aged hounds and young The huntsman near him stands.

25

‘My huntsman, Rody, blow the horn, And make the hills reply.’ The huntsman loosens on the morn A gay and wandering cry.

30

A fire is in the old man’s eyes, His fingers move and sway, And when the wandering music dies They hear him feebly say,

35

‘My huntsman, Rody, blow the horn, And make the hills reply.’ ‘I cannot blow upon my horn, I can but weep and sigh.’

40

The servants round his cushioned place Are with new sorrow wrung; And hounds are gazing on his face, Both aged hounds and young.



One blind hound only lies apart On the sun-­smitten grass; He holds deep commune with his heart: The moments pass and pass;

21–24.] And now with aged hounds and young The huntsman near him stands, And moves there many a pleasant tongue, Upon his wasted hands. EW. 25.] Now huntsman Rody, blow thy horn, EW, UI, CK. 31. wandering music] Cp. E.B. Barrett, The Seraphim (1838), II, 62–3: ‘The winding, wandering music that returns | Upon itself ’. 33–6.] [1st line missing] [Fading are del.] Break off the feeble sounds

And gazing on his visage worn [Draws near him every hound del.] Are old and puppy hounds. MS. Now huntsman Rody, blow thy horn – ‘ Die off the feeble sounds: And gazing on his visage worn Are old and puppy hounds; EW, UI, CK. 39. And] The EW, UI, CK. 40.] The old hounds and the young EW, UI, CK. 42. sun-­smitten] A  common piece of poetic diction in the nineteenth century, but perhaps cp. Tennyson, ‘The Daisy’, 62: ‘Sun-­ smitten Alps before me lay’.



45

The Ballad of the Foxhunter

697

The blind hound with a mournful din Lifts slow his wintry head; The servants bear the body in; The hounds wail for the dead.

45.] The oldest hound with mournful [cries del. MS] din, MS, EW, UI, CK. 48. wail] keen MS, EW, UI, CK. wail for the dead] In changing ‘keen’ of earlier versions to ‘wail’ in P95, WBY recalls Thomas Davis, Poems (1846), ‘The Burial’, with its politically charged rhetoric (33–39):

In the prisoner’s cell, and the cabin so dreary, Our constant consoler, he never grew weary; But he’s gone to his rest, And he’s now with the blest, Where tyrant and traitor no longer molest – Ululu! ululu! wail for the dead! Ululu! ululu! here is his bed.

95

WHO GOES WITH FERGUS?

THE POEMS

Date of composition. The poem is here placed with work from mid-­late 1889, but it is not possible to assign these lines a firm date of composition. They were composed in the course of WBY’s work on The Countess Kathleen, which began in Feb. 1889, and was ongoing until Nov. 1891. In May 1889, WBY read a scene of the play to Florence Farr (whom he met having seen her work in John Todhunter’s verse-­play A Sicilian Idyll) and it is possible that the lyric was already in the text at this time: certainly, Farr went on to be its performer a decade later, and WBY was from the beginning interested in her quasi-­ musical performances of lyric. The poem’s relation to ‘Fergus and the Druid’ has been a point of critical dispute (see Reception and interpretation), but it is likely that these lines were completed sometime before the longer poem (which was probably composed as late as 1892), perhaps in 1889 or 1890. Text and publication history. The verses were first excerpted from the play as ‘Lyric in the second act of Countess Cathleen’ in Beltaine, May 1899; but they continued to be printed as part of the play in WBY’s books until P12, when they were given the title ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ and placed between ‘A Dream of a Blessed Spirit’ and ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’ in ‘The Rose’ section of poems. This arrangement was repeated in EPS (1925), and remained in all future collected editions of WBY’s poetry. Original dramatic context. In the CK version of the play, the verses are presented as follows in Sc. II, where the character Oona is alone with Kathleen, who has earlier asked her to ‘Sing how King Fergus in his brazen car | Drove with a troop of dancers through the woods’:

Oona Now lay your head once more upon my knees. I’ll sing how Fergus drove his brazen cars.



[She chants with the thin voice of age.]



Who will go drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow, And lift your tender eyelids, maid, And brood on hopes and fears no more.



You have dropped down again into your trouble. You do not hear me.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003047148-96



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699

Kathleen Ah, sing on, old Oona, I hear the horn of Fergus in my heart.

Oona I do not know the meaning of the song. I am too old.



Kathleen



And no more turn aside and brood Upon Love’s bitter mystery; For Fergus rules the brazen cars, And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all dishevelled wandering stars.

The horn is calling, calling. Oona

Reception and interpretation. In May 1899, just ahead of The Countess Kathleen’s performance in Dublin, The Academy praised its ‘vague, mystical beauty’, but remarked how ‘Personally, we would rather read the play in the quiet of the study than witness it lit by footlights’; this lyric was quoted in full, with the observation: ‘That is one of the songs in this most musical, intangible drama’. One reader upon whom the lines made a decided and consequential impact was James Joyce. Joyce had heard Florence Farr chanting the lines on stage in the 1899 Dublin production of the play: R. Ellmann comments that the lyric’s ‘feverish discontent and promise of carefree exile were to enter [Joyce’s] own thought, and not long afterwards he set the poem to music and praised it as the best lyric in the world’ (James Joyce [1957], 67). The poem seems indeed to have been set to music by Joyce, and it plays a significant role also in the early pages of Ulysses (1922) where Stephen Dedalus remembers ‘Fergus’ song’: ‘I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords’. Once out of its dramatic context, ‘Who Goes with Fergus?’ became a popular piece, and was sufficiently well known by 1930 to present W. Empson with an attractive case-­study for his Seven Types of Ambiguity. For Empson, this was ‘one of the finest poems’ of WBY; it was also an example of the sixth of his seven types of ambiguity, ‘irrelevant statements’. Assuming a connection between this poem and ‘Fergus and the Druid’, Empson read the poems as being in creative dialogue. ‘Now’ in the opening line may, according to Empson, apply either to Fergus before his transformation at the hands of the Druid, or after it (Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), 189–190): If after, the first line means: ‘Now that the awful example of Fergus is in front of you, surely you will not be so unwise as to brood?’; to drive with him would be to wander through the woods like a ghost, as he does [. . .] Or ‘Now who will be so loyal as to follow him?’ or ‘Can you be so cruel as to abandon

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him now?’; or with a different feeling: ‘Now that Fergus knows everything, who will come and join in his meditations; who will share his melancholy and his knowledge; which of you will pierce the mystery of the forest and rejoice in sympathy with the whole of nature?’ [.  .  .] This poem says: ‘Do not brood’. But the words have little of the quality of an order; they convey rather: ‘How strange and sad that you should still be brooding!’; and one may interpret variously the transition from advice to personal statement, from such of an imperative as was intended to the mere pain of loss, in the repetition of no more. Empson’s conclusion is a wide-­ranging one: The wavering and suggestive indefiniteness of nineteenth-­century poetry is often merely weak. When, as here, it has a great deal of energy and sticks in your head, it is usually because the opposites left open are tied round a single strong idea; thus here, on the one hand, the condition of brooding is at once to be sought out and to be avoided; on the other, the poet, ‘nothing, being all,’ contemporaneously living all lives, may fitly be folding before him both the lives of Fergus, and drawing the same moral from either of them. Empson relied heavily on an identification between the Fergus in this poem and the Fergus of ‘Fergus and the Druid’; and in theory, this could be disputed. A. Rutherford denied Empson’s identification, adducing the Fergus of ‘The Secret Rose’ as a more relevant (and, in his view, Dionysian) mythic figure. However, WBY in his WATR note to ‘The Secret Rose’ wrote about Fergus that ‘I have explained my imagination of him in “Fergus and the Druid,” and in a little song in the second act of “The Countess Kathleen” ’; what is more, the resonances between the lyric in the play, and then the narrative at the beginning of ‘Legends and Lyrics’, is very much to the purpose of CK as a volume. Empson’s measuring of possible ambiguities is more acutely attuned to the poem than Rutherford’s conclusion that ‘we see the transformation of Fergus from a kingly to a god-­like reveller, and his chariots and triumphal progress assume a new significance’ (The Explicator, Jan. 1954). However, the imaginative power which Fergus celebrates was of particular interest to H. Bloom, for whom this ‘vivid’ poem was ‘where Yeats for once fully indulges the Promethean dream’: ‘To consider Fergus is to know the power of imagination over nature, over even “dishevelled wandering stars,” and knowing this we need brood no longer upon any futurity, “hopes and fear,” or ‘love’s bitter mystery’ [. . .] Yeats is not free, but rather movingly plays at the imagination’s freedom here’ (Bloom, 112). Modern criticism has not often concentrated on the poem, though it is interesting that the old question of connections with ‘Fergus and the Druid’ (or the lack of them) has not gone away. As H. Adams intimates, this makes an interpretative difference (57): It is surprising that the poet now ignores the earlier, unsatisfactory conclusion of ‘Fergus and the Druid.’ The impulse to release oneself from brooding on



Who Goes With Fergus?

701

‘love’s bitter mystery’, which has possessed the poet’s recent life, seems to have been so strong as to blot out thoughts of Fergus’s own disappointment. Partly in the form of a question, the poem is more or less an invitation. Yet the question remains: will the poet himself follow Fergus or pursue his beloved, the two possibilities apparently being opposites that cannot be resolved?

Copy-­text: P49.

W 5

ho will go drive with Fergus now, And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade, And dance upon the level shore? Young man, lift up your russet brow, And lift your tender eyelids, maid, And brood on hopes and fear no more.

10

And no more turn aside and brood Upon love’s bitter mystery; For Fergus rules the brazen cars, And rules the shadows of the wood, And the white breast of the dim sea And all dishevelled wandering stars.

6. fear] fears (in all versions before CP33). This is not an entirely fortunate alteration: it means to reduce a noun from the plural to the singular, but succeeds in creating at least the strong impression of a verb, and thus blunders into an unintended echo of Shakespeare, Cymbeline IV ii 331: ‘Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun’. 8. love’s bitter mystery] The effectiveness of WBY’s phrase depends on the relatively familiar adjective in connection with love being applied surprisingly to a word with which it is never associated. The formula ‘love’s bitter. . . ’ is a common one in nineteenth-­ century poetry (e.g. ‘love’s bitter smart’, ‘love’s bitter wrong’, ‘love’s bitter grief ’), but ‘mystery’ here is wholly unexpected and unprecedented. 9–12.] R. Ellmann saw these ‘elements’ as ‘more interesting’ than in some of the more routine

early verse by WBY: ‘here they symbolize his aspirations at the same time that they order the scenic details’ (Identity, 33). 9. the brazen cars] These chariots of brass trundle through a good deal of nineteenth-­ century poetry that imagines the ancient world. WBY would have met them in R. Southey, The Curse of Kehama (1810), XXIV, 22–23: ‘Then, in his brazen Cars of triumph, straight | At the same moment, drove through every gate’. 12. dishevelled] With this, another strikingly unusual term, WBY engineers a final moment of stylistic surprise in the lines. That the stars are ‘wandering’ is in itself less surprising (and wandering stars might conventionally be taken as planets), but ‘dishevelled’ suggests a more radical kind of disorder: it is OED 3.a ‘Disordered, ruffled, disorderly, untidy’. It is

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possible WBY’s imagination takes its cue here from Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, (1712), V, 127–130: A sudden Star, it shot thro’ liquid air, And drew behind a radiant trail of hair. Not Berenice’s locks first rose so bright, The heavens bespangling with dishevelled light. According to Frank O’Connor, speaking to R. Ellmann in Aug, 1946, ‘Yeats would steal lines from anywhere – ‘And all dishevelled wandering stars’ is from O’Shaughnessy’ (Ellmann

notebooks, University of Tulsa; see W. Gould, ‘Gasping on the Strand’: Richard Ellmann’s W.B. Yeats Notebooks’, YA 16, 299). However, the line appears not to have its original in Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s poetry; it may be that O’Connor (or indeed WBY) was thinking of O’Shaughnessy’s Music and Moonlight (1874), ‘In Love’s Eternity’, 13: ‘I wandered alone where the stars’ tracks were bright’, or Songs of a Worker (1881), ‘En Soph’, Part 1, 67–69: ‘Oh, send me not to where the outer stars  | Tread their uncertain orbits, growing less bright,  | Cycle by cycle’.

Appendix 1

CONTENTS OF THE WANDERINGS OF OISIN AND OTHER POEMS (1899)

APPENDIX 1

[Where poems were later given different titles by WBY under which they appear in the present edition, these have been supplied within square brackets.]

T

he Wanderings of Oisin and How a Demon Trapped Him Time and the Witch Vivien The Stolen Child Girl’s Song Ephemera An Indian Song Kanva, the Indian, on God [The Indian upon God] Kanva on Himself Jealousy [Anashuya and Vijaya] Song of the Last Arcadian [The Song of the Happy Shepherd] King Goll (Third Century) 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 Sad Shepherd] 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 [Down by the Salley Gardens] Street Dancers To an Isle in the Water Quatrains and Aphorisms The Seeker Island of Statues: A Fragment

Appendix 2

INITIAL PROSE DRAFT OF THE ISLAND OF STATUES APPENDIX 2

The version of the play contained in MS1 (TCD 3502/2) is a loose prose draft, preliminary to the verse composition which begins with MS2. It is transcribed here with editorially supplied punctuation and corrected spellings. For photographic reproduction and diplomatic transcription, see Cornell Early Poetry 1, 130–197. Although the draft is not intended as verse, the line endings of the notebook text are not entirely without significance for WBY as he reworks this material, and so they have been preserved in the version presented here.

Act 1 Scene 1

Scene: morning, before the cottage of Evadne. [A [?] bush in the centre del.]



Enter Thernot on one side: Clorin on the [other side of the bush del.] They both [carry del.] have lutes.



Clorin (aside) [Evadne will soon come forth del.] ’Tis morning; the sheep are on the hills; I will welcome her with song. (Sets [? lute] on side.)



Thernot I will welcome sweet Evadne with lute play, [I have brung the lute, being more sweet del.] And a song more sweet than shepherd pipes.



Clorin (Who has been tuning his lute) Sings [? this as] the verse of his song.



Thernot [Clorin here what does he With a cracked lute playing? I’ll sing and shame him into dumbness. (Sings a verse or two)



Appendix 2

705



Clorin (aside) Here is thus sparrow-­voiced Clorin: I will o’erthrow him with melodious war, and sweet Evadne too. (Sings a few more verses.) [Shall hear his fall – del.] (Sings a few verses.)



Thernot Are you here,



Sparrow-­voice, is this all you can do?



Hear me, and rest in dumbness. (Sings a few verses.)



Clorin I do not rest in dumbness. This is like the scraping together of two reeds: sweet welcome for Evadne that – hear me, a brute your heart: (Sings a few verses.)



Thernot He he ha!



Clorin Well!



Thernot Oh, what a voice!



Clorin Oh, what a thing is thy envy, and how it [? troubles]



Thernot Keep silence, you with the cracked voice!



[Clorin] Let me. (Sings more verses, during which Thernot shows signs of suppressed rage.) (They both sing together, but differently, songs grown louder and louder, as they draw near to each other with signs of rage.)

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Appendix 2



Enter Evadne



Evadne Oh, what a noise! My head spins round.



Clorin I came but to sing to you this fair morn before you went to seek your sheep, but then this crack-­voiced thing, this Thernot



Thernot I came, most sweet Evadne, to save from discord your sweet ears, and greet them with soft melody.



Clorin Discord! My song that broke once on a time a nightingale’s small heart for envy – discord? I [?pound] to pieces smaller than violet leaves as many once again say it is discord.



Thernot Will you?



Clorin Anyone but Thernot – he’s a brother.



Musician (A horn sound.) (An arrow passes through the air.)



(Thernot and Clorin together cry Robbers! and fly).



Evadne O miracles of courage!



Enter Almintor and Antonio



Almintor So the heron [passed this del.] was flying yon?



Antonio You missed, I think. It flies quite steady.



Appendix 2



Almintor (seeing Evadne) O most fair shepherdess, Evadne!



Antonio (bowing and mimicking Almintor) Fair shepherdess, Evadne!



Almintor Thy flock await thee on the hills. May I drive them for thee?



Evadne No, thou rough hunter, I am weary of you. [You bring me leopards del.] What canst thou do worthy Evadne’s love? You brought me shot with your great bow a [heron’s breast del.] a pole cat’s [dappled hide, bright feathers from del.] [illeg.] birds



Antonio Aye, and he made you a cloak of the skin of a silver lynx.



Evadne So be it: this I could with a bow and arrow. Thernot and Clorin could do this much, could they not, Antony?



Antonio Antonio’s my name.



Evadne Yes, they ever could do this. You all alike, a cowardly forest people, this will do; but would you upon a long and dangerous quest as knights to please their ladies do? No, not for an hundred thousand Evadnes, thou uncouth hunter.



Exit

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708

Appendix 2



Antonio Well, uncouth hunter, what ails you now?



Almintor What shall I do, Antonio?



Exit

Act 1 Scene 2

The wood. Almintor and Antonio.



Almintor. My page, as I have told you I’m resolved to go upon a [very distant del.] dangerous quest, from which few return. My loved Evadne calls me but a hunter [rough del.] rude, a sort of [archer del.] forester Thernot or [forester del.] hunter Clorin. I go to bring to her the famous flower that if any man shall give his [lady del.] love [he will del.] he’ll seem always beautiful to her, and she have fifty years of youth before age comes.



Antonio. None ever from this quest return: ’tis they all are changed to stone.



Almintor. You know the story, then: how on an [island del.] the forest depths there is a lake with one island where the flower grows, and know how to the border of the lake the swans come and sing before they die, and all stray they are come, and how there is a living boat that takes a man across to the Enchantress’ Island where the flower grows.



Appendix 2



Antonio. And from whence no man returns.



Almintor. ’Tis dangerous a way to please Evadne.



Antonio. Ay.



Almintor. And I have come here, to this hollow in the forest among the hazel bushes, to wait for the enchanted sun that a man must follow. It comes they say at evening out of the air, and leads a man to the enchanted boat, that spreads wide magical wings, and skims over the water like a wild bird alighting, raising in a bright bow behind it the waters. ’Tis [nearly del.] evening now, – you stay here, and we can come too.



From the air a voice cries Follow



Almintor. Heard you a sound?



Antonio. I did – sad like the friend here in a dream.



(The voice sings a song whose chorus is Follow follow follow.)



Almintor goes forth, the voice slowly away.)



Antonio. [Away like the voice del.]

709

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Appendix 2

Him, O him [the] voice far away lures him alone with its ‘follow, follow’. I’ll never see him more. See, he left me his bow with the red feather arrows.

Act1 Scene 3 The house of the Enchantress. Many flowers are ranged in pots of diverse and wondrous shapes along the walls. Two [old del.] men with beards of enormous length are stooping [as] in the act of pulling a flower, but without a movement.

Enter Almintor.



’Twas here the singing stopped; did ever man see such an [?orchard] of many-­coloured [flowers] blow before? For [illeg.] and [?for] under [?corners] and halls I have gone wandering up and down, and no one flower outshines the rest supremely. Which then is the enchanted flower? How may one choose? I will address one of the old men whose beards sweep on the ground, flowing over their antiquated dress. Father, how shall one know the flower? No answer. ’Tis strange, as I came through this island full many I have seen with low beards thus, and were ^are^ silent. Father, will you speak? Silent too. Stone, stone, they all are stone. Then it is true: if I choose wrong, I shall be changed also to stone. But yet I cannot return again, for none of those fail may, for [whom] the magic boat sped again over the water. I must choose, and may fail. Guide, fate, and all sylvan



Appendix 2



gods that preside over hunters guide me.



He plucks a flower, and is changed into stone.

Act 2 Scene 1

[Evadne and Antonio del.] [to Antonio sitting on a tree [stump] Enter Evadne del] Enter Antonio and Evadne



Evadne My [] Antonio, I will go ^after disguised as a shepherd^ and not dispute.



Antonio None ever have returned from the [fen]



Evadne But here I shall die.



[Antonio You made him go del.] Now that he has not returned, If I am changed to stone I shall be near him.



Antonio What, did you tell him to seek some dangerous quest?



Evadne Do they not upon the [morning] of the dead, but often two [figures] their hands thus all cast in white shine for ever?



Antonio Yes.



Evadne We will be like them stone

711

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Appendix 2



for ever, pretty Antonio. I will seek ^him^, I will dress me as a shepherd. Fetch me a crook, and [I] will go shepherding for my lost Almintor.



Exit [Evadne] O what a fatal [^page^] this flower is to Arcady.



Enter Thernot and Clorin



Antonio Here come two of Evadne’s lovers. [O ho, Thernot del.]



Clorin It is a point that we escape [then no del.] let us sit ^down^ and discuss it here.



Thernot [No del.] I look on it this way – (seeing Antonio) Let us make Antonio the judge.



Clorin Yes, let him be judge.



Thernot We both [of] us [but del.] do love the shepherdess Evadne [how should we del.] Should we then not be at enmity?



[Antonio But it depends which is the [more] favoured by the maid del.]



[Clorin] Does not the code of hounour say we should be enemies? That is the point perplexing us, you being



Appendix 2



squire to Almintor –



Thernot Should be learned in these things.



Antonio [Which is the favoured one?



Thernot Why [hate] who have not spoken yet del.]



Antonio Yes, [you should del.], according to all honourable [war be del.] laws you should fight.



Both fight.



Antonio With swords.



Both [fight] with swords.



So, a thing wiped out only by a death.



Both A death.



Antonio But some one comes.



Enter Evadne



(to Antonio) Look, I am well disguised.



Clorin Who is this?



[Antonio del.] Evadne A [youth del.] shepherd, a Peregot new to these parts.

713

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Appendix 2



Antonio [We del.] Refer the matter we have talked About [to her del.] to him. Let Perot the shepherd [be] your judge.



Clorin Thernot, [fair del.] good Thernot, we both do love the maid.



Evadne I know the maid, short, freckled, somewhat curving in the nose.



Both No, she is more beautiful than morning.



Evadne Opinions differ. Well, the question



Antonio Is this: should [they not die del.] they [for del.] not [fight del.] be enemies, for both cannot be loved by this same [freckled del.] short [and del.] freckled, curved nosed? Evadne, should [you del.] they not fight?



Evadne Yes, to the death. [Clorin del.] Shepherd, farewell: fight to death. (to Antonio) So, do I not look well in this shepherd’s garb? let us go.



Antonio Farewell.



Evadne



Appendix 2



But, think you, will they fight? [Fight not they? del.]



Clorin Fight not they?



Exeunt.

Act 2 Scene 2

The border of the lake.



Enter Evadne and Antonio.



Evadne Look [at del.] you, did you count how many trees he had written [our n[ames] del.] Almintor and under neath Evadne – Peregot not.



Antonio Peregot – did I not give you a good name?



Evadne And here on the sand he has writ our names Almintor, then a great flourish and then Evadne.



Antonio Yon is the enchanted boat.



Evadne Farewell, I will return soon or not at all.



Antonio There is that sad voice out of the air again.



(The song with the chorus foll[ows])

715

716

Appendix 2



Evadne I must go alone. Farewell. (exit)



Almintor Gone, Evadne! Gone! Never to return! Ah, woe is me! Ha – here come Colin and Thernot. Let us be merry a bit, just to [mock del.] anger sadness.



Enter Colin and Thernot with sword-­play



[Colin/Thernot] We have got swords.



Antonio Are both of you alive? O where is the ancient courage of shepherds? What, doubtless you have come here to fight?



Colin No, a sheep strayed.



Thernot (aside to Antonio) I would have fought, but Colin is a born coward.



Antonio I’ll see all fair.



Thernot No, it is late; we would be belated and [caught] by the night.



Antonio No, by all shepherd gods, I [being del.] as squire to Almintor swear that honour requires ye to fight: draw your swords.



(Colin draws his slowly)



Appendix 2



(Aside, to Antonio) O, he is such a coward, [I] could not induce him to fight.



Antonio Draw, Thernot.



Thernot Doubtless the law of honour so requires.



(draws) (Antonio sits to one side)



[Antonio] They fight, each makes severe efforts to break his sword.



(At last, Thernot [succeeds])



Thernot My sword is broken, we cannot go on: I am disarmed by an accident.



Antonio [Thernot] and Clorin, expect denunciation as a coward, and then go.

Act 2 Scene 3

Same as scene 3 of act 1.



The old men still kneeling.



Enter the Enchantress and Evadne.



Enchantress Good, you return again: you are young. 1000 years I have not had pity, but you are young.

717

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Appendix 2



Evadne Give Almintor life.



Enchantress I cannot: once changed into stone I have no power over them, But if a mortal touch them on the lips with the enchanted flower they wake. But none can find that flower among these thousand.



Evadne O what a world of flowers! How shall I choose?



Enchantress I would gladly tell thee, but when the flower is pulled I die.



Evadne Ay me, and will I never wake if I choose wrong?



Enchantress This one has been here thus since Babylon had rule; this one since Troy was first besieged.



Evadne I will pull one by chance.



Enchantress Stay, fair youth: go back, do not choose – I’d tell you but I’d die.



Evadne Give Almintor life.



Enchantress I cannot go back again: I led you here by long and twisted ways to keep you for a time from here,



Appendix 2



I who have now pitied for a thousand years.



Evadne I choose.



Enchantress Stay, I will show you its place, and I will die. I could not see you changed to stone, fair youth. Here are a thousand are all stone [ ]. I will die. What is it to die? for I do not know I have lived. A thousand – look you, here is the flower [pluck del.] I will down (lies down), and when you pull it I die. What can this be? Yet pull it not. I love you, fair youth [stay here a little del.] Ah, you will pull it: I am [dying del.] gone.



(Evadne pulls the flower) (Almintor and the old men awake)



1 Old Man I have slept.



2 Old Man [My] beard!



1 Old Man My beard!



Evadne You have slept years, old men.



1 Old Man Is Babylon that was triumphant?



2 Old Man And does Ulysses wander still? I was his shipmate, and I left her when she touched this land.

719

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Appendix 2



Evadne [A thousand del.] Hundreds of years ago Babylon fell, hundreds of years Ulysses is dead.



Both old men O wonderful!



Almintor My Evadne! The world and thee once more!

Index of Poems Page numbers for main texts and commentary on poems are given in bold. [‘A Double Moon or More Ago. . .’] 14 – 15 A Dream of a Blessed Spirit 698 [‘A Flower Has Blossomed. . .’] 3 – 4 A Legend 632 – 634 A Lover’s Quarrel Among the Fairies 522 – 525 A Song of Sunset 352 – 353 [‘A Soul of the Fountain Spake Me a Word’] 104 – 105 [‘A Sound Came Floating, an Unearthly Sound’] 106 – 109 A Summer Evening 687, 689 – 690 Anashuya and Vijaya 451 – 458 An Indian Song 435 – 437 An old and solitary one 350 – 351 [‘As Me Upon My Way the Tram-car Whirled’] 76 – 77 [‘Behold the Man’] 50, 76, 102 – 103, 324, 553 Child’s Play 7 – 10 [‘Death Hath Ta’en My Child to Nurse’] 78 Dedication to a Book of Stories Selected from the Irish Novelists 587 [Dramatic Fragment] 35 – 36 [‘For Clapping Hands of All Men’s Love’] 251 – 252 Fragment [And Helen’s Eyes’] 333 Fragment (‘I Raise to Thee No Praying Voice’) 100 Fragment of Opening Scene of an Abandoned Verse-Play 16 – 17 [From The Village of the Elms] 358 – 360 Girl’s Song 510 – 511, 518 – 519 [‘How Beautiful Thy Colours Are. . .’] 470 – 471 How Ferencz Renyi Kept Silent 480 – 494 [‘Hushed in the Vale of Dajestan’] 347 – 349

[‘I Sat Upon a High Gnarled Root’] 11 – 13 In a Drawing-Room 379, 387, 403, 441 – 443, 460 In Church 687 – 688 In the Firelight 679 – 680 Inscription for a Christmas Card 19 – 20 Into the Twilight 303 Kanva on Himself 403 – 406 King Goll: An Irish Legend 459 – 469 King Goll (Third Century) 625 – 631 Life 380 – 381 Love and Death [poem] 21, 40, 42, 47, 58, 79, 110 – 204, 460 Love and Death [verse-play] 91, 104, 106, 354 [Love and Sorrow] 200, 217 Love Song: From the Gaelic 495 – 497 Love’s Decay 334 – 340, 418, 511, 512 [‘’Mong Meadows of Sweet Grain’] 212 – 213 Mosada 105, 194, 218 – 250, 255, 264, 297, 352, 390, 391, 464, 650 Mourn – And then Onward! 587 [‘My Song Thou Knowest of a Dreaming Castle’] 79 On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy 407 – 413 Pan 21 – 27 Quatrains and Aphorisms 441 – 443 Sansloy – Sansfoy – Sansjoy 214 – 216 She Who Dwelt Among the Sycamores 498 – 500 Song of Spanish Insurgents 418, 438 – 440 Song of the Faeries 210 – 211 Speech from Opening of an Abandoned Dramatic Poem 80 – 83 Street Dancers 565, 654 – 658, 676 Sunrise 29 – 31

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Index of Poems

The Ballad of Father Gilligan 416 The Ballad of Father O’Hart 641 – 646 The Ballad of Moll Magee 472 – 479, 501 The Ballad of the Foxhunter 691 – 697 [‘The Children Play in White and Red’] 101 The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes 329 – 330 The Danaan Quicken Tree 15, 672 The Dell 19, 32 [‘The Dew Comes Dropping’] 356 – 357 The Fairy Doctor 515 – 517 The Fairy Pedant 444 – 447 The Falling of the Leaves 417 – 419 The Field Mouse 341 The Host 622 The Hosting of the Sidhe 516, 622, 646 The Indian to His Love 433, 435, 459 The Indian upon God 433 – 434, 451, 459 The Island of Statues 37, 219, 255 – 328 The Lake Isle of Innisfree 3, 333, 356, 489, 608, 612, 616, 654, 662 – 678 The Madness of King Goll 464, 509 The Magpie 253 – 254 The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland 698 The Meditation of the Old Fisherman 414 – 416 The Old Grey Man 5 – 6 The Outlaw’s Bridal 681 – 686 The Pathway 405 The Phantom Ship 647 – 653 The Priest and the Fairy 397 – 402 The Priest of Pan 18, 21, 23, 123 The Protestants’ Leap 501 – 508 The Rose of the World 103 The Sad Shepherd 263, 270, 371, 372, 377, 382 – 386, 398, 432, 459

The Secret Rose 425, 493, 503, 554, 622, 700 The Seeker 221, 349, 361 – 370 The Song of the Happy Shepherd 371 – 378 The Sorrow of Love 103 The Stolen Child 420 – 428 The Two Titans 387 – 394 The Two Trees 123, 336, 376 The Unappeasable Host 571 The Wanderings of Oisin 5, 88, 91, 96, 123, 199, 260, 262, 297, 369, 371, 398, 420, 444, 451, 470, 514  –   5 15, 674, 676 The Wanderings of Oisin and How a Demon Trapped Him 526 – 624 [‘The World Is but a Strange Romance’] 28 [‘There Sings a Rose by the Rim’] 395 – 396 Time and the Witch Vivien 37, 39, 42, 55, 255, 342 – 346 To – (Remembrance) 429 – 432 To an Isle in the Water 635, 659 – 661 To Ireland in the Coming Times 684 [‘Tower, Wind-Beaten, Grim’] 33 – 34 [‘Truth is Bold, but Falsehood Fears’] 331 – 332 Vivien and Time 37 – 75 [‘When to Its End o’er-ripened July Nears’] 84 – 99 When You Are Old 199, 621 [‘Wherever in the Wastes of Wrinkling Sand. . .’] 520 – 521 Who Goes with Fergus? 698 – 702

Index of First Lines A double moon or more ago 14 A flower has blossomed 3 A little boy outside the sycamore wood 499 A man has a hope for heaven 210 A soul of the fountain spake me a word 104 A sound came floating, an unearthly sound 107 Afar from our lawn and our levée, 445 All the bees that in this country dwell 32 And Helen’s eyes, beneath their moveless lids, 333 Around the twitter of the lips of dust 379 As me upon my way the tram-car whirled 76 Autumn is over the long leaves that love us, 419 Aye, older by many a winter 35 Behold the flashing waters, 354 Behold the man – behold his brow of care 102 Come and dream of kings and kingdoms, 679 Come round me, little childer; 476 Death hath ta’en my child to nurse 78 Do not fear us, earthly maid! 523 Dost thou not fear an outlaw’s mournful love, 683 Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet; 639 Flames the shuttle of the lightning across the driving sleet, 651 For clapping hands of all men’s love 252 From the waves the sun hath reeled, 448 Full moody is my love and sad, 519 Good Father John O’Hart 643 Heavy with wool the sheep are gathered in, 363 How beautiful thy colours are, oh marvellous morn of May, 471 Hushed in the vale of Dajestan 348 I know a merry thicket 8 I live in this lake-girt tropic island 81

I passed along the water’s edge below the humid trees, 434 I raise to thee no praying voice 100 I sat upon a high gnarled root 11 I sing of Pan and his piping sweet, 25 I was a wise young king of old; 465 I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 672 If the melancholy music of the spheres 18 In this ruddy time of holly 19 I’ve built a dreaming palace 43 Maiden, come forth: the woods keep watch for thee; 266 Malformed our guide as from a failing tribe, 504 Mine was a chair of skins and gold, 627 ’Mong meadows of sweet grain and musing kine 212 My love, we will go, we will go, I and you, 496 My song thou knowest of a dreaming castle 79 Now lay me in a cushioned chair 695 Now wherefore hast thou tears innumerous? 405 Oh! would on the hill of the falcons we tended our flocks – 439 Oisin, tell me the famous story, 549 Over the heath has the magpie flown, 253 Pale Love and Sorrow pass, nor do I greatly grieve 217 Remembering thee, I search out these faint flowers 431 Send peace on all the lands and flickering corn 453 She prays for father, mother dear, 687 Shy one, shy one, 660 Sing ye the song of the rusting scythe 358

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Index of First Lines

Singing in this London street 655 Sudden as I sat in a wood 6 The child pursuing lizards in the grass, 380 The child who chases lizards in the grass, 441 The children play in white and red 101 The dew comes dropping 356 The fairy doctor comes our way 516 The field mouse running yonder has reared up 341 The giddy day goes barefoot on the hills; 335 The living woods forego their care, 689 The Maker of the stars and worlds 633 The talking wind hath found her home, 352 The vision of a rock where lightnings whirl’d 391 The woods of Arcady are dead, 374 The world is but a strange romance 28 The young leaves spring, the cattle low 30 There sings a rose by the rim 395 There was a man whom Sorrow named his friend, 384 They say I’m proud and solit’ry, yes proud 350

This lake washeth around the reedy strand 16 Three times the roses have grown less and less 224 ’Tis of a vision heard and seen 215 Tower, wind-beaten, grim, 34 Truth is bold, but falsehood fears 331 Unto the heart of the woodland straying, 398 We, too, have seen our bravest and our best 487 What do you weave so fair and bright? 305 When to its end o’er-ripened July nears 85 When we were not and these men were 113 Where dips the rocky highland 425 Where moves there any beautiful as I, 343 Wherever in the wastes of wrinkling sand, 521 Who will go drive with Fergus now, 698 Yonder the sickle of the moon sails on, 412 You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play, 415 Your eyes that once were never weary of mine 512