The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems

by W.B. Yeats

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems was the first collection of poems by W. B. Yeats. It was published in 1889. In addition to the title poem, the last epic-scale poem that Yeats ever wrote, the book includes a number of short poems that Yeats would later collect under the title Crossways in his Collected Poems. The Wanderings of Oisin The Song of the Happy Shepherd The Sad Shepherd The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes Anashuya and Vijaya The Indian upon God The Indian to His Love The Falling of the Leaves Ephemera The Madness of King Goll The Stolen Child To an Isle in the Water Down by the Salley Gardens The Meditation of the Old Fisherman The Ballad of Father O'Hart The Ballad of Moll Magee The Ballad of the Foxhunter

Genres: Poetry

Library Binding

First published January 1, 1889

About the author

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin]

Yeats published his first collection, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), when he was twenty-five, and some of the poems contained within it were almost five years old at the time. With a few exceptions, most of them are derivative and undistinguished, but the title work, Yeats' first and only sustained narrative poem, is both haunting and memorable.

Most of the shorter poems are clearly the work of a young man learning his craft through imitation, primarily of English models. Their language is pre-Raphaelite, their attitude Symbolist, and the Romantic heart beating inside each of them beats with the rhythm of Shelley’s. The exotic locations Yeats chooses—India, Arcady, 15th Century Spain—are seldom convincing, and the frequent poems about fairies—with one exception—are not memorable individually, and grow tedious in number. That exception is “The Stolen Child”, remembered for its haunting refrain:

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.

"The Stolen Child” succeeds because it captures the mournful, slightly sinister feeling of Irish fairy lore, something far removed from English nursery fairies which inhabit the rest of young Yeats’ “fey” verse. Indeed, whenever Yeats treats seriously Irish folk tradition—as in the folk song imitation “Down by the Salley Gardens” or the dramatic monologue of the blind, mad monarch “King Goll”—he creates enduring and original work.

The best thing about the book, however, is the lengthy narrative poem of the title. Yeat’s critics have largely ignored or panned it, but Harold Bloom likes it, and I like it a lot too. It is a thoughtful reworking of Irish legend that has something to say, not only about the growth and temptations of the young artist, but also about the challenges facing the Irish in the coming revolutionary age.

The Wanderings of Oisin tells the tale of how the Irish bard Oisin (pronounced “O’Sheen”), hunting with the Fenian heroes, is enticed away by Naimh, daughter of the King of the Young. She spirits him away to a series of three islands, where he lingers for three hundred years. On the first island he hunts and fishes with those forever young, on the second he battles a demon who holds a princess captive, and on the third he rests and dreams surrounded by the sleeping giants of old.

In the following passage, Oisin tells of a song he sang to the young immortals, and of their reaction:

And once a lady by my side
Gave me a harp, and bid me sing,
And touch the laughing silver string;
But when I sang of human joy
A sorrow wrapped each merry face,
And, patrick! by your beard, they wept,
Until one came, a tearful boy;
‘A sadder creature never stept
Than this strange human bard,’ he cried;
And caught the silver harp away,
And, weeping over the white strings, hurled
It down in a leaf-hid, hollow place
That kept dim waters from the sky;
And each one said, with a long, long sigh,
‘O saddest harp in all the world,
Sleep there till the moon and the stars die!’

At the end of the three hundred he wakes, returning to Ireland only to discover that all his comrades are dead, that Christianity holds sway, and that the warlike pagan spirit is no more. St. Patrick offers Oisin a rosary (“the chain of small stones”) and bids him pray for his sins and avoid the fires of Hell, but Oisin replies:

Ah me! to be Shaken with coughing
and broken with old age and pain,
Without laughter, a show unto children,
alone with remembrance and fear;
All emptied of purple hours
as a beggar’s cloak in the rain,
As a hay-cock out on the flood,
or a wolf sucked under a weir.
It were sad to gaze on the blessed
and no man I loved of old there;
I throw down the chain of small stones!
when life in my body has ceased,
I will go to Caoilte, and Conan,
and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians,
be they in flames or at feast.

[Paul Christensen]

Oisin journeys to three islands representing feeling, combat and repose, ‘the three incompatible things man is always seeking.’

(This is also mirrored in Yeats’ three ‘Rose’ poems, ‘The Rose of the World’, ‘The Rose of Battle’ and ‘The Rose of Peace’, and on a more mundane level in the labour movement - eight hours work, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.)

I don’t like the way the rhythm changes dramatically in the third section, like the time change in an ‘80s glam rock song; it makes the poem feel unbalanced. Other than that, an incredible work for a 22 year old scribe.

[Rosopsida]

Shy one, shy one,
Shy one of my heart,
She moves in the firelight
Pensively apart.

She carries in the dishes,
And lays them in a row.
To an isle in the water
With her would I go.

She carries in the candles,
And lights the curtained room,
Shy in the doorway
And shy in the gloom;

And shy as a rabbit,
Helpful and shy.
To an isle in the water
With her would I fly.

[James Kelly]

This is the book that brought Yeats fame. It is a beautiful and lyrical collection of verse that examines themes of love, fidelity, nationhood and spirituality. it is a sublime piece of writing.