The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IX: Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews Written Between 1886 and 1900 - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Butler Yeats is generally considered to be Ireland's greatest poet, living or dead, and one of the most 

important literary figures of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. 

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Chapter One

THE POETRY OF SIR SAMUEL FERGUSON -- I

This article appeared in The Irish Fireside of 9 October 1886, under the heading "Irish Poets and Irish Poetry." Sir Samuel Ferguson had died on 9 August 1886, and the present article was one of two pieces written by Yeats to sum up the achievement of Ferguson. This article may have been written after the longer, more detailed one that appeared in The Dublin University Review of November 1886, pp. 10-27 in this collection. In the present article Yeats writes about Ferguson's Conary, from Poems (Dublin: W. McGee, 1880), "Of this poem's splendid plot, which I have no space to describe here, I have written somewhat copiously elsewhere."

Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), Belfast-born poet and antiquary, most heavily influenced Yeats by his attempt to use ancient Irish legends and heroic sagas as subjects for his poems. What Ferguson's work meant to Yeats is writ large in this and the following article.

Of old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago.

In the garden of the world's imagination there are seven great fountains. The seven great cycles of legends -- the Indian; the Homeric; the Charlemagnic; the Spanish, circling round the Cid; the Arthurian; the Scandinavian; and the Irish -- all differing one from the other, as the peoples differed who created them. Every one of these cycles is the voice of some race celebrating itself, embalming for ever what it hated and loved. Back to their old legends go, year after year, the poets of the earth, seeking the truth about nature and man, that they may not be lost in a world of mere shadow and dream.

Sir Samuel 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.

It was in Ferguson's later poems that he restored to us the old heroes themselves; in his first work, Lays of the Western Gael, he gave us rather instants of heroic passion, as in 'Owen Bawn', and 'Deirdre's Lament for the Sons of Usnach', or poems in which character is subordinated to some dominant idea or event, as in the 'Welshmen of Tirawley', and 'Willy Gilliland', or tales round which is shed the soft lustre of idyllic thought, as the 'Fairy Thorn'.

In other words, he was more lyrical and romantic than dramatic in this first and best known of his books. 'The Fairy Thorn', does the whole range of our rich ballad literature contain a more beautiful ballad of 'the good people' than this? I will quote almost the whole of it:

'Get up, our Anna dear, from the weary spinning-wheel,

For your father's on the hill, and your mother's asleep;

Come up above the crags, and we'll dance a highland-reel

Around the fairy thorn on the steep'.

At Anna Grace's door 'twas thus the maidens cried --

Three merry maidens fair, in kirtles of the green;

And Anna laid the sock and weary wheel aside,

dThe fairest of the four, I ween.

They're glancing through the glimmer of the quiet eve,

Away, in milky wavings of neck and ankle bare;

The heavy sliding stream in its sleepy song they leave,

And the crags in the ghostly air;

And linking hand in hand, and singing as they go,

The maids along the hillside have ta'en their fearless way,

Till they come to where the rowen trees in lonely beauty grow

Beside the fairy hawthorne grey.

But solemn is the silence of the silvery haze

That drinks away their voices echoless repose,

And dreamily the evening has still'd the haunted braes,

And dreamier the gloaming grows.

And sinking one by one, like lark-notes from the sky

When the falcon's shadow saileth across the open shaw,

Are hushed the maidens' voices, as cowering down they lie

In the flutter of their sudden awe.

For from the air above, and the grassy ground beneath,

And from the mountain ashes, and the old whitethorn between,

A power of faint enchantment doth through their beings breathe,

And they sink down together on the green.

Thus clasped and prostrate all, with their heads together bow'd,

Soft on their bosoms beating -- the only human sound --

They hear the silky footsteps of the silent fairy crowd,

Like a river in the air, gliding round.

No scream can they raise, nor prayer can they say,

But wild, wild, the terror of the speechless three --

For they feel fair Anna Grace drawn silently away --

By whom they dare not look to see.

They feel their tresses twine with her parting locks of gold,

And the curls elastic falling, as her head withdraws;

They feel her sliding arms from their tranced arms unfold,

But they may not look to see the cause.

For heavy on their senses the faint enchantment lies

Through all that night of anguish and perilous amaze;

And neither fear nor wonder can ope their quivering eyes,

Or their limbs from the cold ground raise.

Till out of night the earth has rolled her dewy side,

With every haunted mountain and streamy vale below;

When, as the mist dissolves in the yellow...