The Wanderings of Oisin

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The Wanderings of Oisin
Author
William Butler Yeats
LanguageEnglish
GenreEpic poetry
Narrative poetry
Publication date
1889
Followed byThe Song of the Happy Shepherd 

The Wanderings of Oisin (

TS Eliot.[3] However, Harold Bloom defended this poem in his book-length study of Yeats, and concludes that it deserves reconsideration.[4]

Story

Jean Ingres

The fairy princess

Manannan stood. Here they found another woman held captive by a demon, whom Oisin battled again and again for a hundred years, until it was finally defeated. They then went to an island where ancient giants who had grown tired of the world long ago were sleeping until its end, and Niamh and Oisin slept and dreamt with them for a hundred years. Oisin then desired to return to Ireland to see his comrades. Niamh lent him her horse warning him that he must not touch the ground, or he would never return. Back in Ireland, Oisin, still a young man, found his warrior companions dead, and the pagan faith of Ireland displaced by Patrick's Christianity. He then saw two men struggling to carry a "sack full of sand";[5]
he bent down to lift it with one hand and hurl it away for them, but his saddle girth broke and he fell to the ground, becoming three hundred years old instantaneously.

Structure

The poem is told in three parts, with the verse becoming more complex with each: the lines run four (iambic tetrameter), five (iambic pentameter), and six (anapaestic hexameter) metrical feet respectively. The three "books" begin thus:

  • Book I:

You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,
Have known three centuries, poets sing,
Of dalliance with a demon thing.[6]

  • Book II:

Now, man of the croziers, shadows called our names
And then away, away, like whirling flames;
And now fled by, mist-covered, without sound,
The youth and lady and the deer and hound[7]

  • Book III:

Fled foam underneath us, and round us, a wandering and milky smoke,
High as the saddle-girth, covering away from our glances the tide;
And those that fled, and that followed, from the foam-pale distance broke;
The immortal desire of Immortals we saw in their faces, and sighed.[8]

See also

  • List of works by William Butler Yeats

Notes

  1. ^ Yeats 1889
  2. ^ Matthew Russell reviewed the poem in the Irish Monthly (February 1889), stating "Ireland can boast of another true poet in William Yeats"; quoted in a later Irish Monthly (March 1953) article by Roger McHugh.
  3. ^ "The poetry of the young Yeats hardly existed for me until after my enthusiasm had been won by the poetry of the older Yeats.." TS Eliot in The First Annual Yeats Lecture, Dublin 1940, collected in On Poetry & Poets, Faber 1957, quoted by John Kelly in his essay Eliot & Yeats, Yeats Annual no 20.
  4. ^ Bloom, H; Yeats, Oxford University Press, 1970,
  5. ^ Yeats 1990: 444 (line 876)
  6. ^ Yeats 1990: 409
  7. ^ Yeats 1990: 423
  8. ^ Yeats 1990: 431

References

  • Yeats, William Butler
    (1889). The Wanderings of Oisin, and other poems (1 ed.). London: Kegan Paul & Co.
  • ISBN 978-0-330-31638-5
    .

External links
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