MR. W. B. YEATS
(Woman’s World, March 1889.)

‘The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems is, I believe, the first volume of poems that Mr. Yeats has published, and it is certainly full of promise.  It must be admitted that many of the poems are too fragmentary, too incomplete.  They read like stray scenes out of unfinished plays, like things only half remembered, or, at best, but dimly seen.  But the architectonic power of construction, the power to build up and make perfect a harmonious whole, is nearly always the latest, as it certainly is the highest, development of the artistic temperament.  It is somewhat unfair to expect it in early work.  One quality Mr. Yeats has in a marked degree, a quality that is not common in the work of our minor poets, and is therefore all the more welcome to us—I mean the romantic temper.  He is essentially Celtic, and his verse, at its best, is Celtic also.  Strongly influenced by Keats, he seems to study how to ‘load every rift with ore,’ yet is more fascinated by the beauty of words than by the beauty of metrical music.  The spirit that dominates the whole book is perhaps more valuable than any individual poem or particular passage, but this from The Wanderings of Oisin is worth quoting.  It describes the ride to the Island of Forgetfulness:

And the ears of the horse went sinking away in the hollow light,
   For, as drift from a sailor slow drowning the gleams of the world and the sun,
Ceased on our hands and faces, on hazel and oak leaf, the light,
   And the stars were blotted above us, and the whole of the world was one;

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 hoofs in the heavy grasses, with monstrous slumbering folk,
   Their mighty and naked and gleaming bodies heaped loose where they lay.

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.

And this, which deals with the old legend of the city lying under the waters of a lake, is strange and interesting:

The 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.

‘The props,’ said He, ‘of stars and worlds
   Are prayers of patient men and good.
The boys, the women, and old men,
   Listening, upon their shadows stood.

A grey professor passing cried,
   ‘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 left ear—
   There were some talking of the poor—
And to himself cried, ‘Communist!’
   And hurried to the guardhouse door.

The bishop came with open book,
   Whispering along the sunny path;
There was some talking of man’s God,
   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.

The place was empty now of people;
   A cock came by upon his toes;
An old horse looked across the fence,
   And rubbed along the rail his nose.

The maker of the stars and worlds
   To His own house did Him betake,
And on that city dropped a tear,
   And now that city is a lake.

Mr. Yeats has a great deal of invention, and some of the poems in his book, such as Mosada, Jealousy, and The Island of Statues, are very finely conceived.  It is impossible to doubt, after reading his present volume, that he will some day give us work of high import.  Up to this he has been merely trying the strings of his instrument, running over the keys.

The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.  By W. B. Yeats.  (Kegan Paul.)

MR. YEATS’S WANDERINGS OF OISIN
(Pall Mall Gazette, July 12, 1889.)

Books of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are never met.  Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author.  Such a book Mr. Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin certainly is.  Here we find nobility of treatment and nobility of subject-matter, delicacy of poetic instinct and richness of imaginative resource.  Unequal and uneven much of the work must be admitted to be.  Mr. Yeats does not try to ‘out-baby’ Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in ‘out-glittering’ Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across strange crudities and irritating conceits.  But 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 the largeness of vision that belongs to the epical 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 air of a child.  Here is a characteristic passage from the account of Oisin’s return from the Island of Forgetfulness:

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.

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.

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-winds brown.

If I were as I once was, the gold hooves crushing the sand 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 wattle and woodwork made,
Thy bell-mounted churches, and guardless the sacred cairn and the earth,
   And a small and feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade.

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; but, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel in these stanzas the presence of the true poetic spirit.

The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems.  By W. B. Yeats.  (Kegan Paul.)