The poems excerpted on this page exempify instances of W. B. Yeats’s use of folklore materials in very different periods of his life. In 1888 he was determined to ‘revive’ the ancient stories of Ireland and so he wrote the long poem “Wanderings of Oisin” based on accounts of Tir na nOg and the meeting between St. Patrick and the last of the members of the Fianna (or Fenians), - an Old Irish text sometimes called “The Colloquy of the Ancients”.

Thirteen years later, he was able to embody such Celtic materials into a convincingly holistic vision of Irish culture and imagination considered as a cultural force which the dominent culture of modernity could not easily dismiss as insignificant or foolish - still less drive out of the publishing and critical scene. In this phase his constant appeal was to the idea of a ‘our central fire’ and an ‘unappeasable’ atavistic force to be met with in folklore memories of the the sidh, or fairies, of Irish folklore. (Notice, however, the evocation of Catholic pietism - more specifically Mariolatry - in the last line of the second poem which reveals a strong tendency to unite with Catholic nationalism in that period..)

By the end of his career he had accepted, not merely as a biographical fact but as an imaginative premise, the idea that his engagement with Irish myth and legend had been a poetical strategy rather than a genuine discovery of impassable spiritual sources - though this acceptance was paradoxical in its way too. He had come to accep that the human spirit always finds the materials for belief in the “bestial floor” of its instinctual nature - thus marrying his earlier folklore interests with a genuinely Freudian conception of the poet’s art.

In such a climate of ideas, the Symbolism of his earlier phase had become a form of semiotic - that is, a conception of language as a vehicle for ideas not given in the empirical perspective but nonetheless real if barely apprehensible. Such an idea is, for instance, immortality or eternity which he studiously embodied in his one philosophical book, A Vision (1925; rev. 1937) - a diagrammatic commentary on the great movements of history which threw up the human spirit in different forms at different times.

It is a matter of embarrassment to Yeatsian studies that the poet’s mature thought was increasingly given to fascist ideas about a new and brutal dispensation - the ‘Second Coming’ in Yeatsian poetical lexicon. Luckily, perhaps, he did not live to see what Fascism in Europe and in France where he spent his last days) really meant in practice but he was well-acquainted with the restrictive mind-set of nationalism when it won its battle against British Unionism in Ireland where he was born and which he treated as his native country though often, in fact, resident in London.

Oisin. 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.
[1888]

The Danaan children laugh, in cradles of wrought gold,
And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,
For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,
With heavy whitening wings, and a heart fallen cold:
I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast,
And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me.
Desolate winds that cry over the wandering sea;
Desolate winds that hover in the flaming West;
Desolate winds that beat the doors of Heaven, and beat
The doors of Hell and blow there many a whimpering ghost;
O heart the winds have shaken, the unappeasable host
Is comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet.
[1896]

[...]
What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?
[...]