The Wanderings of Oisin

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

The Wanderings of Oisin (/oʊˈʃiːn/ oh-SHEEN) is an epic poem published by William Butler Yeats in 1889 in the book The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.[1] It was his first publication outside magazines, and immediately won him a reputation as a significant poet.[a] This narrative poem takes the form of a dialogue between the aged Irish hero Oisín and St. Patrick, the man traditionally responsible for converting Ireland to Christianity. Most of the poem is spoken by Oisin, relating his 300-year sojourn in the isles of Faerie. The poem was not popular among modernist critics like T. S. Eliot.[2] However, Harold Bloom defended this poem in his book-length study of Yeats, and concludes that it deserves reconsideration.[3]

Story

The fairy princess Niamh fell in love with Oisin's poetry and begged him to join her in the immortal islands.[4] For a hundred years he lived as one of the Sidhe, hunting, dancing, and feasting. At the end of this time he found a spear washed up on the shore and grew sad, remembering his times with the Fianna. Niamh took him away to another island, where the ancient and abandoned castle of the sea-god 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,[6] 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.[7]

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[8]

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.[9]

Publication history

The poem was first published in Yeats's 1889 volume The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. In that book, it is printed first and occupies one third of the printed pages. It was republished in a revised form in his Poems (1899),[10] where it was placed last. Later the poem was printed anew in his Early Poems and Stories (1925). Warwick Gould writes that in this volume, the poem was given "pride of place" in accordance with Yeats's assessment "my subject-matter became Irish" with this poem.[11]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ 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.

References

Notes

  1. ^ Yeats 1889.
  2. ^ Kelly, John (2016). "Eliot and Yeats". Yeats Annual. 20 (20). Open Book Publishers: 182. doi:10.11647/OBP.0081.07. ISBN 978-1-78374-177-9. ISSN 0278-7687. JSTOR 90000767. Although, as [Eliot] acknowledged in a lecture delivered shortly after Yeats's death [in Dublin, 1940], 'Yeats was already a considerable figure in the world of poetry' when he began to write, he could not 'remember that his poetry at this stage made any deep impression on me', because, as he went on to explain, the poetry he needed to quicken his consciousness only existed in France; for this reason 'the poetry of the young Yeats hardly existed for me until after my enthusiasm had been won by the poetry of the older Yeats; and by that time—I mean from 1919 on my own course of evolution was already determined'.
  3. ^ Bloom, Harold (1970), Yeats, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-1111649234
  4. ^ Gomes, Daniel (2014). "Reviving Oisin: Yeats and the Conflicted Appeal of Irish Mythology". Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 56 (4): 376–399. doi:10.7560/TSLL56402. JSTOR 43280231.
  5. ^ Yeats 1990, p.444 (line 876).
  6. ^ Ikeda, Hiroko (2014). "The Explorations of Ancient Memories: Shadows of Irish Tradition in W.B. Yeats's 'The Wanderings of Oisin'". Journal of Irish Studies. 29: 42–52. JSTOR 24367810.
  7. ^ Yeats 1990, p. 409.
  8. ^ Yeats 1990, p.423.
  9. ^ Yeats 1990, p.431.
  10. ^ Alspach, Russell K. (1943). "Some Sources of Yeats's The Wanderings of Oisin". PMLA. 58 (3): 849–66. doi:10.2307/458836. JSTOR 458836.
  11. ^ Gould, Warwick (2016). "Yeats and his Books". Yeats Annual. 20 (20). Open Book Publishers: 3–70. doi:10.11647/OBP.0081.02. ISBN 978-1-78374-177-9. ISSN 0278-7687. JSTOR 90000762.

Sources

  • Yeats, William Butler (1889). The Wanderings of Oisin, and other poems (1 ed.). London: Kegan Paul & Co.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
  • Yeats, William Butler (1990) [1985]. Collected Poems (2 ed.). London: Picador/Pan Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-330-31638-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
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