Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
and American Studies
Lenka Pokorná
2012
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
……………………………………………..
Author’s signature
I would like to thank my supervisor Michael Matthew Kaylor, PhD. for his patient guidance and helpful
advice, as well as support and reassurance when I most needed it. I am also grateful to my classmates and
friends Petra Králová, Ondřej Harušek and Viktor Dvořák for reading the thesis and for their valuable
comments. Great thanks also to my boyfriend, for helping me with the formal structure of the thesis.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction...........................................................................................................................5
2. Theoretical Part.....................................................................................................................7
2.2. Self-fashioning..........................................................................................................19
3. Analytical Part.....................................................................................................................42
3.1. Otherworld................................................................................................................42
3.3. Transcendence...........................................................................................................84
3.3.1. Death....................................................................................................................84
3.3.2. Kidnappers...........................................................................................................88
4. Conclusion............................................................................................................................96
Works cited................................................................................................................................98
1. Introduction
William Butler Yeats certainly ranks among the greatest poets of the 20 th century
and is closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival, as a poet, dramatist, and to an
extent, as a fiction writer. Being so famous a poet, there is no doubt that heaps of books
have been written on him, viewing his work from many different angles. What this
thesis attempts to do is to offer a little more insight into his early work, which is paid
much less critical attention to, in comparison with his mature poems he was awarded a
The thesis aims to present a concise picture of young Yeats set against the
broader cultural context of the late 19th century Ireland and to analyse his contribution
into the process of self-fashioning of the Irish as a nation. It also explores this process
itself – two different strategies are employed when creating a national identity: re-
creation of the ancient epic integrity; and defining the nation in negative terms, as “not-
English”. These two strategies overlap in the use of mythology and folklore as a
Yeats, too, leaned on mythology, ancient legends and folklore, in order to avail
transcendence. The main question posed by this thesis is: “How does he achieve that?”
To answer this question, the analytical part discusses the recurring Celtic elements in his
work, in particular focuses on the themes and motifs connected to these elements. Yeats
employs certain motifs repeatedly and the thesis will analyse these very motifs, in order
to recognize in what ways Yeats uses them to influence the Irish national consciousness.
These motifs are, the thesis argues, tied to mythological and folkloric themes, as well as
to topical themes related to life in the 19 th century Ireland, which enables them to
5
The late 19th century was a transitory period in general – the turn of the 20 th
century was at hand, Modernism was gradually replacing the Victorian period.
However, the prospect of change was in Ireland even more immediate than elsewhere;
Ireland was hoping to transcend its own colonial limitations and, in the coming century,
become a free nation. For this reason, the theme of transcendence is given special
attention in the thesis, focusing on motifs such as the Otherworld, fairies and the
As the thesis is focused on Yeats’s earlier work, various poems from the period
between 1886 and 1900 are analysed;1 mostly taken from the first three collections of
poems: Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), Rose (1893) and The Wind
Among the Reeds (1899)2. Furthermore, the thesis deals with two plays, taking into
consideration the aesthetic beauty of their language and style, they can be analysed
alongside the poetry as long dramatic poems. What is, finally, necessary to say is that
this thesis leans heavily on primary sources, which makes the view of the period and the
ongoing social and cultural processes coloured through Yeats’s personal accounts.
However, historic accuracy is not the primary goal; rather the depiction of the mystical
1
Unless stated differently, all the poems are taken from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, Wordsworth
Editions Ltd.. Pagination is not stated in the parenthetical reference, only the line numbers.
2
In the Collected Poems, The Wanderings of Oisín is set separate in the end of the book and the first
collection roughly corresponds to the now known The Crossways (The 1889 Poems were republished and
renamed in 1895 with some minor changes and exclusions of various poems Yeats no longer found
suitable for his purposes).
6
2. Theoretical Part
literature rather than through detached historical analyses. This may be the result of the
that would contrast with the existing Unionist elite, by producing mass romantic
literature (The Oxford Companion to Irish History - OCH 320) which, according to
Yeats, spoke “out of a people to a people” (Selected Criticism 256). Further, this
literature was seen as the genuine history which has a “privileged access to Irishness”,
while history, in the strict sense, was seen as an Anglo-Irish colonial imposture (OCH
320).
nationalism was also being promoted, by a group of nationalist writers and politicians
who were labelled “the Young Irelanders” in 1844. Among their chief leaders were
Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy, all of whom remained
influential figures throughout the rest of the century. They “resolved that it is expedient
to establish Reading-rooms in the Parishes of Ireland” (Davis 242); and, although the
intellectual activities of these societies and clubs “were often narrow and ill informed”
(OCH 381), some of these Young Ireland Societies survived the suppression of the
1848. By the end of the 19th century, they operated as “centres of nationalist activity”
(OCH 381) which preserved the legacy of the Young Irelanders, whose chief merit was
(OCH 603). Thomas Davis essentially laid the foundation-stone of the later Irish
7
Renaissance – “he contrasted the philistinism and gradgrindery of England with the
superior idealism and imagination of Ireland” (Kiberd 22). In an essay published in The
Nation, a newspaper issued by the Young Irelanders, Davis states that when “a country
is without national poetry”, it “proves its hopeless dullness or its utter provincialism”
(Davis 223). He understood well that a cultural colony is prone to imitate the literature
of the mother country; and in order to gain independence, it was essential to “displace
the constricting environment and its forms” (Kiberd 115) and to create a proper national
literature different from that of the English. This national form of art was to be the
romantic ballad, which Charles Gavan Duffy declared “to be the supreme form of public
art” (Dwan, “Ancient Sect” 207). Such ballads were seen as the essential and perhaps
countries; and their popularity here, now, is no slight evidence that the
national mind is still fresh and earnest, and has the impulses and
The ballads Duffy is considering are not the popular folk ballads of country peasants,
but what he calls “our Anglo-Irish ballads” (“Introduction” to The Ballad Poetry of
Ireland 15), representing Irish canonical art as set against that of the English. They were
susceptible “of this distinct and intrinsic nationality” (“Introduction” The Ballad Poetry
of Ireland 23) – nobody who is not an Irishman could have written them. By making
Anglo-Irish ballads the canonical Irish literature of the 19 th century, the Anglo-Irish
Ascendancy was also avowing their own Irish identity. Though still hazy and vague, the
However, perhaps the most notable poet of the period – and the greatest
influence on the young Yeats – was Samuel Fergusson, who, despite being a Northern
8
Ireland Unionist, was attracted by Davis’s cultural nationalism and turned the national
literature’s interest towards mythology. He translated a few Gaelic poems and wrote his
own epic poems inspired by Irish legends in which he strove to “present a case for a
form of Irish self-government” (Oxford Companion to Irish Literature - OCL 186). His
greatest effort was to spread the knowledge of Ancient Ireland in Victorian Ireland
(OCL 186) and, thus, to enhance the awareness of Irish national identity. According to
The search for the authentic Irishness and ancient tradition is a phase of
With this though being dominant during the nationalist era, in 1853 The Ossianic
Society was founded by Standish Hayes O’Grady, its main aim being to preserve and
publish the manuscripts of ancient Ireland (OCL 458); for these scholars believed that,
to build the identity of a nation, it is important to know the history of the people’s
ancestors and to ask the question, “How did their personality affect the minds of their
The effort to create a link to the aforementioned “racial substrate of the colony”
was not seen only in literature and art. From the ashes of the Young Ireland Movement a
new movement arose – the Fenians. They were a secret nationalist organization founded
by James Stephens, which later became known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood
(IRB), and which functioned from the second half of the 19 th century into the 20th (OCH
189, 272). By the very act of naming themselves the “Fenians”, they reinforced the
nationalist message they were willing to fight for, asserting their identity as a
continuation of the mythological past – for, in the Fionn Cycle of Irish mythology, the
9
“Fenians” were the members of the Fianna, a group of the toughest warriors in Ireland
of their time, its protectors. It was a good choice, since the Fionn Cycle was the most
popular and widely known of such works (MacCana 106), and, therefore, all the better
motif of mythological heroes waiting in some reclusive place until the need to save the
country arises (in this case, manifested by a well known legend about mythological
heroes sleeping in a cave from whence “they will emerge to save Ireland” in “the last
hour of doom” [Tynan qtd. in Williams 306]), enabled the members of the Fenian
Movement to assert their continuity to and even their identification with their
mythological predecessors.
Among the most famous Fenians was John O’Leary, who had a major influence
on the Irish Renaissance of the 1880s. He was a romantic and heroic figure – a fighting
Fenian and revolutionary who had suffered hardships in an English prison, but was well
read in poetry and letters at the same time (OCL 444). When, in 1885, he was allowed to
return to Dublin, young emerging authors “flocked about him to take fire from his lips”
(Tynan 267). Katharine Tynan, one of the prominent figures of the early literary revival,
described him as “a dear, great, simple, heroic old man” who “was something of a
literary critic to us” (Tynan 267). O’Leary, in a way, initiated Yeats into nationalism and
was responsible for his development as a national poet; by giving him Young Ireland
poetry to read, by influencing his ideas on nation and literature, by urging him to join
the Young Ireland Society and introducing him into the Irish Republican Brotherhood
(Foster 43, Jeffares 100), and, most importantly, by serving as an “example of a man
without hope of success whose service was none the less devoted to a romantic,
idealised conception of nationalism” (Jeffars, Man and Poet 30). Yeats himself
10
From these debates, from O’Leary’s conversation, and from the Irish
books he lent or gave me has come all I have set my hand to since.
(Autobiographies 125)
O’Leary became the centre of nationalist cultural life in Dublin in the late 1880s, where
meetings were held on a weekly basis in clubs and societies, such as the Young Ireland
Society (a continuation of the Young Ireland Societies of the 1840s), whose ethos was,
under O’Leary as its president, “distinctly armchair Fenian” (Foster 42); and the
Contemporary Club, a place where “Unionist and Nationalist could interrupt one
another and interrupt one another without the formal and traditional restraint of public
speech” (Yeats, Autobiographies 115). At these meetings, “the social, political and
literary questions of the day” were discussed (Yeats qtd. in Foster 41), with young men
and their older mentors mostly constituting the core of these societies (OCH 380). Apart
from O’Leary, the other famous attendees of these meetings included Douglas Hyde, the
future founder of the Gaelic League, whose “Irish songs were made as independently as
though no Anglo-Irish writer had come before him: as though none should come after
him” (Tynan 267); Katharine Tynan, a young poet and Yeats’s close friend, whose
(Yeats qtd. in Foster 55)3; George Russell, writing under the penname Æ, who was, in
Tynan’s words, “the dreamer of dreams [and] seer of visions” (267); Michael Davit, a
former Fenian; as well as T. W. Rolleston, J. F. Taylor, and the Yeatses, both father and
son. Especially in the Young Ireland Societies, apart from discussing political opinions,
many young, unknown poets – “men whose names,” Yeats’s admits, “you have not
heard” (Ideas of Good and Evil 1) – continued in the tradition of looking for their
3
However, by the 1890s they drifted apart, and Yeats considered her poetry “uninteresting”. The positive
opinion he had had of her in the 1880s had changed.
11
If somebody could make a style which would not be an English style and
yet would be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire
from him, and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in
The goal was not only to create national ballad poetry, but also to nurture a national
identity which would unify all the people of Ireland, “catching fire” one from another.
In this spirit, “Unity of Culture” would become the binding force to achieve the unity of
the nation – in the words of Thomas Carlyle, they would become men “animated by one
great Idea” (Whitaker 326). The kind of outlook coloured the nationalism of the late
1880s and 1890s with a tint of mysticism, as well as interconnected the two (especially
for Yeats and Æ), which further promoted concerns for acquiring and crafting Celtic
material.
Yeats might have adopted some of these ideas from Standish O’Grady, who
became known as the “Father of the Literary Revival in Ireland” (Boyd 18). Described
by Lady Gregory as a “Fenian Unionist” (Boyd 17), he was attracted to Irish legends,
which, being part of the people’s history, could serve to unite the Irish. His attitude to
these legends was, however, not that of a sober scholarly academic, but rather that of a
novelist. He attempted to popularize these legends, and “adopted a style at once high
flown and graphic to convey the grandeur, as he saw it, of the [mythological] cycle”
(OCL 434). Most famously, he wrote the two-volume History of Ireland: Heroic Period
(1878) and History if Ireland: Chuchulain and his Contemporaries (1880). Through
these books, he “filled a fruitful generation of young writers with the proud
consciousness of nationality divorced from mere politics” and directed them back to the
roots of “national thought” (Boyd 18). His “multifarious knowledge of Gaelic legend
and Gaelic history and a most Celtic temperament have put him in communion with the
12
moods that have [always] been over Irish purposes” (Yeats qtd. in Hirsh, “Irish Peasant”
1121). In the same way that, in Davis’s era of the 1860s, national ballads were seen as a
touchstone of nationalism, in the late 1880s and 1890s mythology and supernatural
Celticism became the basis of national thought, and the focus was moved more towards
While societies and clubs flourished on the cultural scene, the political scene
was dominated by the Land War and the Home Rule Movement. Home Rule was the
aim of constitutional nationalists, and it entailed having the same ruler, executive and
council for state affaires, while home affaires would by solved by each country’s own
parliaments. The leader of the Irish parliamentary party since 1880, Charles Stewart
Parnell, who was often seen as “the solitary and proud” leader (Yeats, Autobiographies
241), led the movement with extreme success and, by 1885, “Fenianism seemed the
heroic past and the Parnellite constitutionalism the hopeful future” (Foster 41).
However, his plans for Ireland, despite seeming promising, were thwarted in 1889 by
the public revelation of his lengthy affair with Cathy O’Shea, a married woman. His
reputation suffered greatly: Gladstone refused to proceed in his dealings with “an
public sinner unfit for leadership” by the Roman Catholic Church (Kiberd 23). Catholic
Ireland, in particular, campaigned against Parnellism, which was labelled “simple love
for adultery” (Kee 202). As a result, his party split. Even though the reality was less
black and white, traditionally he was assessed as a man with a “brilliant career brought
to a tragic end” (OCH 431). This is also what Yeats and his circle thought about Parnell;
O’Leary, Tynan and Yeats firmly adhered to the Parnellite camp, claiming that Parnell
“has driven up into dust and vacuum no end of insincerities” (Yeats qtd. in Foster 113).
Yeats himself saw Parnell as a martyr, perhaps even an incarnation of the proud, stern
13
heroism of old. Yet after the failure of Parnell’s politics and his death in 1891, with the
political hopes for achieving Home Rule being shattered, it was the cultural movement
which took up the mantle of upholding and developing nationalism. Yeats expressed this
“It was the death of Parnell that convinced me that the moment had come
for work in Ireland, for I knew that for a time the imagination of young
That fact that many of the Irish intellectuals who had taken Parnell’s side had grown
create a national literature from 1891” (Foster 115). This is, however, not exactly true;
considered as only the result of political activism being squelched – these societies
abounded already in the 1880s, and were originally intended to support Parnellite
constitutionalism (Foster 43). Still, it is a common claim, whether myth or not, that
Parnell’s fall enhanced the Literary Revival. Later in his life, Yeats liked to present it
this way, which can be seen in his Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in 1923:
The modern literature of Ireland, and indeed all that stir of thought which
prepared for the Anglo-Irish War, began when Parnell fell from power in
195)
Thus, the Literary Revival per se – seen as an Anglo-Irish effort to revive Irish literature
written in England through the use of “Gaelic material” – began in the 1890s with the
fall of Parnell, though this revival was firmly rooted in the literary societies of the 1880s
14
and its precursors, reaching back to Standish O’Grady and even to Samuel Fergusson. It
was soon dominated by names such as Yeats, Augusta Gregory, Synge and Hyde (OCH
319)
Yeats was definitely the moving force of the Revival; in the words of George
Moore, “All the Irish movement rose out of Yeats and return to Yeats” (qtd. in Reid
150). However, in the 1890s his prospects did not seem particularly promising. The
Revival was not a homogenous movement; there was “no consensus on how identity
was to be defined or preserved” (OCH 319); and, for a young author, it was extremely
difficult to win recognition as the future national poet whose art was meant to unite the
country. In his Autobiographies, Yeats bitterly remembers the Dublin “after Parnell”:
manners, and their looks, and in its stead opinion crushes and rends, and
all is hatred and bitterness: when biting upon wheel, a roar of steel or
(285)
Yeats had a particular reason for this bitterness, for he strove to establish a national
literature canon, based on an Irish style that would make Ireland “beautiful in memory”
(Autobiographies 126), that would be non-English and yet not provincial and restricted.
metaphors” (Autobiographies 251) – which Yeats criticized as not being good poetry
(Selected Criticism 256) – he was doomed to failure, and was “accused of being under
English influence” (Jeffars, Man and Poet 77). He was forced from the national literary
scene by older and more distinguished authors such as Charles Gavan Duffy, who
returned in the 1890s from Australia and, as the incarnation of the famous Young Ireland
Movement, gained control over the literary circles in Dublin. Duffy was taking,
15
however, a backward step – what he wanted, according to Yeats, was to “complete the
unpublished works by the generations of the 1840s and 1850s (Autobiographies 281).
Some of this nationalist literary activity, as represented by the younger and fresher
generation, moved to London, where Yeats lived from 1887 to 1891, the year he
founded the London Irish Literary Society, “which soon included every London Irish
author and journalist” (Yeats, Four Years 92). However, the precursor of this society
was likely the already well-established Rhymer’s Club in London, one of whose
members and co-founders was Yeats himself. The club had a Celtic flavour and
orientation (Foster 107), with a predominance of Irish membership, including the likes
of Yeats, Rolleston, Todhunter, Wilde and Lionel Johnson (Welch, Companion 274).
Johnson, who was neither born nor raised in Ireland, but who was the son of an Irish
officer, felt drawn to the Revival, and is often seen as one of the Revivalists writing
Society and placed O’Leary in its presidential chair. He was full of ambition: he was
busily planning a series of public lectures about national literature to be delivered by his
lifelong love, Maud Gonne (Jeffares 75), who could “draw great crowds out of the
slums by her beauty and sincerity” (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 5); he launched a project
for editing a series of books to be called “The Library of Ireland” (Foster 117).
However, while bringing these plans to realization, he found opponents not only in
Gavan Duffy, J.F. Taylor and the older generation – who must have seen him as a young
man too rude to follow tradition (Yeats, Autobiographies 279) – but also in his
contemporaries, who turned against him because, according to O’Leary, they “were
16
Clubs and societies associated with the National Literary Society and professing
cultural nationalism flourished in this period, and, in 1892, Yeats established the Irish
National Dramatic Society (Jeffares 119). Although founded earlier, the Gaelic Athletic
Association took an openly revolutionary stance in the 1890s (OCH 212); and, more
importantly, the Gaelic League was founded in 1893 by Douglas Hyde, “the greatest
folklorist that ever lived”, and one who “was to create a great popular movement”
(Yeats, Autobiographies 270). Although the League was not meant as a political
movement, Patrick Pearse, looking back, called it “the most revolutionary influence that
has ever come to Ireland” (qtd. in Hirsch, “Irish Peasant” 1122). This demonstrates the
importance of the cultural nationalism of the 1890s in defining what it meant to be Irish
through cultural deanglicization in general. Disputes arose between the Irish Ireland
branch, who thought it important to build national identity on the basis of language, and
the nationalists, who were mainly from protestant backgrounds and were opposed to this
utilitarianism with the Irish nobleness they believed still resided in folklore, mythology
and some kind of Celtic abstract transcendence to higher values (Kiberd 136-54).
Peasants were defined by the Revivalists as “the essence of an ancient, dignified Irish
culture”, and their “supernatural folklore and imaginative wealth” were “posed against
the modern industrial and commercial British spirit” (Hirsch, “Irish Peasant” 1120). In
such a context, folklore gained even greater importance than before in the creation of
Irish identity. In 1890, Douglas Hyde wrote Beside the Fire, the “first really scientific
treatment of Irish folklore” (Bramsbäck 12), and Yeats compiled and edited two books
of Irish folk tales: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888) and Irish Fairy
17
Tales (1892). His Celtic Twilight, “a big book about the commonwealth of faery” (The
Celtic Twilight 3), appeared in 1893; it was this book that gave the Revival its popular
nickname, “The Celtic Twilight” (OCH 319). Yeats also befriended Lady Augusta
Imaginations and Reveries 28) of the Revival, who, at the turn of the 20 th century,
and Fighting Men and Cúchalain Muirtheme. Further, she and Yeats co-founded the
Irish National Theatre, one of the main executive forces of the Revival.
18
2.2. Self-fashioning
Having outlined the historical and cultural development of the second half of the
19th century in Ireland, the ideas that ruled the era should be analysed in greater detail.
The term “self-fashioning” is often used in connection with the English Renaissance,
identity as a manipulable, artful process” (Greenblat 2). Ireland, however, having been
bereft of its national identity in the 16 th century through Elizabethan colonization, came
to this point of self-fashioning much later, and the process of conscious defining of an
identity did not begin until the 19th century; the parallels to the English Renaissance
caused the Revival to be called, sometimes, “the Irish Renaissance”. Due to the fall of
the Gaelic order (and the subsequent shattering of the original native culture) and the
“centuries of enforced provincialism” by the New English settlers (Kiberd 3), Ireland’s
different stage (Yeats, “Nationalism and Literature” 85) – a young nation whose identity
was yet to be formed via cultural nationalism. According to Prof. Hirsch, Irish writers
identity” (“Irish Peasant” 1121). The English, who were the conquerors – hence, had
power in their hands – did not feel the need to assert their national identity in literature,
whereas the Irish needed to assert some kind of national unity to get rid of the
powerless.”
“make Ireland once again interesting to the Irish” (Kiberd 3). It is, of course, impossible
if simplified for the present purposes, it can be said that there were two main strategies
19
which merged the natural and the artificial: supporting the notion of a kind of inherent
nationality rooted in the people themselves (which is unconscious); and dwelling on the
One of the two above-mentioned underlying concepts of this process was the
idea presented by Yeats in his lecture “Nationality and Literature”, published in 1893. In
this lecture, he claims that all nations and their literatures are ageing and growing from
epic to lyrical, like a tree which “grows from unity to multiplicity, from simplicity to
complexity” (“Nationality and Literature” 86). A young nation that has yet to be fully
formed and achieve national and cultural unity is still in the stage of an epic society, and
this is reflected in its literature, which ties the nation together. This literature has a
Society presents itself through the epic, while the epic installs and
maintains that social structure. Epic art is therefore internal to the social
Therefore, a society mirrors and is mirrored by the epic literature it produces. The
authors, by maintaining the epic canon, were supporting the epic social structure, which
led to an unconscious unity which was presumably felt by the people; an epic society is
characterized by the citizen’s “identification with his own social basis” of the national
unit he pertains to. This identification “was immediate, and was not a function of
reflective deliberation or individual choice or preference” (Dwan 2004, 208). This idea
of unity in an epic society corresponds to Michael Foucault’s theory about the character
20
(this could also be applicable to pre-Revival, epic Ireland). Since the pre-classical
episteme (as opposed to the classical one which is based on difference) is based on
similarity – it draws things together, seeks for any kind of kinship or a “shared nature”
Yeats argued that “alone, perhaps, among the nations of Europe we [Irish] are in
our ballad or epic age” (Yeats, “Nationality and Literature” 91): hence, the belief that
Ireland possesses an inherent unity which can be re-established through looking back to
the epic legends of the past – Yeats’s idea in the early 1890s was that “it was by looking
to the past that the poet served the present” because this way he reaches “the more
fundamental level” of the Irish people’s spirituality (Cairns, Richards 68-69). Yeats, as
well as O’Grady, believed that Ireland’s history is a downfall from heroic unity to
modern fragmentation (Whitaker 326). Therefore, to retrieve that unity, one must look
into the heroic past, where epic art can be found; this epic art will foster an epic society
held together by the aforementioned epic unity. Moreover, legends were ideal for this
purpose, not only because they determine the unified society, but also because they
[They are] made by no one man, but by the nation itself through a slow
process of modification and adaptation, to express its loves and its hates,
its likes and its dislikes. (qtd. in Dwan, "Ancient Sect” 204)
The basic idea behind this, though, was that poetry transcends subjective human
individuality and that poets are just representatives of a far greater force than
themselves. Yeats saw poetry as the “product of an anonymous tradition that operates
behind the backs of poets” (Dwan, “Ancient Sect” 205), and claimed that a people is
bound together by the “imaginative possessions” which it owns and by “stories and
poems which have grown out of its own life” (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 337).
21
The Young Irelanders adhered to this very principle when they wrote national
ballads, though perhaps in a much less metaphysical way than Yeats and his generation
did. John Todhunter’s invocation portrays how poets of the 1880s and 1890s reached
out in an attempt to grasp inspiration from the supernatural and the ancient:
From long ago. (“Mighty Melancholy Wind,” ll. 5-8, in Lyra Celtica
173)
the unearthly powers that will help him transcend into the world of ancient art. Ancient
art, as opposed to modern, is here treated as a unifying force not only because of its epic
integral unity, but also because it speaks to people’s deeper, unconscious identity.
According to Yeats, in modern times this effect can be gained through holding to
If Shelley had nailed his Prometheus or some equal symbol upon some
Welsh or Scottish rock, their [his and Morris’s] art had entered more
Ancient poetry and poetry sticking to folklore and myths therefore enters “more
intimately” and “more microscopically” into readers’ thoughts, thus affecting the
mentioned unconscious identity. Therefore, Yeats’s chief concern was to “nail” his
poetry to some Irish “rock”; in his essay “Ireland and the Arts,” he acknowledges that he
4
It is closely associated with the Sidhe (Yeats, “Notes” to Wind among the Reeds 79), supernatural
mythological beings who will be dealt with in the subsequent chapters of the present thesis.
22
“could not now write of any other country but Ireland” (Ideas of Good and Evil 329).
His writings about Ireland, however, differ from the poems written by his predecessors
and most of his contemporaries – poems such as Davis’s “A Nation Once Again” or
Lionel Johnson’s “Ways of War”; though strikingly different from Yeats’s poetry, these
poems by Davis and Johnson, too, emerge from the same idea of ancient unity:
However, while others’ poetry usually strove to affect the readers on the more
superficial level of boosting their national pride and inspiring them to embrace
nationalism, Yeats’s poetry was instead “preoccupied with Ireland” (Yeats, Poetry and
Ireland 3), because he wanted his poems to penetrate deeper into the people’s minds on
the metaphysical level; and, by touching something unconscious and mystical in them,
he was trying to form their conception of themselves as Irish and to revive in them the
feeling of unity.
This indirect appeal can also be found in the works of Ferguson, with Duffy
describing his poems as not “suggestive or didactic, but fired with a living and local
interest. They appeal to the imagination and passions, not to the intellects” (Duffy,
“Introduction” to The Ballad Poetry of Ireland 32). What Yeats admired in Ferguson’s
poetry was a kind of “savage, primitive truth,” a truth which was also, in his opinion,
one of the greatest values of Irish literature. Ferguson’s work based on mythology had
the essence of “barbarous truth”; and it was for this that Ferguson was labelled by Yeats
“the greatest Irish poet” (Yeats qtd. in Hirsch, “Irish Peasant” 1121). The importance of
truth and beauty for the Irish national cause was stressed even further in a 1903 essay,
23
published in the magazine Samhain, in which Yeats proclaimed them to be the
Beauty and truth are always justified of themselves, and that their
Consistent with the 1880s and 1890s being the era of Aestheticism in Ireland as in
Britain, “Beauty” was considered to be one of the touchstones holding a nation together,
and serving to represent and characterize it. The notion of beauty is often connected to
mythology: expressions such as “wild beauty” (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 324) and
“Eternal Beauty” (Russel, “Priest or Hero”) are attributed to Irish legends and Celtic
lore. Yeats’s first poems were described in the early 20th century by Forrest Reid as
possessing “a pagan and sensuous beauty” (Reid 36); and, for Yeats and others, beauty,
art and paganism were often connected, for the “secret fount” of inspiration and the
images illuminating the artist’s brain lay in the “ancestral beauty” (Russell,
Imaginations and Reveries 40). These legends, though they were set in the past, could
help construct the present and the future through art and beauty – “they contain so much
of a new beauty, that they may well give the opening century its most memorable
symbols” (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 295). The symbols installed through art would
help to introduce what modernity lacked, “a social, moral and aesthetic coherence”
(Dwan, “Ancient Sect” 201; italics added), a coherence which marked ancient Ireland.
However, this idea of inherent nationality embedded in an epic society was not
nearly enough to build a solid national identity upon, an identity which would be able to
inspire the fight for Ireland’s liberation. Although Yeats claimed that Ireland was in “her
24
epic or ballad age”, by the late 19 th century Irish national identity could no longer be
based only on the pre-classical episteme of similarity, and the notion of difference came
increasingly to play its role. National consciousness had to be created and Ireland had to
be defined somehow; and the definition of Ireland closest at hand was “not-England”.
the Elizabethan era, when these conquered people were seen as “the very antithesis” of
their English rulers (Kiberd 9). At that time, the English were going through the process
required, so that “the maintenance of subtle points of differentiation” would support and
sustain their “superordination” (Cairns, Richards 10). In the 19th century, however, Irish
nationalists availed themselves of this concept of otherness and used it to support their
nationalist cause. They “embraced […] the clichés of the Anglo-Saxonist theory” and
reinterpreted them in “a more positive light” (Kiberd 32), 5 and “innate Irish virtues
became defined against English vices” (Cairns, Richards 63). Therefore, the Irish found
Renan, ascribed to Ireland a feminine quality: he presented the “notion of the Teuton as
the energetic, brutal warrior completed by Celt, the producer of civility and culture”
(Cairns, Richards 45). From the basic dichotomy masculine vs. feminine, sprang a
number of other dichotomies – emotional vs. intellectual, traditional vs. modern, artistic
vs. practical, natural vs. industrial (Cairns, Richards 44-50; Kiberd 31-32). The Irish
were seen to have, as opposed to the English, “the Celtic genius, sentiment as its main
brains, with the love for beauty, charm, spirituality for its excellence” (Arnold qtd. in
5
This, however, sometimes led to the reinforcement of the stereotypes which the Revivalists sought to
dismantle, but according to Declan Kiberd, this “was an inevitable, nationalist phase through which they
and their country had to pass en route to liberation” (32).
25
Cairns, Richards 48).6 All these qualities defined here as purely “Irish” were
encompassed in ancient legends, which, moreover, were something that English culture,
to a large extent, lacked.7 Ireland assumed the mystical role in direct opposition to
secular England; the Irish are here associated with the Celtic race, which was seen as
having something magical about it, something which Renan described as “a love of
nature for herself, a vivid feeling for her magic, commingled with the melancholy a man
knows when he is face to face with her, and thinks he hears her communing with him
about his origin and is destiny” (qtd. in Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 270). The
mystical role assigned to Ireland predetermined building Irish identity via turning to a
heroic past, mythology and the supernatural – which was seen as something singularly
Irish, or perhaps Celtic. Through the legends they promoted, on one hand, all the
traditional, natural, poetic; on the other, they breached the concept of Ireland being
feminine – thus, subjected and passive – by depicting the heroic past with its warriors
and gods: the ancient warriors are characterized “as symbols of a once-independent
Ireland. The gods similarly represent the unpolluted Soul of Ireland, free from foreign
influence” (Marcus 318). Mythology enabled the Irish to combine the supposed positive
qualities inherent to the Celtic race (such as being poetical and artistic) with the rougher
features – for example, Oisín, one of the most famous heroes of the Fionn Cycle, was
described as “the warrior-bard” (O’Grady Selected Essays 109); and, more generally, to
be accepted into the Fianna warrior group, one had to be skilled in poetry as well as
6
Arnold, however, did not consider the Celts as capable of achieving freedom, or even autonomy. Nor
was it desirable from his point of view (Cairns, Richards 47-8). The role of Celticism was, in English
eyes, to sustain the subordinate position of Ireland – it was England’s Victorian middle-class wife.
7
At best, “English rulers appropriated Welsh origin stories, e.g. in the form of Arthurian mythology”
(Stroh 27).
26
The main enemies of the Irish at the turn of the 20 th century were “English ideas
and English culture rather than English soldiers” (Marcus 314). Clinging to legends and
folklore was felt to be the best weapon for fighting the so-called “West Britonism,” a
term used by Douglas Hyde to denote the Irish people’s acceptance of English values
and culture (Hyde, “Necessity for De-Anglicising”). The fairies and mythical heroes
were expected to save the Irish from becoming overly similar to their colonizers – as
already mentioned, the “supernatural folklore and imaginative wealth of the Irish
peasant” were used as a weapon “against the modern industrial and commercial British
spirit” (Hirsch, “Irish Peasant” 1120). This identity based on mythology and folklore
often had nothing to do with political preferences, but instead with cultural pertinence to
a certain tradition. Samuel Fergusson, from the political point of view a conservative
unionist, wrote epic poetry based on Irish legends, which strongly opposed all that Yeats
associated with West Britonism and what he derogatively terms the “leprosy of the
According to Cairns and Richards, English materialism, which was creeping into
Ireland, was fought, on the part of the Anglo-Irish, by trying to establish a society which
would be parallel to the Celtic social order: “Industrialism and materialism are enemies
to Ireland and will be fought via the concept of Ascendancy as the chieftains and their
people” (56). From the ideological point of view, modernity, too, became the enemy; for
in a nation defined “in terms of the past”, modernity poses “a threat to its ancestral
integrity” and therefore might undermine the idea of national identity (Cairns, Richards
65). The past was something the nation could cling to, and, moreover, “in these first
centuries the Celt made himself” (Yeats, Writings on Folklore 51), so it was to serve as
an example for re-creating the nation in the coming times. At the turn of the 20th century,
in his essay “Poetry and Tradition”, Yeats claimed that the Revivalists were forging “in
27
Ireland a new sword on our old traditional anvil for that great battle that must in the end
re-establish the old, confident, joyous world” (Poetry and Ireland 5). However,
historical accuracy was not the goal in this process. In the same essay Yeats admits that
it is “perhaps from this out an imaginary Ireland”, in whose service he labours (Poetry
and Ireland 1; italics added). It was important that history and tradition were depicted in
an appealing manner; being presented via myths, O’Grady claims, the ancient legends
can become “kind of a history a nation desires to possess” (O’Grady, Selected Essays,
41; italics added). The Irish identity was incomplete, and people lacked certain virtues,
because Ireland “lacked models for the development of its identity” (Marcus 81). The
nation needed myths in order to create the desired history, upon which they could built
their Irishness. According to Æ, mythical characters “begin to stir us with their power,”
and “Angus, Lu, Ossian, Deirdre, Finn etc, will be found to be each one the symbol of
Poets, who, in the late 19th century, brought these personifications of “enduring
qualities” back to life, posed as bards of the nation. Bards had a special rank in Celtic
Ireland there were two types of poets: praise-poetry oriented bards, and the filidh – a
professional class who had the status of “seers, teachers, advisors of the rulers and
prophets.” (MacCana 14-15). These two classes of poets merged; and, consequently, the
figure of a bard, performing all these functions, gained an extremely powerful position
in the society, and assumed a nation-forming character. Yeats, in an article from the
1890s, observes that “this power of the bards was responsible, it may be, for one curious
thing in ancient Celtic history – its self-consciousness” (Writings on Folklore 51). If the
19th century poets wanted to recreate the Irish “self-consciousness” once again, they had
to model themselves upon the example of the Celtic bards; hence the tendency of
28
Yeats’s to pose as a bard, which can be seen, for example, in his self-modelling into the
role of “the Celt” who is returning from London to Ireland to fulfil the dreams of the
National Literary Society (Yeats, Selected Criticism 17). Even though Yeats had no
Celtic ancestors whatsoever, in his essay “The Irish National Literary Society”, (which
is, in fact, a manifesto of his plans for Ireland in the early 90s), he refers to himself as
“the Celt.” He defines himself as Irish by drawing a link to his ancestral race, to which
he, however, does not belong from the ethnic point of view.8 He renounced the ethnic
delimitation of the Celtic race, and sought for their identity in “more nebulous terms”
(Cairns, Richards 67). Within these “nebulous terms” he, and other authors of the
period, assumed the role of the bard, which is reflected in the use of heroic and mythical
themes in the late 19th century poetry.9 The poetry of the 19th century bards often had the
character of a manifestation, and, although it spoke about the past, it was looking
towards the future – this stand is taken in Yeats’s manifesto poem “To Ireland in the
Coming Times” (Campbell 11) where he establishes the poet as a link in the continuum
of the nation’s history; in the older Yeats’s words from 1927, the poet is singing “of
8
Both his paternal and maternal ancestors came to Ireland from England in the 18 th and 19th centuries and
belonged to the middle class protestant Ascendancy (Jeffares Man and Poet).
9
It can be seen also in the diction of certain poems, which sometimes attempt to approach the style of the
Celtic masters of old; a good example of this adoption of poetic diction can be found in Ferguson’s
poems, who “was nearer [than young Yeats] to the epic tradition of the Gaelic poetry (Jeffares 38).
29
2.3. Role of Art in Ireland
Having touched upon the importance of art in the process of self-fashioning, the
principles underlying this important role should be elaborated. The process of re-
mythology, using art as a vehicle, is rooted in the idea, already briefly mentioned, that
“Art imitates Life” into “Life imitates Art”; Wilde draws an example from classical
Greece, explaining that “they [the Greeks] knew that Life gains from Art not merely
spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can
form herself on the very lines and colours of art” (Marcus 73). This conception gives
grounds to Æ’s idea that through depicting mythical characters that embody the very
virtues that Ireland lacked these virtues will actually be created. (Williams 315).
Lionel Johnson in his lecture “Poetry and Patriotism” when he asks: “After all, who is to
decide, what is, absolutely and definitely, the Celtic and Irish note?” (Johnson, Poetry
and Ireland 31). According to the popular opinion, based partly on the Renan /
Arnoldian Celticism, Celtic poetry is “drenched in the dew of natural magic” (Sharp 23)
and possesses a “strange, remote, far-away beauty in the music and in the colour
(Johnson Poetry and Ireland 31), “dream-like music” (Sharp 44); further, the Celtic
considered Celtic, had to have a certain transcendental value which would reach beyond
the crude reality into the supernatural and imaginary world of dreams and magic.
The art of the Young Ireland movement strove to represent the essence of
Irishness. They “had provided some simple images” to help build up models necessary
30
for the development of the Irish identity, which were lacking in Irish culture before,
(Marcus 81) and did “much to the credit of Irish nature”, even if not availing “wholly to
the advantage of Irish literature” (Johnson, Poetry and Ireland 28). The Young
Irelanders’ poetry came to be treated as the canon and the one and only truly Irish art; in
the words of Lionel Johnson, who shared many opinions on art with Yeats, “in the
poetry of the Nation and of ‘Young Ireland,’ … we have a fixed and unalterable
standard, whereby to judge all Irish poetry, past and present and to come” (Johnson,
Poetry and Ireland 21). This, however, led to certain rigidity and Yeats, having in mind
the future of Irish literature, was vigorously attacking their poetry, claiming the Young
Ireland writing to be exceedingly vague and propagandistic – the verses were full of
“vague, abstract words such as one finds in a newspaper” (Autobiographies 126). In his
opinion, this kind of popularity was but “fleeting”, as it was united “with politics and
economics” (Yeats qtd. in Marcus 75). Moreover, from the literary point of view, these
poems seemed to him and his followers written carelessly; composed in a “rush of
sentiment”, without paying much attention to “delicate graces of art”. Yet this very
quality made them be considered great art in the eyes of the nationalists because, by
“being unfettered as the Irish winds”, the verses could best express the nature of the
Yeats opposed the commonplace thought of the era that poets “should hiss at the
villain” and that “the greater the talent the greater the hiss” (Autobiographies 254); this
Now brooks his chain! now brooks his chain! (“The Dalcassians’ War-
31
Song” ll. 17-20 in The Spirit of the Nation 43)
These verses are trying to provide the aforementioned models for the development of
national identity, which would be based on heroic deeds of old – the poem referrs to the
battle of Clontarf where the Gaelic tribe of Dalcassians, led by Brian Boru, beat the
Danes (OCH 100, 135). There is nothing individual about the poem; it is a voice of a
nation heated by battle in times long ago. Through the use of questions and
exclamations the writer means to appeal directly to the reader and the general choral
tone is supposed to enable any reader to identify with the heroic warriors of old; which
the people in a more metaphysical way through the arts; in Ideas of Good and Evil, he
looks back to the past and claims that “in very early days” arts were “almost inseparable
from religion” (321). The artist “alone can know the ancient records and be like some
mystic courtier who has stolen the keys from the girdle of time” and he is “the Creator
of the standards of manners in their subtlety” (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 10); these
standards being necessary for self-possession, which arises from “deliberate shaping of
all things, and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion, into confusion or
dullness” (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 9). Drawing on Kiberd, self-possession was a
predisposition to freedom of mind and, consequently, the freedom of the Irish nation –
“personal liberation must precede national recovery” (Kiberd 124). The Irish “self”,
according to Yeats, was supposed to be created and shaped through truly good and noble
art, which would be deliberately crafted by the “Artificers of the Great Moment” (Yeats,
Poetry and Ireland 18), and through mastering the style – a notion which Yeats
understands in much broader terms than is usually implied by the word (Kiberd 120).
32
Poems such as the one quoted above lacked these qualities professed by Yeats, who,
which the Irish nation lacked, “but in a more profound and enduring way” (Marcus 81).
class protestant Ascendancy, could not stake upon Catholicism, as his friend Katharine
Tynan did; but he rather fell back upon “esoteric symbolism as a direct communion with
his fellow countrymen and via Celtic ‘Otherworldliness’, by-passing the influence of
their spirituality” (Cairns, Richards 68). With the support of Æ,10 who was named “the
spiritual inspirer of the Irish Literary Movement” (Graf 57), Yeats created a “kind of
mystical nationalism” which combined theosophy and paganism (Graf 53). According
to Æ, paganism was the one and only true religion of the Irish, and thus a force through
which one could best strike the right note with the people’s national identity; in his own
words “national sentiment seems out of date here [in Ireland], the old heroism
slumbers” because “alien thought and an exotic religion have supplanted our true ideals
and our natural spirituality” (Russell “Priest or Hero”). Paganism and fairy-lore is seen
The faery tales have ever lain nearer to the hearts of the people, and
whatever there is of worth in song or story has woven into it the imagery
handed down from the dim druidic ages. (Russell, “Priest and Hero”)
10
Yeats together with Æ had an ambition to create an Irish magical order, The Castle of Heroes. A few
other Golden Dawn members, particularly Yeats’s uncle George Polexfen, and MacGregor Mathers were
involved; the rituals of the Castle of Heroes were parallel to those of the Order of the Golden Dawn, but
based on Celtic mythology and neopaganism (Greer 89).
11
This thought corresponds to the passage on the epic integrity dealt with earlier in the previous chapter –
the legends and folklore, being handed on from generation to generation, form a continuous thread linking
the 19th century Ireland to the past; and, therefore, apart from creating the nation’s ancestral line, they
retrieve the mentioned “epic ballad age” (Yeats, Nationality and Literature 98), with its unconscious
adherence to this ancestral line.
33
However, Yeats was not interested in simply parroting old legends and folk tales;
imagined it, could be created “only by a free use of what was at hand” (Alspach 886);
which meant that he was mingling old legends with other Celtic elements, creating his
own mystical Celtic Order and endowing it with individual poetic beauty, in order to
In Irish literature on mythology and folk beliefs –whether written by Yeats and
his circle, or by earlier writers – two leading themes can be discerned: the heroic and the
transcendental. Both these strains serve to build different values necessary for self-
fashioning a national identity. Heroic motifs would obviously give Ireland a “history
which a nation desires to possess” (O’Grady, Selected Essays, 41) and break the
widespread commonplace that the Irish are a feminine race who have “nothing
masculine in the character” (Moran qtd. in Cairns, Richards 50). As was mentioned
before, the heroic aspect of legends breaches the undesirable aspects of Celticism (the
alleged subordinate femininity of the Celtic race); but, at the same time, the
supernatural, which abounds in the heroic age, would support the claim that the Irish
nation is metaphysical, artistic and connected to nature (the positive qualities brought
that Irish history is a downfall “from a unified heroic age” to the contemporary
fragmented nation (Whitaker 326), Æ, too, exalted the heroic character of Ancient
Ireland:
It has been so from the beginning, from the time of the cursing of Tara,
where the growing unity of the nations was split into fractions, down to
34
With this perspective, it was only natural for the nationalists to turn the attention of art
to motifs which would evoke ancient history. The very names of ancient heroes became
symbols of free Ireland which were supposed to “stir” the reader “with their power”
(Russell qud. in Williams 315) – to name but a few, Cuchullain 12, the main hero-warrior
of the Ulster cycle and according to Æ “the most complete ideal of Gaelic chivalry”
(Russell, Imaginations and Reveries 30); the warrior and king Fergus; the leader of the
Fianna, Finn McCoill, and the members of the Fianna, Oisín, Osgar, Caoilte, Goll; gods
Lugh or Nauda, who in times of old were warriors and heroes too. However, especially
at the turn of the 20th century, the heroic theme was more restricted to prose than to
Gregory’s Cúchulainn Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904), are a
fine example of the popularization of heroic myths in prose. In poetry, though, heroic
motifs are present (primarily through Ferguson’s poems and translations), but later on in
the 19th century, the heroic theme is almost always entwined with transcendental motifs.
This can be noted in Yeats’s poetry in particular: his heroes always get, or try to get, to
some other level of being; perhaps experiencing a different kind of life to what they had
experienced before, whether through connection with supernatural powers, or, less
directly, through love, madness or wisdom. With Oisín and his journey to the land of the
Everliving, this transcendental theme is most obvious; but also in such poems as
“Madness of King Goll”, “Fergus and the Druid” or “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea”,
the warriors and kings are dealt with from a non-traditional perspective; Yeats stresses a
change that has come upon them, or perhaps they are depicted as overcoming certain
boundaries of their hitherto lives – they are “drifting like a river / from change to
12
In the early 20th century Cuchulain became a role-model and in many ways was a symbol of the Easter
Rising in 1916; a continuous line was drawn from the ancient hero through Christ to the revolutionaries of
the 18th century (Kiberd 196, 212). Cuchulain was the personal hero of P.H. Pearse – in Æ’s words, during
the Easter Week there was an imagination in Pearse’s soul and “that of a hero who stood against the host”
(Kiberd 196) and in a poem of Yeats’s, “Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side” when fighting at the
Post Office in Dublin (“Statues” 25).
35
change”13 (“Fergus and the Druid” 31-2). Yeats also combined folk beliefs and fairy-lore
with the ancient myths, dissolving the border between what is considered a heroic
served as dual sources for a new Irish literature. It was Yeats’s typical
Yeats tried to stress both the transcendental and heroic themes in mythology,
intertwining various influences of his predecessors; while taking from “Ferguson his
pleasure in heroic legend”, “from Allingham and Walsh” he took “their passion for
country spiritism” (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 4). The theme of transcendence, side by
side with the heroic theme, served to provide the lacking models for the development of
the national identity, but in a less direct way – instead of imitation, symbolism is the
driving force here. The turn of the 20th century was a transitory period in general and for
Ireland all the more – writers were looking from the “nineteenth century to the coming
times of the last century of a millennium” (Campbell 10); and the very depiction of
transcendence in arts could symbolize the step the Irish people, as individuals and as a
nation, were about to take. In real life they were striving to transcending the limits of
life as it used to be, walking towards personal liberation and accordingly towards a
complex national identity; and too, the transcendence of Ireland as a province into
Interestingly, Yeats and his literary circle displayed a tendency to push Irish
people towards mysticism by depicting them in a particular way: they started a “process
13
There is an interesting iteration of this motif in Yeats’s later poetry. The motif of a flowing changing
river is used in his poem on the “Easter 1916”, where it symbolizes the “living stream” of life and
constant change – not only the water is moving, but even a “shadow of cloud on the stream / changes
minute by minute” (49-50); change and the flow of life was a very important theme in Yeats’s later poetry.
36
of turning the peasants into a single figure of literary art (“the peasant”)” (Hirsch, “Irish
Peasant” 1121); remaking the Catholic peasant into a “noble peasant” or a mystic Celt
(Cairns, Richards 67) was an act of transcendence, in which “literature becomes an act
“essence of an ancient, dignified Irish culture”, the Revivalists created an image they
could set against the English stereotype (Hirsch, “Irish Peasant” 1121), and which
would serve as a romantic symbol of Irish life being anti-commercial, deep, pastoral and
mystic (Hirsch, “Irish Peasant” 1122). This peasant figure fabricated trough art was to
become the audience of the art written at that time – a noble peasant “in grey
Connemara clothes” (“Fisherman” 4).14 In the second half of the 19 th century, peasants
were transcended into symbols, which were supposed to serve as cornerstones to the
Irish national identity. The poet was creating myths through his art, which would carry
presence beyond the borders of harsh reality and thus, at the same time, recreate reality;
Yeats’s idea of a poet was both as a “solipsist and communal mythmaker” (Hirsh,
“Hanrahan” 882).
Moreover, Yeats believed that the Irish, having preserved “a gift of vision”
(Yeats, Introduction to Secret Rose, in Red Hanrahan 78), were still able to feel and
perceive as men in times of old could, when their souls were “naked to the winds of
heaven” (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 51); thus possessing a character which is closer
to mystical transcendence than that of the “more hurried and successful nations” (Yeats,
Introduction to Secret Rose, Stories of Red Hanrahan 78). Plunging into mysticism in
literature was parallel to looking into darkness; and in Ireland, according to Yeats, this
14
In 1916 Yeats wrote about this fabricated peasant that he is “a man who does not exist / a man who is
but a dream” (“Fisherman” 35-36).
37
No shining candelabra have prevented us from looking into the darkness,
and when one looks into the darkness there is always something there.
Therefore, when employing Celtic and mystical themes in his poetry, Yeats was
reaching out beyond the known reality, to find “something there”, make his art even
more transcendental, and at the same time available particularly to the Irish nation.
time. The poem which is perhaps the clearest manifestation of this thought in the 1890s
15
is “Apologia Addressed to Ireland in the Coming Days.” This poem, written in 1892,
later became the closing poem of the 1895 collection The Rose, in which Yeats first
combined nationalism and occultism (Parkinson 19); the ancient Irish is blended here
The poem was written as a manifesto of Yeats’s ambition to become the Irish
wrong” (2-3). He places himself into the posteriority of the most famous Irish poets:
“Nor may I less be counted one / With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson” (17-18). The poem is
very conscious of the role of art, which transcends time. Art, in general, links the past
and the “coming times” of the future; furthermore, having in mind the rebirth of the
Irish nation, it also brings back the “beginnings of history of the world which, even at
that time, still contained Ireland” (Campbell 13). Artists are those who can sing “of
things discovered in the deep, / where only body’s laid asleep” (21-22), because of the
power of art, which connects all, and which also transcends reality; for it brings alive
the supernatural in this world – “For elemental creatures go / about my table to and fro”
(23-24). Art can, according to Yeats, combine various strains of thought, such as the
occult, folk and mythological – the “elemental beings” and “wizard things” are melded
15
Later know as “To Ireland in the Coming times.”
38
in one with “faeries dancing under moon” and with druidic rites; as they all come out of
the Anima Mundi, the racial memory which stores all the experience and thought
(Parkinson 10-11). Art enables people to reach out into the Anima Mundi, understand
and interpret it. Moreover, adding a new occult dimension to the mythological and folk
materials Yeats was handling in his poetry enabled him to reach “beyond nationality into
universality” (Jeffares Commentary 47). In his essay “Ireland and the Arts”, Yeats
argues that arts in Ireland “will find two passions ready to their hands, love of the
Unseen Life and love of country” (Ideas of Good an Evil 322); which is a principle
Yeats adheres to in his own poetry, combining the “Unseen Life” – with roots in
continue writing poetry for the Irish cause, addressing the future people of Ireland16:
Art, to be able to become great, must be personal; “some actual man” has to be
perceived in a beautiful piece of art (Ronsley 7). That is why Yeats must “cast his heart”
into his poems, often indiscernibly mingling the personal and the national (unlike the
propagandist poets of the age); this tendency of combining the national and the personal
in his poetry is typical of the collection following the “Apologia” The Wind Among the
Reeds (1899), which can be considered the most Celtic, as for imagery. The mentioned
16
A poem which is similarly looking towards his future readers is included in the Wind among the Reeds
and it is titled “The Fish”; the fish symbolizing Yeats’s thoughts or words. Although now, at the moment
of writing, they are not yet seen and appreciated, “The people of coming days will know / about the
casting of my net” (3-4). Fish are a peculiar motif in Yeats’s work (seen as symbols of thoughts, words, or
perhaps poems) and in Celtic mythology in general – they symbolize wisdom (Monaghan 196) and they
can be seen as messengers to the Otherworld: in a poem by Yeats “A Man who Dreamt of Faeryland” it
were fish who “sang what gold morning and evening sheds” (8) are in the Otherworld and aroused in the
fisherman the desire to transcend the possibilities of the world he lives in. This symbolism, mythological
on one hand, Yeats’s own on the other, emphasizes the transcendental value of art – fish being works of
art, which open new horizons for the reader.
39
“red rose bordered hem” Yeats claims to follow in his poetry alludes to the central
symbol used in the whole collection The Rose. It is a vague and complex symbol which
“combines physical and spiritual, pagan and Christian”; it was an important symbol in
the Order of the Golden Dawn; in Irish folklore, Rose was the name of a female
“the Rose” became a mystical symbol for Yeats, denoting spiritual and intellectual
Transcendence in the art of Yeats’s circle was manifested through themes which
dwell on the brink of the supernatural: poems dealing with the fairies and their natural
world, humans crossing to the Otherworld, with all the joy and sorrow it may bring,
fairies and old Celtic gods serving as guides of the souls of these chosen humans; or
often the transcendence can be of a less supernatural, but nonetheless mystical, value –
achieving something, or perhaps reaching towards one’s higher self through love,
wisdom, art and poetry. The purpose of these poems, too, was supposed to become
something new, special and transcendental which should actually bring Ireland through
her “Great Moment” (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 18)18; as Yeats declared in his
once cold and passionate, daring long premeditated act” and the Irish people, “bitter
17
This symbol was not restricted to Yeats’s poetry; it played a role in his prose as well – two of his prose
collections, The Secret Rose and Rosa Alchemica, bear the symbol in the title and, in a number of stories,
the symbol appears. Interestingly, the very expression “red rose bordered hem” is mentioned in one of his
short stories, “The Crucifixion of the Outcast” and connected to Irish art; a gleeman, who is a modern
version of a Gaelic bard, talks about his life as an artist: “And I have been the more alone upon the roads
and by the sea because I heard in my heart the rustling of the rose-bordered dress of her who is more
subtle than Aengus, the Subtle-hearted, and more full of the beauty of laughter than Conan the Bald, and
more full of the wisdom of tears than White-breasted Deirdre, and more lovely than a bursting dawn to
them that are lost in the darkness” [italics added] (“The Crucifixion of the Outcast” in Stories of Red
Hanrahan 96-7). Here the “rustling of the rose bordered dress” seems to be an inspiration for the
gleeman, and the lady wearing the dress seems to be his Gaelic muse, more divine than all the gods and
ancient heroes.
18
Which, however, a few years later, at the beginning of the 20 th century, Yeats bitterly claims not to have
achieved: “Ireland's great moment had passed, and she had filled no roomy vessels with strong sweet
wine, where we have filled our porcelain jars against the coming winter.” (Yeats, Poetry and Ireland 18)
40
beyond all the people of the world” will get through their art “nearest to the honeyed
41
3. Analytical part
3.1. Otherworld
As a result of art being considered a vehicle of transcendence of the Irish nation,
folklore the very motifs of transcendence in order to stress the idea. It can be claimed
that poems drawing from mythology were to lead people into the world of mythology,
or perhaps the Otherworld, and thus create the feeling of adherence to an ancient nation;
One of the most transcendental motifs that can be found in Irish literature is the
and the interpretations of it in literature vary even more. There is no doubt that Celts
believed in life after death (MacCana 123) and the Otherworld is sometimes interpreted
as the Elysian Fields, subsuming the land of the dead (MacKillop). However, more
commonly it is seen as the realm of ancient gods – the Thuata Dé Danann, or “Tribes of
the goddess Danu”, who, according to the 11th century manuscript Book of Invasions,
used to inhabit Ireland before they were defeated by the mortals and consequently
withdrew to the Otherworld. This world transcends “limitations of human time” as well
as “spatial definition” (MacCana 124); and therefore the term “Otherworld” is rather
place, situated beyond the Western sea, as an underwater land, or a domain within hills
or mounds – so called fairy raths (MacCana 124; Bramsbäck 48). Sometimes, on the
other hand, it is a “realm beyond senses” (MacKillop), a world existing “beyond our
immediate reality”, but “contiguous with our world” – a kind of alternative parallel
reality, where deities, fairies and beloved dead dwell (Monaghan, “Introduction” 13;
42
370). It may reach into our world as a house appearing and disappearing suddenly 19
(MacCana 124) or as the aforementioned fairy mounds, which are often considered to
be portals into this alternative reality (Monagham 176,177). But whether as a physical
place, or a realm coexisting with this world, but beyond our senses, the Otherworld is a
realm of eternal bliss, peace, and plenitude, where death or old age do not enter:
“It is the country is most delightful of all that are under the sun; the trees
are stooping down with fruit and with leaves and with blossom. Honey
and wine are plentiful there, and everything the eye has ever seen; no
wasting will come on you with the wasting away of time; you will never
The blissful character of eternal beauty is emphasised in the other common names used
for the Otherworld – Tír-na-n- og, meaning “country of the Young” (Yeats, Fairy and
Folk Tales 197) or The Land of the Living.20 Also, Tír-na-n- og was in the popular
culture of the 19th century sometimes identified with mythological sites Mag Mall
(Gaelic for “plain of delight”), where “life is endlessly joyous and sweet” (Monaghan
And they called it Hy- Brasail, the isle of the blest. (Griffin, “Hy-Brasil –
The Isle of the Blest2,” ll. 1-4 in Fairy and Folk Tales 209)
The Otherworld is seen as a part of Ireland, where, according to Yeats’s essay “Irish
Folklore, Legend and Myth”, “this world and the other are not widely sundered”
19
A visit of such a house by Finn and his companions is depicted in the chapter “Hospitality of Cuanna’s
House” (Lady Gregory 181-183).
20
Interestingly enough, Celts did not find any inconsistency in joining the land of the dead in the Elysian
sense of an Underworld and the Land of the Living “as two aspects of the same Otherworld” (MacCana
129).
43
(Writings on Folklore 58). This view emphasises Ireland’s picture as a nation possessing
practical English.
Under that woven changeless roof of boughs. (“The Man who Dreamt of
Faeryland” 9-12)
Perhaps the importance of this theme is caused by the frustrations of Yeats’s personal
love life with Maud Gonne; unable to find love in the real world of mortals, he views
the Otherworld as a place to gain it – as can be seen in the following verses from a
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;
(9-10)
Frustrated by his unrequited love, he endows his heroes with his own desire for
immortal love – they seek the “love that the gods give” and which is “the soft fire / That
shall burn time when times have ebbed away” (Yeats, The Shadowy Waters 19); often
the mortal heroes who enter the Otherworld are taken there by their fairy lover, which is
a common motif in Irish mythology and folklore generally, and not being restricted only
to Yeats’s work.22
21
“Danaan shore” means the Otherworld here; as the home of the mentioned Thuata Dé Danann, the
godlike nation who allegedly lived in Ireland before the Celts. They will be dealt with in more detail in
the next chapter of the present thesis.
22
In folklore, this motif is represented by a fairy mistress who steals away the most handsome man and
most brilliant poet; or, less often, a maiden is carried away to the Fairy world by a fairy king (Monagham
175-5) or by “the handsomest young man” (“Host of Air” 26) from the fairy folk, as happens in the poem
“Host of Air”, based on a folk ballad Yeats heard from an old woman in Sligo (Jeffares, Commentary 55).
In mythology, the most famous couples finding love in the Otherworld are Oisín and Niamh, who get
44
3.1.1. Otherworld as a physical place
a physical place is generally depicted in voyage literature as far away islands in the west
(Bramsbäck 48, Mac Cana 124) and perhaps the most typical mythological story of this
kind served as a template for one of Yeats’s first famous poems The Wanderings of
Oisín, which depicts Oisín’s journey to Tír-na-nOg. Oisín was the son of Finn, the
central character of the Fenian cycle, who entered the Otherworld by becoming the
lover and husband of Niamh, one of the Ever-living who fell in love with him. 23 Having
spent some time in the untroubled land (in fact three hundred years, but this he does not
know), but still not finding what he was looking for, he returns to Ireland to find
everything changed and the heroic age gone. Here he recounts his journey to the
Otherworld to St. Patrick and from the dialogue the reader learns much about Tír-na-
nOg. Yeats creates the otherworldly feeling through appealing to senses by the use of
colourful images. According to Cairns and Richards, he uses colours “to evoke moods
with a repetitiveness which seems almost didactic” (67) and thus he creates a world
“It quite frankly has nothing to give, but its beauty, and that beauty is
The other voyage story in Yeats’s work which is depicting mortals in pursuit of
the Otherworld is dramatic – The Shadowy Waters, a play whose first drafts reach back
into the early 1880s, with many revisions until the final Acting Version from year 1911
married in the Otherworld and live there happily for three hundred years; and the beautiful fairy Fand and
Cúchulainn, who follows her into the Otherworld, leaving his mortal wife at home. About the story of the
latter couple Yeats claimed to be “one of the most beautiful of our old tales”, which shows how deeply
influenced he was by these mythological love stories, mingling them with his personal life in his poems.
23
Sometimes she is seen as a beautiful fairy queen ruling over Hy Brasil, sometimes as the daughter of
the sea god Mannamán mac Lir (Monaghan 252, 358); but in Yeats’s version she is the daughter of the
love god Angus, which sheds even more light on the importance of the role of love in Yeats’s poetry
concerning the Otherworld.
45
(Bramsbäck 30). The first published version, a dramatic poem printed out as a book in
1900, will be dealt with in this work, as it is closest of all versions to Yeats’s early
poetics. The main mortal hero Forgael is also searching the seas in hope of finding the
Otherworld, which he assumes to be his destiny, after it has appeared to him as a vision
in a dream. The story of Forgael displays just his unyielding desire – another motif
strongly connected to transcendental themes in Yeats’s poetry – and he never reaches the
Otherworld; the play ends in his aspirations for an endless search, while the reader
three parts of the poem correspond to the three Islands of the Otherworld. Traditionally,
is used in folklore with magical connotations. Yeats, in his compilation of Irish fairy
tales, describes Tír-na-nOg as “triple – the island of the living, the Island of victories
and the underwater land” (Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales 197). The sources of Yeats’s
version of the legend were mainly translations of two poems written in Gaelic: the
traditional form of the legend – the 12 th century Colloquy of Old Men, which is a
dialogue between St. Patrick, Oisín and yet another hero Caoilte, both of whom, owing
to their adventures in the Otherworld, survived to the Christian era, creating a “mood of
nostalgic recollection of past glories” (MacCana 106); yet even a greater source of
borrowings – the framework of the poem as well as certain motifs and images –was
Michael Comyn’s 18th century Gaelic poem “The Lay of Oisín on the Land of Youth”
(Alspach 849-853). One of the major alternations Yeats made in his version of the
legend is the triple vision of the Otherworld – in Comyn’s version the third island is
missing. (Alspach 851). Yeats made his hero go to three islands – first the Island of the
Living (or the Island of Youth), which is a traditional Elysian blissful Otherworld,
46
where “tangled creepers every hour / blossom in some new crimson flower” and joy and
The next island Oisín and Niamh visit is the Island of Dancing and Victories. Oisín
spends the next hundred years in battle and feasting – on this island they encounter a
chained maiden and a demon who holds her captive. Oisín fights him for a day, rests
and feasts for the next four days “until the fourth morn saw emerge / his new-healed
shape” (II, 220-21), causing their life on this island to be “with no dreams nor fears / nor
languor or fatigue: an endless feast / an endless war” (II, 222-25). The ever-rising
demon can symbolize patterns of history and cycles of life in general; a theme never too
old for Yeats to explore. However, in the 19 th century the chained maiden could have
alluded to the subdued Ireland, which, having actually been named after the female
goddess Ériu (160), was often personified as a maiden; in this poem, it would be the
Hearing Aedh touch the mournful string of gold. (Book II, 85-7)
Aedh is a name common in Celtic mythology, but in this poem it probably refers to the
god of death, whose harp brings death to anyone who hears him play (Jeffares,
Commentary 524).24 Later, in the collection The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats uses the
name Aedh as his poetic alter ego, “a principle of mind”, as he calls him (The Wind
Among the Reeds 73), and the poetic persona speaking through many of his poems in
24
However, in connection with the national interpretation, Aedh can be seen as Áed Eangach, who was to
be, according to a prophecy, a long expected king and deliverer of Ireland (CE 4).
47
The Wind Among the Reeds.25 The last verse: “Hearing Aedh touch the mournful string
of gold,” can, therefore, imply the power of a bard to change things and transcend the
power of gods and demons; if the maiden is seen as Ireland suffering hardship, the verse
could refer to the power of poetry and art to create the new and free Ireland.
The last Island of Yeats’s Otherworld depicted in The Wanderings of Oisin is the
Island of Forgetfulness – the part missing from Comyn’s original, and added by Yeats.
On this island, whose atmosphere, with its “spacious woods” and “dripping trees”, is
probably most uncanny of all the islands, the lovers encounter a “monstrous slumbering
folk” (Book III, 27). These are sleeping giants with “faces alive with such beauty” (III,
51), curiously possessing some bird features. In this part of the book, Yeats probably
made use of the popular legend about heroes sleeping in a cave, which he was
doubtlessly familiar with; he actually incorporated into his compilation of Irish fairy
tales of 1888 a story “The Giant’s Stairs” in which a young man discovers sleeping
giants in a cave.26 Oisín and Niamh fall asleep as well,27 and in their dream, kings of old,
heroes, and demons are “driving the dust with their throngs”; here Yeats might be, once
again, touching upon the issue of art and inspiration in general – Oisín was
characterized as the “warrior-bard” in the Fianna (O’Grady Selected Essays 109; italics
added). Otherworldly dreams Oisín is dreaming bring him nearer to the heroes and
characters from the legendary past; in the same way otherworldly visions endow the
25
In the notes to the original edition of The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats explains that Aedh, being “the
Irish for fire, is fire burning by itself . . . and he is the myrrh and frankincense that the imagination offers
continually before all that it loves” (The Wind Among the Reeds 73-74).
26
While in folk tales, the sleeping heroes are often giants, in mythology they are interpreted as sleeping
members of the Fianna, who one day will “rise up as strong and as well as they ever were” (Lady Gregory
292).The fusion of the Fenians and the giants in this meme is caused by the tendency of pagan heroes
from mythological cycles to grow “bigger and bigger, until they turned into the giants” in folklore
(Peasants 257).
27
They are lulled to sleep by the swaying of a branch with bells, which is an otherworldly motif from a
different story in Irish mythology – King Comrac was given such a bell-branch by the god Mannanan and
used it to lull people to sleep or soothe their sorrow - “no one on earth would keep in mind any want, or
trouble, or tiredness, when that branch was shaken for him” (Gregory 87). Yeats obviously found this
motif very appealing, as he used a similar one in his other Otherworld story The Shadowy Waters – the
hero Forgael possesses a magical harp which enables him to manipulate his companions, making them
feel as he wants them to. Motifs like this emphasise the power and the importance of the bard.
48
poet with inspiration from legends and myths. They spent there another hundred years,
So lived I and lived not, so wrought I and wrought not, with creatures of
dreams,
In a long iron sleep as a fish in the water goes dumb as a stone. 28 (Book
III, 95-6)
The form of the poem – dialogue of Oisín and St. Patrick and the first person
narration – makes the depiction of the Otherworld much more personal and credible;
thus avoiding a mere narrative description, but presenting a clash of the mythical pagan
world and the Christian Ireland of the 5th century – which can be also seen as a clash of
one’s dreams and memories with reality. This gives the poem a more individual voice
and the hero is pursued by a modernistic feeling of alienation and estrangement from the
community in which he lives. According to David Dwan, he “is not the last
representative of an epic integrity, but is the living embodiment of its demise” (“Ancient
Sect” 209), which, perhaps, enables easier identification of the hero with the Irish
reader, who, too, is estranged from their country and community by not having a
conscious national identity and not feeling pertinence to the Irish nation. The epic tale
unfulfilled desire; in the second part of the poem, when Oisín grows homesick at
leaving the Island of Dancing and Victories, he asks his fairy lover:
49
And on my bosom laid her weeping head. (Book II, 248-250)
From The Wanderings of Oisin, and from other poems dealing with the
Otherworld, it can be clearly seen that the motif of an island is one of the most
important motifs constituting the image of the Otherworld in Yeats’s poetry. There is
something mystical about islands, as they emerge from either a lake or the sea, both of
which often hide an unknown world underneath.29 They are detached from the land and
the mundane reality – in one poem Yeats describes the Fairyland to be “upon a woven
world-forgotten isle” (“Man who dreamt of Faeryland” 8). In mythology and folklore
islands in general are often seen as “liminal places” (Monaghan 264), which means that
they belong neither quite to the Otherworld, nor to our world; they are points of contact
between the worlds, and, thus, were extremely important in myths and rituals of the
Yeats also views islands as places of refuge, which gives them even more
otherworldly qualities; since the Otherworld is seen as the ultimate retreat where, if
chosen, one can fly before sickness, death or change. In a letter to Katrine Tynan he
wrote that in his semi-autobiographical novel John Sherman he made one of his
characters always seek refuge and peace on a little island – living there alone whenever
he felt troubled; which was also, as a matter of fact, a dream of the young Yeats himself
(Jeffares Commentary 34). On wild islands one could see “what lay hidden in himself”
(Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate 176), which makes it a symbol of inner transcendence.30
29
In The Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, there are stories mentioning an underwater land,
such as “The Soul Cages” or “The Legend of O’Donoghue”; in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting men,
for example, Diarmuit, the handsomest man of the Fianna, pursues “the daughter of King Under-Wave”
into an underwater land (218-223).
30
This statement actually referred to an actual person – Yeats’s friend, J.M. Synge; the whole quote goes
as follows: “He was a drifting silent man full of hidden passion, and loved wild islands, because there, set
out in the light of day, he saw what lay hidden in himself” (Yeats, The Cutting of an Agate 176). However,
the thought of an island being a place of inner transcendence can be applied more generally, especially
when taking into consideration how islands are portrayed in Yeats’s poetry and in mythology as such.
50
Moreover, Ireland itself being an island, this otherworldly motif has a special
place among mythological motifs which were supposed to create the national
consciousness – on certain levels it implicitly identifies the vision of Ireland with the
Otherworld; thus creating an imaginary vision of Ireland, which people could cling to as
to an ideal, where wondrous stories are set, and where all is possible. Yeats believed that
these stories and “images once created and associated with river and mountain” will
work as a unifying force and “deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist
(Autobiographies 240).
Islands play a crucial role in Yeats’s early poetry in general; in his perhaps most
quoted early poem “The Lake Island of Innisfree”, an island is the central motif, which
comes to be seen as a retreat from the commercial world to the world of natural beauty;
and although in this poem it is a real existing island from Yeats’s childhood, it is
described in a rather otherworldly manner, and possesses certain attributes which are, in
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning, to where the cricket sings;
It is described as a place of peace, which soothes the poet’s soul, and might invoke the
feeling of timeless bliss. But more interestingly, Yeats is using the very same motifs
which are recurring in his writing on the Otherworld: 32 drops (and generally the sound
of dripping) – this motif keeps iterating throughout The Wanderings of Oisin; curious
31
The particular story Yeats had in mind when writing this statement was “some new Prometheus
Unbound”, writing of which was his ambition at that time. He meant to tie it to the Irish countryside and
mythology, from which “all the nations had their first unity”; it would have “Patrick or Columbkil, Oisín
or Fion, in Promethous’ place; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro-Patric or Ben Bulben (Autobiographies
240).
32
Some of these will be dealt with later in the chapter.
51
light which creates an unearthly shimmering impression – midnight’s “glimmer” and
noon’s “purple glow”; “the linnet’s wings” – the motif of birds carries a lot of
transcendental value; and “veils of the morning” – a veil of mist can conceal the
Seeing Otherworld as an island usually entails the motif of crossing water. The
original classic voyage to the Otherworld in Irish literature is a Gaelic poem The Voyage
of Bran composed in the late 7th or 8th century (Mac Cana 72; OCL 257), which
established Bran as the perhaps most famous sailor in Irish literature. In Yeats’s work,
crossing the sea plays a major role both in The Shadowy Waters33 as in The Wanderings
of Oisin. In the former, water is depicted as “shadowy”, “misty” (26), “cloudy” (46),
“empty” (32), “waste” (45), (though Forgael knows there is something awaiting him)
throughout the play; in the latter, the sea gets more hostile gradually: Oisín and Niamh
“galloped over the glossy sea” (I, 132) in the first book, whereas in the third book there
was “foam underneath us, and round us, wandering and milky smoke” (III, 1). The
hostility and haziness of the waters the heroes have to cross to get to the Otherworld
stresses the immediate unattainability of what they are reaching for. In his notes to The
Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats himself says that the sea can be described as “a symbol of
the drifting indefinite bitterness of life” and that he believes “there is like symbolism
intended in the many Irish voyages to the islands of enchantment” (Yeats, “Notes” to
The Wind Among the Reeds 90). In modern times, crossing the sea may be interpreted as
Crossing the sea is depicted as timeless – the sailors on the ship are losing count
of time and Oisín claims twice he does “not know if days / or hours passed by” (19-20).
Interestingly, in both works there is a Christian motif of walking over the water, which
points out to the omnipotence of the otherworldly beings, linking the Celtic Otherworld
33
The Voyage of Bran actually served as an inspiration for Yeats’s The Shadowy Waters (Bramsback 33).
52
to Christian symbolism – Niamh’s horse gallops over the sea; and in The Shadowy
Waters, the sailors claim that “something that was bearded like a goat / Walked on the
waters” (14) and bid their captain Forgael look for the Otherworld.34
Eden-like in certain respects (Allen 94). The Otherworld, and everything it can stand for
outside the world of mythology, is somewhere beyond reach; and the water is a
metaphoric division between the reality and the stage – whatever it may be – to which
the character, the poet, the reader, and perhaps the whole nation are attempting to
transcend. In The Shadowy Waters, Forgael is sailing across misty seas “to seek / His
heart's desire where the world dwindles out” (14) – the water being the barrier between
his desire and the reality. When he speaks about his discontent with the real world and
earthly love, he even uses the motif of water to express the distance he feels towards
mortal women: “When I hold / A woman in my arms, she sinks away / As though the
waters had flowed up between” (The Shadowy Waters 19). The motif of a journey in
Yeats’s work is “the archetypal, mythic, or ritual journey, emblematic of man's course
through life toward some ideal or transcendent goal” (Allen 93) and crossing water
seems to symbolize overcoming the barrier which hinders the move to a next stage; 35
whether for an individual, or for the whole nation and its consciousness.
34
Goats were considered fairylike animals; an example in the folklore is the Irish fairy “pooka”, having
it’s origin in the gaelic poc for “goat” (Monagham 218). The goat-creature in The Shadowy waters could
have been a messenger from the Otherworld, sent to Forgael by the Everliving.
35
The motif of sailing across the water to achieve some “transcendental goal” recurred in Yeats’s poetry
even much later in his life. Whereas young Yeats was crossing seas to reach the Otherworld in his poems,
older Yeats was “Sailing to Byzantium” [italics added] to get rid of the “tatter in its mortal dress” and be
gathered “into the artifice of eternity.”
53
Often in Yeats’s work, the Otherworld is seen as a parallel co-existing reality
which ordinary mortals cannot perceive. There are, however, “points of exchange
between the two worlds” – whether geographical sites, such as fairy mounds, islands,
bogs or lakes; or temporal instances of liminality, mostly twilight, dawn or certain days
of the year (Monaghan 289). Not surprisingly, the motif of twilight is very frequent in
Yeats’s poetry of the 19th century; knowing that twilight was often seen as a touch point
between the two worlds, the motif gives his poetry an otherworldly hue in general:
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn. (“Into the Twilight” 1-4)
The above quoted excerpt comes from the poem “Into the Twilight”, in which the poetic
otherworldly reality, although the Otherworld itself is not mentioned throughout the
nature; it is a place where “the mystical brotherhood / Of sun and moon and hollow and
wood / And river and stream work out their will” (10-12). Therefore Yeats creates an
illusion in his poems that there are two Irelands – the world of the mortals and the
This mystical world can be entered through some of the aforementioned liminal
places, in folklore mostly the fairy raths; or just simply through being granted insight
(MacCana 124). Usually one can enter only when they are chosen – “specially selected
human beings whose destiny is the Otherworld” (Bramsback 47). The notion of being
chosen is a tricky one – even though the Otherworld is described as a world of bliss, to
mortals it seems strange and unknown and they usually do not want to be chosen; it is
54
the fairies and inhabitants of the Otherworld who do the choosing, often against the will
of the mortals. Sometimes the person who is taken away to the Otherworld dies in the
world of the mortals – in The Celtic Twilight, Yeats retells a story of a beautiful woman,
Mary Hynes, who “died young because the gods loved her” (45); or they might turn
crazy – they “are at times ‘away,’ as it is called, know all things, but are afraid to
The theme of a conflict between the Otherworld and the world of mortals is dealt
with in a play by Yeats, first staged in 1894, The Land of Heart’s Desire.36 It is a work
based on one of the most common folklore themes, in which Yeats grasps the essence of
Irish imagination (Bransback 46, 59). On May Eve, 37 a day of supernatural powers in
folk tradition, a fairy child tempts a newly wed bride, Mary, to renounce the mortal
world where she will “grow like the rest; / Bear children, cook, be mindful to the churn”
The Otherworld is described as blissfully as may be, with the always recurring motifs of
beauty, joy, endlessness, dance, the “merrier multitude” (28) of divine beings; which are
all motifs used also in The Wanderings of Oisin to describe the Island of the Living. In
opposition to this, Yeats sets a world “of drudgery and misery” (Bramsbäck 69), which
does not allow dreaming – for, in the words of the priest, ancient legends Mary likes to
read are but “foolish dreams” – with gloomy prospects of growing “old and bitter of
36
The version mostly analysed in the present thesis is the 1905 published version of the play, for being the
original one, pertaining to the era which is dealt with here. However, Yeats later revised the play and,
occasionally, the revised version from 1912 is quoted.
37
Beltaine, held on the first day of May, is one of the greatest Celtic festivals, which, traditionally, marked
the beginning of summer, and used to be connected to fertility festivities (Monaghan 40-42). However,
Christianity attributed to Beltaine a somewhat sinister character among the country people, as can be seen
from the words of Bridget Bruin, the mother of the family, talking to the priest: “For there is not another
night in the year / So wicked as to-night” (Land of Heart’s Desire 1912). The concerns of country people
were based on superstitions that “the veil between the realms of the living and the dead is thought to be at
its thinnest” and it was actually possible to pass to the Otherworld (Matson, Roberts 9).
55
tongue” (29). Further, the latter world is expressed in words that evoke the ordinariness
of the life Mary lives, such as “butter”, “eggs”, “fowl”, “churn”. If she does not leave
for the “Land of Heart’s Desire,” she will “grow like the rest” – emphasising the lack of
possibilities in the mortal world to transcend one’s own conditions; losing any kind of
individuality and just melding with “the rest.” However, no matter how beautiful the
Otherworld is, the fairy child who is offering its beauties to Mary is depicted, in
opposition to the priest, as the antagonist of the play, who tricks her way into the favour
of the family. Therefore, she is able to lay her charms on Mary, so that she wastes away,
dying in the mortal world, only to be led away into the “the woods and waters and pale
lights” (30); the combination of these three motifs – paleness, trees and water – often
Mary herself “dreads and longs for the Otherworld” (Bramsbäck 59); although
from the very beginning of the play she desires to “dance / Deep in the dewy shadow of
a wood” (8), she still longs to stay with her husband, whom she loves greatly, and she
still clings to “mortal hope” (30). The Otherworld is in its essence absolutely non-
human, and the ambivalent attitude of most of the humans towards it stems from not
being able to understand it and to identify with its inhabitants; for example, the pastime
human:
The “winds”, “tide”, “mountains” and “flame” represent all the elements; the natural
setting and the dynamic verbs used, such as “ride”, “run” and “dance”, create the notion
that the inhabitants of the Otherworld not only belong to the natural world, but are
56
personifications and manifestations of the elements themselves; or perhaps incarnations
of boundless passions, which is somewhat at odds with the milder human ways of
seeing life.38
The reader, or the audience, may feel ambivalent about the ending; and so does
Mary – there is an “and yet” in her decision to leave into the fairy world:
The non-articulated doubts expressed by the dying young woman carry their emotional
impact and strength in not being specified. Mary dies without revealing what she
actually wants, and the focus of the play stays with the family; the reader, or the
audience, do not follow Mary’s journey to the Otherworld. This way, the veil is not
drawn, and the Otherworld remains mysterious. All the reader gets is the description
made by the fairy child, and an insight provided through Mary’s daydreaming. The
blissful depiction of the Otherworld as a heavenly place of many delights is at odds with
Mary’s unwillingness, or even fear, to obey the tempting powers of the Fairyland. Yet
even more so, when the reader realizes that it is Mary herself who evoked these powers;
not only is she “courteous to them” (10) – spreading primroses, in front of the door, and
giving them milk and fire,39 but she invokes them directly, calling them, moreover, by
the expression “faeries”:40 “Come, faeries, take me out of this dull house! / Let me have
38
Seeing the inhabitants of the Otherworld as incarnations of boundless passions can be supported by
Yeats’s explanation of the fairies’ immortality in his essay “The Untiring Ones” from The Celtic Twilight
where he draws the contrast between human and fairy emotions. He actually ascribed their immortality to
the possibility of having boundless emotions: we, mortal people, “cannot have any unmixed emotions”
and “it is this entanglement of moods which makes us old, and puckers our brows and deepens the
furrows about our eyes. If we could love and hate with as good heart as the faeries do, we might grow to
be long-lived like them.” Their lives consist of “untiring joys and sorrows” and “love with them never
grows weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet” (Celtic Twilight 130).
39
The primroses were supposed to bring good luck to the household, if a “golden path” was made in front
of the door (9). However, “the wind cried and carried them away; / and a child came running in the wind
and caught them in her hands and fondled them” (10). Later the faery child spreads primroses at Mary’s
feet when laying charms on her. Yeats probably “picked up this idea when collecting folklore in the West
of Ireland” (Bramsback 63), but later he discarded the primrose symbol, and exchanged it for the much
more common “quicken bough”, a tree closely associated with fairy lore and the Otherworld – either used
for detecting witches, or for making magic rods to cast spells with (Monaghan 400).
40
In Ireland, fairies were never called by their real name, as it was considered dangerous, and naming
them brought ill luck; they were usually referred to as “good people”, but often rather not mentioned at
all, as the country people believed that “the fairies are very secretive and much resent being talked of”
57
all the freedom I have lost” (15). The Otherworld, depicted through descriptions of great
beauty, is a stage to which one should aspire; and the fact that the Otherworld is deeply
rooted in Mary’s own self – the child lays her claims on Mary using the words: “I keep
you in the name of your own heart” – even emphasizes the idea that everyone has their
own Otherworld to which they might aspire. Yet the play also depicts human fear of
transcending their own possibilities and the conflict between desire and fear.
the mortal visitors, such as Oisín, the Otherworld conceived as an alternative reality is
depicted through the eyes of the inhabitants of the Otherworld – mostly fairies,
where the fairy child is tempting Mary and describing the bliss of the world with the
greatest possible beauty, but also in one of Yeats’s earliest poems, “The Stolen Child”,
dating back to 1886. The addressee of the first three stanzas is a child, lured from the
human world by fairies. They describe nature and their life, depicting, in beautiful
images, what he would gain if he went with them “to the waters and the wild” (10). The
last stanza forms a contrast by showing what he lost, having gone off with them. Some
of Yeats’s early poetry was criticised as “attempts to deny civilization and its discontents
by escaping to the Happy Island of Oisín or Tír na nOg” (Kiberd 103), but in this poem,
as in The Land of Heart’s Desire, the Otherworld is not presented as an ultimate solution
which would be undoubtedly positive, because the reader can realize what the “stolen
child” and Mary have to renounce – the latter losing her mortal love and the possibility
to “watch the turf smoke coiling from the fire / And feel content and wisdom in your
heart” (13); and the “stolen child” missing forever the peaceful cosy atmosphere of a
mortal home.
(Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales 4). In The Land of Heart’s Desire, Bridget Bruin blames Mary for not
obeying the tradition: “You know well / How calling the good people by that name / Or talking of them
over much at all / May bring all kinds of evil on the house” (14).
58
Unlike The Land of Heart’s Desire, where the tension is created by the fairies
having an adversary, such as the priest or the Bruin family, in “The Stolen Child”, the
conflict is wound around the depiction of two worlds, both of which are appealing in
unique ways:
Here the two worlds are not set against each other as in The Land of Heart’s Desire, but
they overlap and co-exist in symbiosis. Still, they create a tension, expressed by a set of
dichotomies.
The basic obvious dichotomy of human vs. fairy incorporates other dichotomies
– the most evident is woods vs. the house with all its human details as the “kettle” or
“the oatmeal chest”. For the fairies, nature is their home; they live “where dips the
rocky highland of Sleuthwood in the lake”, on the “leafy island”, or in the “hills above
Glen-car” (line 29). This dichotomy, setting the house and the woods in opposition, can
be noticed in The Land of Heart’s Desire too, where the Bruins’ house is seen as a safe
59
place of simple peace, whereas the world behind the door poses a threat, and the woods
are obviously the abode of the fairies.41 It is worth noticing that when describing the
nature which encloses the Otherworld, Yeats uses names of concrete places in Ireland.
This has a few reasons: firstly, the Revivalists saw Western Ireland as the “repository of
Gaelic values” (Allison 61); by using concrete places Yeats stresses the Gaelic
otherworldliness, but makes it more accessible and imaginable for people; secondly, he
sees these points as “meeting places, locations of cultural unity and energy, regenerative
sources for his imagination and for the nation at large (Allison 56); thirdly, these
concrete places are meeting points of imagination and reality and by attributing
otherworldly values to these real places, Yeats is implicitly shoving Ireland towards
unity, which was, at that stage, still the imagined ideal; and fourthly, some of these
create associations concerning fairies or ancient gods.42 Therefore the nature of the
The above mentioned contrast is also connected to the dichotomy of wildness vs.
domestication: animals mentioned in the first part are “herons”, “water-rats” and
41
In the 1912 version of The Land of Heart’s Desire, the initial stage directions for Mary read: “MARY
BRUIN stands by the door reading a book. If she looks up she can see through the door into the woods.”
Her position by the open door foreshadows the plot – she is obviously depicted as on the periphery of the
worlds; she, as the only one of the family, has a view on the mysterious woods, and therefore the only one
who can perceive the Otherworld.
42
Rosses, mentioned in “The Stolen Child”, is “a sandy plain, covered with short grass”, being a
“mournful, haunted place.” When a person fell asleep there, their soul would be carried away and they
would wake up “silly”, according to the folk beliefs observed by Yeats (Yeats qtd. in Jeffares,
Commentary 13). Another famous otherworldly site in Yeats’s poetry was Knocknarea, the grave of
Queen Meave of the Sidhe (Yeats, “Notes” to The Wind Among the Reeds 69) where, according to his
Autobiographies, strange lights were appearing – Yeats himself as a boy saw a “small light” climbing up
the hill, which “in five minutes it reached the summit, and I [Yeats], who had often climbed the mountain,
knew that no human footstep was so speedy” (Autobiographies 96) Places fabled with legends like this
completed the picture of the Otherworld and made it more real.
60
“trout”43 whereas in the last stanza it is “calves”, which are tamed animals, and “mice”,
animals often living among people. The fairy world clearly favours freedom,
symbolized, among other things, by the animals mentioned; in contrast to people who
Another interesting dichotomy is chill vs. warmth. The coldness of the fairy
world44 comes from the strong presence of water in this world; dew, lakes, streams are
everywhere: “wandering water gushes” (28), “ferns that drop their tears” (line 36). Even
the “dim grey sands” (line 14) in the moonlight seem moist and cold. Water is seen by
Yeats as something singularly Irish – in The Celtic Twilight he claims “that the water,
the water of the seas and of lakes and of mist and rain, has all but made the Irish after its
image” (135); the Irish, living in a moist and rainy climate, got formed by their
environment and water is one of the constituents of their identity. Therefore, it is but
natural that the Otherworld oozes with water, which makes the Irish people associate
themselves with it. The motif of dew is also often connected to the Otherworld – in The
Land of Heart’s Desire, Mary wishes to dance “deep in the dewy shadow of a wood” (8)
and this adds to the chilly impression.45 Contrasted to this, the fourth stanza depicts the
warmth of the human world with the “warm hillside” and the boiling water in the kettle.
The chill in the wet wild nature also brings about a kind of unquietness vs. peacefulness
43
Moreover, all three mentioned animals have symbolic meanings tying them to the Otherworld in some
way: heron being a bird which exists in “several elements”, became the bird to symbolize the Otherworld
(Monaghan 245); water-rat itself has no special symbolic meaning – but it is close to an otter, which was
an animal to whom “powers of the Otherworld” were ascribed, and who, like men, lived in their own
kingdoms and were “virtually invulnerable” (Monaghan 371); the trout had a special rank among the fish
of Ireland – Yeats includes among his Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry Samuel Lover’s story “A
White Trout; a Legend of Cong” (43-45), in which a caught trout changes into a beautiful lady; in his
notes to the story he claims that “these trout stories are common all over Ireland. Many holy wells are
haunted by such blessed trout” (45). Moreover, this motif reappears in his own poetry in “The Song of
Wandering Aengus” – the Master of Love Angus “caught a little silver trout”, who consequently changed
into “a glimmering girl” and left him hopelessly enchanted.
44
Yeats in his Autobiographies comments on his conscious effort to acquire a “cold” style: “I deliberately
reshaped my style, deliberately sought out an impression as of cold light and tumbling clouds” (91); this
is, it might be argued, the style in which the fairy world is described.
45
Sometimes the mysterious chill of the Otherworld is connected to paleness as well as to water – in The
Land of Heart’s Desire, the fairy child is described in a beautifully chilling simile: “Her face was pale as
water before dawn” (10).
61
of the child’s house, where the kettle “sings peace into his breast” (47). The fairies
dance all night, and seem always in motion; “unquiet dreams” (34) are mentioned; the
water is “wandering” (28); and even moonlight, which is usually something constant,
fairies never get tired of dancing (The Celtic Twilight 130). Generally, this unquietness,
which is disturbing for the mortals, may be caused by the impression of constant
motion; which can be also noted in other poems, especially in “The Unappeasable
Host”.
ordinariness. The images and colours are more exotic (“reddest stolen cherries” [italics
added] (8), pools “that scarce could bathe a star” (31), “ferns that drop their tears” (36)),
in comparison with the ordinariness of the images in the last stanza (“brown mice”
[italics added] (48), “oatmeal chest” (49), “kettle on the hob” (46)). There is a strong
aesthetic aspect about the Otherworld, which can send chills down the spine: “Where
the wave of moonlight glosses / the dim grey sands with light” (lines 13-14).
The last, but not least, important dichotomy, portrayed in this poem is abstract
vs. concrete. The first three stanzas are much more vague and dreamy, while the last one
is filled with little concrete details. The fairies’ “mingling hands and mingling glances”
(line 18) is not a still image and presents the reader with difficulty of imagining it; it is a
motion and a vague fleeing moment. The fairy world might be beautiful, but it is
essentially empty for mortals. The verses “to and fro we leap / and chase the frothy
bubbles” (lines 20-21) probably express best the vagueness and dreaminess of the fairy
world. The motifs of “froth” and “bubbles” invoke the feeling of something being
hollow and unreal, as if the fairies were chasing just after an illusion which is not real.
62
Also, the motif of rushes surrounding the pools where the fairies live (line 30) supports
the theme of the fairy-realm’s emptiness – rushes are hollow from within. The
off, by furthest Rosses” [italics added] (15); the repetition of “far” moves the realm
beyond human reach and gives it a fairytale-like quality. The appeal of the refrain uses
just the words “come away” (line 9), leaving the “away” dreamy, abstract, and
unearthly, beyond the scope of human understanding. Abstraction is the main feature of
the Otherworld – it creates the hazy impression, and, thus, stresses the transcendental
the stereotypical characteristics of the Celtic nations, and, therefore, depicting the
Otherworld behind this misty veil of abstraction yet even more stresses its Celtic
singularity. One of the most famous Celticists, Ernest Renan, quoted by Yeats in his
essay “The Celtic Element in Literature” claims that the Celtic race “has worn itself out
on mistaking dreams for realities” (qtd. in Yeats 1903, 270) 46 – a prose image which
The poem is told from the perspective of the fairies, so the Otherworld is
presented initially as the ideal solution to escape troubles. The reader, however, has got
a human perspective and reading the poem written in the first person from the point of
view of fairies creates tension in them; and the reader moves on the brink of the real and
supernatural. The poem itself, therefore, is a point of liminality; works like this were
46
Abstraction was a theme much discussed by Yeats in his poems as well as essays. At the time when the
“The Stolen Child” was written, Yeats still held a positive attitude towards abstraction; he was exalting
the “Celtic passion for ‘abstract right’” and the capability of having “abstract emotions”, as linked to the
concept of “Irish virtue” (Dwan, “Abstract Hatred” 24), which made the Irish special and distinguished
them from the other “more successful, and practical races” (Yeats qtd. in Dwan “Abstract Hatred” 24).
Later, however, Yeats became famous for his negative attitude towards abstraction in nationalism and the
capability of Celtic nations of abstract hatred; by 1909 he claimed that “Ireland” was “ruined by
abstraction” (qtd. Dawn “Abstract Hatred” 19). In his essay on J.M. Synge, he writes that in Ireland
“abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature” until minds in a land that has given
itself to agitation over-much, abstract thoughts are raised up between men's minds and Nature, who never
does the same thing twice, or makes one man like another, till minds “cry down natural impulse with the
morbid persistence of minds unsettled by some fixed idea” and the defence of “that what is so unreal” is
making the patriots “bitter and restless“ (The Cutting of an Agate 150).
63
supposed to be the doors to the realm beyond earthly senses, carrying the reader off to
the Otherworld.
point out a few recurring motifs which constitute Yeats’s depiction of the Otherworld
one of the most powerful tools for Yeats to create an unearthly impression. Yeats
distinguished between the “red flare of dreams” and the “common light of common
hours” (The Land of Heart’s Desire 9). This peculiar light can be created through the
aforementioned twilight, or by using verbs and adjectives which imply any sort of
Lake Isle of Inishfree” 7), “gleaming bodies” (The Wanderings of Oisin III, 28 )”,
“golden or silver skies” (“The Man who Dreamt of Faeryland” 21), “softness came from
the starlight” (The Wanderings of Oisin III, 72). Images filled with this otherworldly
light evoke the impression of perfect beauty and the reader may thus feel the power of
the Otherworld. Forest Reid argues – though originally the comment was meant to
describe Yeats’s prose, it may be well applied to some of his poems too – that through
the dark atmosphere “flame wild unearthly lights that lure the soul to its destruction”
(Reid 132). He uses uncommon descriptions, similes and metaphors to carry the reader
off to the Otherworld, as their unusualness strikes the reader’s senses; such as “drops of
frozen rainbow light” (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 184) or “the pale blossom of the
moon” (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 288). In the former the combination of the motifs of
64
drops, cold, colours, and light implied in the simile creates a mysterious beauty;
whereas in the latter the word “blossom” bestows the moonlight with a sense of
Another motif closely associated with the Otherworld is the sound of dripping,
or drops in general. When Oisín and Niamh arrive to the Island of Forgetfulness, they
hear “dropping, murmurous dropping; silence and that one sound” (III, 18). The
monotony of the dripping may be soothing to the soul – “peace comes dropping slow”
[italics added] (Innisfree, line 5). Hearing water dripping from the depths of the forest
combined with a personification like the following: “Leaning softly out / from ferns that
drop their tears / over the young streams” (35-7). Perhaps the sound of dripping is also
used because of the Irish rainy weather – yet another way how to distinguish the
Otherworld as particularly Irish; and at the same time, by drawing corresponding links
between Ireland and the happy Otherworld, Yeats is embellishing the vision of Ireland
Related to the drops, dew is perhaps the most common motif in early Yeats’s
poetry as such, especially in The Wind Among the Reeds. In his descriptions of the
Otherworld, this motif appears over and over, completing the image of wet cold
shimmering beauty; on the Island of the Living, Oisín and Niamh walk through
“shadowy ways / Where drops of dew in myriads fall” (221-22); and in The Land of
Heart’s Desire the Fairyland is told to be “deep in the dewy shadow of a wood” (8).
There is something magical about dew; it is water that appears every morning on the
leaves and grass without any obvious reason such as rain – this might have been seen as
47
Moreover, comparing the moon to a flower enables Yeats to introduce his favourite symbol of the
“Rose”; which might give the moonlight a more mystical hue, taking into consideration the connotations
Yeats’s “Rose” carries (even though the Rose did not become “an increasingly complex symbol” sooner
than in 1891 (Jeffares Commentary 22), two years after publishing of The Wanderings of Oisin), the
reader might ascribe this mystical meaning to the “blossoming moon”, though originally unintentional.
65
somewhat supernatural in the past. Moreover, occult practices consider dew an
important element – in alchemy it is a component related to the “subtle form of the fire
of nature” (Greer 132); all these connotations were probably known to Yeats and were
made use of to create the Otherworldly character of his poems. 48 He often combined the
motif of dew, and all its magical connotations, with the other transcendental motifs, in
order to strengthen the mysticism of his images: with the liminal twilight, to stress the
vagueness between the two worlds, as in “dew ever shining and twilight grey”; and to
link between dew and something as unreachable as stars, Yeats draws the unattainable
far away stars closer to our world, and, at the same time, it gives a yet even more
The last of the frequent motifs linked to the Otherworld in Yeats’s work which
will be given attention to, is that of birds. In his work around 1900 a wide variety of
birds can be found, to which he attributes different symbolism (Bramsbäck 85). Birds
had an important place in Irish mythology and folklore – they were often companions of
(Monaghan 46); the famous love god Aengus was closely associated closely with
birds.49 In folklore a motif of a transformation of a soul into a white bird at the moment
of death was common (Bramsbäck 86); this idea was used in The Land of Heart’s
Desire, where Mary’s soul transforms into a bird as she dies. The Faery Child luring her,
she is repeatedly referring to Mary as: “White bird, white bird, come with me, little
48
Interestingly, in a passage in The Wanderings of Oisín, the love god Aengus compares in his song men’s
hearts to fiery dew, which stresses the transcendental value of dew, as something coming directly form
gods: “Men’s hearts of old were drops of flame / that from the saffron morning came” (Book I, 276-7).
49
The phrase “birds of Aengus” appears in many Yeats’s poems and works – among other, in The
Shadowy Waters (41), or in the epic poem “Baile and Aillinn”, where they can be seen as patrons of love.
According to the mythology, the birds “that used to be with Angus were four of his kisses that turned into
birds and that used to be coming about young men of Ireland, and crying after them (Lady Gregory 66).
66
bird” (31).50 Yeats was aware of the cultural meanings attributed to birds, finding
evidence in the oral lore of country people or in older Gaelic literature (Bramsbäck 85).
The connection to the Otherworld is obvious – either through the association with gods,
or through the transcendental motif of the transformation of a soul into a bird. In The
Shadowy Waters, “grey birds”, which are men who died, serve as “good pilots”, calling
“from wind to wind” (21), showing him the way to the Otherworld. Birds are also the
first creatures which Oisín and Niamh behold as they approach the Otherworld – “round
every branch the song birds flew” (180). The motif of birds seems to complete the
vision of the Otherworld not only because of their mythological and folkloric meaning,
but also through other themes they may represent. Birds are generally seen as unfretted
and free; the Otherworld, too, is seen as a place where there “is nor law, nor rule” (I,
282). The theme of freedom was, moreover, rather topical at the turn of the 20th century,
when Ireland was aspiring to become a nation. Birds with their wings and flying
towards the sky can also become a symbol of aspirations – trying to achieve something
beyond one’s current reach, transcending one’s possibilities; and on a larger scale, the
50
The motif of a soul’s transformation into a white bird is also used in a poem written to Maud Gonne,
“White Birds” – a love poem, in which he wishes to change into a bird together with his beloved, in order
to escape the “weariness” (5) and the “fret of the flames” (11) of this world: “For I would we were
changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you!” (8).
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3.2. Otherworldly beings
Having described the Otherworld and analysed its depiction in Yeats’s poetry,
now its inhabitants should be looked upon in more detail. Often it is them who are the
cause of the mortal’s entering the Otherworld, whether voluntarily, or against their will.
They act as mediators between the worlds and as psychopomps51 – leaders of mortal
souls, helping them to reach out beyond the borders of their constrained lives.
The expressions Tuatha Dé Danann, Sidhe and fairies all refer to the inhabitants
of the Otherworld; but they have quite different connotations, even though their
People of the Goddess Danu”, came to Ireland as the fifth invaders, which is described
in Lebor Gabála Érenn, “The Book of Invasions.” They were a “magical race”
(Monaghan 457) who “became skilled in the arts of druidry and magic” when living in
51
The word “psychopomp” is not used in its narrow sense, understood from Greek mythology, as guides
of souls into the Underworld after death, but also on a more general level – as guides to the Otherworld,
or just to some other level of being, perhaps seeing it in a slightly Jungian way, who used the term to
describe something within the self of a person – like an anima pointing “the way to the highest meaning”
(Jung 29), or the archetype of and old man, who is “the enlightener, the master and teacher, a psychopomp
whose personification…” (Jung 37).
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the “northern islands of the world” (MacCana 58). Having defeated the previous
inhabitants of Ireland, Fir Bolgs, and the demon-like Fomorians, they ruled the island
for nearly 3000 years, only to be subdued by the last invasion of the Milesians, or
Goidelic Celts, in the end. However, wielding many supernatural powers, they made the
Milesians agree to split Ireland – the Sons of Mil took the surface of the land, while the
(Monaghan 457); or, according to Lady Gregory’s Mythology, they “chose out the most
beautiful of the hills and valleys of Ireland for them to settle in; and […] put hidden
walls about them, that no man could see through, but they themselves could see through
them and pass through them” (Lady Gregory 61). Seen either way, this world of theirs
became later known as the Otherworld, and the Tuatha Dé Danann, who created it,
became known as the Ever-Living. In folklore though, the inhabitants of the Otherworld
Gaelic texts and not commonly accessible in the 19th century. It was Lady Gregory’s
mythology Gods and Fighting Men which was probably the most influential book
treating the Tuatha Dé Danann written in her times. Yeats himself, however, did not
mention the gods often. The only one from the Dananns to get credit in Yeats’s poetry is
Angus Óg, the aforementioned god of beauty and poetry (Monaghan 21), sometimes
seen as the god of love (Matson, Roberts 3), who plays a role in many of Yeats’s poems
When the Tuatha Dé Danann retreated into the Otherworld, they became known
as the Sidhe (sídh, “fairy” in Gaelic). Originally, sídh meant “hill” or a mound that
served as a passage to the Otherworld52 (Monaghan 419); and the people hiding in these
52
Here is a nice example of the overlapping of history and mythology. These mounds were usually
ancient man-made cairns, or passage tombs, from the pre-Celtic era (Matson, Roberts 102); it makes
sense that the Tuatha Dé Danann, in mythology a pre-Celtic (pre-Milesian) people, would find their home
in the burial tombs built by the pre-Celtic men in history.
69
mounds were referred to as Aes Sidhe, “The People of the Fairy Mounds” (Monaghan
169). Eventually, the aes was dropped, and name of their dwelling became to denote the
fairies themselves (Bramsbäck 49). Although sídh means fairy in Irish, the connotations
of the word are more mystical than those of the word “fairy”, perhaps because there is a
noble air about them – they are unearthly, beautiful and shadowy. Sometimes they are
called “the host of air”,53 as “they journey with the wind” (Yeats, “Notes” to The Wind
Among the Reeds 65); the manner in which Yeats describes them in one of his prose
there were other shapes, sinking and rising and coming and going, and
Hanrahan knew them by their whirling flight to be the Sidhe, the ancient
The same ambivalence which enfolds the Otherworld can be also noticed when
speaking, or writing, about the Sidhe. Sometimes they are depicted as a “gay, exalting
and gentle race” (“The Man who Dreamt of Faeryland” 20) with brows as “white as
fragrant milk” (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 204), emphasising their beauty and nobility;
sometimes they are portrayed with neither positive nor negative connotations, yet in
words which evoke a mystical sensation in the reader – showing them as essentially
non-human, and beyond the mortals’ comprehension because of their feelings connected
to unearthly passion, which is outside of the human concepts of right and wrong – “the
wayward twilight companies / who sigh with mingled sorrow and content / because
their blossoming dreams have never bent / under the fruit of evil and of good” (“To
Some I Have Talked by Fire” 6-9); and sometimes their portrayal is clearly dark,
53
Yeats asserts that he believes “the host of air” and “the host of the Sidhe” to be the same, but “some
writers distinguish between the Sluagh Gaoith, the host of the air, and Sluagh Sidhe, the host of the Sidhe,
and describe the host of the air as of a peculiar malignancy (“Notes” to Wind among the Reeds 78).
70
shadowy and sinister, stressing the connection of the Sidhe to death, 54 or to baleful
powers of nature, such as “desolate winds” (“Unappeasable Host”); one of the most
tenebrous descriptions of them is expressed in the following simile, which presents their
tendency to sometimes take over a mortal’s soul: “the dark folk who live in souls / of
passionate men, like bats in the dead trees” (“To Some I Have Talked by Fire” 4-5).
They are not particularly interested in the world of people and rarely intervene
into the world of the mortals (MacCana 65); usually they live their own lives, do not
care for much attention, even “resent being talked of” (Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales 4).
Moreover, “if any one becomes too much interested in them, and sees them over much,
he loses all interest in ordinary things” (Yeats, “Notes” to Wind Among the Reeds 66) –
sometimes just glancing upon their unearthly beauty is enough to become glamoured
and drop the “mortal dream” (“Hosting of the Sidhe” 5), renouncing hopes of happiness
in the ordinary world; and being endowed with the dreams and desires of the immortal
We come between him and the hope of his heart. (“Hosting of the Sidhe”
l0-12)
Sídh is sometimes used synonymously to fairy, but the term “fairy” encompasses
less mysticism, and is more general – it may refer to “different beings of the
in Yeats’s work), elves (in the English diminutive conception of little pixies 55), or even
54
A “battle among the Sidhe at a man's death” is said to be fought and that “is the battle of life and death”
(Yeats, “Notes” to Wind among the Reeds 101).
55
Size of Irish fairies disputable – they are sometimes little, but often they are thought to be of human
size, this feature being one of the main difference from the English fairies (Bramsbäck 28); Yeats explains
this discrepancy about the fairies’ size by the fact that “everything is capricious about them, even their
size” (Fairy and Folk Tales 12) and they often seem little “when first seen, though seeming of common
human height when you are once glamoured” (Writings on Folklore 20-21).
71
ghosts (Monaghan 167). Fairies in Yeats’s work are “more complicated and less human”
– “pretty and kind”, yet “lawless angels” who “live in the elements of “air, water, and
fire” (Parkinson 26); very different from “trumpety little English fairies” (MacNeice
qtd. in Parkinson 25). Yeats tried to create a systematic classification of Irish fairies,
28).56 Yeats distinguishes between two types of fairies – the sociable fairies and solitary
fairies (Yeats, Irish Fairy Tales 402). The most common of the sociable fairies are
called also trooping fairies, or sheehogues; these are the typical Irish “Good People” or
“Wee Folk” (Yeats, Irish Tales 402; Monaghan 168), who live in fairy raths, steal
children and sometimes act mischievously, but are otherwise “on the whole good” (Irish
Fairy Tales 403). The solitary fairies are, on the other hand, “nearly all gloomy and
terrible in some way” (Irish Fairy Tales 403) – perhaps the most famous is the
Leprechaun and other similar spiteful creatures; the Pooka, described as a “wild staring
phantom”, which takes forms of various animals and is “only half in the world of form”
(Yeats, Fairy and Folk 100); various water spirits, which are a kind of will’o’the’wisps,
and house spirits (Yeats, Writings on Folklore 23); the Banshee, whose wailing is an
omen of death (Yeats, Fairy and Folk 113); and, finally, the Leanhaun Sidhe, one of the
most important fairy figures in Yeats’s work, who is the fairy mistress and muse of poets
The Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry, also explain the origin of the fairies
– from the outlook of Christian peasants that they are “fallen angels”, not good, nor bad
enough to be either redeemed or damned; from the more pagan view that they are “gods
of the earth”, or, they are placed on one level with the Sidhe and the Tuatha Dé Danann,
they are “the gods of pagan Ireland”, who, with the arrival of Christianity, “when no
56
This classification was first published in 1889 in an article of his, “Irish Fairies, Ghosts and Witches”;
later it constituted an appendix to his compilation Irish Fairy Tales from 1892.
72
longer worshiped and fed with offerings, dwindled away in the popular imagination and
In Yeats’s times, the faith in fairies or the Sidhe was still widely spread among
the peasantry of western Ireland. In his introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish
Peasantry, he actually stresses the fact that people believed in fairies in Ireland, whereas
in England this faith has been long dead (3); thus using fairy lore as one of the self-
feature of the Irish nation. However, Yeats was blamed that he was “merely trying to
bring back a little of the old dead beautiful world of Romance into this century of great
engines and spinning jennies”, when he claimed that the Irish peasant still believes in
fairies (Yeats, Writings on Folklore 77). Yeats gathered his information from country
people; he “wandered about raths and faery hills and questioned old women and old
men” when he “was tired out or unhappy” (Autobiographies 96). Among these people,
he mentions, in his writings, most often Paddy Flynn and Biddy Hart, who became to be
viewed symbols of the peasant wisdom. He claims that in Ireland, “no matter what one
doubts, one never doubts the fairies” (The Celtic Twilight 8) – even when all other faith
has failed, people still have the fairies to stick to. As for Yeats himself, in his Reveries
of Childhood and Youth, he explains how his emotional intuition reflected in his own
faith in fairies: “I did not believe with my intellect that you could be carried away body
and soul, but I believed with my emotions and the belief of the country people made
and the motifs they are expressed through, it is impossible to draw generalizations – the
73
motifs are sometimes very complex and express more than just one theme. Therefore,
first the themes which are most closely connected to the Sidhe 57 will be analysed; then
the most recurring motifs in Yeats’s work concerning the Sidhe will be dealt with on
three themes are strongly connected to the inhabitants of the Otherworld – desire,
freedom, and uneasiness. All of these themes were extremely topical in the late 19 th
century Ireland, which found itself in an age of transition, changes, and uncertainty
about picking the right way take in order to achieve the desired outcome.
When describing the Sidhe, Dananns and fairies, their freedom and unfettered
And hands that hold no wearisome tool (The Wanderings of Oisin I, 337-
340)
The mention of the “wearisome tool” clearly shows that the freedom of the Sidhe was
also seen as liberation from the daily drudgery of the Irish people, for whom the vision
of the Otherworld was an escapist fantasy from their ordinary lives; its inhabitants were
happy because their hands were free of “wearisome tools”. In the above quoted excerpt,
boundless sea is used as the motif which expresses the theme of freedom – “unchainable
as the dim tide”; but other accurate motifs, such as wind and dance recur in Yeats’s
the Sidhe, dynamic verbs are often used, and the poems seem to be, at all times, in
restless fluttering motion. A good demonstration of this can be found in the poem “The
57
Where the term Sidhe is used in the thesis, it is usually meant to denote the inhabitants of the
Otherworld in general; it implies the Tuatha Dé Danann as well as the fairies.
74
Unappeasable Host”, which is written in first person from the perspective of a mortal
woman, while a host of the Sidhe is passing by. The whole poem is in motion; nothing
is still, apart from the mortal woman, who is the speaker, and her child – therefore
everything supernatural is on the move. If the reader makes a list of the verbs used in
the poem, almost all of them express a somewhat violent circulation – “ride”, “flies”,
“calling”, “cry”, “hover”, and “beat”, “blow ”,“ shake”; the Sidhe move freely at their
will, and there is nothing to tie them up. Even their appearance shows them as
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart. (“The Hosting of the Sidhe” 7-9)
These three verses not only show the unfettered character of the Sidhe, through motifs
of their unbound hair, heaving breasts, waving arms; but also a kind of ecstasy rooted in
their freedom – the “eyes agleam” and “lips apart” indicate that the Sidhe indulge in
their freedom to the point of rapture. Dishevelled hair is also a motif connected to fairies
and the Sidhe which would express a degree of freedom; in the Land of Hearts Desire,
the fairy child is described to have “wild hair the winds have tumbled” (1912). In his
notes to the first edition of The Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats says about them that “they
are almost always said to wear no covering upon their heads, and to let their hair stream
out” (“Notes” to Wind among the Reeds 66), an image which emphasises the theme of
The other important theme connected to the Sidhe is that of desire. Yeats’s early
work is full of motifs which express desire – either spiritual (the desire of mortals for
the immortal world, or for a kind of spiritual epiphany); or romantic – longing for
immortal love. These are usually intermingled indiscernibly, and achieving one often
75
entails achieving the other as well – this is the case of Forgael, who inseparably links
love and the Otherworld; or the case of the fisherman in the poem “The Man who
Dreamt of Faeryland”; or Oisín and Niamh, Cúchulainn and Fand, and other such
mythological couples. The Sidhe seem to be connected to “vague desires and hopes”
(Yeats, “Notes” to Wind among the Reeds 86) and their desire does not dwindle; it is
“the immortal desire of immortals” (“Notes” to Wind among the Reeds 93). In The
everlasting longing – Oisín and Niamh, while crossing the sea to the Otherworld,
Yeats borrowed the motifs of the hornless deer and red-eared hound, who change into
the lady and the young man, from the Gaelic poem by Michael Comyn (Alspach 852-
53). He adopted this shape-shifting motif to such an extent, that he used it later in
another poem of his own “Mongan Laments the Change that has Come upon Him and
His Beloved” – “Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns! / I have been
changed to a hound with one red ear” (1-2). The very motif of a hunt is a symbol of
desire; and in his notes to the Wind Among the Reeds, Yeats claims that “this hound and
this deer seem plain images of the desire of man ‘which is for the woman,’ and ‘the
desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man,’ and of all desires that are as
76
these” (92-3). The image describes eternal unfulfilled desire; for anytime Oisín and
Niamh pass the sea, these two phantoms are chasing each other, never to achieve their
goal. They are obviously otherworldly beings – white animals with red ears come from
the Otherworld, according to Celtic folklore (Hemming 71); and they, apart from
romantic desire, express the “Celtic longing for infinite things the world has never
seen.”58 It reached beyond this world, and those who got overcome by this kind of
desire, “found no comfort in the grave” (“The Man who Dreamt of Faeryland 48). By
giving such a great importance to the theme of desire in his early poetry, Yeats is
definitely voicing his own romantic frustrations; yet he also makes it clear that this
longing is not just his own, but it is a “Celtic longing” – a general feeling of a nation,
long deprived of welfare, which is striving to achieve liberty and peace. The Irish
desire, whether it belonged to the mortal, or immortal world, helped the Irish to identify
themselves with the Sidhe – a “chosen race”, who rejoice in spite of “whatever ravelled
waters rise and fall” (30-1); something denied to the Irish for centuries, being the
However, as already mentioned, the Revival was not homogenous – there was
no agreed way to fashion the Irish identity (OCH 319), making the last two decades of
the 19th century a turbulent period full of hopes and desires to achieve national and
personal freedom; but leaving the nation quite uncertain about how they were to be
achieved, and which is the right path to take. The fairies were to lead the way; however,
in popular depiction, as well as in poetry, the fairies were shrouded in ambivalence. The
uncertainty of the era may be reflected in the uncertainty and uneasiness about those
who were to symbolise the transition into the new age. People feared and awed the
Sidhe, who were a mysterious race from beyond the realms of the mortal world;
58
The desire connected to the Sidhe seems to be similar to that which Yeats described as characteristic of
Rossetti’s paintings, where “the ecstasy of the lover and of the saint are alike, and desire become wisdom
without ceasing to be desire” (Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil 70).
77
moreover, the Sidhe were capable of evoking in mortals contradictory feelings at the
same time:
The fairy piper from the “host of air” creates a feeling of ambivalence in the mortal
listeners; in the same way nothing was black and white in the reality, and the
contradictory feelings about many national matters were at place, as can be seen from
Yeats’s bitter description of the era given in his Ireland after Parnell.
To create the above described image of the Sidhe, and to express the
aforementioned themes connected to them in tradition, Yeats used certain motifs more
than others. Of these the perhaps most remarkable is the motif of the wind, which is
connected to Ireland in general;59 the strong association of this motif and the Sidhe in
Yeats’s work has its roots in folklore, according to which the Sidhe certainly have
“much to do with the wind.60 They journey in whirling winds” and “when the country
people see the leaves whirling on the road they bless themselves, because they believe
the Sidhe to be passing by” (“Notes” to Wind among the Reeds 65-6). The belief that
59
Moreover, wind is an extremely powerful natural force – associating it with Ireland gave the nation a
sense of power. In “The Unappeasable Host”, wind is the chief symbol, not only representing the Sidhe,
but also demonstrating the power of the mystical world:
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. (7-10)
The triple anaphora shows that wind is everywhere, being unbound and mighty. By not ending verse 9
with the object (“doors of Heaven”), but with the predicate of “desolate winds” (“beat”), the enjambment
makes the Heaven and Hell seem relatively unimportant in comparison to the almighty strength of the
wind. The wind even brings “many a whimpering ghost” to the doors of Heaven and Hell, which makes it
a kind of psychopomp.
60
According to Yeats’s notes, “Sidhe is also Gaelic for wind” (65), but this is not verified otherwise.
78
“The Sidhe are in the wind” can be noted in The Land of Heart’s Desire, when the wind
carries away the primroses which were to protect the family, and the Bruins believe that
it is the fairies who have taken them, and the child who “came running in the wind”(10).
Yeats uses the wind to symbolize desire, as he claims: “wind and spirit and vague desire
have been associated everywhere” (“Notes” to Wind among the Reeds 86). This “vague
desire” is something which is characteristic of Yeats’s early poetry and is strongly linked
to the Irish mind and spirit, as was pointed out before. An interesting combination of
motifs is that of “wind” and “reeds” – both very typical of the Irish environment and
scenery. The motif of “the wind among the reeds” can evoke different feelings in the
mercy of something powerful and unconcerned, but still able to withstand it, as the
reeds withstand the gusts of wind; or, on the other hand, it might be taken into
consideration that it is the wind that makes the reeds speak, thus, giving a voice to an
otherwise dumb plant – it speaks out for a voiceless people, perhaps through the power
of the Sidhe: “The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits [. . .] lamented over our
fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds” (The Celtic Twilight 174). In
The Land of Heart’s Desire the final fairy song ends by repeating what they “heard a
reed of Coolaney say”, when swayed by the wind.61 The very title of his most aesthetic
collection (Jeffares, Man and Poet 106) is The Wind Among the Reeds, a term which
Yeats associates with the poetry of Ireland. In the Celtic Twilight, he said about poems
of an Irish peasant, that “they, with their wild music as of winds blowing in the reeds,
seemed to me the very inmost voice of Celtic sadness, and of Celtic longing for infinite
61
Giving an important voice to the nature of Ireland meant actually giving power to Ireland itself; as the
Irish were considered to be closely connected to nature, as was said in the previous chapters. This
connection is stressed in the juxtaposition of the “reeds” and “man” in the following verses:
The wind is blowing on the waving reeds
The wind is blowing on the heart of man. (The Land of Heart’s Desire 24)
Both “the waving reeds” and “the heart of man”, being objects of the sentence with the same construction,
give the reader not only an impression of connection, but a vague sense of identification of the hearts of
men and swaying reeds.
79
things the world has never seen” (16). This longing is what enables the Sidhe in the
wind to act as psychopomps on various levels – they are guides who lead the mortals to
the “land of heart’s desire”; whether that may be the Otherworld, or Ireland itself.
Another important recurring motif is that of a “host”. The Sidhe were often
depicted as passing in groups, forming a host – “the merrier multitude” or “the Western
host”, being the expressions the fairy child uses in The Land of Heart’s Desire (28). The
word “host” carries a multitude of meanings, all of them applied in the poems and
helpful to constitute the picture of the Sidhe: it can mean an “army”, originating in Latin
hostis, “enemy”; or a “host” can be someone who receives or entertains guests, from
Latin hospit, “guest”. This near-opposite double meaning expresses the ambivalence
towards the Sidhe and fairies – looking upon them with slight mistrust, but accepting
them as an inevitable part of the Irish tradition and of being Irish. For example, the title
of a poem “The Hosting of the Sidhe” offers a sinister image of an airy host passing by,
but also implies that the Sidhe are inviting the mortals to join them. The word has yet
another meaning: Eucharist bread, from Latin hostia – “sacrifice”. The “host of the
Sidhe” are the gods of old, and the meaning of “Eucharist” implied in the word “host”,
brings the old religion to the level of Christianity; for the Sidhe still have a refined place
in the religious and metaphysical lives of the Irish – “the unappeasable host / Is
comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet” (“The Unappeasable Host” 11-12).
Moreover, the etymology of the last meaning of the word, “sacrifice”, indicates that
getting to know the Sidhe, and the acceptance of their world, requires a sacrifice of the
joys of the human world. This can be seen in many poems, mainly in “The Stolen
Child”, “Hosting of the Sidhe”, or the in play The Land of Heart’s Desire.
To describe the past time of the Sidhe and to stress their unbound and free
character, Yeats often uses the motif of dance. When Oisín and Niamh came to the
80
Island of the Living, they danced with the immortals, who “danced like shadows on the
mountains” (I, 388); Mary longs for a “dance deep in the dewy shadow of the wood”
(The Land of Heart’s Desire 8), in “The host of Air”, O’Driscoll and his bride Bridget
joined the “faery” people for a dance before these carried Bridget away. This motif
Bate, something in Yeats, which is forcing him “to attempt a creation of an art separate
from everything heterogeneous and casual, from all character and circumstance” (Yeats
qtd. in Bate 1217), connecting dance and eternity (Bate 1218);62 but already in his early
poems it was connected to immortality and those who danced the “wild and sudden
dance” of the immortals, “mocked at Time and Fate and Chance” (Wanderins of Oisin I,
291). Dance in folklore is depicted as being the favourite past time of fairies, who
“danced on and on, and days and days went by, and all the country-side came to look at
them, but still their feet never tired.” (The Celtic Twilight 131). Their dancing is
In The Land of Heart’s Desire, dance is used as a form of sorcery, when the fairy child
“dances, swaying about like the reeds” (24) and thus charms Mary – perhaps carrying
out a kind of initiation rite of Mary to the Otherworld. Dance also symbolises passion;
not in the restricted romantic sense of the word, but in much broader terms – it can
evoke the feeling of a vague unearthly passion. In Rosa Alchemica, Yeats describes
a mystical dance which was an initiation rite into a magical order: “and every moment
the dance was more passionate, until all the winds of the world seemed to have
62
In Bate’s essay, the expression “association between dance and eternity” was used to describe a poem
by Arthur Symons, but it might as well describe Yeats’s conception of the dance metaphor.
81
awakened under our feet” (“Rosa Alchemica” in Stories of Red Hanrahan 222). This
kind of passion also runs through the feet of the dancing Sidhe in Yeats’s depiction of
Another motif also connected to the unrestrained passion and sorcery of the
Sidhe, though not as dominant as that of “dance”, is the motif of “fire.” In the
Otherworld, love is seen as an “imperishable fire” (The Shadowy Waters 49), which
emphasises the theme of eternal passion of its inhabitants. In the early version of The
Land of Heart’s Desire, the fairy child, after dancing and forming around Mary a barrier
of primroses, kisses the flowers and makes them to turn into “little twisted flames” (35).
The Sidhe are sometimes depicted in a fiery way – as a part of the “embattled flaming
multitude” (“To Some I have Talked by Fire” 10), which represents the transcendental
unearthly powers in Ireland. In the “Hosting of the Sidhe”, Caoilte (who was originally
a mortal hero, but probably achieved immortality by joining the Sidhe 63) is “tossing his
burning hair” – Yeats explains this image in the notes to The Wind Among the Reeds, by
retelling a legend of Caoilte’s appearance to a king of Ireland years after his alleged
death, while being “a flaming man, that he might lead him in the darkness” (69) 64. The
motif of fire was important also because of the relation to the character of Irish people
as it was seen back in the 19th century – “as the most inflammable people on God’s
earth” (Taylor qtd. in Yeats, Autobiographies 283). Depicting the Irish as fiery and
63
The character of Caoilte is somewhat problematic in mythology: according to some sources, he and
Oisín were the only members of the Fianna to survive into the days of Christianity and talked to St.
Patrick (MacCana 106) (this is told in the 12 th century story Colloquy of Old Men; however, in Yeats’s
account of this story, the dialogue occurs only between Patrick and Oisín); the Celtic Encyclopaedia even
hints that the two Fenian heroes got later merged into one, as Caoilte was displaced by Oisín in most of
the later ballads (MacKillop); this, however, is at odds with Lady Gregory’s Mythology, which was one of
Yeats’s most likely sources – for Caoilte is introduced as a unique member of the Fianna and his
adventures are described at length, side by side with the adventures of Oisín. When he was old “he went
into a hill of the Sidhe to be healed of his old wounds. And whether he came back from there or not is not
known; and there are some who say he used to be talking with Patrick of the Bells the same time Oisín
was with him. But that is not likely, or Oisín would not have made complaints about his loneliness the
way he did” (Lady Gregory Gods and Fighting Men 291).
64
The image of “Caoilte tossing his burning hair” also comes from Lady Gregory, as in her book, the
mentioned account of Caoilte’s appearance to the king is present and he is described as the “very tall man,
that was shining like a burning flame” (291).
82
inflammable, while attributing these very qualities to the Sidhe, might have worked as a
means of self-fashioning; Yeats was creating national identity by remaking Irish people
The last motif related to the Sidhe, particularly important for Yeats as an artist, is
that of a “voice.” The voices of the Sidhe are the inspiration for the artist; the
“everlasting voices”, who talk to the mortals “in birds, in wind on the hill, / in shaken
boughs, in tide on the shore” 65 (“Everlasting Voices” 6-7). In The Land of Heart’s
Desire, the voices of unseen beings speak the last words in the play, and continuously
repeat what can be seen as Mary’s verdict, “the lonely of heart is withered away” (17,
33). But The Land of Heart’s Desire is not the only work in which Yeats stresses the
importance of voices at the moment of someone’s death; in the short story “The Death
of Red Hanrahan”, the poet Hanrahan is embraced by a woman of the Sidhe, who
claims to be one of the “one of the lasting people, of the lasting unwearied Voices”
(Stories of Red Hanrahan 76). The significance of the motif of a voice is brought about
by the fact that the poet, inspired by the voices of the Sidhe, is a voice himself, inspiring
the nation.
65
In an essay “The Golden Age” in The Celtic Twilight there is a prose passage which corresponds to
these verses: “The faeries and the more innocent of the spirits dwelt within it, and lamented over our
fallen world in the lamentation of the wind-tossed reeds, in the song of the birds, in the moan of the
waves, and in the sweet cry of the fiddle” (174).
83
3.3. Transcendence
The two previous chapters have dealt with the Otherworld and its inhabitants,
who act as psychopomps, leading the mortals towards transcendence; here, the act of
transcendence itself, aided by the otherworldly beings, will be looked upon. In Yeats’s
writings there are various instances in which the fairies, or the Sidhe, act as
psychopomps to human souls and accompany them to a next stage of their being. There
as in Yeats’s work, and a few categories can be drawn; yet it is impossible to clearly
3.3.1. Death
As already mentioned, the Sidhe were often connected to death. In Yeats’s time a
legend existed in Western Ireland, that “a battle over the dying” was fought “between
the friends and enemies of the dying” among the Sidhe (“Notes” to Wind Among the
Reeds 100).67 The fairy most closely linked to death in Irish folklore is probably the
banshee (bean sidhe – Gaelic for “woman fairy”). Banshees are categorised as solitary
fairies; though Yeats claims that, perhaps, a banshee is “a sociable fairy grown solitary
66
Overlapping and inconsistency is a typical phenomena in Celtic mythology – the Celts had no “clear
differentiation of divine functions” (MacCana 23) and their deities roles overlapped.
67
He also provides the reader with an examples from living folklore: “I have heard of the battle over the
dying both in County Galway and in the Isles of Arann, an old Arann fisherman having told me that it was
fought over two of his children, and that he found blood in a box he had for keeping fish, when it was
over.”
84
through much sorrow” (Irish Fairy Tales 405). Appearing sometimes as hags and
sometimes as beautiful women (Monaghan 34), they often foretell a person’s death by
wailing in grief or clapping their hands (Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales 113). The more
respectable and brave the dying person was, the more keening voices of banshees’
lamented over him; therefore, the cry of a banshee often stressed the factor of dead
person’s greatness in praise poetry, as can be seen from the poem by Clarence Mangan,
For a fallen Chief. (“A Lamentation” ll. 1-4, in Fairy and Folk Tales 117)
However, the banshee is “a folkloric rather than literary character” and did not occur in
Irish literature before the 17th century (Monaghan 34). In Yeats’s work she appears in
In The Land of Heart’s Desire, the fairies singing outdoors bear certain accepts
of a banshee, as their song about how “the lonely of heart is withered away”
foreshadows Mary’s death. After she dies, the song of the fairies “is taken up by many
voices, who sing loudly, as if in triumph” (33). The fairies’ singing accompanies her
through her death and presumably leads her to the Otherworld. Such a companion in
death is also the character Winny Byrne from the short story “The Death of Hanrahan”
(The Stories of Red Hanrahan). Winny is an old beggar, whose wits were stolen by “the
Others, the great Sidhe” (67-8), and she tends the poet Owen Red Hanrahan during his
last illness in her hut. In the moment of his death she embraces him:
And then there came out of the mud-stiffened rags arms as white and as
shadowy as the foam on a river, and they were put about his body. (75)
85
As he is dying, he marries one of the lasting people, who dwells in Winny’s body, and
he can see lights which sometimes seem like a “wisp lighted for a marriage, and
sometimes like a tall white candle for the dead” (76). The image of the flames, which
are lighted at a marriage as well as at a funeral, strengthens the connection between the
end of life in the mortal world and the new beginning in the Otherworld, where Owen
This short story is probably the best prose account of the gradual transmission
into the Otherworld through death which can be found in Yeats’s work. At first, it
seemed to Red Hanrahan that he “was beginning to belong to some world out of sight
and misty” (65); he moved on the edge of the worlds, somewhere between dream and
reality because “sometimes he would hear coming and going in the wood music that
when it stopped went from his memory like a dream” (65). Then “once in the stillness
of midday he heard a sound like the clashing of many swords” (65), which is the above
mentioned battle between the friends and enemies of a man who “is near his death”
(70). At night he heard “the faint sound of keening” (65), which would be the banshee,
and the sound of “frightened laughter broken by the wind” (65-6); and to show, that it is
the Sidhe who lead the way and act as psychopomps, Hanrahan saw “many pale
beckoning hands” (66). Later, in Winny’s house, he heard “voices, very faint and joyful”
(72-3) and he knew that the room was filled by “some [beings] greater than himself”
(72) who had “all power in their hands” (72). The short story follows, step by step, a
death of a person, looked upon from a folkloric and at the same time mystical point of
view.
dealing with the theme of transcendence through death. In this vague poem, the fairy
and the human worlds overlap in the approach of death, while a host of the Sidhe passes
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by. Being written from the subjective perspective of a woman narrator, the reader does
not learn whether all this is really happening or whether it is just a vision and some kind
And clap their hands together, and half close their eyes,
For they will ride the North when the ger-eagle flies,
And hear the narrow graves calling my child and me. (1-6)
The theme of death is present through various motifs such as the “narrow graves”,
“heart fallen cold”; and, in connection to the Sidhe, the motif of clapping hands is
Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry, banshees clap their hands to foretell a person’s
death. The whole poem is written in a mystic tone, belonging to the supernatural world.
Only the verse “I kiss my wailing child and press it to my breast” (5) seems to be rooted
in the real world; everything else is somewhat veiled and vague. The poem is also based
on iteration of contrasting concepts, which creates certain bipolarity. The double vision
of the world as the human and the supernatural is expressed by pairs of contrasting
words and images, which represent also the contrast between life and death: such as
“laugh – wail”, “cradles – narrow graves”, “clap their hands together – press my child
to my breast”68. The contrast is also reinforced by the repetition of the word “child” in
the expressions “my wailing child” and the “Danaan children” – the Tuatha Dé Danann.
Therefore the same word “child” refers to the vulnerable wailing being, and to the
Sidhe, who, perhaps, have the life of the “wailing child” in their hands. The host of the
The last pair of images is not exactly contrasting, but the first image expresses joy,
68
while the second evokes the feeling of anxiety; therefore arousing contrasting feelings.
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Sidhe, in this poem, with all their beauty and charm, are the guides of souls; and in the
moment of death, Christian belief is displaced by old Celtic myth, because “The
3.3.2. Kidnappers
Another type of psychopomps among the fairies, or the Sidhe, are the
kidnappers. They usually carry away a child, or a newly-wed bride, whom they fancy –
in Yeats’s poetry and drama, the subject is dealt with in “The Stolen Child”, “The Host
of Air” and the Land of Hearst’s Desire. In an essay “Kidnappers”, published in Celtic
Twilight, Yeats displays folk stories he gathered, which talk about people who were
carried away. The poem “The Host of Air” is based on one of these stories – a young
man, O’Driscoll, joins a merry company among whom is his bride, “with a sad and a
gay face”. While he is engaged in playing cards with them, the company is suddenly
“gone like a drifting smoke” and carrying off his bride. In the story published in Celtic
Twilight, the young man rushes home, only to find his bride dead; and in original
Old women were keening the dead. (Yeats qtd. in Jeffares, Commentary)
It may be just the soul which is stolen, after death – “when it has left the body, it is
drawn away, sometimes, by the fairies” and “such souls are considered lost” (Yeats,
Fairy and Folk Tales 131). Or sometimes, when the fairies carry off a mortal, they leave
“some sickly fairy child” instead, or “a log of wood, so bewitched that it looks like a
mortal pining away, and dying, and being buried” (Fairy and Folk Tales 55). They take
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away the body and soul and “the dead body was but an appearance made by the
Death” in Folk Writings 176). This “country faith” is demonstrated in The Land of
Heart’s Desire, where Bridget warns Mary’s husband to keep away from her body,
because the fairy child has not only taken Mary’s soul, but her body as well, leaving
But the kidnappers need not be connected with death – they can steal a child or a
new-wedded bride and keep these mortals to live among them in the “bloodless land of
Faery” where, according to folk beliefs, mortals are “happy enough, but doomed to melt
out at the last judgment like bright vapour” (The Celtic Twilight 118). Or, perhaps, the
soul can be carried off, leaving the body untouched, yet without wits – there are places
where one should not sleep, for there is a possibility that if they do, they “may wake
silly”; such as the aforementioned Rosses point (Yeats qtd. in Jeffares 1968, 13), or fairy
raths. In the “Death of Red Hanrahan”, the Sidhe stole Winny Byrne’s wits “one
Samhain night many years ago, when she had fallen asleep on the edge of a rath” (The
Stories of Red Hanrahan 68); and one of the Ever-living found dwelling in her body.
Perhaps the contact with the Sidhe, and the transcendental value of their madness, is
what gave “the fools of the Celtic stories” wisdom “that was above all the wisdom of
The most famous kidnappers in Yeats poetry are the fairies in “The Stolen
Child”. Their voice resonates throughout the poem, but it is most distinctly heard in the
refrain:
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Come away, O human child,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand. (9-12)
The verses sound rather theatrical and convey a really strong appeal. One wonders,
whether the child even has a chance to say “No”. A very strong contrast between the
human child and the fairies is present. The rhyme “child-wild” is somewhat
expected,69which makes the refrain easy to remember; and, together with the regular
rhythm, it sounds almost like an incantation. However, the tone changes in the fourth
stanza and the last refrain. It is still spoken by the fairy, but the addressee shifted from
the child to someone third – there is no more the necessity to lure him, since the fairies
have triumphed and are leading him away: “Away with us he’s going, / the solemn
eyed” (lines 42-3). Also, the minor chances in the last refrain make a great difference, as
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand. (lines 50-53)
The final refrain is less dramatic and theatrical. It is no longer an appeal and there is no
argumentation, which is expressed by the change of “for the world’s more full of
weeping” to “from a world more full of weeping than he can understand.” The child is
stolen, nothing can be done about it, and the world will stay the same as it was, for those
who remain – still “full of weeping.” Moreover, the very last verse seems to imply that
also the child’s departure will cause the weeping mentioned in the poem, but he will be
no longer touched by it; for he has gone beyond the scope of the human world.
69
As one of Yeats’s favourite rhymes, it connects the child to its natural surroundings (Kiberd 102).
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3.3.3. Art and love
mythology, particularly important for Yeats, are the stories of people who achieve
such as that of Oisín, but it can be just an insight to the world of art, or being changed
through love. Depicting psychopomps like this means seeing them more on the
metaphorical level – many a time they lead the souls to a different stage of knowledge
and being. Art and love are connected in the figure of the Leanhaun Sidhe (Gaelic for
“fairy mistress”) – a fairy who seeks love of men and becomes their muse, giving
inspiration to the poets who, however, pine away under her influence. According to
Yeats, “most of the Gaelic poets, down to quite recent times, have had a Leanhaun
Shee”; they die young and are carried to the Otherworld, “for death does not destroy her
power”70 (Fairy tales 404-5). The theme of a poet under the power of a Leanhaun Shee
is treated by Yeats in many of his narrative works; his poet-heroes, for example,
Michael Hearne from the Speckled Bird, but most notably, Owen Red Hanrahan, must
experience, a doomed wanderer and exile in search of eternal beauty” (Hirsch 59) and
this eternal beauty comes to him as a fairy mistress, who is for Yeats “both the muse of
the Gaelic poet and an emblem of the deep cost to the romantic artist” (Hirsch 61).
However, the Leanhaun Shee “is simultaneously life-giving […] and life-denying”
(Hirsch 61), and she leads them to their moment of epiphany and transcendence at the
70
This can be compared to the desire of “The Man who Dreamt of Faeryland”, who also wanted to find
love and beauty in the Otherworld – and he never escaped the desire; “he found no comfort on the grave”
(48).
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In the poem “The Hosting of the Sidhe”, a whole host of unearthly beautiful
beings are the inspiration of the poet and therefore act as psychopomps, guiding his soul
into and through the world of poetry. However, they have a similar effect as the
Leanhaun Shee has on those who “gaze on” their “rushing band” (10) – they come
between “him and the deed of his hand” and “him and the hope of his heart”; thus
bereaving him of the mortal hopes of happiness in this world, but replacing them with a
sense of beauty:
In this evaluative conclusion carried out by the speaker of the poem, he seems to imply
that they are so beautiful, that it might be worth sacrificing human happiness
(satisfaction with the human life and world) for the ideal of beauty towards which they
could lead his soul. The host of the Sidhe has given the speaker his poetic abilities, but
there is a price to be paid: the Sidhe interfere with his human life, and “to attain this
immortal beauty in a single timeless moment the Yeatsian hero must leave the time-
The Leanhuan Shee is often connected to death, as Winny Byrne is, in the last
story from the Stories of Red Hanrahan – as the poet is dying, she enters into a kind of
mystical marriage with him, and, being one of the “lasting unwearied Voices” (76), she
is also his muse, who was with him throughout his life, but whom he was still seeking;
when she reveals herself, she whispers to him: “You will go looking for me no more
upon the breasts of women” (75). In this case, the poet hero “must die a physical death
in order to attain the irreducible and indefinable mystified essence” (Hirsch 63).
However, this need not be always the case; the transcendence through art and love may
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spiritual growth and development” and “his developing faith in a higher, invisible level
Yeats’s concern with the theme of transcendence though art and love, enabled
through a relationship with a fairy muse, definitely has much to do with his own
romantic obsession with Maud Gonne. In his eyes, she was the incarnation of the
immortal beauty of the Sidhe;72 he stressed her godlike character in his autobiographical
Being high and solitary and most stern? (“No Second Troy” 8-10)
He gives her attributes which could easily be used to describe one of the Tuatha Dé
Danann. She, by “being what she is” (No Second Troy 11), became his psychopomp,
carrying his soul helplessly away, and becoming an inspiration of much of his poetry; in
The Wind Among the Reeds she is the most frequent object and addressee of his love
poems, which are full of unyielding devotion. This, together with the Celtic imagery
Before the unlabouring stars and you. (“He Tells of the Perfect Beauty”
6-8)
71
In the poem “Fergus and the Druid”, the Ulster king Fergus pursues this “higher, invisible level of
being”. He gives up his crown , seeks wisdom and experiences his own personal transcendence by
unloosing “the cord”, opening a “little bag of dreams” which “wrap” him “round” and give him insight he
did not have before.
72
Yeats’s description of Maud manifests his view of her as the very ideal of the Otherworldly beauty: “I
had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to
some legendary past. A complexion like the bloom of apples … and stature so great that she seemed of a
divine race. Her movements were works of grace … she seems like a goddess.” (Yeats Reader)
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Maud was well aware of being Yeats’s muse. In her autobiography, she recorded a
dialogue with Yeats, where she says: “The world should thank me for not marrying
you” … “because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness”
(Jeffares, Man and Poet 113). Just as the Gaelic muse Leanhaun Shee, Maud “is an
emblem of the poet's necessary fatal attraction to the predatory muse” (Hirsch 61), who
enables him, through love, to move to a different, and higher, stage of being.
individual and their reaching out for new possibilities. But Yeats is also concerned about
transcendence on a broader level in his world – “the quotidian social world” changing
“into a higher invisible or supernatural realm” (Hirsch 56), which symbolizes the
transcendence of the whole nation.73 At the end of the 19th century, Ireland, tackling with
a political crisis, badly needed a guide who would lead it towards independence or
Home Rule. Literature was to become the mediator between the reality and the desired
outcome. This idea was already discussed in the chapter on the role of art in Ireland –
art itself has an otherworldly character, as it transcends time and links the past, presence
and future. Therefore, not only the Sidhe, depicted in literature and mythology were
consciousness, but Yeast’s poems as such could be considered the guides of souls,
However, Yeats, being a mystic, went even further and practised a kind of
73
This is not just the transformation of the mundane world into the Otherworld in literature – in one
poem, Yeats describes an apocalyptic vision of a world where “the day sinks, drowned in dew / Being
weary of the world’s empires, bow down to you, / Master of still stars and of the flaming door” (“The
Valley of the Black Pig” 5-8). Yeats comments on the poem, asserting that Irish peasants, those “who still
labour by the cromlech on the shore” (4), “have for generations comforted themselves, in their
misfortunes, with visions of a great battle, to be fought in a mysterious valley called ‘The Valley of the
Black Pig,’ and to break the last power of their enemies. (Yeats qtd. in Jeffares Commentary 69). This,
too, is a transformation of the whole society into something grander, even if mysterious and sinister.
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sorcery through his poems. The poem “The Secret Rose” is an invocation of something
One must keep in mind that the Rose, among other things, symbolises also Ireland.
Here, it is some great revelation, either for the world, for Ireland, or for Yeats himself.
What is interesting, is what led to these final culminating words – the greater part of the
poem, Yeats is remembering episodes from Irish mythic past, which are enfolded in the
“great leaves” of the Memory of the World. Therefore, on a level of mysticism and
sorcery, the combination of mythology and poetry can bring some great revelation – it is
though the ancient stories mentioned in the poem, that Yeats invokes the “Secret Rose”.
He himself is the psychopomp, the leader of souls, the magician who though his art
Red Rose, prod Rose, sad Rose of all my days. (“To Rose upon the Rood
of Time” 22-4)
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4. Conclusion
The main purpose of the thesis was to demonstrate how national identity can be
constructed through literature, and, particularly, how the use of certain motifs and
themes in Yeats’s poetry supports the process of Irish self-fashioning. As the Irish
identity, to a large extent, depended on the people’s adherence to their racial Celtic
substrate, and on differentiating themselves from the English, the Revival literature,
which strove to support the self-fashioning process, turned to ancient myths and Celtic
elements. Further, the thesis argued that the theme of transcendence in poetry
symbolized the metaphorical transcendence of the Irish, who were reaching towards
liberation.
The motifs Yeats chose to employ in the analysed works were closely connected
to the Irish folk imagination of the 19th century; apart from the theme of mystic
transcendence, the choice of the motifs points to themes topical in Yeats’s times and
related to the strives of the 19th century Ireland: desire, freedom, aspirations, insecurity,
The motif of the Otherworld conveyed solace for the country people, who saw in
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it the vision of happiness. Moreover, the personal journey of a hero who reaches the
Island of the Blest can bear parallels to the journey of the Revivalists to reach the
“imaginary Ireland” (P&T), which would be independent. This symbolic value of the
Otherworld is supported by the use of images which are typically Irish – apart from the
fact, that as a physical place it is usually an island, the use of mist, weater, dew, drops,
birds is extensive, all of these being motifs connected to Ireland. The implicit
identification of the Otherworld and Ireland is yet strengthened by the fact that the
Otherworld actually is in Ireland; it is the “other”, unseen, mystical part of the country,
The other dominant motif in Yeats’s Celtic poetry is represented by the Sidhe.
They are the inhabitants of the Otherworld, and, being able to pass in and out of their
invisible realm, they have also become the mediators between the two worlds.
Therefore, it is they who enable the aforementioned transcendence. As is the case with
the Otherworld, the Sidhe, too, are connected to sub-motifs such as wind, dance, and
fire, which express themes of desire and freedom. Their very appearance, with their
loose hair, unearthly beauty, unfettered character and unpredictable behaviour, reflects
The Sidhe act as psychopomps, leading the mortals into the Otherworld; whether
increasingly important in the late 19th century, because, as mentioned, the transcendence
to the Otherworld could be seen as a metaphor: in the real world it corresponded to the
transcendence of a subdued nation into the Irish nation; a process in which art, in this
case particularly poetry, played the role of the psychopomp. Or, perhaps, poems could
289) between the two worlds and the gateways into the Otherworld. Then it would be
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the poet himself, who would be the psychopomp, guiding his readers’ souls towards
finding their own national identity; which certainly was one of Yeats’s ambitions.
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Résumé
The thesis offers an insight into the early poetry, drama and prose of William
Butler Yeats, focusing on the Celtic elements. These, in the late 19th century, were
thesis, the term is used to denote the formation a national identity, or sense of the
national self. The work is divided into two major parts: the theoretical, where the
historical and cultural background is briefly outlined; and the analytical, which deals
The first, theoretical part, deals first with the historical development of the era
and the events that lead to the formation of the Irish Literary Revival. Then the work
have proved to be an essential base for this process and the Irish Literary Revival leaned
on myths exceedingly. The second part analyses Yeats’s poems and searches in them for
Celtic elements. The theme which is analysed in greatest detail is the theme of
transcendence in mythology, and therefore, the motifs like the Otherworld and the Sidhe
(fairies) are paid most attention to in the thesis. Some poems, or parts of poems, are
subdued to close-reading, which has shown how tightly the theme of transcendence is
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tied to the strivings of the Irish for personal, as well as national freedom.
Resumé
Irsku, jak v mé práci stojí, se tento termín používá k označení vznikání národní identity
nebo pocitu sounáležitosti národa. Práce je rozdělena na dvě části: teoretickou část, kde
je krátce načrtnuta historie a kulturní pozadí tématu, a analytickou část, jež se zabývá
jež vedly ke vzniku Irského literárního obrození. Dále v práci zkoumám proces
literárního obrození, které na nich stavělo. V druhé části rozebírám Yeatsovy básně a
tím pádem se zde nejvíce soustřeďuji na Onen svět a takzvané Sidhe (bytosti z Onoho
světa). Podrobnou analýzou některých básní nebo jejich částí se ukázalo, jak úzce spolu
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