106 PA RT O N E
Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood ’s woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fears no more.
And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love ’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.Shadowy, dim, disheveled may unnerve us, but Yeats had more in mind. King
Fergus of ancient Ulster, a hero and poet as well, abdicated to live in the woods.
That gesture seized Yeats from early on. He cherished Irish myth, legend, folk
imagination, and a tension was already pulling on him, between poetry and
power, intellect and action, country and city. So he sets it all to music, entrust-
ing life and nature to well-woven four-beat verse.
Celtic folk tradition never let Yeats go. At twenty-three he edited Irish Fairy
and Folk Tales, to breed popular consciousness. Fairies, ghosts, legendary he-
roes—he takes this fabulous world at face value. His entry on banshees, female
spirits whose wild wailing portends a death, reports confidently that “at Dulla-
han” one of them hurled a bucket of blood in a peasant ’s face. He adds a sort
of proof: “Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall give the following notation of the banshee ’s
cry,” and there on a treble staff is a spine-chilling cry!
Throughout his half-century career, Irish places and place-names bind Yeats
to the landscape. In this ballad, “salley” is a willow tree:
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.First Yeats called this “An Old Song Resung,” as it was “an extension of three
lines sung to me by an old woman at Ballisodare.” Enlisting in the tradition,
he weaves his own words into a lilting Irish melody. What counts is popular
lineage, re-rooting him in native soil: “an old woman” sang “to me... at Balli-
sodare,” a village near Sligo.
Place names—Sligo, Innisfree, Dullahan, Ballisodare, Coole, Ballylee, Drum-
cliff, Ben Bulben—charmed him no less than the natural scene behind them.
Whereas Gerard Manley Hopkins fastened on organic detail, with Yeats our
senses don’t feel alerted to wind, moon, stream, lake, seashore, rock, woodland,