Yeats thought himself to be one of the last of the classical Romantics; he celebrated the power of imagination to help people see and empathize deeply, he recognized the dangers of abstract reasoning divorced from imagination and the natural world, and he sought a kind of lost knowledge not taught in schools or churches. Yeats rejected realistic, imitative art. He believed that only art that recognized and celebrated the panpsychic power of imagination, myth, and symbol could reveal the deeper truths and intuitive meanings underlying everyday experience. In his poem “Who Goes with Fergus?” Yeats invokes the ancient king of Irish legend who abandoned his high office and its grating, relentless demands to head to the woods and learn the mysterious “dreaming wisdom” of the Druid priests.
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.
Fergus is a hero of the imagination who leaves the everyday human world to revel in the mysteries of nature and spirit. The “shadows of the wood” and “the white breast of the dim sea” represent primeval knowledge and beauty that can only be glimpsed through experiences of wilderness solitude, trance, magic, and meditation. Full of fantasies of a better world, the young Yeats struggled to accept regular life on earth and sought desperately to find a way into other dimensions of space and time. In “The Stolen Child,” he portrays an alluring, otherworldly kingdom that calls us from the frustrations of everyday life to the eerie phantasm of the faery dance.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles and is anxious in its sleep
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The landscape is lit up with moonlight, under which things dark and hidden become visible. The powerful faeries (creatures who in Celtic tradition are emphatically not small, cute, or winged) call the poet to “the waters and the wild,” the fluid, frothy, and sometimes freaky realm of visionary trance and imagination.
Available: http://www.realitysandwich.com/yeats_magical_visionary
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.
Fergus is a hero of the imagination who leaves the everyday human world to revel in the mysteries of nature and spirit. The “shadows of the wood” and “the white breast of the dim sea” represent primeval knowledge and beauty that can only be glimpsed through experiences of wilderness solitude, trance, magic, and meditation. Full of fantasies of a better world, the young Yeats struggled to accept regular life on earth and sought desperately to find a way into other dimensions of space and time. In “The Stolen Child,” he portrays an alluring, otherworldly kingdom that calls us from the frustrations of everyday life to the eerie phantasm of the faery dance.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles and is anxious in its sleep
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
The landscape is lit up with moonlight, under which things dark and hidden become visible. The powerful faeries (creatures who in Celtic tradition are emphatically not small, cute, or winged) call the poet to “the waters and the wild,” the fluid, frothy, and sometimes freaky realm of visionary trance and imagination.
Available: http://www.realitysandwich.com/yeats_magical_visionary
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