Early Articles and Reviews Uncollected Articles and Reviews Written between 1886 and 1900

Chapter One THE POETRY OF SIR SAMUEL FERGUSON -- IThis article appeared in The Irish Fireside of 9 October 1886, under the heading "Irish Poets and Irish Poetry." Sir Samuel Ferguson had died on 9 August 1886, and the present article was one of two pieces written by Yeats to sum up the achievement of Ferguson. This article may have been written after the longer, more detailed one that appeared in The Dublin University Review of November 1886, pp. 10-27 in this collection. In the present article Yeats writes about Ferguson's Conary, from Poems (Dublin: W. McGee, 1880), "Of this poem's splendid plot, which I have no space to describe here, I have written somewhat copiously elsewhere."Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), Belfast-born poet and antiquary, most heavily influenced Yeats by his attempt to use ancient Irish legends and heroic sagas as subjects for his poems. What Ferguson's work meant to Yeats is writ large in this and the following article. Of old, unhappy, far-off things,And battles long ago. In the garden of the world's imagination there are seven great fountains. The seven great cycles of legends -- the Indian; the Homeric; the Charlemagnic; the Spanish, circling round the Cid; the Arthurian; the Scandinavian; and the Irish -- all differing one from the other, as the peoples differed who created them. Every one of these cycles is the voice of some race celebrating itself, embalming for ever what it hated and loved. Back to their old legends go, year after year, the poets of the earth, seeking the truth about nature and man, that they may not be lost in a world of mere shadow and dream.Sir Samuel Ferguson's special claim to our attention is that he went back to the Irish cycle, finding it, in truth, a fountain that, in the passage of centuries, was overgrown with weeds and grass, so that the very way to it was forgotten of the poets; but now that his feet have worn the pathway, many others will follow, and bring thence living waters for the healing of our nation, helping us to live the larger life of the Spirit, and lifting our souls away from their selfish joys and sorrows to be the companions of those who lived greatly among the woods and hills when the world was young.It was in Ferguson's later poems that he restored to us the old heroes themselves; in his first work, Lays of the Western Gael, he gave us rather instants of heroic passion, as in 'Owen Bawn', and 'Deirdre's Lament for the Sons of Usnach', or poems in which character is subordinated to some dominant idea or event, as in the 'Welshmen of Tirawley', and 'Willy Gilliland', or tales round which is shed the soft lustre of idyllic thought, as the 'Fairy Thorn'.In other words, he was more lyrical and romantic than dramatic in this first and best known of his books. 'The Fairy Thorn', does the whole range of our rich ballad literature contain a more beautiful ballad of 'the good people' than this? I will quote almost the whole of it: 'Get up, our Anna dear, from the weary spinning-wheel,For your father's on the hill, and your mother's asleep;Come up above the crags, and we'll dance a highland-reelAround the fairy thorn on the steep'.At Anna Grace's door 'twas thus the maidens cried -- Three merry maidens fair, in kirtles of the green;And Anna laid the sock and weary wheel aside,The fairest of the four, I ween.They're glancing through the glimmer of the quiet eve,Away, in milky wavings of neck and ankle bare;The heavy sliding stream in its sleepy song they leave,And the crags in the ghostly air;And linking hand in hand, and singing as they go,The maids along the hillside have ta'en their fearless way,Till they come to where the rowen trees in lonely beauty growBeside the fairy hawthorne grey.But solemn is the silence of the silvery hazeThat drinks away their voices echoless repYeats, W. B. is the author of 'Early Articles and Reviews Uncollected Articles and Reviews Written between 1886 and 1900' with ISBN 9780684807300 and ISBN 0684807300.