What we lose, though, is the sense of mystery and unforeseen delight that comes when we encounter a new and powerful poetic voice without any retrospective knowledge of how it will develop. The opportunity is to see Yeats from a different vantage that is not bound to his own critical legacy but is closer to that of his early reviewers, many of whom were immediately entranced by what Lionel Johnson characterized as the “haunting music” in Yeats’s poems, “which depends not upon any rich wealth of words, but upon a [subtle] strain of music in their whole quality of thoughts and images, some incommunicable beauty, felt in the simplest words and verses.”7

When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales is meant as a fresh introduction to that Yeats—the poet, dramatist, and folklorist whose writings from 1886 through 1902 first captivated a generation of readers. The volume’s limited temporal frame, incorporation of multiple genres, and reliance on early editions are designed to evoke a different age and literary context, so that fans today can experience something of that immediate charm, haunting music, and quality of thoughts and images. Consider, for example, the opening quatrain of Yeats’s 1892 poem “The Sorrow of Love,” as it now appears in editions of the collected poems:

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves,

The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,

And all that famous harmony of leaves,

Had blotted out man’s image and his cry.

Revised for publication in 1925, the stanza exhibits many of the characteristics of Yeats’s late poetry. The opening gerund is direct and powerful, the images are romantic but rendered with specificity, and the tone is confident, almost urbane—“all that famous harmony of leaves.” By contrast, the version that appears in this book, taken from the 1895 edition of Poems, relies upon a languid, hypnotic rhythm. The images are more evocative than descriptive, and the overall tone is wistful, dreamy, and melancholic:

The quarrel of the sparrows in the eaves,

The full round moon and the star-laden sky,

And the loud song of the ever-singing leaves

Had hid away earth’s old and weary cry.

Reading this version is a very different experience, and part of what makes it feel so different is that it awakens an aesthetic sensibility that can seem to us both foreign and familiar. Foreign, in the sense that the adjectives that immediately spring to mind—wistful, dreamy, melancholic, delicate, ornamental, elusive, ephemeral, or even sentimental—are normally used today as terms of disparagement, reserved for poems that are deemed inferior because they lack precision and intellectual complexity. Familiar, in the sense that these adjectives strike exactly the right note, reminding us of those moments when lush imagery, dreamy associations, and hypnotic rhythms linger in our minds, evoking a mood that we can sense but cannot fully describe. To read this version of “The Sorrow of Love” or any of his other early writings as part of one discrete group—the poems, plays, and fairy tales all in dialogue with one another—is to rediscover that familiar experience, when the artist’s words resonate in what Yeats calls in his signature poem “the deep heart’s core,” against the backdrop of a foreign age, when sentiment, euphony, delicacy, sensitivity, and beauty were the primary markers of literary quality. It is, in other words, to recognize that these works can stand on their own, not because they are necessarily superior to his other writings (that question is best left to the reader) but because, more than a century later, they continue to move, challenge, and inspire us.

When You Are Old begins with selections from Yeats’s edited collection Irish Fairy Tales (1892), which are designed to provide readers with a context for exploring his work in light of his commitments to folklore, spiritualism, and cultural nationalism. These are followed by complete first editions of Poems (1895), which was chosen for its lasting popularity, and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), a volume that, perhaps more than any other, has come to define the avant-garde symbolism of the fin de siècle. Poems also includes two underappreciated early plays, The Countess Cathleen (1892, originally spelled “Kathleen”) and The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894). The concluding selections of fairy and folk tales have been chosen from The Celtic Twilight (1893, rev. 1902), a title that has become synonymous with the Celtic Revival. The absence of a strict thematic organization is meant to encourage readers to examine these volumes in dialogue with one another, while the incorporation of multiple genres is intended to mirror Yeats’s own arrangement practices and to provide a sense of his varied artistic pursuits and interests during this incredibly productive time in his life. One place to start is with the fairy tales, which had an influence going back as far as the first two poems he published under his own name, “Song of the Faeries” and “Voices,” in the March 1885 issue of the Dublin University Review.

THE FAIRY TALES

Although Yeats had listened with fascination as a boy in the western Irish village of Sligo to his mother’s stories about ghosts, fairies, and other supernatural encounters, his interest in fairy tales, and in folklore more generally, was spurred during the late 1880s primarily by his involvement in theosophy and other forms of spiritualism. Yeats was Protestant by birth, but his father, the painter John Butler Yeats, was a Victorian agnostic who instilled in his eldest son a skeptical attitude toward Ireland’s two mainstream religions. Yeats did not, however, share his father’s commitment to scientific materialism. He believed instead in the theosophist notion that deeper truths, woven throughout all of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions, are only accessible when individual thought transcends rationality and merges with the collective mind, ultimately reaching back to what he called the “one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.”8 In his travels throughout County Sligo, where ghosts and fairies were a part of everyday conversation (“I always mind my own affairs and they always mind theirs,” says old Biddy Hart in Irish Fairy Tales), Yeats found confirmation of a spiritual realm that exceeded logical thought, and in the stories he heard and retold proof that all manifestations of true creativity spring from one primal source. “Folk-lore,” he proclaimed in 1893, “is at once the Bible, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer, and well-nigh all the great poets have lived by its light.”9

Folklore also had a more pragmatic function. In 1885, just as he was immersing himself in theosophy, Yeats met the former Irish revolutionary John O’Leary. Though only in his fifties, O’Leary seemed to the young poet a romantic figure from an earlier, heroic age, and his teachings prompted Yeats to embrace the cause of Irish nationalism. Initially this meant a brief interest in, if not a deep commitment to, revolution by physical force, but for the most part Yeats followed O’Leary’s lead in promoting the notion that independence from England could best be achieved through cultural transformation. If Ireland featured in British popular media as a backward land plagued by ignorance, superstition, and drunkenness, unfit for self-government because it had not produced great artistic achievements like other Western countries, cultural nationalism sought to reawaken a sense of pride in the Irish people by reminding them of an oral tradition that had always been a vital feature of rural life. As a nationalist of Protestant heritage who did not speak Gaelic, Yeats felt that this tradition, because it was rooted in the great memory, represented a model of communal unity that could transcend modern sectarian divisions. His early folklore collections were, in this sense, one aspect of a broader program designed to establish in material form a canon of Irish literature that would be accessible to contemporary readers, helping, as he put it in 1892, “to build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language.”10

In his early folk collections, this Irish spirit is usually associated with place, but in his most popular collection of folklore and fairy tales, The Celtic Twilight, it is primarily associated with character. Passionate or melancholy, simple or wise, the people in these stories entrance us more than the fairies, for they intuitively embrace all that is extraordinary in the world and that cannot be encompassed by the dictates of Enlightenment thought. “When all is said and done,” asks Yeats in “Belief and Unbelief,” “how do we not know that our own unreason may be better than another’s truth? [F]or it has been warmed on our hearths and in our souls, and is ready for the wild bees of truth to hive in it, and make their sweet honey. Come into the world again, wild bees, wild bees!” Not coincidentally, Yeats was living in London when he expressed these sentiments, and they align neatly with the core convictions he discovered in the artists who occupied his attention: the Romantic poets Blake and Shelley, the mid-century Pre-Raphaelites, whose paintings recalled the styles of the Middle Ages, and William Morris, who inspired the Arts and Crafts movement. For Yeats, the modern age was characterized by a deadening adherence to mechanized logic.