As is always the case with Yeats, the ordering is crucial. Throughout his life, Yeats usually opened his collected editions with either “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” or “The Wanderings of Oisin” (spelled “Usheen” in the 1895 collection). The former is set in a dying pastoral realm, where the earth no longer “dreams,” no longer gives birth to gods and spirits, because the “Gray Truth” of Enlightenment thought has now become “her painted toy.” The shepherd, though, is joyful, for he sings,

But ah! She dreams not now—dream thou!

For fair are poppies on the brow:

Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.

Humble peasant, visionary artist, or any reader of this poem, all who embrace the power of the imagination and live with poppies on the brow, irrespective of any national ties, have the capacity to reawaken an ancient spiritualism in a world dominated by modern logic. In the 1895 collection, however, Yeats signals his more immediate commitment to cultural nationalism by beginning with “The Wanderings of Usheen,” an epic poem rooted in Irish mythology. The volume’s middle section of symbolist and mystical poems, which he titled The Rose, reinforces this commitment, as the speaker declares in the opening lyric that he will “Sing of old Eri [i.e., Ireland] and the ancient ways.”14 The book then concludes with a section titled Crossways, in which “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” introduces a group of lyrics with Arcadian and Eastern settings. Taken as a whole, the volume offers a retrospective of Yeats’s career to this point, but more important the arrangement communicates a set of fundamental beliefs: transformation of Irish culture is the primary goal, mystical poetry focused on Irish myths and legends provides the means, and universal spiritualism, which transcends national boundaries, is the source.

Although the poems in both major sections are part of an overarching narrative, they are different in approach. In Crossways, as Yeats notes in his preface, the young artist had “tried many pathways,” while in The Rose “he has found, he believes, the only pathway whereon he can hope to see with his own eyes the Eternal Rose of Beauty and of Peace.” The former introduces a central theme in Yeats’s art—creativity born out of the tension between opposites, where fulfillment of desire always gives way to further yearning. If “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” affirms the power of the individual imagination to remake the world through poetic language, its Blakean companion, “The Sad Shepherd,” transforms this romantic dream into a solipsistic nightmare, as the speaker is unable to sustain his own identity in the face of nature’s power, his attempts at song echoing back as an “inarticulate moan.” In “The Stolen Child,” the most famous poem in this section, the fairy realms that seduce the boy are characterized by abundance and the joyful dances of creatures who are indifferent to mortal cares, yet the child departs “solemn-eyed,” having left behind those humble comforts of ordinary human existence, the sounds of young cows “lowing . . . on the warm hillside / Or the kettle on the hob” that “sing peace into his breast.”

The Rose, by contrast, introduces another central theme—creativity born out of the attempt to unify opposites. Having joined the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, an occult society that was steeped in Rosicrucian philosophy, Yeats believed that multiple levels of reality, extending from the visible world to the spiritual world, could be momentarily apprehended as one through sustained contemplation of symbols—a more active form of magical incantation than he had practiced during his earlier studies of theosophy. The lush and rhythmic poems in The Rose are designed to induce this meditative state, with the rose functioning as an object of contemplation that evokes and brings into being, among many other things, a once and future Ireland, mystical wisdom, peace, and multiple forms of ideal beauty, all of which are associated with Maud Gonne. The rose, though, does not directly symbolize any of these ideals. Instead, the rose is a symbol of symbolism itself—the point at which art brings into harmony two separate orders of reality. In “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” beauty and infinite pity blossom on the cross of human suffering and mortal, time-bound existence. In “The Rose of the World,” ancient “beauty [that] passes like a dream” simultaneously manifests itself in the “lonely face” and “wandering feet” of an idealized woman, presumably Gonne. This unifying aesthetic operates even in those poems that do not directly reference the rose. In “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the speaker, walking “the pavements grey” of the modern city, conjures up a remote geographical location where peace and the essence of beauty are imagined as physical qualities of the landscape. Although the speaker declares that he “will arise and go now” to this magical place, the journey is purely metaphysical, in that the speaker longs to ascend into that contemplative state where a fusion of the real and ideal can be felt in the depths of the heart.

In this sense, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is more about the desire for spiritual unity than its actualization, and this expression of longing becomes one of the central issues that Yeats explores in The Wind Among the Reeds. Here, though, desire is primarily directed toward emotional and erotic fulfillment, a reflection of Yeats’s complex personal life during the mid-1890s. Having been repeatedly rebuffed by Maud Gonne, who had moved to Paris in 1893, Yeats began an affair with a married woman, Olivia Shakespear, in 1895. This was Yeats’s first sexual relationship, and in his Memoirs he confesses to feelings of insecurity, embarrassment, painful yearning, and awkward excitement before his more experienced lover. Gonne, though, had already returned to his life, and he soon abandoned the reality of an actual woman for the fantasy of an ideal beloved, unaware that throughout this time Gonne was in a relationship with a French newspaper editor, Lucien Millevoye, an older, married man with whom she had had two children (one dying in infancy). In The Wind Among the Reeds, these experiences shape his diverse representations of the lover’s attitude toward the beloved, where the prospect of fulfilled desire is often associated with entanglement, a loss of identity, or even death, while the prospect of unfulfilled desire is often associated with intense fidelity, frustrated longing, or suicidal self-abasement. It is important, however, to keep in mind that these are not confessional poems. Unlike later, revised editions of this volume, where the titles refer to “He” or “The Lover,” the speakers in this first edition, like the various depictions of the beloved, are a series of characters, representing different imaginative temperaments and the varying, conflicted attitudes of a lover, all couched in the decadent symbolism that Yeats discovered in his reading of French authors, including Villiers. The Wind Among the Reeds is, in this respect, a carefully designed performance, in which Yeats incorporates a variety of personas and symbols to dramatize the complexities of human sexuality, emotion, fantasy, and desire.

Just four months before the publication of The Wind Among the Reeds, Maud Gonne met with Yeats on December 8, 1898, at the Crown Hotel in Dublin and told him about Lucien Millevoye. It was the first in a series of events that, over the next decade, would prompt Yeats to reassess his personal beliefs and aesthetic assumptions, to the point that he came to regard his first works as a phase that had to be cast aside before he could discover his mature poetic voice and artistic vision. Or, to quote W. H. Auden’s more sardonic assessment, “Yeats spent the first part of his life as a minor poet, and the second part writing major poems about what it had been like to be a minor poet.”15 But Auden was wrong—as readers of When You Are Old will quickly discover.