In The 1890s: British Literature, Art, and Culture,
    ed. G. A. Cevasco (New York and London: Garland
    Publishing Co., 1993)

Desire and Apocalypse: The Wind Among the Reeds

The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) by W. B. Yeats, containing 37 poems, sounds keynotes of painful desire, world-weariness, and apocalyptic fantasy. Its "end-of-the-world" mood recalls some of the stories in The Secret Rose (1897), and the poetry book is related in important ways to the short story collection. "To the Secret Rose," the introductory work in the earlier volume, appears again among the poems as "The Secret Rose"; a statement of radical dichotomy between the real world and the ideal, it records the poet's plea to enter the realm of Eternal Beauty. Like the prose volume, The Wind Among the Reeds makes use of both theosophy and Irish folklore. Poems include highly-mannered lyrics (like "The Secret Rose") and simpler ballads (like "The Fiddler of Dooney"). The contents had appeared previously in 15 different magazines and books between 1892 and 1899--from periodicals like The Savoy and The Yellow Book to collections like The Second Book of the Rhymers' CLUB (1894) and Yeats's own THE CELTIC TWILIGHT: Men and Women, Dhouls and Fairies (1893).

Althea Gyles, Yeats's fellow student of the occult and an artist and poet, designed the cover for The Wind Among the Reeds, generally considered her best work for Yeats. On the front, stylized gold reeds, stamped on a deep blue background, form an interlaced Celtic pattern resembling a fisherman's net, but the mesh of reeds on the back opens in large swirls as if violently loosened by wind. The earthy reeds and the wind join depictions of flames and waves to form a visual microcosm composed of the four cosmogonic elements. On the spine, a slender flower-tipped wand suggests cabalistic magic and initiation rites that inform many of the poems. In Yeats's iconography, the reeds represent all perishable mortal things while the wind signifies the uncanny immortal powers buffeting them and interacting with them; wind also suggests to Yeats the "vague desires" of humans who are forever unsatisfied by the transcient and palpable. Moreover, the figure of the wind in the reeds reproduces the favorite Romantic trope of the Aeolian harp (with well-known Celtic counterparts), a stringed instrument played by the wind as if signifying the way inspiration plays upon the poetic imagination.

Names from The Secret Rose reappear in The Wind Among the Reeds: Aedh (a revision of the name Aodh, derived from a Celtic god of death), Michael Robartes, and Red Hanrahan are now personae. Although Yeats had not yet developed his famous "mask" theory, these dramatic speakers forerun it; they are no longer the "personages" of the stories, Yeats states, but "principles of the mind." In fact, they may seem intermediary between the embodied fiction characters and the spiritual forces Yeats calls "the Moods." One poem, "The Eternal Moods," grows out of the poet's nineties theory that eternal, elemental forces surround and infuse humans (forces like those he imagines in the wind--sometimes as the Sidhe--and elsewhere identifies as daimons). "The Moods," he writes in the poem, are "fire-born spirits," and a note associates Hanrahan with "fire blown by the wind," Robartes with "fire reflected in water," and Aedh with "fire burning by itself." Ten of the volume's poems are attributed to Aedh, three to Hanrahan, three to Robartes, and two to Mongan (a figure from ancient Celtic literature). But these voices are scarcely individualized, a fact underlined when Yeats later changed the titles, identifying the personae only as "He" or "the Lover," as in "He [once Aedh] hears the Cry of the Sedge."

Despite the use of personae, it is quite possible to find in the volume a central quasi-autobiographical "narrative" about a young poet caught up in a triangular love affair with two women (like those in Yeats's own life in the nineties--Olivia Shakespear and Maud Gonne). Although scholarship can discern poems written to each woman individually, the two clusters sometimes coalesce. On one hand is requited love; on the other, frustrated longing. In the "Olivia" poems, the beloved is a vulnerable mortal; in the "Maud" poems, the loved one has features of the inaccessible Sidhe (fairies). The young man experiences remorse at his inability to maintain the realized love affair in the face of his continuing desire for the ideal one, and he calls for the end of a world in which he is denied the utmost fulfillment.

This is the story the poems tell in chronological order. (They not only trace the course of Yeats's individual experience but also follow a theme of quest and inevitable loss common to Romantic poetry more generally.) But Yeats reordered the poems for the volume's publication, thus obscuring the sequence while creating other unifying features. The poems represent exercises in nuance and subtle emotional shifts. Celtic setting and mythology are sometimes foregrounded, and the opening poem is an alluring call from the Sidhe in fairyland to "come away," at the cost of mortal life. In "The Valley of the Black Pig" (as elsewhere in the volume), the apocalyptic beast is a great boar, which Yeats has adapted from both Gaelic and classical legends (and from accounts by Sir George Frazer) to herald not simply seasonal death or local disaster but Armageddon itself. Such eschatological material provides a pervasive "suicidal" impulse, often coupled with impotent longing for some eternal dimension beyond the apocalypse. This is Yeats's most escapist volume, one that, atypically for him, tends to repudiate the realistic things of this world instead of holding them in a balance with the ideal or otherworldly.

Many of the poems are highly stylized ("curiously elaborate," as Yeats acknowledged), varied in metrics (ranging from ballad measure to stately anapests and hexameters), and lush in diction; they represent the culmination of his early aesthetic style. A Pre-Raphaelite quality appears in elusive images of women--pallid, shadowy, displaying luxuriant hair--and in an atmosphere of phantasmagoria or the "dream-heavy hour." One of the volume's most noteworthy motifs is the "hair-tent," produced when a woman's "dim heavy hair," or "shadowy blossom" of hair, seemingly shields her lover from the chaos outside her embrace (as in "The Heart of the Woman" and "Michael Robartes Bids His Beloved Be at Peace"). While critics often relate such imagery biographically to Olivia, it also recalls a characteristic attribute of women in paintings and poems by D. G. ROSSETTI and others. French Symbolists were right to see the volume as a remarkable instance of "the eternal feminine" theme.

The rose symbolism--already prominent in The Secret Rose and the 1895 Poems--continues in The Wind Among the Reeds. The rose is the image of the ideal woman, threatened by the "broken" and distorting things of this world (as in "Aedh tells of the Rose in his Heart") and is also the ultimate repository of the immortals and Irish heroes like Cuchulain and Fergus (as in "The Secret Rose"). Another recurring motif is the net, suggested by the cover design of the enmeshed reeds. "Breasal the Fisherman" presents a man who has spent a lifetime casting "nets," apparently for the elusive ideal, and the speaker in "The Song of Wandering Angus" has caught a mysterious silver fish that becomes a "glimmering girl" and disappears. "Into the Twilight," previously in The Celtic Twilight, alters the perspective on the net image, calling for escape from the oppressive world with its "nets of right and wrong" to the ideal landscape of "Mother Eire."

Images of secret initiation proliferate, and it is possible to read the escapist appeals as invitations to rituals like those of the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, to which Yeats belonged. The focus on Ireland as an unworldly sanctuary reflects his nineties' hope of establishing there a "castle" or mystical order of Celtic heroes and visionaries. The volume's immersion in Celtic mythology and occult lore caused Yeats to add 43 pages of explantory notes after the 62 pages of poetry, a fact that led to complaints by reviewers.

FRANCIS THOMPSON, while finding the poetry "frail and mysterious" like wind in reeds, nonetheless felt "alarm" because Yeats had redoubled the difficulty of Irish mythology by an admixture of arcane symbolism; Fiona MacLeod (William Sharp) also found the allusions "too vague" and "too esoteric," despite notes, and an anonymous reviewer referred to Yeats's "poetic pedantry." Even Arthur Symons, Yeats's colleague in the Rhymers' Club, writing in the Saturday Review in 1899, seemed bemused by the number of notes--though he declared them fitting for a book of poetry because of their "delightfully unscientific vagueness." Some reviewers decried the volume's melancholy tone, one found the content of the notes "spooky," and Paul Elmer More saw "something troubling and unwholesome" in the frequent hair imagery. James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), depicted his character Stephen Dedalus in recoil at the wistful nostalgia of one of the Yeats poems ("Michael Robartes remembers Forgotten Beauty").

But Yeats's acknowledged genius carried the day in spite of such quibbles. No poetry but Yeats's had true "Celtic magic," according to Thompson. Symons noted the poet's new maturity (not all joyous), for Yeats had "learnt to become quite human" while still producing "one long 'hymn to intellectual beauty.'" The allusion to Shelley (more immediately than to Spenser) rightly places the volume in the tradition of the Romantics, even "The Last Romantics," as Yeats later called the members of the Rhymers' Club. While Yeats acknowledged some influence from Stephane Mallarm

(as translated by Symons), his symbolism owed an even older debt to William Blake, whose poetry he and Edwin J. Ellis edited in three volumes in 1893. The Wind Among the Reeds, while setting a terminus to Yeats's early period, has clear continuities with his later poetry, in which mystical, artistic, and apocalyptic themes gain an expanding symbolism. Symons was especially prescient when detecting in some of the 1899 poems a "really modern" avoidance of stylistic artifice for the simplicity of the "natural chant," thus accurately predicting Yeats's later spare manner. The same critic recognized Yeats's topic as "love to which the imagination has given infinity." Yeats would never be better at expressing this kind of love. Nor would his poetic language ever again (except at times in The Shadowy Waters of 1900) display the same languor and luxuriance.

Virginia Hyde
Washington State University