Early Ballads and Lyrics

These are the poems where a young William Butler Yeats first heard the old voices of Ireland whispering across the hills. Written in the 1880s and gathered here from their original appearances in Crossways and The Rose, these are verses steeped in twilight and legend, in the dying light of a world that was already passing into memory. Here you will find the shape-shifters and the fairy lovers, the heroes of the Fenian cycle, the rose and the rose-garden, the eternal feminine rendered as goddess and mortal woman alike. This is Yeats before the political fury, before the modernist complexity that would make him Nobel-worthy. But already you can hear the music that would never leave his work: the lilt and longing, the ache for something always fading, the belief that poetry could be a spell to hold back the dark.