Wanderings of Oisin

The poem begins in the twilight of pagan Ireland. St. Patrick has come to convert the island, but he encounters instead Oisín, an ancient man who claims to be the warrior-poet of the Fianna, and who has spent three hundred years in the immortal islands of Faerie. There he rode with the golden Niamh, daughter of the Sidhe, through Lands of the Young, where the warriors never age and the feasts never end. But Oisín chose to return to Ireland, and the moment his foot touched mortal ground, his faerie youth sloughed away and he became an old man in an instant. Now he sits among the Christian monks, last survivor of a vanished world, telling of wonders that no one believes. Yeats wrote this poem at twenty-four, and it already contains his lifelong obsession: the ancient Irish past, the beauty of that world, and the unbearable grief of knowing it is gone. It is at once a love story, an elegy, and a meditation on memory, loss, and the terrible price of mortality.