Yeats' obsession with death and ageing means that one can estimate the age of the poet on accordance with his poems. My personal preference is for his younger poems, as they deal in elements of fantasy and by that I mean fairies. Irish fairies, though, not your cute Tinkerbelles and tooth fairies. I love the sense of suspicion around the west of Ireland because it translates to any countryside and so sends shivers up your spine when you're next walking alone through woods or near streams. Please, if you have the chance, read 'The Stolen Child', it excites the imagination as though you were a child once again and things really did go 'bump' in the night.
The Hosting of the Sidhe (1899)
THE HOST is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;
Caolte tossing his burning hair
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing ’twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caolte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.
Now, this poem has many cultural references, too many for me to describe here when they will be far better depicted in other sources. So if you really would like to learn more about the Irish folklore behind this, have a look around this delightful website: http://www.mythicalireland.com/mythology/tuathade/
From a slightly liberal humanist approach to this text, we could say that the poem focuses on the themes of activity and death. I might be mistaken but the 'host' reminded me of the 'Wild Hunt', the members of which take away the living person who saw them . This is slightly different to the belief that the Sidhe lived within the wind (as that is its translation from Gaelic) and so whenever someone saw a rustling of leaves in a whirlwind they were granted luck, but perhaps it was more of a blessing that they had not been taken by the host. Or maybe I just love the idea of a host of fairies and skeletons snatching people away. At least that would align with the chilling imperative 'Away, come away', as used in almost all Yeats' fairy poems to denote the ethereal nature of the fairy world, one which might bring profitable change or evil slavery.
The way the poem begins sets the reader on edge; the present tense 'is' and present participle 'riding' give immediate pace and action, meaning anyone could be taken. As I said before, the next time you go out you will look around twice and cast glances over your shoulder every so often. Graphologically, I think even the italics used in the speech pushes the host onward, leaning with the wind onto its next victim.
In Yeats's later poems, he still discusses mortality but with more of a sense of Christianity and faith. In his earlier works, the fairies take precedence, as if they were an alternative ending to human life. Yeats knows that neither option is entirely safe or secure, even though both promise such things. Yet this option at least appears to offer some ort of active life after death; there is a semantic field of wildness, with words such as 'unbound', 'heaving', 'a-gleam', 'waving' presenting the host as liberating for a mortal. This is far more positive than the 'injustice of the skies' that God seems to offer to Yeats in 'The Cold Heaven'. In fact, this poem does greatly contrast to that afterlife through the 'burning' of Caolte's hair. Whether this is literal or an image for ginger, the hot, blood-red depiction denotes danger but in an exciting, virile way, much more appealing than his later musings of heaven.
Told you I love Yeats.
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