17 - Yeats’s Sacred Grove

Summary

‘THE WOODS OF Arcady are dead / And over is their antique joy.’ These opening lines, from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Song of the Happy Shepherd’, are also the opening lines to his Collected Poems. As Patrick Keane notes, they act as a gateway, and ‘much in the volume is a variation on this opening theme’. The poem itself begins with this definitive declaration, spoken from an age in which the world has ceased to feed on ‘dreaming’, and instead plays only with ‘Grey Truth’ (65). Shirking the ‘dead’ truth of science, ‘the starry men / Who follow with the optic glass’ (66), the happy shepherd chooses to sing instead over a grave, where a faun is buried, imagining that in his singing, the faun’s ghost will walk among the dew, and be ‘pierced’ by songs of ‘old earth’s dreamy youth’ (66). The poem, in this way, is double-edged: it speaks from a ‘dead’, disenchanted world, but through its insistent rhythm and repetition suggests the possibility of re-enchantment through song. Not only this, but it enacts a looping of time that is both mournful and protesting. The woods of Arcady are dead, but their ghosts might be conjured into the present through a dream, and ‘this is also sooth’ (66).

Again and again, throughout his poems, prose and drama, Yeats returns to the woods, to the sacred grove, as a site of re-enchantment, a place in which the hegemony of nineteenth-century scientific rationalism might be undone in favour of the animated, the spiritually immanent and the imagined. The death of those Arcadian woods, and the calling to sing their spirit back into the modern age through poetry, reverberates through his oeuvre, and in looking closely at the instances of groves and woodlands in his work, we can more clearly see the poet’s routes to a vision of reality that is ensouled, spiritual and animated.