The Wind Among the Reeds

Abstract

Yeats introduced this volume in CW I in 1906 with the comment that he had so meditated on the images that had come to him in writing ‘Ballads and Lyrics’, ‘The Rose’ and ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ and other images from Irish folklore that they had become true symbols. He had when awake, but more often in sleep, moments of vision; ‘a state very unlike dreaming, when these images took upon themselves what seemed an independent life and became a part of a mystic language, which seemed always as if it would bring me some strange revelation.’ Being troubled by what was thought to be reckless obscurity he tried to explain himself in lengthy notes into which he put ‘all the little learning I had, and more wilful phantasy than I now think admirable, though what is most mystical still seems to me the most true’.