The Wind Among the Reeds

by W. B. Yeats

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Pages: 57

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About this book

Fairy riders, restless winds and remembered love fill the short poems in The Wind Among the Reeds. W. B. Yeats draws on Irish legends while giving close attention to ordinary work and feeling: an old mother tends her fire, a fiddler imagines a welcome in heaven, and a fisherman catches something stranger than a trout. The natural world supplies both the scenery and the language of longing, with reeds, birds, roses and twilight returning across the collection.

The accompanying notes offer another way into these poems. Yeats explains Aedh, Hanrahan and Michael Robartes as expressions of the imagination, and discusses the rose as a symbol of love, beauty and Ireland. Readers interested in the meeting of lyric poetry and folklore can follow how familiar landscapes become places of dream, loss and spiritual meaning.

About the author

W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865 to 1939) was an Irish poet and dramatist, a driving force of the Irish Literary Revival and a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 and is counted among the foremost figures of twentieth-century poetry.