A collection of poems

Crossways

188916 poems

The lyrics first appeared in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, January 1889). Yeats grouped them as "Crossways" in Poems (T. Fisher Unwin, 1895); there was never a book called Crossways.

1The Song of the Happy ShepherdThe woods of Arcady are dead,The last shepherd of Arcady praises words and dreams over hard truth.
2The Sad ShepherdThere was a man whom Sorrow named his friendA grieving man seeks comfort from stars, sea, dew and shell, and finds none.
3The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes"What do you make so fair and bright?"A mysterious maker prepares a cloak, a boat and shoes for Sorrow.
4Anashuya and VijayaSend peace on all the lands and flickering corn.A young priestess discovers her lover still thinks of another woman.
5The Indian upon GodI passed along the water's edge below the humid trees,Each creature by a lake imagines God in its own image.
6The Indian to his LoveThe island dreams under the dawnA lover invites his beloved to a dreaming island far from the world.
7The Falling of the LeavesAutumn is over the long leaves that love us,Two lovers, feeling their love fade with the autumn, choose to part.
8Ephemera"Your eyes that once were never weary of mineTwo lovers walk by an autumn lake as their love fades.
9The Madness of King GollI sat on cushioned otter skin:An ancient Irish king goes mad in battle and wanders the woods.
10The Stolen ChildWhere dips the rocky highlandFairies lure a human child away from home to the Sligo wilds.
11To an Isle in the WaterShy one, shy one,A shy young woman at her household tasks, and a lover's dream of escape.
12Down by the Salley GardensDown by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;A young man ignores his sweetheart's advice to take love easy, and regrets it.
13The Meditation of the Old FishermanYou waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,An old fisherman insists everything was better when he was young.
14The Ballad of Father O'HartGood Father John O'HartA kindly Sligo priest is cheated of his land and mourned by birds.
15The Ballad of Moll MageeCome round me, little childer;A homeless woman tells the children who taunt her how she lost her baby.
16The Ballad of the Foxhunter"Lay me in a cushioned chair;A dying old foxhunter asks to see his horse and hounds once more.

Yeats's own note

Many of the poems in Crossways, certainly those upon Indian subjects or upon shepherds and fauns, must have been written before I was twenty, for from the moment when I began “The Wanderings of Usheen,” which I did at that age, I believe, my subject matter became Irish. Every time I have reprinted them I have considered the leaving out of most, and then remembered an old school friend who has some of them by heart, for no better reason, as I think, than that they remind him of his own youth. The little Indian dramatic scene was meant to be the first scene of a play about a man loved by two women, who had the one soul between them, the one woman waking when the other slept, and knowing but daylight as the other only night. It came into my head when I saw a man at Rosses Point carrying two salmon. “One man with two souls,” I said, and added, “Oh, no, two people with one soul.” I am now once more in “A Vision” busy with that thought, the antitheses of day and of night and of moon and of sun. “The Rose” was part of my second book, The Countess Cathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics, 1892, and I notice upon reading these poems for the first time for several years that the quality symbolized as The Rose differs from The Intellectual Beauty of Shelley and of Spencer in that I have imagined it as suffering with man and not as something pursued and seen from afar. It must have been a thought of my generation, for I remember the mystical painter Horton, whose work had little of his personal charm and real strangeness writing me these words, “I met your beloved in Russell Square, and she was weeping,” by which he meant that he had seen a vision of my neglected soul. I have altered several of these poems, “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Waves,” “The Dedication to a Book of Stories,” and “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” considerably, and “The Song of the Old Pensioner” and “The Sorrow of Love” till they are altogether new poems. Whatever changes I have made are but an attempt to express better what I thought and felt when I was a very young man. —⁠W. B. Y., 1925.

I here revised “The Ballad of the Foxhunter,” and once again “Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea,” and “The Dream of a Blessed Spirit” I have renamed “The Countess Cathleen in Paradise,” as it was once part of this play and is so much rewritten that it is almost a new poem. —⁠W. B. Y., 1926