The Seeker

An old knight follows a lifelong call and finds only Infamy.

A short verse play in two scenes. Three shepherds sit by their fire at evening; the flute gives out a piercing, mournful cry, and they take it for an omen. An old knight arrives, worn by sixty years of "dream-led wandering", searching for the "sullen wood" where a voice has called him since boyhood. The shepherds warn him that nothing lives there, but he goes. In a ruined palace in the forest he bows before a silent figure, begging it to speak and show its face before he dies. When light falls on it, it is a bearded witch who says "Men call me Infamy". Her voice was the one that summoned him. She holds up a mirror to him, and he dies.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 13An omen at the fire

   The sheep are in and the first shepherd's dreams rove like "red- / Eyed panthers" round their young. When he and the third shepherd try the flute, it gives a piercing cry instead of a dance tune. "An omen!" say two of them; the third feels "A creeping horror".

2. Lines 14 to 28The knight arrives

   An old knight greets them. He has spent "threescore years of dream-led wandering" over spice islands, polar seas and Indian rivers, and now a voice has told him that the "long-lost forest of the sprite, / The sullen wood" lies in this land.

3. Lines 29 to 38The shepherds warn him

   The shepherds point him to a sunless valley, then try to stop him: goblin snakes sing there "songs of fearful things", no shepherd has entered it, and "The very squirrel dies that enters it." He simply says farewell twice and goes.

4. Lines 39 to 51He was a spirit

   Left alone, the shepherds expect him to be "Ashes / Before the wind". They noticed his glittering eyes and trembling body, like smoke rising "blue as the halcyon's wing". They decide he was a spirit, sent by God to make them "glad with wonder".

5. Lines 52 to 69Before the figure

   In a ruined palace strewn with fallen leaves, the knight bows before a motionless figure. Its words have lived in him since boyhood "as banded adders in my breast". The call made him a coward in battle, mocked as the "Knight of the Waterfall", yet he never complained, trusting it led to "joys unhuman".

6. Lines 70 to 86Begging for a face

   The figure will not speak, and he feels death sucking out his soul. He asks whether his wandering, "Untouched of human joy or human love", was all for nothing, gathers the dead leaves to his breast, and begs at least to touch "Thy garment's hem".

7. Lines 87 to 98The face of Infamy

   Light reveals "A bearded witch" with dull, unmoving eyes. "Men call me Infamy," she says, and she does not know what she is. The voice that called him was hers. She shows him his face in a mirror and he falls; as she mocks, "Lover, die before our lips have met?", he dies crying "Again, the voice! the voice!"

Themes

Context

The Seeker is one of Yeats's earliest works: a short verse drama printed in the Dublin University Review in 1885 and included in his first book, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889). He left it out of his later collections. Its dreamy knight, called away from ordinary life by a voice, anticipates the conflict between a life of dream and a life of action that runs through the title poem of that first book.

Form

A dramatic poem in two scenes, with named speakers and stage directions, written in unrhymed blank verse. Many lines are shared between speakers, so a single five-beat line may be split between two or three voices. That quick exchange among the shepherds contrasts with the knight's long, lonely speeches in the second scene.