The Song of the Happy Shepherd

The last shepherd of Arcady praises words and dreams over hard truth.

A shepherd from the old pastoral world of Arcady sings that his world is dead. The earth once fed on dreaming, but now it plays with "Gray Truth", and of all the passing things of time, "Words alone are certain good." Great kings survive only as an idle word in a schoolboy's reading, and the earth itself may be "Only a sudden flaming word". So he warns against worshipping deeds or hungering after truth, and against the astronomers, whose cold study of the stars has broken their hearts. Better to tell your story to a shell, which will echo it back as comfort. At the end he leaves to sing at the grave of a buried faun, and urges the reader, since the earth no longer dreams, to dream: "Dream, dream, for this is also sooth."

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 5Arcady is dead

   The opening line is an obituary: "The woods of Arcady are dead". The world, pictured as a restless woman, once "on dreaming fed" and now amuses herself with "Gray Truth" as a "painted toy". The shepherd speaks for a lost age of imagination.

2. Lines 6 to 10Words alone

   He addresses the "sick children of the world", caught up in the "dreary dancing" of things spun past by time, and gives them his creed: "Words alone are certain good." Time here is Chronos, singing a "cracked tune".

3. Lines 11 to 17The vanished kings

   "Where are now the warring kings" is asked twice. The answer is ironic: those who mocked words now live only as "An idle word", read aloud by a "stammering schoolboy" from a tangled story. Words have outlasted power.

4. Lines 18 to 21The world as a word

   The thought grows larger: perhaps the whole earth is "Only a sudden flaming word", heard for a moment in "clanging space" and disturbing the "endless reverie". Creation itself becomes an act of speech.

5. Lines 22 to 27Truth in the heart

   So he advises against worshipping "dusty deeds" or hungering fiercely for truth, which only breeds "New dreams, new dreams". The one truth lies "in thine own heart". The refrain-like phrase "for this is also sooth" first appears here.

6. Lines 28 to 34The starry men

   He warns against learning from the astronomers, the "starry men" who follow the stars through "the optic glass". Their cold study, the "star-bane", has split their hearts in two, and "dead is all their human truth".

7. Lines 35 to 44Tell it to a shell

   Instead, the listener should find a "twisted, echo-harbouring shell" by the sea and tell it his story. The shell will echo his "fretful words" back in "melodious guile" until they fade. The creed returns: "words alone are certain good", and so, "Sing".

8. Lines 45 to 49The faun's grave

   The shepherd must leave. Somewhere among daffodils and lilies is the grave of a "hapless faun", and he wants to cheer it with "mirthful songs before the dawn". The half-animal god of the old pastoral world is buried, like Arcady itself.

9. Lines 50 to 54The ghostly faun

   The faun's days were once full of shouting and mirth. The shepherd still dreams that it walks "ghostly in the dew", pierced through by his songs of "old earth's dreamy youth".

10. Lines 55 to 57Dream on

    The earth no longer dreams, so the reader must: "dream thou!" Poppies, the flowers of sleep, are "fair" on the brow. The final line doubles the command and turns the refrain one last time: "Dream, dream, for this is also sooth."

Themes

Context

The poem was first collected in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London, January 1889), titled "Song of the Last Arcadian". Renamed, it became the opening poem of "Crossways", the group of early lyrics Yeats put at the front of his collected poems, so it serves as a kind of manifesto for his early work: dreams and words against the scientific spirit of his age.

It is paired with "The Sad Shepherd", which follows it. There a grieving man takes this poem's advice and tells his story to a shell, only to hear it turned into "inarticulate moan". Read together, the two poems test the happy shepherd's faith in words.

Form

Three verse paragraphs of 21, 23 and 13 lines, in lines of mostly four beats. The rhymes are loose and shifting, sometimes in couplets, sometimes alternating, with sounds returning across long stretches. The repeated phrase "for this is also sooth" works like a refrain, and the freely wandering rhymes suit a speaker whose thoughts move by dreamy association.