The Wanderings of Oisin

Abstract

This poem was first published in WO; the first version seems to have been finished in the autumn of 1887 (LKT 41). Yeats prepared it for the printer in the early part of 1888. The poem has been extensively revised and VB 1–63 should be consulted. A list of variant spellings is given on p. 1. The Gaelic sources are Oisin i d Tir na n Og and A.gallamh na Senorach. See note on lines 139–45, and Giles W. L. Telfer, Yeats’s Idea of the Gael (1965). Yeats departed from the spirit of the Gaelic originals; he believed that Irish legends and beliefs resembled those of the east. See the discussion in YCE 45–51, and see also Y: M&P, 42–7 and F. Shaw, ‘The Celtic Element in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats’, Studies (June 1934).