William Butler Yeats

In The Seven Woods (annotated) William Butler Yeats

In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age is a volume of Irish poems by W. B. Yeats, published in 1903 by Elizabeth Yeats's Dun Emer Press, the first edited by this publishing house. Dun Emer published two editions of the book in 1903. The more expensive collection was published on Dutch and Irish paper and is bound with a vellum cover with Irish linen ties (see image). This is the first book of Yeats's "middle period," in which he eschewed his previous Romantic ideals and preference for pre-Raphaelite imagery, in favor of a more spare style and an anti-romantic poetic stance similar to that of Walter Savage Landor. The poem "Adam's Curse", however, continues to reflect the old ideals. This is also the most popular and frequently anthologized of the poems from this volume. In The Seven Woods: I have heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees Hum in the lime tree flowers; and put away The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile Tara uprooted, and new commonness Upon the throne and crying about the streets And hanging its paper flowers from post to post, Because it is alone of all things happy. Contents: "In the Seven Woods""The Old Age of Queen Maeve""Baile and Ailinn""The Arrow""The Folly of Being Comforted""The Withering of the Boughs""Adam's Curse""The Song of Red Hanrahan""The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water""Under the Moon""The Players Ask for a Blessing in the Psalteries and Themselves""The Rider From the North"Comment by Yeats"On Baile's Strand: A Play"Advertisements (in the cheaper version)