Essay Questions

Why does Oisin turn back into an old man at the end of the poem?

Oisin is almost biblical in his longevity at the end of the poem, reminiscent of one of the Old Testament forefathers said to have been several centuries old. The poem spans three hundred years of his life; the first part, as a man in the physical world, the subsequent centuries as the companion of faerie princess Niamh in the immortal Islands. Although almost an entire century of this life was spent battling a monster and another spent sleeping with the sleeping giants, Oisin remains the same young, handsome poet that he had been when he first agreed to accompany Niamh into the Otherworld.

He remains homesick throughout the poem, and eventually feels such a strong pull to see Ireland and his old comrades again that Niamh agrees to let him go back to the physical world for a visit. She gives him her horse so that he is guaranteed to return to her again, but warns him that he must not let his feet, or the hooves of the horse, touch the ground. He intends to adhere to this but an accident with his saddle strap means that he falls from the horse, touching the ground, and breaking the spell. He is immediately turned back into the man he would be if he had never left Ireland; in this case, a now three hundred year old man, with long beard and bent back.

How does Yeats convey his love of Ireland in his poems?

The poems in this collection tend to feature both the Ireland of the physical world, and another magical world, opposite each other, but there is always a sort of other-worldliness about Ireland as well that shows Yeats' feeling that it, too, has a certain magical property about it. He also shows that however wonderful the world of the faeries is, those who leave Ireland to go there still yearn for their home. The small child, for example, in The Stolen Child will be having an incredible adventure with faeries in a beautiful and magical environment, but as the poet explains, this will never make up for the sound of the tea kettle on the stove, or the view of the calves on the hillside that he sees from the kitchen window. Even Oisin is not immune to the pull of his homeland, leaving his lover, Niamh, and guaranteed immortality for a chance to see his home and his old comrades again. Yeats' Ireland is a place worth giving up immortality for.

Even the poems that do not involve the mystical world still show Ireland in a sort of grainy, romantic light. The descriptions are rich and vivid, typically involving bubbling rivers, vibrant green grass, a certain way that the light slants at the end of the day. Yeats is a man in love with the land of his birth and in writing poems that set scenes in both Ireland and the magical world he manages to bestow a certain air of magic to Ireland as well.