Crossways

by W.B. Yeats

The first collection of poetry by W.B. Yeats, one of the foremost Irish writers of the 20th century and master of the Irish Literary Revival.This collection highlights the Celtic beauty of his early works - a man connected to the heritage of his land.Presented here for the first with illustrations by Understudy Publishing.

Genres: Poetry, 19th Century, Classics, Irish Literature, Ireland, Nobel Prize

51 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 1889

About the author

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).

Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth, and from an early age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and those slow paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as to the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
--from Wikipedia

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yeats’ first collection of poetry. The works herein are mostly narrative, mostly lengthy and mostly quite beautiful.

The Falling of the Leaves

Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves.

The hour of the waning of love has beset us,
And weary and worn are our sad souls now;
Let us part, ere the season of passion forget us,
With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow.

My next book: The Amazing Spider-Man vol. 10: Green Goblin Returns

[Ula]

i think i fell in love with yeats' poetry when i first read "the song of the happy shepherd" from his debut collection "crossways" i finally read now– his imagery is simply gorgeous and the way his words *sound* while read out loud is really what made me come back to poetry for good

the already mentioned poem is still one of my favourites (cmon, "Go gather by the humming sea/Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell,/And to its lips thy story tell,/And they thy comforters will be,/Rewording in melodious guile/Thy fretful words a little while,/Till they shall singing fade in ruth/And die a pearly brotherhood;/For words alone are certain good:/Sing, then, for this is also sooth." IS FANTASTIC), but so many of the others featured in this collection are amazing as well (i think about "the stolen child *a lot*), so here are some of the lines i find worth mentioning:

"Come away, O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." ("The Stolen Child")

"She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;/But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears." ("Down by the Salley Gardens")

"His eyelids droop, his head falls low,/His old eyes cloud with dreams;/The sun upon all things that grow/Falls in sleepy streams." ("The Ballad of the Foxhunter")

[Jaimie · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know that feeling when you read something so profound that you can’t get the words out of your head? Well, I had forgotten that my favourite Yeats poem was in this collection (I’ve been seriously tardy about working on reading the Complete Works), but I was immediately reminded why he’s one of my favourite poets. Most of the poems in this collection are quite good (barring “Anashuya and Vijaya” which I thought was rather trite), but “The Stolen Child” is a whole other level of brilliance. Yeats uses simple phrases and poignant imagery to paint a tantalizing image of the world which is waiting past the border of Faerie, and I don’t think that any other call by the fey can be more haunting than “Come away O human child!/To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand,/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

[Irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable romanticism, sweet and occasionally bittersweet, leaning into folklore and story telling. I enjoy Yeats generally, he's restful to listen to and evocative in a simple way.

[Liván · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeats empieza su trayectoria poética con un libro muy bien logrado. Son 16 poemas donde ya se comienza a ver su interés por la espiritualidad universal (con 3 poemas sobre India) y el sentido de pertenencia en el mundo tradicional irlandés, y con el que se nota la magia que quería comenzar a desarrollar en futuros poemas. Estoy muy emocionado de seguir ahondando en su mundo ^^

[Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

To describe this earliest collection of W.B. Yeats in one word: messy.

While the use of words is ok, the verses are not. The form is shaky, the symbols do not work. The choice of themes seems also very random, from Pre-Raphaelite motifs of a classic idyll of an Arcadian-like shepherd in "The song of the happy shepherd" (although Arcady here is already dead) and classical love poems to Indian and Irish mythology.

Most of the poems have a lack of feeling. The love poems are boring, the (early) symbolism here is still unrefined. One can probably still enjoy some of the poems, and the work is an important example in the development of W.B. Yeats. Still, the negative points are too strong here to give more than 2*.

Interesting poems: "The song of the happy shepherd", "The madness of King Goll", "The stolen child", "Down by the salley gardens", The ballad of Moll Magee" and "The ballad of the foxhunter".

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

The schemes of the consonants repeating when being read aloud are beautiful. Two guttural beats and a soft “t” or two, repeating and repeating. Yeats, in this first collection, clearly has a gift for evoking the beauty of english words. But it unfortunately gets muddled up in boring forced rhyme schemes (ABAB CDCD…) that he thankfully fixes (at least to an acceptable level) later. Although I will say some of these poems, even with my complaints, are must reads. The Stolen Child is masterful for such an early piece in his entire works.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first Yeats I've ever read (except perhaps in grade school or college). I very much liked "The Ballad of Moll Magee" if it means what I think Yeats was projecting. If it doesn't mean anything much at all, like a number of current fiction bestsellers I've read, then I'm lost. I'm not much of a fan of "rhyming" poetry anyway (so give me Ginsberg any day!) thus I didn't find anything here I thought was great. I believe Yeats wrote this selection at twenty or younger and for a guy that young, there is certainly promise here of greater things to come. Now, on to "The Rose" from 1893. Maybe when I get a better understanding of this artist, I'll be able to revisit
"Crossways" and perhaps find it more enjoyable.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Cloak, The Boat and The Shoes

"What do you make so fair and bright?'
"I make the cloak of Sorrow:
O lovely to see in all men's sight
Shall be the cloak of Sorrow,
In all men's sight.'

"What do you build with sails for flight?'

"I build a boat for Sorrow:
O swift on the seas all day and night
Saileth the rover Sorrow,
All day and night.'

What do you weave with wool so white?'

"I weave the shoes of Sorrow:
Soundless shall be the footfall light
In all men's ears of Sorrow,
Sudden and light.'

[Jean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I've never allowed myself the slow-reading pleasure of Yeats, I decided to start at the beginning and to take my time. In his first volume of poetry (1889), he draws out Ireland's physical beauty, understands the underlying pathos of its native literature and the intelligence and insight of its people.

[Mark Nenadov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed it.

[for-much-deliberation ... · Rating 4 out of 5]

A simple yet beautifully written first collection of poetry by Yeats...

[your brilliant friend · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Butler Yeats, born 1865, is perhaps the only genuinely crazy man to have won the Nobel Prize in literature. One might even say that he came closest to winning the prize twice, since the poems he wrote in his later years are all masterpieces, as if his apprenticeship was itself worthy of the Nobel. The early Yeats, the Yeats of The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, from which the poems in this collection come from, is the young Blake redux; he audaciously tackles the themes of romantic pastorals, writing about shepherds and fauns and the country as if he was not aware of the changing tides of time. He would never stop revising the poems of his earlier years, smoothing out the rather too juvenile lines, even sometimes wanting to leave them behind entirely. But if one thing is constant from the early Yeats to the late one it's the music of his poems. Most people who read Yeats (I know none personally) must greatly value the tremendous beauty of The Stolen Child, my personal entry point into Yeats, and arguably the greatest poem in this collection, and among the greatest that he wrote in the nineteenth century.

Many of the poems in Crossways, certainly those upon Indian subjects or upon shepherds and fauns, must have been written before I was twenty, for from the moment when I began The Wanderings of Oisin, which I did at that age, I believe, my subject-matter became Irish. Every time I have reprinted them I have considered the leaving out of most, and then remembered an old school friend who has some of them by heart, for no better reason, as I think, than that they remind him of his own youth.
(Yeats's note on "Crossways"

Even the quite clueless early Yeats is the singer we now so much treasure, so much that one, reading just about any of his poems, with very few exceptions, wants to possess them by memory, if only for their music. I hereby quote from The Stolen Child:

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water-rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berries
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim grey sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances,
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

[Ahn Hundt · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Crossways', William Butler Yeats' first collection of poetry, is an everblooming and thrilling set of poems that leave the impression of a master on the reader despite it being his very first foray into world literature. I recently gained a sudden fascination for Irish literature, mostly spawned by brilliant minds such as Oscar Wilde or one of my very favorites, James Joyce, and so I figured I should also start to dive into the pool of poetry that this country's history has to offer.

Yeats, from my first impression here, already establishes his magnificent sense for sentimental drama, mythology and simultaneously also an inexplicable sense of modernity with this work. I know that he goes much, much further into modernism in the later stage of his career, so I am intrigued to see where his oeuvre will lead me down the line, as I am planning to read most of his catalog. The language is quaint, emotional and vagrant, it seems like his words are dancing on the page to the rhythm of his own mind, but they never feel archaic or beyond the reader. I love how they are sequenced here, each poem next to each other is sort of connected through either theme or phrasing, and his ideas about craving for the past are interesting to read.

I certainly cannot say that I resonate with every poem or every idea he offers, but I certainly enjoyed the majority of it, with a few poems standing out as staggering pieces of writing. My favorites were 'The Song of the Happy Shepard' and 'Ephemera', both for totally different reasons, but they're some of my favorite poems of the 19th century that I've read so far.

[Andrew Benzinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeats’ early collection of poems Crossways certainly imitates or at least bears strong resemblance to Romantic works from the first half of the nineteenth century. While there are indications of his later obsessions with non-Western religious thought, the occult and esoteric (especially strong in “Anashuya and Vijaya”), his work here contains much more straightforward renderings of nature appreciation and the waxing and waning of love than his later works such as “Sailing to Byzantium”, “The Second Coming”, or even The Rose published a handful of years later. “The Indian upon God” is definitely my favorite of the bunch; his relatively simple but powerful message of the tendency for any self-aware being to believe in a higher power that appears and acts in ways corresponding to themselves - “I am in His image made” - works very well. I also appreciate the smooth transitions between otherwise disparate poems written years apart - particularly the autumn setting in “The Falling of the Leaves” and “Ephemera” as well as the Indian subject matter/titles of “Anashuya and Vijaya”, “The Indian upon God” and “The Indian to His Love”. I see a lot of melancholy in these works, perhaps equal parts Yeats’s brooding young adult phase as well as his first stabs at the themes that would pop up time and again throughout his life - regret, duality in spirituality, love gained and just as soon lost, and the ephemerality of all things in nature.

[Duffy Pratt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yeats must have been a ton of fun at parties. This first book, published when he was 24, is full of images of death, loss and regret. These will stick with him, of course, but I was not aware of how little "youth" there would be in his early poems.

On the other hand, there is some evidence of immaturity as a writer. Some of the images he calls upon seem to come out straight out of stock Romanticism, and these will be gone (or more subtly employed) later on. And in some of the poems, the meter felt just a bit clunky to me.

Yet even here, when he is writing more colloquially, and especially when he is writing in hexameter (which many of these poems are), there is an extraordinary power and beauty to his work. If this is all he had written, he probably would be unheard of today, or perhaps one or two poems would get anthologized. Still, its very nice to see where he started.

[Bryn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am reading Yeats in order until I get tired of doing so, so I started with this, his very first collection of poetry. It is much of a muchness thematically; he doesn't like the world he lives in or find it particularly meaningful, he imagines a lot of misty hazy twilight worlds instead, or people being sad they can't connect emotionally, or occasionally a (much better realised) fairy land that the lucky few can make it to. Given that I'm only familiar with a few of his poems, I was surprised to find two that I know very well in this volume -- "The Stolen Child" and "Down by the Salley Gardens," both of which I first encountered as songs rather than as texts.

Definitely not my favourite, but I am going to keep going for a while & see how it is.

[Comics Instrucciones de uso · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeats es un poeta enorme, superior. Vuelvo a su primer libro y me sigue maravillando. Por supuesto, hay alusiones al folklore irlandés que no siempre alcanzo a coger, pero la imagen general, la de una poesía dedicada a la naturaleza, a la nostalgia y a personajes míticos que se preguntan por los creadores del mundo, no creo que tenga iguales en la literatura. Reparo, ahora, que en este primer libro no hay un "yo". Yeats habla de la naturaleza, de los ancianos, de los animales, pero él -sea lo que sea-, no aparece, lo cual es aún más admirable. El poema "Stolen Child" es para echarse a llorar maravillado.

[Felipe Fuentealba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeats es un poeta enorme, superior. Vuelvo a su primer libro y me sigue maravillando. Por supuesto, hay alusiones al folklore irlandés que no siempre alcanzo a coger, pero la imagen general, la de una poesía dedicada a la naturaleza, a la nostalgia y a personajes míticos que se preguntan por los creadores del mundo, no creo que tenga iguales en la literatura. Reparo, ahora, que en este primer libro no hay un "yo". Yeats habla de la naturaleza, de los ancianos, de los animales, pero él -sea lo que sea-, no aparece, lo cual es aún más admirable. El poema "Stolen Child" es para echarse a llorar maravillado.

[M. Ashraf · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is very good, the words are great, the phrases are simple and it rhymes.
16 poems and I liked most of them.
My favorites:
- The Song of the Happy Shepherd
- The Cloak, the Boat, and the Shoes
- Ephemera
- The Stolen Child
The first set in the collected works of Yeats very good start!
To "The Rose"

The kings of the old time are dead;
The wandering earth herself may be
Only a sudden flaming word,
In clanging space a moment heard,
Troubling the endless reverie.
- The Song of the Happy Shepherd

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beginning my foray into the collected works of Yeats. Also feel like I'm cheating by putting a 24 page book on my reading challenge.

Overall, good stuff but didn't quite scratch heights I know Yeats is capable of in his middle to late poetry. Still fun. I'm curious what level of influence Robert Browning had on him, because quite a few of these are poetic monologues in varying forms.

[Truls Ljungström · Rating 5 out of 5]

Många av dessa är sorgsna, men detta sagt, finns det fantastiska bildspråk och dikter bland dem. Den sista - den gamle jägaren, och det stulna barnet, och ephemera, och den glade herden var alla strålande. Det finns visst spår av melodrama även i dessa, men det är en begränsad melodram, och det gör den mer tolererbar. Sedan får jag väl medge att jag verkligen älskar Yeats i allmänhet.

[Genavieve Zermeno · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid 3.5. Some poems were bland. Some were ephemeral. My favorites by far were ‘The stolen Child”
And ‘Ephemera’. The dichotomy of ‘The song of the happy Shepard’ and ‘the sad shepard’ was intriguing.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Stolen Child": todas as estrelas do mundo.

Resto do livro: três estrelas.

Vou deixar quatro estrelas no total.

[Descending Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

An early collection from 1889 of 16 poems. Highlights - "the song of the happy shepherd" "ephemera" "the stolen child"

[Lawrence Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm only beginning with Yeats. I am not Irish and so found many of the allusions obscure, which is all upon me. The language is beautiful.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has my favorite poem "Ephemera." I really appreciate this early work as one of my favorite collections.

[Alexander Bertoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really solid meditations on aging, loss, and missed opportunity.

[Ruby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ephemera is the most heart wrenching poem Ive every read, it’s beautiful yet sad and speaks to me on a level so personal that I feel yeats is speaking to me directly. However, the other poems don’t flow in anyways so for that I cannot rate higher than 3 as a collection

[Rabha Aishwarya · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A sad, sad thought went by me slowly."

"What do you weave with wool so white?
I weave the shoes of sorrow."