WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS The Song of the Happy Shepherd The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted toy; Yet still she turns her restless head: But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good. Where are now the warring kings, Word be-mockers? — By the Rood Where are now the warring kings? An idle word is now their glory, By the stammering schoolboy said, Reading some entangled story: 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. Then nowise worship dusty deeds, Nor seek, for this is also sooth, To hunger fiercely after truth, Lest all thy toiling only breeds New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth Saving in thine own heart. Seek, then, No learning from the starry men, Who follow with the optic glass The whirling ways of stars that pass — Seek, then, for this is also sooth, No word of theirs — the cold star-bane Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain, And dead is all their human truth. Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell, And to its lips thy story tell, And they thy comforters will be, Rewarding 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. I must be gone: there is a grave Where daffodil and lily wave, And I would please the hapless faun, Buried under the sleepy ground, With mirthful songs before the dawn. His shouting days with mirth were crowned; And still I dream he treads the lawn, Walking ghostly in the dew, Pierced by my glad singing through, My songs of old earth's dreamy youth: But ah! she dreams not now; dream thou! For fair are poppies on the brow: Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889, Kegan Paul & Co.)
Yeats’s “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” feels like someone sitting beside us and confessing a quiet sadness about the world losing its sense of wonder. There’s something deeply touching in the way he says that Arcady — that old dream of beauty — is gone, and yet he still believes in the power of words to hold things together. It doesn’t sound like a grand theory; it sounds like a person trying to make sense of a world that has become too factual, too cold. What moved me most is his insistence that truth isn’t in the stars or in the calculations of clever men, but in the fragile, private space of the heart. The image of telling our story to a seashell is strangely comforting — as if even the smallest, simplest things can listen when the world won’t. By the end, when he speaks of singing to comfort a buried faun, it feels like he’s reminding us that imagination is a kind of kindness, a way of keeping something alive. It’s a poem that whispers rather than shouts, and that whisper lingers.
Thank you, Mr. Yeats