This is another one from the more populist end of W.B.Yeats’s wide-ranging oeuvre, being akin to other such early pieces as ‘The Ballad of Father Gilligan’ and ‘The Host of the Air’ with their cast of priests and angels and fairy pipers, poems infused with a religiose sentimentality that certainly forms no part of my own agnostic sensibility. And yet I like it, even while remaining doubtful of its assertions. Are the truly good always the merry? I would have thought they were more likely to exist in a state of permanent frazzlement, as part of that cadre Keats defines as ‘those to whom the miseries of the world/Are misery, and will not let them rest’. And yet it may be that they do carry within them some fount of secret joy that only awaits its time to find expression, and that such a time, as in this poem, may best be provided by music.

Yeats comments: ‘A couple of miles from Innisfree, no four or five miles from Innisfree, there’s a great rock called Dooney Rock where I had often picnicked when a child. And when in my 24th year I made up a poem about a merry fiddler I called him ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’ in commemoration of that rock and of all those picnics. The places mentioned in the poem are all places near Sligo.’

The Fiddler Of Dooney

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.

W.B.Yeats