1. Dunhill’s ‘Half close your eyelids’ was first published in the 1900 issue of The Dome: An Illustrated Magazine and Review of Literature, Music, Architecture and the Graphic Arts, which, with the slightly later The Vocalist, contributed greatly to the renaissance of English song at the turn of the century. This is the earliest known setting of a poem by Yeats.

1. ‘I have 3 Poems, and O – a new song for mezzo soprano. One of my best, madam; that being a setting of those wistful, magical words of Yeats – “The Folly of Being Comforted”. There is one passage “O she had not these ways/When all the wild summer was in her gaze”, which will raise your hair’ (Gurney in a letter to Marion Scott, 31 October 1917, written from the Edinburgh War Hospital, Bangour, where he was recovering from gassing). The poem, for Gurney, was associated with his attachment to Nurse Annie Drummond at the hospital. Gurney hoped for a permanent relationship but she was not as serious, and it all finished sometime during 1918.

2. Lady Gregory, perhaps.

3. Maud Gonne.

4. easier not to be dazzled by Maud Gonne’s beauty.

1. ‘I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball on its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem “Innisfree”, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing but the common syntax. A couple of years later I would not have written that first line with its conventional archaism – “Arise and go” – nor the inversion in the last stanza’ (Autobiographies). The poem was written in December 1888 and published in 1890. Its success later embarrassed Yeats.

2. Yeats explained in a wireless broadcast that this phrase referred to the reflection of heather in the water – ‘Innisfree’ means ‘heather island’.

1. The inspiration for this celebrated poem is Pierre de Ronsard’s sonnet ‘Quand vous serez bien vieille’.

1. The Wind among the Reeds was published in 1899, the same year as Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, dedicated to Yeats. Several of Yeats’s own poems in this collection also breathe a Symbolist atmosphere of suggestion and evocation; and they reflect his increasingly tormented relationship with Maud Gonne. Indeed, the title of the volume appears in a prose sketch of an unwritten poem about Maud Gonne: ‘I / hear the cry of the birds/& the cry of the deer/& I hear the wind among the/reeds, but I put my hands/over my ears for were not/they my beloved whispering to/me’.

1. The poem explores Yeats’s relationship to his lover, Olivia Shakespear, and Maud Gonne, his unattainable beloved. ‘a beautiful friend’ refers to Olivia, ‘your image’ (line 6) to Maud. This tallies with Yeats’s own account of breaking off relations with Olivia: ‘Then Maud Gonne wrote to me […] And at last one morning instead of reading much love poetry, as my way was to bring the right mood round, I wrote letters. My friend [Olivia] found my mood did not answer hers and burst into tears. “There is someone else in your heart,” she said’ (Memoirs, p. 89).

1. Slieve Echtge, a mountain in County Galway.

2. The gods of ancient Ireland, the Tuatha de Danaan, who dwelt in Tír na nÓg, the Country of the Young.

1. The poem reflects the agony caused by Yeats’s break-up with Olivia Shakespear. On p. 125 of his Memoirs, Yeats tells how, for seven celibate years after their relationship had finished, he experienced such sexual stress that he felt like screaming aloud.

1. willow. Cf. Desdemona’s cry of ‘Salce’ in Verdi and Boïto’s Otello.

2. ‘Down by the salley gardens’, first published in Crossways (1889), has since achieved folk song status. Forty-eight years later Yeats said in a radio broadcast: ‘When I was a young man poetry had become eloquent and elaborate. Swinburne was the reigning influence and he was very eloquent. A generation came that wanted to be simple, I think I wanted that more than anybody else. I went from cottage to cottage listening to stories, to old songs; sometimes the songs were in English, sometimes they were in Gaelic – then I would get somebody to translate. Some of my best known poems were made in that way. “Down by the Salley Gardens”, for example, is an elaboration of two lines in English somebody sang to me at Ballysadare, County Sligo’ (Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, Vol. II, p. 495, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson, 1975).

1. ‘In Yeats’s jargon’, Tippett writes in Those Twentieth Century Blues, ‘an artefact is a work of art that is entirely separated from its creator – where the personal emotion has disappeared into the magnificence of the craft.’ Many commentators consider that Yeats’s late poem ‘Byzantium’ (1930) epitomizes such an aesthetic apotheosis.

2. Yeats wrote a prose draft of his poem in his 1930 diary: ‘Describe Byzantium as it is in the system [of A Vision] towards the end of the first Christian millennium. A walking mummy. Flames at the street corners where the soul is purified, birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees, in the harbour [dolphins], offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry them to Paradise.’

3. prostitutes.

4. Yeats, recalling the way Maud Gonne reverberated throughout his life after their first meeting, wrote in his Memoirs, p. 40: ‘it seems to me that she brought into my life in those days […] a sound as of a Burmese gong, an overpowering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes.’

5. The dome referred to here is that of Hagia Sofia (Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople.

6. The mummy resembles a spool on which its temporal life is rolled.

7. In Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, the Sibyl counsels Aeneas to acquire a golden bough to assist his descent into the underworld.

7. Dolphins in Neoplatonic mythology carry the souls of the newly dead to the Isles of the Blest.

8. This wonderful phrase describes the warring impulses of sexuality (dolphins) and spirituality.

1. Julius Caesar, who extended the Roman Empire in his wars against the Gauls.

2. Cf. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria VII: ‘Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it […] This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking.’ Yeats’s poem shows how greatness in life and art can begin almost imperceptiby in a silent, improvisatory manner.

3. Cf. Marlowe, Dr Faustus, Act V, sc. I, 94–5: ‘Was this the face that lancht a thousand shippes? /And burnt the toplesse Towres of Ilium?’ The reference is to Helen of Troy, whose beauty led to the burning of Troy’s ‘topless towers’.