The Wanderings Of Oisin Book 2 - Analysis

A bargain with time that keeps changing its price

This book of The Wanderings of Oisin reads like an argument staged inside a legend: Oisin wants a life big enough to match the old heroic self he remembers, but the poem keeps showing him that any escape from ordinary human limits comes with its own kind of rot. The island Niamh brings him to promises a realm before God was, where lovers refuse to look at the life that fades; yet almost immediately her song is Troubled by tears. The central claim the poem presses is bleak and specific: even in Faery, where days and centuries slide strangely, time still wins—not by killing you outright, but by thinning out meaning, turning heroism into routine, and love into a weary endurance.

That is why the story’s marvels feel both intoxicating and sickly. Oisin crosses into a place of mist-covered phantoms, but he is also crossing into a version of himself that can’t stop testing whether he still matters. The poem’s splendour is never just decorative; it keeps doubling as a warning.

Niamh’s kiss: shutting out one world, letting another blur

Niamh literally interrupts perception: kissed my eyes right after telling him, Gaze no more. That gesture is tender, but it’s also controlling, like a spell that forces Oisin to stop comparing what he sees now to what he once knew. Her song stitches together an alternative history—faeries who wedded men with Druid gold, wars shadowy and vast—a world meant to outrank Christian time. Yet Yeats makes the tenderness falter: she sang no more as before, and her tears interrupt the enchantment. The poem quietly admits what the legend tries to deny: even immortal stories get homesick; even a timeless lover can grieve.

That early crack matters because it predicts the whole book’s emotional motion. The tone begins in swiftness and glamour (away, away like flames), but it keeps acquiring heaviness: screams from the faery horse who knows the Isle of Many Fears, the surf and dark towers, the sense that what waits ahead is not celebration but trial.

The hall of gods: grandeur built out of indifference

When the riders pass the seaweed-covered pillars into Manannan’s hall, the imagery hardens from mist to stone and slime. The path is lit only by surging phosphorus, an underwater glow that feels beautiful and cold, like the light of something not meant for human eyes. Inside, the statues are older than human categories: one has watched stars dawned and shone and set since God made Time. Yeats doesn’t use this to reassure us that eternity is comforting; he uses it to make eternity feel like a pressure that flattens personality.

The hall’s scale even becomes a theological dare. Oisin thinks Not even your God could throw down that roof, imagining God’s unloosed lightnings stalled like horses. This is not casual blasphemy so much as a symptom of the poem’s key tension: Oisin measures worth by might, by what can be built, broken, or endured. The hall seems to confirm that worldview—until it starts to feel less like a palace and more like a trap, a place where ages pass without moral difference.

The chained lady and the stubborn eagles: pity meets the unhuman

The poem then narrows from cosmic architecture to a single captive: a woman with eyes like funeral tapers is tied by a wave-rusted chain to two old eagles. The details are strikingly wrong-footed: eagles usually mean freedom, but these have dishevelled wings and dim minds sunk into ancient things. When Oisin breaks the chain, the eagles remain earless and blind, repeating the word as if repetition itself were a kind of futility.

This moment is a quiet rebuke to heroic instinct. Oisin can still perform the gesture of liberation, but the poem shows a freedom that doesn’t take—either because the victims are too far gone into the unhuman mind, or because this world does not run on human ethics. The rescue is real and useless at the same time, which is one of the book’s most unsettling contradictions.

Manannan’s sword and the demon’s shapes: heroism reduced to maintenance

Oisin’s fighting is narrated with exhausting vividness: the demon’s eyes burn like wings of kingfishers; it runs through forms—eel, fir-tree, drowned body—so that each blow seems to land on the wrong reality. The hall records the captive’s motion like a stain: journeys to and fro written in prints of scales, each step sparking phosphorus flame. Even the victory is conditional. Oisin drives the blade through heart and spine and casts the demon into the sea, but the demon returns, dull and unsubduable, and the cycle repeats: a battle each day, a recovery each fourth morning, for a hundred years.

This is where the poem’s promise of immortality curdles. What sounds at first like endless adventure becomes endless upkeep: An endless feast, / An endless war. The tone here is both exultant and trapped. Yeats lets us feel the thrill of the struggle and also the creeping horror that nothing ends, so nothing finally matters. Heroism, without mortality, becomes a job.

The clerics and the thunder: the poem’s hard turn toward judgment

The book’s sharpest hinge comes when Oisin suddenly speaks from bitterness about the present: lying clerics who murder song with barren words. The mythic narration breaks open into polemic, and immediately Saint Patrick answers from the storm: Be still, because God’s anger is in the thunder and lightning. The shift is not only in speaker but in moral atmosphere. In Faery, power is aesthetic and immense; in Patrick’s voice, power is disciplinary, demanding prayer and submission.

Yet Yeats refuses to make either side cleanly right. Oisin, who rails at clerics, is also the man whose king-remembering soul cannot move an inch toward humility; Patrick, who speaks for God, is also answered by Oisin’s hallucinated hearing of the Fenian horses and the ravens flocking to battle. The poem sets up an unresolved contradiction: is spiritual authority a cure for emptiness, or just another force that silences the old music?

The beech-bough from Almhuin: a small object that defeats eternity

After the hundred-year cycle, the poem finally gives Oisin something stronger than the demon: a beech branch carried by the waves. The beech-bough is almost nothing compared to basalt halls and sea-gods, but it pierces him: he remembers standing by white-haired Finn at Almhuin, hearing the thin bats’ cry. It’s a memory of ordinary, mortal texture—sound, place, companionship—that the grand faery world cannot reproduce. The heart grows sore not because the past was perfect, but because it was finite, and therefore fully his.

This is the poem’s quietest violence: nostalgia is not sentimental here; it is a force that unbuilds the faery tower stone after stone in Oisin’s mind. Niamh herself hears it: I hear my soul drop down into decay, and she predicts Manannan’s tower will gather slime and collapse. The immortals begin to sound like ruins.

The Island of Forgetfulness: the bleak mercy of not wanting

The ending doesn’t offer a triumphant return to either Christianity or Faery. Niamh admits the earlier islands, Dancing and Victories, are empty of all power, and she proposes the Island of Forgetfulness instead. When Oisin asks for the Island of Content, she answers, None know. It’s one of the poem’s most devastating lines because it refuses the idea that there is a stable place where desire can rest.

In the final image, Niamh lays her weeping head on Oisin’s chest, and the poem leaves them there: not solved, not saved, but held together by sorrow. Forgetfulness sounds like defeat, yet it also sounds like the only kindness left in a universe of endless battle and endless memory. If the clerics murder song, the faery world exhausts it; what remains is the desperate human wish to stop needing what cannot be kept.

A sharper question the poem won’t let go

When Oisin boasts that even God could not topple the hall, he is still thinking like a warrior: greatness equals force. But by the end, what truly breaks him is not thunder, not demons, not centuries—it is a simple beech-bough and the remembered thin sound of bats. If that is what defeats Faery, then the poem is asking something unnerving: is mortality the secret source of meaning, and are all the grand immortal powers finally just ways of avoiding it?