«Rewording in melodious guile» W.B. Yeats’s “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” and its Evolution Towards a Musico-Literary Manifesto

Abstract

This essay intends to explore how The Song of the Happy Shepherd elaborates on the notion of poetry as song, to contextualize it against the background of its (para)textual history and evolution, and emphasize its role as a musico-literary manifesto. Yeats’s Song is able to perform its variations on «the supreme theme of Art and Song» because its atavistically unifying ‘sooth’ is inborn to the very substance and features of its tropical mediation between poetry and song, thus making it neither classically «cracked» (l. 9) – i.e. burst asunder, fractured – like the merely «musical tune that Chronos sings» (l. 9), nor romantically ‘primeval and wild’ like The Song of the Shepherd in Thomas Moore’s To Joseph Atkinson, Esq. From Bermuda.