Notes on the Poems:
Here you can explore the vast world of analysis and critique of Yeats's poems! This is not an all-encompassing list, but rather a starting point to dive into the different scholarly views of In The Seven Woods.
"Wit and paradox were, in Yeats's view, especially destructive of the power of the beautiful woman. They had no place in the ritual of love because they were an encroachment of intellect into image; they made ritual impossible because the role-player in stepping outside the role in order to comment wittily upon it left it empty--the beautiful woman's role was to stay within the image and give it truth" (Kline 61).
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Kline, Gloria C. The Last Courtly Lover: Yeats and the Idea of Woman. Ann Arbor MI, UMI Research Press, 1976.
"Over the years the father also inculcated in the son the two basic precepts of courtly love: that what a man derives intuitively from a woman's image is of more value to him that what he can glean from her intellect and that love of that image brings out in the lover his highest spiritual qualities" (Kline 51).
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Kline, Gloria C. The Last Courtly Lover: Yeats and the Idea of Woman. Ann Arbor MI, UMI Research Press, 1976.
The concluding poems of the 1908 version--"O Do Not Love Too Long," "The Players ask for a Blessing..." and "The Happy Townland"--contradict each other in mood, style, and argument, and an exclusively synchronic reading of this and later versions might well find the dissonance of the collection's ending incoherent. But when In the Seven Woods is read diachronically this dissonance communicates the dynamics of a long and agonizing struggle."
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Holdeman, David. Interpreting Textual Processes: The Case of Yeats's "In the Seven Woods." Indiana University Press. Text, Vol. 8 (1995), pp. 249-265
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"The poet remembers that he had made an arrow from the thought of the beauty of his beloved, no directly addressed. Playing his own Cupid, he shot himself with that thought-arrow."
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Adams, Hazard. "The Early Poems of In The Seven Woods." ADE Bulletin, No. 87, 1987, pp. 8-11
"Adam's Curse renders the tension between man and poet, life and art. If poetry is to appear spontaneous - 'a moment's thought' - it must convey the impression of vital life."
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Peskin, S. G. "W. B. Yeats and Adam's Curse" University of the Witwatersrand. pp. 11-17
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"Speechlike rhythms roughens its iambic pentameter meter, and its sentences often strengthen the impression of spontaneous, colloquial speech by extending themselves over several lines, sometimes by means of enjambment."
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Holdeman, David. The Cambridge Introduction to W.B. Yeats. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010.
"Because both 'O Do Not Love Too Long' and 'The Hollow Wood' are first-person lyrics, Yeats's placement of them in the middle of what had been the collection's concluding choral phase continues the disassembly-begun in The Poetical Works-of the tripartite progression of 1903 and underlines the suggestion that the speaker has abandoned his original quest"
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Holdeman, David. Interpreting Textual Processes: The Case of Yeats's "In the Seven Woods." Indiana University Press, 1995, Vol. 8, pp. 248-265.
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Note: "The Ragged Wood" was originally titled "The Hollow Wood."
"The happy townland itself is another version of the world, exaggerated to super-mundane proportions, just as the Irish legends of the heroic age isolate and exaggerate the passions of men - courage, hatred, love - to superhuman proportions."
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Schleifer, Ronald. "Narrative in Yeats's 'In The Seven Woods." The Journal of Narrative Technique. Vol. 6, No. 3, 1976, pp. 155-174
"Never Give all the Heart," [the speaker] for the first time attributes her rejection of him to his failure to use his imagination to master his own self. Passionate women, he tells us, give their hearts only to "the play," and no one can "play it well enough / If deaf and dumb and blind with love."
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Holdeman, David. Interpreting Textual Processes: The Case of Yeats's "In the Seven Woods." Indiana University Press. Text, Vol. 8 (1995), pp. 249-265
"The friend who speaks in 'The Folly of Being Comforted,' the next poem, is unnamed, but one may infer that it is Lady Gregory. This friend is kind, like the new beauty of the beloved, and she begins in a patient way to reason with the poet about his feelings" (Adams 9).
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Adams, Hazard. "The Early Poems of 'In The Seven Woods.'" ADE Bulletin. Fall 1987, pp. 8-11.
"In the gulf opened up between the writer and the reader an 'I' emerges whose subject is itself. But Yeats also had ambitions to be a 'public' poet and this 'I' is isolated in a way which makes that ambition unrealizeable. Yeats's attempt to recover a presence in oral literature denied by written language is an answer to a persistent Romantic problem" (Hirsch 881).
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Hirsch, Edward. "'And I Myself Created Hanrahan': Yeats, Folklore, and Fiction." ELH, vol. 48, no. 4, 1981, pp. 880-93.
"It has always as far as I know been read as a straight patriotic poem. . . . [However,] following 'Adam's Curse,' it invites one to read it as a poem of a parallel bitterness. . . . [I]n this location it appears to be about another bitter and exhausting love affair, that of the Irish with Cathleen ni Houlihan. . . . We learn later that the beloved is a radical Irish patriot, and he has resented this Ireland as a rival."
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Adams, Hazard. "The Early Poems of In The Seven Woods." ADE Bulletin, No. 87, 1987, p. 11
Because "O Do Not Love Too Long" dramatizes the speaker addressing a new "Sweetheart" rather than the beloved, it places him even farther beyond the failure of 1903 than had the additions to the two 19o06 versions (VP z 211). Though still obviously haunted by his memories of the beloved, he has evidently had the time and achieved the composure necessary to become involved with someone else. His comprehension of his earlier failure also seems to have deepened. He focuses even more intently on the need for self-mastery, telling his new sweetheart that his heart was broken by the beloved because he loved "long and long, / And grew to be out of fashion" and warning her that if she isn't careful she may quickly do the same" (VP 211).
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Holdeman, David. Interpreting Textual Processes: The Case of Yeats's "In the Seven Woods." Indiana University Press. Text, Vol. 8 (1995), pp. 249-265
In 'Old Memory' the poet returns to the theme of the arrow. Here our Cupid directs the aim of his thought to "her," taking up her new image of nobility. It is evening, and he feels the wound in his marrow still. He directs this second arrow more carefully than the first, however, and at the outset it has the quality of a barb. . . . It is this nobility, not the apocalyptic archer, that might 'call up a new age.'
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Adams, Hazard. "The Early Poems of In The Seven Woods." ADE Bulletin, No. 87, 1987, p. 9
After attempting to convince the beloved that her strength has been partly constructed by his "dear words," the speaker of "Old Memory" suddenly understands that his imagination has had no more power over her emotions than it has had over the wind.
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Holdeman, David. Interpreting Textual Processes: The Case of Yeats's "In the Seven Woods." Indiana University Press. Text, Vol. 8 (1995), pp. 249-265
"In 'The Withering of the Boughs' the poet describes the result of his alleged naive unmakes sincerity. It is not the wind, the object of his hatred earlier--a sort of scapegoat--that has withered the trees; it is his own open self-expression This knowledge has come to him in a dream of witches, Danaan dancers, and a wandering pair of lovers, a king and a queen. The poem is ambiguous and unsettled, for while it seems to formulate a clear reason for his failure--the forthright assertion of his dreams--he contrives to state that this new wisdom itself arrives as a result of dreams, forthrightly asserted."
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Adams, Hazard. "The Early Poems of In The Seven Woods." ADE Bulletin, No. 87, 1987, p. 10
The Poems
Yeats, William B. The Collected Poems of W B Yeats. Edited by Richard J Finneran, Simon & Schuster, 1996