Poem of the Day: ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’

Before he made his modernist turn — transforming himself into as great a poet as the 20th-century would know — William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was a wildly successful late-romantic young Irish poet: “Willy Yeats,” as he was sometimes known by his readers, for he had the gift of making himself seem a friend and companion — different from the later “William Butler Yeats” who looked out from his tower above the literary scene. And it was this early Willy Yeats who gave us “The Fiddler of Dooney,” set here for St. Patrick’s Day: trimeter quatrains in the voice of an Irish fiddler who expects the joy he brings through his songs are better even than the prayers of his priest brother and cousin. A St. Patrick’s offering. “Four or five miles from Innisfree, there’s a great rock called Dooney Rock where I had often picnicked when a child,” he later wrote. “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.”