The Wind Among the Reeds

This volume is, like most of Yeats, multivalent. The consistent thread through these poems is the the "He"; this is the clue to a relationship which may be to poetry, or a love affair, or a god, or, to combine all three, to the Muse of lyrical verse...the emotion that is the course of the volume runs from the high spirited young, eager young poet, a virtuoso of the felt world to the dejected older poet who has lost use of his early love and grown philosophical. 

Some of Yeats' concerns we can witness throughout his works are apparent in this collection, especially in the linchpin that ties the beginning poems to the last, 59 and 60, the Cap and Bells  and The Valley of the Black Pig. The first poem seems to correspond to the two components of poetry, the heart and the soul: the soul, "blue" and wise,  and the  sweet tongued "red", whoch only together (and separate from the jester) have the power to charm the poem's young queen .

The Valley of the Black Pig is a poem obsessed with historicity. In the evening "dew dropped" hours, a motif throughout the volume, the narrator loses himself and seems to move into ancient, "unknown" epochs: we have the cromlech and the cairn, two symbols of ancient Gaelic culture, submitting to what must be assumed is the Roman empire. These are established as players in a dichotomy between rational and irrational, with the short term preference on the the masters of the "still star" but the realistic bet with the irrational to trump these empiricists.