In the Seven Woods

In Yeats’s In the seven Woods the different narrators and styles of narration struck me.
In The Withering Boughs he returns to using a lyrical refrain, as he did in The Madness of King Goll, it is also an interesting since the two share a visceral quality while describing nature. In the latter the “…beech leaves are old” and in the former “The boughs have withered.” Both old and withered imply decay, a lessening of life and an emphasis on death. The second line of the refrain in The Withering Boughs goes a step further and supplies the narrators dreams/ dreaming as the reason that the “boughs have withered because I have told my dreams” This aspect seems to echo Irish history, Brown mentions a motif of disenchantment and that seems to be driving many of the poems in this section (as well as others). Having a dream u ultimately leads to the shattering of said dream. The Happy townland seems to reverberate this thought, I was startled to see the word happy, especially in a title, and more confused as the poem went on. However by the end it seems as though the only happiness for Michael (or anyone) to have is in the very dreams that lead to the withering boughs.