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“Once upon a time, when herons built their nests in old men's beards, Forgael, a Sea-King of ancient Ireland, was promised by certain human-headed birds love of a supernatural intensity. These birds were the souls of the dead, and he followed them over seas toward the sunset; where their final rest is. By means of a magic harp, he could call them about him when he would and listen to their speech. His friend Aibric, and the sailors of his ship, thought him mad, or that this mysterious happiness could come after death only, and that he and they were being lured to destruction. Presently they captured a ship, and found a beautiful woman upon it, and Forgael subdued her and his own rebellious sailors by the sound of his harp. The sailors fled upon the other ship, and Forgael and the woman drifted on alone following the birds, awaiting death and what comes after, or some mysterious transformation of the flesh.…”1
—Yeats's Summary of the play in 1906
“The Shadowy Waters” is an extreme example of Yeats's early mystical style even as Yeats writes that he was striving to make it concrete. Analysis of his personal difficulties that interfered with this aim, at a time in his life when they seem to have been putting the most severe pressure on him, leads to a greater appreciation of the power and clarity of his later work.
Yeats's conception of “The Shadowy Waters” at age seventeen coincides with a surge of sexual feeling which he describes as descending on him “like the bursting of a shell”2 and which quite probably included the reawakening of Oedipal fantasies. The play's themes of escape to an island of perfection