Yeats and the Flying Dutchman1

This is not a note on Yeats and Richard Wagner’s opera Der fliegende Holländer (premiered in 1843). Instead, it concerns itself with the rôle played in the evolution of Yeats’s thinking by the influential myth of the ‘legendary ghost ship’ that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever, captained by a species of the Wandering Jew figure. I trace thereby the source of his early play Mosada (1886), and the influence of the myth in the form in which Yeats originally encountere.