John Sherman and Dhoya - William Butler Yeats - 163 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

John Sherman and Dhoya - two interconnected short stories of Yeats.

With the exception of “John Sherman,” William Butler Yeats’s short stories show Yeats’ legendary attraction to the spirit world and reflects his fascination with good and evil. Since they were written during the fin de siècle period when literary and graphic artists, epitomized by the French symbolists, were expressing a world-weariness and pessimism that celebrated the triumph of evil, it is understandable that Yeats’s tales articulate that prevailing mood. These early fictional works also identify the themes which were to occupy Yeats’s poetic genius for the remainder of his life.



John Sherman

First published in 1891, John Sherman and Dhoya was Yeats's third separate publication. The stories were reprinted in the 1908 Collected Works in Verse and Prose.

John Sherman, Yeats's only completed attempt at realistic fiction, details the title character's dilemma. He is a lazy chap and quite uninterested in pursuing a woman for marriage but gradually gets in the race. He is confused not just between two women but also between two places to settle down. He must choose between life in London and marriage to Margaret Leland, an English girl, and life in Ireland and marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Mary Carton.

The story has a lot of autobiographical elements. The town of Ballah is modelled on Yeats's Sligo. The themes center around Yeats's persistent ideas, which came later in his life, such as the debate between nationality and cosmopolitanism and the conflict between what he would later call the Self and the Anti-Self. In the end, Sherman reaffirms his Irish roots, and Margaret Leland's affections are transferred to Sherman's friend, the Reverend William Howard.

But this is not the end of the story. In a long kind of postscript, and a fantasy addon, we now encounter Dhoya. He is a giant of a man that the ancient race of Fornorians held captive until he escaped into the woods , living alone and sleeping in caves . One day, he feels a vague female presence and follows this wispy creature that turns out to be a beautiful woman who has emerged from the depths of the sea. This secret marine life is a world where people are always happy, singing and dancing, without ever growing old. But the catch here is they cannot love, and that is why she has come out of the sea and has found Dhoya. Hence she pursued love and found what she wanted.



The connection between the realistic and the mythical story is about the main themes of the story -


Love
Sherman and the Dhoya’s woman are both looking for love and choose the path to clear the dilemma in their hearts.


Change
In both the stories, everything is changing, and humans are victims of change and uncertainty. Sherman was reluctant to change and Dhoya’s woman had to think about leaving her familiar secret world where nothing changes.