<h3><b><SPAN name="2._His_Poetry"></SPAN>2. His Poetry</b></h3>
<p>It is distinctly surprising to find Mr. Yeats compared to Milton and
Jeremy Taylor, and Mr. Forrest Reid, who makes the comparison, does not
ask us to apply it at all points. There is a remoteness about Milton's
genius, however, an austere and rarefied beauty, to which Mr. Reid
discovers certain likenesses in the work of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats is
certainly a little remote. He is so remote that some people regard his
work with mixed feelings, as a rather uncanny thing. The reason may
partly be that Mr. Yeats is not a singer in the ordinary tradition of
poets. His poems are incantations rather than songs. They seem to call
for an order of priests and priestesses to chant them. There are one or
two of his early poems, like <i>Down by the Sally Garden</i>, that
might
conceivably be sung at a fair or even at a ballad-concert. But, as Mr.
Yeats has grown older, he has become more and more determinedly the
magician in his robes. Even in his prose he does not lay aside his
robes; it is written in the tones of the sanctuary: it is prose for
worshippers. To such an extent is this so that many who do not realize
that Mr. Yeats is a great artist cannot read much of his prose without
convincing themselves that he is a great humbug. It is easy to
understand how readers accustomed to the rationalism of the end of the
century refused to take seriously a poet who wrote "spooky"
explanations
of his poems, such as Mr. Yeats wrote in his notes to <i>The Wind
Among
the Reeds</i>, the most entirely good of his books. Consider, for
example,
the note which he wrote on that charming if somewhat perplexing poem,
<i>The Jester</i>. "I dreamed," writes Mr. Yeats:—</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed
another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and
whether I was to write it in prose or verse. The first dream was more a
vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me a
sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while
the second dream was confused and meaningless. The poem has always
meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it
has not always meant quite the same thing. Blake would have said, "The
authors are in eternity"; and I am quite sure they can only be
questioned in dreams.</p>
</div>
<p>Why, even those of us who count Mr. Yeats one of the immortals while
he
is still alive, are inclined to shy at a claim at once so solemn and so
irrational as this. It reads almost like a confession of witchcraft.</p>
<br/>
<p>Luckily, Mr. Yeats's commerce with dreams and fairies and other
spirits
has not all been of this evidential and disputable kind. His
confessions
do not convince us of his magical experiences, but his poems do. Here
we
have the true narrative of fairyland, the initiation into other-worldly
beauty. Here we have the magician crying out against</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,</p>
</div>
<p>and attempting to invoke a new—or an old—and more beautiful world
into
being.</p>
<div class="blkquot">
<p>The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told,</p>
</div>
<p>he cries, and over against the unshapely earth he sets up the "happy
townland" of which he sings in one of his later and most lovely poems.
It would not be easy to write a prose paraphrase of <i>The Happy
Townland</i>, but who is there who can permanently resist the spell of
this
poem, especially of the first verse and its refrain?—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>There's many a strong farmer<br/>
</span><span>Whose heart would break in two,<br/>
</span><span>If he could see the townland<br/>
</span><span>That we are riding to;<br/>
</span><span>Boughs have their fruit and blossom<br/>
</span><span>At all times of the year;<br/>
</span><span>Rivers are running over<br/>
</span><span>With red beer and brown beer.<br/>
</span><span>An old man plays the bagpipes<br/>
</span><span>In a golden and silver wood;<br/>
</span><span>Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,<br/>
</span><span>Are dancing in a crowd.<br/>
</span></div>
<div class="stanza"><span>The little fox he murmured,<br/>
</span><span>"O what of the world's bane?"<br/>
</span><span>The sun was laughing sweetly,<br/>
</span><span>The moon plucked at my rein;<br/>
</span><span>But the little red fox murmured,<br/>
</span><span>"O, do not pluck at his rein,<br/>
</span><span>He is riding to the townland<br/>
</span><span>That is the world's bane."<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>You may interpret the little red fox and the sun and the moon as you
please, but is it not all as beautiful as the ringing of bells?</p>
<p>But Mr. Yeats, in his desire for this other world of colour and
music,
is no scorner of the everyday earth. His early poems especially, as Mr.
Reid points out, give evidence of a wondering observation of Nature
almost Wordsworthian. In <i>The Stolen Child</i>, which tells of a
human
child that is enticed away by the fairies, the magic of the earth the
child is leaving is the means by which Mr. Yeats suggests to us the
magic of the world into which it is going, as in the last verse of the
poem:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Away with us he's going,<br/>
</span><span>The solemn eyed:<br/>
</span><span>He'll hear no more the lowing<br/>
</span><span>Of the calves on the warm hillside;<br/>
</span><span>Or the kettle on the hob<br/>
</span><span>Sing peace into his breast,<br/>
</span><span>Or see the brown mice bob<br/>
</span><span>Round and round the oatmeal-chest.<br/>
</span><span><i>For he comes, the human child,</i><br/>
</span><span><i>To the waters and the wild</i><br/>
</span><span><i>With a faery, hand in hand,</i><br/>
</span><span><i>From a world more full of weeping than he can
understand.</i><br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>There is no painting here, no adjective-work. But no painting or
adjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of the
world mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simple
things. To read <i>The Stolen Child</i> is to realize both that Mr.
Yeats
brought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius
had
its birth in a sense of the beauty of common things. Even when in his
early poems the adjectives seem to be chosen with the too delicate care
of an artist, as when he notes how—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span class="i8">in autumnal solitudes<br/>
</span><span>Arise the leopard-coloured trees,<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>his observation of the world about him is but proved the more
conclusively. The trees in autumn <i>are</i> leopard-coloured, though
a poet
cannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental.</p>
<p>What I have written so far, however, might convey the impression
that in
Mr. Yeats's poetry we have a child's rather than a man's vision at
work.
One might even gather that he was a passionless singer with his head in
the moon. This is exactly the misunderstanding which has led many
people
to think of him as a minor poet.</p>
<p>The truth is Mr. Yeats is too original and, as it were, secret a
poet to
capture all at once the imagination that has already fixed the outlines
of its kingdom amid the masterpieces of literature. His is a genius
outside the landmarks. There is no prototype in Shelley or Keats, any
more than there is in Shakespeare, for such a poem as that which was at
first called <i>Breasal the Fisherman</i>, but is now called simply <i>The
Fisherman</i>:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Although you hide in the ebb and flow<br/>
</span><span>Of the pale tide when the moon has set,<br/>
</span><span>The people of coming days will know<br/>
</span><span>About the casting out of my net,<br/>
</span><span>And how you have leaped times out of mind<br/>
</span><span>Over the little silver cords.<br/>
</span><span>And think that you were hard and unkind,<br/>
</span><span>And blame you with many bitter words.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>There, in music as simple as a fable of Aesop, Mr. Yeats has figured
the
pride of genius and the passion of defeated love in words that are
beautiful in themselves, but trebly beautiful in their significances.</p>
<p>Beautifully new, again, is the poem beginning, "I wander by the
edge,"
which expresses the desolation of love as it is expressed in few modern
poems:</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>I wander by the edge<br/>
</span><span>Of this desolate lake<br/>
</span><span>Where wind cries in the sedge:<br/>
</span><span><i>Until the axle break</i><br/>
</span><span><i>That keeps the stars in their round</i><br/>
</span><span><i>And hands hurl in the deep</i><br/>
</span><span><i>The banners of East and West</i><br/>
</span><span><i>And the girdle of light is unbound,</i><br/>
</span><span><i>Your breast will not lie by the breast</i><br/>
</span><span><i>Of your beloved in sleep.</i><br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>Rhythms like these did not exist in the English language until Mr.
Yeats
invented them, and their very novelty concealed for a time the passion
that is immortal in them. It is by now a threadbare saying of
Wordsworth
that every great artist has himself to create the taste by which he is
enjoyed, but it is worth quoting once more because it is especially
relevant to a discussion of the genius of Mr. Yeats. What previous
artist, for example, had created the taste which would be prepared to
respond imaginatively to such a revelation of a lover's triumph in the
nonpareil beauty of his mistress as we have in the poem that ends:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>I cried in my dream, "<i>O women bid the
young men lay</i><br/>
</span><span><i>Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with
your hair,</i><br/>
</span><span><i>Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair</i><br/>
</span><span><i>Till all the valleys of the world have been withered
away</i>,"<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>One may doubt at times whether Mr. Yeats does not too consciously
show
himself an artist of the aesthetic school in some of his epithets, such
as "cloud-pale" and "dream-dimmed." His too frequent repetition of
similar epithets makes woman stand out of his poems at times like a
decoration, as in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, rather than
in the vehement beauty of life. It is as if the passion in his verse
were again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take his
love-poems as a whole, however, the passion in them is at once vehement
and beautiful.</p>
<p>The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion
that
has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. <i>The Wind Among the Reeds</i>
is a
book of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry. It
utters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair,
of
desire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in the
love-poetry of other ages. But here are new images, almost a new
language. Sometimes we have an image which fills the mind like the
image
in some little Chinese lyric, as in the poem <i>He Reproves the Curlew</i>:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>O, curlew, cry no more in the air,<br/>
</span><span>Or only to the waters of the West;<br/>
</span><span>Because your crying brings to my mind<br/>
</span><span>Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair<br/>
</span><span>That was shaken out over my breast:<br/>
</span><span>There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>This passion of loss, this sense of the beloved as of something
secret
and far and scarcely to be attained, like the Holy Grail, is the
dominant theme of the poems, even in <i>The Song of Wandering Aengus</i>,
that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silver
trout" that became</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span class="i7">—a glimmering girl<br/>
</span><span>With apple blossom in her hair,<br/>
</span><span>Who called me by my name and ran<br/>
</span><span>And faded through the brightening air.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in the
exquisite last verse—a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr.
Yeats's writings after <i>The Lake Isle of Innisfree</i> and <i>Had I
the
Heaven's Embroidered Cloths</i>:—</p>
<div class="poem">
<div class="stanza"><span>Though I am old with wandering<br/>
</span><span>Through hollow lands and hilly lands,<br/>
</span><span>I will find out where she has gone,<br/>
</span><span>And kiss her lips and take her hands;<br/>
</span><span>And walk among long dappled grass,<br/>
</span><span>And pluck till time and times are done<br/>
</span><span>The silver apples of the moon,<br/>
</span><span>The golden apples of the sun.<br/>
</span></div>
</div>
<p>This is the magic of fairyland again. It seems a little distant from
human passions. It is a wonderful example, however, of Mr. Yeats's
genius for transforming passion into elfin dreams. The emotion is at
once deeper and nearer human experience in the later poem called <i>The
Folly of Being Comforted</i>. I have known readers who professed to
find
this poem obscure. To me it seems a miracle of phrasing and
portraiture.
I know no better example of the nobleness of Mr. Yeats's verse and his
incomparable music.</p>
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