Conamara Blues

Find it at alibris.com
( 4.6/5.0 ★ | 220 downloads )
-- Click the link to download --

https://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=*C/UgjGtUZ8&offerid=1494105.26
539780060196448&type=15&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alibris.com%2Fsearch%2
Fbooks%2Fisbn%2F9780060196448
Conamara Blues

ISBN: 9780060196448
Category: Media > Books
File Fomat: PDF, EPUB, DOC...
File Details: 5.9 MB
Language: English
Website: alibris.com
Short description: Good condition book with a firm cover and clean
readable pages. Shows normal use including some light wear or limited
notes highlighting yet remains a dependable copy overall. Supplemental
items like CDs or access codes may not be included.

DOWNLOAD: https://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=*C/UgjGtUZ8&
offerid=1494105.26539780060196448&type=15&murl=http%3A%2F%2F
www.alibris.com%2Fsearch%2Fbooks%2Fisbn%2F9780060196448
 Conamara Blues

• Click the link: https://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=*C/UgjGtUZ8&offerid=1494105.2653978006019644

8&type=15&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alibris.com%2Fsearch%2Fbooks%2Fisbn%2F9780060196448 to do
latest version of Conamara Blues in multiple formats such as PDF, EPUB, and more.

• Don’t miss the chance to explore our extensive collection of high-quality resources, books, and guides on
our website. Visit us regularly to stay updated with new titles and gain access to even more valuable
materials.
.
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.09%
accurate

W. B. YEATS dramatist as one chooses one's newspaper, for

his opinions on politics, the relations of the sexes, socialism, the
emancipation of women. In 1898 the new movement was only
beginning, though Grant Allen had published several " Hilltop "
novels, and Mr. Bernard Shaw the first two volumes of his plays.
From a newspaper controversy1 that took place towards the end of
that year I glean the following remarks made by Mr. Yeats : — I
believe that the renewal of belief, which is the great movement of
our time, will more and more liberate the arts from " their age " and
from life, and leave them more and more free to lose themselves in
beauty, and to busy themselves, like all the great poetry of the past
and like religions of all times, with " old faiths, myths, dreams," the
accumulated beauty of the age. I believe that all men will more and
more reject the opinion that poetry is " a criticism of life," and be
more and more convinced that it is a revelation of a hidden life. . . .
It may well be that men are only able to fashion into beautiful
shapes the most delicate emotions of the soul, spending their days
with a patience like the patience of the middle ages in the perfect
rounding of a verse, or the perfect carving of a flower, when they
are certain that the soul will not die with the 1 In the columns of
The Daily Express, Dublin, and reprinted as a pamphlet called
Literary Ideals in Ireland. 58
The text on this page is estimated to be only 27.90%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 body, and that the gates of peace are

wide, and that the watchers are at their places upon the wall.1 He
has been accused — it is a reproach to be found particularly often
upon the lips of those who have neither the patience nor the will to
understand him — of having all too successfully " liberated " his art
from life ; yet what he means is merely that he would liberate it
from the bonds of an uninspired realism busied with interminable
descriptions of external things. With an art that never gets beyond
notebook and document, Mr. Yeats has, indeed, little sympathy. The
artist must found his work on " what is permanent in the world," on
what recurs through all the changing fashions of the ages, " as
desire and hope, terror and weariness, spring and autumn recur."2
There are painters who paint for posterity, making due allowance for
the mellowing, softening touch of time, and Mr. Yeats has this in
common with them, that his art is concerned only with a substance
that that great collaborator cannot make stale. He writes of the
deeper moments of life, of emotions that are eternal in human
nature, of nature itself only as a transparent veil 1 Literary Ideals in
Ireland, p. 36. 2 Discoveries, " The Two Kinds of Asceticism." 59
The text on this page is estimated to be only 29.01%
accurate

W. B. YEATS throughTwhich shine eternal spiritual powers.

His philosophy has something in it of Platonism ; his poetry is a
setting free of the soul by means of mortal and changing things that
it may gaze upon immortal and unchanging things. That is exactly
what the Platonic Socrates sought to do by dialectic, and what he
actually does do when poetry has not been overshadowed by
dialectic. Both ancient philosopher and modern poet throw their net
among the stars, and capture a strange and wandering loveliness
that will always seem unearthly and illusive to those who,
consciously or unconsciously, have accepted materialism, and to
those upon whose souls the practical cares of life have closed down
like a coffin-lid. II " I remember," Mr. Yeats says, " that when I first
began to write I desired to describe outward things as vividly as
possible, and took pleasure, in which there was, perhaps, a little
discontent, in picturesque and declamatory books. And then quite
suddenly I lost the desire of describing outward things, and found
that I took little pleasure in a book unless it was spiritual and
unemphatic. I did 60
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.89%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 not then understand that the change

was from beyond my own mind, but I understand now that writers
are struggling all over Europe . . . against that ' externality ' which a
time of scientific and political thought has brought into literature."1
The change he alludes to, and which he goes on to describe in
detail, is what is known, and what Mr. Arthur Symons and other
critics have written about, always a little narrowly and
controversially, as the Symbolist Movement. It had found its
inspiration in the onesided, bizarre, and somewhat perverse genius
of Villiers de PIsle Adam, though poor Gerard de Nerval, whose
talent had an almost Greek simplicity and purity, has been dragged
in as a kind of precursor. It flourished for a few years, mainly in
Paris, and is already half forgotten. For like most other movements it
was but a wave that swept up out of obscurity a crowd of disciples
who had little other artistic equipment than the ardour of their
convictions. Intelligence is a rather rare quality among disciples,
breadth of view a still rarer one, and the almost pitiful exiguity of
that pale and bloodless world in which the Symbolists moved is
revealed, far more cruelly than by any hostile critic, in the two
volumes of Messrs. 1 Ideas of Good and Evil, p. 296. 61
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.28%
accurate

W. B. YEATS Van Bever and Leautaud's anthology, Poetes

d'Aujourd'hui. In this we find what are presumably the masterpieces
of forty-two poets, ranging alphabetically from M. Henri Barbusse to
M. Francis Viele-Griffin. The plan of the volumes gives M. Henri
Barbusse a very unfair advantage, for when we have read his five
pieces we have read the work of at least thirtysix out of our forty-
two poets. They all seem to want to say the same thing, and to want
to say it in very much the same way ; and they all do say the same
thing, with varying degrees of success. The one poet of the first rank
who has been connected with the movement, if we exclude Mr.
Yeats, is Verlaine, and Verlaine really is no more a Symbolist than
Tennyson was. In spite of what has been claimed for him, and of
what he has — probably at the suggestion of others — claimed for
himself, I doubt if he had any very conscious theory of art at all. He
was a Symbolist to oblige Mr. Arthur Symons and Stephane Mallarme
and Remy de Gourmont, but he would have been any other " ist "
they wanted with the same alacrity and good-nature. Certainly he
had no such elaborate philosophy of life or of aesthetics as we find
in the author of Axel, in Mallarme, and in Mr. Yeats. He was a born
poet and wrote very much as a bird sings. 62
The text on this page is estimated to be only 29.42%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 He had a beautiful, a divine genius, but

in his work there is not the slightest indication that he had ever
thought on any subject whatever. Now one cannot be a Mallarme or
a Villiers or a Yeats without thought. In all of them the scientific, the
intellectual element is perpetually awake and alert. They write with a
theory as to how one ought to write constantly before them. In
Mallarme, who is the extremist, and the high-priest, of the
movement, the act of composition becomes a sort of double process
of invention and translation. He could write French of the most
admirable lucidity and grace : his translations of Edgar Poe's poems
are by far the subtlest achievements in that most difficult art I have
ever seen. One would think that the man who could do them could,
so far as mere technique might carry him, do very nearly anything
he wanted. And no doubt this was the case. Unfortunately, what he
wanted to do principally was to experiment with words, and while he
translates Poe into French he translates his own verses into a
language which is unintelligible even to the disciples. I think it would
not be unfair to draw the conclusion that Mallarme had not a great
deal to say, and that he was far too sincere a lover of letters to
desire to repeat himself. He had a 63
The text on this page is estimated to be only 29.18%
accurate

W. B. YEATS few poems to write, and he had a lifetime to

write them in. Theory was his undoing. The whole attitude of mind
that led to such tricks as the omission of punctuation, the
photographing of the poems from the original manuscript, is
inconceivable in a man with any great creative gift. Directly, or
indirectly through the enthusiasm of his friend Arthur Symons, he
had, and Villiers had, an influence, though only a temporary
influence, upon Mr. Yeats. /fust when Mr. Yeats became a Symbolist I
do not know, but it is not till The Wind Among the Reeds of 1899
that we find his use of symbols becoming deliberate and
selfconscious, and from the moment it becomes so, from the
moment it ceases to be instinctive, from the moment symbol ceases
to be the metaphor that every poet from Homer to himself has
employed, we see it beginning to hamper him, so that about half of
that marvellous little book has to be devoted to explanatory notes.
That the notes themselves are delightful, with a perhaps deliberately
wandering and careless beauty, is no excuse for them. The only valid
excuse one could imagine is certainly not one they can in most cases
lay a claim to, namely, that they are unnecessary. 64
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.13%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 To return for a moment to Mr. Yeats's

own statement of the case :— " All art," he tells us, " that is not
mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the
purpose of those symbolic talismans which mediaeval magicians
made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients
ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy ; for it entangles, in
complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence."1 As Mr.
Arthur Symons reminds us, this is more or less a re-statement of
what Carlyle had said in Sartor Resartus. " In the Symbol proper,
what we can call a Symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and
directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite ; the
Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and
as it were, attainable there."2 As Mr. Yeats puts it, connecting it with
the practices of " mediaeval magicians," it is exactly the theory of
Mallarme. But there is a world of difference between the metaphor
or unconscious symbolism of a Shelley or a Shakespeare and the
definitely reasoned and arbitrary symbolism of Blake's prophetical 1
Ideas of Good and Evil, p. 230. * Symons, The Symbolist Movement
in Literature, p. 4. E 65
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.23%
accurate

W. B. YEATS books and of some of Mr. Yeats's later poems.

As an example of legitimate symbolismkeeping to our poet's
nomenclature — we may endorse what he has said about these two
lines of Burns : — The white moon is setting behind the white wave,
And Time is setting with me, O ! " These lines are perfectly symbolic.
Take from them the whiteness of the moon and of the wave, whose
relation to the setting of Time is too subtle for the intellect, and you
take from them their beauty. But, when all are together, moon and
wave and whiteness and setting Time and the last melancholy cry,
they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other
arrangement of colours and sounds and forms."1 The great
drawback to all this is that it really claims for the support of a theory
effects that were not in the least arrived at by the conscious
application of that theory. We might therefore expect to find these
effects tremendously intensified in the poetry of the conscious artist
who is working in the full light of his system, of his discovery. But is
that what we find ? Let us take a deliberately symbolic poem by Mr.
Yeats:— 1 Ideas of Good and Evil, p. 241. 66
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.76%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long

manes a-shake, Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes
glimmering white ; The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping
night, The East her hidden joy before the morning break, The West
weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away, The South is pouring
down roses of crimson fire : O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless
Desire, The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay. . . .l There
is an explanatory note to this poem which I shall leave to the reader
to refer to if he needs it, though I may tell him that the last two lines
I have quoted contain the key to the four preceding ones. But do we
really find these lines suggestive as Burns's lines are suggestive, or
as those lines by Nash, which Mr. Yeats is so fond of quoting, are
suggestive ? Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young
and fair, Dust hath closed Helen's eye. Personally I do not think so.
It is indeed only after I have referred to the note at the end of the
book, which is over a page in length, that I can get much more from
them than a mere lulling of the senses, a mere sensuous pleasure
conveyed by the monotonous beating of the verse. As I understand
art, above all the art of poetry, it should depend much more upon
the natural, though of course 1 The Wind Among the Reeds, p. 24.
67
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.57%
accurate

W. B. YEATS cultivated, sensitiveness of the reader than

upon his scientific knowledge. The scientific mind cares only for
what is actually said, and poetry, which depends upon what never
can quite be said, makes little or no appeal to it. But these lines of
Mr. Yeats's depend, like the greater part of Blake's writings,
altogether upon our proper understanding of what is said ; are not,
unless we hold the key to them, in the true sense of the word,
suggestive at all. The faculties that we must bring to bear upon
them are exactly the same faculties that we employ in scientific
work. That is to say, until we have translated them and know that A
= White, and B = Black, and C = Life, and D= Death, we know
nothing.1 This is mere Mallarmeism in another form. Apart from the
beauty of sound we get nothing till we have solved our puzzle, and
while we are busy with the solution we lose even the beauty of
sound. The first great truth that the artist must keep before him is
that all unnecessary strain upon the reader's attention is so much to
the bad, is sheer waste of a faculty that after all is limited and must
relax in one direction when it is too arduously worked in another. If it
is to be so worked the very purpose of rhythm is defeated. For
rhythm is there to » See p. 223. 68
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.50%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 induce in the reader a mood which is

not in itself the subject of the poem, but the evocation of which is
necessary before the poem can come to life in his imagination. To
have to turn to a note, whether we turn to it before or after reading
the poem, is fatal, keeps us firmly attached to a world of ink and
paper. Our magician has failed, and we watch him coldly and
sceptically, as Elijah watched the too sanguine priests of Baal. In The
Wind Among the Reeds symbolism is carried even beyond the actual
content of the poems, for certain of the lyrics are put into the
mouths of imaginary persons who are themselves symbols — Aedh,
Hanrahan, Michael Robartes, the heroes of the stories of The Secret
Rose, but here without their human attributes, being each identified
with a particular mood of consciousness. As Mr. Yeats puts it in the
notes, " Hanrahan is the simplicity of an imagination too changeable
to gather permanent possessions, or the adoration of the shepherds
; and Michael Robartes is the pride of the imagination brooding upon
the greatness of its possessions, or the adoration of the Magi ; while
Aedh is the myrrh and frankincense that the imagination offers
continually before all that it loves."1 1 The Wind Among the Reeds,
pp. 73-4. 69
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.72%
accurate

W. B. YEATS I confess that I never found all this particularly

convincing, and I find it still less so when, on turning to the
Collected Works, I discover that the poems are no longer given to
Aedh, Hanrahan, etc., but are there printed just as the other lyrics
are printed. Yet if these personages meant anything in 1899 and in
1903, which are the dates of my two editions of The Wind Among
the Reeds, it is hard to understand why they should mean nothing in
1908. And though now that they are gone we ought perhaps to treat
them as if they had never existed, yet this swaying between
opinions, this shifting of the point of view, somehow tends to
invalidate similar theories when they are applied elsewhere, and to
point to a suspicion of pedantry that is no less barren because it
happens to be the pedantry of the artist. Yet even as I make these
remarks I find myself wondering if I have not laid too much stress
upon obscurities that are after all not numerous. Taking the work as
a whole, it is certainly as ' easy ' as that of any other serious poet I
can call to mind, and easier than many. Moreover, one may get an
intense pleasure from a poem like The Happy Townland — belonging
to a later volume1 in which » Poems, 1899-1905. 70
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.12%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 there are no notes — and not in the

least be prepared to give an explanation of Gabriel and the " fish
tail." So, too, the " little red fox," and the sun and the moon, may
have an esoteric meaning : I take them simply as part of the most
delightful poetic refrain imaginable. Ill X Most of the lyrics in The
Wind Among the Reeds are love poems, or philosophic poems, or a
blend of the two ; but there are three or four narrative poems, and
one of these, The Host of the Air, cannot be passed over in silence,
for it is the most perfect thing of its kind Mr. Yeats has written.
Based upon a scrap of folk-lore in The Celtic Twilight,1 and
apparently among the simplest of his poems, nothing he has ever
done shows a greater mastery of atmosphere, or a greater metrical
mastery. His exquisite modifications and variations of a metre that
might to some readers seem as artless as an old ballad metre are of
a supreme beauty, yet so delicate, so unobtrusive, that the whole
thing is like an improvisation, a thing dropped softly out of the air,
like the passing murmur of wind. 1 The Celtic Twilight, "
Kidnappers," p. 123. 71
The text on this page is estimated to be only 29.21%
accurate

W. B. YEATS O'Driscoll drove with a song The wild duck and

the drake, From the tall and the tufted reeds Of the drear Hart Lake.
And he saw how the reeds grew dark At the coming of night tide,
And dreamed of the long dim hair Of Bridget his bride. He heard
while he sang and dreamed A piper piping away, And never was
piping so sad, And never was piping so gay. And he saw young men
and young girls Who danced on a level place And Bridget his bride
among them, With a sad and a gay face. The dancers crowded
about him, And many a sweet thing said, And a young man brought
him red wine And a young girl white bread. But Bridget drew him by
the sleeve, Away from the merry bands, To old men playing at cards
With a twinkling of ancient hands. The bread and the wine had a
doom, For these were the host of the air ; He sat and played in a
dream Of her long dim hair. He played with the merry old men And
thought not of evil chance, Until one bore Bridget his bride Away
from the merry dance. 72
The text on this page is estimated to be only 29.20%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 He bore her away in his arms, The

handsomest young man there, And his neck and his breast and his
arms Were drowned in her long dim hair. O'Driscoll scattered the
cards And out of his dream awoke : Old men and young men and
young girls Were gone like a drifting smoke ; But he heard high up
in the air A piper piping away, And never was piping so sad, And
never was piping so gay. I shall not write of the love poems in The
Wind separately, for his treatment of love, here and elsewhere,
brings out so clearly the peculiar beauty of his genius that it will be
simpler and more profitable to group all the lyrics of this class
together, taking the later with the earlier, and examine them more
closely, with the imagery he makes use of in them. They are
certainly unlike any other erotic poetry that I know of. The passion in
them seems somehow to be different in kind from the passion in, let
us say, Rossetti's House of Life, where the erotic fever, as we are
accustomed to conceive of it, finds perhaps its completest
expression. It is not really different, of course, because it may be
said to include the other ; only it seems to be rooted in something
73
The text on this page is estimated to be only 27.93%
accurate

W. B. YEATS different. The passion has a spiritual intensity

that it is difficult to find a parallel to in literature, unless we find it in
Wuthering Heights. Some of these poems have a kind of white flame
of rapture in which all that is of the earth is burned up. They
express, as Emily Bronte's Heathcliff expresses, not the desire of the
body, but the desire of the soul. Nevertheless, they are varied in
their inspiration ; and sometimes, as in The Pity of Love -,1 have a
simple tenderness ; sometimes, as in A Memory of Youth,* are
saddened with a sense of love's brevity ; while now and then they
express an ecstatic longing that no mortal love can satisfy, and that
is not really a love for any human being, but the cry of one who has
his hands clutched upon the topmost rung of Diotima's ladder, and
his eyes fixed upon " the divine beauty, pure and clear and
unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the
colours and vanities of human life." The words are Plato's3 but they
might have been the words of more than one of Mr. Yeats's lovers. It
is in the pursuit of this ideal that the lover grows old and weary, is
filled with an infinite restlessness and discontent. A " fire is in his
head," a madness in his heart, that 1 Poems. 2 Responsibilities. *
Symposium (trans. Jowett, vol. i, p. 582). 74
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.33%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 shut him out from all the rest of the
world, and come between him and all that to other men makes life
worth living. When I had laid it on the floor I went to blow the fire a-
flame, But something rustled on the floor, And someone called me
by my name : It had become a glimmering girl With apple blossom
in her hair Who called me by my name and ran And faded through
the brightening air. Though I am old with wandering Through hollow
lands and hilly lands, I will find out where she has gone, And kiss
her lips and take her hands ; And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the
moon, The golden apples of the sun.1 So, when Michael Robartes
loves a mortal woman, it is really an eternal and imperishable beauty
that he loves : When my arms wrap you round I press My heart
upon the loveliness That has long faded from the world. . . .* And
Aedh would rebuild the whole world, making of it a shrine for love ;
and that the beloved might be more tender and compas1 The Wind
Among the Reeds, "The Song of Wandering Aengus." 2 Ibid., "
Michael Robartes Remembers Forgotten Beauty." 75
The text on this page is estimated to be only 27.68%
accurate

W. B. YEATS sionate, he would have her dead, " under the

dock-leaves in the ground." Love is transformed by the imagination,
bringing with it the sense of all eternity : And then you came with
those red mournful lips, And with you came the whole of the world's
tears, And all the trouble of her labouring ships, And all the trouble
of her myriad years.1 The beauty of the beloved is the last perfected
gift of Time ; it has made the great dramas of the world's history,
and the past lives in it as in a memory, and all the glory and nobility
of the past : For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one
high funeral gleam, And Usna's children died.2 The beloved, like
Helen, is desired of all men ; " stars climbing the dew-dropping sky,
live but to light her passing feet." Yet while the spirit is in the body,
love is spoiled and wearied by time, threatened by all things. It is "
less kind than the gray twilight," Danger no refuge holds, and war
no peace, For him who hears love sing. . . .3 4 The hour of the
waning of love " inevitably 1 Poems, " The Sorrow of Love." » Ibid., "
The Rose of the World." 8 Ibid., " The Rose of Battle." 76
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.18%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 Iraws near, bringing with it pensive

autumnal thoughts, memories of a dead spring and summer. Then,
for poor consolation, the lovers in their loneliness turn to each other
by the sad lake's border. Ah, do not mourn . . . ... for other loves
await us ; Before us lies eternity ; our souls Are love, and a continual
farewell.1 And yet again the hollowness of such consolation is
proved by time, which is powerless to obliterate the beloved's image,
as it is to cover away the memory of lost happiness : Pale brows, still
hands and dim hair, I had a beautiful friend And dreamed that the
old despair Would end in love in the end : She looked in my heart
one day And saw your image was there ; She has gone weeping
away.2 No gifts are too precious to lay at the beloved's feet; yet in
the end it is his dreams that the poet brings, the most precious gift
of all. Dreams, however, turn to sadness, and hope withers away,
and all that is certain is that time will bring change and separation,
that death in life which is more cruel than 1 Poems, " Ephemera." *
The Wind Among the Reeds, " Aedh laments the Loss of Love." 77
The text on this page is estimated to be only 27.58%
accurate

W. B. YEATS death itself, because of the countless dangers

that accompany it. All that is left is a great longing in which the spirit
seeks a reunion that is denied to the body. All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write, Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight, Till they come where your sad, sad
heart is, And sing to you in the night, Beyond where the waters are
moving, Storm-darken'd or starry bright.1 Even in constancy there is
danger. The poet fears to love too long lest he " grow out of fashion
" : yet love's tenderness and constancy are inexhaustible, and " time
can but make " the beloved's " beauty over again " O she had not
these ways When all the wild summer was in her gaze :2 and in the
last rapture he can cry aloud, " No one has ever loved but you and I
! " The imagery that clothes these superb poems is borrowed for the
most part from dreaming Irish woods, from lonely lakes, from the
sky and the sea. There is hardly an image, hardly an epithet, that
does not strike us as much by its precision as by its novelty. The 1
From Irish Fairy Tales, ed. by W. B. Yeats. Unwin, 1892. a Poems,
1899-1905, " The Folly of Being Comforted." 78
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.65%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 words have a pictorial as well as a

musical value. The images he uses are so interpenetrated by the
idea that image and idea are as closely united as body and soul. We
have but to turn his pages at random and begin to read anywhere to
see this. There are few comparisons, but everywhere there is
metaphor ; and sometimes it is hard to tell even where the actual
scene passes into a state of mind. I wander by the edge Of this
desolate lake Where wind cries in the sedge Until the axle break
That keeps the stars in their round And hands hurl in the deep The
banners of East and West And the girdle of light is unbound, Your
breast will not lie by the breast Of your beloved in sleep.1 In the
very first words all that is given in the last words is given. The
feeling of separation, of loneliness, of restless, hopeless sorrow
seems to exist as much in the wind crying in the sedge, in the
desolate lake, though these are suggested in three brief lines, as in
the human cry of the man. The picture, the scene, is transfused by
the idea, is indistinguishable from it. 1 The Wind Among the Reeds, "
Aedh hears the Cry of the Sedge." 79
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.37%
accurate

W. B. YEATS Mr. Yeats's view of nature is in the highest

degree mystical and subjective. The world, as we find it in his
poetry, is a world that has passed through his imagination and is
wrapped in the twilight which reigns there. The twilight hour is the
hour he loves, " when white moths are on the wing, and moth-like
stars are flickering out," " when owls begin to call," and the whole
ear,th seems ready to dissolve into a dream. Thus wood and stream
and mountain, the passing clouds, and the whiteness of water,
appeal to him principally for their imaginative associations, and
because they are presented everywhere as haunted by unseen
presences, wrapped in mystery, brooded over by the atmosphere of
the soul. The " sweet everlasting voices " " call in bird, in wind on
the hill," In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore. Nature is never
evoked for her own sake as she is by Wordsworth. The cry of the
curlew becomes the symbol of a lost love, of a love seeking love
through the world and beyond the gates of death ; and " the rushes
and the fowl of the air cry of love with their pitiful cries." The "
unquiet leaves " whisper uneasily with strange voices, or, when they
are still, "drop old silence." And usually 80
The text on this page is estimated to be only 26.17%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 the season is autumn — the season of

melancholy and reverie, of a beauty subdued and fading. The woods
of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy. The paths along
which lovers pace are strewn with fallen leaves ; " the yellow leaves
" turn and fall slowly about them, dropping down noiselessly " like
faint meteors in the gloom." Even the rabbit that limps " down the
path " is "old and lame": "autumn is over him," too, as it is over all
things. " The hare grows old as she plays in the sun," and " the
eagle cock ... on Ballygawley Hill ... is the oldest thing under the
moon." Everywhere is " the fluttering sadness of earth ; " in every
sound we hear " earth's old and weary cry." Memories — memories
and ghosts — and the restless longing of a mood that can only find
rest in a life more perfect than this poor, broken, mortal life ! "
Desolate winds " cry " over the wandering sea," and " beat the doors
of Heaven, and beat the doors of Hell." " Through the broken
branches go the ravens of unresting thought," and 'l the boughs
wither " when the poet tells " them his dreams." Water is the symbol
of the passing of mortal F 81
The text on this page is estimated to be only 27.70%
accurate

W. B. YEATS beauty, and of the passing of time. To the old

men by the thorn trees All that's beautiful drifts away Like the
waters : and Fergus sees his life " go dripping like a stream from
change to change," while men's souls " waver " and drift on into the
darkness, " like the pale waters in their wintry race." The sky that is
reflected in these waters is grey and wintry, or dark and stormy :
they are never touched by the sun. It is on the border of " the drear
Hart Lake " that O'Driscoll dreams "of the long dim hair of Bridget
his bride " ; beside a " desolate lake " that Aedh hears the wind
crying " in the sedge " of the hopelessness of love. The messages of
wind and water, of the thin rushes and the swaying trees, are nearly
always messages of sadness : and when they invite to joy, it is to an
unearthly joy, an unholy joy, or to the joy of a life passed in lonely
meditation. It is to " the woods and waters and pale lights " that the
faery child lures Mary Bruin : and the murmur of the beech leaves
draws King Goll out from his palace to dream away his life in lonely
woods. These alluring, enchanted voices are never silent. Even in
the heart of a distant city the poet hears them 82
The text on this page is estimated to be only 26.62%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 with a passion of home-sickness, hears

the call of far-off waters — " lake water lapping with low sounds by
the shore." The sea is a symbol of the " drifting indefinite bitterness
of life." It is " the bitter tide," " the dim sea that cries her old cry
still." The " dim tides are hurled upon the wharves of sorrow." The "
old wandering moon " floats above them, glossing " the dim gray
sands with light." By " the dove-gray edge of the sea " Usheen
meets Niam, who leads him to perdition and the joys of the
Venusberg. The stars are " white stars," " foam of the sky " ; and
the sky is the " dew-dropping sky," and night " the dew-dropping
night " " old Night " who tells " her mystery " " to the sad, the lonely,
the insatiable." The moon is a symbol of weariness. She is " worn " ;
a " shell washed by time's waters." I had a thought for no one's but
your ears ; That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in
the old high way of love ; That it had all seemed happy, and yet
we'd grown As weary hearted as that hollow moon.1 In contrast
with all this earth-weariness and sorrow is the passionate, glowing
life of immortal beings, " the embattled flaming multitude who rise
wing above wing, flame above 1 Poems, 1899-1905, " Adam's
Curse." 83
The text on this page is estimated to be only 27.91%
accurate

W. B. YEATS flame," amid the " rapturous music " of " the
clashing of sword blades " ; the rushing host, the Powers who have
passed through the " flaming lute-thronged angelic door," and to
gaze upon whom is fatal. The whole mood is a yearning for release
— for release from the body's prison, and for a union with some far
life beyond " Fate and Time and Change." IV In these marvellous
poems written between 1890 and 1899, Mr. Yeats's lyrical genius has
reached its highest point. He has written beautiful lyrics since then,
one or two, perhaps, quite as beautiful as anything he ever wrote,
but no book of poems he has published since then can show
anything like the same sustained quality of inspiration and execution.
This earlier work is now collected in the two volumes called Poems,
and The Wind Among the Reeds ; and in the Collected Works it is
printed under the general titles of The Wind Among the Reeds,
Ballads and Lyrics, and The Rose. In these poems he gives us all, or
nearly all, he has to give ; there is no side of his genius that they do
not express. And once again I must insist on their absolute
originality. Others following him have tried to write in this way —
such an 84
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.21%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 attempt is Mr. Arthur Symons's Crying of

the Waters, which would be a finer poem were it not so obviously
derivative — but no one had written in this way before him. The
mention of The Crying of the Waters, with its richness of music so
far beyond anything its author had attained to in his earlier verse,
brings me to what is I think the greatest quality of all in Mr. Yeats's
poetry — its sheer beauty of sound. In that it stands unrivalled save
by a very few poems, such as Rossetti's Stream's Secret. The music
of Poe, though delicate and wonderful, seems thin and a trifle
metallic in comparison ; the music of Swinburne shallow, jingling,
save in a few pieces irritating in its untripping accuracy, its glittering,
brilliant finish, its matchless skill that we are rarely allowed to forget.
O, women, kneeling by your altar rails long hence, When songs I
wove for my beloved hide the prayer, And smoke from this dead
heart drifts through the violet air And covers away the smoke of
myrrh and frankincense ; Bend down and pray for the great sin I
wove in song, Till Mary of the wounded heart cry a sweet cry, And
call to my beloved and me : " No longer fly Amid the hovering,
piteous, penitential throng."1 What music of any modern poet have
we to set beside the slow, trailing splendour of those 1 The Wind
Among the Reeds, " Hanrahan Speaks to the Lovers of His Songs."
85
The text on this page is estimated to be only 27.42%
accurate

W. B. YEATS lines ? Mr. Yeats's charact£ristkL--Jhythms

aPPE2aciLJi0 ili? rhythms of nature. They are wavering, passionate,
deliberately uncertain ; now .. lingering^ dying, like faint ecEoes,
now rich and full and triumphant as the breaking of the sea.
Sometimes a poem opens out slowly, with a sort of spreading,
increasing movement that breaks at last into a proud lonely
magnificence of phrasing, as in the concluding lines of The Rose of
the World : Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode : Before you
were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat
; He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering
feet.1 Here, no doubt, much depends upon the solemn grandeur of
a single phrase, which recalls the splendour of Milton's Where the
bright Seraphim in burning row. . . . This particular quality in Mr.
Yeats's poetry, and in his prose also, is the more remarkable when
we learn that he has no ear for music apart from words. That he has
given, on the other hand, a closer study to the connection between
poetry and music than most poets have, is apparent from his
writings and from experiments prolonged over years. " I wrote," he
says, " and still speak the verses that 1 Poems, " The Rose of the
World." 86
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.38%
accurate

POEMS 1890-1899 begin ' Autumn is over ' to some

traditional air, though I could not tell that air or any other on
another's lips. . . . When, however, the rhythm is more personal than
it is in these simple verses, the tune will always be original and
personal, alike in the poet and in the reader who has the right ear ;
and these tunes will now and again have great beauty."1 And he
continues, " I am certain all poets, even all delighted readers of
poetry, speak certain kinds of poetry to distinct and simple tunes,
though the speaker may be deaf to ordinary music " ; adding that "
different tunes will fit different speakers or different moods."2 The
tunes will, I think, vary, certainly, with different readers, but not
nearly so much, and if really distinct tunes hardly at all, with
different moods, particularly as they themselves help to create the
mood. Poe's Annabel Lee, instance, is to my sense written to so
definite and elaborate a tune that it would be quite impossible to
vary it. In Annabel Lee, indeed, I find the tune too pronounced,
exercising a sort of tyranny over the meaning of the words, over the
substance of the poem, throwing it, just as a composer's setting of
any lyric invariably does, too much into the background. 1 Collected
Works, vol. iii, p. 235. » Ibid., p. 234. 87