I made my song a coat,
Covered with embroideries,
Out of old mythologies,
From heel to throat.
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eye,
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.
Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture. But
his work is now more frankly personal than it used to be--at once
harsher and simpler. One would not give _Responsibilities_ to a reader
who knew nothing of Mr. Yeats's previous work. There is too much raging
at the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty of _The Wind
Among the Reeds_. One finds ugly words like "wive" and "thigh"
inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore's _Hail and
Farewell_, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement.
Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to the
lover of literature. An Elizabethan might have made the music of the
first verse of _A Woman Homer Sung_.
And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us in _The
Second Troy_:--
Why should I blame her, that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways.
Or hurled the little streets against the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary, and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
It is curious to note in how much of his verse Mr. Yeats repeats his
protest against the political passion of Ireland which once meant so
much to him. _All Things can Tempt Me_ expresses this artistic mood of
revolt with its fierce beginning:--
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse;
One time it was a woman's face, or worse,
The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.
Some of the most excellent pages of _Reveries_, however, are those which
recall certain famous figures in Irish Nationalism like John O'Leary and
J.F. Taylor, the orator whose temper so stood in his way.
Mr. Yeats recalls a wonderful speech Taylor once made at a meeting in
Dublin at which a Lord Chancellor had apparently referred in a
belittling way to Irish nationality and the Irish language:
Taylor began hesitating and stopping for words, but after speaking
very badly for a little, straightened his figure and spoke as out
of a dream: "I am carried to another age, a nobler court, and
another Lord Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the first
Pharaoh." Thereupon he put into the mouth of that Egyptian all his
audience had listened to, but now it was spoken to the children of
Israel. "If you have any spirituality as you boast, why not use our
great empire to spread it through the world, why still cling to
that beggarly nationality of yours? what are its history and its
works weighed with those of Egypt?" Then his voice changed and
sank: "I see a man at the edge of the crowd; he is standing
listening there, but he will not obey"; and then, with his voice
rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he would never have come down the
mountain carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the language
of the outlaw."
That Mr. Yeats, in spite of his secession from politics, loves the old
passionate Ireland, is clear from the poem called _September, 1913_,
with its refrain:--
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone
And with O'Leary in the grave.