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 _Down by the Sally Garden_, 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 _The Wind Among
the Reeds_, the most entirely good of his books. Consider, for example,
the note which he wrote on that charming if somewhat perplexing poem,
_The Jester_. "I dreamed," writes Mr. Yeats:--
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.
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.
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
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
and attempting to invoke a new--or an old--and more beautiful world into
being.
The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told,
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 _The Happy
Townland_, but who is there who can permanently resist the spell of this
poem, especially of the first verse and its refrain?--
There's many a strong farmer
Whose heart would break in two,
If he could see the townland
That we are riding to;
Boughs have their fruit and blossom
At all times of the year;
Rivers are running over
With red beer and brown beer.
An old man plays the bagpipes
In a golden and silver wood;
Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
Are dancing in a crowd.
The little fox he murmured,
"O what of the world's bane?"
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein;
But the little red fox murmured,
"O, do not pluck at his rein,
He is riding to the townland
That is the world's bane."
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?
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 _The Stolen Child_, 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:--
Away with us he's going,
The solemn eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside;
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
_For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand._
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 _The Stolen Child_ 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--
in autumnal solitudes
Arise the leopard-coloured trees,
his observation of the world about him is but proved the more
conclusively. The trees in autumn _are_ leopard-coloured, though a poet
cannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental.
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.
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 _Breasal the Fisherman_, but is now called simply _The
Fisherman_:
Although you hide in the ebb and flow
Of the pale tide when the moon has set,
The people of coming days will know
About the casting out of my net,
And how you have leaped times out of mind
Over the little silver cords.
And think that you were hard and unkind,
And blame you with many bitter words.
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.
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:
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._
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:--
I cried in my dream, "_O women bid the young men lay
Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,
Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair
Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away_,"
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.
The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion that
has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. _The Wind Among the Reeds_ 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 _He Reproves the Curlew_:--
O, curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters of the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.
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 _The Song of Wandering Aengus_,
that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silver
trout" that became
--a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair,
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
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 _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_ and _Had I the
Heaven's Embroidered Cloths_:--
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.
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 _The
Folly of Being Comforted_. 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.