BOOKS AND WRITERS
THE difference between the early and the later poems of W. B. Yeats—sometimes used by critics to praise the one at the expense of the other—is a cause more of admiration that his poetic power continued to grow to the end of his life than one of controversy. The addition of poems from A Full Moon iii March (1935) and Last Poems (1940) to the Collected Poetns (first published in 1933) to make the collection complete confirms this.* Not less strange than such unwearying growth is the-great fulfilment of the romantic promise of his youth long :after he had discarded the manners of the aesthetes and symbolists and the early Celtic enthusiasts. In time, however, it is to be hoped that there will be an edition of these works . with a text that does not, like the present one, embody his " final revision," but which preserves impartially (as the author never did) the early text of the early works, restores the original " Countess Cathleen " to the collected poems, and rearranges the poems either into the order in which they were written (the date of their first publication is the present order) or into a sequence based on their subject.
Yeats was an Irish poet in that his subjects were taken mostly from Irish legend or history, contemporary people or events ; but his models in style were Spenser and Shelley, not Raftery and Douglas Hyde. His version of the Celtic exaggerated those moods of longing for an unobtainable and departed beauty, for the youthful wildness and mournful loveliness of the Sidhe, which —after they had been beaten into a traditional English prose— most closely corresponded to his own. Others thought the Celtic movement a revival ; Yeats made it famous as a twilight. But he had little more than a talent for picturesque narrative verse. " The Wanderings of Oisin " has all the excitement and excesses of a young and exuberant fancy. His genius was for that kind of undramatic description, or of suspended action, which has caused some of his works to be described as pieces of tapestry. "The Shadowy Waters" is the climax of those poems in which he suggests an immortal, immaterial beauty. Everything that conduces to the feeling of joy out of reach, of dreams that must be ever- lasting, of music that the human ear is too coarse to hear, is brought into these poems, and they succeed in stirring appetites which are not satisfied. For where everything is vagueness and suggestion, one receives only a vague impression. In the ability to sustain story and passion he was deficient ; it was the mood and the picture, but not the action, which he studied to convey.
Those moods were never uniform. The spirit as well as the clarity of Milton's " L'Allegro " and " II Penseroso " are caught in several early lyrics. Not merely are the Irish landscapes and characters which he introduced novel in English poetry, but he colours them with that feeling of delight which justifies their pre- sentation. Far from showing an excess of the characteristic languor of his generation, many of these lyrics, even the ill-treated " Innis- free," have a freshness and grace that comes, not from aesthetic theory, but from the fields, the winds and the lakes. The weakness of the early Verse is the occasional degeneration of its delicacy into a feeble and ineffectual effeminacy. In the later lyrics he aimed at intensity and passion of statement and wit to correct these faults. The moods changed. Masculine strength and heroic, careless manli- ness, often made impetuous by anger and scorn, often abandoned to lust and rage and drunkenness, become the pronounced themes. Where the early lyrics were sometimes' mere sound and silhouette, these are often little more than noise and nonsense. One cannot judge between Crazy Jane and the girl with snow-white feet, but the later drinking-songs are a species of their own. The general fault of the early verse is that too many of its precedehts came from beautiful old books ; of the later that too many were raked
from the gutter. • Neither these, lyrics, nor the narrative rehearsal of the Irish legendary scene, was motivated by that intensity and wholeness of
* Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. (Macmillan. 15s.)
imagination which inspired his great mystical compositions. For here, through the dark and unfamiliar knowledge of a mind that had absorbed and tested secret and esoteric forms of magic and mysticism, there was breathed in these poems a spirit that makes them beat with a sense of doom and revelation. Their obscurity is of the kind that does not repel but demands investigation. In such a poem as " Byzantium " the position of every word recalls Coleridge's definition of verse ; each word begets the next, each image at once summons all the vaguest feelings of awe and mystery, and all the clearest attentive faculties of the mind, into activity, and rewards them This is the mature and complete expression of that desire for a perfectly spiritual state, of that urge which in his younger days was differently defined by the rose. The poems that achieve this particular intensity of power, as though great visions were harnessed to every phrase, are rare.
But what he performed once in a poem half magical, half mystical, he performed frequently in a less intense, though not less moving style. When he wrote about the people and places he knew, instead of those he had merely read about in translated books, his work assumed a dignity and a depth which it never reached with Celtic lore, or with the symbolical expression of vague, wistful longings. From the poem, To Ireland in the Coming Times, published in 1893, to The Municipal Gallery Revisited, written not long before his death, this genus of poetry grew, until it had re- created the hope, the violence and the disillusion of politics, the love and the lesson of places, the sympathy and the greatness of friends—all the things he had loved or witnessed through an age which was not only famous in itself, but was made more famous through his poetry. When one has said that there is a power of observation at work in these poems which chooses and records real places and people with energy and accuracy, one has spoken less than half the truth ; for more important than this is the power of imagination that transformed those persons and those places into something of universal interest, that associates them with permanent and great qualities of the mind.
So well within the fabric of these poems alone are those characters and the places where they lived made clear, that it is not necessary to refer to the pages of biographies to make them understood. So well are they built that the very words, like " tower " and " lake " and " swan," seem in this verse to be charged with a more than usual force. Poem by poem the scenes follow each other, each adding more to our sight and to our sympathy—scenes that are full of the bitterness and hate that characterise Irish politics—full also of the vague Utopias by which they were inspired. Here is that tone of indifferent scorn which made him cast himself in the role of the Anglo-Irish Swift ; there is that mood of subdued excitement and awe, that astonishment, fear and pity evoked by the terrible Easter Rising. Here the exquisite pathos and beauty of the memorial to the two sisters of Lissadell, that in a few short lines conveys all the tragedy of brilliant hope that came to its end in disillusion ; there the feeling, almost Elizabethan, of pent-up anger that calls for revenge of an injustice in " The Ghost of Roger Casement."
Dominating all his poetry is that power which places have to stir the imagination, and which, incorporated in his verse, is both its genius and its discipline. One thinks of the lake at Coole, with its nine-and-fifty swans, the tower set on the stream's edge, all the historical and personal memories which were summoned to its wind- ing stair, that were recalled on its battlements ; of the " cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn." Side by side with these land- scapes are the singular portraits of his friends, remembered in some few lines for the things that they and he had loved or done. One thinks particularly of " that enquiring man, John Synge," and Lady Gregory's son, whose elegy has the sympathy that is absent from " Lycidas," and of Lady Gregory herself. Always in his greatest verse there was that deep sense of a sanctity or loveliness which can, and will be eventually, destroyed—" We were the last romantics
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