W. B. YEATS

Last Poems and Two Plays. By William Butler Yeats. (Cuala Press. 125. 6d.) THE importance of this last collection of Yeats's poems (aside

from its quite peculiar flavour—the testament of an isolated, violent poet about to die) lies in its value as an index : the validity of his time-worn manner, the continued upward curve of his career, the great freshening power that even old age might conceivably provide—they are here put to the test. It is usual with a posthumous work either listlessly to over- praise or benignly to dismiss. With this particular volume, at least, there is no occasion for either.

There are sixty pages in the book : twenty poems, two short plays. It is impossible, if one reads them at all care- fully, to read them through without a novel and intense excitement. Probably it would be irrelevant to argue that these poems are his best—as it would be irrelevant to argue that " Guernica " is a finer painting than Picasso's early clowns and absinthe drinkers. This much can be said safely : they include, astoundingly, almost every variety of form and tone he has used before; end of the twenty at least ten are as masterly as any poem he has written.

After the brilliance and profusion of The Tower and the Winding Stair (presumably his two best books, cer-

tainly the ones which crystallised the superiority of his late work over his earlier) it seemed that a further development occurred, in the direction of the angular, bleak, acrid Crazy Jane poems. Then a certain confusion appeared to set in, the " foolish passionate man " grew into one intermittently torn by " lust and rage." The collection which appeared some two years ago was pinched and comfortless indeed. However, in these final poems there are echoes of the earlier, more rounded and grandiloquent manner. They are highly lyrical and even ornate, more richly coloured, more deftly patterned. Sometimes clear and elegiac in sound, they are never really clear or elegiac.

" When a man grows old his joy Grows more deep day after day, His empty heart is full at length, But he has need of all that strength Because of the increasing Night That opens her mystery and fright."

In such lines, seemingly direct, one presently perceives the thrilling and frightful double-entendre—the uncompromising self-disgust and humiliation of his old age sharpening every edge. The effect of these pages, frantically emphasising as they do all that has gone before, is at times terrifying. It is a sort of magnificence I have met nowhere else.

The old images recur—like ghosts : self-admitted effigies- ". . . and yet when all is said, It was the dream itself enchanted me."

The old figures appear once again, rubbing shoulders, acquir- ing a bizarre freshness from propinquity and the dreamy, self- identifying loyalty Yeats felt toward them: Michael Angelo, Oisin, Pearse and Conolly, Pythagoras, Cuchulain, Parnell. And the old decor, too—the Post Office, the tower, the dol- phins, the ruined house, ancient Ireland. They are juxtaposed

and brought into focus with a dexterity and pertinence no surrealist could surpass. It is the terrible burden of old age, that " foul rag and bone shop of the heart," again and again compelled into activity by the glamour which his ceaseless brooding cast over his former passions, his own lost youth and beauty, the qualities of beauty, pride, belligerence and learning in his dead friends.

The best poems are The Man and the Echo, A Bronze Head, News for the Delphic Oracle, The Statues, and The Circus Animal's Desertion. In these exist most conspicuously the unique and flawless music, as well as the vigour and virtu- osity with which he produces in a single glaring image the whole luxuriance of a highly elaborate idea.

" No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the man That with a mallet or a chisel modelled these Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down All Asiatic vague immensities . . ."

The two plays are very short—a dozen pages or so. Both are spasmodic, fragmentary, horrible. Both deal with the linked themes of passion and death—or rather, lust and homi- cide. Old men " about to die " (a phrase which is a haunting

refrain throughout the book) are the protagonists. In The Death of Cuchulain there is a frightful scene in which the

blind man, knife in hand, fumbles upward along the dying Cuchulain's body, fastened to a pillar to keep him from falling. Finally he reaches the neck, and Cuchulain cries : " There floats out there

The shape that I shall take when I am dead, My soul's first shape, a soft feathery shape, And is not that a strange shape for a soul Of a great fighting man? "

Yeats seemed to have attained to an almost legendary view of humanity, in which could be projected in their full horror acts which in a less remote and rarefied atmosphere would be unacceptable.

It is interesting to contrast Yeats with that other awe- inspiring poet of old age, his opposite in every way, Walt Whitman. Shrewd contemporary minds might see fore- shadowzd in the two well-known opposing ideologies. Yeats drew continually from the vast, energetic phantoms of his mind ; Whitman only from the quasi-photographic, masculine figures of his own landscape. Yeats brought to perfection certain rigid verse forms of his own ; Whitman exploited every variety of looseness, reluctant ever to repeat an image or pattern (though in the end presenting a far greater uniformity of impulse than Yeats). Yeats ended his days in despair, unsated passion, and intense disgust with the con- temporary world ; Whitman with an oddly unimpaired optimism and (paradoxically) every evidence of satisfied desire. Of the two, Yeats ended more impressively, and it may be said that no poet has ever worked so relentlessly and sublimely toward a close. Though far less expansive and perhaps less remunerative than Whitman, it appears that his unfaltering preference for an ugly truth rather than a palatable hypothesis, deeply rooted in the richness of his experience, together with his life-long veneration for his craft, involved in the end a corresponding sharpness of intellect and eye. He will never data, ; if he were ever to do so, he would already, for his ways of thinking are unfashionable in " this foul world in