Hammered Gold

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. (Macmillan, 10s. 6d.) THE publication of Mr. Yeats' collected poems is a literary event of importance. This book enables one to make an estimate of his life's work as a poet, but it is important also not to forget that the prose works have still to be collected.

The effect of reading the poems straight through was to make me more than ever convinced that the reputation of Yeats will rest on his later poems. The experience of the majority of artists is to begin their first serious work in the hard school of observation of real life. Or if they begin, like Shelley, Keats, and Byron, with romantic invention, the conflict between the world of the imagination and the outside world of reality that is more and more forced on them, becomes so appalling that they must either cease to exist as artists, or else die. Mr. Yeats is a remarkable exception : he began as an extremely romantic writer of the " Celtic twilight " school, and he has become an acute commentator on political condi-

tions and on the position of the violent individualist in modern life.

In the early poems the total effect of dreaminess, of the complete lack of anything which seems to be either observed- or experienced, is finally one of fatigue and disillusionment ;

" 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."

In this poem, " Adam's Curse," Mr. Yeats seems aware of the deadness and unreality of the twilight world which he had woven out of his dreams. Apart from his power of self- criticism, what is most valuable in the early poetry is that, occasionally, in such poems as " Down by the Salley Gardens " and " The Indian to his Love," even the most artificial sub- jects acquire an eloquent lucidity, which reminds one of Shelley's " I arise from dreams of thee."

In 1902 he wrote " In the Seven Woods," and the opening lines of the title poem are like a breath of fresh air : -

" I haVe heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods - Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees Hum in the lime-tree flowers."

For the first time we really see something : and this is the first note of the whole of Mr. Yeats' later poetry. The moon, the witches, the fiddlers, the magic symbols, the unicorns, are not forsaken, but they are used in an entirely different way. They are no longer the means of escape from the world ; they are the means of approach to experience ; and they become symbols of the world in which Mr. Yeats now honOurs us by living. For example, in a poem called " The Second Coming," such symbolism is used with terrifying effectiveness. The first section of the poem contains a statement which is a direct comment on the sort of life about which we read in the newspapers :

" Things fall apart ; the centre cannot hold ; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned ; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand ; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming I Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight : somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gazo blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all dbout it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds."

Much of Yeats' later poetry is characterized by this juxta- position of imagery which is observed, -with imagery which is magical or apocalyptic. The effect is added to by the fact that his visual experiences are very few : the tower, the moorhen, the winding stair, the swans at Coole, the tree, arc rare and portentous. The effect is that- of a disordered world making kW strong impressions and -leading straight into an imaginary world of still greater, wild, but somehow glorious

disorder : for the philosophy of Yeats is not-calm'; it' is one of delight in the creations of the imagination.

Mr. Yeats' later poetry is passionate, serious and extremely eloquent. - It is not necessary for me here to air my appre- ciation of poetry. which is already acknowledged to be beau-

tiful by all who read it. It is more to the point perhaps to try and forestall future criticism. In one of his poems Yeats'

makes the prophetie claim

" There is not a fool can call me friend, And I may dine at journey's end With Landor and with Donne."

Mr. T. S. Eliot, in his essay on the Metaphysical Poets, speaks of Donne feeling his " thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." Sometimes in Mr. Yeats' poetry there is a

directness of thought which reminds us of Mr. Eliot's phrase, but too often his thoughts are only very aristocratic cabbage roses. Too often there is an ingenuity of magical inventiveness where we had expected complexity

and depth of feeling. Too often where we had expected sim- plicity, we find simplification. The most noticeable and obvious defect of his later work is that there is too much fortis-

simo : or, where it is soft, it seems soft only in order to lead to the contrasting loudness.

Mr. Yeats is, in fact, a poet who stimulates the mind and the senses rather than one in whom the imagination may rest and wander. Ultimately he is lacking in sympathy for the whole range of human qualities : he only sympathizes with certain attitudes which the self-regarding, self-fearing mind has developed : courtesy, pride, intellectual passion, intel- lectual love, aristocratic breeding. The truest epitaph on Ifs own merits and on his incomplete approach to humanity is in the last verse of " Sailing to Byzantium " :

" Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy emperor awake ; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

STEPHEN SPENDER.