No More Learning

We go wandering
together for ever, but Dermot that was my lover sees me always as a
body that has been a long time in the ground, and I know that is the
way he sees me. Ask me more, ask me more, for all the years have left
their wisdom in my heart, and no one has listened to me for seven
hundred years. '

A great terror had fallen upon Hanrahan, and lifting his arms above his
head he screamed out loud three times, and the cattle in the valley
lifted their heads and lowed, and the birds in the wood at the edge
of the mountain awaked out of their sleep and fluttered through the
trembling leaves. But a little below the edge of the rock, the troop of
rose leaves still fluttered in the air, for the gateway of Eternity had
opened and shut again in one beat of the heart.




THE DEATH OF HANRAHAN


HANRAHAN, that was never long in one place, was back again among the
villages that are at the foot of Slieve Echtge, Illeton and Scalp and
Ballylee, stopping sometimes in one house and sometimes in another,
and finding a welcome in every place for the sake of the old times and
of his poetry and his learning. There was some silver and some copper
money in the little leather bag under his coat, but it was seldom he
needed to take anything from it, for it was little he used, and there
was not one of the people that would have taken payment from him. His
hand had grown heavy on the blackthorn he leaned on, and his cheeks
were hollow and worn, but so far as food went, potatoes and milk and a
bit of oaten cake, he had what he wanted of it; and it is not on the
edge of so wild and boggy a place as Echtge a mug of spirits would be
wanting, with the taste of the turf smoke on it. He would wander about
the big wood at Kinadife, or he would sit through many hours of the
day among the rushes about Lake Belshragh, listening to the streams
from the hills, or watching the shadows in the brown bog pools; sitting
so quiet as not to startle the deer that came down from the heather
to the grass and the tilled fields at the fall of night. As the days
went by it seemed as if he was beginning to belong to some world out of
sight and misty, that has for its mearing the colours that are beyond
all other colours and the silences that are beyond all silences of
this world. And sometimes he would hear coming and going in the wood
music that when it stopped went from his memory like a dream; and once
in the stillness of midday he heard a sound like the clashing of many
swords, that went on for a long time without any break. And at the fall
of night and at moonrise the lake would grow to be like a gateway of
silver and shining stones, and there would come from its silence the
faint sound of keening and of frightened laughter broken by the wind,
and many pale beckoning hands.

He was sitting looking into the water one evening in harvest time,
thinking of all the secrets that were shut into the lakes and the
mountains, when he heard a cry coming from the south, very faint at
first, but getting louder and clearer as the shadow of the rushes grew
longer, till he could hear the words, 'I am beautiful, I am beautiful;
the birds in the air, the moths under the leaves, the flies over the
water look at me, for they never saw any one so beautiful as myself. I
am young; I am young: look upon me, mountains; look upon me, perishing
woods, for my body will shine like the white waters when you have been
hurried away. You and the whole race of men, and the race of the beasts
and the race of the fish and the winged race are dropping like a candle
that is nearly burned out, but I laugh out because I am in my youth. '
The voice would break off from time to time, as if tired, and then it
would begin again, calling out always the same words, 'I am beautiful,
I am beautiful. ' Presently the bushes at the edge of the little lake
trembled for a moment, and a very old woman forced her way among them,
and passed by Hanrahan, walking with very slow steps. Her face was of
the colour of earth, and more wrinkled than the face of any old hag
that was ever seen, and her grey hair was hanging in wisps, and the
rags she was wearing did not hide her dark skin that was roughened by
all weathers. She passed by him with her eyes wide open, and her head
high, and her arms hanging straight beside her, and she went into the
shadow of the hills towards the west.

A sort of dread came over Hanrahan when he saw her, for he knew her to
be one Winny Byrne, that went begging from place to place crying always
the same cry, and he had often heard that she had once such wisdom that
all the women of the neighbours used to go looking for advice from her,
and that she had a voice so beautiful that men and women would come
from every part to hear her sing at a wake or a wedding; and that the
Others, the great Sidhe, had stolen her wits one Samhain night many
years ago, when she had fallen asleep on the edge of a rath, and had
seen in her dreams the servants of Echtge of the hills.

And as she vanished away up the hillside, it seemed as if her cry, 'I
am beautiful, I am beautiful,' was coming from among the stars in the
heavens.

There was a cold wind creeping among the rushes, and Hanrahan began to
shiver, and he rose up to go to some house where there would be a fire
on the hearth. But instead of turning down the hill as he was used, he
went on up the hill, along the little track that was maybe a road and
maybe the dry bed of a stream. It was the same way Winny had gone, and
it led to the little cabin where she stopped when she stopped in any
place at all. He walked very slowly up the hill as if he had a great
load on his back, and at last he saw a light a little to the left, and
he thought it likely it was from Winny's house it was shining, and he
turned from the path to go to it. But clouds had come over the sky,
and he could not well see his way, and after he had gone a few steps
his foot slipped and he fell into a bog drain, and though he dragged
himself out of it, holding on to the roots of the heather, the fall
had given him a great shake, and he felt better fit to lie down than
to go travelling. But he had always great courage, and he made his way
on, step by step, till at last he came to Winny's cabin, that had no
window, but the light was shining from the door. He thought to go into
it and to rest for a while, but when he came to the door he did not see
Winny inside it, but what he saw was four old grey-haired women playing
cards, but Winny herself was not among them. Hanrahan sat down on a
heap of turf beside the door, for he was tired out and out, and had no
wish for talking or for card-playing, and his bones and his joints
aching the way they were. He could hear the four women talking as they
played, and calling out their hands. And it seemed to him that they
were saying, like the strange man in the barn long ago: 'Spades and
Diamonds, Courage and Power. Clubs and Hearts, Knowledge and Pleasure. '
And he went on saying those words over and over to himself; and whether
or not he was in his dreams, the pain that was in his shoulder never
left him. And after a while the four women in the cabin began to
quarrel, and each one to say the other had not played fair, and their
voices grew from loud to louder, and their screams and their curses,
till at last the whole air was filled with the noise of them around and
above the house, and Hanrahan, hearing it between sleep and waking,
said: 'That is the sound of the fighting between the friends and the
ill-wishers of a man that is near his death. And I wonder,' he said,
'who is the man in this lonely place that is near his death. '

It seemed as if he had been asleep a long time, and he opened his eyes,
and the face he saw over him was the old wrinkled face of Winny of the
Cross Roads. She was looking hard at him, as if to make sure he was not
dead, and she wiped away the blood that had grown dry on his face with
a wet cloth, and after a while she partly helped him and partly lifted
him into the cabin, and laid him down on what served her for a bed. She
gave him a couple of potatoes from a pot on the fire, and, what served
him better, a mug of spring water. He slept a little now and again, and
sometimes he heard her singing to herself as she moved about the house,
and so the night wore away. When the sky began to brighten with the
dawn he felt for the bag where his little store of money was, and held
it out to her, and she took out a bit of copper and a bit of silver
money, but she let it drop again as if it was nothing to her, maybe
because it was not money she was used to beg for, but food and rags; or
maybe because the rising of the dawn was filling her with pride and a
new belief in her own great beauty. She went out and cut a few armfuls
of heather, and brought it in and heaped it over Hanrahan, saying
something about the cold of the morning, and while she did that he took
notice of the wrinkles in her face, and the greyness of her hair, and
the broken teeth that were black and full of gaps. And when he was well
covered with the heather she went out of the door and away down the
side of the mountain, and he could hear her cry, 'I am beautiful, I
am beautiful,' getting less and less as she went, till at last it died
away altogether.

Hanrahan lay there through the length of the day, in his pains and his
weakness, and when the shadows of the evening were falling he heard
her voice again coming up the hillside, and she came in and boiled the
potatoes and shared them with him the same way as before. And one day
after another passed like that, and the weight of his flesh was heavy
about him. But little by little as he grew weaker he knew there were
some greater than himself in the room with him, and that the house
began to be filled with them; and it seemed to him they had all power
in their hands, and that they might with one touch of the hand break
down the wall the hardness of pain had built about him, and take him
into their own world. And sometimes he could hear voices, very faint
and joyful, crying from the rafters or out of the flame on the hearth,
and other times the whole house was filled with music that went through
it like a wind. And after a while his weakness left no place for
pain, and there grew up about him a great silence like the silence in
the heart of a lake, and there came through it like the flame of a
rushlight the faint joyful voices ever and always.

One morning he heard music somewhere outside the door, and as the day
passed it grew louder and louder until it drowned the faint joyful
voices, and even Winny's cry upon the hillside at the fall of evening.
About midnight and in a moment, the walls seemed to melt away and to
leave his bed floating on a pale misty light that shone on every side
as far as the eye could see; and after the first blinding of his eyes
he saw that it was full of great shadowy figures rushing here and there.

At the same time the music came very clearly to him, and he knew that
it was but the continual clashing of swords.

'I am after my death,' he said, 'and in the very heart of the music of
Heaven. O Cherubim and Seraphim, receive my soul! '

At his cry the light where it was nearest to him filled with sparks of
yet brighter light, and he saw that these were the points of swords
turned towards his heart; and then a sudden flame, bright and burning
like God's love or God's hate, swept over the light and went out and
he was in darkness. At first he could see nothing, for all was as dark
as if there was black bog earth about him, but all of a sudden the
fire blazed up as if a wisp of straw had been thrown upon it. And as
he looked at it, the light was shining on the big pot that was hanging
from a hook, and on the flat stone where Winny used to bake a cake now
and again, and on the long rusty knife she used to be cutting the roots
of the heather with, and on the long blackthorn stick he had brought
into the house himself. And when he saw those four things, some memory
came into Hanrahan's mind, and strength came back to him, and he rose
sitting up in the bed, and he said very loud and clear: 'The Cauldron,
the Stone, the Sword, the Spear. What are they? Who do they belong to?
And I have asked the question this time,' he said.

And then he fell back again, weak, and the breath going from him.

Winny Byrne, that had been tending the fire, came over then, having her
eyes fixed on the bed; and the faint laughing voices began crying out
again, and a pale light, grey like a wave, came creeping over the room,
and he did not know from what secret world it came. He saw Winny's
withered face and her withered arms that were grey like crumbled earth,
and weak as he was he shrank back farther towards the wall. And then
there came out of the mud-stiffened rags arms as white and as shadowy
as the foam on a river, and they were put about his body, and a voice
that he could hear well but that seemed to come from a long way off
said to him in a whisper: 'You will go looking for me no more upon the
breasts of women. '

'Who are you? ' he said then.

'I am one of the lasting people, of the lasting unwearied Voices, that
make my dwelling in the broken and the dying, and those that have lost
their wits; and I came looking for you, and you are mine until the
whole world is burned out like a candle that is spent. And look up
now,' she said, 'for the wisps that are for our wedding are lighted. '

He saw then that the house was crowded with pale shadowy hands, and
that every hand was holding what was sometimes like a wisp lighted for
a marriage, and sometimes like a tall white candle for the dead.

When the sun rose on the morning of the morrow Winny of the Cross Roads
rose up from where she was sitting beside the body, and began her
begging from townland to townland, singing the same song as she walked,
'I am beautiful, I am beautiful. The birds in the air, the moths under
the leaves, the flies over the water look at me. Look at me, perishing
woods, for my body will be shining like the lake water after you have
been hurried away. You and the old race of men, and the race of the
beasts, and the race of the fish, and the winged race, are wearing away
like a candle that has been burned out. But I laugh out loud, because I
am in my youth. '

She did not come back that night or any night to the cabin, and it was
not till the end of two days that the turf cutters going to the bog
found the body of Red Owen Hanrahan, and gathered men to wake him and
women to keen him, and gave him a burying worthy of so great a poet.




_Printed by_ A. H. BULLEN, _at The Shakespeare Head Press,
Stratford-on-Avon. _

* * * * *

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Varied hyphenation was retained
such as Drumahair on page 3 and Drum-a-hair on page 96.

Page 85, repeated word "a" removed from text. Original read (I fling a
a pebble on)

Page 191, "unforgetable" changed to "unforgettable" (most unforgettable
thoughts)

Page 235, "san" changed to "sang" (sang Hanrahan, and his)





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? The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of
William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8), by William Butler Yeats

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Title: The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8)
Ideas of Good and Evil

Author: William Butler Yeats

Release Date: August 5, 2015 [EBook #49613]

Language: English

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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS




IDEAS OF GOOD AND EVIL
BEING THE SIXTH VOLUME OF
THE COLLECTED WORKS IN
VERSE & PROSE OF WILLIAM
BUTLER YEATS :: IMPRINTED
AT THE SHAKESPEARE HEAD
PRESS STRATFORD-ON-AVON
MCMVIII


LONDON:
CHAPMAN & HALL
LIMITED




CONTENTS


PAGE

WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'? 1

SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY 13

MAGIC 23

THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS 55

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SHELLEY'S POETRY 71

AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON 111

WILLIAM BLAKE AND THE IMAGINATION 131

WILLIAM BLAKE AND HIS ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE
'DIVINE COMEDY' 138

SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING 176

THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY 185

THE THEATRE 200

THE CELTIC ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 210

THE AUTUMN OF THE BODY 230

THE MOODS 238

THE BODY OF THE FATHER CHRISTIAN ROSENCRUX 240

THE RETURN OF ULYSSES 243

IRELAND AND THE ARTS 249

THE GALWAY PLAINS 259

EMOTION OF MULTITUDE 264




WHAT IS 'POPULAR POETRY'?


I THINK it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running on
'popular poetry. ' We used to discuss everything that was known to us
about Ireland, and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We
had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in
English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at that
time the dates of the birth and death, and quoted the chief poems, of
men whose names you have not heard, and perhaps of some whose names I
have forgotten. I knew in my heart that the most of them wrote badly,
and yet such romance clung about them, such a desire for Irish poetry
was in all our minds, that I kept on saying, not only to others but
to myself, that most of them wrote well, or all but well. I had read
Shelley and Spenser and had tried to mix their styles together in a
pastoral play which I have not come to dislike much, and yet I do not
think Shelley or Spenser ever moved me as did these poets. I thought
one day--I can remember the very day when I thought it--'If somebody
could make a style which would not be an English style and yet would
be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him,
and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in Ireland.
If these poets, who have never ceased to fill the newspapers and the
ballad-books with their verses, had a good tradition they would write
beautifully and move everybody as they move me. ' Then a little later on
I thought, 'If they had something else to write about besides political
opinions, if more of them would write about the beliefs of the people
like Allingham, or about old legends like Ferguson, they would find
it easier to get a style. ' Then, with a deliberateness that still
surprises me, for in my heart of hearts I have never been quite certain
that one should be more than an artist, that even patriotism is more
than an impure desire in an artist, I set to work to find a style and
things to write about that the ballad writers might be the better.

They are no better, I think, and my desire to make them so was, it may
be, one of the illusions Nature holds before one, because she knows
that the gifts she has to give are not worth troubling about. It is for
her sake that we must stir ourselves, but we would not trouble to get
out of bed in the morning, or to leave our chairs once we are in them,
if she had not her conjuring bag. She wanted a few verses from me, and
because it would not have seemed worth while taking so much trouble
to see my books lie on a few drawing-room tables, she filled my head
with thoughts of making a whole literature, and plucked me out of the
Dublin art schools where I should have stayed drawing from the round,
and sent me into a library to read bad translations from the Irish,
and at last down into Connaught to sit by turf fires. I wanted to
write 'popular poetry' like those Irish poets, for I believed that all
good literatures were popular, and even cherished the fancy that the
Adelphi melodrama, which I had never seen, might be good literature,
and I hated what I called the coteries. I thought that one must write
without care, for that was of the coteries, but with a gusty energy
that would put all straight if it came out of the right heart. I had
a conviction, which indeed I have still, that one's verses should
hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one's own climate and scenery in
their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of the
reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of
setting things right, not as I should now by making rhythms faint
and nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a certain
wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a board. I felt
indignant with Matthew Arnold because he complained that somebody,
who had translated Homer into a ballad measure, had tried to write
epic to the tune of Yankee Doodle. It seemed to me that it did not
matter what tune one wrote to, so long as that gusty energy came often
enough and strongly enough. And I delighted in Victor Hugo's book
upon Shakespeare, because he abused critics and coteries and thought
that Shakespeare wrote without care or premeditation and to please
everybody. I would indeed have had every illusion had I believed in
that straightforward logic, as of newspaper articles, which so tickles
the ears of the shopkeepers; but I always knew that the line of Nature
is crooked, that, though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can,
the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.

From that day to this I have been busy among the verses and stories
that the people make for themselves, but I had been busy a very little
while before I knew that what we call popular poetry never came from
the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and
Macaulay in his _Lays_, and Scott in his longer poems are the poets
of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten
tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of
themselves, to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the
world, and who have not learned the written tradition which has been
established upon the unwritten. I became certain that Burns, whose
greatness has been used to justify the littleness of others, was in
part a poet of the middle class, because though the farmers he sprang
from and lived among had been able to create a little tradition of
their own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech, they had been
divided by religious and political changes from the images and emotions
which had once carried their memories backward thousands of years.
Despite his expressive speech which sets him above all other popular
poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the
imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is
in Longfellow. Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he
tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses
to understand it. No words of his borrow their beauty from those that
used them before, and one can get all that there is in story and
idea without seeing them as if moving before a half-faded curtain
embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their
days out hunting, or else with holy letters and images of so great
antiquity that nobody can tell the god or goddess they would commend
to an unfading memory. Poetry that is not popular poetry presupposes,
indeed, more than it says, though we, who cannot know what it is to be
disinherited, only understand how much more, when we read it in its
most typical expressions, in the _Epipsychidion_ of Shelley, or in
Spenser's description of the gardens of Adonis, or when we meet the
misunderstandings of others. Go down into the street and read to your
baker or your candlestick-maker any poem which is not popular poetry.
I have heard a baker, who was clever enough with his oven, deny that
Tennyson could have known what he was writing when he wrote 'Warming
his five wits, the white owl in the belfry sits,' and once when I read
out Omar Khayyam to one of the best of candlestick-makers, he said,
'What is the meaning of "we come like water and like wind we go"? ' Or
go down into the street with some thought whose bare meaning must be
plain to everybody; take with you Ben Jonson's 'Beauty like sorrow
dwelleth everywhere,' and find out how utterly its enchantment depends
on an association of beauty with sorrow which written tradition has
from the unwritten, which had it in its turn from ancient religion; or
take with you these lines in whose bare meaning also there is nothing
to stumble over, and find out what men lose who are not in love with
Helen.

'Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye. '

I pick my examples at random, for I am writing where I have no books to
turn the pages of, but one need not go east of the sun or west of the
moon in so simple a matter.

On the other hand, when Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of
tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and
the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet
his work by chance. Nature, which cannot endure emptiness, has made
them gather conventions which cannot disguise their low birth though
they copy, as from far off, the dress and manners of the well-bred and
the well-born. The gatherers mock all expression that is wholly unlike
their own, just as little boys in the street mock at strangely-dressed
people and at old men who talk to themselves.

There is only one kind of good poetry, for the poetry of the coteries,
which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind
from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten
tradition. Both are alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who
have not understanding, and both, instead of that manifest logic,
that clear rhetoric of the 'popular poetry,' glimmer with thoughts
and images whose 'ancestors were stout and wise,' 'anigh to Paradise'
'ere yet men knew the gift of corn. ' It may be that we know as little
of their descent as men knew of 'the man born to be a king' when they
found him in that cradle marked with the red lion crest, and yet we
know somewhere in the heart that they have been sung in temples, in
ladies' chambers, and our nerves quiver with a recognition they were
shaped to by a thousand emotions. If men did not remember or half
remember impossible things, and, it may be, if the worship of sun and
moon had not left a faint reverence behind it, what Aran fisher-girl
would sing--

'It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was
speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird
throughout the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find
me.

'You promised me and you said a lie to me, that you would be before me
where the sheep are flocked. I gave a whistle and three hundred cries
to you; and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

'You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold under a
silver mast; twelve towns and a market in all of them, and a fine white
court by the side of the sea.

'You promised me a thing that is not possible; that you would give me
gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of the skin
of a bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

'My mother said to me not to be talking with you, to-day or to-morrow
or on Sunday. It was a bad time she took for telling me that, it was
shutting the door after the house was robbed. . . .

'You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me, you
have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken the
moon, you have taken the sun from me, and my fear is great you have
taken God from me. '

The Gael of the Scottish islands could not sing his beautiful song
over a bride, had he not a memory of the belief that Christ was the
only man who measured six feet and not a little more or less, and was
perfectly shaped in all other ways, and if he did not remember old
symbolical observances--

I bathe thy palms
In showers of wine,
In the cleansing fire,
In the juice of raspberries,
In the milk of honey.

* * * * *

Thou art the joy of all joyous things,
Thou art the light of the beam of the sun,
Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,
Thou art the surpassing pilot star,
Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
Thou art the step of the horse of the plain,
Thou art the grace of the sun rising,
Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.

The lovely likeness of the Lord
Is in thy pure face,
The loveliest likeness that was upon earth.

I soon learned to cast away one other illusion of 'popular poetry. ' I
learned from the people themselves, before I learned it from any book,
that they cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea
of a cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly
separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond of the words and
verses that keep half their secret to themselves. Indeed, it is certain
that before the counting-house had created a new class and a new art
without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class
between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister,
the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the
coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical
animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion,
with the unchanging speech of the poets.

Now I see a new generation in Ireland which discusses Irish literature
and history in Young Ireland societies, and societies with newer names,
and there are far more than when I was a boy who would make verses for
the people. They have the help, too, of a vigorous journalism, and this
journalism sometimes urges them to desire the direct logic, the clear
rhetoric, of 'popular poetry. ' It sees that Ireland has no cultivated
minority, and it does not see, though it would cast out all English
things, that its literary ideal belongs more to England than to other
countries. I have hope that the new writers will not fall into its
illusion, for they write in Irish, and for a people the counting-house
has not made forgetful. Among the seven or eight hundred thousand who
have had Irish from the cradle, there is, perhaps, nobody who has not
enough of the unwritten tradition to know good verses from bad ones, if
he have enough mother-wit. Among all that speak English in Australia,
in America, in Great Britain, are there many more than the ten thousand
the prophet saw, who have enough of the written tradition education has
set in room of the unwritten to know good verses from bad ones, even
though their mother-wit has made them Ministers of the Crown or what
you will? Nor can things be better till that ten thousand have gone
hither and thither to preach their faith that 'the imagination is the
man himself,' and that the world as imagination sees it is the durable
world, and have won men as did the disciples of Him who

His seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.

1901.




SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY.


I

I HAVE always known that there was something I disliked about singing,
and I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand
why, for I have found something better. I have just heard a poem spoken
with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for
its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people
to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again. A friend,
who was here a few minutes ago, has sat with a beautiful stringed
instrument upon her knee, her fingers passing over the strings, and
has spoken to me some verses from Shelley's _Skylark_ and Sir Ector's
lamentation over the dead Launcelot out of the _Morte d' Arthur_ and
some of my own poems. Wherever the rhythm was most delicate, wherever
the emotion was most ecstatic, her art was the most beautiful, and yet,
although she sometimes spoke to a little tune, it was never singing,
as we sing to-day, never anything but speech. A singing note, a word
chanted as they chant in churches, would have spoiled everything; nor
was it reciting, for she spoke to a notation as definite as that of
song, using the instrument which murmured sweetly and faintly, under
the spoken sounds, to give her the changing notes. Another speaker
could have repeated all her effects, except those which came from her
own beautiful voice that would have given her fame if the only art that
gives the speaking voice its perfect opportunity were as well known
among us as it was known in the ancient world.


II

Since I was a boy I have always longed to hear poems spoken to a harp,
as I imagined Homer to have spoken his, for it is not natural to enjoy
an art only when one is by oneself. Whenever one finds a fine verse
one wants to read it to somebody, and it would be much less trouble
and much pleasanter if we could all listen, friend by friend, lover
by beloved. Images used to rise up before me, as I am sure they have
arisen before nearly everybody else who cares for poetry, of wild-eyed
men speaking harmoniously to murmuring wires while audiences in
many-coloured robes listened, hushed and excited. Whenever I spoke of
my desire to anybody they said I should write for music, but when
I heard anything sung I did not hear the words, or if I did their
natural pronunciation was altered and their natural music was altered,
or it was drowned in another music which I did not understand. What
was the good of writing a love-song if the singer pronounced love,
'lo-o-o-o-o-ve,' or even if he said 'love,' but did not give it its
exact place and weight in the rhythm? Like every other poet, I spoke
verses in a kind of chant when I was making them, and sometimes, when
I was alone on a country road, I would speak them in a loud chanting
voice, and feel that if I dared I would speak them in that way to
other people. One day I was walking through a Dublin street with the
Visionary I have written about in _The Celtic Twilight_, and he began
speaking his verses out aloud with the confidence of those who have
the inner light. He did not mind that people stopped and looked after
him even on the far side of the road, but went on through poem after
poem. Like myself, he knew nothing of music, but was certain that he
had written them to a manner of music, and he had once asked somebody
who played on a wind instrument of some kind, and then a violinist,
to write out the music and play it.