W.B. Yeats

“ There was a slight resentment in Sherman’s voice. The other noticed it, and said, changing his manner from the insolent air of a young beauty to a self-depreciatory one, which was wont to give him at times a very genuine charm—
“It is really a great pity, for you Shermans are a deep people, much deeper than we Howards. We are like moths or butterflies on rather rapid rivulets, while you and yours are deep pools in the forest where the beasts go to drink. No! I have a better metaphor. Your mind and mine are two arrows. Yours has got no feathers, and mine has no metal on the point. ”

“ Then she sighed gently, "It grows late,
"Music and love and sleep await,
"Where I would be when the white moon climbs
"The red sun falls, and the world grows dim."
And then I mounted and she bound me
With her triumphing arms around me,
And whispering to herself enwound me;
But when the horse had felt my weight,
He shook himself and neighed three times:
Caolte, Conan, and Finn came near,
And wept, and raised their lamenting hands,
And bid me stay, with many a tear;
But we rode out from the human lands.
In what far kingdom do you go,
Ah, Fenians, with the shield and bow? ”

“ One felt that he had lived always with small unimaginative, effective men whom he despised; and that perhaps through some lack of early education, perhaps because nine years’ imprisonment at the most plastic period of his life had jarred or broken his contact with reality, he had failed, except during the first months of the Land League, to dominate those men. He told me that if the split in the Irish Party had not come he would have carried the Land League into the Highlands, and recovered for Ireland as much of Scotland as was still Gaelic in blood or in language. ”

“ And though they love to blow a smoking coal
Till it’s all flame, the wars they blow aflame
Are full of glory, and heart uplifting pride,
And not like this; the wars they love awaken
Old fingers and the sleepy strings of harps.
Who did it then? Are you afraid; speak out,
For I have put you under my protection
And will reward you well. Dubthach the Chafer.
He had an old grudge. No, for he is with Maeve.
Laegaire did it. Why do you not speak?
What is this house? [A pause.] Now I remember all.
Fintain.
He will kill us. O, I am afraid!
Cuchullain.
[Who is before Concobar’s chair.] ”

“ W.B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. ”

“ I'll live as you live and do as you do.
[Johneen and other children come running in.
Johneen. I was on the top of the bank and I seen a priest coming down the cross-road with his ass. It's collecting he is. We're going to set ourselves here to beg something from him.
Another Child. [Breathlessly.] And he has a whole lot of things on the ass. A whole lot of things up behind him.
Another Child. O boys, O boys, we'll have our dealing trick out of them yet. The best way'll be—— [He suddenly catches sight of Paul Ruttledge.] Whist, ye divils ye, don't you see the new gentleman? ”

“ Charlie Ward. Those free drinks of yours, Paul, is playing the devil with them. Do you hear them now and every roar out of them? They're putting the cocks astray. [He takes out a cock.] Sure they think it's thunder.
Molly the Scold. There's not a man of them outside there now but would be ready to knock down his own brother.
Tommy the Song. He wouldn't know him to knock him down. They're all blind. I never saw the like of it.
Paul Ruttledge. You in here stood it better than that.
Charlie Ward. When those common men drink it's what they fall down. They haven't the heads. ”

“ He was a white-haired old man, who had written the standard history of Young Ireland, had emigrated to Australia, had been the first Australian Federalist, and later Prime Minister, but, in all his writings, in which there is so much honesty, so little rancour, there is not one sentence that has any meaning when separated from its place in argument or narrative, not one distinguished because of its thought or music. One imagined his youth in some little gaunt Irish town, where no building or custom is revered for its antiquity ”

“ You have no feeling; you have no temperament; you are quite the most stupid creature I was ever engaged to.”
“What is wrong with you?” he asked, in bewilderment.
“Don’t you see,” she replied, with a broken voice, “I flirted all day with that young clerk? You should have nearly killed me with jealousy. You do not love me a bit! There is no knowing what I might do!”
“Well, you know,” he said, “it was not right of you. People might say, ‘Look at John Sherman; how furious he must be!’ To be sure I wouldn’t be furious a bit ”

“ The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a better name, were called Theosophists. Beside the resident members, other members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading-room was a place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. The house had been taken in the name of the engineer to the Board of Works, a black-bearded young man, with a passion for Manichean philosophy, and all accepted him as host ”

“ Being a self-educated, un-scholarly, though learned man, he was bound to express the fundamental antithesis in the most crude form, and being arrogant, to prevent as far as possible that alternation between the two natures which is, it may be, necessary to sanity. When the nature turns to its spiritual opposite alone there can be no alternation, but what nature is pure enough for that.
I see Paris in the Eighteen-nineties as a number of events separated from one another, and without cause or consequence, without lot or part in the logical structure of my life ”

“ It was from the Burrough he was coming that May morning, light-hearted enough, and singing some new song that had come to him. But it was not long till a hare ran across his path, and made away into the fields, through the loose stones of the wall. And he knew it was no good sign a hare to have crossed his path, and he remembered the hare that had led him away to Slieve Echtge the time Mary Lavelle was waiting for him, and how he had never known content for any length of time since then. ”

“ As over and over he counted them, he heard, first with the ear only, then with the mind also, a footstep going to and fro within the cave. Lifting his eyes he saw the same figure seen on the cliff—the figure of a woman, beautiful and young. Her dress was white, save for a border of feathers dyed the fatal red of the spirits. She had arranged in one corner the spears, and in the other the brushwood and branches used for the fire, and spread upon the ground the skins, and now began pulling vainly at the great stone pitcher of the Fomorians. ”

“ I cried, "Come out of the shadow, king of the nails of gold!
"And tell of your goodly household and the goodly works of your hands,
"That we may muse in the starlight and talk of the battles of old;
"Your questioner, Usheen, is worthy, he comes from the Fenian lands."
Half open his eyes were, and held me, dull with the smoke of their dreams;
283His lips moved slowly in answer, no answer out of them came;
Then he swayed in his fingers the bell-branch, slow dropping a sound in faint streams
Softer than snow-flakes in April and piercing the marrow like flame. ”

“ We will surround ourselves with a wall. The world will be on the outside, and on the inside we and our peaceful lives.”
“Wait,” she said; “I will give you your answer,” and going into the next room returned with several bundles of letters. She laid them on the table; some were white and new, some slightly yellow with time.
“John,” she said, growing very pale, “here are all the letters you ever wrote me from your earliest boyhood.” She took one of the large candles from the mantlepiece, and, lighting it, placed it on the hearth. Sherman wondered what she was going to do with it. ”

“ The bird shook a shower of seed on his shoulder. He picked one of them from the collar of his coat and turned it over in his fingers mechanically. “I loved you all along.”
“You have done no duty that came to you. You have tired of everything you should cling to; and now you have come to this little town because here is idleness and irresponsibility.”
The last letter lay in ashes on the hearth. She blew out the candle, and replaced it among the photographs on the mantlepiece, and stood there as calm as a portion of the marble.
“John, our friendship is over—it has been burnt in the candle.” ”

“ The wind roars.]
They begin a song
And there is still some music on their tongues.
OONA.
[Casting herself face downwards on the floor.]
O maker of all, protect her from the demons,
And if a soul must needs be lost, take mine.
[ALEEL kneels beside her, but does not seem to hear her words; he is gazing down as if through the earth. The peasants return. They carry the COUNTESS CATHLEEN and lay her upon the ground before OONA and ALEEL. She lies there as if dead.] ”

“ But the old man sat clasping a mass of roses and lilies in his arms, and with his head sunk upon his breast. On the table, at his left hand, was a leathern wallet full of gold and silver pieces, as for a journey, and at his right hand was a long staff. The boy touched him and he did not move. He lifted the hands but they were quite cold, and they fell heavily.
'It were better for him,' said the lad, 'to have told his beads and said his prayers like another, and not to have spent his days in seeking amongst the Immortal Powers what he could have found in his own deeds and days had he willed. ”

“ I am only convinced that the liveliness of our pleasure in those and many other lines by the same author will ultimately cause the majority to believe, by faith, that W.B. Yeats is a genius. The one reassuring aspect of the literary affair is that the passionate few are passionate about the same things. A continuance [pg 24] of interest does, in actual practice, lead ultimately to the same judgments. There is only the difference in width of interest. Some of the passionate few lack catholicity, or, rather, the whole of their interest is confined to one narrow channel; they have none left over. ”

“ Yeats sometimes makes us wonder how he has so long been able to hold his style above the ever rising level of modern poetry. No man stands so apart in his own perfection as does this Irish poet and playwright, in his art of discovering truths remote and beautiful. Serious, vital thoughts he veils, as the genuine poet, in a cloak of fine rhythmical expression. ”

“ He had a house now at Mortlake on the Thames with a great ivy tod shadowing door and window, and one night there he shocked and startled a roomful of men by showing how far he could be swept beyond our reach in reveries of affection. The dull man, who had tried to put Wilde out of countenance, suddenly said to the whole room, roused by I cannot remember what incautious remark of mine made to some man at my side: “Yeats believes in magic; what nonsense.” Henley said, “No, it may not be nonsense; black magic is all the go in Paris now.” ”

“ Fintain.
Where are the Kings? What are the Kings doing?
Barach.
They are shouting and running down to the shore, and the people are running out of the houses, they are all running.
Fintain.
You say they are running out of the houses, there will be nobody left in the houses. Listen, fool.
Barach.
There, he is down! He is up again! He is going out into the deep water.
Fintain.
Come here, fool; come here, I say.
Barach.
[Coming towards him but looking backward towards the door.] What is it?
Fintain.
There will be nobody in the houses. Come this way, come quickly; the ovens will be full ”

“ The late W. B. Yeats wrote the author that he found Chesterton “a kindly and generous man of whom I constantly heard from friends, but as far as I can recollect I only met him socially twice, once at a Club dinner and once for tea at a country house. So much of my life has always been spent in Ireland that I know comparatively little of the English celebrities. ”

“ Because of his delight in all that was formal and arranged he objected to the public quotation of private conversation even after death, and this scruple helped his refusal. Perhaps this dreaming was made a necessity by his artificial life, yet before that life began he wrote from Oxford to his Tory but flattered family, that as he stood mounted upon a library ladder in his rooms taking a book from a shelf, Gladstone, about to pass the open door on his way upstairs to some college authority, had stopped, hesitated, come into the room and there spent an hour of talk. ”

“ I have never seen any myself, but I am a cousin of Hearne, and my uncle was away twenty-one years.’ The wife of the old miller said, ‘It is said they are mostly good neighbours, but the stroke of the fool is what there is no cure for; [157] any one that gets that is gone. The Amadán-na-Breena we call him!’ And an old woman who lives in the Bog of Kiltartan, and is very poor, said, ‘It is true enough, there is no cure for the stroke of the Amadán-na-Breena. There was an old man I knew long ago, he had a tape, and he could tell what diseases you had with measuring you ”

“ Has kissed her lips, and the long blessed hair
Has fallen on her face; the Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
(ALEEL releases the ANGEL and kneels.)
OONA
Tell them to walk upon the floor of peace,
That I would die and go to her I love;
The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman goads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.
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Down by the Salley Gardens.—An extension of three lines sung to me by an old woman at Ballisodare.
Findrinny (Findruine) .—A kind of white bronze. ”