NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 31 July 1919, Page 26

NOTES

" Responsibilities" A volume of poems by Yeats published two years ago came into our hands the other day. There is a new sound in the title,' Responsibilities, and a new note in the songs themselves. There are verses here that remind one rather of Stephens than of the old Yeats, but there are others go loer of which the fairy music and the eerie lyric call are unmistakable. After the poems comes a Yeats play with a motif reminiscent of Bourget's Le Disciple. We have found nothing in this volume to move us as some of the old songs of the same poet did. We shall lay aside the book unhaunted by strains as sweet and piercing as the little songs like Down by the Sally Gardens, When You Are Old, or The Lake of Inisfree. But nevertheless here is fine poetry to delight a lover of. this great Gaelic singer, and a book worth many books that the profanum vulgns that knows not Yeats will devour unto destruction. Yeats is the greatest modern mystic poet. In his symbolic verses he has no rival; in his simple ballads he illumines his subject with the fairy light of Celtic magic as no other poet of our time, or perhaps of any time, •could. He has done better work than the present volume, but as the following quotations will reveal what he here gives us is of a high order. ■ Song, From the Grey Rock. I have kept my faith, though faith was tried, To that rock-born, rock-wandering foot, And the world's altered since you died, And I am in no good repute With the loud host before the sea, 'That think sword strokes were better meant Than lover's music—let that be, .So that the wandering foot's content. Here is a picture at the opening of the poem called The Two Kings : King Eoehaid came at sundown to a wood Westward of Tara. Hurrying to his queen He had outridden his war-wasted men That with empounded cattle trod the mire And where beech trees had mixed a pale green light ■With the ground ivy's blue, he saw a stag .Whiter than curds, its eyes the tint of the sea. In Running To Paradise we have the old power of enchantment revealed in a simple ballad :

As I came over the Windy Gap" They threw a halfpenny into my cap, For I am running to Paradise; And all that I need to do is to wish And somebody puts his hand in the dish To throw me a bit of salted fish; And there the king is but as the beggar. My brother Mourteen is worn out With skelping his big brawling lout, And I am running to Paradise; A poor life do what he can, \ And though he keep a dog and a gun, A serving maid and a serving man: And there the king is but as the beggar. The wind is old and still at play While I must hurry upon my way, For I am running to Paradise; Yet never have I lit on a friend To take my fancy like the wind That nobody can buy or bind: And there the king is but as the beggar. The following verses are more in his old style: Fallen Majesty. Although crowds gathered once if she showed but her face, And even old men's eyes grew dim, this hand alone, Like some last courtier at a gypsy camping place, Babbling of majesty, records what's gone. The lineaments, a heart that laughter has made sweet, 1 hese, these remain, but I record what's gone. A crowd Will gather, and not know it walks the very street Whereon a thing once walked that seemed a burning cloud. .. b

September, 1913. What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone : For men were born to pray and save : Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the" grave. They were of a different kind The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time they had to play For whom the hangman's rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save: Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in his grave. Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide ; For this that all the blood was shed, For this Lord Edward Fitzgerald died. And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave; Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in his grave. Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were, In all their loneliness and pain You'd cry, "Some woman's yellow hair Has maddened every mother's son": They weighed so lightly what they gave, But let them be, they're dead and gone, They're with O'Leary in the grave. In 1913, when he wrote that poem, it certainly seemed true that the romance was gone. Now that the great names of Pearse, Plunkett, and McDonagh blaze beside the Geraldines and Emmets, the past is reborn and the old hopes more substantial than ever. Romantic Ireland is not dead. She is ' worthy of the men of the past. : -. ■; . ~^;Xa:„;..: