A Poet Young and old—W. B. Yeats

256 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY ing the sensibilities of the young poet. The first was the influence of William Morris and the pre-Raphaelites, to which he had been exposed in the drawing room of his father's house in Dublin and later in London, and the second was the impression made upon him by the gray beauty of the Galway coast and the deep imaginative power i.n the life of the Gaelic-speaking peasants, among whom he used to spend the holidays at the home of his grandparents. From the one he derived an enthusiasm for the most significant of the contemporary movements in European art, the revolt against realism under the banner of the Symbolists, and from the other tile inspiration to simplify, strengthen, and purify his verse that ultimately led him away from the refulgence of some of the early poems to the sinewy austerity of the later. Stimulated by the excitement of the symbolist discoveries, the young poet set out to make a delicate music and monotonous rhythm induce in the reader a receptive mood approaching all hypnotic trance, while at the same time, under the direction of the other impulse, he was trying to rid his verse of the yellows and reds of Spenser and Shelley and seeking a sensitive, nervous rhythm and a bolder, more naked image. He oelieved that in the strong, uncorrupted, fantastic imagination of the Irish countryman he had found a meeting place for the two forces that were directing his poetry. Symbolist erudition and popular balladry could here be fused. " I learned from the people themselves," he wrote in Ideas of Good and Evil, "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 words and verses that keep half their ,ecret to themselves." This is undoubtedly true, and can easily be illustrated-as easily from English folk poetry as from Irish: The maidens came When] was in my mother's bower; ] had all that] would. The bailey benreth the bell away; The lily, the rose, the rose] lay. Or, as George Peele remembered a country ceremony, Gently dip, but not too deep, For (ear you make the golden beard to weep. Fair maiden, white and red, Comb me smooth and stroke my head, And thou shalt have some cockell-bread. A POET YOUNG .~N D OLD-W. B. YEATS 257 It is a significan t commen tary 011 how hard it is to be a modern poet that it took Yeats half a life time of discipline and thought to achieve something like the union of the strange and the si mple that these Tudor dance poems express so effortlessly. Yet that he did succeed such verses as the following fro m a poem in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) seem to indicate: Upon a grey old battered tombstone Tn Glendalough beside the stream) Where the O'Byrnes and Byrnes are buried, He stretched his bones and (~l in a dream Of sun and moon (hot a good hour Be:llowed and prancc=d in the round tower.l This is poetry that the middle class could make nothing of. "Indeed," Yeats went on to say, "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 bet';'een the hut and the castle, the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the coteries as was the speech of the people ... with the speech of the poet." But the more closely he came in contact with the people the more certain he grew that the art of the coteries, at 1east in so far as it meant the weary ornateness of thefin de sieel!, was enervating and seductive. He came to believe, he has written, that the insistence of the poets of the Rhymers' Club "upon emotion which has no relation to any public interest gathered together overwrought, unstable men." And he described them as "too proud, too...