I do not know that I get more enjoyment from the poetry of the verses entitled "The Valley of the Black Pig" because Mr. Yeats's note tells us that it is the scene of Ireland's Götterdämmerung, though it is an unquestionable gratification to the puzzle interest I have with my kind, and I would at times be more comfortable were I sure that the "Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door" was he who keeps the gates of the Other World, the real world we shall enter when death sets us free of that dream men call life. Mr. Yeats is not so kind to the men "in the highway" as the old Irish bards. When they wrote enigmas they were apt to explain them fully, as does the poet of "The Wooing of Emer" when he tell what was meant by the cryptic questions and answers exchanged between that princess and Cuchulain. When the symbolism is of the kind found in "Death's Summons" of Thomas Nash, which of all poems Mr. Yeats quotes oftenest, all cultivated men may understand—
"Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye."
The difference between the symbol Helen and each one of the several symbols Mr. Yeats employs in "The Valley of the Black Pig" is the difference between a symbol universally recognized throughout the world and a symbol recognized by one people; but there is the further difference that one is intimately associated with the thing symbolized, is the name of a woman the context tells us is a queen and beautiful, and the other is only the scene of a battle that symbolizes the ending of the world. It is more natural to use a beautiful woman as a symbol of all beauty than to use a black boar that shall root up all the light and life of the world as a symbol of the ending of the world. But neither of these is a symbol that would be understood intuitively, as the rose used as a symbol of beauty or the wind as a symbol of instability. Sometimes Mr. Yeats's symbols are very remote, but perhaps they were remote in the old stories in which he found them. The details in
"the phantom hound
All pearly white, save one red ear,"
and "the hornless deer" which it chases, seem arbitrary. The hound, it is true, is known of all men as the pursuer, and the deer as the pursued; but does this knowledge suggest immediately "the desire of the man which is for the woman, and the desire of the woman which is for the desire of the man"? Mr. Yeats does not, as I take it, expect all his symbols to be understood so definitely as this hound and deer, which, of course, are not only symbols, but figures from the tapestry of fairyland. It is often enough, perhaps, that we understand emotionally, as in "Kubla Khan" or "The Owl." From some of his writing it would appear he believed many symbols to be of very definite meaning and to be understood by generation upon generation. In the note to "The Valley of the Black Pig" he writes, "Once a symbol has possessed the imagination of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an embodiment of disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age after age."
This is but another phase of Mr. Yeats's belief that when a poem stirs us as by magic, it is a real magic has been at work. The words have loosened the seals that the flesh has fastened upon the universal memory which is subconscious in all of us, until that memory possesses us and we are one with all that has been since the beginning of time, and may in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by the magical rites of their priests.
In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world." His heart's desire was simpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then he had a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poems of Blake-like innocence and freshness. "The brown mice" that