Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown."
It is true, though, that the dream-drenched poems are those most characteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new to English poetry. It is impossible to pick out one as more representative than another where so many are representative and where all are of highest achievement. Nowhere is his own individual note better sustained, however, than in the Michael Robartes poems or in "The Rose of Battle" or "Into the Twilight"; and the hold that dream has of him and the hold that human things have, chief among them love of country, are told with utmost distinction and inevitability of phrase in "To Ireland in the Coming Times" and in "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time."
I sometimes wonder, is the reason for the poet's holding so devotedly to spiritual things of his kind not the very same holding of his peasant countryman to the folk-tales that take him to a world as rich and gorgeous-hued as the Ireland about him is bare and gray, and to a church that prepares him for a better world after death? A large part of all poetry is the realization of the brevity of all beautiful things,—of bloom, of youth, of life; but no poet has more often lamented "Fate and Time and Change" than Mr. Yeats. It is, he says, "our narrow rooms, our short lives, our soon ended passions and emotions put us out of conceit with sooty and feeble reality." So the poet seeks refuge in his own dream and in contemplation of the life from which he came and to which he will return, and—one almost dare say—in communication with which he now knows such joy. The poet's life is little because he has found out the littleness of earthly things; the peasant holds life little because his share of it has been so poor. If the peasant acquires riches by chance or by emigration, he sees as the poet that all he can have is as nothing, so short is the time he may hold it. Irish writers of the past have made this peasant only the jarvey wit; but if you read the old romances, or listen to the folk-tales still alive, you will learn that Mr. Yeats is at one with his countryman in this basic likeness.
There is a side of Irish life, the side the world knows best, that Mr. Yeats does not present, but that which he does present is true, though the poet's personality is so dominant that we get more of this than of Ireland in his poetry. So it should be, so it is with every artist. All the world can ask of him is his interpretation of what he knows. Yet so native is Mr. Yeats that the atmosphere of his poetry is the very atmosphere of Ireland. The artist and the setting of his art are in an unwonted harmony. No reader of Mr. Yeats who knows the brooding landscape of West Ireland can escape that realization, but only he who has met the poet amid the scenes that inspired his verse may know how complete is their accord. Such a meeting was mine one lowering August day, in whose late afternoon we walked in the Woods of Coole. Then I knew at last what Mr. Yeats meant by "druid charm" and "druid light." I felt the "druid charm" that was potent in gray skies over gray water and gray rock and gray-green woods; the bewildering "druid light" flashed out as the sun followed westward the trail to Hy Brasil, leaving in the Atlantic skies wild after-glow of winter yellow.