“Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colors of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night.”
Which is Blake, and which is Yeats? You may put the name of either under any of these stanzas, without being guilty of an unpardonable critical lapse. Mr. Yeats took Blake and imitated him as frankly, and it may be, as unconsciously, as many less sophisticated versifiers have imitated Tennyson, or Mr. Swinburne, or Rossetti. It is creditable to him that he should have had discernment enough to perceive in Blake an exceptional and individual content; but why having got hold of that content, having saturated himself with it, as it were, and having found the exploitation of it easy and provocative of praise, Mr. Yeats should turn round and call it Keltic is something of a puzzle. Of course, one has to remember that among a people whose interests are material, rather than spiritual, the poet who would get a hearing is compelled to have resort to a certain amount of adventitiousness and empyricism.
“We poets in our youth begin in gladness;