WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.
[PAGE 181]
Born (of an Irish father, and of a Cornish mother come of a family settled in Ireland) at Sandymount, Dublin, in 1866; but early life chiefly spent in Sligo, and on the Connaught seaboard. Of late years, Mr Yeats has passed much of his time in London, but is never absent from Ireland for any long period—
“... for always night and day
I hear lake-water lapping with low sounds on the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
W. B. Yeats is the prince of contemporary Irish poets. While no one is more essentially Celtic, and none is more distinctively national, his poetry belongs to English literature. Mr Yeats himself would be the last man to nail his flag to the mast of parochialism in literature. He is one of the two or three absolutely poetic personalities in literature at the present moment; and in outlook, and, above all, in atmosphere, stands foremost in the younger generation. It is noteworthy that the two most convincingly poetic of all our younger poets, since the giants who (with the exception of George Meredith, A. C. Swinburne, and William Morris) have gone from our midst, are predominantly Celtic; W. B. Yeats and John Davidson—and noteworthy, also, that both are too wise, too clear-sighted, too poetic, in fact, to aim at being Irish or Scoto-Celtic at the expense of being English in the high and best sense of the word. This, fortunately, is consistent with being paramountly national in all else. In the world of literature there is no geography save that of the mind.
Mr Yeats’ poetic work is best to be read, and perhaps best to be enjoyed, in the revised collective edition of his poems, in one volume, published recently by Mr Fisher Unwin. His first volume of verse, The Wanderings of Oisìn, was published in 1889. This was followed (in 1892) by The Countess Kathleen: and Various Legends and Lyrics; The Land of Heart’s Desire, and two short prose tales (in the Pseudonym Library), John Sherman and Dhoya. Two new books are promised in 1896 (through Mr Elkin Mathews), The Shadowy Waters (a poetic play), and The Wind Among the Reeds (poems). He has also published several volumes of selected Irish tales and legendary lore; edited, in conjunction with Mr E. J. Ellis, the Works of William Blake (3 vols., 1893); and A Book of Irish Verse (Methuen, 1895), an interesting rather than an adequately representative anthology of nationalistic Irish poetry. All that is most distinctive in Mr Yeats’ own original work is to be found in his Poems (Collective Edition, in 1 vol., Fisher Unwin, 1895), and the prose volume entitled The Celtic Twilight (Lawrence & Bullen, 1893), one of the most fascinating prose-books by a poet published in our time.
LATER SCOTO-CELTIC
THE PROLOGUE TO GAUL.
[PAGE 189]
Comes from the Sean Dana: vide Dr John Smith’s Collection of Ancient Poems (1780), (vide Note to page 13 supra, and also Introduction).
IN HEBRID SEAS.
[PAGE 191]
This stirring Hebridean poem is given as from the ancient Gaelic. Probably by this is meant merely old Gaelic, mediæval or even later. The translation is by Mr Thomas Pattison, and is included in his Gaelic Bards. He has the following note upon it: “This effusion, although in its original form it is only a kind of wild chant—almost indeed half prose—yet it is the germ of the ballad. It occurs in many of the tales contained in that collection, the repository of old Gaelic lore, the Popular Tales of the West Highlands, sometimes more and sometimes less perfect. The original will be found in the second volume of the Tales.... The vigorous and elastic spirit that pervades these verses must have strung the heart of many a hardy mariner who loved to feel the fresh and briny breeze drive his snoring birlinn bounding like a living creature over the tumbling billows of the inland loch or the huge swell of the majestic main.”