Ideas of Good and Evil

by W. B. Yeats

He does not believe that the reformation of society can bring this beauty, this divine order, among men without the regeneration of the hearts of men. Even in Queen Mab, which was written before he had found his deepest thought, or rather perhaps before he had found words to utter it, for I do not think men change much in their deepest thought, he is less anxious to change men’s beliefs, as I think, than to cry out against that serpent more subtle than any beast of the field, ‘the cause and the effect of tyranny.’ He affirms again and again that the virtuous, those who have ‘pure desire and universal love,’ are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when ‘the spirit of nature,’ the spirit of beauty of his later poems, who has her ‘throne of power unappealable in every human heart,’ shall have made men so virtuous that ‘kingly glare will lose its power to dazzle and silently pass by,’ and as it seems even commerce, ‘the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth should purchase not,’ come as silently to an end.

He was always, indeed in chief, a witness for that ‘power unappealable.’ Maddalo, in Julian and Maddalo, says that the soul is powerless, and can only, like a ‘dreary bell hung in a heaven-illumined tower, toll our thoughts and our desires to meet round the rent heart and pray’; but Julian, who is Shelley himself, replies, as the makers of all religions have replied—

‘Where is the beauty, love and truth we seek
But in our minds? And if we were not weak,
Should we be less in deed than in desire?’

while Mont Blanc is an intricate analogy to affirm that the soul has its sources in ‘the secret strength of things,’ ‘which governs thought and to the infinite heavens is a law.’ He even thought that men might be immortal were they sinless, and his Cythna bids the sailors be without remorse, for all that live are stained as they are. It is thus, she says, that time marks men and their thoughts for the tomb. And the ‘Red Comet,’ the image of evil in Laon and Cythna, when it began its war with the star of beauty, brought not only ‘Fear, Hatred, Fraud, and Tyranny,’ but ‘Death, Decay, Earthquake, and Blight and Madness pale.’

When the Red Comet is conquered, when Jupiter is overthrown by Demogorgon, when the prophecy of Queen Mab is fulfilled, visible nature will put on perfection again. He declares, in one of the notes to Queen Mab, that ‘there is no great extravagance in presuming ... that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human species,’ and thinks it ‘certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth, health in the true and comprehensive sense of the word is out of the reach of civilized man.’ In Prometheus Unbound he sees, as in the ecstasy of a saint, the ships moving among the seas of the world without fear of danger

‘by the light
Of wave-reflected flowers, and floating odours,
And music soft,’

and poison dying out of the green things, and cruelty out of all living things, and even the toads and efts becoming beautiful, and at last Time being borne ‘to his tomb in eternity.’

This beauty, this divine order, whereof all things shall become a part in a kind of resurrection of the body, is already visible to the dead and to souls in ecstasy, for ecstasy is a kind of death. The dying Lionel hears the song of the nightingale, and cries—

‘Heardst thou not sweet words among
That heaven-resounding minstrelsy?
Heardst thou not that those who die
Awake in a world of ecstasy?
How love, when limbs are interwoven,
And sleep, when the night of life is cloven,
And thought to the world’s dim boundaries clinging,
And music when one beloved is singing,
Is death? Let us drain right joyously
The cup which the sweet bird fills for me.’

And in the most famous passage in all his poetry he sings of Death as of a mistress. ‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.’ ‘Die, if thou wouldst be with that which thou wouldst seek;’ and he sees his own soon-coming death in a rapture of prophecy, for ‘the fire for which all thirst’ beams upon him, ‘consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.’ When he is dead he will still influence the living, for though Adonais has fled ‘to the burning fountains whence he came,’ and ‘is a portion of the eternal which must glow through time and change unquenchably the same,’ and has ‘awaked from the dream of life,’ he has not gone from ‘the young dawn,’ or the ‘caverns in the forests,’ or ‘the faint flowers and the fountains.’ He has been ‘made one with nature,’ and his voice is ‘heard in all her music,’ and his presence is felt wherever ‘that power may move which has withdrawn his being to its own,’ and he bears ‘his part’ when it is compelling mortal things to their appointed forms, and he overshadows men’s minds at their supreme moments, for