Though your eyes with tears were blind,
Pain upon the path you trod:
Well we knew, the hosts behind,
Voice and shining of a god.
For your darkness was our day,
Signal fires, your pains untold,
Lit us on our wandering way
To the mystic heart of gold.
Naught we knew of the high land,
Beauty burning in its spheres;
Sorrow we could understand
And the mystery told in tears.
Something of the secret of his quiet strength is seen in the following two stanzas, which close his poem Apocalyptic (1916):
It shall be better to be bold
Than clothed in purple in that hour;
The will of steel be more than gold;
For only what we are is power.
Who through the starry gate would win
Must be like those who walk therein.
You, who have made of earth your star,
Cry out, indeed, for hopes made vain:
For only those can laugh who are
The strong Initiates of Pain,
Who know that mighty god to be
Sculptor of immortality.
It is a wonderful thing—a man living in a house in Dublin, living a life of intense, ceaseless, and extraordinarily diversified activity, travelling on life's common way in cheerful godliness, and shedding abroad to the remotest corners of the earth a masculine serenity of soul.
James Stephens was not widely known until the year 1912, when he published a novel called The Crock of Gold; this excited many readers in Great Britain and in America, an excitement considerably heightened by the appearance of another work of prose fiction, The Demi-Gods, in 1914; and general curiosity about the author became rampant. It was speedily discovered that he was a poet as well as a novelist; that three years before his reputation he had issued a slim book of verse, boldly named Insurrections, the title being the boldest thing in it. By 1915 this neglected work had passed through four editions, and during the last six years he has presented to an admiring public five more volumes of poems, The Hill of Vision, 1912; Songs from the Clay, 1915; The Adventures of Seumas Beg, 1915; Green Branches, 1916, and Reincarnations, 1918.
A. E. believed in him from the start; and it was owing to the influence of A. E. that Insurrections took the form of a book, gratefully dedicated to its own begetter. Both patron and protégé must have been surprised by its lack of impact, and still more surprised by the immense success of The Crock of Gold. The poems are mainly realistic, pictures of slimy city streets with slimy creatures crawling on the pavements. It is an interesting fact that they appeared the same year of Synge's Poems with Synge's famous Preface counselling brutality, counselling anything to bring poetry away from the iridescent dreams of W. B. Yeats down to the stark realities of life and nature. They bear testimony to the catholic breadth of A. E.'s sympathetic appreciation, for they are as different as may be imagined from the spirit of mysticism. It must also be confessed that their absolute merit as poetry is not particularly remarkable; all the more credit to the discernment of A. E., who described behind them an original and powerful personality.
The influence of Synge is strong in the second book of verses, called The Hill of Vision, particularly noticeable in such a poem as The Brute. Curiously enough, Songs from the Clay is more exalted in tone than The Hill of Vision. The air is clearer and purer. But the author of The Crock of Gold and The Demi-Gods appears again in The Adventures of Seumas Beg. In these charming poems we have that triple combination of realism, humour, and fantasy that gave so original a flavour to the novels. They make a valuable addition to child-poetry; for men, women, angels, fairies, God and the Devil are treated with easy familiarity, in practical, definite, conversational language. These are the best fruits of his imagination in rime.