This is but another phase of Mr. Yeats's belief that when a poem stirs us as by magic, it is a real magic has been at work. The words have loosened the seals that the flesh has fastened upon the universal memory which is subconscious in all of us, until that memory possesses us and we are one with all that has been since the beginning of time, and may in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by the magical rites of their priests.
In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that have gathered up the heart's desire of the world." His heart's desire was simpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then he had a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poems of Blake-like innocence and freshness. "The brown mice" that
are out of memories of childhood, and many other of the similes of these early poems are out of the ways of wild little things that appeal so to children, perhaps because they are wild little things themselves. A later mood of Mr. Yeats is to hold of less account the things of out-of-doors, but still he uses as similes the ways of birds, as did the old Irish bards whose stories have so informed his. He never did describe nature for its own sake, but natural things gave him more figures than they do now, although always there have been in his lines many out of mythology. Summer days between Slieve Echtge and the western sea are, however, bringing the plovers and curlews and peewits back to his poetry. In the country of the Countess Cathleen, as everywhere in Ireland, you may hear "wind cry and water cry and curlew cry," and there, as all the world over,--
"Ill bodings are as native unto our hearts As are their spots unto the woodpeckers."
It is from such knowledge of country things come the fine lines about
"The dark folk, who live in souls Of passionate men like bats in the dead trees";--
and such lines are coming again into his verse, even into the blank verse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heard are more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and to those who know his story they reveal again and again a great and common sorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. So may "The Countess Cathleen" be taken as well as "The King's Threshold." "Ephemera," "The Dedication to a Book of Stories," "In the Seven Woods," "The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Old Memory," "Adam's Curse," as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes, are but little "dream-burdened," and passages elsewhere have the human call. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, for instance, the common joy on nearing the shore of the homeland at the end of exile:--