"magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn";
"old, unhappy, far-off things And battles long ago";
"the far-off curfew sound Over some wide-watered shore Swinging slow with sullen roar,"
were most of them in the earlier versions. There were those lines of Maire's denouncement of the two demons and her prophecy to them:--
"You shall at last dry like dry leaves, and hang Nailed like dead vermin to the doors of God";
and those wonderful lines of Cathleen dying:--
"Bend down your faces, Oona and Aleel: I gaze upon them as the swallow gazes Upon the nest under the eave, before He wander the loud waters";
and those last lines of all, great as only the greatest lines are great,--
"The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the herdsman goads them on behind, And I am broken by their passing feet."
It was about this time, too, that Mr. Yeats wrote that most startling of all his lines,--
"And God stands winding his lonely horn",
and "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," that so charmed Stevenson that he had to write its author, and say it cast over him a spell like that of his first reading of the "Poems and Ballads" of Swinburne and the "Love in the Valley" of Meredith.
There is no greater lyric poetry anywhere in the writing of Mr. Yeats than in "The Land of Heart's Desire" (1894), that little folk-play whose constant boding and final tragedy cannot overcome, either while it is playing or as you remember it, the sing and lilt that are in the lines. It tells of the luring away by a fairy child of the soul of a newly married bride on May-Eve, and of her death when her soul has passed to the "Land of Heart's Desire"--
"Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue, And where kind tongues bring no captivity."
It is a story out of folk-lore, and so far back in time, and so far away from the life that we know is it, that all that happens seems not only possible but inevitable.
"The Land of Heart's Desire" was the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put on the stage, being presented at the Avenue Theatre in London in 1894; and it was also the first play of Mr. Yeats to be put on in America, being presented with Miss Mabel Taliaferro in the fairy's rôle as the curtain-raiser to Mrs. Le Moyne's production of "In a Balcony," in the spring of 1901. Fragile as is its charm, it crossed the footlights and made itself felt as a new beauty of the theatre. It was the lyrical interbreathings that appealed most to me, but the strife of priest and fairy for Maire Bruin's soul was very real drama. It was the fairy's song, however, that haunted me after I left the theatre, as it could not but be. It haunts me still, coming into my mind whenever I think of Mr. Yeats, as inevitably as the last lines of "The Countess Cathleen," or as "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," or "The Valley of the Black Pig," or "The Rose of the World," or the ecstasies of Forgael and Dectora, or the song in "Deirdre." "The lonely of heart is withered away" is its burden, a burden that will not out of mind.