THE
HAPPIEST
OF THE POETS.
Yeats
The symbols are of all
kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its association, momentous
or trivial, in the great memory, and one never knows what forgotten
events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and the ragweed, into
the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in Ireland sometimes
distinguish between the simples that work cures by some medical
property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such
magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of an
elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the
mind where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great
memory, some curative energy, some hypnotic command. They are not what
we call faith cures, for they have been much used and successfully,
the traditions of all lands affirm, over children and over animals,
and to me they seem the only medicine that could have been committed
safely to ancient hands. To pluck the wrong leaf would have been to go
uncured, but, if one had eaten it, one might have been poisoned.
VIII
I have now described that belief in magic which has set me all but
unwilling among those lean and fierce minds who are at war with their
time, who cannot accept the days as they pass, simply and gladly; and
I look at what I have written with some alarm, for I have told more
of the ancient secret than many among my fellow-students think it
right to tell. I have come to believe so many strange things because
of experience, that I see little reason to doubt the truth of many
things that are beyond my experience; and it may be that there are
beings who watch over that ancient secret, as all tradition affirms,
and resent, and perhaps avenge, too fluent speech. They say in the
Aran Islands that if you speak overmuch of the things of Faery your
tongue becomes like a stone, and it seems to me, though doubtless
naturalistic reason would call it Auto-suggestion or the like, that I
have often felt my tongue become just so heavy and clumsy. More than
once, too, as I wrote this very essay I have become uneasy, and have
torn up some paragraph, not for any literary reason, but because some
incident or some symbol that would perhaps have meant nothing to the
reader, seemed, I know not why, to belong to hidden things. Yet I must
write or be of no account to any cause, good or evil; I must commit
what merchandise of wisdom I have to this ship of written speech, and
after all, I have many a time watched it put out to sea with not less
alarm when all the speech was rhyme. We who write, we who bear witness,
must often hear our hearts cry out against us, complaining because
of their hidden things, and I know not but he who speaks of wisdom
may not sometimes in the change that is coming upon the world, have
to fear the anger of the people of Faery, whose country is the heart
of the world--'The Land of the Living Heart. ' Who can keep always to
the little pathway between speech and silence, where one meets none
but discreet revelations? And surely, at whatever risk, we must cry
out that imagination is always seeking to remake the world according
to the impulses and the patterns in that great Mind, and that great
Memory? Can there be anything so important as to cry out that what we
call romance, poetry, intellectual beauty, is the only signal that the
supreme Enchanter, or some one in His councils, is speaking of what has
been, and shall be again, in the consummation of time?
1901.
THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS.
I
ROSSETTI in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the
order of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved
form and colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One
feels sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers,
of impossible purities. It is as though the last judgment had already
begun in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the divine
hand had mixed into one another to make the loam of life, fell asunder
at his touch. If he painted a flame or a blue distance, he painted as
though he had seen the flame out of whose heart all flames had been
taken, or the blue of the abyss that was before all life; and if he
painted a woman's face he painted it in some moment of intensity when
the ecstasy of the lover and of the saint are alike, and desire becomes
wisdom without ceasing to be desire. He listens to the cry of the flesh
till it becomes proud and passes beyond the world where some immense
desire that the intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire of a
body's warmth and softness. His genius like Shelley's can hardly stir
but to the rejection of nature, whose delight is profusion, but never
intensity, and like Shelley's it follows the Star of the Magi, the
Morning and Evening Star, the mother of impossible hope, although it
follows through deep woods, where the star glimmers among dew-drenched
boughs and not through 'a windswept valley of the Apennine. ' Men like
him cannot be happy as we understand happiness, for to be happy one
must delight like nature in mere profusion, in mere abundance, in
making and doing things, and if one sets an image of the perfect before
one it must be the image that draws her perpetually, the image of a
perfect fulness of natural life, of an Earthly Paradise. One's emotion
must never break the bonds of life, one's hands must never labour to
loosen the silver cord, one's ears must never strain to catch the sound
of Michael's trumpet. That is to say, one must not be among those that
would have prayed in old times in some chapel of the Star, but among
those who would have prayed under the shadow of the Green Tree, and on
the wet stones of the Well, among the worshippers of natural abundance.
II
I do not think it was accident, so subtle are the threads that lead the
soul, that made William Morris, who seems to me to be the one perfectly
happy and fortunate poet of modern times, celebrate the Green Tree and
the goddess Habundia, and wells and enchanted waters in so many books.
In _The Well at the World's End_ green trees and enchanted waters are
shown to us, as they were understood by old writers, who thought that
the generation of all things was through water; for when the water that
gives a long and fortunate life and that can be found by none but such
a one as all women love is found at last, the Dry Tree, the image of
the ruined land, becomes green. To him indeed as to older writers Well
and Tree are all but images of the one thing, of an 'energy' that is
not the less 'eternal delight' because it is half of the body. He never
wrote, and could not have written, of a man or woman who was not of the
kin of Well or Tree. Long before he had named either he had made his
'Wanderers' follow a dream indeed, but a dream of natural happiness,
and all the people of all his poems and stories from the confused
beginning of his art in _The Hollow Land_ to its end in _The Sundering
Flood_, are full of the heavy sweetness of this dream. He wrote indeed
of nothing but of the quest of the Grail, but it was the Heathen Grail
that gave every man his chosen food, and not the Grail of Malory or
Wagner; and he came at last to praise, as other men have praised the
martyrs of religion or of passion, men with lucky eyes and men whom all
women love.
kinds, for everything in heaven or earth has its association, momentous
or trivial, in the great memory, and one never knows what forgotten
events may have plunged it, like the toadstool and the ragweed, into
the great passions. Knowledgeable men and women in Ireland sometimes
distinguish between the simples that work cures by some medical
property in the herb, and those that do their work by magic. Such
magical simples as the husk of the flax, water out of the fork of an
elm-tree, do their work, as I think, by awaking in the depths of the
mind where it mingles with the great mind, and is enlarged by the great
memory, some curative energy, some hypnotic command. They are not what
we call faith cures, for they have been much used and successfully,
the traditions of all lands affirm, over children and over animals,
and to me they seem the only medicine that could have been committed
safely to ancient hands. To pluck the wrong leaf would have been to go
uncured, but, if one had eaten it, one might have been poisoned.
VIII
I have now described that belief in magic which has set me all but
unwilling among those lean and fierce minds who are at war with their
time, who cannot accept the days as they pass, simply and gladly; and
I look at what I have written with some alarm, for I have told more
of the ancient secret than many among my fellow-students think it
right to tell. I have come to believe so many strange things because
of experience, that I see little reason to doubt the truth of many
things that are beyond my experience; and it may be that there are
beings who watch over that ancient secret, as all tradition affirms,
and resent, and perhaps avenge, too fluent speech. They say in the
Aran Islands that if you speak overmuch of the things of Faery your
tongue becomes like a stone, and it seems to me, though doubtless
naturalistic reason would call it Auto-suggestion or the like, that I
have often felt my tongue become just so heavy and clumsy. More than
once, too, as I wrote this very essay I have become uneasy, and have
torn up some paragraph, not for any literary reason, but because some
incident or some symbol that would perhaps have meant nothing to the
reader, seemed, I know not why, to belong to hidden things. Yet I must
write or be of no account to any cause, good or evil; I must commit
what merchandise of wisdom I have to this ship of written speech, and
after all, I have many a time watched it put out to sea with not less
alarm when all the speech was rhyme. We who write, we who bear witness,
must often hear our hearts cry out against us, complaining because
of their hidden things, and I know not but he who speaks of wisdom
may not sometimes in the change that is coming upon the world, have
to fear the anger of the people of Faery, whose country is the heart
of the world--'The Land of the Living Heart. ' Who can keep always to
the little pathway between speech and silence, where one meets none
but discreet revelations? And surely, at whatever risk, we must cry
out that imagination is always seeking to remake the world according
to the impulses and the patterns in that great Mind, and that great
Memory? Can there be anything so important as to cry out that what we
call romance, poetry, intellectual beauty, is the only signal that the
supreme Enchanter, or some one in His councils, is speaking of what has
been, and shall be again, in the consummation of time?
1901.
THE HAPPIEST OF THE POETS.
I
ROSSETTI in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the
order of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved
form and colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One
feels sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers,
of impossible purities. It is as though the last judgment had already
begun in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the divine
hand had mixed into one another to make the loam of life, fell asunder
at his touch. If he painted a flame or a blue distance, he painted as
though he had seen the flame out of whose heart all flames had been
taken, or the blue of the abyss that was before all life; and if he
painted a woman's face he painted it in some moment of intensity when
the ecstasy of the lover and of the saint are alike, and desire becomes
wisdom without ceasing to be desire. He listens to the cry of the flesh
till it becomes proud and passes beyond the world where some immense
desire that the intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire of a
body's warmth and softness. His genius like Shelley's can hardly stir
but to the rejection of nature, whose delight is profusion, but never
intensity, and like Shelley's it follows the Star of the Magi, the
Morning and Evening Star, the mother of impossible hope, although it
follows through deep woods, where the star glimmers among dew-drenched
boughs and not through 'a windswept valley of the Apennine. ' Men like
him cannot be happy as we understand happiness, for to be happy one
must delight like nature in mere profusion, in mere abundance, in
making and doing things, and if one sets an image of the perfect before
one it must be the image that draws her perpetually, the image of a
perfect fulness of natural life, of an Earthly Paradise. One's emotion
must never break the bonds of life, one's hands must never labour to
loosen the silver cord, one's ears must never strain to catch the sound
of Michael's trumpet. That is to say, one must not be among those that
would have prayed in old times in some chapel of the Star, but among
those who would have prayed under the shadow of the Green Tree, and on
the wet stones of the Well, among the worshippers of natural abundance.
II
I do not think it was accident, so subtle are the threads that lead the
soul, that made William Morris, who seems to me to be the one perfectly
happy and fortunate poet of modern times, celebrate the Green Tree and
the goddess Habundia, and wells and enchanted waters in so many books.
In _The Well at the World's End_ green trees and enchanted waters are
shown to us, as they were understood by old writers, who thought that
the generation of all things was through water; for when the water that
gives a long and fortunate life and that can be found by none but such
a one as all women love is found at last, the Dry Tree, the image of
the ruined land, becomes green. To him indeed as to older writers Well
and Tree are all but images of the one thing, of an 'energy' that is
not the less 'eternal delight' because it is half of the body. He never
wrote, and could not have written, of a man or woman who was not of the
kin of Well or Tree. Long before he had named either he had made his
'Wanderers' follow a dream indeed, but a dream of natural happiness,
and all the people of all his poems and stories from the confused
beginning of his art in _The Hollow Land_ to its end in _The Sundering
Flood_, are full of the heavy sweetness of this dream. He wrote indeed
of nothing but of the quest of the Grail, but it was the Heathen Grail
that gave every man his chosen food, and not the Grail of Malory or
Wagner; and he came at last to praise, as other men have praised the
martyrs of religion or of passion, men with lucky eyes and men whom all
women love.
