Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
We broke the vision that we might have supper, breaking it with some form
of words which I forget. When supper had ended the seeress cried out that
while we had been eating they had been building, and they had built not a
masonic house but a great stone cross. And now they had all gone away but
the man who had been in chain armour and two monks we had not noticed
before. He was standing against the cross, his feet upon two stone rests
a little above the ground, and his arms spread out. He seemed to stand
there all day, but when night came he went to a little cell, that was
beside two other cells. I think they were like the cells I have seen in
the Aran Islands, but I cannot be certain. Many days seemed to pass, and
all day every day he stood upon the cross, and we never saw anybody there
but him and the two monks. Many years seemed to pass, making the vision
flutter like a drift of leaves before our eyes, and he grew old and
white-haired, and we saw the two monks, old and white-haired, holding him
upon the cross. I asked the evoker of spirits why the man stood there, and
before he had time to answer I saw two people, a man and a woman, rising
like a dream within a dream, before the eyes of the man upon the cross.
The evoker of spirits saw them too, and said that one of them held up his
arms and they were without hands. I thought of the two gravestones the man
in chain mail had passed over in the great hall when he came out of the
chapel, and asked the evoker of spirits if the knight was undergoing a
penance for violence, and while I was asking him, and he was saying that
it might be so but he did not know, the vision, having completed its
circle, vanished.
It had not, so far as I could see, the personal significance of the other
vision, but it was certainly strange and beautiful, though I alone seemed
to see its beauty. Who was it that made the story, if it were but a story?
I did not, and the seeress did not, and the evoker of spirits did not and
could not. It arose in three minds, for I cannot remember my acquaintance
taking any part, and it rose without confusion, and without labour, except
the labour of keeping the mind's eye awake, and more swiftly than any pen
could have written it out. It may be, as Blake said of one of his poems,
that the author was in eternity. In coming years I was to see and hear of
many such visions, and though I was not to be convinced, though half
convinced once or twice, that they were old lives, in an ordinary sense of
the word life, I was to learn that they have almost always some quite
definite relation to dominant moods and moulding events in this life. They
are, perhaps, in most cases, though the vision I have but just described
was not, it seems, among the cases, symbolical histories of these moods
and events, or rather symbolical shadows of the impulses that have made
them, messages as it were out of the ancestral being of the questioner.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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