Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Philosophy
Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
Essays
When its genius comes to Rousseau, shedding dew with one hand, and
treading out the stars with her feet, for she is also the genius of the
dawn, she brings him a cup full of oblivion and love. He drinks and his
mind becomes like sand 'on desert Labrador' marked by the feet of deer and
a wolf. And then the new vision, life, the cold light of day moves before
him, and the first vision becomes an invisible presence. The same image
was in his mind too when he wrote
'Hesperus flies from awakening night
And pants in its beauty with speed and light,
Fast fleeting, soft and bright.'
Though I do not think that Shelley needed to go to Porphyry's account of
the cold intoxicating cup, given to the souls in the constellation of the
Cup near the constellation Cancer, for so obvious a symbol as the cup, or
that he could not have found the wolf and the deer and the continual
flight of his Star in his own mind, his poetry becomes the richer, the
more emotional, and loses something of its appearance of idle phantasy
when I remember that these are ancient symbols, and still come to
visionaries in their dreams. Because the wolf is but a more violent symbol
of longing and desire than the hound, his wolf and deer remind me of the
hound and deer that Usheen saw in the Gaelic poem chasing one another on
the water before he saw the young man following the woman with the golden
apple; and of a Galway tale that tells how Niam, whose name means
brightness or beauty, came to Usheen as a deer; and of a vision that a
friend of mine saw when gazing at a dark-blue curtain. I was with a number
of Hermetists, and one of them said to another, 'Do you see something in
the curtain?' The other gazed at the curtain for a while and saw presently
a man led through a wood by a black hound, and then the hound lay dead at
a place the seer knew was called, without knowing why, 'the Meeting of the
Suns,' and the man followed a red hound, and then the red hound was
pierced by a spear. A white fawn watched the man out of the wood, but he
did not look at it, for a white hound came and he followed it trembling,
but the seer knew that he would follow the fawn at last, and that it would
lead him among the gods. The most learned of the Hermetists said, 'I
cannot tell the meaning of the hounds or where the Meeting of the Suns is,
but I think the fawn is the Morning and Evening Star.' I have little
doubt that when the man saw the white fawn he was coming out of the
darkness and passion of the world into some day of partial regeneration,
and that it was the Morning Star and would be the Evening Star at its
second coming. I have little doubt that it was but the story of Prince
Athanase and what may have been the story of Rousseau in _The Triumph of
Life_, thrown outward once again from that great memory, which is still
the mother of the Muses, though men no longer believe in it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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