In all these figures, pirates or peasants, there is an ever present
suggestion of poetry; it is in the skies, or in the distance, or in the
colors; and these people who laugh in the fairs will have after hours
as solemn as the quiet star-gazer in the "Midsummer Eve." This poetry
is evident in the oddest ways, and escapes analysis, so elusive and so
original is it, as in the "Street of Shows." Nothing at first thought
seems more hopelessly remote from poetry than the country circus, with
its lurid posters of the Giant Schoolgirl, the Petrified Man, and the
Mermaid, all in strong sunlight; but the heart carries with it its
own mood, and this flaring scene has undergone some indefinite
transformation by the alchemy of genius, and it assumes the character of
a fairy tale or Arabian Nights Entertainment imagined in the fantastic
dreams of childhood. The sleepy doorkeeper is a goblin or gnome. Perhaps
the charm of it all is that it is so evidently illusion, for when the
heart is strong in its own surety it can look out on the world, and
smile on things which would be unendurable if felt to be permanent,
knowing they are only dreams.
Many of these sketches have a largeness, almost a nobility, of
conception, which is, I think, a gift from father to son. "After the
Harvest's Saved" is something elemental. The "Post-car" suggests the
horses of the sun, or the stage coach in De Quincey's extraordinary
dream, when the opium had finally rioted in his brain, and transformed
his stage-coach into a chariot carrying news of some everlasting
victory. Blake has said "exuberance is genius," and there is an excess
of energy or passion, or a dilation of the forms, or a peace deeper than
mere quietude in the figures of Mr. Yeats' pictures, which gives them
that symbolic character which genius always impresses on its works.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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