In these days poetry is usually a flower of evil or good; but it is the timbre of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timbre that has not strong roots among the clay and worms. Even if we grant that exalted poetry can be kept successful by itself, the strong things in life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal. Like Herrick, he wrote verse about himself, for he knew that much biography and criticism would follow his funeral. ON AN ANNIVERSARY _After reading the dates in a book of Lyrics._ With Fifteen-ninety or Sixteen-sixteen We end Cervantes, Marot, Nashe or Green: Then Sixteen-thirteen till two score and nine, Is Crashaw's niche, that honey-lipped divine. And so when all my little work is done They'll say I came in Eighteen-seventy-one, And died in Dublin.... What year will they write For my poor passage to the stall of night? A QUESTION I asked if I got sick and died, would you With my black funeral go walking too, If you'd stand close to hear them talk or pray While I'm let down in that steep bank of clay. And, No, you said, for if you saw a crew Of living idiots pressing round that new Oak coffin--they alive, I dead beneath That board--you'd rave and rend them with your teeth. The love of brutal strength in Synge's work may have been partly the projection of his sickness, just as the invalid Stevenson delighted in the creation of powerful ruffians; but the brooding on his own death is quite modern, and is, I think, part of the egoism that is so distinguishing a feature in contemporary poetry. So many have abandoned all hope of a life beyond the grave, that they cling to bodily existence with almost gluttonous passion, and are filled with self-pity at the thought of their own death and burial. To my mind, there is something unworthy, something childish, in all this. When a child has been rebuked or punished by its father or mother, it plays a trump card--"You'll be sorry when I am dead!" It is better for men and women to attack the daily task with what cheerful energy they can command, and let the interruption of death come when it must. If life is short, it seems unwise to spend so much of our time in rehearsals of a tragedy that can have only one performance. In the modern Tempest of Ireland, Yeats is Ariel and A. E. is Prospero. He is the Master of the island. As a literary artist, he is not the equal of either of the two men whose work we have considered; but he is by all odds the greatest Personality. He holds over his contemporaries a spiritual sway that many a monarch might envy. Perhaps the final tribute to him is seen in the fact that even George Moore treats him with respect.