The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8): Ideas of Good and EvilYeats, W. B. (William Butler)
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The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 6 (of 8): Ideas of Good and Evil
Yeats, W. B. (William Butler)
English literature -- Irish authors
He seems in his speculations to have lit on that memory of nature the
visionaries claim for the foundation of their knowledge; but I do not
know whether he thought, as they do, that all things good and evil
remain for ever, ‘thinking the thought and doing the deed,’ though
not, it may be, self-conscious; or only thought that ‘love and beauty
and delight’ remain for ever. The passage where Queen Mab awakes ‘all
knowledge of the past,’ and the good and evil ‘events of old and
wondrous times,’ was no more doubtless than a part of the machinery
of the poem, but all the machineries of poetry are parts of the
convictions of antiquity, and readily become again convictions in minds
that dwell upon them in a spirit of intense idealism.
Intellectual Beauty has not only the happy dead to do her will, but
ministering spirits who correspond to the Devas of the East, and the
Elemental Spirits of mediæval Europe, and the Sidhe of ancient Ireland,
and whose too constant presence, and perhaps Shelley’s ignorance
of their more traditional forms, give some of his poetry an air of
rootless phantasy. They change continually in his poetry, as they do
in the visions of the mystics everywhere and of the common people in
Ireland, and the forms of these changes display, in an especial sense,
the glowing forms of his mind when freed from all impulse not out of
itself or out of supersensual power. These are ‘gleams of a remoter
world which visit us in sleep,’ spiritual essences whose shadows are
the delights of all the senses, sounds ‘folded in cells of crystal
silence,’ ‘visions swift and sweet and quaint,’ which lie waiting their
moment ‘each in his thin sheath like a chrysalis,’ ‘odours’ among
‘ever-blooming eden trees,’ ‘liquors’ that can give ‘happy sleep,’ or
can make tears ‘all wonder and delight’; ‘the golden genii who spoke to
the poets of Greece in dreams’; ‘the phantoms’ which become the forms
of the arts when ‘the mind, arising bright from the embrace of beauty,’
‘casts on them the gathered rays which are reality’; ‘the guardians’
who move in ‘the atmosphere of human thought,’ as ‘the birds within the
wind, or the fish within the wave,’ or man’s thought itself through all
things; and who join the throng of the happy hours when Time is passing
away—
‘As the flying fish leap
From the Indian deep,
And mix with the seabirds half asleep.’
It is these powers which lead Asia and Panthea, as they would lead all
the affections of humanity, by words written upon leaves, by faint
songs, by eddies of echoes that draw ‘all spirits on that secret
way,’ by the ‘dying odours’ of flowers and by ‘the sunlight of the
sphered dew,’ beyond the gates of birth and death to awake Demogorgon,
eternity, that ‘the painted veil called life’ may be ‘torn aside.’
There are also ministers of ugliness and all evil, like those that came
to Prometheus—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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