,,per ,,amica ,,silentia ,,lunae ,,other ,,works ,,of ,,william ,,butler ,,yeats ,,poems ,,and ,,plays1 #b volumes3 ,i--,lyrics4 #b4jj4 ,,ii--,,dramatic ,,poems4 #b4jj4 ,,the ,,celtic ,,twilight4 #a4ej4 ,,ideas ,,of ,,good ,,and ,,evil4 #a4ej4 ,,stories ,,of ,,red ,,hanrahan4 #a4be4 ,,reveries ,,over ,,childhood ,,and ,,youth4 ,illustrated4 #b4jj4 ,,responsibilities ,,and ,,other ,,poems4 #a4be4 ,,the ,,tables ,,of ,,the ,,law4 #a4be4 ,,the ,,hour ,,glass ,,and ,,other ,,plays4 #a4be4 ,,the ,,green ,,helmet ,,and ,,other ,,poems4 #a4be4 ,,the ,,cutting ,,of ,,an ,,agate4 #a4ej4 ,,the ,,macmillan ,,company4 ,,per ,,amica ,,silentia ,,lunae ,,special ,,limited ,,edition ,,per ,,amica ,,silentia ,,lunae ,,by ,,william ,,butler ,,yeats ,new ,york ,,the ,,macmillan ,,company #aiah ,all rights reserved ,,copyright1 #aiah1 ,,by ,,the ,,macmillan ,,company4 ,set up and electrotyped4 ,published ,january1 #aiah4 ,norwood ,press ,j4 ,s4 ,cushing ,co4--,berwick ,smith ,co4 ,norwood1 ,mass41 ,u4,s4,a4 ,,prologue ,,my ,,dear ,,maurice--,you will remember that afternoon in ,calvados last summer when your black ,persian ,minoulooshe1 who had walked behind us for a good mile1 heard a wing flutter in a bramble-bush8 ,for a long time we called her endearing names in vain4 ,she seemed resolute to spend her night among the brambles4 ,she had interrupted a conversation1 often interrupted before1 upon certain thoughts so long habitual that ,i may be permitted to call them my convictions4 ,when ,i came back to ,london my mind ran again and again to those conversations and ,i could not rest till ,i had written out in this little book all that ,i had said or would have said4 ,read it some day when ,minoulooshe is asleep4 ,w4 ,b4 ,,yeats4 ,may #aa1 #aiag4 ,,ego ,,dominus ,,tuus ,,hic ,on the grey sand beside the shallow stream1 ,under your old wind-beaten tower1 where still ,a lamp burns on above the open book ,that ,michael ,robartes left1 you walk in the moon1 ,and1 though you have passed the best of life1 still trace1 ,enthralled by the unconquerable delusion1 ,magical shapes4 ,,ille ,by the help of an image ,i call to my own opposite1 summon all ,that ,i have handled least1 least looked upon4 ,,hic ,and ,i would find myself and not an image4 ,,ille ,that is our modern hope1 and by its light ,we have lit upon the gentle1 sensitive mind ,and lost the old nonchalance of the hand2 ,whether we have chosen chisel1 pen1 or brush1 ,we are but critics1 or but half create1 ,timid1 entangled1 empty1 and abashed1 ,lacking the countenance of our friends4 ,,hic ,and yet1 ,the chief imagination of ,christendom1 ,dante ,alighieri1 so utterly found himself1 ,that he has made that hollow face of his ,more plain to the mind's eye than any face ,but that of ,christ4 ,,ille ,and did he find himself1 ,or was the hunger that had made it hollow ,a hunger for the apple on the bough ,most out of reach8 ,and is that spectral image ,the man that ,lapo and that ,guido knew8 ,i think he fashioned from his opposite ,an image that might have been a stony face1 ,staring upon a ,beduin's horse-hair roof1 ,from doored and windowed cliff1 or half upturned ,among the coarse grass and the camel dung4 ,he set his chisel to the hardest stone2 ,being mocked by ,guido for his lecherous life1 ,derided and deriding1 driven out ,to climb that stair and eat that bitter bread1 ,he found the unpersuadable justice1 he found ,the most exalted lady loved by a man4 ,,hic ,yet surely there are men who have made their art ,out of no tragic war2 lovers of life1 ,impulsive men1 that look for happiness1 ,and sing when they have found it4 ,,ille ,no1 not sing1 ,for those that love the world serve it in action1 ,grow rich1 popular1 and full of influence2 ,and should they paint or write still is it action1 ,the struggle of the fly in marmalade4 ,the rhetorician would deceive his neighbours1 ,the sentimentalist himself2 while art ,is but a vision of reality4 ,what portion in the world can the artist have1 ,who has awakened from the common dream1 ,but dissipation and despair8 ,,hic ,and yet1 ,no one denies to ,keats love of the world1 ,remember his deliberate happiness4 ,,ille ,his art is happy1 but who knows his mind8 ,i see a schoolboy1 when ,i think of him1 ,with face and nose pressed to a sweetshop window1 ,for certainly he sank into his grave1 ,his senses and his heart unsatisfied2 ,and made--being poor1 ailing and ignorant1 ,shut out from all the luxury of the world1 ,the ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper-- ,luxuriant song4 ,,hic ,why should you leave the lamp ,burning alone beside an open book1 ,and trace these characters upon the sand8 ,a style is found by sedentary toil1 ,and by the imitation of great masters4 ,,ille ,because ,i seek an image1 not a book2 ,those men that in their writings are most wise ,own nothing but their blind1 stupefied hearts4 ,i call to the mysterious one who yet ,shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge1 ,and look most like me1 being indeed my double1 ,and prove of all imaginable things ,the most unlike1 being my anti-self1 ,and1 standing by these characters1 disclose ,all that ,i seek2 and whisper it as though ,he were afraid the birds1 who cry aloud ,their momentary cries before it is dawn1 ,would carry it away to blasphemous men4 ,december #aiae4 ,,per ,,amica ,,silentia ,,lunae ,,anima ,,hominis ,i ,when ,i come home after meeting men who are strange to me1 and sometimes even after talking to women1 ,i go over all ,i have said in gloom and disappointment4 ,perhaps ,i have overstated everything from a desire to vex or startle1 from hostility that is but fear2 or all my natural thoughts have been drowned by an undisciplined sympathy4 ,my fellow-diners have hardly seemed of mixed humanity1 and how should ,i keep my head among images of good and evil1 crude allegories4 ,but when ,i shut my door and light the candle1 ,i invite a ,marmorean ,muse1 an art1 where no thought or emotion has come to mind because another man has thought or felt something different1 for now there must be no reaction1 action only1 and the world must move my heart but to the heart's discovery of itself1 and ,i begin to dream of eyelids that do not quiver before the bayonet3 all my thoughts have ease and joy1 ,i am all virtue and confidence4 ,when ,i come to put in rhyme what ,i have found it will be a hard toil1 but for a moment ,i believe ,i have found myself and not my anti-self4 ,it is only the shrinking from toil perhaps that convinces me that ,i have been no more myself than is the cat the medicinal grass it is eating in the garden4 ,how could ,i have mistaken for myself an heroic condition that from early boyhood has made me superstitious8 ,that which comes as complete1 as minutely organised1 as are those elaborate1 brightly lighted buildings and sceneries appearing in a moment1 as ,i lie between sleeping and waking1 must come from above me and beyond me4 ,at times ,i remember that place in ,dante where he sees in his chamber the ,lord of ,terrible ,aspect1 and how1 seeming to rejoice inwardly that it was a marvel to see1 speaking1 he said1 many things among the which ,i could understand but few1 and of these this3 ego dominus tuus2 or should the conditions come1 not as it were in a gesture--as the image of a man--but in some fine landscape1 it is of ,boehme1 maybe1 that ,i think1 and of that country where we eternally solace ourselves in the excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner of flowers and forms1 both trees and plants1 and all kinds of fruit4 ,,ii ,when ,i consider the minds of my friends1 among artists and emotional writers1 ,i discover a like contrast4 ,i have sometimes told one close friend that her only fault is a habit of harsh judgment with those who have not her sympathy1 and she has written comedies where the wickedest people seem but bold children4 ,she does not know why she has created that world where no one is ever judged1 a high celebration of indulgence1 but to me it seems that her ideal of beauty is the compensating dream of a nature wearied out by over-much judgment4 ,i know a famous actress who in private life is like the captain of some buccaneer ship holding his crew to good behaviour at the mouth of a blunderbuss1 and upon the stage she excels in the representation of women who stir to pity and to desire because they need our protection1 and is most adorable as one of those young queens imagined by ,maeterlinck who have so little will1 so little self1 that they are like shadows sighing at the edge of the world4 ,when ,i last saw her in her own house she lived in a torrent of words and movements1 she could not listen1 and all about her upon the walls were women drawn by ,burne-,jones in his latest period4 ,she had invited me in the hope that ,i would defend those women1 who were always listening1 and are as necessary to her as a contemplative ,buddha to a ,japanese ,samurai1 against a ,french critic who would persuade her to take into her heart in their stead a ,post-,impressionist picture of a fat1 ruddy1 nude woman lying upon a ,turkey carpet4 ,there are indeed certain men whose art is less an opposing virtue than a compensation for some accident of health or circumstance4 ,during the riots over the first production of the ,playboy of the ,western ,world ,synge was confused1 without clear thought1 and was soon ill--indeed the strain of that week may perhaps have hastened his death--and he was1 as is usual with gentle and silent men1 scrupulously accurate in all his statements4 ,in his art he made1 to delight his ear and his mind's eye1 voluble daredevils who go romancing through a romping lifetime 444 to the dawning of the ,judgment ,day4 ,at other moments this man1 condemned to the life of a monk by bad health1 takes an amused pleasure in great queens 444 making themselves matches from the start to the end4 ,indeed1 in all his imagination he delights in fine physical life1 in life where the moon pulls up the tide4 ,the last act of ,deirdre of the ,sorrows1 where his art is at its noblest1 was written upon his death-bed4 ,he was not sure of any world to come1 he was leaving his betrothed and his unwritten play--,oh1 what a waste of time1 he said to me2 he hated to die1 and in the last speeches of ,deirdre and in the middle act he accepted death and dismissed life with a gracious gesture4 ,he gave to ,deirdre the emotion that seemed to him most desirable1 most difficult1 most fitting1 and maybe saw in those delighted seven years1 now dwindling from her1 the fulfilment of his own life4 ,,iii ,when ,i think of any great poetical writer of the past 7a realist is an historian and obscures the cleavage by the record of his eyes7 ,i comprehend1 if ,i know the lineaments of his life1 that the work is the man's flight from his entire horoscope1 his blind struggle in the network of the stars4 ,william ,morris1 a happy1 busy1 most irascible man1 described dim colour and pensive emotion1 following1 beyond any man of his time1 an indolent muse2 while ,savage ,landor topped us all in calm nobility when the pen was in his hand1 as in the daily violence of his passion when he had laid it down4 ,he had in his ,imaginary ,conversations reminded us1 as it were1 that the ,venus de ,milo is a stone1 and yet he wrote when the copies did not come from the printer as soon as he expected3 ,i have 444 had the resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects and to forswear all future undertakings4 ,i have tried to sleep away my time and pass two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed4 ,i may speak of myself as a dead man4 ,i imagine ,keats to have been born with that thirst for luxury common to many at the outsetting of the ,romantic ,movement1 and not able1 like wealthy ,beckford1 to slake it with beautiful and strange objects4 ,it drove him to imaginary delights2 ignorant1 poor1 and in poor health1 and not perfectly well-bred1 he knew himself driven from tangible luxury2 meeting ,shelley1 he was resentful and suspicious because he1 as ,leigh ,hunt recalls1 being a little too sensitive on the score of his origin1 felt inclined to see in every man of birth his natural enemy4 ,,iv ,some thirty years ago ,i read a prose allegory by ,simeon ,solomon1 long out of print and unprocurable1 and remember or seem to remember a sentence1 a hollow image of fulfilled desire4 ,all happy art seems to me that hollow image1 but when its lineaments express also the poverty or the exasperation that set its maker to the work1 we call it tragic art4 ,keats but gave us his dream of luxury2 but while reading ,dante we never long escape the conflict1 partly because the verses are at moments a mirror of his history1 and yet more because that history is so clear and simple that it has the quality of art4 ,i am no ,dante scholar1 and ,i but read him in ,shadwell or in ,dante ,rossetti1 but ,i am always persuaded that he celebrated the most pure lady poet ever sung and the ,divine ,justice1 not merely because death took that lady and ,florence banished her singer1 but because he had to struggle in his own heart with his unjust anger and his lust2 while unlike those of the great poets1 who are at peace with the world and at war with themselves1 he fought a double war4 ,always1 says ,boccaccio1 both in youth and maturity he found room among his virtues for lechery2 or as ,matthew ,arnold preferred to change the phrase1 his conduct was exceeding irregular4 ,guido ,cavalcanti1 as ,rossetti translates him1 finds too much baseness in his friend3 ,and still thy speech of me1 heartfelt and kind1 ,hath made me treasure up thy poetry2 ,but now ,i dare not1 for thy abject life1 ,make manifest that ,i approve thy rhymes4 ,and when ,dante meets ,beatrice in ,eden1 does she not reproach him because1 when she had taken her presence away1 he followed in spite of warning dreams1 false images1 and now1 to save him in his own despite1 she has visited 444 the ,portals of the ,dead1 and chosen ,virgil for his courier8 ,while ,gino da ,pistoia complains that in his ,commedia his lovely heresies 444 beat the right down and let the wrong go free3 ,therefore his vain decrees1 wherein he lied1 ,must be like empty nutshells flung aside2 ,yet through the rash false witness set to grow1 ,french and ,italian vengeance on such pride ,may fall like ,anthony on ,cicero4 ,dante himself sings to ,giovanni ,guirino at the approach of death2 ,the ,king1 by whose rich grave his servants be ,with plenty beyond measure set to dwell1 ,ordains that ,i my bitter wrath dispel1 ,and lift mine eyes to the great ,consistory4 ,v ,we make out of the quarrel with others1 rhetoric1 but of the quarrel with ourselves1 poetry4 ,unlike the rhetoricians1 who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win1 we sing amid our uncertainty2 and1 smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude1 our rhythm shudders4 ,i think1 too1 that no fine poet1 no matter how disordered his life1 has ever1 even in his mere life1 had pleasure for his end4 ,johnson and ,dowson1 friends of my youth1 were dissipated men1 the one a drunkard1 the other a drunkard and mad about women1 and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out and were awakening from the dream2 and both1 one in life and art and one in art and less in life1 had a continual preoccupation with religion4 ,nor has any poet ,i have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist4 ,the other self1 the anti-self or the antithetical self1 as one may choose to name it1 comes but to those who are no longer deceived1 whose passion is reality4 ,the sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money1 in position1 in a marriage bell1 and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play1 that all is forgotten but the momentary aim4 ,they find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from ,lethe's wharf1 and for the awakening1 for the vision1 for the revelation of reality1 tradition offers us a different word--ecstasy4 ,an old artist wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of ,new ,york1 and how he found there a woman nursing a sick child1 and drew her story from her4 ,she spoke1 too1 of other children who had died3 a long tragic story4 ,i wanted to paint her1 he wrote1 if ,i denied myself any of the pain ,i could not believe in my own ecstasy4 ,we must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt1 for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect1 the only gift man can make to ,god1 and therefore it must be offered in sincerity4 ,neither must we create1 by hiding ugliness1 a false beauty as our offering to the world4 ,he only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs1 for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer4 ,we could not find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being but as water with fire1 a noise with silence4 ,he is of all things not impossible the most difficult1 for that only which comes easily can never be a portion of our being1 ,soon got1 soon gone1 as the proverb says4 ,i shall find the dark grow luminous1 the void fruitful when ,i understand ,i have nothing1 that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell4 ,the last knowledge has often come most quickly to turbulent men1 and for a season brought new turbulence4 ,when life puts away her conjuring tricks one by one1 those that deceive us longest may well be the wine-cup and the sensual kiss1 for our ,chambers of ,commerce and of ,commons have not the divine architecture of the body1 nor has their frenzy been ripened by the sun4 ,the poet1 because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold1 may find his pardon4 ,,vi ,i think the ,christian saint and hero1 instead of being merely dissatisfied1 make deliberate sacrifice4 ,i remember reading once an autobiography of a man who had made a daring journey in disguise to ,russian exiles in ,siberia1 and his telling how1 very timid as a child1 he schooled himself by wandering at night through dangerous streets4 ,saint and hero cannot be content to pass at moments to that hollow image and after become their heterogeneous selves1 but would always1 if they could1 resemble the antithetical self4 ,there is a shadow of type on type1 for in all great poetical styles there is saint or hero1 but when it is all over ,dante can return to his chambering and ,shakespeare to his pottle pot4 ,they sought no impossible perfection but when they handled paper or parchment4 ,so too will saint or hero1 because he works in his own flesh and blood and not in paper or parchment1 have more deliberate understanding of that other flesh and blood4 ,some years ago ,i began to believe that our culture1 with its doctrine of sincerity and self-realisation1 made us gentle and passive1 and that the ,middle ,ages and the ,renaissance were right to found theirs upon the imitation of ,christ or of some classic hero4 ,st4 ,francis and ,caesar ,borgia made themselves over-mastering1 creative persons by turning from the mirror to meditation upon a mask4 ,when ,i had this thought ,i could see nothing else in life4 ,i could not write the play ,i had planned1 for all became allegorical1 and though ,i tore up hundreds of pages in my endeavour to escape from allegory1 my imagination became sterile for nearly five years and ,i only escaped at last when ,i had mocked in a comedy my own thought4 ,i was always thinking of the element of imitation in style and in life1 and of the life beyond heroic imitation4 ,i find in an old diary3 ,i think all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other life1 on a re-birth as something not one's self1 something created in a moment and perpetually renewed2 in playing a game like that of a child where one loses the infinite pain of self-realisation1 in a grotesque or solemn painted face put on that one may hide from the terror of judgment4444 ,perhaps all the sins and energies of the world are but the world's flight from an infinite blinding beam2 and again at an earlier date3 ,if we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are1 and try to assume that second self1 we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves though we may accept one from others4 ,active virtue1 as distinguished from the passive acceptance of a code1 is therefore theatrical1 consciously dramatic1 the wearing of a mask4444 ,wordsworth1 great poet though he be1 is so often flat and heavy partly because his moral sense1 being a discipline he had not created1 a mere obedience1 has no theatrical element4 ,this increases his popularity with the better kind of journalists and politicians who have written books4 ,,vii ,i thought the hero found hanging upon some oak of ,dodona an ancient mask1 where perhaps there lingered something of ,egypt1 and that he changed it to his fancy1 touching it a little here and there1 gilding the eyebrows or putting a gilt line where the cheekbone comes2 that when at last he looked out of its eyes he knew another's breath came and went within his breath upon the carven lips1 and that his eyes were upon the instant fixed upon a visionary world3 how else could the god have come to us in the forest8 ,the good1 unlearned books say that ,he who keeps the distant stars within ,his fold comes without intermediary1 but ,plutarch's precepts and the experience of old women in ,soho1 ministering their witchcraft to servant girls at a shilling apiece1 will have it that a strange living man may win for ,daemon an illustrious dead man2 but now ,i add another thought3 the ,daemon comes not as like to like but seeking its own opposite1 for man and ,daemon feed the hunger in one another's hearts4 ,because the ghost is simple1 the man heterogeneous and confused1 they are but knit together when the man has found a mask whose lineaments permit the expression of all the man most lacks1 and it may be dreads1 and of that only4 ,the more insatiable in all desire1 the more resolute to refuse deception or an easy victory1 the more close will be the bond1 the more violent and definite the antipathy4 ,,viii ,i think that all religious men have believed that there is a hand not ours in the events of life1 and that1 as somebody says in ,wilhelm ,meister1 accident is destiny2 and ,i think it was ,heraclitus who said3 the ,daemon is our destiny4 ,when ,i think of life as a struggle with the ,daemon who would ever set us to the hardest work among those not impossible1 ,i understand why there is a deep enmity between a man and his destiny1 and why a man loves nothing but his destiny4 ,in an ,anglo-,saxon poem a certain man is called1 as though to call him something that summed up all heroism1 ,doom eager4 ,i am persuaded that the ,daemon delivers and deceives us1 and that he wove that netting from the stars and threw the net from his shoulder4 ,then my imagination runs from ,daemon to sweetheart1 and ,i divine an analogy that evades the intellect4 ,i remember that ,greek antiquity has bid us look for the principal stars1 that govern enemy and sweetheart alike1 among those that are about to set1 in the ,seventh ,house as the astrologers say2 and that it may be sexual love1 which is founded upon spiritual hate1 is an image of the warfare of man and ,daemon2 and ,i even wonder if there may not be some secret communion1 some whispering in the dark between ,daemon and sweetheart4 ,i remember how often women1 when in love1 grow superstitious1 and believe that they can bring their lovers good luck2 and ,i remember an old ,irish story of three young men who went seeking for help in battle into the house of the gods at ,slieve-na-mon4 ,you must first be married1 some god told them1 because a man's good or evil luck comes to him through a woman4 ,i sometimes fence for half-an-hour at the day's end1 and when ,i close my eyes upon the pillow ,i see a foil playing before me1 the button to my face4 ,we meet always in the deep of the mind1 whatever our work1 wherever our reverie carries us1 that other ,will4 ,,ix ,the poet finds and makes his mask in disappointment1 the hero in defeat4 ,the desire that is satisfied is not a great desire1 nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained4 ,the saint alone is not deceived1 neither thrusting with his shoulder nor holding out unsatisfied hands4 ,he would climb without wandering to the antithetical self of the world1 the ,indian narrowing his thought in meditation or driving it away in contemplation1 the ,christian copying ,christ1 the antithetical self of the classic world4 ,for a hero loves the world till it breaks him1 and the poet till it has broken faith2 but while the world was yet debonair1 the saint has turned away1 and because he renounced ,experience itself1 he will wear his mask as he finds it4 ,the poet or the hero1 no matter upon what bark they found their mask1 so teeming their fancy1 somewhat change its lineaments1 but the saint1 whose life is but a round of customary duty1 needs nothing the whole world does not need1 and day by day he scourges in his body the ,roman and ,christian conquerors3 ,alexander and ,caesar are famished in his cell4 ,his nativity is neither in disappointment nor in defeat1 but in a temptation like that of ,christ in the ,wilderness1 a contemplation in a single instant perpetually renewed of the ,kingdom of the ,world2 all1 because all renounced1 continually present showing their empty thrones4 ,edwin ,ellis1 remembering that ,christ also measured the sacrifice1 imagined himself in a fine poem as meeting at ,golgotha the phantom of ,christ the ,less1 the ,christ who might have lived a prosperous life without the knowledge of sin1 and who now wanders companionless a weary spectre day and night4 ,i saw him go and cried to him ',eli1 thou hast forsaken me4' ,the nails were burning through each limb1 ,he fled to find felicity4 ,and yet is the saint spared1 despite his martyr's crown and his vigil of desire1 defeat1 disappointed love1 and the sorrow of parting4 ,o ,night1 that did'st lead thus1 ,o ,night1 more lovely than the dawn of light1 ,o ,night1 that broughtest us ,lover to lover's sight1 ,lover with loved in marriage of delight6 ,upon my flowery breast1 ,wholly for him1 and save himself for none1 ,there did ,i give sweet rest ,to my beloved one2 ,the fanning of the cedars breathed thereon4 ,when the first morning air ,blew from the tower1 and waved his locks aside1 ,his hand1 with gentle care1 ,did wound me in the side1 ,and in my body all my senses died4 ,all things ,i then forgot1 ,my cheek on him who for my coming came2 ,all ceased and ,i was not1 ,leaving my cares and shame ,among the lilies1 and forgetting them4#a ,x ,it is not permitted to a man1 who takes up pen or chisel1 to seek originality1 for passion is his only business1 and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another4 ,he is like those phantom lovers in the ,japanese play who1 compelled to wander side by side and never mingle1 cry3 ,we neither wake nor sleep and passing our nights in a sorrow which is in the end a vision1 what are these scenes of spring to us8 ,if when we have found a mask we fancy that it will not match our mood till we have touched with gold the cheek1 we do it furtively1 and only where the oaks of ,dodona cast their deepest shadow1 for could he see our handiwork the ,daemon would fling himself out1 being our enemy4 ,,xi ,many years ago ,i saw1 between sleeping and waking1 a woman of incredible beauty shooting an arrow into the sky1 and from the moment when ,i made my first guess at her meaning ,i have thought much of the difference between the winding movement of nature and the straight line1 which is called in ,balzac's ,seraphita the ,mark of ,man1 but comes closer to my meaning as the mark of saint or sage4 ,i think that we who are poets and artists1 not being permitted to shoot beyond the tangible1 must go from desire to weariness and so to desire again1 and live but for the moment when vision comes to our weariness like terrible lightning1 in the humility of the brutes4 ,i do not doubt those heaving circles1 those winding arcs1 whether in one man's life or in that of an age1 are mathematical1 and that some in the world1 or beyond the world1 have foreknown the event and pricked upon the calendar the life-span of a ,christ1 a ,buddha1 a ,napoleon3 that every movement1 in feeling or in thought1 prepares in the dark by its own increasing clarity and confidence its own executioner4 ,we seek reality with the slow toil of our weakness and are smitten from the boundless and the unforeseen4 ,only when we are saint or sage1 and renounce ,experience itself1 can we1 in the language of the ,christian ,caballa1 leave the sudden lightning and the path of the serpent and become the bowman who aims his arrow at the centre of the sun4 ,,xii ,the doctors of medicine have discovered that certain dreams of the night1 for ,i do not grant them all1 are the day's unfulfilled desire1 and that our terror of desires condemned by the conscience has distorted and disturbed our dreams4 ,they have only studied the breaking into dream of elements that have remained unsatisfied without purifying discouragement4 ,we can satisfy in life a few of our passions and each passion but a little1 and our characters indeed but differ because no two men bargain alike4 ,the bargain1 the compromise1 is always threatened1 and when it is broken we become mad or hysterical or are in some way deluded2 and so when a starved or banished passion shows in a dream we1 before awaking1 break the logic that had given it the capacity of action and throw it into chaos again4 ,but the passions1 when we know that they cannot find fulfilment1 become vision2 and a vision1 whether we wake or sleep1 prolongs its power by rhythm and pattern1 the wheel where the world is butterfly4 ,we need no protection1 but it does1 for if we become interested in ourselves1 in our own lives1 we pass out of the vision4 ,whether it is we or the vision that create the pattern1 who set the wheel turning1 it is hard to say1 but certainly we have a hundred ways of keeping it near us3 we select our images from past times1 we turn from our own age and try to feel ,chaucer nearer than the daily paper4 ,it compels us to cover all it cannot incorporate1 and would carry us when it comes in sleep to that moment when even sleep closes her eyes and dreams begin to dream2 and we are taken up into a clear light and are forgetful even of our own names and actions and yet in perfect possession of ourselves murmur like ,faust1 ,stay1 moment1 and murmur in vain4 ,,xiii ,a poet1 when he is growing old1 will ask himself if he cannot keep his mask and his vision without new bitterness1 new disappointment4 ,could he if he would1 knowing how frail his vigour from youth up1 copy ,landor who lived loving and hating1 ridiculous and unconquered1 into extreme old age1 all lost but the favour of his muses4 ,the mother of the muses we are taught ,is memory2 she has left me2 they remain ,and shake my shoulder urging me to sing4 ,surely1 he may think1 now that ,i have found vision and mask ,i need not suffer any longer4 ,he will buy perhaps some small old house where like ,ariosto he can dig his garden1 and think that in the return of birds and leaves1 or moon and sun1 and in the evening flight of the rooks he may discover rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and so never awake out of vision4 ,then he will remember ,wordsworth withering into eighty years1 honoured and empty-witted1 and climb to some waste room and find1 forgotten there by youth1 some bitter crust4 ,february #be1 #aiag4 ,,anima ,,mundi ,i ,i have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of ,indian and ,japanese poets1 old women in ,connaught1 mediums in ,soho1 lay brothers whom ,i imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their village1 learned authors who refer all to antiquity2 to immerse it in the general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have begun to call the subconscious2 to liberate it from all that comes of councils and committees1 from the world as it is seen from universities or from populous towns2 and that ,i might so believe ,i have murmured evocations and frequented mediums1 delighted in all that displayed great problems through sensuous images1 or exciting phrases1 accepting from abstract schools but a few technical words that are so old they seem but broken architraves fallen amid bramble and grass1 and have put myself to school where all things are seen3 ,a ,tenedo ,tacitae per ,amica ,silentia ,lunae4 ,at one time ,i thought to prove my conclusions by quoting from diaries where ,i have recorded certain strange events the moment they happened1 but now ,i have changed my mind--,i will but say like the ,arab boy that became ,vizier3 ,o brother1 ,i have taken stock in the desert sand and of the sayings of antiquity4 ,,ii ,there is a letter of ,goethe's1 though ,i cannot remember where1 that explains evocation1 though he was but thinking of literature4 ,he described some friend who had complained of literary sterility as too intelligent4 ,one must allow the images to form with all their associations before one criticises4 ,if one is critical too soon1 he wrote1 they will not form at all4 ,if you suspend the critical faculty1 ,i have discovered1 either as the result of training1 or1 if you have the gift1 by passing into a slight trance1 images pass rapidly before you4 ,if you can suspend also desire1 and let them form at their own will1 your absorption becomes more complete and they are more clear in colour1 more precise in articulation1 and you and they begin to move in the midst of what seems a powerful light4 ,but the images pass before you linked by certain associations1 and indeed in the first instance you have called them up by their association with traditional forms and sounds4 ,you have discovered how1 if you can but suspend will and intellect1 to bring up from the subconscious anything you already possess a fragment of4 ,those who follow the old rule keep their bodies still and their minds awake and clear1 dreading especially any confusion between the images of the mind and the objects of sense2 they seek to become1 as it were1 polished mirrors4 ,i had no natural gift for this clear quiet1 as ,i soon discovered1 for my mind is abnormally restless2 and ,i was seldom delighted by that sudden luminous definition of form which makes one understand almost in spite of oneself that one is not merely imagining4 ,i therefore invented a new process4 ,i had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and form1 all that ,i had failed to find while awake2 and ,i elaborated a symbolism of natural objects that ,i might give myself dreams during sleep1 or rather visions1 for they had none of the confusion of dreams1 by laying upon my pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or leaves4 ,even to-day1 after twenty years1 the exaltations and the messages that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem of all moments of my life the happiest and the wisest4 ,after a time1 perhaps because the novelty wearing off the symbol lost its power1 or because my work at the ,irish ,theatre became too exciting1 my sleep lost its responsiveness4 ,i had fellow-scholars1 and now it was ,i and now they who made some discovery4 ,before the mind's eye1 whether in sleep or waking1 came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read1 and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory1 ,i came to believe in a great memory passing on from generation to generation4 ,but that was not enough1 for these images showed intention and choice4 ,they had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one's knowledge4 ,if no mind was there1 why should ,i suddenly come upon salt and antimony1 upon the liquefaction of the gold1 as they were understood by the alchemists1 or upon some detail of cabalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his never-published manuscripts1 and who can have put together so ingeniously1 working by some law of association and yet with clear intention and personal application1 certain mythological images4 ,they had shown themselves to several minds1 a fragment at a time1 and had only shown their meaning when the puzzle picture had been put together4 ,the thought was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age1 and that these minds still saw and thought and chose4 ,our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea3 ,henry ,more's ,anima ,mundi1 ,wordsworth's immortal sea which brought us hither 444 and near whose edge the children sport1 and in that sea there were some who swam or sailed1 explorers who perhaps knew all its shores4 ,,iii ,i had always to compel myself to fix the imagination upon the minds behind the personifications1 and yet the personifications were themselves living and vivid4 ,the minds that swayed these seemingly fluid images had doubtless form1 and those images themselves seemed1 as it were1 mirrored in a living substance whose form is but change of form4 ,from tradition and perception1 one thought of one's own life as symbolised by earth1 the place of heterogeneous things1 the images as mirrored in water and the images themselves one could divine but as air2 and beyond it all there was1 ,i felt confident1 certain aims and governing loves1 the fire that makes all simple4 ,yet the images themselves were fourfold1 and one judged their meaning in part from the predominance of one out of the four elements1 or that of the fifth element1 the veil hiding another four1 a bird born out of the fire4 ,,iv ,i longed to know something even if it were but the family and ,christian names of those minds that ,i could divine1 and that yet remained always as it seemed impersonal4 ,the sense of contact came perhaps but two or three times with clearness and certainty1 but it left among all to whom it came some trace1 a sudden silence1 as it were1 in the midst of thought or perhaps at moments of crisis a faint voice4 ,were our masters right when they declared so solidly that we should be content to know these presences that seemed friendly and near but as the phantom in ,coleridge's poem1 and to think of them perhaps1 as having1 as ,st4 ,thomas says1 entered upon the eternal possession of themselves in one single moment8 ,all look and likeness caught from earth1 ,all accident of kin and birth1 ,had passed away4 ,there was no trace ,of ought on that illumined face1 ,upraised beneath the rifted stone1 ,but of one spirit all her own2 ,she1 she herself and only she1 ,shone through her body visibly4 ,v ,one night ,i heard a voice that said3 ,the love of ,god for every human soul is infinite1 for every human soul is unique2 no other can satisfy the same need in ,god4 ,our masters had not denied that personality outlives the body or even that its rougher shape may cling to us a while after death1 but only that we should seek it in those who are dead4 ,yet when ,i went among the country people1 ,i found that they sought and found the old fragilities1 infirmities1 physiognomies that living stirred affection4 ,the ,spiddal knowledgeable man1 who had his knowledge from his sister's ghost1 noticed every hallowe'en1 when he met her at the end of the garden1 that her hair was greyer4 ,had she perhaps to exhaust her allotted years in the neighbourhood of her home1 having died before her time8 ,because no authority seemed greater than that of this knowledge running backward to the beginning of the world1 ,i began that study of spiritism so despised by ,stanislas de ,gaeta1 the one eloquent learned scholar who has written of magic in our generation4 ,,vi ,i know much that ,i could never have known had ,i not learnt to consider in the after life what1 there as here1 is rough and disjointed2 nor have ,i found that the mediums in ,connaught and ,soho have anything ,i cannot find some light on in ,henry ,more1 who was called during his life the holiest man now walking upon the earth4 ,all souls have a vehicle or body1 and when one has said that1 with ,more and the ,platonists one has escaped from the abstract schools who seek always the power of some church or institution1 and found oneself with great poetry1 and superstition which is but popular poetry1 in a pleasant dangerous world4 ,beauty is indeed but bodily life in some ideal condition4 ,the vehicle of the human soul is what used to be called the animal spirits1 and ,henry ,more quotes from ,hippocrates this sentence3 ,the mind of man is 444 not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly1 but by a clear luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood4 ,these animal spirits fill up all parts of the body and make up the body of air1 as certain writers of the seventeenth century have called it4 ,the soul has a plastic power1 and can after death1 or during life1 should the vehicle leave the body for a while1 mould it to any shape it will by an act of imagination1 though the more unlike to the habitual that shape is1 the greater the effort4 ,to living and dead alike1 the purity and abundance of the animal spirits are a chief power4 ,the soul can mould from these an apparition clothed as if in life1 and make it visible by showing it to our mind's eye1 or by building into its substance certain particles drawn from the body of a medium till it is as visible and tangible as any other object4 ,to help that building the ancients offered fragrant gum1 the odour of flowers1 and it may be pieces of virgin wax4 ,the half materialised vehicle slowly exudes from the skin in dull luminous drops or condenses from a luminous cloud1 the light fading as weight and density increase4 ,the witch1 going beyond the medium1 offered to the slowly animating phantom certain drops of her blood4 ,the vehicle once separate from the living man or woman may be moulded by the souls of others as readily as by its own soul1 and even it seems by the souls of the living4 ,it becomes a part for a while of that stream of images which ,i have compared to reflections upon water4 ,but how does it follow that souls who never have handled the modelling tool or the brush1 make perfect images8 ,those materialisations who imprint their powerful faces upon paraffin wax1 leave there sculpture that would have taken a good artist1 making and imagining1 many hours4 ,how did it follow that an ignorant woman could1 as ,henry ,more believed1 project her vehicle in so good a likeness of a hare1 that horse and hound and huntsman followed with the bugle blowing8 ,is not the problem the same as of those finely articulated scenes and patterns that come out of the dark1 seemingly completed in the winking of an eye1 as we are lying half asleep1 and of all those elaborate images that drift in moments of inspiration or evocation before the mind's eye8 ,our animal spirits or vehicles are but as it were a condensation of the vehicle of ,anima ,mundi1 and give substance to its images in the faint materialisation of our common thought1 or more grossly when a ghost is our visitor4 ,it should be no great feat1 once those images have dipped into our vehicle1 to take their portraits in the photographic camera4 ,henry ,more will have it that a hen scared by a hawk when the cock is treading1 hatches out a hawkheaded chicken 7,i am no stickler for the fact71 because before the soul of the unborn bird could give the shape the deeply impassioned fancy of the mother called from the general cistern of form a competing image4 ,the soul of the world1 he runs on1 interposes and insinuates into all generations of things while the matter is fluid and yielding1 which would induce a man to believe that she may not stand idle in the transformation of the vehicle of the daemons1 but assist the fancies and desires1 and so help to clothe them and to utter them according to their own pleasures2 or it may be sometimes against their wills as the unwieldiness of the mother's fancy forces upon her a monstrous birth4 ,though images appear to flow and drift1 it may be that we but change in our relation to them1 now losing1 now finding with the shifting of our minds2 and certainly ,henry ,more speaks by the book1 claiming that those images may be hard to the right touch as pillars of crystal and as solidly coloured as our own to the right eyes4 ,shelley1 a good ,platonist1 seems in his earliest work to set this general soul in the place of ,god1 an opinion1 one may find from ,more's friend ,cudworth now affirmed1 now combated1 by classic authority2 but ,more would steady us with a definition4 ,the general soul as apart from its vehicle is a substance incorporeal but without sense and animadversion pervading the whole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein1 according to the sundry predispositions and occasions1 in the parts it works upon1 raising such phenomena in the world1 by directing the parts of the matter and their motion as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical powers4 ,i must assume that sense and animadversion1 perception and direction1 are always faculties of individual soul1 and that1 as ,blake said1 ,god only acts or is in existing beings or men4 ,,vii ,the old theological conception of the individual soul as bodiless or abstract led to what ,henry ,more calls contradictory debate as to how many angels could dance booted and spurred upon the point of a needle1 and made it possible for rationalist physiology to persuade us that our thought has no corporeal existence but in the molecules of the brain4 ,shelley was of opinion that the thoughts which are called real or external objects differed but in regularity of occurrence from hallucinations1 dreams and ideas of madmen1 and noticed that he had dreamed1 therefore lessening the difference1 three several times between intervals of two or more years the same precise dream4 ,if all our mental images no less than apparitions 7and ,i see no reason to distinguish7 are forms existing in the general vehicle of ,anima ,mundi1 and mirrored in our particular vehicle1 many crooked things are made straight4 ,i am persuaded that a logical process1 or a series of related images1 has body and period1 and ,i think of ,anima ,mundi as a great pool or garden where it spreads through allotted growth like a great water plant or branches more fragrantly in the air4 ,indeed as ,spenser's ,garden of ,adonis3 ,there is the first seminary ,of all things that are born to live and die ,according to their kynds4 ,the soul by changes of vital congruity1 ,more says1 draws to it a certain thought1 and this thought draws by its association the sequence of many thoughts1 endowing them with a life in the vehicle meted out according to the intensity of the first perception4 ,a seed is set growing1 and this growth may go on apart from the power1 apart even from the knowledge of the soul4 ,if ,i wish to transfer a thought ,i may think1 let us say1 of ,cinderella's slipper1 and my subject may see an old woman coming out of a chimney2 or going to sleep ,i may wish to wake at seven o'clock and1 though ,i never think of it again1 ,i shall wake upon the instant4 ,the thought has completed itself1 certain acts of logic1 turns1 and knots in the stem have been accomplished out of sight and out of reach as it were4 ,we are always starting these parasitic vegetables and letting them coil beyond our knowledge1 and may become1 like that lady in ,balzac who1 after a life of sanctity1 plans upon her deathbed to fly with her renounced lover4 ,after death a dream1 a desire she had perhaps ceased to believe in1 perhaps ceased almost to remember1 must have recurred again and again with its anguish and its happiness4 ,we can only refuse to start the wandering sequence or1 if start it does1 hold it in the intellectual light where time gallops1 and so keep it from slipping down into the sluggish vehicle4 ,the toil of the living is to free themselves from an endless sequence of objects1 and that of the dead to free themselves from an endless sequence of thoughts4 ,one sequence begets another1 and these have power because of all those things we do1 not for their own sake but for an imagined good4 ,,viii ,spiritism1 whether of folk-lore or of the seance room1 the visions of ,swedenborg1 and the speculation of the ,platonists and ,japanese plays1 will have it that we may see at certain roads and in certain houses old murders acted over again1 and in certain fields dead huntsmen riding with horse and hound1 or ancient armies fighting above bones or ashes4 ,we carry to ,anima ,mundi our memory1 and that memory is for a time our external world2 and all passionate moments recur again and again1 for passion desires its own recurrence more than any event1 and whatever there is of corresponding complacency or remorse is our beginning of judgment2 nor do we remember only the events of life1 for thoughts bred of longing and of fear1 all those parasitic vegetables that have slipped through our fingers1 come again like a rope's end to smite us upon the face2 and as ,cornelius ,agrippa writes3 ,we may dream ourselves to be consumed in flame and persecuted by daemons1 and certain spirits have complained that they would be hard put to it to arouse those who died1 believing they could not awake till a trumpet shrilled4 ,a ghost in a ,japanese play is set afire by a fantastic scruple1 and though a ,buddhist priest explains that the fire would go out of itself if the ghost but ceased to believe in it1 it cannot cease to believe4 ,cornelius ,agrippa called such dreaming souls hobgoblins1 and when ,hamlet refused the bare bodkin because of what dreams may come1 it was from no mere literary fancy4 ,the soul can indeed1 it appears1 change these objects built about us by the memory1 as it may change its shape2 but the greater the change1 the greater the effort and the sooner the return to the habitual images4 ,doubtless in either case the effort is often beyond its power4 ,years ago ,i was present when a woman consulted ,madame ,blavatsky for a friend who saw her newly-dead husband nightly as a decaying corpse and smelt the odour of the grave4 ,when he was dying1 said ,madame ,blavatsky1 he thought the grave the end1 and now that he is dead cannot throw off that imagination4 ,a ,brahmin once told an actress friend of mine that he disliked acting1 because if a man died playing ,hamlet1 he would be ,hamlet in eternity4 ,yet after a time the soul partly frees itself and becomes the shape changer of the legends1 and can cast1 like the mediaeval magician1 what illusions it would4 ,there is an ,irish countryman in one of ,lady ,gregory's books who had eaten with a stranger on the road1 and some while later vomited1 to discover he had but eaten chopped up grass4 ,one thinks1 too1 of the spirits that show themselves in the images of wild creatures4 ,,ix ,the dead1 as the passionate necessity wears out1 come into a measure of freedom and may turn the impulse of events1 started while living1 in some new direction1 but they cannot originate except through the living4 ,then gradually they perceive1 although they are still but living in their memories1 harmonies1 symbols1 and patterns1 as though all were being refashioned by an artist1 and they are moved by emotions1 sweet for no imagined good but in themselves1 like those of children dancing in a ring2 and ,i do not doubt that they make love in that union which ,swedenborg has said is of the whole body and seems from far off an incandescence4 ,hitherto shade has communicated with shade in moments of common memory that recur like the figures of a dance in terror or in joy1 but now they run together like to like1 and their ,covens and ,fleets have rhythm and pattern4 ,this running together and running of all to a centre and yet without loss of identity1 has been prepared for by their exploration of their moral life1 of its beneficiaries and its victims1 and even of all its untrodden paths1 and all their thoughts have moulded the vehicle and become event and circumstance4 ,x ,there are two realities1 the terrestrial and the condition of fire4 ,all power is from the terrestrial condition1 for there all opposites meet and there only is the extreme of choice possible1 full freedom4 ,and there the heterogeneous is1 and evil1 for evil is the strain one upon another of opposites2 but in the condition of fire is all music and all rest4 ,between is the condition of air where images have but a borrowed life1 that of memory or that reflected upon them when they symbolise colours and intensities of fire1 the place of shades who are in the whirl of those who are fading1 and who cry like those amorous shades in the ,japanese play3 ,that we may acquire power ,even in our faint substance1 ,we will show forth even now1 ,and though it be but in a dream1 ,our form of repentance4 ,after so many rhythmic beats the soul must cease to desire its images1 and can1 as it were1 close its eyes4 ,when all sequence comes to an end1 time comes to an end1 and the soul puts on the rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body and contemplates all the events of its memory and every possible impulse in an eternal possession of itself in one single moment4 ,that condition is alone animate1 all the rest is phantasy1 and from thence come all the passions1 and some have held1 the very heat of the body4 ,time drops in decay1 ,like a candle burnt out1 ,and the mountains and the woods ,have their day1 have their day4 ,what one1 in the rout ,of the fire-born moods1 ,has fallen away8 ,,xi ,the soul cannot have much knowledge till it has shaken off the habit of time and of place1 but till that hour it must fix its attention upon what is near1 thinking of objects one after another as we run the eye or the finger over them4 ,its intellectual power cannot but increase and alter as its perceptions grow simultaneous4 ,yet even now we seem at moments to escape from time in what we call prevision1 and from place when we see distant things in a dream and in concurrent dreams4 ,a couple of years ago1 while in meditation1 my head seemed surrounded by a conventional sun's rays1 and when ,i went to bed ,i had a long dream of a woman with her hair on fire4 ,i awoke and lit a candle1 and discovered presently from the odour that in doing so ,i had set my own hair on fire4 ,i dreamed very lately that ,i was writing a story1 and at the same time ,i dreamed that ,i was one of the characters in that story and seeking to touch the heart of some girl in defiance of the author's intention2 and concurrently with all that1 ,i was as another self trying to strike with the button of a foil a great china jar4 ,the obscurity of the prophetic books of ,william ,blake1 which were composed in a state of vision1 comes almost wholly from these concurrent dreams4 ,everybody has some story or some experience of the sudden knowledge in sleep or waking of some event1 a misfortune for the most part happening to some friend far off4 ,,xii ,the dead living in their memories1 are1 ,i am persuaded1 the source of all that we call instinct1 and it is their love and their desire1 all unknowing1 that make us drive beyond our reason1 or in defiance of our interest it may be2 and it is the dream martens that1 all unknowing1 are master-masons to the living martens building about church windows their elaborate nests2 and in their turn1 the phantoms are stung to a keener delight from a concord between their luminous pure vehicle and our strong senses4 ,it were to reproach the power or the beneficence of ,god1 to believe those children of ,alexander who died wretchedly could not throw an urnful to the heap1 nor that ,caesarea#b murdered in childhood1 whom ,cleopatra bore to ,caesar1 nor that so brief-lived younger ,pericles ,aspasia bore being so nobly born4 ,,xiii ,because even the most wise dead can but arrange their memories as we arrange pieces upon a chess-board and obey remembered words alone1 he who would turn magician is forbidden by the ,zoroastrian oracle to change barbarous words of invocation4 ,communication with ,anima ,mundi is through the association of thoughts or images or objects2 and the famous dead and those of whom but a faint memory lingers1 can still--and it is for no other end that1 all unknowing1 we value posthumous fame--tread the corridor and take the empty chair4 ,a glove or a name can call their bearer2 the shadows come to our elbow amid their old undisturbed habitations1 and materialisation itself is easier1 it may be1 among walls1 or by rocks and trees1 that carry upon them particles the vehicles cast off in some extremity while they had still animate bodies4 ,certainly the mother returns from the grave1 and with arms that may be visible and solid1 for a hurried moment1 can comfort a neglected child or set the cradle rocking2 and in all ages men have known and affirmed that when the soul is troubled1 those that are a shade and a song3 live there1 ,and live like winds of light on dark or stormy air4 ,,xiv ,awhile they live again those passionate moments1 not knowing they are dead1 and then they know and may awake or half awake to be our visitors4 ,how is their dream changed as ,time drops away and their senses multiply8 ,does their stature alter1 do their eyes grow more brilliant8 ,certainly the dreams stay the longer1 the greater their passion when alive3 ,helen may still open her chamber door to ,paris or watch him from the wall1 and know she is dreaming but because nights and days are poignant or the stars unreckonably bright4 ,surely of the passionate dead we can but cry in words ,ben ,jonson meant for none but ,shakespeare3 ,so rammed are they with life they can but grow in life with being4 ,,xv ,the inflowing from their mirrored life1 who themselves receive it from the ,condition of ,fire1 falls upon the ,winding ,path called the ,path of the ,serpent1 and that inflowing coming alike to men and to animals is called natural4 ,there is another inflow which is not natural but intellectual1 and is from the fire2 and it descends through souls who pass for a lengthy or a brief period out of the mirror life1 as we in sleep out of the bodily life1 and though it may fall upon a sleeping serpent1 it falls principally upon straight paths4 ,in so far as a man is like all other men1 the inflow finds him upon the winding path1 and in so far as he is a saint or sage1 upon the straight path4 ,,xvi ,daemon and man are opposites2 man passes from heterogeneous objects to the simplicity of fire1 and the ,daemon is drawn to objects because through them he obtains power1 the extremity of choice4 ,for only in men's minds can he meet even those in the ,condition of ,fire who are not of his own kin4 ,he1 by using his mediatorial shades1 brings man again and again to the place of choice1 heightening temptation that the choice may be as final as possible1 imposing his own lucidity upon events1 leading his victim to whatever among works not impossible is the most difficult4 ,he suffers with man as some firm-souled man suffers with the woman he but loves the better because she is extravagant and fickle4 ,his descending power is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag1 illuminating the passive and active properties1 the tree's two sorts of fruit3 it is the sudden lightning1 for all his acts of power are instantaneous4 ,we perceive in a pulsation of the artery1 and after slowly decline4 ,,xvii ,each ,daemon is drawn to whatever man or1 if its nature is more general1 to whatever nation it most differs from1 and it shapes into its own image the antithetical dream of man or nation4 ,the ,jews had already shown by the precious metals1 by the ostentatious wealth of ,solomon's temple1 the passion that has made them the money-lenders of the modern world4 ,if they had not been rapacious1 lustful1 narrow and persecuting beyond the people of their time1 the incarnation had been impossible2 but it was an intellectual impulse from the ,condition of ,fire that shaped their antithetical self into that of the classic world4 ,so always it is an impulse from some ,daemon that gives to our vague1 unsatisfied desire1 beauty1 a meaning and a form all can accept4 ,,xviii ,only in rapid and subtle thought1 or in faint accents heard in the quiet of the mind1 can the thought of the spirit come to us but little changed2 for a mind1 that grasps objects simultaneously according to the degree of its liberation1 does not think the same thought with the mind that sees objects one after another4 ,the purpose of most religious teaching1 of the insistence upon the submission to ,god's will above all1 is to make certain of the passivity of the vehicle where it is most pure and most tenuous4 ,when we are passive where the vehicle is coarse1 we become mediumistic1 and the spirits who mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can only rarely and with great difficulty speak their own thoughts and keep their own memory4 ,they are subject to a kind of drunkenness and are stupefied1 old writers said1 as if with honey1 and readily mistake our memory for their own1 and believe themselves whom and what we please4 ,we bewilder and overmaster them1 for once they are among the perceptions of successive objects1 our reason1 being but an instrument created and sharpened by those objects1 is stronger than their intellect1 and they can but repeat with brief glimpses from another state1 our knowledge and our words4 ,,xix ,a friend once dreamed that she saw many dragons climbing upon the steep side of a cliff and continually falling4 ,henry ,more thought that those who1 after centuries of life1 failed to find the rhythmic body and to pass into the ,condition of ,fire1 were born again4 ,edmund ,spenser1 who was among ,more's masters1 affirmed that nativity without giving it a cause3 ,after that they againe retourned beene1 ,they in that garden planted be agayne1 ,and grow afresh1 as they had never seene ,fleshy corruption1 nor mortal payne4 ,some thousand years so doen they ther remayne1 ,and then of him are clad with other hew1 ,or sent into the chaungeful world agayne1 ,till thither they retourn where first they grew3 ,so like a wheele1 around they roam from old to new4 ,the dead who speak to us deny metempsychosis1 perhaps because they but know a little better what they knew alive2 while the dead in ,asia1 for perhaps no better reason1 affirm it1 and so we are left amid plausibilities and uncertainties4 ,,xx ,but certainly it is always to the ,condition of ,fire1 where emotion is not brought to any sudden stop1 where there is neither wall nor gate1 that we would rise2 and the mask plucked from the oak-tree is but my imagination of rhythmic body4 ,we may pray to that last condition by any name so long as we do not pray to it as a thing or a thought1 and most prayers call it man or woman or child3 ,for mercy has a human heart1 ,pity a human face4 ,within ourselves ,reason and ,will1 who are the man and woman1 hold out towards a hidden altar1 a laughing or crying child4 ,,xxi ,when ,i remember that ,shelley calls our minds mirrors of the fire for which all thirst1 ,i cannot but ask the question all have asked1 ,what or who has cracked the mirror8 ,i begin to study the only self that ,i can know1 myself1 and to wind the thread upon the perne again4 ,at certain moments1 always unforeseen1 ,i become happy1 most commonly when at hazard ,i have opened some book of verse4 ,sometimes it is my own verse when1 instead of discovering new technical flaws1 ,i read with all the excitement of the first writing4 ,perhaps ,i am sitting in some crowded restaurant1 the open book beside me1 or closed1 my excitement having over-brimmed the page4 ,i look at the strangers near as if ,i had known them all my life1 and it seems strange that ,i cannot speak to them3 everything fills me with affection1 ,i have no longer any fears or any needs2 ,i do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end4 ,it seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that one half imagines that the images from ,anima ,mundi1 embodied there and drunk with that sweetness1 would1 as some country drunkard who had thrown a wisp into his own thatch1 burn up time4 ,it may be an hour before the mood passes1 but latterly ,i seem to understand that ,i enter upon it the moment ,i cease to hate4 ,i think the common condition of our life is hatred--,i know that this is so with me--irritation with public or private events or persons4 ,there is no great matter in forgetfulness of servants1 or the delays of tradesmen1 but how forgive the ill-breeding of ,carlyle1 or the rhetoric of ,swinburne1 or that woman who murmurs over the dinner-table the opinion of her daily paper8 ,and only a week ago last ,sunday1 ,i hated the spaniel who disturbed a partridge on her nest1 a trout who took my bait and yet broke away unhooked4 ,the books say that our happiness comes from the opposite of hate1 but ,i am not certain1 for we may love unhappily4 ,and plainly1 when ,i have closed a book too stirred to go on reading1 and in those brief intense visions of sleep1 ,i have something about me that1 though it makes me love1 is more like innocence4 ,i am in the place where the daemon is1 but ,i do not think he is with me until ,i begin to make a new personality1 selecting among those images1 seeking always to satisfy a hunger grown out of conceit with daily diet2 and yet as ,i write the words1 ,i select1 ,i am full of uncertainty1 not knowing when ,i am the finger1 when the clay4 ,once1 twenty years ago1 ,i seemed to awake from sleep to find my body rigid1 and to hear a strange voice speaking these words through my lips as through lips of stone3 ,we make an image of him who sleeps1 and it is not him who sleeps1 and we call it ,emmanuel4 ,,xxii ,as ,i go up and down my stair and pass the gilded ,moorish wedding-chest where ,i keep my barbarous words1 ,i wonder will ,i take to them once more1 for ,i am baffled by those voices that still speak as to ,odysseus but as the bats2 or now that ,i shall in a little be growing old1 to some kind of simple piety like that of an old woman4 ,may #i1 #aiag4 ,,epilogue ,,my ,,dear ,,maurice--,i was often in ,france before you were born or when you were but a little child4 ,when ,i went for the first or second time ,mallarme had just written3 ,all our age is full of the trembling of the veil of the temple4 ,one met everywhere young men of letters who talked of magic4 ,a distinguished ,english man of letters asked me to call with him on ,stanislas de ,gaeta because he did not dare go alone to that mysterious house4 ,i met from time to time with the ,german poet ,doukenday1 a grave ,swede whom ,i only discovered after years to have been ,strindberg1 then looking for the philosopher's stone in a lodging near the ,luxembourg2 and one day in the chambers of ,stuart ,merrill the poet1 ,i spoke with a young ,arabic scholar who displayed a large1 roughly-made gold ring which had grown to the shape of his finger4 ,its gold had no hardening alloy1 he said1 because it was made by his master1 a ,jewish ,rabbi1 of alchemical gold4 ,my critical mind--was it friend or enemy8--mocked1 and yet ,i was delighted4 ,paris was as legendary as ,connaught4 ,this new pride1 that of the adept1 was added to the pride of the artist4 ,villiers de ,l',isle ,adam1 the haughtiest of men1 had but lately died4 ,i had read his ,axel slowly and laboriously as one reads a sacred book--my ,french was very bad--and had applauded it upon the stage4 ,as ,i could not follow the spoken words1 ,i was not bored even where ,axel and the ,commander discussed philosophy for a half-hour instead of beginning their duel4 ,if ,i felt impatient it was only that they delayed the coming of the adept ,janus1 for ,i hoped to recognise the moment when ,axel cries3 ,i know that lamp1 it was burning before ,solomon2 or that other when he cries3 ,as for living1 our servants will do that for us4 ,the movement of letters had been haughty even before ,magic had touched it4 ,rimbaud had sung3 ,am ,i an old maid that ,i should fear the embrace of death8 ,and everywhere in ,paris and in ,london young men boasted of the garret1 and claimed to have no need of what the crowd values4 ,last summer you1 who were at the age ,i was when first ,i heard of ,mallarme and of ,verlaine1 spoke much of the ,french poets young men and women read to-day4 ,claudel ,i already somewhat knew1 but you read to me for the first time from ,jammes a dialogue between a poet and a bird1 that made us cry1 and a whole volume of ,peguy's ,mystere de la ,charite de ,jeanne d',arc4 ,nothing remained the same but the preoccupation with religion1 for these poets submitted everything to the ,pope1 and all1 even ,claudel1 a proud oratorical man1 affirmed that they saw the world with the eyes of vine-dressers and charcoal-burners4 ,it was no longer the soul1 self-moving and self-teaching--the magical soul--but ,mother ,france and ,mother ,church4 ,have not my thoughts run through a like round1 though ,i have not found my tradition in the ,catholic ,church1 which was not the church of my childhood1 but where the tradition is1 as ,i believe1 more universal and more ancient8 ,w4 ,b4 ,y4 ,may #aa1 #aiag4 ,printed in the ,united ,states of ,america4 ,the following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or on kindred subjects4 ,responsibilities ,,by ,,william ,,butler ,,yeats ,cloth1 #a4be ,william ,butler ,yeats is by far the biggest poetic personality living among us at present4 ,he is great both as a lyric and dramatist poet4 --,john ,masefield4 ,this poetry has the rhythm that is incantation and sorcery1 that is not of the senses nor of the spirit1 but of a mingling which is exaltation4 --,chicago ,evening ,post4 ,under the title of ,responsibilities ,william ,butler ,yeats brings together some of his recent poems4 ,notable still for his freshness of thought1 his keen originality1 and his purely poetic conception of thoughts and facts1 ,mr4 ,yeats sometimes makes us wonder how he has so long been able to hold his style above the ever rising level of modern poetry4 ,no man stands so apart in his own perfection as does this ,irish poet and playwright1 in his art of discovering truths remote and beautiful4 ,serious1 vital thoughts he veils1 as the genuine poet1 in a cloak of fine rhythmical expression4 ,it is1 after all1 as a poet that the majority of people like to think of ,mr4 ,yeats1 and this splendid collection1 the first in a number of years1 is assured of a warm welcome4 ,,by ,,william ,,butler ,,yeats ,the ,cutting of an ,agate #abmo1 #a4ej ,mr4 ,yeats is probably the most important as well as the most widely known of the men concerned directly in the so-called ,celtic renaissance4 ,more than this1 he stands among the few men to be reckoned with in modern poetry4--,new ,york ,herald4 ,the ,green ,helmet and ,other ,poems ,decorated cloth1 #abmo1 #a4be ,the initial piece in this volume is a deliciously conceived heroic farce1 quaint in humor and sprightly in action4 ,it tells of the difficulty in which two simple ,irish folk find themselves when they enter into an agreement with an apparition of the sea1 who demands that they knock off his head and who maintains that after they have done that he will knock off theirs4 ,there is a real meaning in the play which it will not take the thoughtful reader long to discover4 ,besides this there are a number of shorter poems1 notably one in which ,mr4 ,yeats answers the critics of ,the ,playboy of the ,western ,world4 ,lyrical and ,dramatic ,poems ,in ,two ,volumes ,vol4 ,i4 ,lyrical ,poems1 #b4jj ,leather1 #b4be ,vol4 ,,ii4 ,plays 7,revised71 #b4jj ,leather1 #b4be ,the two-volume edition of the ,irish poet's works included everything he has done in verse up to the present time4 ,the first volume contains his lyrics2 the second includes all of his five dramas in verse3 ,the ,countess ,cathleen1 ,the ,land of ,heart's ,desire1 ,the ,king's ,threshold1 ,on ,baile's ,strand1 and ,the ,shadowy ,waters4 ,reveries ,over ,childhood and ,youth #b4jj ,in this book the celebrated ,irish author gives us his reminiscences of his childhood and youth4 ,the memories are written1 as is to be expected1 in charming prose4 ,they have the appeal invariably attached to the account of a sensitive childhood4 ,the ,hour ,glass and ,other ,plays #a4be ,the ,hour ,glass is one of ,mr4 ,yeats' noble and effective plays1 and with the other plays in the volume1 make a small1 but none the less representative collection4 ,stories of ,red ,hanrahan #a4be ,these tales belong to the realm of pure lyrical expression4 ,they are mysterious and shadowy1 full of infinite subtleties and old wisdom of folklore1 and sad with the gray wistful ,celtic sadness4 ,lovers of ,mr4 ,yeats's suggestive and delicate writing will find him at his best in this volume4--,springfield ,republican4 ,ideas of ,good and ,evil #a4ej ,essays on art and life1 wherein are set forth much of ,yeats' philosophy1 his love of beauty1 his hope for ,ireland and for ,irish artistic achievement4 ,the ,celtic ,twilight #a4ej ,a collection of tales from ,irish life and of ,irish fancy1 retold from peasants' stories with no additions except an occasional comment4 ,,the ,,works ,,of ,,rabindranath ,,tagore ,,bolpur ,,edition ,,hungry ,,stones ,,and ,,other ,,stories4 ,,fruit ,,gathering4 ,,chitra3 ,a ,play in one act4 ,,the ,,crescent ,,moon3 ,child ,poems4 ,,the ,,gardener3 ,love ,poems4 ,,gitanjali3 ,religious ,poems4 ,,the ,,king ,,of ,,the ,,dark ,,chamber3 ,a ,play4 ,,the ,,songs ,,of ,,kabir4 ,,sadhana3 ,the ,realization of ,life4 ,,the ,,post ,,office3 ,a ,play4 ,each volume decorated cloth1 #a4ej2 leather1 #b4jj4 ,this new edition of the works of ,rabindranath ,tagore will recommend itself to those who desire to possess the various poems and plays of the great ,hindu writer in the best possible printings and bindings4 ,great care has been taken with the physical appearance of the books4 ,in addition to the special design that has been made for the cover1 there are special end papers and decorated title pages in each book4 ,altogether this edition promises to become the standard one of this distinguished poet and seer4 ,,the ,,macmillan ,,company ,publishers #fd-ff ,fifth ,avenue ,new ,york ,footnotes3 #a ,translated by ,arthur ,symons from ,san ,juan de la ,cruz4 #b ,i have no better authority for ,caesarea than ,landor's play4