Last Poems and Plays
$1.75
MACMILLAN
THAT a poet should write his best work in his sixties is astonishing enough, and it would be more than astonishing it he continued at that height in his seventies. Yeats never reaches the peak of his genius in this volume, but that is not to say that it is not full of amazing vigor and energy of mind and hand. Full too of a haunting pathos, the pathos of a proud spirit who has seen his hopes perish: who has watched ‘conduct and work grow coarse,’ who has lost his friends by death, who has seen ‘a good strong cause’ turn into ‘a formless spawning fury,’ and who senses the world today as ‘this filthy modern tide.’
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave.
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave.
Lust and anger spur him still to write, and the dominant theme is a blazing rage at the incompleteness, incoherence, and indignity of man’s estate. But there is something more. There is that nobility of mind and spirit which belongs to Yeats alone among modern poets: the courage which can sing
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay,
the voice which can answer the temptation to ‘lie down and die,’
That were to shirk
The spiritual intellect’s great work,
And shirk it in vain. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be work so great
As that which cleans man’s dirty slate.
The spiritual intellect’s great work,
And shirk it in vain. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be work so great
As that which cleans man’s dirty slate.