lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THENINETIES"that he edited that poet, if editing demands more of"observation" than a poet is always willing to give.From Blake he learned and accepted as fundamentalthe opposition of the reason and the imagination:ButBeloved, gaze in thine own heart,The holy tree is growing there ;From joy the holy branches start,And all the trembling flowers they bear.Gaze no more in the bitter glassThe demons, with their subtle guile,Lift up before us when they pass,Or only gaze a little while,The glass of outer wearinessMade when God slept in days of old.Whether indeed Mr Yeats's was a more passionatelover than the author of Hawthorn and Lavender weneed not discuss. The love of his earlier poems isundoubtedly a more sublimated, ethereal, imaginative'passion, more akin than was that of Rossetti to thelove which inspired the sonnets of Dante and Petrarch,because like theirs an unfulfilled passion. This is thetheme of the loveliest of his carefully and delicatelywrought lyrics, The Rose of the World, The Sorrow ofLove, " When you are old and gray and full of sleep,"The White Birds, To an Isle in the Water, all in thePoems of 1899, and A Poet to His Beloved in The Windamong the Reeds. The latter volume is by the initiatedconsidered the best of his early works, but the passionis too ethereal, the art too symbolic for normal readers.To my mind, the fullest expression of this love, thatlongs but is never fulfilled, is the Bailie and Aillinnand Adam's Curse of the 1905 volume. In these poems,149