Les Mouches Fantastiques (amateur journal)/March 1920/A Reading by Yeats

While all the eyes in the oblong hall stared at him with their various expressions and unexpressions and he, the poet, sat silent on a chair, not regarding at all the people he had come to amuse, some of his own words insistently fingered my memory:

words more wistfull and unhappy than any I have read; and I could not forget them through the ebb and flow of his reading. It was not that his attitude or manner even whispered of despair, but the sadness that comes to poets who think, and dream overmuch, and that is half-sister to despair, was constantly in his voice, rich as it was with that same sad, wild magic one is enslaved by in his poems. His voice is the complement of his poems, for Yeats is a bard at heart. No violin, no organ has stirred me, furrowed my imagination as did Yeats’ chants of his disturbed, beautiful, fairy-haunted Ireland, chants which are equally, I feel, chants of his disturbed and fairy-haunted heart.

“I wanted to sing of the places around the spot where I was born,” he confessed, “the places I knew well and loved; but it was always myself I put into the poems my feelings and emotions.” Yet one does not question his intense affection for these places. Myself, I felt that he was one of those who find their completest truth in nature’s nakedness, as contrasted with the overclothedness of sophisticated life. There are two types of people to whom nature is the all-giver: those happy-souled, crude, yet curiously refined first children of her brown, rich body, who never betray her for the red-lit eyes of cities; and those so opposite ones who are born with a sad weight of experience on their spirits, and who are perpetually obsessed by that “nostalgia of the infinite” spoken of by one of the French Romanticists, Gauthier, I believe. Among these latter I placed Yeats.

From his poems I had inferred that he looked for and found in those illusive, lovely beings that play or weep in the silent and green places of earth, and appear to those who dream with clear eyes, the delicate and desired things that rarely come as gifts from those one loves; and when his voice lingered on this tale and that tale of the fairy-folk I knew I had guessed truly.

But there is no being so desolate as he over whom the fairy-spell has endured and been broken. For him, indeed, is nothing left but “dissipation and despair,” for he learns that he is alone and without the strength and hardness to endure loneliness. Poets of Yeats’ type rarely possess hardness enough to permit of their enjoying spiritual loneliness and it is tragedy for them if some myth lure them up a mountain, then leave them there where the sun is too bright, the wind too bare and the crags too bald.

I hope the fairies will never desert their god-son for he needs them, and we need the magic and the singing, simple wisdom they give him for his poems.