Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/252

Ideas of Good and Evil. and whiteness and setting Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colours and sounds and forms. We may call this metaphorical writing, but it is better to call it symbolical writing, because metaphors are not profound enough to be moving, when they are not symbols, and when they are symbols they are the most perfect, because the most subtle, outside of pure sound, and through them one can the best find out what symbols are. If one begins the reverie with any beautiful lines that one can remember, one finds they are all like those by Burns. Begin with this line by Blake—

or these lines by Nash—

or these lines by Shakespeare— 242