Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/346

Ideas of Good and Evil. has made many love songs has here been given, in a long wooing, to danger, that ghostly bride. It is not a difference in the substance of things that the lamentations that were sung after battles are now sung for men who have died upon the gallows.

The emotion has become not less, but more noble, by the change, for the man who goes to his death with the thought—

has behind him generations of poetry and poetical life.

The poets of to-day speak with the voice of the unknown priest who wrote, some two hundred years ago, that Sorrowful Lament for Ireland, Lady Gregory has put into passionate and rhythmical prose—

I do not know of anything under the sky

That is friendly or favourable to the Gael,

But only the sea that our need brings us to,

Or the wind that blows to the harbour

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