Page:Ideas of Good and Evil, Yeats, 1903.djvu/347

The Galway Plains.

The ship that is bearing us away from Ireland;

And there is reason that these are reconciled with us,

For we increase the sea with our tears,

And the wandering wind with our sighs.'

There is still in truth upon these great level plains a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart to imaginative action. One could still, If one had the genius, and had been born to Irish, write for these people plays and poems like those of Greece. Does not the greatest poetry always require a people to listen to it.? England or any other country which takes its tune from the great cities and gets its taste from schools and not from old custom, may have a mob, but it cannot have a people. In England there are a few groups of men and women who have good taste, whether in cookery or in books; 337