Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/148

 124 so personal, so undogmatic, that you would hardly write him down a didactic poet at first reading "A New Theme" tells of his desertion of subjects "that win the easy praise," of his venturing


 * "in the untrodden woods

To carve the future ways."

Here he acknowledges that the things he has to tell are "shadowy," that his breath in "the magic horn" can make but feeble murmurs. In the prologue to "The Divine Vision" he states the conditions of his inspiration:—

"When twilight over the mountains fluttered And night with its starry millions came, I too had dreams: the songs I have uttered Came from this heart that was touched by the flame";—

that is, the flame of his being that, "mad for the night and the deep unknown," leaps back to the "unphenomenal" world whence his spirit came and blends his spirit into one with the Universal Spirit. This same union through the soul's flame "A. E." presents in his pictures, and in his prologue to "The Divine Vision" he writes that he wishes to give his reader

"To see one elemental pain, One light of everlasting joy."

This elemental pain, as I take it, is the pain of the soul shut up in its robe of clay in this physical, phenomenal world, and so shut off from the spiritual world, the world of the unphenomenal or unknowable. The "everlasting joy" I take to be the certainty of eventual union with the Universal Spirit in the unphenomenal world, a union and a joy anticipated in the occasional temporary