Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/78

 58 and Nationalist though he still is he has grown more and more preoccupied with art. There was a time when a love of the occult threatened his art, but from that the theatre has saved him, if it has taken him from the writing lyrics, in which his powers are at their highest. To old Irish legend, Mr. Yeats has, however, been true from the start, and from the start, too, there has never been a time the two he has not been preoccupied with dream. And if the two loves to which he has been constant cannot be said with exactitude to be in the story of Forgael and Dectora, because that story is not a reshaping of any one legend out of old Irish legend, it is of the very spirit of the journeys oversea in which that legend abounds, and it is steeped in dream. It would be here, then, that one would look for an expression as like a credo as is possible to Mr. Yeats, and here we do find it on the lips of Forgael, his hero, who, can we doubt? speaks also for the poet himself:—


 * "All would be well

Could we but give us wholly to the dreams, And get into their world that to the sense Is shadow, and not linger wretchedly Among substantial things; for it is dreams That lift us to the flowing changing world That the heart longs for. What is love itself, Even though it be the lightest of light love, But dreams that hurry from beyond the world, To make low laughter more than meat and drink, Though it but set us sighing?"

"On Baile's Strand" (1903) follows very closely the story of Cuchulain's slaying of his own son as retold Lady Gregory in her "Cuchulain of Muirthemne" (1902).