Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/84

 64 from "The Countess Cathleen" to prove that beyond doubt. There is no better material for epic as yet unused than Irish legends, but there is none the old bard developed into epic proportions. There would be here the largest scope for the shaping power of the poet. Mr. Yeats must, of course, have thought of epic, but preferred drama as more in harmony with our time. Lionel Johnson said that Mr. Yeats took to drama because he liked to hear his lines finely spoken, but, surely, if that were his greatest delight, he could invent some way in which to bring story in verse to listeners. It were surely a lesser task than that of stimulating Mr. Dolmetsch to make a psaltery to which his lyrics may be musically spoken.

From the beginning, the verse of Mr. Yeats has had vocal quality, a quality that is unfortunately often rarer in good poetry than in verse that is good rhetoric. I cannot see that his interest in the psaltery, that developed after 1900, has brought about any change in the quality of his verse. There have been constant to it since "The Wanderings of Oisin" all the qualities that distinguish it to-day,—its eloquence, its symbols that open up unending vistas through mysteries, its eeriness as of the bewildering light of late sunset over gray-green Irish bog and lake and mountain, its lonely figures as great in their simplicity as those of Homer, its plain statement of high passion that breaks free of all that is occult and surprises with its clarity where so much is dim with dream. First one and then another of these qualities has most interested him. He has written in explanation of patriotic