Page:Irish plays and playwrights (IA irishplaysplaywr00weygrich).pdf/89

 Rh "Ill bodings are as native unto our hearts As are their spots unto the woodpeckers."

It is from such knowledge of country things come the fine lines about

"The dark folk, who live in souls Of passionate men like bats in the dead trees";—

and such lines are coming again into his verse, even into the blank verse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heard are more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and to those who know his story they reveal again and again a great and common sorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. So may "The Countess Cathleen" be taken as well as "The King's Threshold." "Ephemera," "The Dedication to a Book of Stories," "In the Seven Woods," "The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Old Memory," "Adam's Curse," as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes, are but little "dream-burdened," and passages elsewhere have the human call. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, for instance, the common joy on nearing the shore of the homeland at the end of exile:—

"Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart. Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down; later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away, From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown."

It is true, though, that the dream-drenched poems are those most characteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new to English poetry. It is impossible