Page:Poetry, a magazine of verse, Volume 7 (October 1915-March 1916).djvu/199

A Painter-Poet and

Men are the strayed heaven-dwellers—the gods who have "forgot themselves to men," the angels who have "willed in silence their own doom." And in all the wise and pious things A. E. has to say there is the heroic note. Everywhere there is an insistence on the will—"the sword of will," "the imperial will." His last counsellor declares:

but the second counsel is often remembered by A. E.—

It is this heroic note that makes this poetry of mystical vision direct and bracing:

A short note on A. E.'s poems can only be a résumé of many remarkable points. One might dwell on his eye for color and his power of creating landscape in poetry—qualities that belong to him as one of Ireland’s distinctive painters. One might speak, too, about that power he possesses—the