aud Gonne.

"Ah! Conchubar, had you seen her
With that high, laughing, turbulent head of hers
Thrown backward, and the bowstring at her ear,
Or sitting at the fire with those grave eyes
Full of good counsel as it were with wine,
Or when love ran through all the lineaments
Of her wild body."

One remembers these things, but if one has not seen the play on the
stage, he does not bear with him memories of beauty such as one bears
always with him from even the reading of "The Countess Cathleen" or of
"The Land of Heart's Desire." Nor is one moved by "On Baile's Strand" as
one is moved by other tellings of the same world story, as one is moved
by the epic telling of it by Matthew Arnold in "Sohrab and Rustum," or
even by such a casual telling of it as is Mr. Neil Munro's in "Black
Murdo." If it were not for "Deirdre," in fact, one would have to say
that the verse plays of Mr. Yeats after "The Shadowy Waters" grow, play
by play, less in poetic beauty, and that their gain in dramatic
effectiveness does not compensate for such a loss.

"The King's Threshold" (1904) is as near a play with a purpose as Mr.
Yeats has written. It vindicates the right of the poet in Ireland's
Heroic Age to sit at the highest table of the King, and as it was
written and played in 1903, when its author was being accused of caring
more for his art than for his country, it looks very like a defense.
Seanchan, the poet, removed from his high seat at the request of
"Bishops, Soldiers, and Makers of the Law," takes his stand on the
King's threshold, with the intention of starving himself to death there,
as there is, as the King says,--

"a custom,
An old and foolish custom, that if a man
Be wronged, or think that he is wronged and starve
Upon another's threshold till he die,
The common people, for all time to come,
Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold,
Even though it be the King's."

It was at this time that the clamor against "In the Shadow of the Glen"
had stirred up a great deal of feeling against Mr. Yeats and the other
managers of the Irish National Theatre Society. And Mr. Yeats, it may
be, wrote the play not only to symbolize his contention that the poet is
as important to society as is the man of action, but also to assert that
poetry cultivated for its own sake, the sake of art, is as necessary to
a nation, to Ireland, as what Ireland calls patriotism.