outh;
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.'

It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poet
mistakes the cause of his sorrow. He is worn out not with dreams, but
with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative
energy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has
merely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew.
Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that
vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is
no way back to the past.

'My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor;
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.'

It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We do
not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in
and for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose
creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands
upon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching
his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverishment, as
of all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware.

'I would find by the edge of that water
The collar-bone of a hare,
Worn thin by the lapping of the water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.'

Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its
bitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world
of imagination. Mr Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to
contemplate it was sufficient. Had he been a great poet he would have
made it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech. By
re-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have built
landmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his last
discovery had ended. But now there remains nothing but a handful of the
symbols with which he was content:--

'A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at play.'

These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and,
alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live.

Whet