r the law of his own being, who could tell
us how his brain first became illuminated with images, and who tried
to track the inspiration to its secret fount and the images to their
ancestral beauty. Few of the psychologists who have written about
imagination were endowed with it themselves: and here is a poet, the
most imaginative of his generation, who has written about his youth and
has told us only about external circumstances and nothing about himself,
nothing about that flowering of strange beauty in poetry in him where
the Gaelic imagination that had sunk underground when the Gaelic speech
had died, rose up again transfiguring an alien language until that
new poetry became like the record of another mystic voyager to
the Heaven-world of our ancestors. But poet and artist are rarely
self-conscious of the processes of their own minds. They deliver their
message with exultation but they find nothing worth recording in the
descent upon them of the fiery tongues. So our poet has told us little
about himself but much about circumstance, and I recall in his pages the
Dublin of thirty years ago, and note how faithful the memory of eye and
ear are, and how forgetful the heart is of its own fancies. Is nature
behind this distaste for intimate self-analysis in the poet? Are our own
emanations poisonous to us if we do not rapidly clear ourselves of them?
Is it best to forget ourselves and hurry away once the deed is done or
the end is attained to some remoter valley in the Golden World and look
for a new beauty if we would continue to create beauty?

I know how readily our poet forgets his own songs. I once quoted to him
some early verses of his own as comment on something he had said. He
asked eagerly "Who wrote that?" and when I said "Do you not remember?"
he petulantly waved the poem aside for he had forsaken his past. Again
at a later period he told me his early verses sometimes aroused him to a
frenzy of dislike. Of the feelings which beset the young poet of genius
little or nothing is revealed in this Reverie. Yet what would we not
give for a book which would tell how beauty beset that youth in his
walks about Dublin and Sligo; how the sensitive response to color, form,
music and tradition began, how he came to recognize the moods which
incarnated in him as immortal moods. Perhaps it is too much to expect
from the creative imagination that it shall also be capable of exact and
subtle analysis. In this work I walk down th