would have admitted, but such
picturesque beauty as Marcus Aurelius found in the foam on the jaws of
the wild boar.

I always want to find the fundamental emotion out of which a poet
writes. It is easy to do this with some, with writers like Shelley and
Wordsworth, for they talked much of abstract things, and a man never
reveals himself so fully as when he does this, when he tries to
interpret nature, when he has to fill darkness with light, and chaos
with meaning. A man may speak about his own heart and may deceive
himself and others, but ask him to fill empty space with significance,
and what he projects on that screen will be himself, and you can know
him even as hereafter he will be known. When a poet puts his ear to a
shell, I know if he listens long enough he will hear his own destiny. I
knew after reading "The Shell" that in James Stephens we were going to
have no singer of the abstract. There was no human quality or stir in
the blind elemental murmur, and the poet drops it with a sigh of relief:

O, it was sweet
To hear a cart go jolting down the street.

From the tradition of the world too he breaks away, from the great
murmuring shell which gives back to us our cries and questionings
and protests soothed into soft, easeful things and smooth orthodox
complacencies, for it was shaped by humanity to whisper back to it
what it wished to hear. From all soft, easeful beliefs and
silken complacencies the last Irish poet breaks away in a book of
insurrections. He is doubtful even of love, the greatest orthodoxy of
any, which so few have questioned, which has preceded all religions and
will survive them all. When he writes of love in "The Red-haired Man's
Wife" and "The Rebel" he is not sure that that old intoxication of
self-surrender is not a wrong to the soul and a disloyalty to the
highest in us. His "Dancer" revolts from the applauding crowd. The
wind cries out against the inference that the beauty of nature points
inevitably to an equal beauty of spirit within. His enemies revolt
against their hate; his old man against his own grumblings, and the poet
himself rebels against his own revolt in that quaint scrap of verse he
prefixes to the volume:

What's the use
Of my abuse?
The world will run
Around the sun
As it has done
Since time begun
When I have drifted to the deuce:
And what's the use
Of my abuse?

He does not revolt against the abstract like