so many because he is
incapable of thinking. Indeed, he is one of the few Irish poets we have
who is always thinking as he goes along. He does not rebel against love
because he is not himself sweet at heart, for the best thing in the book
is its unfeigned humanity. So we have a personal puzzle to solve with
this perplexing writer which makes us all the more eager to hear him
again. A man might be difficult to understand and the problem of his
personality might not be worth solution, but it is not so with James
Stephens. From a man who can write with such power as he shows in these
two stanzas taken from "The Street behind Yours" we may expect high
things. It is a vision seen with distended imagination as if by some
child strayed from light:

And though 'tis silent, though no sound
Crawls from the darkness thickly spread,
Yet darkness brings
Grim noiseless things
That walk as they were dead,
They glide and peer and steal around
With stealthy silent tread.

You dare not walk; that awful crew
Might speak or laugh as you pass by.
Might touch or paw
With a formless claw
Or leer from a sodden eye,
Might whisper awful things they knew,
Or wring their hands and cry.

There is nothing more grim and powerful than that in The City of
Dreadful Night. It has all the vaporous horror of a Dore grotesque and
will bear examination better. But our poet does not as a rule write with
such unrelieved gloom. He keeps a stoical cheerfulness, and even when
he faces terrible things we feel encouraged to take his hand and go with
him, for he is master of his own soul, and you cannot get a whimper
out of him. He likes the storm of things, and is out for it. He has
a perfect craft in recording wild natural emotions. The verse in this
first book has occasional faults, but as a rule the lines move, driven
by that inner energy of emotion which will sometimes work more metrical
wonders than the most conscious art. The words hiss at you sometimes,
as in "The Dancer," and again will melt away with the delicacy of fairy
bells as in "The Watcher," or will run like deep river water, as in "The
Whisperer," which in some moods I think is the best poem in the book
until I read "Fossils" or "What Tomas an Buile said in a Pub." They are
too long to print, but I must give myself the pleasure of quoting the
beautiful "Slan Leat," with which he concludes the book, bidding us, not
farew