African is crooning
sweetly with his idol, arranging its domestic affairs and the marriage
of Heaven and Earth. Sometimes our poet essays the pastoral, and in
sheer gaiety: flies like any bird under the boughs, and up into the
sunlight. There are in his company imps and grotesques, and fauns and
satyrs, who come summoned by his piping. Sometimes, as in "Eve," the
poem of the mystery of womanhood, he is purely beautiful, but I find
myself going back to his men and women; and I hope he will not be angry
with me when I say I prefer his tinker drunken to his Deity sober. None
of our Irish poets has found God, at least a god any but themselves
would not be ashamed to acknowledge. But our poet does know his men
and his women. They are not the shadowy, Whistler-like decorative
suggestions of humanity made by our poetic dramatists. They have entered
like living creatures into his mind, and they break out there in an
instant's unforgettable passion or agony, and the wild words fly up
to the poet's brain to match their emotion. I do not know whether the
verses entitled "The Brute" are poetry, but they have an amazing energy
of expression.

But our poet can be beautiful when he wills, and sometimes, too, he has
largeness and grandeur of vision and expression. Look at this picture of
the earth, seen from mid-heaven:

And so he looked to where the earth, asleep,
Rocked with the moon. He saw the whirling sea
Swing round the world in surgent energy,
Tangling the moonlight in its netted foam,
And nearer saw the white and fretted dome
Of the ice-capped pole spin back a larded ray
To whistling stars, bright as a wizard's day,
But these he passed with eyes intently wide,
Till closer still the mountains he espied,
Squatting tremendous on the broad-backed earth,
Each nursing twenty rivers at a birth.

I would like to quote the verses entitled "Shame." Never have I read
anywhere such an anguished cowering before Conscience, a mighty creature
full of eyes within and without, and pointing fingers and asped tongues,
anticipating in secret the blazing condemnation of the world. And there
is "Bessie Bobtail," staggering down the streets with her reiterated,
inarticulate expression of grief, moving like one of those wretched whom
Blake described in a marvelous phrase as "drunken with woe forgotten";
and there is "Satan," where the reconcilement of light and darkness in
the twilights of