full
understanding. As the years go by, I think their exact meaning will
escape more and more readers until they will have no more significance
than Spenser's allegories have to us. Only to the student deeply read in
Elizabethan politics do these mean to-day what must have been patent to
the inner circle at Elizabeth's court. Those symbols of Mr. Yeats that
we may understand intuitively, as we may "The white owl in the belfry
sits," other generations also may understand, but hardly those that have
meanings known only to a coterie. But we may read Spenser with enjoyment
even if all the inner allegories are missed, and so, too, many read Mr.
Yeats to-day, neglectful of the images of a formal symbolism.

I do not know that I get more enjoyment from the poetry of the verses
entitled "The Valley of the Black Pig" because Mr. Yeats's note tells us
that it is the scene of Ireland's _Goetterdaemmerung_, though it is an
unquestionable gratification to the puzzle interest I have with my
kind, and I would at times be more comfortable were I sure that the
"Master of the Still Stars and of the Flaming Door" was he who keeps the
gates of the Other World, the real world we shall enter when death sets
us free of that dream men call life. Mr. Yeats is not so kind to the men
"in the highway" as the old Irish bards. When they wrote enigmas they
were apt to explain them fully, as does the poet of "The Wooing of Emer"
when he tell what was meant by the cryptic questions and answers
exchanged between that princess and Cuchulain. When the symbolism is of
the kind found in "Death's Summons" of Thomas Nash, which of all poems
Mr. Yeats quotes oftenest, all cultivated men may understand--

"Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen's eye."

The difference between the symbol Helen and each one of the several
symbols Mr. Yeats employs in "The Valley of the Black Pig" is the
difference between a symbol universally recognized throughout the world
and a symbol recognized by one people; but there is the further
difference that one is intimately associated with the thing symbolized,
is the name of a woman the context tells us is a queen and beautiful,
and the other is only the scene of a battle that symbolizes the ending
of the world. It is more natural to use a beautiful woman as a symbol of
all beauty than to use a black boar that shall root up all the light and
life of the world as a symbol