of the ending of the world. But neither of
these is a symbol that would be understood intuitively, as the rose
used as a symbol of beauty or the wind as a symbol of instability.
Sometimes Mr. Yeats's symbols are very remote, but perhaps they were
remote in the old stories in which he found them. The details in

"the phantom hound
All pearly white, save one red ear,"

and "the hornless deer" which it chases, seem arbitrary. The hound, it
is true, is known of all men as the pursuer, and the deer as the
pursued; but does this knowledge suggest immediately "the desire of the
man which is for the woman, and the desire of the woman which is for the
desire of the man"? Mr. Yeats does not, as I take it, expect all his
symbols to be understood so definitely as this hound and deer, which, of
course, are not only symbols, but figures from the tapestry of
fairyland. It is often enough, perhaps, that we understand emotionally,
as in "Kubla Khan" or "The Owl." From some of his writing it would
appear he believed many symbols to be of very definite meaning and to be
understood by generation upon generation. In the note to "The Valley of
the Black Pig" he writes, "Once a symbol has possessed the imagination
of large numbers of men, it becomes, as I believe, an embodiment of
disembodied powers, and repeats itself in dreams and visions, age after
age."

This is but another phase of Mr. Yeats's belief that when a poem stirs
us as by magic, it is a real magic has been at work. The words have
loosened the seals that the flesh has fastened upon the universal memory
which is subconscious in all of us, until that memory possesses us and
we are one with all that has been since the beginning of time, and may
in such moments live over all that has been lived. He thinks that in
such moments the poet's magic brings before us the past and the unseen
as the past and the unseen were brought before our pagan ancestors by
the magical rites of their priests.

In his younger years Mr. Yeats held that poetry is "the words that have
gathered up the heart's desire of the world." His heart's desire was
simpler in those days than his heart's desire of after years. Then he
had a child's wistfulness for little things and put lines in his poems
of Blake-like innocence and freshness. "The brown mice" that

"bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest"

are out of memories of childhood, and many other of