the similes of these
early poems are out of the ways of wild little things that appeal so to
children, perhaps because they are wild little things themselves. A
later mood of Mr. Yeats is to hold of less account the things of
out-of-doors, but still he uses as similes the ways of birds, as did the
old Irish bards whose stories have so informed his. He never did
describe nature for its own sake, but natural things gave him more
figures than they do now, although always there have been in his lines
many out of mythology. Summer days between Slieve Echtge and the western
sea are, however, bringing the plovers and curlews and peewits back to
his poetry. In the country of the Countess Cathleen, as everywhere in
Ireland, you may hear "wind cry and water cry and curlew cry," and
there, as all the world over,--

"Ill bodings are as native unto our hearts
As are their spots unto the woodpeckers."

It is from such knowledge of country things come the fine lines about

"The dark folk, who live in souls
Of passionate men like bats in the dead trees";--

and such lines are coming again into his verse, even into the blank
verse of his plays. The poems in which "the strong human call" is heard
are more than the many who read Mr. Yeats hurriedly will think, and to
those who know his story they reveal again and again a great and common
sorrow. Whole poems and plays are often symbols of the poet's life. So
may "The Countess Cathleen" be taken as well as "The King's Threshold."
"Ephemera," "The Dedication to a Book of Stories," "In the Seven Woods,"
"The Old Age of Queen Maeve," "The Folly of Being Comforted," "Old
Memory," "Adam's Curse," as well as the folk-poems of the first volumes,
are but little "dream-burdened," and passages elsewhere have the human
call. The feeling of Oisin nearing the coast of Ireland is, for
instance, the common joy on nearing the shore of the homeland at the end
of exile:--

"Remembrance, lifting her leanness, keened in the gates of my heart.
Till, fattening the winds of the morning, an odour of new-mown hay
Came, and my forehead fell low, and my tears like berries fell down;
later a sound came, half lost in the sound of a shore far away,
From the great grass-barnacle calling, and later the shore-weeds brown."

It is true, though, that the dream-drenched poems are those most
characteristic of the author, those that give a note entirely new to
English poetry. It is impossibl