thetic school in some of his epithets, such
as "cloud-pale" and "dream-dimmed." His too frequent repetition of
similar epithets makes woman stand out of his poems at times like a
decoration, as in the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, rather than
in the vehement beauty of life. It is as if the passion in his verse
were again and again entangled in the devices of art. If we take his
love-poems as a whole, however, the passion in them is at once vehement
and beautiful.

The world has not yet sufficiently realized how deep is the passion that
has given shape to Mr. Yeats's verse. _The Wind Among the Reeds_ is a
book of love-poetry quite unlike all other books of love-poetry. It
utters the same moods of triumph in the beloved's beauty, of despair, of
desire, of boastfulness of the poet's immortality, that we find in the
love-poetry of other ages. But here are new images, almost a new
language. Sometimes we have an image which fills the mind like the image
in some little Chinese lyric, as in the poem _He Reproves the Curlew_:--

O, curlew, cry no more in the air,
Or only to the waters of the West;
Because your crying brings to my mind
Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair
That was shaken out over my breast:
There is enough evil in the crying of the wind.

This passion of loss, this sense of the beloved as of something secret
and far and scarcely to be attained, like the Holy Grail, is the
dominant theme of the poems, even in _The Song of Wandering Aengus_,
that poem of almost playful beauty, which tells of the "little silver
trout" that became

--a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair,
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

What a sense of long pursuit, of a life's quest, we get in the
exquisite last verse--a verse which must be among the best-known of Mr.
Yeats's writings after _The Lake Isle of Innisfree_ and _Had I the
Heaven's Embroidered Cloths_:--

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

This is the magic of fairyland again. It seems a little distant from
human passions. It is a wonderful example, however, of Mr. Yeats's
genius for transformin