Irish Plays and Playwrights Part 7

"Dusk wraps the village in its dim caress,"

as in "Dusk"; or at night, when

"The yellow constellations shine with pale and tender glory In the lilac-scented stillness,"

as in "The Singing Silences"; or at sunrise, when there is

"Fire on the altar of the hills,"

as in "Dawn";--it is most often through some beauty of the sky at such times that he becomes one with the Universal Spirit in "the rapture of the fire," that he is "lost within the 'Mother's Being,'" he would say that the soul returns to the Oversoul, Emerson would There are ways by which the soul homes other than these--sometimes it is

"By the hand of a child I am led to the throne of the King."

but it is most often by way of beauties of the sky. Some reasons are not far to seek. From sunset to sunrise the poet is free as he may be from the treadmill of the "common daily ways," and the high moods he tries to express are most easily symbolized by skyey images--ma.s.sed clouds and sweeping lights of diamond, sapphire, amethyst; the still blue black of heaven thrilling with far stars; the purples of twilight horizons. In his use of these splendid symbols he is but following Proclus, whom he found quoted by Emerson as saying that "the mighty heaven exhibits, in its transfiguration, clear images of the splendor of intellectual perceptions, being moved in conjunction with the unapparent period of intellectual natures."

How important the symbol is to "A.E."--as important as it is to Emerson--may be gathered from "Symbolism," which, read in the light of what I have quoted, needs, I hope, no further interpretation.

"Now when the giant in us wakes and broods, Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods.

Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things: Clothing the vast with a familiar face; Reaching his right hand forth to greet the starry race.

Wondrously near and clear the great warm fires Stare from the blue; so shows the cottage light To the field laborer whose heart desires The old folk by the nook, the welcome bright From the housewife long parted from at dawn-- So the star villages in G.o.d's great depths withdrawn.

"Nearer to Thee, not by delusion led, Though there no house-fires burn nor bright eyes gaze: We rise, but by the symbol charioted, Through loved things rising up to Love's own ways: By these the soul unto the vast has wings And sets the seal celestial on all mortal things."

In this poem is the proof of how intimately "A.E." could write of the sweet things of earth did he so choose. But he does not so choose, except rarely, and sometimes he leaves out the statement of beautiful material things by which he customarily bids farewell to earth in his aspiration to spiritual things, and writes only of unearthly things--as of some girl that he, an Irishman living in the Dublin of to-day, loves in the Babylon of three thousand years ago, to the annihilation of s.p.a.ce and time. This is written in the very spirit of Emerson's declaration that "before the revelations of the soul, Time, s.p.a.ce, and Nature shrink away." Need I quote further to show that "A.E.," like Emerson, holds that the true poet is he who "gives men glimpses of the law of the Universe; shows them the circ.u.mstance as illusion; shows that Nature is only a language to express the laws, which are grand and beautiful; and lets them, by his songs, into some of the realities"? Emerson yearns that "the old forgotten splendors of the Universe should glow again for us," and "A.E." believes that we at times attain "the high ancestral Self"; his restless ploughman, "walking through the woodland's purple"

under "the diamond night"

"Deep beneath his rustic habit finds himself a King"

"A.E.'s" poems on death are little different from those in which he celebrates the soul's absorption into the Universal Spirit, since death means to him only a longer absorption into the Universal Spirit or sometimes such absorption forever. In the event of this last, he in some moods sees

"Life and joy forever vanish as a tale is told.

Lost within the 'Mother's Being,'"

or no sense of individuality in souls in heaven; in other moods he sees individuality preserved after death among those "High souls," that,--

"Absolved from grief and sin, Leaning from out ancestral spheres, Beckon the wounded spirit in."

So sustained is the habitual alt.i.tude of Mr. Russell's thought, so preoccupied his mood with spiritual things, that the human reader must feel lonely at times, must feel the regions of the poet's thought alien to him. At such times it is a positive relief to find the poet yearning for the concrete sweet things of earth. It is perhaps only in "Weariness" that Mr. Russell's high mood does fail, but I rejoice when that failure makes him acknowledge--

"Fade the heaven-a.s.sailing moods: Slave to petty tasks I pine For the quiet of the woods, And the sunlight seems divine.

"And I yearn to lay my head Where the gra.s.s is green and sweet; Mother, all the dreams are fled From the tired child at thy feet."

It is love, love of country, love of countryside, and love of woman that he writes of when he does write of "loved earth things." "A Woman's Voice" and "Forgiveness" are poems so simple that none may misunderstand; they have the human call so rare in "A.E.," but it is not a strong human call. Of such love songs he has written but few--poems out of the peace and not out of the pa.s.sion of love; of pa.s.sion other than spiritual ecstasy and rapt delight in nature there is none in his verse. Although he has been given "a ruby-flaming heart," he has been given also "a pure cold spirit." Only about a fourth of his poems have the human note dominant, and even when it is so dominant, as when he writes of his country, he is very seldom content to rest with a description of the beauty of place or legend; the beautiful place must be threshold to the Other World, as "The Gates of Dreamland," which he finds at the end of "the lonely road through bogland to the lake at Carrowmore," Carrowmore, the great cemetery of the great dead of prehistoric Ireland under Knocknarea near Sligo; or the legend must be symbol of some mystic belief--"Connla's well is a Celtic equivalent of the First Fountain of mysticism."

He can draw starkly, when he will, a picture of bare Irish landscape:--

"Still rests the heavy share on the dark soil: Upon the black mould thick the dew-damp lies: The horse waits patient: from his lowly toil The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes.

"The unbudding hedgerows dark against day's fires Glitter with gold-lit crystals: on the rim Over the unregarding city's spires The lonely beauty shines alone for him."

In "In Connemara" and "An Irish Face," poems with earthly t.i.tles, you expect only things earthly, but in these too, he uses the picture of the concrete only as the symbol of the universal. The reason Mr. Russell must take you to the supernatural in these poems is because he sees spirits everywhere he goes in Ireland. "Never a poet," he writes, "has lain on our hillsides, but gentle, stately figures, with hearts shining like the sun, move through his dreams, over radiant gra.s.ses, in an enchanted world of their own." Start "The Memory of Earth" and you think you are to read one of the many fine poems of twilight in our literature, but the fourth line undeceives you:--

"In the wet dusk silver sweet, Down the violet-scented ways, As I moved with quiet feet I was met by mighty days.

"On the hedge the hanging dew Gla.s.sed the eve and stars and skies; While I gazed a madness grew Into thundered battle-cries.

"Where the hawthorn glimmered white, Flashed the spear and fell the stroke-- Ah, what faces pale and bright Where the dazzling battle broke!

"There a hero-hearted queen With young beauty lit the van.

Gone! the darkness flowed between All the ancient wars of man.

"While I paced the valley's gloom Where the rabbits pattered near, Shone a temple and a tomb With the legend carven clear.

"Time put by a myriad fates That her day might dawn in glory; Death made wide a million gates So to close her tragic story."

And so it is in "A.E.'s" score and more poems that are suggested by Irish places and Irish legends and Irish loves. Never an Irish exile but will have a dear home place brought before him by such lines as

"The Greyhound River windeth through a loneliness so deep Scarce a wild fowl shakes the quiet that the purple boglands keep";

and a story of the home place brought before him by such lines as

"Tarry thou yet, late lingerer in the twilight's glory; Gay are the hills with song: earth's fairy children leave More dim abodes to roam the primrose-hearted eve, Opening their glimmering lips to breathe some wondrous story";

and a girl of the home place brought before him by such lines as

"Dusk, a pearl-grey river, o'er Hill and vale puts out the day-- What do you wonder at, asth.o.r.e, What's away in yonder grey?"

but all these poems, of which these lines are the fine onsets, lead past "the dim stars" and "unto the Light of Lights."

A man that believes that his spirit is one with the Universal Spirit cannot but be an optimist if he believe that Spirit is the Spirit of Good, and that a Platonist must believe. Yet "A.E." so longs to be rapt into everlasting union with the Universal Spirit that he tires of the earth, where that union is interrupted by the necessities of daily life.

The fairies call to him and he would away--

"'Come away,' the red lips whisper, 'all the world is weary now; 'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough.

Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew, And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you.'"

But it is not always twilight to him, and there are many blither moods.

Over against these lines you may put,

"I always dwell with morning in my heart,"

and

"Oh, but life is sweet, is sweet."

Earth is not an unhappy place, but he sighs sometimes for the happiness unalloyed of heaven.