words. I have written a little play that can be played in a room for so
little money that forty or fifty readers of poetry can pay the price.
There will be no scenery, for three musicians, whose seeming sun-burned
faces will I hope suggest that they have wandered from village to village
in some country of our dreams, can describe place and weather, and at
moments action, and accompany it all by drum and gong or flute and
dulcimer. Instead of the players working themselves into a violence of
passion indecorous in our sitting-room, the music, the beauty of form and
voice all come to climax in pantomimic dance.

In fact with the help of these plays 'translated by Ernest Fenollosa and
finished by Ezra Pound' I have invented a form of drama, distinguished,
indirect and symbolic, and having no need of mob or press to pay its
way--an aristocratic form. When this play and its performance run as
smoothly as my skill can make them, I shall hope to write another of the
same sort and so complete a dramatic celebration of the life of Cuchulain
planned long ago. Then having given enough performances for I hope the
pleasure of personal friends and a few score people of good taste, I
shall record all discoveries of method and turn to something else. It is
an advantage of this noble form that it need absorb no one's life, that
its few properties can be packed up in a box, or hung upon the walls
where they will be fine ornaments.


II

And yet this simplification is not mere economy. For nearly three
centuries invention has been making the human voice and the movements of
the body seem always less expressive. I have long been puzzled why
passages, that are moving when read out or spoken during rehearsal, seem