had said. He asked eagerly "Who wrote that?" and when I said "Do
you not remember?" he petulantly waved the poem aside for he had
forsaken his past. Again at a later period he told me his early
verses sometimes aroused him to a frenzy of dislike. Of the feelings
which beset the young poet of genius little or nothing is revealed
in this Reverie. Yet what would we not give for a book which would
tell how beauty beset that youth in his walks about Dublin and Sligo;
how the sensitive response to color, form, music and tradition began,
how he came to recognize the moods which incarnated in him as immortal
moods. Perhaps it is too much to expect from the creative imagination
that it shall also be capable of exact and subtle analysis. In this
work I walk down the streets of Dublin I walked with Yeats over
thirty years ago. I mix with the people who then were living in
the city, O'Leary, Taylor, Dowden, Hughes and the rest; but the
poet himself does not walk with me. It is a new voice speaking of
the past of others, pointing out the doorways entered by dead youth.
The new voice has distinction and dignity of its own, and we are
grateful for this history, others more so than myself, because most
of what is written therein I knew already, and I wanted a secret
which is not revealed. I wanted to know more about the working of
the imagination which planted the little snow-white feet in the
sally garden, and which heard the kettle on the hob sing peace into
the breast, and was intimate with twilight and the creatures that
move in the dusk and undergrowths, with weasel, heron, rabbit, hare,
mouse and coney; which plucked the Flower of Immortality in the
Island of Statues and wandered with Usheen in Timanogue. I wanted
to know what all that magic-making meant to the magician, but he
has kept his own secret, and I must be content and grateful to one
who has revealed more of beauty than any other in his time.