and protests soothed into soft, easeful things and smooth orthodox
complacencies, for it was shaped by humanity to whisper back to it
what it wished to hear. From all soft, easeful beliefs and silken
complacencies the last Irish poet breaks away in a book of
insurrections. He is doubtful even of love, the greatest orthodoxy
of any, which so few have questioned, which has preceded all religions
and will survive them all. When he writes of love in "The Red-haired
Man's Wife" and "The Rebel" he is not sure that that old intoxication
of self-surrender is not a wrong to the soul and a disloyalty to the
highest in us. His "Dancer" revolts from the applauding crowd. The
wind cries out against the inference that the beauty of nature points
inevitably to an equal beauty of spirit within. His enemies revolt
against their hate; his old man against his own grumblings, and
the poet himself rebels against his own revolt in that quaint scrap
of verse he prefixes to the volume:

What's the use
Of my abuse?
The world will run
Around the sun
As it has done
Since time begun
When I have drifted to the deuce:
And what's the use
Of my abuse?

He does not revolt against the abstract like so many because he
is incapable of thinking. Indeed, he is one of the few Irish poets
we have who is always thinking as he goes along. He does not rebel
against love because he is not himself sweet at heart, for the best