and
They are but the slaves of light
Who have never known the gloom
And between the dark and bright
Willed in silence their own doom.
Men are the strayed heaven-dwellers—the gods who have "forgot themselves to men," the angels who have "willed in silence their own doom." And in all the wise and pious things A. E. has to say there is the heroic note. Everywhere there is an insistence on the will—"the sword of will," "the imperial will." His last counsellor declares:
Only be thou thyself the goal
In which the wars of time shall cease.
but the second counsel is often remembered by A. E.—
Make of thy silence words to shake
The long enthroned Kings of Earth,
Make of thy will the force to break
Their towers of wantonness and mirth.
It is this heroic note that makes this poetry of mystical vision direct and bracing:
The power is ours to make or mar
Our fate as on the earliest morn,
The Darkness and the Radiance are
Creatures within the spirit born.
Yet, bathed in gloom too long, we might
Forget how we imagined light.
A short note on A. E.'s poems can only be a résumé of many remarkable points. One might dwell on his eye for color and his power of creating landscape in poetry—qualities that belong to him as one of Ireland’s distinctive painters. One might speak, too, about that power he possesses—the
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