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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
71

no change at all, or but changed as do the wild creatures, or from devil well to devil sick, and so go round the clock.

They and their sort alone earn contemplation, for it is only when the intellect has wrought the whole of life to drama, to crisis, that we may live for contemplation, and yet keep our intensity.

And these things are true also of nations, but the Gate-keepers who drive the nation to war or anarchy that it may find its Image are different from those who drive individual men, though I think at times they work together. And as I look backward upon my own writing, I take pleasure alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found something hard, cold, some articulation of the image, which is the opposite of all that I am in my daily life, and all that my country is; yet man or nation can no more make Mask or Image than the seed can be made by the soil into which 1t is cast.

Ille

What portion in the world can the artist have,
Who has awakened from the common dream,
But dissipation and despair?

Hic

And yet
No one denies to Keats, love of the world.
Remember his deliberate happiness.

Ille

His art is happy, but who knows his mind?
I see a schoolboy, when I think of him,
With face and nose pressed to a sweet-shop window.
For certainly he sank into his grave
His senses and his heart unsatisfied,
And made, being poor, ailing, and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world,
Luxurious song.


XXIII

Two or three years after our return to Bedford Park The Doll's House had been played at the Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, the first Ibsen play to be played in England and somebody had given