The Future Poetry

Recent English Poetry – 2 181

Through widening chambers of surprise to where

Throbs rapture near an end that aye recedes,

Because his touch is infinite and lends

A yonder to all ends, —

a description which might well be applied to the whole drift
and cause of this spiritual principle of rhythm. A. E. is not a
great rhythmist, he is too preoccupied with his vision, more of a
truth-seer than a truth-hearer of the Spirit, but when the hearing
comes, the ́sruti, somehow or other without any expenditure of
device the full spiritual intonation rises up and takes possession
of the music, — to give one instance only,

Like winds and waters were her ways:

They heed not immemorial cries;

They move to their high destinies

Beyond the little voice that prays.

And in Yeats, a supreme artist in rhythm, this spiritual intonation
is the very secret of all his subtlest melodies and harmonies and
reveals itself whether in the use of old and common metres which
cease to be either old or common in his hands or in delicate new
turns of verse. We get it in his blank verse, taken at random, —

A sweet miraculous terrifying sound, —

or in the mounting flight of that couplet on the flaming multitude

That rise, wing upon wing, flame above flame

And like a storm cry the ineffable name,

or heard through the slowly errant footfalls of that other,

In all poor foolish things that live a day

Eternal Beauty wandering on her way, —

but most of all in the lyrical movements, —

With all the earth and the sky and the water remade, like a

casketofgold

For my dream of your image that blossoms, a rose in the deeps

of my heart.