The Happiest of the Poets by W.B. Yeats

I.

Rossetti in one of his letters numbers his favourite colours in the order / of his favour, and throughout his work one feels that he loved form and / colour for themselves and apart from what they represent. One feels / sometimes that he desired a world of essences, of unmixed powers, of / impossible purities. It is as though the last judgment had already begun / in his mind and that the essences and powers, which the divine hand had / mixed into one another to make the loam of life, fell asunder at his / touch. If he painted a flame or a blue distance, he painted as though he / had seen the flame out of whose heart all flames had been taken, or the / blue of the abyss that was before all life; and if he painted a woman's / face he painted it in some moment of intensity when the ecstasy of the / lover and of the saint are alike, and desire becomes wisdom without / ceasing to be desire. He listens to the cry of the flesh till it becomes / proud and passes beyond the world where some immense desire that the / intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire of a body's warmth and / softness. His genius like Shelley's can hardly stir but to the rejection / of nature, whose delight is profusion, but never intensity, and like / Shelley's it follows the Star of the Magi, the Morning and Evening Star, / the mother of impossible hope, although it follows through deep woods, / where the Star glimmers among dew-drenched boughs and not through 'a / wind-swept valley of the Apennine. ' Men like him cannot be happy as we / understand happiness, for to be happy one must delight like nature in mere / profusion, in mere abundance, in making and doing things, and if one sets / an image of the perfect before one it must be the image that draws her / perpetually, the image of a perfect fulness of natural life, of an Earthly / Paradise.