The Tree of Life by W.B. Yeats — Read

We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about / seeking after the Kingdom of Heaven. Verlaine told me that he had tried / to translate 'In Memoriam,' but could not because Tennyson was 'too / noble, too Anglais, and when he should have been broken-hearted had many / reminiscences. ' About that time I found in some English review an essay / of his on Shakespeare. 'I had once a fine Shakespeare,' he wrote, or / some such words, 'but I have it no longer. I write from memory. ' One / wondered in what vicissitude he had sold it, and for what money; and an / image of the man rose in the imagination. To be his ordinary self as / much as possible, not a scholar or even a reader, that was certainly his / pose; and in the lecture he gave at Oxford he insisted 'that the poet / should hide nothing of himself,' though he must speak it all with 'a / care of that dignity which should manifest itself, if not in the / perfection of form, at all events with an invisible, insensible, but / effectual endeavour after this lofty and severe quality, I was about to / say this virtue.'

It was this feeling for his own personality, his / delight in singing his own life, even more than that life itself, which / made the generation I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not till / after his death that I understood the meaning his words should have had / for me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states of / mind, lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have been / as delighted as I am now by that banjo-player, or as shocked as I am now / by that girl whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose voice has / grown harsh by the neglect of all but external activities. I had not / learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in those who / have become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it I had come to / care for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out on life with the / thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood this as / a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away the / non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my / imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. I / thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle / of my own mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht / that Satan's watch fiends cannot find. Then one day I understood quite / suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and / unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always / out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its / hand.