The Holy Places by W.B. Yeats — Read

When all art was struck out of personality, whether as in our daily / business or in the adventure of religion, there was little separation / between holy and common things, and just as the arts themselves passed / quickly from passion to divine contemplation, from the conversation of / peasants to that of princes, the one song remembering the drunken miller / and but half forgetting Cambynskan bold; so did a man feel himself near / sacred presences when he turned his plough from the slope of Cruachmaa / or of Olympus. The occupations and the places known to Homer or to / Hesiod, those pure first artists, might, as it were, if but the / fashioners hands had loosened, have changed before the poem's end to / symbols and vanished, winged and unweary, into the unchanging worlds / where religion only can discover life as well as peace. A man of that / unbroken day could have all the subtlety of Shelley, & yet use no image / unknown among the common people, and speak no thought that was not a / deduction from the common thought. Unless the discovery of legendary / knowledge and the returning belief in miracle, or what we must needs / call so, can bring once more a new belief in the sanctity of common / ploughland, and new wonders that reward no difficult ecclesiastical / routine but the common, wayward, spirited man, we may never see again a / Shelley and a Dickens in the one body, but be broken to the end. We have / grown jealous of the body, and we dress it in dull unshapely clothes, / that we may cherish aspiration alone. Moliere being but the master of / common sense lived ever in the common daylight, but Shakespeare could / not, & Shakespeare seems to bring us to the very market-place, when we / remember Shelley's dizzy and Landor's calm disdain of usual daily / things.

And at last we have Villiers de L'Isle Adam crying in the / ecstasy of a supreme culture, of a supreme refusal, 'as for living, our / servants will do that for us. ' One of the means of loftiness, of / marmorean stillness has been the choice of strange and far away places, / for the scenery of art, but this choice has grown bitter to me, and / there are moments when I cannot believe in the reality of imaginations / that are not inset with the minute life of long familiar things and / symbols and places. I have come to think of even Shakespeare's journeys / to Rome or to Verona as the outflowing of an unrest, a dissatisfaction / with natural interests, an unstable equilibrium of the whole European / mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of / better stone. I am orthodox and pray for a resurrection of the body, and / am certain that a man should find his Holy Land where he first crept / upon the floor, and that familiar woods and rivers should fade into / symbol with so gradual a change that he never discover, no not even in / ecstasy itself, that he is beyond space, and that time alone keeps him / from Primum Mobile, the Supernal Eden, and the White Rose over all.