Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,
Thou art the surpassing pilot star,

Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
Thou art the step of the horse of the plain,
Thou art the grace of the sun rising,
Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.

What is 'Popular Poetry'?

The lovely likeness of the Lord

Is in thy pure face,

The loveliest likeness that was upon earth.

I soon learned to cast away one other illusion of 'popular poetry.' I learned from the people themselves, before I learned it from any book, that they cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea of a cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond of words and verses that keep half their secret to themselves. Indeed, it is certain that before the counting-house had created a new class and a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister, the art of the people was as closely mingled

Ideas of Good and Evil.

with the art of the coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion, with the unchanging speech of the poets.

Now I see a new generation in Ireland which discusses Irish literature and history in Young Ireland societies, and societies with newer names, and there are far more than when I was a boy who would make verses for the people. They have the help, too, of a vigorous journalism, and this journalism sometimes urges them to desire the direct logic, the clear rhetoric, of 'popular poetry.' It sees that Ireland has no cultivated minority, and it does not see, though it would cast out all English things, that its literary ideal belongs more to England than to other countries. I have hope that the new writers will not fall into its illusion, for they write in Irish, and for a people the counting-house has not made forgetful. Among the seven or eight hundred thou

sand who have had Irish from the cradle,
there is, perhaps, nobody who has not
enough of the unwritten tradition to know
good verses from bad ones, if he have
enough mother-wit. Among all that speak
English in Australia, in America, in Great
Britain, are there many more than the ten
thousand the prophet saw, who have
enough of the written tradition education
has set in room of the unwritten to know
good verses from bad ones, even though
their mother-wit has made them Ministers
of the Crown or what you will? Nor can
things be better till that ten thousand have
gone hither and thither to preach their faith
that 'the imagination is the man himself,'
and that the world as imagination sees it is
the durable world, and have won men as
did the disciples of Him who-

His seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.

1901.

What is 'Popular Poetry'?

SPEAKING TO THE PSALTERY

I

I HAVE always known that there was something I disliked about singing, and I naturally dislike print and paper, but now at last I understand why, for I have found something better. I have just heard a poem spoken with so delicate a sense of its rhythm, with so perfect a respect for its meaning, that if I were a wise man and could persuade a few people to learn the art I would never open a book of verses again.) A friend, who was here a few minutes ago, has sat with a beautiful stringed instrument upon her knee, her fingers passing over the strings, and has spoken to me some verses from Shelley's Skylark and Sir Ector's lamentation over the dead Launcelot out of the Morte d'Arthur and some of my own poems. Wherever the rhythm was most delicate, wherever the emotion was most ecstatic, her art was the most beautiful, and yet, although she sometimes spoke to a little

tune, it was never singing, as we sing today, never anything but speech. A singing note, a word chanted as they chant in churches, would have spoiled everything; nor was it reciting, for she spoke to a notation as definite as that of song, using the instrument, which murmured sweetly and faintly, under the spoken sounds, to give her the changing notes. Another speaker could have repeated all her effects, except those which came from her own beautiful voice that would have given her fame if the only art that gives the speaking voice its perfect opportunity were as well known among us as it was known in the ancient world.

Speaking
Psaltery.

to the

II

Since I was a boy I have always longed to hear poems spoken to a harp, as I imagined Homer to have spoken his, for it is not natural to enjoy an art only when one is by oneself. Whenever one finds a fine verse one wants to read it to somebody,