I made my song a coat,
    Covered with embroideries,
    Out of old mythologies,
    From heel to throat. 
    But the fools caught it,
    Wore it in the world’s eye,
    As though they’d wrought it. 
    Song, let them take it,
    For there’s more enterprise
    In walking naked.

Mr. Yeats still gives some of his songs the old embroidered vesture.  But his work is now more frankly personal than it used to be—­at once harsher and simpler.  One would not give Responsibilities to a reader who knew nothing of Mr. Yeats’s previous work.  There is too much raging at the world in it, too little of the perfected beauty of The Wind Among the Reeds.  One finds ugly words like “wive” and “thigh” inopportunely used, and the retort to Mr. George Moore’s Hail and Farewell, though legitimately offensive, is obscure in statement.  Still, there is enough beauty in the book to make it precious to the lover of literature.  An Elizabethan might have made the music of the first verse of A Woman Homer Sung.

And what splendour of praise and censure Mr. Yeats gives us in The Second Troy:—­

    Why should I blame her, that she filled my days
      With misery, or that she would of late
    Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways. 
      Or hurled the little streets against the great,
    Had they but courage equal to desire? 
      What could have made her peaceful with a mind
    That nobleness made simple as a fire,
      With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
    That is not natural in an age like this,
      Being high and solitary, and most stern? 
    Why, what could she have done, being what she is? 
      Was there another Troy for her to burn?

It is curious to note in how much of his verse Mr. Yeats repeats his protest against the political passion of Ireland which once meant so much to him. All Things can Tempt Me expresses this artistic mood of revolt with its fierce beginning:—­

    All things can tempt me from this craft of verse;
    One time it was a woman’s face, or worse,
    The seeming needs of my fool-driven land.

Some of the most excellent pages of Reveries, however, are those which recall certain famous figures in Irish Nationalism like John O’Leary and J.F.  Taylor, the orator whose temper so stood in his way.

Mr. Yeats recalls a wonderful speech Taylor once made at a meeting in Dublin at which a Lord Chancellor had apparently referred in a belittling way to Irish nationality and the Irish language: