But, as Mr. Yeats has grown older, he has become more and more determinedly the magician in his robes.  Even in his prose he does not lay aside his robes; it is written in the tones of the sanctuary:  it is prose for worshippers.  To such an extent is this so that many who do not realize that Mr. Yeats is a great artist cannot read much of his prose without convincing themselves that he is a great humbug.  It is easy to understand how readers accustomed to the rationalism of the end of the century refused to take seriously a poet who wrote “spooky” explanations of his poems, such as Mr. Yeats wrote in his notes to The Wind Among the Reeds, the most entirely good of his books.  Consider, for example, the note which he wrote on that charming if somewhat perplexing poem, The Jester.  “I dreamed,” writes Mr. Yeats:—­

I dreamed this story exactly as I have written it, and dreamed another long dream after it, trying to make out its meaning, and whether I was to write it in prose or verse.  The first dream was more a vision than a dream, for it was beautiful and coherent, and gave me a sense of illumination and exaltation that one gets from visions, while the second dream was confused and meaningless.  The poem has always meant a great deal to me, though, as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing.  Blake would have said, “The authors are in eternity”; and I am quite sure they can only be questioned in dreams.

Why, even those of us who count Mr. Yeats one of the immortals while he is still alive, are inclined to shy at a claim at once so solemn and so irrational as this.  It reads almost like a confession of witchcraft.

Luckily, Mr. Yeats’s commerce with dreams and fairies and other spirits has not all been of this evidential and disputable kind.  His confessions do not convince us of his magical experiences, but his poems do.  Here we have the true narrative of fairyland, the initiation into other-worldly beauty.  Here we have the magician crying out against

     All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

and attempting to invoke a new—­or an old—­and more beautiful world into being.

     The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told,

he cries, and over against the unshapely earth he sets up the “happy townland” of which he sings in one of his later and most lovely poems.  It would not be easy to write a prose paraphrase of The Happy Townland, but who is there who can permanently resist the spell of this poem, especially of the first verse and its refrain?—­

    There’s many a strong farmer
    Whose heart would break in two,
    If he could see the townland
    That we are riding to;
    Boughs have their fruit and blossom
    At all times of the year;
    Rivers are running over
    With red beer and brown beer. 
    An old man plays the bagpipes
    In a golden and silver wood;
    Queens, their eyes blue like the ice,
    Are dancing in a crowd.