The little fox he murmured,
    “O what of the world’s bane?”
    The sun was laughing sweetly,
    The moon plucked at my rein;
    But the little red fox murmured,
    “O, do not pluck at his rein,
    He is riding to the townland
    That is the world’s bane.”

You may interpret the little red fox and the sun and the moon as you please, but is it not all as beautiful as the ringing of bells?

But Mr. Yeats, in his desire for this other world of colour and music, is no scorner of the everyday earth.  His early poems especially, as Mr. Reid points out, give evidence of a wondering observation of Nature almost Wordsworthian.  In The Stolen Child, which tells of a human child that is enticed away by the fairies, the magic of the earth the child is leaving is the means by which Mr. Yeats suggests to us the magic of the world into which it is going, as in the last verse of the poem:—­

Away with us he’s going, The solemn eyed:  He’ll hear no more the lowing Of the calves on the warm hillside; Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal-chest. For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.

There is no painting here, no adjective-work.  But no painting or adjectives could better suggest all that the world and the loss of the world mean to an imaginative child than this brief collection of simple things.  To read The Stolen Child is to realize both that Mr. Yeats brought a new and delicate music into literature and that his genius had its birth in a sense of the beauty of common things.  Even when in his early poems the adjectives seem to be chosen with the too delicate care of an artist, as when he notes how—­

            in autumnal solitudes
    Arise the leopard-coloured trees,

his observation of the world about him is but proved the more conclusively.  The trees in autumn are leopard-coloured, though a poet cannot say so without becoming dangerously ornamental.

What I have written so far, however, might convey the impression that in Mr. Yeats’s poetry we have a child’s rather than a man’s vision at work.  One might even gather that he was a passionless singer with his head in the moon.  This is exactly the misunderstanding which has led many people to think of him as a minor poet.

The truth is Mr. Yeats is too original and, as it were, secret a poet to capture all at once the imagination that has already fixed the outlines of its kingdom amid the masterpieces of literature.  His is a genius outside the landmarks.  There is no prototype in Shelley or Keats, any more than there is in Shakespeare, for such a poem as that which was at first called Breasal the Fisherman, but is now called simply The Fisherman: