But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf.  The structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility.  The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will rise when he hears the trumpet-note:  ‘Of man’s first disobedience....’  And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be condemned to the sterility of a coterie.  The lawless and fantastic shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect embodiment, the discipline of the common perception.  The phantoms of the individual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity and become like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms they should be.  For the poet himself must move securely among his visions; they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are.  To anchor them he needs intelligible myth.  Nothing less than a supremely great genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark visible to other eyes than his own.  Blake had a supremely great genius and was saved in part.  The masculine vigour of his passion gave stability to the figures of his imagination.  They are heroes because they are made to speak like heroes.  Even in Blake’s most recondite work there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise the austere and awful countenances of gods.  The phantasmagoria of the dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet.  Like Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and would not let him go.

The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman; yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a poet may plunge into the world of phantasms.  Mr Yeats has too little of the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming.  He knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle.  But the very terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of impotence:—­

  Hands, do what you’re bid;
  Bring the balloon of the mind
  That bellies and drags in the wind
  Into its narrow shed.

The languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poet has failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression of an ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness to the poet’s minor probity.  He remains an artist by determination, even though he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry.  We were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majestic isolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit.  Subsequently they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty.  Although it has little mysterious and haunting beauty, The Wild Swans at Coole is indeed a swan song.  It is eloquent of final defeat; the following of a lonely path has ended in the poet’s sinking exhausted in a wilderness of gray.  Not even the regret is passionate; it is pitiful.