’I am worn out with dreams,
  A weather-worn, marble triton
  Among the streams;
  And all day long I look
  Upon this lady’s beauty
  As though I had found in book
  A pictured beauty,
  Pleased to have filled the eyes
  Or the discerning ears,
  Delighted to be but wise,
  For men improve with the years;
  And yet, and yet
  Is this my dream, or the truth? 
  O would that we had met
  When I had my burning youth;
  But I grow old among dreams,
  A weather-worn, marble triton
  Among the streams.’

It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poet mistakes the cause of his sorrow.  He is worn out not with dreams, but with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative energy.  He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has merely followed them like will-o’-the-wisps away from the world he knew.  Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that vanishes into a no-man’s land, where is no future, and whence there is no way back to the past.

  ’My country is Kiltartan Cross,
  My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor;
  No likely end could bring them loss
  Or leave them happier than before.’

It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation.  We do not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in and for himself.  From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands upon it.  His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous.  Of this impoverishment, as of all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware.

  ’I would find by the edge of that water
  The collar-bone of a hare,
  Worn thin by the lapping of the water,
  And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
  At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
  And laugh over the untroubled water
  At all who marry in churches,
  Through the white thin bone of a hare.’

Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its bitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world of imagination.  Mr Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to contemplate it was sufficient.  Had he been a great poet he would have made it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech.  By re-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have built landmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his last discovery had ended.  But now there remains nothing but a handful of the symbols with which he was content:—­

  ’A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
  A Buddha, hand at rest,
  Hand lifted up that blest;
  And right between these two a girl at play.’

These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and, alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live.