Michael Robartes and the Dancer

Abstract

Some of the poems in this volume were written in 1916 but not publicly circulated until 1920. His earlier mockery — ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone’ — has vanished, and he records in these poems his clear perception of what was achieved by the Rising, by the leaders who have joined the long procession of Ireland’s martyrs. The magnificent poems based on AV’s thought blend imaginative experience and explanation in a manner which imparts a sense of revelation. ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ (CP 211) and ‘Demon and Beast’ (CP 209) while not as completely linked with AV as ‘The Second Coming’ (CP 210) are none the less illustrative of how much Yeats’s life and thought interacted, how much he resembled at this period the poor man in his poem, who, having roved, loved and thought himself beloved, now ‘from a glad kindness cannot take his eyes’.

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