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Yeats's contemplative genius presents bloodless battles, symbolic of life's continued fight, and accentuates the eternal hope and peace in the land of immortal youth. Among his shorter narrative poems, which show some of the power of The Wanderings of Oisin, are The Death of Cuchulain, The Old Age of Queen Maeve, and Baile and Aillinn.
Slowly climbing by stony ways, the path reaches the summit, a rock table crowned with a pyramid of loose boulders, heaped up in olden days as a memorial of golden-haired Maeve. From the dead queen's pyramid a view of surpassing grandeur and beauty opens over sea and land, mingled valley and hill.
The winds was bundled up the clouds high over Knocknarea And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say; Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat, But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet Of Cathleen the daughter of Hoolihan.
Her face was hidden in her hands, but her soft hair and her white neck and the young look of her, put him in mind of Bridget Purcell and Margaret Gillane and Maeve Connelan and Oona Curry and Celia Driscoll, and the rest of the girls he had made songs for and had coaxed the heart from with his flattering tongue. She looked up, and he saw her to be a girl of the neighbours, a farmer's daughter.
It is the traditional Irish way, which we have too often forgotten, to notice the good in the opponent before battling with what is evil. So Maeve, the ancient Queen of Connacht, looking over the walls of her city of Cruachan at the Ulster foemen, said of them, "Noble and regal is their appearance," and her own followers said, "Noble and regal are those of whom you speak."
He is coming for good: to help us." But she did not seem to hear me. She had thrown both her arms about my grandfather, as though to ward off what was coming. The action awoke him, and he stood up tall and commanding as I remembered him of old, as I had not seen him for many a day. "What is the matter, Maeve?" he asked. "You are with me. There is nothing to fear."
The same spirit flashes out in hostile clans, and then Cuculain kisses Ferdiad. They all confidently appeal to; it in each other. Maeve flying after the great battle can ask a gift from her conqueror and obtains it. Fand and Emer dispute who shall make the last sacrifice of love and give the beloved to a rival.
But James, in his high attic, looks upon the mountains and the sky, and shakes off from him with a superb gesture the memory of her taunts. It was outside the town of Ballinscreen, on the country side of the bridge over the Maeve, that Mr. Ramsay-Stewart was shot at in the League days, and that the shot struck a decent boy, Larry Byrne, a widow's only son, and killed him stone dead.
Deirdre and Conchubar, and Angus and Maeve and Dectora and all the shadowy figures in them scarcely become embodied. Their lives and deaths and loves and hates are only a scheme on which they weave a delicate and dim embroidery of pure poetry of love and death and old age and the passing of beauty and all the sorrows that have been since the world began and will be till the world ends. If Mr.
O'Grady to be serious when he fears that many forbidden subjects will be themes for dramatic art, that Maeve with her many husbands will walk the stage, and the lusts of an earlier age be revived to please the lusts of today. The danger of art is not in its subjects, but in the attitude of the artist's mind.
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