The Celtic Dawn: A Survey of the Renascence in Ireland, 1889-1916

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Macmillan Company, 1917 - English literature - 251 pages
 

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Page 47 - All Art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which mediaeval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy ; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
Page 54 - We and the labouring world are passing by : Amid men's souls, that waver and give place, Like the pale waters in their wintry race, Under the passing stars, foam of the sky, Lives on this lonely face. Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode : Before you were, or any hearts to beat, Weary and kind one lingered by His seat ; He made the world to be a grassy road Before her wandering feet...
Page 50 - That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3 ) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.
Page 80 - Even if we grant that exalted poetry can be kept successful by itself, the strong things of life are needed in poetry also, to show that what is exalted or tender is not made by feeble blood. It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.
Page 50 - I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits though I do not know , what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed...
Page 97 - If the real world is not altogether rejected, it is but touched here and there, and into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm, balance, pattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance...
Page 54 - FASTEN your hair with a golden pin, And bind up every wandering tress; I bade my heart build these poor rhymes: It worked at them, day out, day in, Building a sorrowful loveliness Out of the battles of old times.
Page 130 - In all the circumstances of this tramp life there is a certain wildness that gives it romance and a peculiar value for those who look at life in Ireland with an eye that is aware of the arts also.
Page 53 - The Rose of the World Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream? For these red lips, with all their mournful pride, Mournful that no new wonder may betide, Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam, And Usna's children died.
Page 55 - OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

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