• Publishing
• Self-Publishing
• White Seahorse Classics
• About White Seahorse
• Contact Us
• Books we Reviewed
  

The Cutting of an Agate

In The Cutting of an Agate W.B. Yeats starts with thoughts on Lady Gregory's translations and tells of his experiences: He writes about meeting fellow student JM Synge for the first time, putting on a play in a small town in the west of Ireland, and how to make his work appreciated by his audience. He then writes at length about Synge and others of his time. He describes his observations of people he encounters. He discusses the merits of modern plays, and how a character in an epic novel will stay with us longer than one in a play. He describes the first time he took Indian hemp and how the high changed the way he saw things at the time.

He finishes with several chapters dedicated to J.M. Spencer. He is a fellow poet, specific parts of whose poetry Yeats liked to carry around with him. "I have put into this book only those passages from Spenser that I want to remember and carry about with me. I have not tried to select what people call characteristic passages, for that is, I think, the way to make a dull book... I have taken out of The Shepheards Calender only those parts which are about love or about old age, and I have taken out of the Faerie Queene passages about shepherds and lovers, and fauns and satyrs, and a few allegorical processions."

"There is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere. If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him... Yet perhaps he must endure the impermanent a little, for these things return, but not wholly, for no two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned eyes, no two flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of the individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and that the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his home in the Serpent’s mouth?"

Click here for more from White Seahorse Classics