Lasting Songs

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF W. B. YEATS (480 pp.]--Macm/7/an ($5).

A month before his death in 1939, Irish Poet William Butler Yeats wrote to a friend: "And I do nothing but write verse." It was not the lyric verse that once sang: "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree"; now it had a marblelike quality, a classic vigor and clarity that most younger poets envied. A few months earlier, at 73, he had written his epitaph:

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by!

His last verses had something else that shocked some younger , readers: an old man's brooding preoccupation with the grandeurs and miseries of fleshly love. In this final edition of the Collected Poems, the old poet makes it clear that he is still "mad about women," though his madness is a curse to him:

You think it horrible that lust and rage Should dance attention upon my old age; They were not such a plague when I was young;

What else have I to spur me into song?

In his day, other spurs set Yeats agal-loping. In London as a young art student, it was occultism, and it sometimes smothered his early poetry. In Ireland he helped found the famed Abbey Theater, and, with George Bernard Shaw, the Irish Academy of Letters.

He practiced, and survived, several sorts of poetry, and in each phase he was first-rate. His fame gathered and hung above him during his own lifetime. Ireland, which is not always proud of its writers, was proud of him. Eire made him a Senator. He was the first Irishman to win the Nobel Prize. When, in 1940, Poet T. S. Eliot delivered the First Annual Yeats Lecture in Dublin's Abbey Theater, he called Yeats "the greatest poet of our time--certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language."

Like the professional poet he was, Yeats sat down at 11 each morning to write poetry, but his workday lasted only two hours, and he never finished more than a dozen lines a day.

Sometimes the twelve lines were as good as this:

God guard me from the thoughts men

think

In the mind alone; He that sings a lasting song Thinks in a marrowbone;

From all that makes a wise old man That can be praised of all;

0 what am I that I should not seem For the song's sake a fool?

1 pray--for fashion's word is out And prayer comes round again--That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.

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