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The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 8 (of 8) / Discoveries. Edmund Spenser. Poetry and Tradition; and Other Essays. Bibliography cover

The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, Vol. 8 (of 8) / Discoveries. Edmund Spenser. Poetry and Tradition; and Other Essays. Bibliography

Chapter 15: THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS
By W. B. Yeats
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About This Book

A compact collection of essays blending literary criticism, theatrical memoir, and cultural reflection. The author examines poetic tradition and symbolism, offers close readings of earlier poets such as Edmund Spenser, critiques contemporary drama and playwrights including Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, and reflects on the artist’s social role as prophet, priest, and king. Short pieces probe saints, asceticism, the religious foundations of symbolic art, and the bodily energies that give drama its force. Personal anecdotes about performances, convents, and provincial audiences illuminate broader arguments about reconnecting imaginative life with ordinary people, and the volume closes with brief critical notes and a bibliography.

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS

Instinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the serpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer of the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the impermanent, for no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday’s clock. Sanctity has its straight line also, darting from the centre, and with these arrows the many-coloured serpent, theme of all our poetry, is maimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow shall have wisdom older than the Serpent, but what of the black arrow? How much knowledge, how heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can the soul endure?