Werk wel thy-self, that other folk canst rede;
And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.

Tempest thee noght al croked to redresse,
In trust of hir that turneth as a bal: [Fortune]
Gret reste stant in litel besinesse;

And eek be war to sporne ageyn an al;
Stryve noght, as doth the crokke with the wal.
Daunte thy-self, that dauntest otheres dede;
And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.

That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse,
The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fal.
Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse :
Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stal!
Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
Hold the hye way, and lat thy gost thee lede:
And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede."

-Katharine Lee Bates

HAPLESS

Hapless, hapless, I must be
All the hours of life I see,
Since my foolish nurse did once
Bed me on her leggen bones;
Since my mother did not weel

To snip my nails with blades of steel.
Had they laid me on a pillow

In a cot of water willow,

Had they bitten finger and thumb,

Not to such ill hap I had come.

-Walter de la Mare

THE POET'S TRAVAIL

In every generation a few persons ask by what throes genius is enabled to bear fruit. They would know what relationship exists between the human spirit and its achieve. ments. William Butler Yeats has given his answer to this question most concisely in five lines of the poem called "Ego Dominus Tuus":

I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge,
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self.

He has explained his theory at greater length in a small book published about seven years ago and called "Per Amica Silentia Lunæ."

The argument of the book, if such serene and simple speech can be called argument, is founded on the belief that the artist is the man who succeeds in giving expression to a self that is the antithesis of his everyday self. Mr. Yeats says:

When I think of any great poetical writer of the past, I comprehend, if I know the lineaments of his life, that the work is the man's flight from his entire horoscope, his blind struggle in the network of the stars.

And again,

Landor topped us all in calm nobility when the pen was in his hand, as in the daily violence of his passion when he laid it down.

And he believes that Keats was born with a thirst for luxury which he was never able "to slake with beautiful and strange objects" and therefore created an imaginary luxuriance.

The theory is one that might easily be misinterpreted and become a menace to talented youth. It would seem comic in a crude mind and ridiculous in the mouth of the unwary. Must a man be a felon to praise honesty in his verse, or a poltroon to exalt honor? Or conversely, will the strong and virtuous person necessarily write weak and base poetry? Must we alter the words of Christ and look for figs only among the coarse spines of the thistle? These are questions which, lacking discernment, or leisure for thought about complex psychological processes, we might be tempted to ask.

Yet the doctrine of the antithetical self may be better founded than such casual and inapt questioning would seem to suggest. It is not very remote, after all, from certain other doctrines current among plain people everywhere. What country parson has not told his flock to conquer faults by setting up the opposite virtues in their stead? What nation is without a saw or catchword showing that we desire and admire what we do not already possess? And modern psychology tells us that "every organism abhors incompleteness."

In his interesting "Psychology and Morals" Dr. J. A. Hadfield describes this urge of the partial personality towards completeness in a way which is pertinent in any discussion of Mr. Yeats' theory of genius:

The hunger of the soul for fulfillment is evidenced in dreams. We realize in dreams what we cannot realize in