Ebook The Poetical Works of William B. Yeats

When I was in America two or three years ago, I lectured at the Irish College of San J osé, and as I went through the quadrangle to the lecture hall the moonlight fell among the palm trees. I remember how strange and foreign all that beauty seemed to me; and yet the lads I spoke to were moved, as I thought, by the imaginative tradition that would have moved them at home. It seemed to me that they knew the history and the ballad poetry as I did, and were moved as I had been at their age by Davis's Lament for Owen Roe or by Mangan's Ode to the Maguire. I was able to forget the palm trees, and to say what I would have said to young men in Dublin or in Con nacht. As I am looking over the proof sheets of these two books, where I have gathered.