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64 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
from the 90's. The older poet asked him to go through his verse
and point out to him which words were abstractions, and was
surprised at the large number that were so marked. He made a
renewed effort to purge his verse of its weaknesses in At the Hawks
Nest, his first play in six years, which he dictated to Pound early in
1916. The improvement is noticeable at once, the new verse is
more spare, the images are exactly delineated, every shadow is
removed. The tone, too, is definitely that of Yeats and no one else,
I call to the mind
A well long choked up and dry
And boughs stripped by the wind,
And I call to the mind's eye
Pallor of an ivory face
Its lofty dissolute air,
A man climbing up to a place
The salt sea wind has left bare. 13
"The first play," Ellmann continues, "shows the effect of the
young American's stimulating influence in its dramatic form as well
as its style. During the first year that Pound acted as his secretary,
Yeats was working on an essay to prove the connection between the
beliefs of peasants, spiritualists, Swedenborg, and Henry Moore; his
thoughts were full of ghosts, witches and supernatural phenomena.
Pound, on the other hand, had a project of his own. He was the
literary executor of Ernest Fenollosa, a scholar who had spent
many years in Japan studying the Noh drama. It was very exciting
to Yeats, always on the lookout for new ways of using occult
research, to hear that the Japanese plays were full of spirits and
masks, and that the crises in the plays usually occurred when a
character who had appeared to be an ordinary mortal was suddenly
revealed to be a good spirit. He was delighted to learn from Pound
that the Noh 'was one of the great arts of the world, and quite
possibly one of the most recondite. The art of the illusion is at the
root of the Noh. These plays, or eclogues, were made only for the
few; for the nobles; for those trained to catch the illusion. In the
Noh we find an art based upon the god-dance, or upon some local
apparition, or, later, on gestes of war and feats of history; an art of