ABSTRACT
It is tempting to consider Yeats' early poetry as a straightforward commitment to the dream. He himself, writing in 1899 to Katherine Tynan, encourages this conclusion by describing a thicket near Howth in these revealing words:
That thicket gave me my first thought of what a long poem should be; I thought of it as a region into which one should wander from the cares of life. The characters were to be no more real than the shadows that people the Howth thicket. Their mission was to lessen the solitude without destroying its peace. (Letters, p. 106)
Mosada and the Island of Statues are two of the poems written in the thicket. The former, with its theatricalities of the Inquisition, death by poison and the infatuated priest, provides an appropriately lurid setting for the imagery of escape. In the Island of Statues a shepherd and shepherdess overcome an enchantress on an island and find the flower which will restore to life those whom she has turned into statues. Given their choice between the world and
Arcady, the erstwhile statues choose to remain Arcadians. The epilogue 'spoken by a Satyr carrying a sea-shell' informs us nostalgically that:
Of old the world on dreaming fed Grey Truth is now her painted toy; (CP, 7)
In words that are evocative of The Two Trees the 'optic glass' of science is contrasted with the 'twisted echo-harbouring shell' of art, and 'dusty deeds' and the fierce hungering after external truth are contrasted with the real source of truth in man's own heart. The repeated conclusion that 'Words alone are certain good' is, of course, a consoling proposition for a young poet at the outset of his career.
