The Wednesday afternoon session of English 308: Late Romantic Poetry was almost over. Professor Emily Hollis – longtime chair of the Department of English in this very small midwestern college – was summing up.
“And so as we have seen, it can justly be said that Yeats was the Last of the Romantics and the First of the Moderns. Or at least one of the first, I should say. Thanks to Ezra Pound, more or less.”
A student in the back raised his hand.
“Yes?” Hollis said.
“Do you think,” the young man said, “that this helps account for the elegiac tone in some of his last ‘Romantic’ poems – as if he were saying goodbye to an entire era and to its style of writing? Even if, on their surface, these poems would seem to be about lost love?”
Hollis considered the question. “An interesting thought, although so much of Yeats’s early work revolves around love and loss that . . . But did you have any specific poem or poems in mind?”
“Yes,” the student said, “I was –”
But here Hollis interrupted him; it wasn’t a large class, of course, and so she was surprised she couldn’t recall this student’s name: “I am sorry, young man, but what was your name again?”
He smiled and said: “It’s Richard. And as for the poem, I was actually thinking of ‘The Poet bids his Beloved farewell’.”
Hollis consulted her book of memory and was embarrassed to find nothing there: two instances of forgetfulness in a row! “I’m afraid that I’m not sure which poem you mean,” she said, blushing a little. (Around the school, I should mention, she was famous for her inner treasury of English verse, and for her memory generally.) “I’m sorry. Can you recite a line or two perhaps?”
Richard began to declaim:
I have builded an altar to love,
Have builded it high in my heart
And all around are all bright-wove
The sadder stars of my art.
Hollis brightened. “Oh yes,” she said, happy to be remembering the poem at last. “Yes, that is a slight but rather pretty piece of work,” and she began to flip through the index of Yeats’s Collected Poems. But before she could find anything she was surprised to hear herself reciting the second stanza:
Men who would take often will take
What men who would give never will win;
A too single love is hated by fate,
While rakes count their triumphs by ten.
Then Richard cut in, resonantly:
So I lay me down to dream awhile,
And then both professor and student – as if they had agreed together beforehand – joined their voices and spoke the last three lines in unison:
Weighing long the bitter and the sweet.
I think on those still unbeguiled,
And see her fled on light-stepping feet.
The bell rang and class was over. After grabbing his books and backpack, Richard smiled at the professor on his way out. Just then another student came up with a question for Hollis and the mystery of “The Poet bids his Beloved farewell” was forgotten for the time being.
That evening at dinner she said to her husband: “I forgot a poem today.”
“Really? That’s odd.”
“Yes, something of Yeats’s. First time in years that I can remember forgetting a poem.”
“Strange. What poem was it?”
“‘The Poet bids his Beloved farewell’.”
Her husband thought for a moment. “I don’t think I can remember that one either,” he said.
“You know,” she said coaxingly, “the one that begins:
I have builded an altar to love,
Have builded it high in my heart . . .
Her husband looked at her blankly. “No, I still don’t remember it.”
“Well, anyway,” she said, “this student and I – Richard, his name is – ended up singing a sort of a duet over the thing. Somehow his own voice brought it all back to me. One moment I couldn’t remember a thing and the next it was all there – all in my book of memory. We two recited it together.”
“Extraordinary.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding and finishing up her soup.
“We’ll look the thing up after dinner.”
And so near ten o’clock she finally took the Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats down from the shelf.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said after a minute. Her husband looked up from his own book; they were sitting in twin armchairs across from each other in the library. “I can’t find it in the Collected Poems.”
“Really?” he said. “Maybe he suppressed it? Or it was a piece of juvenilia, or a draft?”
“I’m going to phone Branwell,” his wife said. “He’s our big Yeats expert,” and she left the room to make a phone call. When she returned a few minutes later she looked puzzled.
“So?” her husband said.
“Branwell says that there’s no such poem by Yeats.”
“What?”
“No such poem at all.”
“What about its being a draft or some juvenilia?”
“I asked Branwell more or less the same question. He said no, emphatically. It simply doesn’t exist.”
Hollis sank down in her chair. Husband and wife were together lost in wondering for a bit.
“How on earth then,” her husband said finally, “did both you and this Richard boy know the thing by heart?”
His wife sighed: “Yes, dear, that is precisely the question.”
“Strange. Very strange.”
Long after her husband had fallen asleep that night, Hollis lay beside him awake in bed. Such strange thoughts filled her head and there was a crowd of voices in her heart. At last she rose and dressed. Before leaving the house, she consulted the faculty’s Directory of Students. Aha, there he was: “MINTON, Richard, class of 2—; Algernon House, number 241.” That was the only Richard enrolled at the college.
The college had a compact little campus, neo-Gothic in style, and all the undergraduates lived in one of three houses: Algernon, Withers, and Lockwood. Algernon House was only a few minute’s walk from Professor Hollis’s front door.
It was a dark night, a chilly night in March, but Hollis was warm with excitement as she hurried along – alone – through the quadrangle and under the arches and down the colonnade that led to Algernon House, number 241. She went up the stairs and found the right door. It was an old familiar door, she thought. She knocked.
For a moment, silence. Then the door opened and there was Richard; he was smiling at her. It was an old familiar smile, she thought.
“Now do you remember, Emily?” he said.
And suddenly she did. “Yes, Richard,” she said. “Yes, now I remember – yes, I remember it all.”
And his face was old now, and hers was young. And nothing had ever changed between them. Nothing at all.
Very late that night she awoke in bed, but the dream was already fading. She got up and shivered. Had she ever actually left the house? Her husband lay fast asleep and snoring.
She crept out of their bedroom and back into the library. There on her desk was the Directory of Students. She took it up again but now – under “M” – there was no Richard Minton. She sighed, the volume fell into her lap – and a little paper fluttered out onto the floor. She bent down and picked it up. It was just an old man’s scrawl, but it read:
I have builded an altar to love,
Have builded it high in my heart
And all around are all bright-wove
The sadder stars of my art.