The volume called Responsibilities represents the anthesis of Yeats’s early work, stripped of its decoration and mystery. In this volume Yeats turned to savage satire and invective, defending great art against the philistines. Synge and Hugh Lane stand as his symbols of the artist and the enlightened patron respectively. Lane’s offering his collection of gifts to Dublin, on condition that a suitable gallery be built for their display, had not been properly appreciated, just as Synge’s art had been despised by Dublin.
Responsibilities is full of novelties. It is a versatile collection. There are in it a number of direct personal or occasional poems and some satirical ones. There are examples of a new kind of fable-poetry which avoids becoming allegory. There are a couple of those poems in a ballad from with refrain which he later was to use so often. These ballads, appearing care-free and frivolous, convey a simple, serious statement of a particular mood or idea.
The fable poems are “The Grey Rock”, “The Three Beggars”, “The Three Hermits” and “The Hour Before Dawn”. These are dry, unromantic pieces. In them, everyday sometimes colloquial, diction is blended with terms of speech which comes out of the poetic tradition. “The Grey Rock” once again presents a supernatural being love with a man, and in this case embittered by the man’s treachery.
“The Three Beggars” is satirical comment upon everyday avarice. The hero here is a crane who, like the fool or the saint elsewhere in Yeats’s poetry, shows no competitive spirit.
“The Hour Before Dawn” is a defense of waking life against the man who intends to sleep till day of judgement: “For all life longs for the last day”. Yeats had in his time expressed this longing himself and was to continue to express it on occasions. Now, however, he is on the whole an accepter of life instead of a rejector of it.
The best poems in “Responsibilities” are two short, very direct ones addressed to Maud Gonne’s daughter. There are more poems for her in his next volume and she ranks among the few persons who could evoke from Yeats this personal directness. It is incorrect to say that directness is the most striking characteristic of Yeats’s later poems or to think that his best poems are necessarily the direct ones. “Responsibilities” also contains the poem called ‘A Coat’. In this poem, Yeats decides to discard his romantic material; in other words, he abdicates the throne of the “twilight”. Rejecting the coat “covered with embroideries out of old mythologies”, he decides to “walk naked”.
Yeats was strong enough to force a triumph out of defeat. He speaks of a beauty “won from bitterest hours”, and it is this he serves instead of the cloudy glamour of “The Celtic Twilight”. The verse, in its rhythm and diction recognizes the actual world, but holds against it an ideal of aristocratic fitness.
