Slogging to Byzantium

Yeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve heard this much: that Yeats’s best stuff came late. So you pick up the 1950 edition of the Collected Poems and start from the back. The last few lines in the book are the first you see.

And now my utmost mystery is out:A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner:Under it wisdom stands, and I alone —Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone —Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lostIn the confusion of its night-dark folds,Can hear the armed man speak.

Forty years ago, when I first read those lines, I had to remind myself to start breathing again.