Behind major poems of Last Poems stand specific works of art: the statue, theportraits and pictures, the sculpted pieces. The sculpture, like the poetry, which attractedYeats most, was what seemed to have created from the integrated Self. His specialconcern with ‘Upanishads’ is the fourth state of the mind, the union of Self andNot-Self. He knew much better what to look for in Michael Angelo was the spiritualenergy expressed by the physical power of the muscular structure of his figures. Heremarks that it is the poet’s business to describe desirable persons and the states ofmind. The primary example of the ability of the mind to create and to impose form isart.
“Under Ben Bulben” evokes Michael Angelo’s “Secret working mind and expressesthe concrete aspiration” of Yeats’s creative mind and the aim of his greatest poetry in aworld of men and human passion.
Yeats discovers his own freedom, his own greatness of soul as he discovers thefreedom and greatness of his friends in “Municipal Gallery Revisited.” Throughout thepoetry we may notice that it is a community based upon a mutual greatness, a mutualglory that springs from communion of such friends” conduct.
“Lapis Lazuli” explores the relationship between mind and history. Yeats hasdiscovered a way of thinking about the world that locates all value in the act of mind.It is the act of mind involved in forming. Yeats’s contemplation of the piece of lapislazuli is itself the sort of act of mind that is exemplified on the stone. All the stonerecords is the aspiration of the Chinamen; their struggle towards the autonomy of soulthat will provide perspective. But the achievement of that autonomy is Yeats’s “I delightto imagine them seated there.”
Michael Angelo became identified with Yeats himself as an inexhaustible creativeenergy, “an old man’s eagle mind.” And also, in acting as autonomous individuals,Yeats’s friends the status and the efficacy of works of art. They have become the pictures of their own virtue, so that ‘lineaments are their thought. Yeats’s ‘generosity ofmind’ consists in his ability to proclaim commitment on the part of his friends to thevalues that are proper to a community of heroes. It is in Yeats’s belief in the power ofmind, in the act of mind that he could reach the union of flesh and spirit in thecompletion of his passion.