The Realists

The Realists - meaning Summary

Art Revives Lost Hope

Yeats’s short lyric addresses the power of art to restore a lost impulse toward life. Books and paintings—images of mythical, sea-drawn nymphs—are presented as catalysts that awaken hope. That hope had been smothered by dragons, symbolic obstacles or forces that extinguished desire. The poem argues that encountering beauty can revive the will to live that adversity or disillusionment had suppressed.