William Butler Yeats

Those Images

Those Images - meaning Summary

Images to Rouse the Mind

Yeats urges the reader to abandon passive mental seclusion and instead pursue vivid, balancing images that animate creativity. He contrasts inward drudgery with active engagement in sunlight and wind, calling the Muses home and naming archetypal figures—lion, virgin, harlot, child, eagle—to suggest a repertoire of forces whose recognition energises poetic making. The poem promotes seeking outward, plural images as fuel for imaginative life.

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What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind. I never bade you go To Moscow or to Rome. Renounce that drudgery, Call the Muses home. Seek those images That constitute the wild, The lion and the virgin, The harlot and the child. Find in middle air An eagle on the wing, Recognise the five That make the Muses sing.

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