on one of his favorite subjects: eternity. Yeats’s poetry often deals with the conflict of the temporal and the eternal. The chronology of Yeats’s life allows for a very interesting exploration of this conflict—coming of age at the end of the nineteenth century, Yeats’s literary career spans both the close of the romantic and the beginning of the modern eras of poetry. Yeats thus presents an interesting body of work in which he moves from an almost archaic style to one less flowery and embellished (clearly influenced by Ezra Pound). Despite the evolution of style, though, Yeats continually returns to the temporal and eternal as central contrasting themes in his work. From “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” in which a young Yeats appeals to theeternal rose to save him from the temporal world and its woes, to the much later “Sailing to Byzantium,” in which an older Yeats, cognizant of his death, entreaties the artists of the Hagia Sophia to immortalize him in one of their famed mosaics. Humans back to the age of Gilgamesh have feared death, but Yeats’s use of eternity stems less from fear and more from desire. His constant juxtaposition of the temporal and the eternal reflects...

...piece of poetry.
W. B. Yeats has been called the chief exponent of the Symbolist Movement in England. His poetry abounds with symbols. He used both emotional and intellectual symbols in his poems. And his symbols are taken from such diverse source as Irish folklore and mythology, magic, alchemy, and the occult disciplines,