ABSTRACT
In W. B. Yeats' collection, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, the vision of the system reveals its political dimension. This dimension had always been an aspect of Yeats' Rose as part nationalist symbol. This chapter analyses its development, particularly as it incorporates Yeats' sense of a resurgent, avenging sun-king. The poem holds up a wisdom rooted in the body as superior to the development of the earthly desires of the thoughts of the mind. In this instance the woman is representative of the potentially beatified state, in-line with the larger mythic machinery. According to Egyptian myth, Osiris had been murdered by Set, god of "chaos, deserts and war". For the increasingly modern poet, the movement of myth drives the movement of history as most clearly laid out by Yeats in "Leda and the Swan", another poem with a political dimension in origin.
