ABSTRACT
THE image of Yeats' last poems is many-sided, and while lust and rage may dance attention on them, they are not wholly and perhaps not even predominantly the poems of the Steinach operation. The masks of age are chosen to round off an aesthetic life that has been shaped with both care and energy; they include, beside the comforts of the second-best, the aesthetic ascent of the lapis-lazuli mountain, the visionary reading of history under the System's bleakly joyous light, the passionate recollection of friends and old companions, and the sombre fitness of a dying life as a candle with which to survey a dying culture.
