Yeats believed that as a poet Blake had found himself tom between an alliance with magic which would help his poetry and an alliance with Christ which would lead him to Truth. For Yeats himself the statement of conflict appeared more than valid, and took the form of vacillation between the extremes of holiness and pagan enchantment. Yeats spent a lifetime mastering tools of writing and magical theory in preparation for a vision that never came. His awareness of the reversibility of his choice adds personal poignance to much of his writing. The difference, when all is said and done, between Yeats and his master Blake consists of the difference between the beyond-personality nature of belief, and the very personal quality of vacillation, which half fears to give up the poignancy of vacillation. Yeats has only the two sides, in endless conflict without escape from the plane of himself, and no outside authority to stop the battle.