7. Mountain Visions and Other Last Things

Sustained discussion of three texts: first, the final movement of the late masterpiece, ‘Lapis Lazuli’( read in the double context of another poem of Asiatic mountain-vision, the sonnet ‘Meru,’ and of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’; second, close readings of two death-poems, the Dantesque and self-revealing ‘Cuchulain Comforted,’ written on the eve of the poet’s actual death; and ‘What Then?,’ its immediate audience students in Yeats’s old high school, and therefore a particularly accessible demonstration that the tension between the temporal and the eternal, the Homeric -Nietzschean antithetical and the Platonic-Christian primary, persists, as both challenge and imaginative stimulus, to the end.