Praising Yeats, T. S. Eliot wrote that “a man who is capable of experience finds himself in a very different world in every decade of his life; as he sees it with different eyes, the material of his art is continually renewed.” As a young symbolist Yeats had asked:

When shall the stars be blown about the sky,

Like sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?

Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,

Far-off, most secret, and inviolable Rose?