The Vigour of Its Blood: Yeats’s “Words for Music Perhaps”

Whatever stands in field or flood, 
Bird, beast, fish or man, 
Mare or stallion, cock or hen, 
Stands in God's unchanging eye 
In all the vigour of its blood; 
In that faith I live or die. 
  from Tom the Lunatic (1931) 

Reading Yeats, we would posit a poet who suffered from a psychosis characteristic of our time and familiar to other times: namely, an intense and painful preoccupation with the seemingly irreconcilable claims of Soul and Body. Intense and painful, because being a poet he was driven, as by an entelechial motive typical of the artist, toward images of “wholeness,” unity, and “perfection.” There seemed no possibility, however, of realizing or enacting “Unity of Being”: the poetic metaphor was frustrate at every point. In King and No King he had written: