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Behind major poems of Last Poems stand specific works of art: the statue, the portraits and pictures, the sculpted pieces. The sculpture, like the poetry, which attracted Yeats most, was what seemed to have created from the integrated Self. His special concern with ‘Upanishads’ is the fourth state of the mind, the union of Self and Not-Self. He knew much better what to look for in Michael Angelo was the spiritual energy expressed by the physical power of the muscular structure of his figures. He remarks that it is the poet’s business to describe desirable persons and the states of mind. The primary example of the ability of the mind to create and to impose form is art.
“Under Ben Bulben” evokes Michael Angelo’s “Secret working mind and expresses the concrete aspiration” of Yeats’s creative mind and the aim of his greatest poetry in a world of men and human passion.
Yeats discovers his own freedom, his own greatness of soul as he discovers the freedom and greatness of his friends in “Municipal Gallery Revisited.” Throughout the poetry we may notice that it is a community based upon a mutual greatness, a mutual glory that springs from communion of such friends” conduct.
“Lapis Lazuli” explores the relationship between mind and history. Yeats has discovered a way of thinking about the world that locates all value in the act of mind. It is the act of mind involved in forming. Yeats’s contemplation of the piece of lapis lazuli is itself the sort of act of mind that is exemplified on the stone. All the stone records is the aspiration of the Chinamen; their struggle towards the autonomy of soul that will provide perspective. But the achievement of that autonomy is Yeats’s “I delight to imagine them seated there.”
Michael Angelo became identified with Yeats himself as an inexhaustible creative energy, “an old man’s eagle mind.” And also, in acting as autonomous individuals, Yeats’s friends the status and the efficacy of works of art. They have become the pictures of their own virtue, so that ‘lineaments are their thought. Yeats’s ‘generosity of mind’ consists in his ability to proclaim commitment on the part of his friends to the values that are proper to a community of heroes. It is in Yeats’s belief in the power of mind, in the act of mind that he could reach the union of flesh and spirit in the completion of his passion.