One of the most significant moves by Yeats in creating his late style is a new form of adjectival description. It uses a sequence of (often complex, often anomalous) adjectives to describe a single phenomenon, e.g., ‘That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea’. These sequences provoke us to understand the thought process that creates each of the adjectives: How can a sea be ‘torn’? How can a sea be ‘tormented’ by a gong? (These are new aspects of the sea ‘of mire and blood’: ‘torn’ makes it a wounded body, ‘tormented’ makes it a wounded soul.) The two agents – dolphin and gong – are likewise redefined. Instead of being merely the bearers of souls, the dolphins become cruelly aggressive goads to the reluctant body, forcing it towards Byzantium, and the gong, instead of being merely an indicator of midnight, becomes a last call of impending physical death. I begin with early ‘simple’ single adjectives (‘lovely’, ‘dim’), often used repetitively, and then consider the later adjectives, offering many perspectives at once, turning the reader’s gaze from aspect to aspect. An altogether higher order of intellectuality generates these, requiring intense attempts to follow the successive aspects being identified.

Because the lyric poem so often speaks in a first-person voice, we unconsciously expect to hear in its lines someone saying, “No, I am that I am” (Shakespeare) or “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (Wordsworth), or “I too dislike it” (Marianne Moore) or “Black like me” (Langston Hughes). Wallace Stevens sometimes writes poems of this openly personal sort: “

But Stevens' use of the naked first-person voice is relatively rare. The most frequent substitute in lyric for the first-person singular is the first-person plural: “Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end” (Shakespeare); “Oh joy, that in our embers / Is something that doth live” (Wordsworth); “We outgrow love, like other things” (Emily Dickinson). Stevens is much attached to this first-person plural voicing, which serves him, as it has many poets, as a philosophic resource in asserting something true of all human beings:

But the capacious pronoun “we” can equally serve Stevens as the sign of collective American reference - “Deer walk upon our mountains” (56) - or as the sign of intimacy between two people - “Only we two are one” (118) - or as an indirect way of speaking of himself: “If sex were all, then every trembling hand / Could make us squeak, like dolls, the wished-for words” (14).

If we arbitrarily divide Yeats's fifty-four years of publishing into thirds, “late Yeats” would cover the years 1920-39. By 1920, when he was fifty-five, Yeats felt that his heart had grown old (as he said in “The Wild Swans at Coole”). He had given up his hope to marry Maud Gonne (to whom he had proposed, for the last time, in 1916), had married George Hyde Lees, had become a father at the birth of his daughter Anne, and, when lecturing in America, had seen his failing father for the last time (J. B. Yeats died in 1922). Yeats had already moved into a retrospective mode by writing, in 1914, the first of his autobiographical essays, called Reveries over Childhood and Youth, to be followed, in 1922, by The Trembling of the Veil. He was spending summer weeks in his tower at Ballylee, making it his symbol of age, endurance, fortitude, and wide observational power. He and his wife were ardently pursuing the practice of automatic writing, which had led, in 1918, to the first sketch - called Per Amica Silentia Lunae - of the occult materials that would receive their fullest form in the 1926 publication of A Vision.