Part of Edwin Muir’s review of Yeats’ A Vision from yeatsvision.com:

The account of the journeyings of the soul after death, or between one incarnation and another, are equally real or unreal; we give pretty much the same kind and degree of belief to the one as to the other. The division of history into great days, all related to the wheel, all determined by that awful geometrical revolution, is just as impressive and as remote as the rest. Mr Yeats’s vision is a religious one; it has touched his heart, as his poetry shows; it is the vision of a man in love with perfection and impatient of imperfection. The religious vision of Western Europe, thought at its highest a structure of inconceivable complexity, can be understood by the simplest mind, for it implies throughout certain simple facts of experience: the knowledge of imperfection and desire for perfection, the knowledge of death and desire for immortality. This simplicity seems to me to be quite refined out of Mr Yeats’s plan, and that plan is perhaps more than anything else an object of æsthetic pleasure. What a powerful one it is can be seen from reading some of Mr Yeats’s greatest poetry, such as the magnificent sonnet on Leda included in this volume. It may be, after all, that the communicators merely wanted to give him metaphors for his poetry.

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Yeats – “Leda and the Swan”

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?