It may be the case that in his poem “News for the Delphic Oracle” the famous Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, turned for inspiration to an early mythology by Nicolas Poussin, hung in the NG of Art, Dublin. This is Acis and Galatea, an excellent example of Poussin working in a full-blown Venetian style before he would find a more sedate manner in the 1630s. The picture dates to about 1628-9.
Reading the final verse, there are similarities between Yeats poem and Poussin’s picture. The final verse of Yeats’ meditation on the “after-life according to neo-platonic doctrine” (A . Norman Jeffares, Yeats: Selected Poetry ) describes the erotic play in the foam which is also happening in the painting:
Slim adolescence that a nymph has stripped,
Peleus on Thetis stares.
Her limbs are delicate as an eyelid,
Love has blinded him with tears;
But Thetis' belly listens.
Down the mountain walls
From where Pan's cavern is
Intolerable music falls.
Foul goat-head, brutal arm appear,
Belly, shoulder, bum,
Flash fishlike; nymphs and satyrs
Copulate in the foam.
Why no mention of Acis and Galatea? Because Yeats was thinking of an early identification of the picture as “Peleus and Thetis” that was eventually shown to be incorrect. Yeats seems to be mistaking Polyphemous ( jilted lover of Galatea) for Pan according the earlier title and the two lovers for Peleus and Thetis. The love-making in the surf could relate to either subject I suppose.
It is known from Poussin’s correspondence he was thinking of a project of the subject of the “Marriage of Peleus and Thetis” for his first important patron Cassiano dal Pozzo, but it hasn’t survived if it was ever executed.
In his CR of 1966 Blunt notes that the picture on “various ocassions” was called Peleus and Thetis”. I don’t know if Blunt knew of the link between Yeats and Poussin- but he would hardly have approved. AB was famously reluctant to see Poussin as an erotic painter, still less as raw material for a modern philosophical poet with erotic leanings.
The portrait of Yeats (1907) is by Augustus John and is in the Tate.
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