Kermode maintains that Yeats's images and symbols define the Romantic tradition-the preference for images over formal reasoning as a way to reconcile opposites. Yeats's poetry, for all its mythical, classical, and historical allusions,its occultism and arcana, values imagination over intellection, and the resonant image over the plain statement. Organic images, as distinct from descriptive or ornamental images, generate symbolic ripples. Kermode holds that Yeats's recurrent, almost obsessive images, such as tree, bird, tower, and dancer, reach a high point of Romantic imagery and organic form. The pre-eminent example of symbolic images (archetypes), is the dancer and the dance at the end of "Among School Children," an image that reconciles body and soul, identity and action, artist and art. Kermode's study is a standard in Yeats criticism.

I took to this book very quickly as the descriptions that the author gave of growing up in Cork were right on the money. I found myself walking with him, having spent some time in Cork I could vividly picture the city. I also felt as though I knew the people that he spoke of in the book. I found it to be a pleasant trip back to Cork, as well as a well written story.