I attended a workshop by Jas Milam that dealt with, among other thing, Jungian Archetypes. She quoted George Bernard Shaw, "You use a glass mirror to see your face / You use a work of art to see your soul." So true. A work of art overflows with meaning. You understand ineffably what the poet means, but to explain it is to ruin it. Yeats believed that people in a culture share a "common dream" that is not reality, but is instead an illusion. The true artist awakens from the common dream. The following is taken from Yeats's poem, "Ego Dominus Tuus."

The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality.
What portion of the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair.

Yeats was thinking of his friends, Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, who had "awakened," only to die at an early age. Dowson had also been frustrated in love. Change the focus from "dissipation and despair" of the last line to an attitude of delight and desire and you have more of what I think poetry can do.

Chuck