The poetry of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is known for its esoteric, or occult, influences upon its symbolism. Yeats was trained in esoteric societies such as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's Theosophical Society and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

With this in mind it may then be deciphered what he meant when he said:

Because to him, who ponders well / My rhymes more than their rhyming tell / Of the dim wisdoms old and deep, / That God gives unto man in sleep. / For the elemental beings go / About my table to and fro. / In flood and fire and clay and wind, / They huddle from man's pondering mind; [...]

-- "To Ireland in the Coming Times"

Yeats is here referring to the esotericist, occultist, or magician who ponders the ancient symbols and through them is able to gain access to the secrets of the elements. The reference to the "elemental creatures" in juxtaposition with Yeats' description of the four elements: "In flood and fire and clay and wind" is a reference to the elementals as thought of by Paracelsus who describes them as the Gnomes or Pygmies (earth), Sylphs (air), Undines (water) and Salamanders (fire).

It is clear that Yeats saw the saviours of Ireland as skilled in the ancient arts of alchemy and magic, and he portrayed this message strongly in his poetry. Some of his poetry borrows verbatim from the ceremonies and initiations of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, such as in "To My Heart, Bidding It Have no Fear." Another theory, and reasonably justified, is that Yeats inserted the beautiful poetry extant in Golden Dawn rituals. Yeats viewed a modern reincarnation of the Druids to bring the heart of the goddess Eriu back to Ireland. Yeats envisioned the formation of an Order of Celtic Mysteries that would revive a formalised fraternal society intent on bringing practical application of the 'ancient ways' of the pagan Irish into the modern magical paradigm.

Poetry was a physical vessel that Yeats often used to manifest the spiritual changes that he augured would occur in the future. He also did so with visionary poems intent on changing the future that was considered inevitable by the uninitiated masses. An example of the former case is the poem "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out / When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert / A shape with lion body and head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignent desert birds. / The darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmares by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethleham to be born?

"The Second Coming" maintains more Hebraic symbolism, derived from the mystical Jewish Qabalah, than does the majority of Yeats' work. His primary concern was with the Irish, the Hebrew-Egyptian tradition of the Golden Dawn being secondary to that. For examples of Yeats' visionary poems there are few examples better than "To Ireland in the Coming Times" or his more historically visionary poem "Leda and the Swan".