William Butler Yeats with a magnifying glass in front of a blue stone carving

A landscape inside lapis lazuli

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), an Irish poet and playwright, examines a small carving in blue stone in his poem Lapis Lazuli. Two men are on their way up a mountain, with a third carrying a musical instrument behind them. A long-legged bird flies overhead. So much can be read from the work of the carver. What about the marks that nobody seems to have made on purpose?

A crack becomes a watercourse

A single change of colour is enough for the scene to expand far beyond the three small figures. The eye follows a line in the stone and can almost see water running down the mountain. Another irregularity gives the sense of an avalanche in motion. The observer has no need to turn the carving or to alter its surface. He need only linger over marks that were there before he started to look.

Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows

– William Butler Yeats, Lapis Lazuli, 1968, p. 181–182.[1]

The music the carving cannot play

Time begins to move as well. As long as we attend to the figures alone, the travellers will always be on their way uphill. The speaker imagines them having reached their destination and sitting down together. At last there is something for the musician to do with the instrument he has carried all this way.

Music had already featured at the opening of the poem, in an argument over the value of the arts in the face of impending destruction. At the end Yeats offers a very quiet answer. One of the men asks to hear a mournful tune. The others can listen to it and still look out upon the world before them with bright and joyful eyes.