William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound are both keystones to the foundation of poetry. While both of them have different views, and write in different styles. Both have written love poems, and both have included religious references in these poems. Do the poets have an understanding of what "love" is? Does the poet consider religion to tie into the idea of love? The poems "When You Are Old" by Yeats and "Dance Figure" by Pound are examples of these poets love poems that carry religious references.
             "When you are old" is one of the many love poems directed to Maud Gonne. W.B. Yeats love interest throughout his life. "When you are old" is more than a love poem though. It is a poem confessing his true infatuation with her."...How many loved your beauty with love false or true/ but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you" This is to tell her that he is the only man that loves her for more than her exterior aesthetic beauty but he is there to love her soul, her personality, her intentions and her troubles. He is telling her that "when you are old and gray..." he will still love her the same or more than he did when she was young. Gary Geddes writes about W.B. Yeats "Yeats had no use for sloppiness of sentiment or expression. He was an untiring craftsmen, a self-critic who respected his own observations and emotions enough to give them artistic shape." An artistic shape that allows Yeats to confess his feelings with such a fluid grace. With the poem there is also the idea that Yeats is writing about an older woman who has lost her lover to death, or the spirit world. When Yeats writes about the pilgram soul it is a clue that he is writing about the afterlife. A pilgrim soul is a soul which has incarnated into the physical, and, having completed it's mission has now moved on into the spirit world.
             Yeats may also have made an inference that the older woman and her passed on love
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