| "Behold the man" is, of course, the phrase that Pontius Pilate uses when he presents Jesus to the hostile crowd in the Bible, (John 19:5), though Yeats may not have intended so specific an identification. Dido is the legendary Cathaginian queen who falls in love with Aeneas (the "wanderer" of line 9) in Virgil's Aeneid, where he abandons her to seek the new home that the gods had promised im. Slightly reworked, these lines turn up later in Yeats's first major published work The Island of Statues (Poems, 453 and 481), which he bagan around the same time (Early Poetry I, 129). |
| Notes From: William Butler Yeats: The Unpublished Early Poetry Under The Moon Edited by George Bornstein |