Transitional Poem is a conventional young man's statement of the transition from adolescence to manhood, with the particular poetic themes customarily associated with that passage: love and lust, philosophic doubts, mind and imagination, pride and ambition, the power of poetry—all the subjects that young men write poems about. The four 'aspects' that Day Lewis enumerates are not, to my eye, at all distinct: the metaphysical and psychological sides of the problem interweave throughout the poem, and the ethical is scarcely apparent at all.

More fundamental to the structure than transitions are oppositions: mind/body, ideal/real, infinite/finite, love/fear, eternity/time. Day Lewis' use of these terms often echoes Yeats very closely, indeed the whole sequence is heavy with Yeatsian borrowings, and it is not surprising that Day Lewis used Yeats' word for such oppositions: he is dismayed, he says early in the poem, 'by the...