The link to Platonic philosophy is really interesting! It seems to me that Yeats is looking down on the middle class that labors for security—content with the dull, artificial flame within the cave, not valorous enough to seek beyond the domain of learned protection. Yeats’s motif of the color grey also plays into this idea—modernity as a sun-less, (truth-less?) province. If Plato’s form of THE GOOD is the ultimate object of knowledge, it makes sense that Yeats is drawing on the cloistered mind of the poet/artist to conjure the notion of “truth” and passion.
Joe’s reading of “Upon a House” inspires me to consider this: the house in the poem may represent the “artistic essence”—built carefully, with dedication and toil. In its loneliness, it is threatened by the common strife of the Irish middle class (that also threatens the evolution of art in society). It seems plausible that Yeats would craft a metaphoric poem, which draws on the political conditions (land wars?), in relation to its “ruinous” affect on the artist and the notion of “The Good” in Irish society. We see this admission by Yeats in “To a Shade,” where he declares that the true artists of yore “had enough sorrow before death” and are “safer in the tomb.” This is Yeats’s resignation from modernity, as he encounters this realization: the society he is observing exists in a vacuum of ingenuous labor and “grey” reality.