Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.

Yeats invokes Homer as an artistic model and contrasts the pagan poet’s “unchristened heart” with the moral and spiritual frameworks of Christian Europe. The phrase suggests admiration for a pre-Christian imaginative freedom: a heroic, tragic, and sensuous vision of life not filtered through Christian doctrines of sin, redemption, or humility. In Yeats’s recurring struggle between inherited religious culture and a desire for older, mythic sources of authority, Homer stands for an origin-point of Western poetry—an example of craft and grandeur—while “unchristened” signals a deliberate turning toward classical, non-Christian energies as a corrective to modern pieties and constraints.