"Lapis Lazuli" begins with a dedication: "for Harry Clifton." Together, the title and dedication point to the poem's backstory:
- In 1935, Clifton, a young aspiring poet, sent W. B. Yeats a lapis lazuli carving as a 70th birthday gift. (Lapis lazuli is a blue semi-precious stone often used in antique art and jewelry.)
- To Yeats, the carving seemed to exemplify what he variously called "heroic discipline," "heroic ecstasy," and "the heroic cry in the midst of despair." It inspired him to write the poem as a kind of return gift to Clifton—though the poem doesn't start to describe the carving until line 37.
Instead, the speaker (a stand-in for the poet) begins by commenting on the political world around him. The poem dates to 1938, the year before the outbreak of World War II—a time when fascism was spreading through Europe and mass violence was gathering ominously on the horizon. (Civil war was already raging in Spain.) Faced with the likelihood of a second world war in three decades, European civilization, if not human civilization, was in crisis mode.
Amid this crisis, the speaker observes that art, music, and poetry—as well as the people who make them—have become politically unpopular in some quarters. He describes the problem in lines that are themselves highly musical, full of swinging rhythm and alliteration:
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
With a tinge of misogyny (not unusual for Yeats!), the speaker mocks "hysterical women" for taking out their fear on artists. These disapproving ladies, panicked by the threat of war, declare that they're tired of "the palette and fiddle-bow"—metonyms for art and music in general—as well as "poets" whose mood is "always gay." Here and throughout the poem, "gay" means exuberant or cheerful, not homosexual (this definition of the word wouldn't enter the mainstream until decades after Yeats died). Arguably, Yeats is also putting his own unusual spin on the word: he's using it to connote a kind of creative exuberance, or the joyous energy that goes into making art.
Such exuberance repels the "women," who clearly feel that it's inappropriate and unhelpful in times of crisis. As one of the "poets" they're scolding, Yeats disagrees—and uses the rest of the poem to defend his stance.