The word “Shakespeare” does not appear in any of Yeats's poems or plays, but “Shakespearean” does, in “Three Movements,” a poem included in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (1932) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). It consists of three lines:

Most readers probably find the poem obscure; they wonder what “Shakespearean” means, and what “Romantic” means and what “those fish” denote in the allegory, if the poem is an allegory. They want to have these obscurities clarified, if only for the satisfaction of moving on to the next poem in the Collected Poems. Presumably there are readers who don't find the obscurity a nuisance; they appreciate it as an extreme form of discretion on Yeats's part. They may happen to know that Elizabethan rhetoricians had four words for this figure, they called it aenigma, noema, syllogismus, or intimatio. In Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery Rosemond Tuve explains that there were several ways of “beautifying the subject,” one of which was precisely by withholding ornamentation from it. By happy choice she quotes “Three Movements” to illustrate Yeats's use of enigma, though few readers would now recognize that this is what he is doing: