Drawing on insights from relevance theory, the chapter explores how W.B. Yeats’s late poem ‘Long-legged Fly’ creates an exemplary occasion for reflecting first on cognition and then on the ways in which cognition might be made manifest in poetic language; in particular, here, in a dominant simile that repeats as a refrain through the poem. Processing the three stanzas’ different inferential, sensorimotor, and intertextual effects, we as readers at one and the same time contemplate in each case a body in thought, and we contemplate ourselves thinking. The poem in this sense repeatedly performs how a history-changing reflective moment holds a range of creative energies in dynamic tension. Relevance theory’s ‘loose’ sifting of literal and other meanings, in Deirdre Wilson’s words, allows us to become aware of these two processes unfolding at the same time, and in relation to each other, as is demonstrated in this close reading.