박사학위논문

On the Way to Spirituality: Double, Mask, and

Vision in W. B. Yeats’s Poetry and Drama

지도교수 김 영 민

동국대학교 대학원 영어영문학과

조수진
2019
 박사학위논문
On the Way to Spirituality: Double, Mask, and
Vision in W. B. Yeats’s Poetry and Drama
조 수 진
지도교수 김 영 민
이 논문을 박사학위논문으로 제출함
2019 년 7 월
조수진의 영문학 박사학위 논문을 인준함
2019 년 7 월
위원장 김성중 (인)
위 원 노헌균 (인)
위 원 김영민 (인)
위 원 김주성 (인)
위 원 성창규 (인)
동국대학교대학원
 Table of Contents

I. Introduction....... ..................................................................1

II. On the Way to Spirituality ······························· 12

III. Theories on Spirituality ·········································· 23

1. Theories on Spirituality by Others ··························· 23

2. Yeats’s Theories on Spirituality ································ 36

IV. Poetic Representations of Spirituality ·············· 50

V. Dramatic Representations of Spirituality ·········· 85

VI. Conclusion ··································································· 142

Works Cited ······································································· 145

Abstract ··············································································· 151

 Abbreviations

I. Works by Yeats

Au Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1953.

CW 1 The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. 1: The P oems.

Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997.

CW 2 The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. 2: The P lays.

Ed. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark. New York: Scribner,

2001.

CW 3 The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. 3:

Autobiographies. Ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N.

Archibald. New York: Scribner, 1999.

CW 5 The Collected Works of W. B . Yeats. Vol. 5: Later E ssays.

Ed. William H. O’Donnell. New York: Scribner, 1994.

CW 13 The Collected Works of W. B . Yeats. Vol. 13: A Vision. The

Original 1925 Version. Ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret

Mills Harper. New York: Scribner, 2008.

CW 14 The Collected Works of W. B . Yeats. Vol. 14: A Vision. The

Revised 1937 Edition. Ed. Catherine E. Paul and Margaret Mills

Harper. New York: Scribner, 2015.

E & I E ssays and I ntroductions. New York: Collier-Macmillan,

1968.
Ex E xplorations. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

M yth M ythologies. New York: Touchstone, 1998.

P oems W. B. Yeats: The P oems. Ed. Daniel Albright. London:

Dent, 1990.

II. Works about Yeats

A Life 1 Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. 1. New York:

Oxford UP, 1997.

A Life 2 Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. 2. New York:

Oxford UP, 2003.

“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work” Dampier, Graham A. ‘“The

Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work”: A Discussion of the P rinciples

and A Vision’s Account of Death.’ W. B. Yeats’s A Vision:

E xplications and Contexts. Ed. Mann, Neil, Matthew Gibson,

and Claire V. Nally. Clemson: Clemson U Digital P, 2012,

55-89.

“The Supreme Enchanter” Blake, Christopher. “The Supreme

Enchanter: W. B. Yeats and the Soul of the World.” Diss.

Georgia State U, 1997.

Golden D awn Harper, George Mills. Yeats’s Golden D awn. London:

Macmillan, 1974.
Stone Cottage Longenbach, James. Stone Cottage: P ound, Yeats &

M odernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

U nicorn Moore, Virginia. The U nicorn: William B utler Yeats’

Search for Reality. New York: Macmillan, 1954.

III. Other

M agic Hartmann, Franz. M agic, White and B lack; or, The Science of

F inite and I nfinite Life , Containing Practical Hints for Students

of Occultism. London: George Redway, 1888.

D Leadbeater, Charles Webster. D reams: What They Are and

H ow They Are Caused. Los Angeles: Theosophical Publishing

House, 1918.
I. Introduction

Importance of the spiritual search in Yeats’s life and art has been

pointed out by critics over many years. In her book, The U nicorn:

William B utler Yeats’ Search for Reality (which is one of the earliest

works to deal with the subject of Yeats’s search for spiritual reality),

Virginia Moore attempts to address the issue of Yeats’s search for

spirituality by examining its major formative influences: Irish folklore,

druidism, Hermeticism, and Rosicrucianism. In order to provide a

context for her discussions, Moore looks briefly into two very

different views on Yeats and religion: one group sees Yeats as

deeply religious, while another sees him as “culpably antireligious”

(1). Moore illustrates this point by presenting the views of W. H.

Auden and T. S. Eliot on Yeats’s religiosity. Auden speaks scathingly

about Yeats’s religious ideas. While he praises Yeats’s occult view of

the world because of their contribution to great poetry, he denounces

that view as false. Yeats adopted it simply because it was

interesting. Eliot disagrees, and vigorously defends Yeats’s “integrity

and wisdom” (2) even as he rejects many of the poet’s doctrines. He

goes further to say that Yeats, like all great poets, matured ‘“as the

whole man,” distinguished in his “extraordinary development” by “a

kind of moral, as well as intellectual, excellence”’ (2).

Moore raises questions on such views by asking whether critics

actually have the factual evidence, whether any one of them have the

“knowledge of the history of philosophy and religion” which is the

only knowledge that would enable them to recognize the kind of

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authorities he uses to expound his ideas, to ‘analyze his “tradition,”

follow the implications of his thought, and weigh him in a proper

scale,’ and whether critics are open-minded in their criticism on

Yeats’s supernaturalism.

In her article entitled “Yeats’s Religion,” Margaret Mills Harper

notes that Yeats’s consistent search for spirituality throughout his

life, hence, its centrality in any serious study of Yeats. However, she

also observes that “scientific model” on which the school curriculums

are based makes it difficult to address that topic adequately in an

academic context (49). In this model, a student starts from “a

position of skepticism,” which is gradually replaced by “certainty

based on the accumulation of data and logical proofs” (49). The

traditional model of teaching, therefore, “presupposes a final point of

superiority” over the texts we study (49):

Nevertheless, the unfortunate fact remains that lack of

consistency and intelligibility are not qualities that are easily

taught, dynamic as they may be in a personal belief system. For

a number of reasons, Yeats’s fascinating spiritual,

parapsychological, and magical interests are a challenge to

incorporate gracefully into a classroom. Attitudes we probably

bring to the classroom and to our reading are the first sources

of potential awkwardness. Schools, colleges, and universities

reflect positivist ways of looking at reality and thus make

assumptions about the material nature of things that Yeats was

urgently committed to disavowing. Academic settings are based

on a more or less scientific model: a starting position of

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 skepticism is gradually replaced by certainty based on the

accumulation of data and logical proofs. Hence, the model of

teaching in traditional institutions presupposes a final point of

superiority over the texts studied: by the time we finish with

Yeats, we will have “gotten” him (49).

This position of dominance, however, is not easy to sustain in any

serious course on Yeats, for the attitudes in which his religious

doctrines are founded are difficult to “pin down” (50), which is

compounded by the fact that they take place in a literary context.

Finally, teaching the vast range of occult knowledge which Yeats

draws on presents “distinct challenges” (51) in an academic context.

Teacher is “faced with a problem” of how to teach Yeats’s religious

ideas without spending too much time on the background information

(50).

Harper discusses each of these issues in the three sections of her

essay. She first focuses on “attitudes that teachers and students may

bring” in their study of Yeats’s work (51). She then draws “a rough

historical and contextual map” that is designed to suggest a way to

present background material without losing a way in the vast range

of occult traditions with which Yeats were associated (51-52). Finally,

she discusses a “tonal manifestation of Yeats’s occult belief” that

could be heard not only in his poetry but also in his prose (52).

In her book, Our Secret D iscipline: Yeats and Lyric F orm (2007),

Helen Vendler discusses another central aspect in Yeats’s spirituality,

which is a belief in the spiritual world that is not cold and abstract

but passionate and concrete by talking about those poems that

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concern Yeats’s imagination of the afterlife and actual journey to the

realm of the afterlife: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium,” “The

Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus” and “News for the Delphic Oracle.”

Among these, she sees the first two poems as the poet’s imagination

of the afterlife in old age, and another two as the actual journey to

the afterlife. “Sailing to Byzantium,” first of the two Byzantium

poems is made up of four stanzas, each of which serve as four

stations. In the first stanza, the speaker is in the world of the young,

the world of sensual music that excludes the old impotent speaker.

The speaker, desiring to escape from that world by sailing to the

holy city of Byzantium, in which he hopes to learn a singing fitting

to the soul. After having arrived at the cathedral there, the speaker

imagines his afterlife as one of the sages depicted on a golden

mosaic. He hopes that his heart, which is still “sick with desire”

(CW 1 197), will be consumed and he is gathered “Into the artifice of

eternity” (CW 1 197).

However, the speaker turns away from that image of himself as a

lifeless and heart-less saint living in eternity. The speaker fled from

the world of sensuality but the prospect of becoming one of those

sages is unacceptable to him. This leads him to imagine another

image of his afterlife: his image as a golden bird in the Emperor’s

palace, which exists in time and sings of the past, present and the

future. Thus, the speaker, even as he takes an artificial form, chooses

to exist in time and sing about human world, rather than existing in

eternity singing of God. After examining the four stations, “internal

architectonics” (36) of the poem, Vendler moves on to address its

rhyme scheme. Rhyme scheme of the poem (ottava rima), is “stately

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and ceremonious,” which suits well to the poem as the poet continues

to deliberate on “his choice of future incarnation” (36). In ottava rima

(which is made up of six alternately rhyming lines and couplet), final

couplet normally serves to “sum up, or comment on,” the events

taken place in the preceding lines. The first two stanzas follow the

norm. However, the poem starts to deviate from the norm in part III

as the crisis erupts. This crisis is that of the pain of the impotent

man, who finds it unable to join in the sensual song of the young.

The speaker’s agitation causes his sentences to run over, and so

destroy the “equanimity of rhythm” (37), as could be seen in the

lines ‘“ sick with desire / And . . .”, “a dying animal / It knows

not” and “gather me / Into.”’ Enjambments in these lines “mimic” the

man’s urge to escape from his old body (37). The final line, too,

while resonant, is still dependent on the ‘enjambed adjectival lead-in,

“set upon a golden bough to sing . . . To . . .”’ (37). This time, it is

the sense of expectancy on the speaker’s future incarnation that

compels the poem to depart from the norm. Thus in “Sailing to

Byzantium,” together with “Byzantium,” city of Byzantium serves as

kind of “visionary antechambers of death,” as the speakers try to

imagine the forms of their future incarnation (49).

In other two poems inspired by the Delphic Oracle on Plotinus

(“The Delphic Oracle upon Plotinus” and “News upon the Delphic

Oracle”), the speaker moves from these antechambers to the actual

realms of afterlife. The oracle (in The E nneads) says that:

Oft-times as you strove to rise above the bitter waves of this

blood-drenched life, above the sickening whirl, toiling in the

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 mid-most of the rushing flood and the unimaginable turmoil,

oft-times, from the Ever-Blessed, there was shown to you the

Term still close at hand [.] . . . [T]ossed in the welter, you still

had a vision. . . . But now that you have . . . quitted the tomb

that held your lofty soul, you enter at once the heavenly

consort: Where the fragrant breezes play . . . with the

blandishments of the Loves, and delicious airs, and tranquil sky;

where Minos and Rhadamanthus dwell, great brethren of the

golden race of mighty Zeus; where dwell the just Aeacus, and

Plato, . . . and stately Pythagoras and all else that form the

choir of Immortal Love (16-17).

However, in putting this passage into a poem, Yeats gives it a cruel

twist. For, instead of allowing Plotinus to arrive at the “heavenly

consort,” he deprives Plotinus even the glimpse of the afterlife as he

swims the turbulent sea. Similar twist on the oracle could be seen in

the second poem on the Delphic Oracle, entitled “News for the

Delphic Oracle.” In this poem, the speaker (like the one in “Sailing to

Byzantium,”) rejects the afterlife that is devoid of women, adolescence

and sex. The poet, therefore, presents the afterlife which is full of

sex and everything is in chaos. Poetic form mirrors this chaos: for all

its apparent orderliness, the poem only shows the lines of uneven

lengths and imperfect rhymes.

Neil Mann, in his essay, “Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead,”

deals with another central aspect of Yeats’s spirituality by discussing

dream, vision and the supernatural. In chapter I.1, Mann first

classifies various kinds of dreams and visions in the Theosophical

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tradition to provide a context for Yeats’s interests in dreams and

visions. Then, he writes on Yeats’s collaboration with Maud Gonne to

evoke dreams. Even though some of them came spontaneously, many

of them came as a result of “conscious preparation and visualizations”

(116). In chapter I.2, Mann first writes how Yeats’s collaborative

project with Gonne had translated into solitary inquiry on

“spiritualism and psychic phenomena” (131). Mann also mentions how

Yeats’s obsessive interests on the supernatural was stimulated further

by “his study related to Lady Gregory,” which would eventually be

published as Visions and B eliefs in the West of I reland , as well as

the notes he wrote for that book, entitled “Swedenborg, Mediums, and

the Desolate Places.” Mann moves on to show that this solitary

inquiry leads to yet another collaboration with a woman: his wife,

Georgie Yeats. This collaboration, like that with Gonne, often involved

conscious efforts to get in contact with the supernatural (this time to

communicate with the dead through a medium). Their collective effort

was to find their way into A Vision, which is the work that

culminates Yeats’s lifelong search for spiritual reality.

Yeats himself admits the centrality of spiritual endeavor in

“Magic,” in which he states the three doctrines of magic as follows,

defining it specifically as an “evocation of spirits”:

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what I have agreed

to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits,

though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating

magical illusions, in the visions of truths in the depths of the

mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines,

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 which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and

been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These

doctrines are:-

(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that

many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or

reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that

our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of

nature itself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by

symbols. (E & I 28)

Before presenting his doctrines, Yeats makes clear that the spiritual

world is different from the Christian one through the statement which

defines magic as “the evocation” of multiple spirits, not the single

Spirit. However, three doctrines that follow the statement hint that

this multiplicity is in fact an illusion, and that reality is the one. This

in turn hints that doubleness shown by his symbols (most notably,

gyres) were in fact mere appearances.

That said, I will examine Yeats’s poetry and drama as

representations of his spirituality in poetic and dramatic forms. In

order to do so, I will first provide the context on Yeats’s spirituality

by exploring the influences that led him to embark on the spiritual

inquiries in Chapter II, in which I will start by looking at how his

childhood experiences, especially the influences of his father’s

education and his stay in Sligo. Then I will discuss how interests on

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alternative form of spirituality led him to study Theosophy and

magic.

In Chapter III, I will look into the theories on spirituality, both by

others and Yeats himself. In the first part, I will first look at how

scholars tried to present their theories on spirituality in terms of the

Mask and the Noh. These could be divided into two groups: on

Yeats and the Mask, on Yeats and the Noh. In the first group,

researchers explore the concept of the Mask and its relation to

Yeats’s drama. For example, Margaret Mills Harper’s article

demonstrates how Yeats’s thoughts on the Mask changed during

Yeats’s revision of A Vision between 1925-1937 and how these shifts

are reflected in his creative output during this period.

Then, I will explore Yeats’s own theories on spirituality by briefly

examining his five essays: “Magic,” “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the

Desolate Places,” P er Amica Silentia Lunae , “The Tragic Generation,”

and A Vision, which is the culmination of his thoughts on

spirituality. First, in “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places,”

I will examine how Yeats’s interest in spiritualism could be seen in

his research on Swedenborg’s theory on the afterlife, accounts of the

mediums, and the encounter between the living and the dead in Irish

folk tales. Second, on the discussions on P er Amica Silentia Lunae I

will demonstrate how this book presents Yeats’s theory on the Mask,

which plays a central role in the Unity of Being in the first section,

“Anima Hominis,” and the theory on the World Soul in the second

section, “Anima Mundi.” In “The Tragic Generation,” the fourth book

of The Trembling of the Veil (which in turn is one of the books that

make up Autobiographies), I will focus on how Yeats applies his

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ideas on the Unity of Being to writers whom he had known. First, I

will demonstrate how Yeats tries to make Oscar Wilde as a figure

who made himself into an art by choosing a life that was opposite to

his nature. Similarly, I will examine how Yeats makes J. M. Synge

into a writer who could write his plays through the use of dialects

and creating characters who are completely opposite to himself.

In Chapter IV, I will discuss how Yeats’s poems serves as poetic

representations of his theories on spirituality. In this chapter, I will

examine the poems under three headings: poems on the double,

poems on visions and dreams, and poems on the gyres. In the first

category, I have included the poems “Ego Dominus Tuus,” “A

Dialogue of Self and Soul,” and “Man and the Echo.” All of the

poems in this group demonstrate Yeats’s theory on the Mask through

the use of dialogue form. In the second category, I have put “Double

Vision of Michael Robartes” and “Towards Break of Day.” Both

poems in this group have to do with either vision or dream. The first

poem shows the two opposing visions of Michael Robartes. The

second poem shows the concept of complementary dreams through

dreams of a man and a woman, which mirror each other in that both

of them expresses an unfulfillable longing. In the third and final

category, I have included “Vacillation,” “The Gyres,” and “Lapis

Lazuli.” Three poems deal with eternal recurrence of cycles in

individual and history, which are represented by the symbol of gyres.

While “Vacillation” shows the cycle as it appears in the life of a

man, “The Gyres” and “Lapis Lazuli” shows its equivalent in

civilization.

In Chapter V, I will examine Yeats’s plays serves as dramatic

- 10 -
representations on spirituality. I will discuss the plays under the three

headings: plays on the Cuchulain, plays on the supernatural, and

plays on religion. In the first group, I have included the plays At the

H awk’s Well , The Only J ealousy of E mer , and F ighting Waves. All

three plays feature an Irish mythical hero, Cuchulain. These plays

represent some of Yeats’s plays on Cuchulain, whom Yeats

considered as the man of emotional intensity that was essential in

bringing about the cultural unity in Ireland. In the second group, I

have put The D reaming of the B ones and The Words upon the

Window-pane . Both plays stage the supernatural either to think about

Irish history or offer criticism on Irish society in Yeats’s time. In the

third group, I have included Calvary, The Cat and the M oon, and

The Resurrection. While both Calvary and The R esurrection reflect

Yeats’s thoughts on Christ and on Christian era, The Cat and the

M oon deal with more general issues of miracle and belief.

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II. On the Way to Spirituality
Yeats’s thoughts on spirituality had been shaped by a factor that

existed long before his birth. In the Yeatses, there were not only

merchants but also the clergymen of the Church of Ireland. Yeats’s

grandfather and great-grandfather had been clergymen in the Church

of Ireland. His grandfather was a rector at the Tullylish, County

Down.

Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, was expected to follow in that

footstep but rebelled, for he thought that revealed religion was just

myth and fable. Instead of having a career in the Church, he first

studies law, and then abandons it to study art. That his decision to

embrace the life of an artist could impoverish both himself and his

wife, Susan Mary Pollexfen, was none of his concern. However, as

an impoverished artist largely staying at home, John Butler Yeats had

more influence on his son’s education than an average father of the

Victorian age. One of his influences had to do with literature. Among

the books that the father read to the son were Thomas Babington

Macaulay’s The Lays of Ancient R ome and Walter Scott’s The Lay of

the Last M instrel. The first book, published in 1842, is a collection of

lays written by Roman poets. Second one, published in 1805, is a

long narrative poem in six cantos, in which the narrator, the last

minstrel, narrates the tale of feud in the Scottish legends.

Significantly, both of the books are “lays,” which refer to a variety of

mostly medieval poetic forms full of magical and folk elements, for

elements of magic and folklore were to have a profound influence on

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Yeats’s own search for spiritual form.

Another influence has to do with Yeats’s thoughts on what is

important in art. This is shown most notably in the daily

conversations between father and son during their railway trip to

Dublin. In those trips, father read aloud the most passionate moments

of a poem or play. His highest word of praise was intensity. For

John Butler Yeats, what made the poets great was action, not

contemplation. Father, who was a pre-Raphaelite during that time,

makes his son to devote himself to the cultivation of style. Father’s

emphasis on emotional intensity later made Yeats strive to create

works that could evoke passionate intensity in people.

Yet another influence was his father’s skepticism towards

established religions.1) Such skepticism made spirituality an urgent

problem for Yeats from an early age, for, even though he was

strongly influenced by his father’s skepticism, Yeats did not want to

be an agnostic. He was anxious to have proofs of some spiritual

entity. As that need for belief could not take a form of traditional

religion due to skepticism, his interest for the supernatural took the

place of traditional form of spirituality. Such interest, first developed

when he was a child living in Sligo, would stay with him for the

rest of his life, most notably in his spiritual investigations from 1912

to 1916, and also in his fascinations for Theosophy and magic. Roy

1) One of the influences to that skepticism was positivism, which is a school of

thought which held that only certain (positive) knowledge is the one based on

natural phenomena and their properties and relationships. In that it only trusted

knowledge based on what one received through five senses, positivism is based

on empiricism. Given this, it would have been natural for John Butler Yeats to be

distrustful towards orthodox religions, especially Western Christianity (which put

emphasis on unconditional belief and absolute dependence on God).

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Foster similarly notes that it was during this prolonged stay at

Merville that he had first heard the stories of spirits and fairies. Both

the Pollexfen family and their servants were “preoccupied with the

supernatural”2) (A Life 1 20). However, despite his unease at his

father’s skepticism, Yeats only started moving away from the

paternal influence when he encountered an alternative way of

thinking: Theosophy. His encounter with Theosophy made him to

2) Such preoccupation on the dead may had to do with the fact that Sligo was one

of the places in Ireland that had been hit hardest by the cholera epidemic in 1832.

As Foster notes, among those who died was Yeats’s Middleton great-grandfather,

who “died with his four-year-old daughter Mary” (A Life 1 20). They were “‘seen

after death walking hand in hand in the garden’” (A Life 1 20). Their dog saw

them too and “‘ran to meet them’” (A Life 1 20).

Influence of that Pollexfen preoccupation on ghosts was to persist long after he

left Sligo, as we could see in an essay (in his book, The Celtic Twilight [1893])

entitled “Village Ghosts.” In this story, Yeats writes about the haunted places in

the Irish countryside, similar to the kind of ghost stories that he had been told

when he was a child. Of these places, a place called the Hospital Lane is worth

taking a closer look. Site of former hospital which housed patients during the

cholera epidemic, it was haunted ever since the building had been pulled down. In

the following passage, Yeats writes about a farmer, “Paddy B_______,” a teetotaler

of “great strength,” who met one such ghost when he was passing through the

Hospital Lane. The ghost changed its shape from that of “a tame rabbit” and “a

white cat.” It then swelled larger and larger, taking away the man’s strength as it

did so:

I never heard which spirit he braved, but feel sure it was not the one in the

Hospital Lane. In cholera times a shed had been there set up to receive

patients. When the need had gone by, it was pulled down, but ever since the

ground where it stood has broken out in ghosts and demons and fairies. There

is a farmer at H_______, Paddy B________ by name, a man of great strength,

and a teetotaller. His wife and sister-in-law, musing on his great strength,

often wondered what he would do if he drank. One night, when passing

through the Hospital Lane, he saw what he supposed at first to be a tame

rabbit; after a little he found that it was a white cat. When he came near, the

creature slowly began to swell larger and larger, and as it grew he felt his

own strength ebbing away, as though it were sucked out of him. He turned

and ran (M yth 16).

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believe that there was a deeper spiritual reality, even though some

years were to pass before he joined the Society.

Yeats did not join the Theosophical Society until 1887 until he had

met one of its co-founders, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and had read

her book, I sis U nveiled because he had some suspicions on her

teachings. Yeats was in the Theosophical Society for less than three

years when he got into trouble because of his increasing

supernaturalism. He was eventually asked to resign (in 1890) when

he proposed to do an experiment to see whether one could raise up

the ghost of a flower from its ashes. However, its teachings was to

have influence on Yeats even after he joined the Hermetic Order of

the Golden Dawn in 1890 and remained there for more than thirty

years. There are three major figures who had formative influence on

his thought: Alfred Percival Sinnett, Franz Hartmann, and Helena

Petrovna Blavatsky.

As Christopher Blake notes in his dissertation entitled “The

Supreme Enchanter: W. B. Yeats and the Soul of the World,” it was

A. P. Sinnett’s 1883 book, E soteric B uddhism, which he had received

from his aunt, Isabella Pollexfen Varley, that he first became

interested in Theosophy (A Life 1 45). However, Blake also observes

that it was more probable that Sinnett’s earlier work, The Occult

World (1881), that had more influence on Yeats as a young man.

Unlike E soteric B uddhism, which is largely an abstract tract on the

Theosophical doctrine, The Occult World offers a “graphic evidence

of supernormal powers open to students” (70), which was exactly

what Yeats was interested in. Its difficulty notwithstandig, E soteric

B uddhism definitely had a charm for Yeats, who was then heavily

- 15 -
influenced by Shelley. The author of this book claims that he had an

access to “a mass of instruction in the hitherto secret knowledge

over which Oriental philosophers have brooded silently till now”(2).

The book also gives a detailed account on the postmortal states

known as Kama Loca and D evachan, which are the dwellings

respectively of “the perishing power principles and reincarnating

higher principles of the deceased, both realms conditioned by one’s

mental attitudes” (71). Most importantly, however, the book enabled

Yeats to confirm his belief on the vital importance of questions posed

by “the reality of the soul and its immortality” for his age, even

though his “ingrained skepticism” prevented him from sharing Charles

Johnston’s enthusiasm for that book (Au 55).

Another author who had a formative influence on Yeats was Franz

Hartmann, who had written M agic: White and B lack (hereinafter

cited as M agic) and The Life of P hilippus Theophrastus, B ombast of

H ohenheim Known by the N ame of P aracelsus (hereinafter cited as

P aracelsus). Hartmann’s books, in that they were “studies on the

Western, Hermetic tradition,” grounded Yeats in “Western rather than

Eastern teachings” (73-4). In P aracelsus (before going into the

doctrine of the philosopher), Hartmann briefly explains some of the

essential terms. One of such terms is Akasa, which is “a living

primordial substance, corresponding to the conception of some form of

cosmic ether pervading in the solar system” (28).

Another term that Hartmann explains is the Astral Light, which is

partially distinct from Akasa even though it is related. Hartmann

defines it as “the vital life-principle by which all things derive their

existence and character” (75). The Astral Light “is the storehouse of

- 16 -
memory for the great world (the Macrocosm) and “the storehouse of

the memory of the little world, the Microcosm of man” (30). Another

major figure of influence is H. P. Blavatsky, even though her

influence, compared to that of Hartmann’s, is limited. She also defines

the concept of the World Soul as the storehouse of memories, the

definition that Hartmann gives for the Astral Light. What is also

notable is that it was Blavatsky who gave Yeats the magical motto

that he took at the Golden Dawn. Yeats’s motto, Demon Est Deus

Inversus, is most probably taken from Blavatsky’s book, The Secret

D octrine , especially in a section on the problem of evil. In that

section, she “interprets the paradox of dual god, equally benign and

equally malignant, by the Astral Light” (80). By her use of the term

Demon Est Deus Inversus, Blavatsky denies the doctrine of god that

is “purely good” (80). Thus she argues that there should be an

“antithetical principle in nature, that which resists and opposes” (81).

Another influence which helped shape Yeats’s thoughts on

spirituality was magic, which he studied after he became a member

of the Golden Dawn. As Moore notes, the Order was founded in 1887

by William Wynn-Westcott, William R. Woodman, and Samuel Liddell

MacGregor Mathers. Among the three, Woodman died in 1890 after

having left no mark on the Order; Wynn-Westcott resigned in 1897.

After that, Mathers had become a central figure in the Order, and

completely reorganized it. One of the important sources of the Order’s

teachings was The P erfect Way (written by Anna Kingsford and

Edward Maitland), to whom Mathers dedicated his book, The

Kabbalah U nveiled . In that book, the authors argue that Christ was a

historical figure and at the same find the highest ideal that human

- 17 -
beings could reach. Kingsford and Maitland also claim that they are

not opposed to Christianity but rather the orthodox reading of

Christ’s teachings and Christian symbolism. In their acceptance of

Christian religion, Kingsford and Maitland differ significantly from the

theosophical teachings of Madame Blavatsky (who had almost

completely rejected Christianity). The authors also present a rather

unorthodox interpretation on the Fall of Man. To them, the Fall is

“transference of the central will . . . from the soul, which is its

proper seat, to the body” (U nicorn 131). This causes the man to be

subjected to the “limitations of the matter,” and be susceptible to

“sin, sickness, sorrow, and death.” Therefore, redemption “does not

mean a transference of penalties from the guilty to the innocent, but

a shift-back of the will from body to spirit,” so that spirit takes back

its original position of command (U nicorn 131).

Yeats was formally initiated in this Order on March 7, 1890, at the

Isis-Urania (Venus) Temple in London. In that ritual, Yeats first

went through the purification and consecration processes, which are

done by water and fire. After these, he went through several ordeals

while being blindfolded. After these ordeals, designed to make Yeats

purified of all the impurity and prepare him for the search of hidden

truths, he was given certain symbols. He was led to the two pillars

“symbolizing all opposites for his fourth and final consecration”

(U nicorn 137-38). After this final stage, Yeats formally became a

new member (or a Neophyte) of the Order.

After having become a Neophyte in the Order, Yeats set himself to

the courses in esoteric knowledge. These courses, as we can see in

the studies that Yeats had embarked on soon after his initiation, were

- 18 -
arduous ones. He was required to study, for example, ‘the symbols of

the four elements, the signs of the Zodiac, the four triplicities, the

planets, the vital twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the

“fourfold breath,” and the Ten Sephiroth, or Emanations of God,

forming the Tree of Life — its roots in Malkuth and its crown in

Kether’ (U nicorn 139-40). It is only after such a long period of

arduous study that Yeats could make himself an eligible candidate for

3)
the Inner Order.

What Yeats had learned, both the esoteric studies and rituals, had

a huge influence on Yeats’s creative output, especially in his

Noh-inspired drama. One of the important ways in which rituals

3) In one the “Appendixes” for his book, George Mills Harper gives readers an idea

of the process by which a neophyte has to go through in order to advance

through various grades of the Order:

15. Candidates for admission have to receive the approval of the Second Order.

Any member desiring to propose a candidate must apply to the Candellarius,

and inform him of the name, age, address, and occupation; and should say also

whether he belongs to any other Society or Order which teaches any form of

mystical or occult knowledge.

Advancement to the several grades which this Temple is authorized to

confer is obtained by passing an examination in the requisite knowledge, and

by the permission of the Second Order.

MS. Lectures on the requisite knowledge for the several grades may be

obtained on loan from the Cancellarius, and should be copied by the candidate,

who is permitted to keep his copy during his membership when duly labelled

and registered by the Cancellarius.

16. When a candidate is prepared for an examination he shall inform the

Cancellarius, who will arrange the time and place for it to take place.

17. If a candidate fail in his examination for a higher grade, one month shall

elapse before his reexamination. But the Chiefs of the Temple shall be at

liberty to exercise their discretion in the full application of this rule.

18. An examination may take place on the authority of the Cancellarius in

the presence of any Adept; by special permission, in presence of a lower grade

member; and by dispensation, in presence of an uninitiate, provided that such

person be discreet and reliable. (Golden D awn 281-82).

- 19 -
inspired Yeats’s drama was the use of objects such as masks. They

strip the veil of familiarity from daily objects and situations by

enabling a person to become the other. Wearing them made a person

to speak and breathe as the other, in the same way as a medium.

Another way in which rituals helped Yeats to create symbolic drama

was the use of language. Like masks, language (both in terms of its

subject matter and tone) created distance from the ordinary world.

Unlike the ordinary language, language of the ritual does not concern

themselves with the material well-being. Instead, it is concerned with

spiritual matter, most notably cycle of death and rebirth. Its tone, too,

is solemn and exalted, which distinguishes it from the tone ordinarily

used in daily speech.

Yeats’s interest in the supernatural endured long after his expulsion

from the Theosophical Society. Most notably, Yeats conducted an

extensive research on the various spiritual traditions from 1912 to

1916. One of the ways in which he tried to acquire the empirical

evidence on the soul was his visits to the mediums in Soho. Among

the evidence he had gathered from them, the case of a young

medium (Elizabeth Radcliffe) is particularly interesting. Despite the

fact that she could only speak English, French, and a little Italian,

she wrote in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Coptic, Chinese, Hebrew, Greek,

Latin, German, Irish, Welsh, and Provençal in an automatic writing.

These investigations resulted in an essay, “Swedenborg, Mediums,

and the Desolate Places,” which was written in 1914 but became a

part of Lady Gregory’s book, Visions and B eliefs in the West of

I reland (1920). Yeats’s search for ultimate reality reaches the climax

in the book called A Vision, which was first published in 1925. This

- 20 -
book, based on the collaborative occult project between wife and

himself puts what he had supposedly learned from the spirits into the

system..

However, this does not mean that Yeats’s inquiry into spiritual

traditions was over after he published the first version of A Vision,

for his search continued even as he was busy revising the text in

the 1930s. The difference between his earlier Swedenborg essay was

that whereas the earlier text mainly dealt with the mediumship and

comparison between the spiritual traditions in Japan and Ireland

through the Noh and folklore, Yeats’s spiritual inquiries during that

period focused on India. His meeting with Shri Purohit Swāmi

resulted in the essays such as “Introduction to An I ndian M onk” and

“Introduction to The H oly M ountain. Of these, first work is about

Swami’s spiritual journey, while the second one is journey to the holy

mountain, Mount Kailās.

Yeats starts “Introduction to An I ndian M onk” by reminiscing

about his first meeting with the Swami, and how the book had come

to be written. He remembers how, after having met the Swami and

listened to his tale, from childhood leading up to his years as a

wandering monk, asked the monk to write a book. With the

completed book before him, Yeats compares and contrasts the

Western and Indian spiritual traditions. He writes that while both the

Western and Indian religion require constant devotion and

self-discipline, their idea towards God, vision, and nature are

different. In the Western, Christian tradition, people distrust their

visions, even though they admit that they exist. They are also

indifferent to nature and perhaps even dread it. Indians, in contrast,

- 21 -
believe that visions are the means to approach God, and speak

continually about nature.

“Introduction to The H oly M ountain” continues on Yeats’s interests

on the Eastern spiritual tradition. Like “Introduction to An I ndian

M onk” seen earlier, Yeats seems to see the East as offering answers

to spiritual questions that the West had failed to answer. He notes

the difference between the Indian and Western traditions on their

attitudes towards visions. Their trust and distrust on visions in turn

implies their attitude toward human beings. Christianity, which sees

human beings as sinful, distrust their ability to see visions. Hinduism,

in contrast, trust human ability to see visions. That trust or distrust

also translates itself into contrasting attitudes toward nature.

Christian saints, who thought nature as potential enemy which could

disturb their composure, avoided the beauty of nature. Their Indian

counterparts, in contrast, have celebrated nature as manifestation of

god’s glory.

From this brief survey of Yeats’ spiritual development, we have

seen that Yeats’s spirituality, while it appears in different forms, is

founded on the belief on the supernatural world that is phenomenal

as our own. This belief, which developed as a result of his contact

with the Neoplatonic, folkloric and Theosophical traditions contributed

to his unique theories on spirituality that we would discuss in the

next chapter.

- 22 -
III. Theories on Spirituality
1. Theories on Spirituality by Others

Critical theories on Yeats’s spirituality usually deal with the issue

of spirituality and the double in drama, the form that is most suitable

for staging the tension caused by the double. These could be divided

into two groups: theories on the Mask and theories on the Noh. First

group of scholars take up an issue of how Yeats’s plays play with

doubles by splitting the enunciator and speaker, and how it reflects

changes in the meanings of the Mask as Yeats was revising A

Vision, the book of occult philosophy that grew out of his spiritual

experiments with his wife. Second group of critics explore the issue

of how the conventions of the Japanese Noh influenced some of

Yeats’s plays, and the problem of the representation of historical

events in Yeats’s drama.

In her article entitled “The King’s Threshold , Calvary, The D eath of

Cuchulain: Yeats’s Passion Plays,” Alexandra Poulain reads Yeats’s

three plays, The King’s Threshold , Calvary, and Cuchulain as Passion

Plays, and demonstrates how Yeats’s dramaturgy of his plays

revolves around “the staging of a death, in a religious or secular

context” (50).

Her discussions on three plays are divided into four parts: Sacrifice,

Performance, Drama, and Subjectivity. In the first part, she talks

about the problem of physical suffering that could be found in the

plays. The King’s Threshold borrows elements of Christian Passion

- 23 -
but there is no intent to parody these borrowings. The play shows

the tension between the sublime and the burlesque characterizes

Yeats’s drama but the burlesque is situated firmly in the tragic

structure and does not lessen the greatness of Seanchan’s sacrifice.

However, in other two plays, “the burlesque elements consistently

undermine the solemnity of tragedy” (52). Calvary, too “disrupts and

distorts” the elements of Christ’s sacrifice by song of a musician,

which parodies Eucharist in “the unreal conditional where the Christic

fish (‘ichtus’) literally eat up the starving heron” (53).

In the next part, Poulain examines how “self-conscious

theatricality” (54) that connects Yeats’s plays to the medieval Passion

play comes as a consequence of the “sacrificial imagination” discussed

earlier. Death is displayed publicly in the plays as a spectacle. The

King’s Threshold shows this motif in serious and even solemn

fashion. Poet Seanchan’s hunger strike is a political gesture that

needs to be seen by the greatest number of people in order to

achieve its purpose, which is to bring shame on the King’s name. In

other plays, most notably in The D eath of Cuchulain, its hero,

Cuchulain, is deprived of the opportunity to die a tragic and heroic

death that he expects when Aoife exits the stage for no valid reason

and is replaced by “the burlesque Blind Man (of On B aile’s Strand )

who proceeds to cut him up like a piece of meat” (55-56).

Poulain then moves on to the drama in the three plays. Resisting

against the model of well-made, realistic play with “dynamic dialogue,

plot-twists and satisfactory resolution” (56-57), Yeats comes up with

“an alternative dramaturgy” which is expressed most radically in the

three plays by their dramatization of “the process of death” (57). In

- 24 -
The King’s Threshold , inevitable moment of the poet’s death is

delayed artificially and the poet appears to be suspended in the action

of dying. In Calvary, too, all the dramatic actions simply delays the

eventual death of Christ. However, the play does not stage the

crossing of the threshold but instead makes Christ to dream final

moments of his life after his death.

Finally, she discusses the topic of subjectivity in the plays, for the

attempt to dramatize the process of death means to dramatize what

happens to the subject when the subject ceases to be. In The King’s

Threshold , process of Seanchan’s death and gradual collapse of his

reasoning ability is described by external observers. Even though the

poet himself falls into delirium, dramatic structure is not affected by

it because there are “successive interlocutors” who “exist

independently of his delirium” (61). In Calvary, however, death is

staged from within the subject, for the play itself is presented as a

dream of Christ. Delirium of Christ, unlike that of Seanchan’s, is not

shown in his speech but in “the palimpsestic structure of the play

which rewrites the story of the Passion,” deviating from the standard

narrative of Passion in the Bible (61).

In his essay entitled “Playing with Voices and with Doubles in

Two of Yeats’s Plays: The Words upon the Window-pane ” and A

F ull M oon in M arch,” Pierre Longuenesse discusses how Yeats plays

with voices and the doubles in the plays The Words upon the

Window-pane and A F ull M oon in M arch. In the discussions,

Longuenesse focuses on the issue of enunciation, more specifically on

the separation of enunciator and speaker in those two plays. In the

first part, he discusses how this problem arises in The Words U pon

- 25 -
the Window-pane . In the play, ghosts from the past — namely, ghosts

of Jonathan Swift and two women who loved him — returns via a

medium, Mrs. Henderson, who changes her voice into those of Swift

and two women. Given these changes of voices, question of who is

speaking becomes crucial to the understanding the plot of the play.

On the one hand, confusion of identities caused by these changes is

disturbing. Speech of ghosts here is not technically “reported” by the

medium since she switches from one voice to another without giving

us any hint about the next speaker. It is therefore more accurate to

see Mrs. Henderson as “the speech channel of others who turn out to

be ‘possessing’ her” (106), rather than seeing her as “the (indirect)

subject of the speech or discourse” (106).

On the other hand, such confusion is illusory. First, words spoken

by each of the ghosts are reproduced exactly. Second, each voice

retains its “individual integrity in spite of the spiritualist dimension of

the play” (106). Even though Mrs. Henderson is possessed again after

the seance is over, she simply switches “from one identity to

another” while remaining without crossing the boundary “between

past and present or between the dead and the living” (106). In this

regard, he argues that the change of voices in the play has the

limits. He concludes that the play fails to challenge the conventional

form of drama and the underlying notion of the character because its

setting and its organization of speech and dialogue are framed by

naturalism. However, I do not agree with him on this point because I

think that such naturalist framework is just a way to make the play

appear acceptable to the audience who are used to seeing naturalist

drama.

- 26 -
 With this, Longuenesse moves on to discuss A F ull M oon in

M arch, which demonstrates the problem of split between the

enunciator and the speaker more effectively. He starts by examining

the dialogue between the two musicians (who double as attendants)

in the prologue, in which they wonder about what protocol they have

to follow in order to start their song. Text of their song indicates

that all of it is sung by the second Attendant. However, it soon

becomes clear that there is another voice which interrupts the song

with an insistent question. In the uncertainty as to who is speaking,

“a half-way zone” (110) emerges, a zone where “the traditional

conception of the character fades away” (110).

The second passage that Longuenesse discusses is the last

meeting between the Queen and the Swineherd. Although the

encounter is brief (the scene is only 28 lines long), this is when we

hear the two songs, that of the Queen and that of the severed head.

In the first one, an ‘I’ addresses a ‘you’ and both interlocutors seem

to be properly identified: the Queen on the one hand and the severed

head on the other. Moreover, the tone is one of command, thus

confirming that there are two entities, each one addressing the other.

The scene therefore seems to be a dialogue between two perfectly

distinct identities. However, Yeats’s two games of masks, or duality,

soon becomes clear as “these two identities come across each other

or accumulate with one another” (113). The first layer of this game

of doubles is demonstrated in the inner split that occurs in both the

Queen and the Swineherd, between each one’s public and private (if

not spectral) sides. This split originates from the association between

reported speech and singing. The Queen is seen on the other side of

- 27 -
the inner curtain. She dances silently, holding the Swineherd’s

severed head in her bloody hands. Rhythmed as it is by the

percussions, this slow dance gets more and more frenzied. The

ecstatic nature evident in this dance is a kind that is possible only in

Death or Unconsciousness. The dance expresses this ‘second state’ of

the Queen, in which she is neither living nor dead. Moreover, the

relatedness of the dancing Queen’s verbal silence and the speech

reported by the female musician turn her words into the expression

of a thought, of the character’s inner vision. It is notable that the

musician describes Queen’s speech by saying ‘her lips are moving,’

instead of saying that ‘she says’ or ‘she speaks.’ This reveals the

split of speech process between two women: one of them “holds the

internal intention” while the other engages in “the act of utterance”

(113). Then the male musician does the same for the severed head of

the swineherd. This female and male duo occurring next to each

other enables the poet “to stage the communication between the

living and the dead, in order to highlight their spectral

characteristics” and take them to the world that is between the living

and the dead (113).

In her article, “A Vision and Yeats’s Late Masks,” Margaret Mills

Harper investigates the changes in the meaning of the Mask that

occur between the two versions of A Vision, and discusses the

implications of such changes. She looks into the changes in three

aspects: “Personae,” “Form” and the play, The R esurrection. Aim of

her article is to show that for Yeats, Mask is something not only to

be depicted but also enacted. Changes in two versions (in 1925 and

1937) of the work could be seen in two different personae of Yeats,

- 28 -
who is their author. An author of the first version of A Vision is an

aesthete inclined towards magic. In this version, Yeats the author is

the writer who had sought to articulate the political and social

pressures of the 1920s, which included the Anglo-Irish War and the

Irish Civil War. He is also a person who won the Nobel Prize and

served as a senator of the newly-established Irish Free State.

However, Yeats in A Vision seems to oppose his stature as a writer

and a senator. The book is filled with “arcane jargon, difficult

diagrams, and a very curious rhetoric that take itself very seriously

and at the same time be laughing at some private joke” (152).

In A Vision of 1937, the author is more confident, worldly, and

even slightly pompous. Author of second version of A Vision, instead

of attempting and then failing to give an explanation for very difficult

philosophy, is at war with himself. One part of himself accepts

“limited ability to see past his own location” (154) within the system.

Another part of himself refuses to accept that limit and tries to

support “his engagement and energy with reading,” and presents a

strong opinion about the latest work on subjects relevant to the job

he has before him (154).

Changes in Yeats’s thoughts on the Mask is also clear in terms of

form. One of the formal changes is the way in which the occult

system is presented. In 1925 Vision, philosophy is presented statically.

Even though the author is trapped and often confused by the gyres,

but he speaks about the system “as if the material itself emanates

from a still, stable point of view” (155). In contrast, second version of

A Vision presents the system as being more mobile. By 1937, hint of

a still point which exists beyond the turning gyres has become more

- 29 -
complex. It has become more difficult to attain the “final resolution”

from the cycle (156) and reach that still point.

The R esurrection, work that has been composed from 1928-30

(between the publications of A Vision A and A Vision B ), shows

Yeats’s ongoing concern about “how to measure the larger cycles in

which the eras and their gyres are set” (158-59). The play presents a

theological argument on the nature of Christ by means of three

characters, the Hebrew, the Greek and the Syrian, at the same time

as the Dionysian ritual takes place offstage. The Hebrew used to

believe Christ as the Savior but now believes that he was just the

best man that has ever lived. Christ deceived himself into consider

himself as the Messiah. The Greek thinks that Christ did not exist at

all. To him, Christ is just an image, a phantom. Only the Syrian

believes that Christ has indeed risen from death and thinks that this

event is part of a larger pattern.

After the resurrected Christ appears before the three men, each of

them reacts differently according to their perception of Christ and of

the event of the resurrection. The Hebrew backs toward the corner

of the stage and kneels, for, at that moment, he sees Christ as the

divine. The Greek, who still sees Christ as a phantom, has his own

climactic moment when he touches a figure of Christ. He accesses

the divinity by touching the body of a phantom. The Syrian

experiences the most dramatic change. Situating the event in the

larger cycle, he asks rhetorical questions to the other two, begins to

laugh but denies that he is laughing. Instead, he says that he thought

that drums and rattles from outside was laughter, and exclaims “How

horrible”! (CW 2 490). However, it is unclear whether this horror is

- 30 -
directed “at the crowd or his own moment of madness” (162).

The play demonstrates not only Yeats’s ongoing work on the larger

framework of the Great Year at the time of its composition, but also

hints at the personal issues at stake during that time through the

three characters. Harper’s article gives detailed discussions on the

shifts in Yeats’s conception of the Mask by showing the change in

the authorial identity and form in two versions of A Vision and his

concern about how to situate the present in the larger cycle of

history.

In the second chapter of his book, Stone Cottage: P ound, Yeats,

and M odernism, James Longenbach writes on an aristocratic ideal

that Pound and Yeats had tried to achieve in the solitude of the

Stone Cottage, and how it led to their interest in the Japanese Noh.

Longenbach first provides a backdrop against such effort by

discussing how the contemporary events (such as George Moore’s

attack on Yeats and Lady Gregory and controversy over where to

house Hugh Lane’s collections) provoked Yeats and Pound into

develop their rhetoric on the middle class. This middle class, or the

bourgeois, they argued, did not refer to any particular social class,

but rather a state of mind. For both poets, bourgeois was a narrow

mindedness, which made people to be concerned only about

themselves.

One of the events which confirmed their belief on bourgeois as a

state of mind was George Moore’s attacks on Yeats and Lady

Gregory. In his accounts on Yeats (published in the E nglish R eview)

Moore criticized him for aristocratic pretension. Yeats was certainly

not happy about it but chose to confide his feelings in private

- 31 -
journals rather than announcing it publicly. Pound, in contrast, voiced

his criticism publicly. One such example was “The Bourgeois,” an

article published in The E goist on 2 February 1914. In the article,

under a pseudonym Bastien von Helmholtz, Pound (after alluding to

Moore’s attack) criticizes the “bourgeois,” saying that:

The word “bourgeois” is not applied to the middle classes to

distinguish them from the aristocracy. It might be but that is

scarcely its historical usage. The bourgeoisie is a state of mind.

It is as a term of opprobrium, used by the bohemian, or the

artist in contempt of the citizen. The bourgeoisie is digestive. . .

. The bourgeois is, roughly, a person who is concerned solely

with his own comfort or advancement (53).

By using the evidence gathered from contemporary sources,

Longenbach successfully demonstrates what it was that led Pound

and Yeats to find an art form catering to the educated few. This in

turn also provides an important insight into how Yeats saw a

potential to develop Irish drama through the Japanese art form.

In his essay entitled “Noh and Yeats: A Theoretical Analysis,”

Masaru Sekine examines how close are Yeats’s Noh plays to the

medieval Noh plays from Japan. He does this by comparing them

with the theories of Noh as put forward by Ze Ami (Noh actor and

dancer) in his writings. Sekine points out that the first Yeats play

which has been strongly influenced by the Noh was At the H awk’s

Well . He talks about how Yeats followed the Noh tradition in his use

of masks and yet deviated from it by having actor’s face made up. In

- 32 -
the traditional Noh, there is no make up, and waki , the supporting

actor, does not wear a make up. Originally, waki represented a link to

the audience of Ze-Ami’s time. Another difference was the use of

chorus, which was more like that of the Greek theatre than that of

the Japanese. Whereas the chorus in the Noh comes on to the stage

using a back trap door, and sits at the alcove on the left-hand side

and remains their throughout the play, Yeats’s musicians are given

“the roles accorded both chorus and waki in the Noh theatre” (139).

Second play that the author discusses is The Only J ealousy of

E mer . He points out the difference between Yeats’s play and

Japanese tale, Aoinoue , which is believed to be the story on which

the play is based on. First difference that he points out is that Yeats

was not interested in “advocating religious power” (142) as in the

Noh. What he was more interested in was “reviving the mysterious

fairy world” (142). Second difference is the use of masks. All the

characters in Yeats’s plays wear masks, while in the Noh drama, the

waki and the chorus do not wear masks. Even though the Noh drama

does have the convention of changing masks, it is only when there is

a change in the character of the lead actor. Cuchulain’s change of

masks, on the other hand, does not involve such a change, who does

so to “show he has revived” (142).

Third and the final play under comparison is The D reaming of the

B ones, which Sekine sees as closest to the forms of the Noh drama.

In the play, the Young Man plays a role very similar to that of the

waki in the Noh theatre, for he represents the contemporary audience

and does not wear a mask.

Sekine’s discussions on the structure of the Noh plays gives an idea

- 33 -
of what the traditional Noh drama was like. However, I do not agree

with Sekine’s view that such structure could be applied to the study

of Yeats’s Noh-inspired plays because Yeats’s plays, even though

they had been inspired by the Japanese Noh, are different from it.

In her article entitled “W. B. Yeats and the Noh,” Eileen Kato also

explores the question of Yeats and the Noh, but gives a view that is

opposite to that of Sekine’s. Kato first writes briefly about how

Pound and Yeats came to know about the Japanese Noh drama. Then

she looks into some of Yeats’s Noh-inspired plays, starting from At

the H awk’s Well, The D reaming of the B ones, The Only J ealousy of

E mer , and Calvary. In each of her discussions, Kato explores the

issue of writer and history, more specifically that of how writer

should approach historical facts as he/she writes works that are

inspired by historical materials. Related to this is a question of

whether Yeats’s “Noh plays” could be considered as such. She is

doubtful as to whether Yeats’s “Noh plays” can be said to follow the

traditions of the Noh. She gives her reasons for her view by

contrasting Yeats’s treatment of history and legends in his four plays

with the historical events and legends as they are recorded in the

source materials.

One of the plays that Kato discusses is At the H awk’s Well. She

writes that there is no mention at all in the Cuchulain saga (Celtic

legend that is supposed to be a basis for this play) about Cuchulain’s

visit to the hawk’s well. Zeami, a Japanese poet who theorized about

the Noh, specifically warns against that change of episodes from the

old tales, for such a change will make the audience bewildered. The

poet is only allowed to take a well-known character from a

- 34 -
well-known episode, and explore all the range of emotions that the

character can feel in the dramatic situation.

In her discussions of another play, The D reaming of the B ones,

Kato similarly compares Yeats’s treatment of the Norman invasion

with the historical account. The D reaming of the B ones turns Dermot

and Dervorgilla into two lovers guilty of bringing the Normans into

Ireland and so responsible for the beginning of the English rule in

the country. However, in the historical account, Dervorgilla only lives

with Dermot for a brief period before she was sent back to her

husband, long before Dermot was defeated by his enemy and calls

for the help of the Norman knights. Given such fact, it is impossible

for the two to appear together as in Yeats’s play, let alone as lovers.

However, even though I can share Kato’s concern that Yeats might

have treated history and legends too liberally, I cannot share her

view on Yeats’s Noh plays. I think that her unhappiness at Yeats’s

Noh plays overlooks the fact that Yeats wrote them to create Irish

drama, not just an imitation of the Japanese art form.

- 35 -
2. Yeats’s Theories on Spirituality

In the previous section, we have seen how critics have attempted

to come up with the theories on Yeats’s spirituality. In this section,

we will look at how Yeats has tried to formulate his own theories on

spirituality by looking at five of his essays. By examining his prose

writings, spanning from 1901 to 1937, we see that Yeats had tried to

formulate the theory on the spirituality that unites the traditions of

both past and present and East and West.

Yeats’s 1901 essay “Magic” is significant for its links with his later

writings, not least of which is the association of the supernatural

with the desolate places (represented by the western part of

Ireland — such as Galway and Sligo) that were to appear in an essay

“Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places” in 1914. The

parallel that Yeats makes between the Laplander and the Galway

peasants resembles its equivalent in the Swedenborg essay, between

Irish folklore and Japanese Noh plays. Laplanders and Galway

peasants are similar in that they are more exposed to the elements of

nature than modern people and hence more susceptible to believe in

the supernatural power around them.

Yeats starts this essay with three doctrines of magic, in which he

proclaims the fluidity of minds and memory, and about the underlying

unity of memories beneath its apparent diversity.4) After spelling out

4) It might be interesting to compare Yeats’s doctrines of magic with a passage from

Franz Hartmann’s book, in which the author writes about the “universal

storehouse of matter and motion” (M agic 19), which resembles the concept of

Anima Mundi.

- 36 -
these famous doctrines, Yeats first gives evidence in their support by

giving a detailed account of visionary experiences he had with

MacGregor Mathers, Mathers’s wife, and his acquaintance.

Yeats writes in detail about the visions of his acquaintance and

himself, which, while they are products of a person’s imagination,

these visions have lives of their own. In one of the visions (which

are visions of Yeats’s acquaintance), he sees a vision of a Flemish

doctor giving a lecture, with a subject for dissection lying on a table.

After that, Yeats sees his own past life in form of two visions. In

one of such visions, Yeats first sees an image of a castle. Then,

after that initial vision vanished, the image is replaced by that of a

man standing in a monk’s habit reading something from a parchment.

After that, the vision disappears again, and now the man is joined by

men-at-arms, heading to what appeared to be the Holy Land. The

monk and men-at-arms seem to be building the Masonic house.

Then, Yeats, Mathers and the seeress break the vision to have

supper. After they had finished their meal, they realize that what

appeared to be the Masonic house was in fact a great stone cross.

Then, the vision vanishes, after having completed its cycle. This

vision, among many others, convince Yeats of the “supremacy of

imagination” and “the power of many minds to become one,

overpowering one another by spoken words and by unspoken thought

till they have become a single, intense, unhesitating energy” (E & I

36).

“Magic” is also significant in that it expresses Yeats’s belief in the

power of imagination. After the accounts of visions he had with

McGregor Mathers, he quotes a story of a Scholar-Gipsy that

- 37 -
testifies to it. This story — by Joseph Glanvil — is particularly

fascinating in that it shows how one can manipulate others’ minds

just by using one’s power of imagination. In his account, Glanvil

relates the tale of a talented young man at the University of Oxford

who was forced to join a band of gypsies because of poverty. One

day, the man happens to meet and travel with his former

acquaintances. After telling his old friends about the necessity that

drove him to live that way of life, he tells them that gypsies have

traditional learning that could work wonders using the power of

imagination. He tells his friends to remove themselves to another

room and talk among themselves. On his return, he will tell them the

sense of what they had been talking about. He duly did what he

promised, and gave his friends a full account of what they had been

talking about while he was away. Friends were amazed by this feat,

and begged the man for explanation. Then the man told them what

he had done, that he had used his imaginative power, so that the

friends’ discourse took the course that he dictated, and that there

were proven ways to heighten the imagination to such a pitch so as

to bend that of another’s. After that, he leaves the company of

gypsies to tell the whole world what he had learned from them.

In his essay entitled “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate

Places,” originally written in 1914, but was included in Lady

Gregory’s book, Visions and B eliefs in the West of I reland (1920),

Yeats gives a detailed account of the spiritual research done between

1912-1916. In this account, he tries to support his belief in the

immortality of the soul with evidence gained from his readings on

mysticism, on mediums, and on the stories collected by Lady

- 38 -
Gregory.

First evidence he uses to support his thoughts on the spiritual is

The Spiritual D iary of Emmanuel Swedenborg. In one such episode, a

queen fainted when Swedenborg told her (as an ambassador looked

on) the secret that was known only to her and her dead brother.

Another evidence is Swedenborg’s description of the after-life stages

of the soul. During these stages (which look interestingly similar to

those in A Vision), the soul first goes through a state of shifting and

readjustment. This first state, according to Yeats, appears to

“correspond with a state of sleep” that more modern seers had found

to follow a person’s death (CW 5 50). This is followed by a period

which may only last for a short time or many years, in which the

soul lives a life that closely resembles the life on earth. It is indeed

so similar to the life on earth that the soul may not know that it had

died. Such “earth-resembling life” (CW 5 50) is created by “the

image-making power of the mind” plucked away from the body, most

of the images consist of the images stored in the memory (CW 5

50).

Yeats writes that what can be noticed in these states is a

discovery that the smallest details that enter our memory never

leaves us and remains a part of us. This means that in the afterlife

as in this life, one does not know all the images that are in one’s

memory. However, “angelic spirits” that are at work on individuals

when they were living as well as after they had died, can widen and

deepen the consciousness as they please, and “can draw forth all the

past” and make people relive all their wrong doings, as if they were

real (CW 5 50-51).

- 39 -
 After Swedenborg, Yeats focuses on the accounts of the mediums,

most notably the ones written by an American mesmerist and

spiritualist, Andrew Jackson Davis. Davis first discovered his

mediumistic ability at the age of 15, when a traveling mesmerist

visited his native village of Poughkeepsie. He was fascinated by the

mesmerist and “became clairvoyant” (CW 5 57) after he had been

mesmerized by his neighbor. In one of the episodes, Davis hears the

voice in the middle of the night “telling him to get up and dress

himself and follow” (CW 5 57). He had walked for miles, “wondering

at what seemed the unusual brightness of the stars and once passing

a visionary shepherd and his flock of sheep, and then again

stumbling in cold and darkness” (CW 5 57-58), before crossing the

frozen Hudson and fell unconscious.

After a while, Davis awakes from the trance, finding himself

“among the Catskill Mountains” (CW 5 58). After that brief moment

of awakening, he becomes unconscious again. When he regained

consciousness, “he was sitting upon a gravestone in a graveyard

surrounded by a wood and a high wall” (CW 5 58). He makes his

return after talking with the two phantoms. After the return, Davis

realizes that one of the two phantoms was a physician Galen, and

another one, Swedenborg. Davis met the phantoms again and again

and again, with Galen “advising him in the diagnosis of disease” and

Swedenborg, in philosophy (CW 5 58). He quoted a passage from

Swedenborg, when it was clear that he could not have had access to

any of the newly translated work of Swedenborg.

As he relates the tale of Jackson Davis, Yeats constantly compares

it with the Irish stories which he had read in Lady Gregory, one of

- 40 -
which is about a woman who said that “she was often glad to eat

from the pigs’ troughs” when she was in the fairyland (CW 5 58). In

this essay, he also discusses the Japanese Noh plays, and gives a

plot summary of two of the plays (M otome-z uka) and N ishikigi in

order to provide specific examples about the stages of afterlife. Of

the two plays, I will look more closely into N ishikigi , which is

interesting because of its similarities (and differences) with Yeats’s

own play, The D reaming of the B ones. In N ishikigi , a wandering

priest (Waki), meets ghosts of lovers (Shiite and Tsure). The lovers

are wearing a costume of the past, but the priest, being a stranger,

assumes that it is a local costume. The priest is, however, puzzled

by the coarse cloth and the red sticks that the ghosts are holding in

their hands. When the priest asks why, the ghosts tell them a story.

Long time ago, when they lived in the same village, the man put the

red sticks in front of the woman’s house as love charms. The

woman, however, pretends not to see them and continues to weave.

The man dies, and the woman follows soon after. They could not get

married after death, for they had not been married in life. Not

knowing that the ghosts are telling their own story, the priest asks

the lovers to show the way to the cave, and thinks that that is an

interesting tale to tell after he goes back. Then the priest and the

ghosts find their way to the cave. After the three arrive, two lovers

sink into the shadow of the cave, and the priest is left alone Feeling

too cold to sleep, the priest decides to spend his time in prayer. He

prays that the two lovers may at last be one. Presently, to his

surprise, the priest sees that the cave is lighted up, where people are

talking and setting up looms for spinning cloth and red sticks. Lovers

- 41 -
come out and thank the priest for the prayer. Love story is then

unfolded before the priest in a vision. The man and the woman drink

from the bridal cup. Soon after, the dawn comes, and all (the red

sticks, cloth, and singers), leaving the priest alone with the deserted

grave and a pine tree.

Together with the previous essay, “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the

Desolate Places,” P er Amica Silentia Lunae is one of the key

writings in which we could see Yeats’s spiritual development. The

book is made up of two sections: “Anima Hominis” and “Anima

Mundi.”5) In section V of “Anima Hominis,” Yeats states the role of

the internal struggle in the creation of poetry through the following

statement: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of

the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (CW 5 8). That anti-self or

antithetical self could be interpreted as the double or the other who

is desired and feared by the self. Writing process is never a happy,

easy one as it involves the greatest possible struggle between the

self and the anti-self. Not only does the creative process involve

dealing with the other, it also involves becoming the other, which can

be seen in an idea of the mask. Yeats writes in section 6 of “Anima

Hominis” about how modern men became tame and passive because

of the doctrine of “sincerity and self-realisation” (CW 5 10), and how

people of the past such as St. Francis and Caesar Borgia became

“over-mastering and creative” (CW 5 10) by meditating on the Mask.

This meditation on the Mask (which is also an object that has been

5) These two sections refer to the soul of a man and soul of the world, respectively,

which form a part of a system of correspondences. Soul of the man becomes

mirror that reflects the images of the cosmos.

- 42 -
associated with drama) is essentially dramatical, for it requires a

person to consciously wear the mask and enact it, like an actor on a

stage:

If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are,

and try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a

discipline upon ourselves though we may accept one from

others. Active virtue, as distinguished from the passive

acceptance of a code, is therefore theatrical, consciously

dramatic, the wearing of a mask. (CW 5 10)

In order for a poet to free his creativity, therefore, he must be able

to embody the other or the M ask, not just think about becoming one.

Whereas “Anima Hominis” deals with a problem of the double in

an individual, “Anima Mundi” deals with the same problem in more

collective terms. In section VI, Yeats investigates concept of Anima

M undi by exploring the shape-changing powers of the soul. He

writes that souls get the ability to change into whatever shapes they

want, including the shape that they had when they were still alive.

Souls can materialize themselves through a mind’s eye. Or, they can

appear before people in visible and tangible forms like any other

objects by using certain particles from a medium’s body. In order to

facilitate these materializations by offering sheaves of corn, fragrant

gums, fragrance of fruits and flowers, and blood from victims.

Half-formed vehicle then oozes from the skin in dull and luminous

drops or condenses from luminous clouds. Light coming out of them

fades as the vehicle becomes more heavy and dense.

- 43 -
 However, Yeats questions as to how can souls with no modelling

tools or brush show ability to make perfect images. That is when the

notion of Anima M undi comes in, for these images are

materializations of images stored in Anima M undi , a vast storehouse

of images. This suggests that the variety of images that we see

have originated from one source, just like individual memories are

part of a great memory.

“The Tragic Generation” is a fourth chapter of The Trembling of

the Veil, which is itself one of the books in Yeats’s autobiographies.

Even though this chapter supposedly tells the writers of the 1890s, it

is important to note that it is not so much a faithful account of the

writers who lived during that period as how Yeats wanted to see

them. He wanted to see the writers whom he had known using his

theories on the Mask, and by so doing, wanted to put and arrange

them in a pattern.

In the essay, Yeats first talks about Oscar Wilde, whose life had

taken a tragic turn after he was put on a trial for his homosexual

relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. The trial, which began on

May 20, 1895, resulted in Wilde being sentenced to two years of hard

labor. He died five years later as a result of hard labor. Yeats writes

about going to Lady Jane Wilde’s house with letters of sympathy

from various Irish writers after that sentence had been passed. Willie

Wilde (Wilde’s brother) received him at the house. He was hostile at

first but became all friendship on hearing from Yeats that he brought

letters of sympathy. Yeats writes about his brother’s resolve to stay

and face it all, even though the latter had means to escape to the

continent. So Wilde stayed in England, and sentenced to two years in

- 44 -
prison. The decision brought tragedy for his family and himself, for,

before he was released from prison, his mother died. This was

followed by his wife and his brother. Wilde himself was to die soon

after, “his constitution ruined by prison life” (CW 3 226). Yeats

believes, however, this decision to face the situation is responsible for

much of his fame. After this, Yeats notes the change in the attitude

in London towards Wilde after the trial. Those who mocked him

before for his pose and affected style and refused to acknowledge his

wit, became his advocates. Every people on the street praised Wilde’s

wit and eloquence during the trials and in private settings. Before his

decision, he was a comic figure subject to ridicule, but now, he

became a tragic hero who bravely accepted his punishment. Wilde

had made his reputation by assuming an identity opposite to himself,

i.e. that of a tragic hero. Like Dante and Keats in a poem “Ego

Dominus Tuus,” Wilde created an art (or rather, made himself into an

art) by deliberately seeking his opposite.

Second group of people that Yeats writes about are the members

of the Rhymers Club. Among them, Yeats remembers three poets in

particular: Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and Francis Thompson. He

writes about his memory of having listened to Johnson’s poem,

recited by the poet in “his musical monotone” (CW 3 234), in a tone

that made the poem sound like “a great speech” (CW 3 234).

Dowson’s poems, he recalls, sounded like a song, but a song that

was made for the speaking voice. After this, Yeats talks about how

the Rhymers consciously turned to Walter Pater for their philosophy,

and wonders whether the influence of Pater had made them seek a

tragic lives. Guided by Pater’s philosophy, they turned away from

- 45 -
happiness and calm but tragedy and conflicts. It had, as Yeats put it,

taught them “to walk upon a rope tightly stretched through serene

air,” or trying to keep themselves upright on “a swaying rope in a

storm” (CW 3 235). Pater also made the Rhymers to be “ceremonious

and polite,” which made them keep polite distance from one another.

That distance prevented him from knowing that Dowson, beneath the

mask of dignity and reserve, was suffering because of his love for

“the daughter of the keeper of an Italian eatinghouse,” and was

trying to ease his pain in “dissipation and drink” (CW 3 235). The

Rhymers created an art by putting themselves at odds with the

norms of the society, which urges them to live happily by making

themselves busy at work and play, so that everything but

“momentary aim” (CW 5 8) remain. They were, to borrow the words

from P er Amica Silentia Lunae , those who “had found life out and

were awakening from the dream,” (CW 5 8) unlike the practical men

who believe in material wealth, social position, and institution of

marriage.

The last figure that Yeats writes about is J. M. Synge, one of the

co-founders of the Abbey Theatre who was to die of a disease at an

early age. He is yet another example of an artist whose art was

opposite to his life, and could create art out of the most bitter

struggle. Synge, like Wilde, could only create by assuming an identity

opposite from himself. Himself a timid, shy man, “an invalid and full

of moral scruple” (CW 3 263), characters that are completely opposite

to himself, characters that were to be known for “some ranting

braggadocio,” or “most abounding heath” (CW 3 263). He only spoke

kind words, and had admirable manners and yet his play caused

- 46 -
riots, making some of his closest friends to turn against him. He had

to write in a country dialect in order to write well, for that was the

only way in which he could avoid self-expression. Using dialect

enabled Synge to see everything that he did objectively, and to use

his intellect to see “the images of his mind as if they had been

created by some other mind” (CW 3 263).

Yeats’s lifelong interest in spiritualism culminates in the work

called A Vision. As such, this book takes up the interests in the

supernatural expressed in the earlier works. He notes, for instance,

the way in which the living and the dead influence one another, thus

proving that the two worlds (natural and supernatural) are not far

apart but in fact very near. This book also writes on the states of

the afterlife. Emphasis on the equal status of body and soul shows

Yeats’s unique twist to the traditional thoughts on spirituality, in

which soul is regarded as superior to body. This interest is

particularly well reflected in the third book, “The Soul in Judgment.”

In section III of “The Soul in Judgment,” Yeats writes on how the

living and the dead influence one another. As in his earlier

Swedenborg essay, Yeats compares the phenomena of spiritualism in

many traditions. This was accompanied more often than not by the

common belief that “the living can assist in the imaginations of the

dead” (CW 14 160). Cutting a dress or coat to a measure and give it

to the poor to clothe the dead were one of such ways. Yeats recalls

the story told him by a farmer in Doneraile, County Cork. The

farmer told Yeats that his aunt appeared to him stark naked after

death and "complained that she could not go about with other spirits

unless somebody cut a dress to her measure and gave it to a poor

- 47 -
woman in her name” (CW 14 160). In another occasion, an elderly

woman came to Coole Park when Yeats was staying there and told

Lady Gregory that the ghost of Sir William Gregory (her late

husband) had “a tattered sleeve and that a coat must be given to

some beggar in his name” (CW 14 161).

In section V, Yeats writes on the second state of afterlife, which is

called R eturn. In this state, Spirit has to live over the event in the

order of their occurrence so that they can be “related and understood”

and become a part of itself (CW 14 164). In D reaming B ack (which

is also a part of the second state), Spirit re-lives the events of its

life in the order of their intensity. This stage is accomplished by

light, which brighter or less bright according to the intensity of

passion that originally accompanied the events.

After R eturn and D reaming B ack, which are designed to make the

Spirit to understand its past, Spirit goes through P hantasmagoria.

This is a process in which Spirit exhausts its emotion through the

help of Teaching Spirits (Spirits of the Thirteenth Cone or their

representatives). In P hantasmagoria, physical and moral life are

completed, without adding any new element so that “the objects of

hope may be completed” and thereby be known and dismissed (CW

14 167).

In section VIII, Yeats talks about the state of P urification, the state

in which all the memories of Spirit are gone. Spirit in this state no

longer remembers its name. Having forgotten what it was, it is at

last free and “in relation to Spirits like itself” (CW 14 170). Even

though the new H usk and M ask have come into being, they do not

appear because they are under the influence of the Celestial B ody.

- 48 -
What the Spirit must do is to “substitute for the Celestial B ody seen

as a Whole, with its own particular aim” (CW 14 170).

From these discussions, we can see that in previous research on

the subject, critics have largely focused on the double, mask and the

Noh drama. They have explored the ways in which split (caused by

the double) operate in Yeats’s drama, ways in which concept of the

mask had evolved through time, and ways in which Yeats adapted

the Japanese Noh. Yeats’s own spiritual theories also deal with the

mask and the double but are different from those of others. His

theories of spirituality are founded on the belief on the supernatural

world that is physical as ours. Contact with that world of the other

(where mind and personality are also at work but operate in ways

different from ours) can lead to inspiration and creativity.

- 49 -
IV. Poetic Representations of Spirituality

In this chapter, I would like to look into Yeats’s poems, which I

have grouped them under three categories: poems on the double,

poems on visions and dreams, and poems on gyres. In the first group

are poems which address the issue of the double in a form of

dialogue: “Ego Dominus Tuus,” “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” and

“Man and the Echo.” In the second group are poems which deal with

visions and dreams: “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes” and

“Towards Break of Day.” In the final group are poems which explore

the theme of gyres, which commonly appear in a form of double,

interlocking cones, and serve as symbols for the cyclical recurrence

in individual and history: “Vacillation,” “The Gyres,” and “Lapis

Lazuli.”

As an introductory poem to P er Amica Silentia Lunae , “Ego

Dominus Tuus” deals with the concept of the double (which is also

the opposite in the sense that they are most unlike the self) in the

form of dialogue between Hic and Ille. This double exists both within

and outside an individual. If the double is seen as existing outside an

individual, Hic and Ille should be regarded as representing thoughts

of two different individuals. Seen that way, Hic represents a person

who advocates modern, impersonal poetry arranged in free verse6),

6) We might consider Ezra Pound’s poem, “Salutation the Third,” published in a

short-lived Vorticist journal called B last in June 1914, as an example of such

“modern, impersonal poetry”. Following lines in free verse arranged unevenly

across the page, is a far cry from Yeats’s poems, which are usually rhymed verse

arranged evenly across their pages:

- 50 -
while Ille represents a person who advocates poetry that tells of

personal emotion in traditional rhymes. Or, if it is seen as existing

within self, it represents the conflict between desire to stay faithful

to the tradition and desire to give a twist to it, and thereby become

modern. Or — more likely — we could see these double itself as being

doubled within and without the self, just as the gyres (which are

doubled in individual and history).

“Ego Dominus Tuus” starts with Hic’s disapproval of Ille for his

pursuit of image, to the neglect of serious study of poetry. To Ille,

however, this pursuit of image is what inspires the creation of art.

Hic’s idea on art, however, is rather different from that of Ille’s. To

Hic, work of art could only be created after a person comes to

understand who he is. Hic’s wish to find himself — as Ille points

out — reflects the “modern hope” (CW 1 161), the hope that pervades

the modern culture with its “doctrine of sincerity and self-realisation”

(CW 5 10). By the hope to find one’s self, the modern men have

become gentle and passive and lost the creativity that people had in

the past. Being too concerned about the approval of friends, they

have become but critics, who can “but half create” (CW 1 162).

For Ille, two authors best represent his ideas on how poetry comes

into being. Both of them had written their great works through their

struggle with the opposite. First one is Dante:

Let us deride the smugness of “The Times”:

GUFFAW!

So much the gagged reviewers,

It will pay them when the worms are wriggling in their vitals;

These were they who objected to newness,

HERE are their TOMB-STONES. (45)

- 51 -
 And did he find himself

Or was the hunger that had made it hollow

A hunger for the apple on the bough

Most out of reach? (CW 1 162)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous life,

Derided and deriding, driven out

To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread,

He found the unpersuadable justice, he found

The most exalted lady loved by a man. (CW 1 162)

Dante, being a lecherous man, deliberately chose to take a difficult

path by climbing up the stair and eat bitter bread and created great

poetry by finding Beatrice, “The most exalted lady loved by a man.”

According to Ille, Keats’s luxuriant poetry was written precisely

because he was poor. Being deprived a life of luxury, he could only

resort to imaginary one. Keats, like Dante, could create his great

poems by his conflicts with the opposite. In Ille’s imagination, Keats

is but a poor schoolboy who could not afford to buy sweets but only

imagine their sweetness from outside, which reflects Yeats’s view on

Keats’s art in “Anima Hominis.”7)

However, Hic disagrees with Ille, for, to Hic, work of art is created

not with the help of his opposite but with a deliberate study of the

7) In “Anima Hominis,” Yeats imagines Keats as a person who was born with the

“thirst for luxury” but not able to quench that thirst with “beautiful and strange

objects” because he was poor (CW 5 6). Therefore, Keats, being“ignorant, poor,

and in poor health,” found delights in imaginary objects, knowing that he could

never actually enjoy that luxury (CW 5 6).

- 52 -
past masters. Ille then proclaims that he does not seek a book and

knowledge that it offers but an image because his double or the

anti-self, who has all the secrets he wants to find, will stand beside

it. This “mysterious one” (CW 1 163) whom Ille summons is Ille’s

Mask, a figure who is simultaneously like and unlike himself that

will help him create art through the creative tension.

I call to the mysterious one who yet

Shall walk the wet sand by the edge of the stream

And look most like me, being indeed my double,

And prove of all imaginable things

The most unlike, being my anti-self,

And standing by these characters disclose

All that I seek; (CW 1 163)

With this summon to the double/anti-self, Ille proclaims the central

role of the double (or the Mask) plays in Yeats’s idea of spirituality,

spirituality that is based not on the abstraction but something more

concrete and imminent.

“A Dialogue of Self and Soul” similarly follows the dialogue form

prevalent in English poetry. Traditionally, this form featured dialogues

between body and soul. However, Yeats gives a twist to such

convention by personifying not body and soul but rather self and

soul. Each of them symbolizes for two opposing dynamics (one

dynamic being the movement towards the one and another towards

the many) that drive our lives. Thus, this poem shows Yeats’s

success in understanding the system of A Vision. Structure of the

- 53 -
poem itself resembles that of the gyres, whose two interlocking cones

alternately contract and expand. Voice of the soul, which had been

strongest at the beginning of the poem, gradually loses its strength

until it is drowned completely, while that of the self, which is

weakest at the start, gains in strength until it becomes a dominant

voice in the poem.

When the poem starts, My Soul summons the winding stair and

the crumbling tower, which appears in other poems as an emblem of

adversity8):

M y Soul. I Summon to the winding ancient stair;

Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,

Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,

Upon the breathless starlit air,

Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;

8) For example, in the following lines from “My House” in part II of “Meditations in

Time of Civil War,” Yeats makes his tower as a symbol of adversity:

[ . . .] A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,

A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,

A candle and written page.

I l P enseroso 's Platonist toiled on

In some like chamber, shadowing forth

How the daemonic rage

Imagined everything.

Benighted travellers

From markets and from fairs

Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And I, that after me

My bodily heirs may find,

To exalt a lonely mind,

Befitting emblems of adversity. (CW 1 205-206)

- 54 -
 Fix every wandering though upon

That quarter where all thought is done:

Who can distinguish darkness from the soul? (CW 1 238)

Thus My Soul urges My Self to set his soul in an arduous ascent to

receive the wages, which are knowledge of ultimate truth. Steepness

of that ascent make it harder for the climber to reach the top. This

steep ascent is on “the crumbling battlement” (CW 1 238) of a stone

tower, which in itself is symbolical of the adversity. My Soul tells

My Self to focus his thought only on “That quarter where all

thought is done” (CW 1 238). The result of Self’s focusing thoughts

on that quarter, Soul says, would cause Self to lose its subjectivity

and becomes a part of the surrounding darkness.

However, My Self is attracted to the aristocracy (which to Yeats

stood for the state of mind as much as the social class), symbolized

here and elsewhere9) by Sato’s sword. Its aristocratic nature could be

seen in the haughtiness of the sword which lay unchanged for five

centuries, covered in noble silk. This is further heightened by the fact

9) In the following lines from “My Table,” third part of “Meditations in Time of

Civil War,” Yeats writes:

Two heavy trestles, and a board

Where Sato’s gift, a changeless sword,

By pen and paper lies,

That it may moralise

My days out of their aimlessness.

A bit of an embroidered dress

Covers its wooden sheath.

Yet if no change appears

No moon; only an aching heart

Conceives a changeless work of art. (CW 1 206)

- 55 -
that the sword itself was an object reserved only to the members of

the Japanese nobility, those same people who had the subtlety of

mind to enjoy the rhythms of the verse and classical allusions in the

Noh drama. In its association with the nobility and exclusivity, the

sword also can be linked to the Protestant Ascendancy, an Irish

aristocracy that shared the exclusivity of the Japanese nobles who

were able to delight in the Noh:

M y Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees

Is Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was,

Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass

Unspotted by the centuries;

That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn

From some court-lady’s dress and round

The wooden scabbard bound and wound,

Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn. (CW 1 239)

Thus the self displays the same aristocratic attitude that Yeats

(together with Pound) had assumed against what he called the

middle-class, the same crowd who opposed against the construction

of the gallery in Dublin to house the art collections of Hugh Lane.

The soul, which has no such aristocratic ambition, naturally

criticizes My Self for thinking about the sword. My Soul sees the

sword as an emblem of love and war, which could only make the

self tied to the earth and its cycle of death and birth. My Soul

responds to My Self’s conscious act of emblem making by saying

that in order to break free from it, one must think of the “ancestral

- 56 -
night” (CW 1 239), the darkness with which the soul is surrounded

as it ascends the winding stair.

My Self is unwilling to listen to what My Soul says, and

continues to set his own emblem against that of the soul’s. Sato’s

sword and embroidery, which symbolize two extremes of love and

war, will be its symbol in the same way as the wind-beaten tower

with its winding stair is a symbol for the soul. My Self proudly

proclaims that it will use those emblems as a “charter” (CW 1 239),

to commit the “crime of death and birth” (CW 1 239).

Using an image of water that overflows (an image of change), Soul

speaks of a man whose subjectivity has disappeared. Like the Soul in

“Vacillation” that is “Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!” (CW 1

256), the man is “stricken deaf and dumb and blind” (CW 1 239).

Man’s intellect can no longer distinguish among Is (his desire) and

Ought (object of his desire) and Knower (his intelligence) and Known

(object of his intelligence). As the result of the confusion of the

subject and object, the self loses its subjectivity and becomes a part

of the surrounding darkness:

M y Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows

And falls into the basin of the mind

That man is stricken dumb and blind,

For intellect no longer knows

I s from the Ought, or Knower from the Known (CW 1 239)

Such confusion that the soul speaks about refers to the state of

complete objectivity in Phase 1, in which self is obliterated, being

- 57 -
“completely absorbed in its supernatural environment” (CW 14 136).

In this phase, “Thought and inclination, fact and object of desire, are

indistinguishable (M ask is submerged in B ody of F ate , Will in

Creative M ind ), that is to say, there is complete passivity, complete

plasticity” (CW 14 136). As all subjectivity is drowned in plasticity,

mind loses the sense of what is good and evil, body becomes

“undifferentiated” and “dough-like” (CW 14 136). Mind and body

become instruments of “supernatural manifestation,” which is “the

final link between the living and more powerful beings” (CW 14 136).

As if mimicking that state of complete objectivity, the soul loses its

strength and ceases to speak.

As the soul falls into silence, the self dominates the poem

throughout part II. My Self proclaims once more that it will choose

to live and relive the life, even if it means to go through again all

the sufferings that it entails, from the shame of boy growing into a

man, to endless strifes of a grown-up man among his enemies. What

My Self chooses to do, in other words, is to relive the life in all its

impurity and strife, which My Self describes as pitching “Into the

frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch, / A blind man battering blind

ditch” (CW 1 240). Only through this suffering can a person create

lasting work of art:

I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch

Into the frog spawn of a blind man’s ditch

Or into that most fecund ditch of all,

The folly that man does

- 58 -
 Or must suffer, if he woos

A proud woman not kindred of his soul. (CW 1 240)

My Self vows to live through the events through action and thought

so that he could exhaust the emotions and cast out painful memories

associated with those events, after which he could enjoy the feeling

of pure happiness:

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest. (CW 1 240)

That feeling of pure happiness, however, does not last long, for

human beings are condemned to vacillate between the opposite

extremes, whether they are remorse and happiness or life and death.

In the next poem, “Man and the Echo,” that opposition shows itself

through a dialogue between an old man (who expresses remorse over

his past words and deeds) and the echo, which obstinately repeats

the end of each of the man’s sentences. Man first expresses remorse

over something he wrote in his play, which he fears might have led

certain people to be killed: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain

men the English shot?” (CW 1 353)10) What Man fears is the

- 59 -
dangerous influence that the content of his play — especially the songs

— that might have led certain people to lead the rebellion against the

English and got executed. Man thinks that if he had written

something different, they might not have been dead. Second one is

Man’s remorse on words he said to a woman. He fears that what he

said to her may have put too much strain on her: “Did words of

mine put too great strain / On that woman’s reeling brain?” (CW 1

353). Again, Man thinks over what he might have said to bring

about a different outcome.

After listing out his deeds and their consequences, Man hopes that

he could run away from the feeling by lying down. Then, after Echo

repeats the end of his sentence, the man says:

M an. That were to shirk

The spiritual intellect’s great work

And shirk it in vain. There is no release

In a bodkin or disease,

Nor can there be a work so great

As that which cleans man’s dirty slate.

While man can still to his body keep

Wine or love drug him to sleep (CW 1 354)11)

10) The lines might be an allusion to Yeats’s play, Cathleen ni H oulihan (1902), in

— —
which a young man who is about to get married is enchanted by songs of an old

woman who is a symbol of Ireland and follows her (CW 2 92-93). Old man

fears that these lines might have led Irish patriots to fight in the Easter Rising,

who were eventually captured by the English and executed.

11) This passage, as Graham Dampier notes, refers to the clarification process that

Spirit undergoes after its death. Dampier writes on this process as follows:

In lines 24 and 25 the speaker states that there is no work as “great” as “that

- 60 -
What the man says, therefore is that to sleep and forget about what

he has said is to run away from the purification process that his

Spirit has to undergo after his death. After death of body, Spirit

awakens. From that moment, spiritual intellect “grows sure” and

every event is “arranged in one clear view” (CW 1 354):

But body gone he sleeps no more

And till his intellect grows sure

That’s all arranged in one clear view12)

Pursues the thoughts that I pursue,

Then stands in judgment on his soul,

And, all work done, dismisses all

Out of intellect and sight

And sinks at last into the night. (CW 1 354)

which clean man’s dirty slate.” This refers to the purification process of the first

three states of the soul in death. At the end of the Shiftings, the third state, the

Spirit is completely purified of “divisible nature,” which is a requirement of

material incarnation (YVP 3 200). The clarification of the Spirit can only occur in

the states of the soul in death. Only in death can the Spirit attain perfection,

purity and harmony. (“The Spiritual Intellect’s Great Work” 85)

12) Dampier also makes the observations in the same article on what happens after

the Spirit is freed from body as he refers to the stanza quoted above.

This is a reference to the realization of pure “Concord” upon the Spirit’s union

with the Celestial B ody and, subsequently, the Ghostly Self. Essentially, the

first three disincarnate states of the soul in death can be described as the

perfection of the Spirit’s knowledge of emotional and sensuous nature, personal

notions of good and evil, and knowledge of the self “in relation to the ideal,”

and “in relation to God” (YVP 3 233). In the process of perfecting its

knowledge of the foregoing material experience, the Spirit is clarified; its slate

is cleaned and all is synthesized into “one clear view” of life (85).

- 61 -
 However, this moment of unity cannot last for long. Man is unable

to prolong his experience of the “night” or B eatitude, for his thought

is distracted by the cries of an owl and a rabbit. State of B eatitude ,

a state of perfection and unity, cannot last long, for it is our fate to

live in the state of imperfection and discord:

M an. O rocky voice

Shall we in that great night rejoice?

What do we know but that we face

One another in this place?

But hush, for I have lost the theme

Its joy or night seem but a dream;

Up there some hawk or owl has struck

Dropping out of sky or rock,

A stricken rabbit is crying out

And its cry distracts my thought. (CW 1 354)

Dreams and visions are another way in which spirituality could be

represented in poetry. However, as Neil Mann notes in his essay,

“Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead,” question of dreams and visions

have been relatively neglected in Yeats studies, despite the fact that

these inspired many of his poems (including “Double Vision of

Michael Robartes” and “Towards Break of Day”). It is with this

recognition of that relative neglect that Mann starts discussing the

issue of dream, vision and the dead in his article. First issue he

picks up (using the Theosophical theory on dreams proposed by C.

W. Leadbeater) is that on how to classify the dreams into three

- 62 -
levels: physical, etheric, and astral levels.

In the first level, (Theosophical) ego has a “direct access to

spiritual truths, though they are almost inevitably distorted in recall”

(111). The next level, “‘vivid and connected dreams,’ is more common

and significant category” in Yeats’s accounts on dreams (112). These

dreams, according to Leadbeater, are “sometimes a remembrance,

more or less accurate, of a real astral experience which has occurred

to the ego while wandering away from his sleeping physical body”

(D 52).

All the categories of dreams appear in a notebook that Yeats kept

from 1908 to 1909 to record the dreams he had with Maud Gonne,

even though terms he used were slightly different from those used

by Leadbeater. Even though some of the visions “more or less

spontaneous,” many of them came as “a result of conscious

preparations and visualizations,” (116) as we could see the dream

notebook that Yeats used to record them. These symbols, could

sometimes be traditional ones such as vesica piscis or mandorla,

which are in the shape of intersecting rings. Especially suitable

symbol of duality, it is “more broadly associated with visions of

holiness and with the tension or reconciliation of two disparate

elements” (117). Or they could be personal, such as apple blossoms.13)

13) Example of the use of such personal symbols could be seen in a following

passage from The Green Sheaf, a journal edited by Pamela Colman Smith from

1903-1904:

I have a way of giving myself long meaning dreams, by meditating on a

symbol when I go to sleep. Sometimes I use traditional symbols, and

sometimes I meditate upon some image which is only a symbol to myself.

A while ago I came to think of apple-blossom as an image of the East

and breaking day, and one night it brought me, not as I expected a

- 63 -
Visions evoked in that way, shared between Yeats and Gonne, were

related and yet opposite. They operated in a way like a mirror, which

reflects an image but in reverse. On the one hand, these associated

yet different visions shared by a woman and a man contributed much

to the development of the notions of complementary dreams that were

to appear in poems such as “Towards Break of Day.” On the other

hand, poems such as “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,”

demonstrates kind of symbolic visions that the two often had. The

poem shows mirroring images of complete objectivity and complete

subjectivity in the form of visions. In the first of his two visions,

Robartes sees a state of complete objectivity at Phase 1, in which the

moon has vanished:

On the grey rock of Cashel the mind’s eye

Has called up the cold spirits that are born

When the old moon is vanished from the sky

And the new still hides her horn. (CW 1 172)

In his first vision, which shows the state of complete objectivity,

Robartes imagines the “blank eyes and fingers” (CW 1 172) that

pound away “The particular” (CW 1 172) till it becomes a man. At

Phase 1, when the moon is completely hidden, an individual does not

have one’s own will, leaving one’s self at the hands of nature to be

shaped as it fancies. Robartes then takes part imaginatively in this

complete plasticity of a subject, and becomes an automaton with

charming dream full of the mythology of sunrise, but this grotesque dream

about the breaking of an eternal city. (6)

- 64 -
wooden joints and limbs that only moves as it is ordered:

Constrained, arraigned, baffled, bent and unbent

By these wire-jointed jaws and limbs of wood,

Themselves obedient,

Knowing not evil and good; (CW 1 172)

At the opposite pole is an image of the human soul at Phase 15. In

this state, which is that of complete subjectivity, external world is

reduced to a backdrop for distinct images so charged with meaning

that they almost seem meaningless. The human soul at this state is

symbolized by an image of a dancer, who is completely absorbed in

herself:

On the grey rock of Cashel I suddenly saw

A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,

A Buddha, hand at rest,

Hand lifted up that blest;

And right between these two a girl at play

That, it may be, had danced her life away,

For now being dead it seemed

That she of dancing dreamed. (CW 1 173)

The dancer, a figure who symbolizes the fifteenth phase, dances

between the Sphinx and the Buddha, each of which stands for phases

that come before and after Phase 15. The Buddha symbolizes desire,

- 65 -
whereas the Sphinx symbolizes intellect, with the Buddha trying to

find fulfillment outside itself, and the Sphinx inside itself.

These three images present themselves to Robartes solid as if they

were real even though they are but visions that he sees in his mind.

After his visions, Robartes remembers the moment of vision as the

moment of frenzy, being pulled between the forces of the dark and

the full moon. He arranges his visions into a poem for readers to

read, visions with which he had been rewarded after so many years.

Whereas the previous poem dealt with the visions, “Towards Break

of Day” deals with dream. To be more specific, the poem deals with

the concept of complementary dreams that is explained in “What the

Caliph Refused to Learn,” in the second book of a 1925 Vision. This

dream, which occurs to people who are thinking about the same

theme, and are connected by “a supersensual link” (CW 13 140), is a

dream in which people see images that “complete one another”:

I use in the section about the state of man after death the term

complementary dream. When two people meditate upon the one

theme, who have established a supersensual link, they will

invariably in my experience, no matter how many miles apart,

see pass before the mind’s eye complementary images, images

that complete one another.14) (CW 13 140)

14) Mann writes in his essay on complementary dreams that Yeats and Gonne had

on December 7, 1898. Gonne asked Yeats “what dream he had had that night,” to

which he answered: ‘“I have dreamed that I have kissed your lips”’ (“W. B. Yeats,

Dream, Vision, and the Dead” 123). Gonne then said that she was there with him,

but “did not remember much, until”:

in the evening she said some word such as these “I will tell you what

- 66 -
Yeats writes then about examples of such complementary dreams, in

which images in one dream are kinds of mirror images of another:

“One for instance may see a boat upon a still sea full of tumultuous

people, and the other a boat full of motionless people upon a

tumultuous sea” (CW 13 140). If we consider the dreams in the poem

as complementary dreams, each dream might be seen as the double

of each other or even two parts of the same dream even though they

appear to be unrelated. This is why a man wonders whether his

dream and that of a woman are doubles or two halves of one dream:

Was it the double of my dream

The woman that by me lay

Dreamed, or did we but

Halve the dream

Under the first cold dream of day? (CW 1 187)

Indeed, dreams of a man and a woman are related in that they both

express the longing that cannot be fulfilled. Man’s desire to touch a

waterfall that he has loved as a child cannot be satisfied because the

waterfall that he loves is not real. That waterfall exists just in his

memory as an ideal image. Sight of the actual waterfall will bound to

disappoint the man because it is different from the image of the

waterfall that he has in his head. Woman too, longs for an object

happened last night. I went out of my body — I saw my body from outside —
it

& I was brought away by Lug & my hand was put in yours & I was told

that we were married. Then I kissed you & all became dark. I think we went

away together to do some work.” Then and there for the first time with the

bodily mouth, she kissed me. (CL 3 315-16 n. 2)

- 67 -
that is unattainable as she dreams a white stag of Arthur leaping

from mountain to mountain. A white stag in her dream stands for an

ideal beauty that cannot be found in her world.

In the first dream, a man sees a waterfall that he loved as a child:

I thought: ‘There is a waterfall

Upon Ben Bulben side

That all my childhood counted dear;

Were I to travel far and wide

I could not find a thing so dear.’

My memories had magnified

So many times childish delight. (CW 1 187)

Seeing the beloved image, man tries to have it by touching it with

his hand. To his frustration, however, he realizes that only thing that

his fingers touch is “cold stone and water” (CW 1 187). The man

accuses the heaven for denying him the chance to possess something

that he desires when he fails to touch the beloved object:

I would have touched it like a child

But my finger could but have touched

Cold stone and water. I grew wild

Even accusing Heaven because

It had set down among its laws:

Nothing that we love over-much

Is ponderable to our touch. (CW 1 187)

- 68 -
 After talking about the man’s dream, the poem moves on to talk

about the woman’s dream. Her dream, which doubles or complements

that of man’s, she sees a “lofty white stag” of Arthur (CW 1 187),

which she desires to see but cannot. Like the man who almost

touches the waterfall but fails, the woman fails to touch a marvelous

stag of Arthur, and is forced to see him leap from mountain to

mountain:

I dreamed towards break of day,

The cold blown spray in my nostril.

But she that beside me lay

Had watched in bitterer sleep

The marvelous stag of Arthur,

That lofty white stag, leap

From mountain steep to steep. (CW 1 187)

Issue of cyclical recurrence, whether historical or personal, was one

of Yeats’s major concerns. It is significant to note that Yeats’s

interest on this issue had developed at least in part in the context of

the uncertainties (both domestic and abroad). In Ireland, Irish Free

State had just formed as a result of the Anglo-Irish Treaty; in

Germany and Italy, Nazism and fascism was gaining power. Given

such context, it could be said that Yeats’s interest on cycles is partly

founded on his anxiety over what will happen next. Such concern is

reflected in many of the entries in “Pages from a Diary Written in

1930.” In one of the entries in the diary (which was written —

significantly — at Coole Park), Yeats writes on Jonathan Swift. As he

- 69 -
does so, Yeats presents Swift as a representative of the Protestant

ideal. He writes:

Swift’s . . . [A D iscourse of the Contests and D issensions

between the N obles and the Commons in Athens and Rome ] is

more important to modern thought than Vico and certainly

foreshadowed Flinders Petrie, Frobenius, Henry Adams, Spengler,

and very exactly and closely Gerald Heard. It needs

interpretation, for it had to take the form of a pamphlet

intelligible to the Whig nobility. He saw civilisations ‘exploding’

— to use Heard’s term — just before the final state, and that final

state as a tyranny, and he took from a Latin writer the

conviction that every civilisation carries with it from the first

what shall bring it to an end. Burke borrowed of him or

re-discovered and Coleridge borrowed from Burke all but that

inevitable end. (E x 313-14)

The passage above shows his concern and anxiety over the role of

the Protestant Ireland in the fledgling Irish Free State. The Free

State (feeling insecure of its identity) jealously guarded Gaelicism and

Catholicism, considering them as the sole components of Irish

identity. In this context, Yeats thinks over what the Protestants like

himself could do in the emerging Catholic Ireland, and presents Swift

(and later on, George Berkeley) as the examples of the Protestant

ideal. This concern over the political changes in Ireland also expand

to include the whole Western civilization. For instance, in one of the

entries, Yeats writes about the imminent end of the civilization, to be

- 70 -
replaced by another:

We approach influx. What is its form? A civilisation lasts two

thousand years from nadir to nadir — Christ came at the

Graeco-Roman meridian, physical maturity, spirit in celestial

body, and was the first beginning of the One — all equal in the

eyes of One. Our civilisation which began in A. D. 1000

approaches the meridian and once there must see the

counter-birth. What social form will that birth take? It is

multitudinous, the seat of the congeries of autonomous beings

each seeing all within its own unity. I can only conceive of it

as a society founded upon unequal rights and unequal duties

which if fully achieved would include all nations in the European

stream in one harmony, where each drew its nourishment from

all though drew different nourishment. (E x 311)

Such cycles in history, in turn, is reflected in the individual, as

microcosm reflects the macrocosm like a mirror.15) In an individual,

15) The idea that microcosm is a mirror to the macrocosm is central to the doctrine

of correspondence. Such a notion, as Blake notes in his dissertation, is a

“timeworn concept” which appeared regularly in the works of thinkers ranging

from “Plato, Plotinus, and the authors of the Hermetic tractates to the Florentine

Neoplatonists, Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Boehme.” (“The Supreme Enchanter” 90)

Elsewhere, Franz Hartmann writes on this doctrine in his book, connecting it

specifically to magic as he does so:

But if you mean by “man” that intelligent principle, which is active within

the organism of man, and which constitutes him a human being, and by whose

action he becomes a being very distinct from and above the animals in human

or animal form, then the answer is: Yes! for the divine power which acts

within the organism of animal man is the same and identical power which acts

within the centre of nature. It is an internal power of man, and belongs to

- 71 -
such cycles could take a form of an alternation between two

conceptions of reality. Yeats writes on those two alternating

conceptions of reality under the entry number XXI, namely, “reality

as a congeries of beings” and “reality as a single being” These

opposite conceptions, while it causes conflicts, cannot and must not

be “reconciled,” for, if such reconciliation should ever happen, life will

cease to exist:

I think that two conceptions, that of reality as a congeries of

beings, that of reality as a single being, alternate in our emotion

and in history, and must always remain something that human

reason, because subject always to one or the other, cannot

reconcile. I am always, in all I do, driven to a moment which is

the realisation of myself as unique and free, or to a moment

which is the surrender to God of all that I am. I think that

there are historical cycles wherein one or the other

predominates, and that a cycle approaches where all shall [be]

as particular and concrete as human intensity permits. Again

and again I have tried to sing that approach — The Hosting of

the Sidhe, ‘O sweet everlasting voices’, and those lines about

‘The lonely, majestical multitude’ — and have almost understood

my intention. Again and again with remorse, a sense of defeat, I

have failed when I would write of God, written coldly and

conventionally. Could these two impulses, one as much a part of

man, and if man once knows all the powers which belong to his essential

constitution, and knows how to use them, then he may enter from the passive

into the active state, and employ these powers himself. (M agic 20-21)

- 72 -
 truth as the other, be reconciled, or if one or the other could

prevail, all life would cease. (E x 305)

Or, it might, as Yeats writes in another entry (XXIII), take a form

of a person alternating between “human and divine freedom” (E x

306). In incarnation, a person incarnates and translates God’s idea into

human language and asserts his or her own subjectivity. In death, a

person loses his or her subjectivity and returns to the divine freedom,

waiting for the next incarnation. We could say therefore, that poems

included in this section (“Vacillation,” “The Gyres,” and “Lapis

Lazuli”) deal with the cycles in both personal and impersonal levels

just mentioned.

Of these three, “Vacillation” talks about the cycle in an individual.

This cycle occurs due to individual’s vacillation between life and

death (or between incarnate and discarnate life). It is on such

alternation or vacillation that the poem points to as it starts:

Between extremities

Man runs his course;

A brand, or flaming breath,

Comes to destroy

All those antinomies

Of day and night;

The body calls it death,

The heart remorse.

But if these be right what is joy? (CW 1 254)

- 73 -
 For most of the time, however, people are afraid to wake up and

suffer from pain. They choose to indulge in a dream of success, get

all the money they can earn and rise in fame. They put in all their

efforts to lead successful lives. However, all these efforts is a waste

of breath if these do not prepare one to face the death bravely, the

warning which echoes a following passage P er Amica Silentia Lunae :

We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts

the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the

human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and

therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create,

by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world.

He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has

endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and

foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling

unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. (CW 5 9)

Only rarely are people blessed with a state of extreme happiness,

like the one that a poet feels when he is sitting in a “crowded

London shop” (CW 1 255), with an open book and an empty cup on

top of a marble table. For twenty minutes, he forgets his mundane

surroundings in London and feels as if he were blessed and in turn

bless others.

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

- 74 -
 An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessèd and could bless. (CW 1 255)

More often, however, people feel remorse, which comes from thinking

over one’s past words and deeds, thinking over what has been said

or done or what could have been said or done. This regret is

inevitable one as one grows old and nears one’s death as mistakes in

words and deeds accumulate.

In part VII, the poet puts the antinomies in its simplest form: the

one between Soul and Heart (or primary and antithetical , or Soul and

Self). Soul urges Heart to seek reality. To Heart, however, that

amounts to depriving the poetic theme, for poetry comes as a result

of the poet’s struggle with the Mask. Thus, poets are those whose

inspiration comes from the conflicts between or among the opposites

that come before our eyes. Then Soul alludes to a story of Isaiah’s

coal in the Bible, when angel touches Isaiah’s mouth with live coal to

purge his sins. Heart remains defiant, telling Soul that it is “Struck

dumb in the simplicity of fire!” Soul that becomes silent after

purification could be compared with the poem “A Dialogue of Self

and Soul,” in which Soul loses power of speech after it talks about

the point where human beings lose their subjectivity. Soul tells the

heart to look into salvation that lies within the fire. However, Heart

- 75 -
will rather remain sinful like Homer than seek salvation in the fire

because in such peaceful state, no creative activity can take place.

The Soul. Seek out reality, leave things that seem.

The H eart. What, be a singer born and lack a theme?

The Soul. Isaiah’s coal, what more can man desire?

The H eart. Struck dumb in the simplicity of fire!

The Soul. Look on that fire, salvation walks within.

The H eart. What theme had Homer but original sin? (CW 1

256)

In part VIII, the poet asks whether he should part from von Hügel.

Then he wonders whether the undecayed body of St. Theresa of

Avila was not due to miracle but a good mummifying job, done by

the same hands that mummified Pharaohs:

Must we part, Von Hügel, though much alike, for we

Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?

The body of Saint Theresa lies undecayed in tomb,

Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,

Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance

Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once

Had scooped out Pharaoh’s mummy. (CW 1 256)

With this, the poet parts with von Hügel, for, according to Moore, he

cannot go all the way with a Catholic theologian who did not believe

in “reincarnation or karma or gyres or phaseless sphere” (U nicorn

- 76 -
406). Instead, he chooses as his model Homer and “his unchristened

heart” (CW 1 257), like Self in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” who

tells us that he will relive the life in all its sinfulness.

The next poem, “The Gyres,” titled after “the spinning cones that

govern the pattern of recurrence among the millennia” (P oems 771) is

another poem that deals with the cyclical recurrence of history. In the

poem, the poet laments on “a greater, a more gracious time” that has

gone. This lament, however, is mixed with the acceptance of the

change as the inevitable. This acceptance is best expressed in the

oxymoronic term “tragic joy,” which could be seen variously as an

attitude or feeling. As an attitude, tragic joy refers to the heroic

acceptance of the cycle of history; as a feeling, it refers to a kind of

feeling which mixes terror and joy. As the meeting of two extremes

of feeling, one often feels it at the moment of death, for death is

precisely that moment which provokes such terror and joy. It is also

that moment in which an individual have full exercise of one’s

faculties because it is beyond one’s control.

The poet first laments at the destruction of ancient craftsmanship,

drowned by the “irrational streams of blood,” the same streams of

blood that drowns the civilization in “The Second Coming.” All that

is gracious and ceremonious are gone, swept away and blotted out

from the face of the earth:

The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face look forth;

Things thought too long can be no longer thought

For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth,

And ancient lineaments are blotted out.

- 77 -
 Irrational streams of blood are staining earth;

Empedocles has thrown all things about;

Hector is dead and there’s a light in Troy;

We that look on but laugh in tragic joy. (CW 1 299)

However, the poet comes to accept and obey the command of the

Rocky Face to “Rejoice,” for he knows that what he see around him

is something that is beyond his power to control. We can find the

expression of similar feelings in several later poems. For instance, in

part IV of “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” the speaker throws a

curse on the tower should his children degenerate by having too

much time in their hands or marrying someone below their class:

May this laborious stair and this stark tower

Become a roofless ruin that the owl

May build in the cracked masonry and cry

Her desolation to the desolate sky. (CW 1 207)

Similarly, in part III of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” the poet

evokes an image of a swan on a lake, one of the symbols of a

solitary man. Image of that swan soaring to the sky brings

“wildness” and “rage” (CW 1 212), that threatens “to end all things”

(CW 1 212), even the life’s achievements of the speaker, all the

pages of poetry “half-imagined” and “half-written” (CW 1 212-13):

The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven:

That image can bring wildness, bring a rage

- 78 -
 To end all things, to end

What my laborious life imagined, even

The half-imagined, the half-written page (CW 1 212-13)

Then, the poet tells us defiantly that he will not care whether

everything about him becomes the chaos, that he will put up a bold

face against the “numb nightmare” (CW 1 299). He vows to come to

terms with the inevitable turn of history, and not to look back on “A

greater, a more gracious time” (CW 1 299) that is now thing of the

past. He used to long for the beautiful art that decorated ancient

tombs but he will not do so again. He hears the voice that

commands him to “Rejoice” (CW 1 299), not to be obsessed about

things that are of the past, and accept the situation as it is:

What matter though numb nightmare ride on top

And blood and mire the sensitive body stain?

What matter? Heave no sigh, let no tear drop,

A greater, a more gracious time has gone;

For painted forms or boxes of make-up

In ancient tombs I sighed, but not again;

What matter? Out of Cavern comes a voice

And all it knows is that one word ‘Rejoice.’ (CW 1 299)

“Conduct and work grows coarse” (CW 1 299), as well as the

human soul, but the speaker does not mind that fact. Types of people

whom the Rocky Face loves, people who love “horses and women,”

(CW 1 299, things and people that are emblematical of war and love,

- 79 -
will free up the “workman, noble and saint,” from their sleep in the

marble tombs, and make “all things run / On that unfashionable gyre

again.” (CW 1 299):

Conduct and work grow coarse, and coarse the soul,

What matter! Those that Rocky Face holds dear,

Lovers of horses and of women, shall

From marble of a broken sepulchre

Or dark betwixt the polecat and the owl,

Or any rich, dark nothing disinter

The workman, noble and saint, and all things run

On that unfashionable gyre again. (CW 1 299)

Third poem, “Lapis Lazuli,” inspired by lapis lazuli given to Yeats

as a gift, also shows a society on the verge of violent change:

I have heard that hysterical women say

They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,

Of poets that are always gay,

For everybody know or else should know

That if nothing drastic is done

Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,

Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in

Until the town lie beaten flat. (CW 1 300)

In the prospect of war, ordinary people get caught in the

Shakespearean tragedy. Common passersby become heroes and

- 80 -
heroines of tragedy: Hamlet, Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia, even though

they may or may not be aware. Their similarities with Shakespearean

heroes and heroines lie in the fact of meeting of extreme terror and

joy they feel in the face of destruction, like the characters of

Shakespeare’s tragedy who feel joy at the moments of their deaths:

All perform their tragic play,

There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,

That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;

Yet they, should the last scene be there,

The great stage curtain about to drop,

If worthy their prominent part in the play,

Do not break up their lines to weep.

They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.

All men have aimed at, found and lost;

Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:

Tragedy wrought to its uttermost. (CW 1 300)

The joy these people feel at the moment of death, “Gaiety

transfiguring all that dread” (CW 1 300) brings to mind the passage

in an essay “A General Introduction for My Work” (1937), in which

Yeats writes about the “sudden enlargement of their vision”

experienced by heroes of Shakespeare’s plays (E & I 522):

The heroes of Shakespeare convey to us through their looks, or

through the metaphorical patterns of their speech, the sudden

- 81 -
 enlargement of their vision, their ecstasy at the approach of

death: ‘She should have died hereafter,’ ‘Of many thousand

kisses, the poor last,’ ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile.’ They

have become God or Mother Goddess, the pelican, ‘My baby at

my breast,’ but all must be cold; no actress has ever sobbed

when she played Cleopatra, even the shallow brain of a producer

has never thought of such a thing. (E & I 522-23)

People, when faced with death, are transformed from comic characters

into tragic heroes. This transformation, as Denis Donoghue notes,

Yeats “brought Shakespeare and Nietzsche together,” as if the

Nietzschean will-to-power and tragic hero could only find fulfillment

in Shakespeare’s tragedy (“Yeats’s Shakespeare” 89).

Everywhere, ancient civilizations that had been the source of pride

for the humanity are being destroyed; the people die and the wisdom

die with them. Civilizations that produced marvelous works of art —

symbolized by marble statues and draperies of Callimachus — have all

come to ruin. Houses too, with a long chimney like “the stem / Of a

slender palm,” (CW 1 301), have fallen. These marvels, after having

been destroyed, are built again, and “those that build them again are

gay.” (CW 1 301)

Then, the poem contrasts this hysterical world with the idyllic one

depicted on lapis lazuli. This stone, which Yeats had as a birthday

present from a young poet, Harry Clifton, shows three men ascending

a mountain toward a little temple or house. One of the three is a

Daoist master, another his disciple, with a third man, a servant who

follows them at a respectful distance with a musical instrument:

- 82 -
 Two Chinamen, behind them a third,

Are carved in Lapis Lazuli,

Over them flies a long-legged bird

A symbol of longevity;

The third, doubtless a serving-man,

Carries a musical instrument. (CW 1 301)

After describing what is carved on the stone, the poet imagines the

three men climbing to a little house (probably a gazebo) on the

middle of the mountain to play on the instrument. He sees them

sitting in the house after they had climbed up the mountain. Having

blended themselves into the surroundings, they calmly observe the

hysterical that unfolds in the West from above. Their eyes as they

look at the tragedy “are gay” (CW 1 301), knowing that death or

destruction is but part of new life:

Every discolouration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent

Seems a water-course or an avalanche,

Or lofty slope where it still snows

Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch

Sweetens a little half-way house

Those Chinamen climb towards, and I

Delight to imagine them seated there;

There, on the mountain and the sky,

On all the tragic scene they stare.

- 83 -
 One asks for mournful melodies;

Accomplished fingers begin to play.

Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,

Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay. (CW 1 301)

Poems that I have discussed here represent Yeats’s theory of

spirituality in different yet interconnected ways. Dialogue poems

dramatize the tension between the double by using a form of

dialogue. These took the form of a dialogue between two personalities

between two parts of an individual that represents two cones of the

gyres, and between man and echo. Poems on dreams and visions deal

with the ways in which the self could get an access to the spiritual

other (the mysterious one that I lle is looking for in “Ego Dominus

Tuus”), which are often evoked through the use of traditional and

personal symbols. This double (or the Mask) gets a visual symbol in

the form of gyres. In addition to being a symbol of the double, the

gyres are also used to account for the individuals and history.

- 84 -
V. Dramatic Representations of Spirituality

In this chapter, I will discuss how Yeats’s drama serves as

representations of spirituality. As I do so, I will grouped them up just

like I did in the poems: first group, made up of three plays, At the

H awk’s Well, The Only J ealousy of E mer , and F ighting with the

Waves, are plays on Cuchulain. Yeats had used an Irish hero,

Cuchulain as a theme of several of his plays because he wanted to

use the theme that could bring emotional intensity to the Irish people

and so achieve the unity of culture, which in turn can bring about

the Unity of Being. Second group, which consists of two plays, The

D reaming of the B ones and The Words upon the Window-pane , are

those plays that deal with the supernatural by dramatizing the

encounter between the living and the dead. The first play, The

D reaming of the B ones shows an encounter between Irish rebel who

participated in the Easter Rising and two ghosts, Diarmuid and

Dervorgilla, who are thought to be responsible for starting the 800

years of English rule in Ireland. The play borrows a tradition of the

Japanese Noh to demonstrate the persistence of the past in the

present. In the second play, The Words upon the Window-pane ,

ghosts of Jonathan Swift and his two women appear, who express

themselves through the mouth of Mrs. Henderson, a medium. The

play contrasts Swift’s selfless concern for human liberty with the

selfish concerns of the living, which are represented by the

participants in the seance. The final group, consisting of three plays,

are the plays that deal with religion. Of these plays, Calvary and The

- 85 -
R esurrection deal with the biblical events of Christ’s Crucifixion and

resurrection, respectively. The Cat and the M oon does not deal with

Christianity but touches on the issue of salvation through the cases

of the Lame Beggar and the Blind Beggar.

However, before moving on to the discussions of plays themselves,

it is important to give some background on Yeats’s theatre. The kind

of theatre that Yeats wanted to achieve through his plays was a

small, exclusive one, as opposed to the big, commercial one. Yeats’s

desire to reform the theatre is demonstrated in many of his essays.

For instance, in his essay entitled “The Theatre” (1899), Yeats

expresses his thoughts on how the theatre should be. He writes how

modern theatre, because it takes place in the big cities, where people,

who became tired by the demands of their busy lives, are becoming

increasingly unwilling to see the plays which require them to think.

Theatre managers, in keeping with that trend, learned to stage the

drama with elaborate paintings of landscapes, and deck the actors and

actresses with costumes made of exquisite velvet. Unlike in the past

when the audience had to listen to the description of the scene by

actors, and use the power of imagination to see that image unfold

before their eyes, they can now see what is going on even with the

most hurried glance. Thus, that element which had been the least

important in the theatre of the ancient Greece became the most

important one. The audience now admires at the beautiful scenery

painted by someone who knows how to produce a painting that suits

the taste of the audience and theatre managers. Against this

backdrop, actors and actresses, transformed into the immortals with

the help of costumes, enable the audience to indulge their senses with

- 86 -
exquisiteness of the velvet and beauty of the body.

Thus, as a turn away from the commercial theatre, which requires

dramatists to stage their plays before the crowd and the press that

do not understand them, Yeats proposes to return the theatre to its

origin as a ritual. Yeats, therefore, calls for the small, exclusive

theatre made up of the like-minded people, with no exquisite scenery

and dress and props. Yeats found a possibility for developing that

kind of small, exclusive theatre during his stay at the Stone Cottage

with Pound in the winters of 1913-14, in the form of Japanese Noh

drama, which Pound had been translating. Longenbach points out how

this Japanese art form presented a possibility for Irish drama in his

book. Longenbach notes that the word “Noh” itself could be

translated as “accomplishment,” kind of accomplishment (like Swift’s

notion of liberty) that was reserved only to the aristocracy who could

understand the literary and mythological allusions, as well as “ancient

lyrics quoted in speech or chorus” (Stone Cottage 45). It was part of

their discipline and part of their breeding to study them

“assiduously,” and be always ready to organize the performance or to

take part in the play (Stone Cottage 46). Only rarely could common

folks watch the play (when the Noh play was staged for purpose of

charity) and even then only for the select audience. The Japanese

nobles thus formed an exclusive community, not unlike the members

of the secret societies that Yeats joined. They are joined not because

of their social class or material wealth but their ability to appreciate

the beauty of poetry, ability that is hard to get without leisure and

contemplation.

Yeats’s effort to blend an Irish theme with the Japanese form

- 87 -
resulted in the play, At the H awk’s Well, which was first performed

on April 1 and 4, 1916. The play, as Richard Allen Cave notes, was

“a style of dance-drama that was wholly innovatory in its use of

dance, song, masks, ritual and an austere stylization in terms of

design and staging” (Selected P lays 313). Among these, masks play

a central role in creating dramatic space and character. This role is

clearly stated in a long, detailed stage direction that precedes the

play, in which Yeats calls for the stage with no elaborate scenery

but just “a patterned screen” (CW 2 297) that stands against a wall.

Yeats writes on the notes to the play on the advantage in getting rid

of the painted landscape as follows:

I do not think of my discovery as mere economy, for it has

been a great gain to get rid of scenery, to substitute for a crude

landscape painted upon canvas three performers who, sitting

before the wall or a patterned screen, describe landscape or

event, and accompany movement with drum and gong, or deepen

the emotion of the words with zither and flute. Painted scenery

after all is unnecessary to my friends and to myself, for our

imagination kept living by the arts can imagine a mountain

covered with thorn-trees in a drawing-room without any great

trouble, and we have many quarrels with even good

scene-painting. (CW 2 690-91)

Getting rid of the elaborate paintings and replacing them with the

songs of three musicians who describe the scene in verse not only

heightens emotion of the audience but also enables them to engage

- 88 -
imaginatively with the scene that is unfolding before them. The stage

direction also calls for ordinary lighting instead of using any special

kinds of stage lighting, in order to heighten the effect of the masks.

When the play starts, Musicians describe a stark, barren landscape in

a song:

I call to the eye of the mind

A well long choked up and dry

And boughs long stripped by the wind,

And I call to the mind’s eye

Pallor of an ivory face,

Its lofty dissolute air,

A man climbing up to a place

The salt sea wind has swept bare. (CW 2 297-98)

After the Guardian of the Well has entered and musicians have

taken their places next to their instruments, Old Man enters with a

mask on his face. He stands motionless for a moment until he lifts

his head at the sound of drum, moving to a front, crouching and

moving his hands, heaping up leaves to make fire. Then he addresses

the Guardian of the Well who crouches and remains silent and

motionless. As he voices impatience at the guardian who does not

respond to anything he says, Young Man speaks. This young man,

has sailed from far away in search of a well, whose water gives

whoever drinks it an everlasting life. Despite the repeated warnings

of Old Man, Young Man remains undaunted. He suspects that Old

Man’s warnings are but deliberate attempt to threaten and scare

- 89 -
people off from drinking from the well:

YOUNG MAN. Have you been set down there

To threaten all who come, and scare them off?

You seem as dried up as the leaves and sticks,

As though you had no part in life. (CW 2 303)

As the two men talk, Guardian of the Well, who has remained

motionless, raises her body. As she does so, the cloak falls off and

reveals a dress that suggests a hawk. What is notable here is the

effect of the mask in showing the Guardian’s altered state of being.

After the dance, Old Man falls asleep. Young Man’s face grows pale

as the guardian — as a hawk — fixes her eyes upon him. Then the

water plashes. The young man hears the sound but drops his spear

as if he were in a dream and follows the Guardian of the Well as

she leaves the stage. Old Man, who wakes up only to find the stones

were wet, is in rage; he has waited in vain for more than fifty years

at the well and now he is fooled again:

OLD MAN. The accursed shadows have deluded me,

The stones are dark and yet the well is empty.

You have deluded me my whole life through,

Accursed dancers, you have stolen my life.

That there should be such evil in a shadow! (CW 2 305)

Young Man — Cuchulain — too, is cursed, for he dared to look into the

dry, unfaltering eyes of the guardian. Instead of leading a peaceful

- 90 -
life as others do, he will never be at peace until the moment of his

death. The play ends with a song as musicians unfold and fold the

cloth, with an image of comfortable life that will be denied to the

young man, image of a man who calls milk cows to return to the

cozy house, happily married, and stays by a warm hearth surrounded

by dogs and children:

‘The man that I praise’,

Cries out the empty well,

‘Lives all his days

Where a hand on the bell

Can call the milch cows

To the comfortable door of his house.

Who but an idiot would praise

Dry stones in a well?’

‘The man that I praise’,

Cries out the leafless tree,

‘Has married and stays

By an old hearth, and he

On naught has set store

But children and dogs on the floor.

Who but an idiot would praise

A withered tree?’ (CW 2 306)

The Only J ealousy of E mer is another of Yeats’s plays that use

the tale of Cuchulain as its source material. Yeats planned to write

- 91 -
the play soon after the performance of At the H awk’s Well. Writing

of the play had been interrupted by the Easter Rising and

composition of The D reaming of the B ones. More specifically, The

Only J ealousy of E mer is Yeats’s adaptation of the story included in

Lady Gregory’s book, Cuchulain of M uirhemne. Summary of Lady

Gregory’s version of the story with that of Yeats might be helpful in

understanding how Yeats had changed the original tale of Cuchulain.

Her version of the story talks about how Cuchulain is “put into a

mysterious sleep” after he tries to catch “two magic birds” (Selected

P lays 332). As the tale unfolds, it becomes clear that Cuchulain is

put to sleep because Fand, the woman of the Sidhe, is in love with

Cuchulain and wants to have him at her side. Cuchulain spends about

a month with Fand and the two promise to meet again. However,

when Emer hears this, she becomes angry and goes to the place

with the knife to kill the fairy woman. Emer is jealous over Fand

because Fand’s beauty and loveliness will make human beauty seem

poor in comparison. Fand, realizing that Cuchulain does not love her

as she does, gives him up and promises that she will never set foot

on the human world again. Cuchulain is angry when he sees Fand

goes back to her country and goes after her. However, Emer goes to

the king Conchubar to inform him about how Cuchulain was. Druids

give the drink of forgetfulness to Cuchulain and Emer so that the

two can be happily restored.

As I have shown in the summary that I have given above, the

story is rather complex and long-winded, and does not seem to be

promising as a dramatic material. Yeats, however, transforms this

unpromising material into a highly dramatic play by deciding to focus

- 92 -
on Emer’s feelings. Cave rightly observes that Yeats’s play is “a

miracle of compression and theatrical flair” in comparison to the

original (Selected P lays 332). These changes, however, meant that

Yeats had to depart considerably from the source material. First,

Yeats makes The Only J ealousy of E mer to tell a story about what

happened after Cuchulain fights the waves (after he fights and kills

his only son) in On B aile’s Strand . In the original tale, there is no

mention at all about Cuchulain fighting the waves, let alone that he

fights and kills his own son. He then invents the character, Bricriu of

the Sidhe, in order to heighten the conflict between the human and

supernatural lover over who will have Cuchulain. Next, he gives more

role to Eithne Inguba (who does not play any role in the original

story), possibly to better contrast the attitudes of two women

towards Cuchulain.

The play starts after a song and speech of the First Musician, who

first sings about the blood that had been shed over woman’s beauty,

which is frail and useless like a “white sea-bird” (CW 2 317) or like

a “fragile, exquisite, pale shell” (CW 2 318), and then describes a

scene that is taking place before the audience:

FIRST MUSICIAN [speaking ]. I call before the eyes a roof

With cross-beams darkened by smoke;

A fisher’s net hangs from a beam,

A long oar lies against the wall.

I call up a poor fisher’s house;

A man lies dead or swooning,

That amorous man,

- 93 -
 That amorous, violent man, renowned Cuchulain,

Queen Emer at his side.

At her own bidding all the rest have gone;

But now one comes on hesitating feet,

Young Eithne Inguba, Cuchulain’s mistress.

She stands for a moment in the open door.

Beyond the open door the bitter sea,

The shining, bitter sea, is crying out (CW 2 318)

After the song of the musicians, we see Cuchulain lying

unconscious after he had fought the waves. His wife, Emer, watches

over him in the hope that he might wake up, while all the rest have

left. Only Eiithne Inguba, Cuchulain’s mistress, is allowed to come by

his side. Eithne Inguba, fearing that Emer would be jealous of her, is

reluctant to sit next to Cuchulain. However, Emer shows no jealousy

that we normally expect from a wife whose husband deserted her for

another woman when she tells Inguba to stay, that she (Eithne

Inguba) was a person who had loved Cuchulain equally well. Then,

Emer asks Eithne Inguba to speak to him and kiss him so that he

might regain consciousness. As she kisses Cuchulain’s mouth,

however, Eithne Inguba feels that something is lurking behind a

figure of Cuchulain. That something turns out to be Bricriu of the

Sidhe, who brings discords among gods and people. When Emer does

not run away when she meets him, Bricriu sees that she is not

loved. The god has come to restore Cuchulain to his life, but with

one condition. Emer could get her husband back on the condition that

she renounces the hope of ever winning back his love for her, which

- 94 -
is the only remaining hope after she has seen her husband falling in

love with other women. Emer, who had shown no jealousy towards

numerous women whom her husband had taken as mistresses,

becomes jealous toward god who tries to do a bargain with her:

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You are not loved.

EMER. And therefore have no dread to meet your eyes

And to demand him of you.

FUGURE OF CUCHULAIN. For that I have come.

You have but to pay the price and he is free.

EMER. Do the Sidhe bargain?

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. When they would free a captive

They take in ransom a less valued thing.

The fisher, when some knowledgeable man

Restores him to his wife, or son, or daughter,

Knows he must lose a boat or net, or it may be

The cow that gives his children milk; and some

Have offered their own lives. I do not ask

Your life, or any valuable thing;

You spoke but now or the mere chance that some day

You’d be the apple of his eye again

When old and ailing, but renounce that chance

And he shall live again.

- 95 -
 EMER. I do not question

But you have brought ill-luck on all he loves;

And now, because I am thrown beyond your power

Unless your words are lies, you come to bargain.

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You loved your mastery, when but

newly married,

And I love mine for all my withered arm;

You have but to put yourself into that power

And he shall live again.

EMER. No, never, never. (CW 2 322-23)

When he sees Emer refuses to give up on the hope, Bricriu

touches Emer’s eyes and gives her a sight of Cuchulain meeting the

Woman of the Sidhe, Fand. Then, Bricriu of the Sidhe tells Emer

that those who love the Sidhe will never tire.16) Thus Bricriu takes

Emer’s only hope. There would be no way of winning him back

because love of the fairies, unlike that of the human beings, is

unmixed with hatred. In a vision that Emer sees before her, the

Ghost of Cuchulain meets Fand, the Woman of the Sidhe, whose hair,

—
16) In one of the stories in The Celtic Twilight entitled “Untiring Ones,” Yeats

writes about how people who love the fairies will never be tired because their

fairies’-emotions are pure:

If we could love and hate with as good heart as the Sidhe do, we might grow

to be long-lived like them. But until that day their untiring joys and sorrows

must ever be one-half of their fascination. Love with them never grows

weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet. (M yth 77)

- 96 -
mask and dress suggest metal — bronze or gold or brass silver. These

metallic hair, mask and dress in turn heightens the unearthly quality

of Fand as a Sidhe woman, as well as her cruelty and selfishness.

Ghost of Cuchulain is dazzled by the light that emanates from her.

To him, the woman is like the moon at its fifteenth phase, the moon

which has reached its height after having become gradually brighter

in the previous phases. Then he remembers her as the woman whom

he had met long time ago at the well, who was then half-woman,

and half-hawk. When she sees that Cuchulain is still weighed down

by the old memories, the Woman of the Sidhe tells him that if he

can just kiss her mouth, all those painful memories will vanish.

However, just as Cuchulain is about to kiss her, old memories come

back to him:

WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. Time shall seem to stay his course;

When your mouth and my mouth meet

All my round shall be complete

Imagining all its circles run;

And there shall be oblivion

Even to quench Cuchulain’s droughth,

Even to still that heart.

GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. Your mouth!

[They are about to kiss, he turns away.

O Emer, Emer!

WOMAN OF THE SIDHE. So then it is she

- 97 -
 Made you impure with memory.

GHOST OF CUCHULAIN. O Emer, Emer, there we stand;

Side by side and hand in hand

Tread the threshold of the house

As when our parents married us. (CW 2 326)

The Woman of the Sidhe, when she sees that it is memories of his

wife that pains Cuchulain, continues to lure him so that she can take

him by her side. God Bricriu tells Emer to renounce her hope of

winning back Cuchulain’s love as Cuchulain is about to board the

chariot of Fand, the Woman of the Sidhe. Emer refuses at first,

unwilling to give up that last hope, but obeys Bricriu when he tells

her that that is the only way in which to get Cuchulain back.

Cuchulain is restored to life after Emer gives up her hope, calling on

Eithne Inguba.

The play F ighting the Waves, premiered at the Abbey Theatre on

13 August 1929, is a ballet version of the play discussed earlier. This

version has many similarities with The Only J ealousy of E mer but

as many differences,17) which makes it an interesting comparison to

17)These differences and similarities may in part caused by the fact that Fighting

the Waves is designed for a public stage; as a ballet piece for the public stage

(as opposed to a play written for a select audience in a private room), Yeats had

to keep his language as simple as possible, and free it from abstractions. Yeats

writes in his introduction to F ighting the Waves on how he came to rewrite The

O nly J ealousy of E mer as a ballet:

I wrote The O nly J ealousy of E mer for performance in a a private house

or studio, considering it, for reasons which I have explained, unsuited to a

public stage. Then somebody put it on a public stage in Holland and Hildo

van Krop made his powerful masks. [. . .] I have retold the story in prose

- 98 -
its earlier counterpart.

First difference that one notices is a stage direction. Unlike in The

Only J ealousy of E mer , there is no instruction on the folding and

unfolding of the cloth. Instead of folding and unfolding of the cloth

by musicians along with the music, there is a wave scene which

presents Cuchulain fighting the waves. Cuchulain, thinking that the

waves — which may be played by the dancers — are his enemies, fight

them in a fit of madness. He wades deeper into the sea until he is

finally overcome:

M usicians and speaker off stage. There is a curtain with a wave

pattern. A man wearing the Cuchulain mask enters from one

side with sword and shield. H e dances a dance which represents

a man fighting the waves. The waves may be represented by

other dancers: in his frenz y he supposes the waves to be his

enemies: gradually he sinks down as if overcome, then fixes his

eyes with a cataleptic stare upon some imaginary distant object.

The stage becomes dark, and when the light returns it is

empty. The M usicians enter. Two stand one on either side of

the curtain, singing. (CW 2 455)

The play also gives more clear explanation on why Cuchulain acted

that way. Emer’s tone, too, as she gives the account, sounds like a

first-hand account, whereas its equivalent in The Only J ealousy of

E mer gives an impression that she is reporting what she has heard

which I have tried to make very simple, and left imaginative suggestion to

dancers, singers, musicians. . . . (E x 370)

- 99 -
from others:

EMER. I think he loved her as no man ever loved, for when he

heard the name of the man he had killed, and the name of that

man’s mother, he went out of his senses utterly. He ran into the

sea, and with shield before him and sword in hand he fought

the deathless sea. Of all the many men who had stood there to

look at the fight not one dared stop him or even call his name;

they stood in a kind of stupor, collected together in a bunch like

cattle in a storm, until, fixing his eyes as it seemed upon some

new enemy, he waded out further still and the waves swept

over him. (CW 2 457-58)

However, the most significant difference could be seen in a scene

where Emer — with the help of god Bricriu — sees a vision of

Cuchulain as a ghost. As in The Only J ealousy of E mer , Emer is

able to see Cuchulain, but not the other way around. The difference

between the two plays is that whereas the 1919 play, audience is not

given any explanation on who has come on the stage and what is

happening when Fand — the Woman of the Sidhe — appears on the

stage, the 1930 one, the audience knows that a figure on the stage is

Fand, daughter of Manannan.

Bricriu tells Emer that Fand has come with her chariot so that she

could seduce Cuchulain and take him away. The only way to get him

back is by agreeing to renounce her hope of ever having Cuchulain’s

love back. Emer is prepared to do anything to have him restored to

life, but she cannot renounce the hope of getting her husband’s love

- 100 -
back because that is the sole hope that she has as she saw

Cuchulain leaving her for some other woman:

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. Be silent, woman! He can neither

see nor hear. But I can give him to you at a price. [Clashing of

cymbals, etc.] Listen to that. Listen to the horses of the sea

trampling! Fand, daughter of Manannan, has come. She is

reining in her chariot, that is why the horses trample so. She is

come to take Cuchulain from you, to take him away for ever,

but I am her enemy, and I can show you how to thwart her.

EMER. Fand, daughter of Manannan!

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. While he is still here you can keep

him if you pay the price. Once back in Manannan’s house he is

lost to you for ever. Those who love the daughters of the sea

do not grow weary, nor do the daughters of the sea release

their lovers.

EMER. There is no price I will not pay.

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. You spoke but now of a hope that

some day his love may return to you, that some day you may

sit by the fire as when first married.

EMER. That is the one hope I have, the one thing that keeps

me alive.

- 101 -
 FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. Renounce it, and he shall live again.

EMER. Never, never!

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. What else have you to offer?

EMER. Why should the gods demand such a sacrifice?

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. The gods must serve those who

living become like the dead.

EMER. I will get him in despite of all the gods, but I will not

renounce his love. (CW 2 460)

When Emer sees Fand with Cuchulain, she tries to stab Fand with

her dagger, but Bricriu stops her by saying that dagger is of no use

for Fand, who has an airy body that makes her invulnerable. The

dialogue which follows her appearance in The Only J ealousy of

E mer , however, is absent in this play. In the 1919 play, the dialogue

between Cuchulain and Fand reveals that Cuchulain feels remorseful

at having left his wife, Emer, and turns away as he is about to kiss

Fand.

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN [laughing ]. You think to wound her

with a knife! She has an airy body, an invulnerable body.

Remember that though your lamentations have dragged him

- 102 -
 hither, once he has left this shore, once he has passed the bitter

sea, once he lands in Manannan’s house, he will be as the gods

who remember nothing.

[The Woman of the Sidhe, F and, moves round the crouching

Ghost of Cuchulain at front of stage in a dance that grows

gradually quicker as he awakes. At moments she may drop her

hair upon his head, but she does not kiss him. She is

accompanied by string and flute and drum. H er mask and

clothes must suggest gold or bronz e or brass and silver, so

that she seems more an idol than a human being. This

suggestion may be repeated in her movements. H er hair, too,

must keep the metallic suggestion. The object of the dance is

that having awakened Cuchulain he will follow F and out;

probably he will seek a kiss and the kiss will be withheld. (CW

2 461)

Emer refuses to give up her love for Cuchulain almost to the end,

but finally gives in when Bricriu tells her that that is the only way

in which she could have him back. She cries that she will renounce

her hope that her husband will ever love her again:

FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. Cry out that you renounce his love,

cry that you renounce his love for ever.

[F and and Cuchulain go out.

EMER. No, no, never will I give that cry.

- 103 -
 FIGURE OF CUCHULAIN. Fool, fool! I am Fand’s enemy. I

come how to thwart her and you do nothing. There is yet time.

Listen to the horses of the chariot, they are trampling the shore.

They are wild and trampling. She has mounted into her chariot.

Cuchulain is not yet beside her. Will you leave him to such as

she? Renounce his love, and all her power over him comes to

an end.

EMER. I renounce Cuchulain’s love. I renounce it for ever. (CW

2 461-62)

In the Epilogue which has been added, the play ends with the dance

of Fand who expresses her despair at having lost Cuchulain. The

curtain falls as Fand takes “her final pose of despair.” (CW 2 463)

The D reaming of the B ones is one of the plays to stage the

encounter between the living and the dead in order to deal with the

question of Irish history. He does so to show how the past continues

to live and influence the present. This play was written in the

aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916 which occurred just three

weeks after the premiere of At the H awk’s Well , on 24 April. In the

rising, a small group of Irish nationalists had set up their

headquarters at the General Post Office and proclaimed an Irish

Republic. The rebellion was quickly quenched and the sixteen leaders

(including Sir Roger Casement who secretly planned to bring arms to

Ireland with German help) had been executed by the English. This

event dominated Yeats’s imagination for many years, and inspired

him to write poems such as “Easter, 1916” and “The Rose Tree.”

- 104 -
The rising had shown that an event which seems to be in the

remote past can have continued relevance in his own time. The rising

thus opened up the possibilities to combine his interest in the Noh

drama in ways he had not thought of: combine it with the event in

Irish history.

Use of the Noh convention (in which the ghosts who are caught

up in passions caused by memories of past sins seek release from it

through the compassion of the Buddha) enabled Yeats to bring

Diarmuid and Dervorgilla face to face with the anger of the Irish

people accumulated for seven centuries (embodied in the figure of the

Young Man who had fought in the Rising). Yet, this play is also

different from the traditional Noh in several important ways, one of

which is Young Man’s unwillingness to forgive the ghosts. As

Masaru Sekine notes in his essay, “Noh and Yeats: A Theoretical

Analysis,” Yeats ignores the “essential religious elements in Noh

plays” (143). Religious (Buddhist quality) of the Noh could be clearly

seen in the play, N ishikigi , in which we see a wandering priest

meets two ghosts. The priest in the Japanese play (unlike the young

rebel in Yeats’s play) takes pity on the plight of ghosts and says a

prayer so that the two could be united. Through the virtue of

Buddhist mercy, the lovers are united at last.

The play begins with a song of the First Musician. Even though

the musician uses the first person address, what the musician

expresses reflects the feeling of the Young Man rather than that of

the musician’s own:

FIRST MUSICIAN [or all three M usicians, singing ].

- 105 -
 Why does my heart beat so?

Did not a shadow pass?

It passed but a moment ago.

Who can have trod in the grass?

What rogue is night-wandering?

Have not old writers said

That dizzy dreams can spring

From the dry bones of the dead?

And many a night it seems

That all the valley fills

With those fantastic dreams.

They overflow the hills,

So passionate is a shade,

Like wine that fills to the top

A grey-green cup of jade,

Or maybe an agate cup. (CW 2 307-8)

The meeting takes place when the Young Man, who have taken part

in the Easter Rising, running away from the police in the guise of an

Aran fisherman, meets the Stranger and the Young Girl. The Young

Man is to wait until break of day until he is transported to Aran

Islands by a boat, and is looking for a shelter where he can spend

the night. The play starts in the liminal time between the night and

the dawn, the time traditionally associated with the meeting between

the human and the supernatural. Surrounded by darkness, the Young

Man can no longer distinguish between the human and the

supernatural. There is suspense, therefore, as the man gets alarmed

- 106 -
at the approach of the Stranger (who turns out to be a ghost of

Diarmuid) and ask the Stranger to identify himself. Of all the persons

in the play, Young Man is the only unmasked figure in the play, as

he is an equivalent of the Waki (supporting actor in the Japanese

Noh) who connects the world of the play with that of the audience.

Not noticing the strangeness of the Stranger’s dress, Young Man

follows the Stranger to find a hiding place. After they have almost

reached the summit from which they could see the Abbey of

Corcomroe, Young Man asks Stranger whether those souls that do

their penance come from the Abbey graveyard. He is answered by

Young Girl (ghost of Dervorgilla) who tells him that it is not so.

Then, she tells the story about the souls of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla

who had taken their own lives 700 years ago, are still doing the

penance by reliving the passionate and tragic moments of their lives.

As she relates the tale, it becomes clear that she is telling her own

tale, and that she is no other than Dervorgilla. She and her lover,

Diarmuid, are still doing penance because their wrong had affected so

many people over so many centuries. When their penance reaches its

climax, they (two lovers) exchange glances, but just as their lips are

about to meet, the memory of their past wrong comes in between

them and the two are driven apart. The penance could only end

when one of their countryman forgives them. Young Man wonders

what crime would separate the lovers for so many centuries, for he

does not know the identities of the ghosts. Then, he realizes that the

story that he has been listening to was about Diarmuid and

Dervorgilla, two people who have brought the English to Ireland and

thus started more than seven hundred years of the English colonial

- 107 -
rule:

YOUNG MAN You speak of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla

Who brought the Norman in?

YOUNG GIRL Yes, yes, I spoke

Of that most miserable, most accursed pair

Who sold their country into slavery; and yet

They were not wholly miserable and accursed

If somebody of their race at last would say,

‘I have forgiven them.’

YOUNG MAN O, never, never

Shall Diarmuid and Dervorgilla be forgiven.

YOUNG GIRL If some one of their race forgave at last

Lip would be pressed on lip.

YOUNG MAN O, never, never

Shall Diarmuid and Dervorgilla be forgiven.

You have told your story well, so well indeed

I could not help but fall into the mood

And for a while believe that it was true,

Or half believe; but better push on now.

The horizon to the east is growing bright.

[They go round stage once. The M usicians play. (CW 2 314)

- 108 -
 After he learns this, Young Man refuses to forgive the ghosts of

Diarmuid and Dervorgilla. For him, to forgive them is to forgive the

traitors who are responsible for more than 700 years of the English

rule. As a consequence of this refusal, Diarmuid and Dervorgilla are

condemned to continue their penance. The man pushes on until he

reaches the top of the hill, and talks to his companions about how

Ireland might have been had Diarmuid and Dervorgilla not brought

the Normans into the country. Then, as he sees the two dance,

Young Man gets alarmed:

Why do you dance?

Why do you gaze, and with so passionate eyes,

One on the other; and then turn away,

Covering your eyes, and weave it in a dance?

Who are you? what are you? you are not natural. (CW 2

314-15)

Diarmuid and Dervorgilla, deprived of the chance of forgiveness by

an Irishman, and condemned to continue their penance, performs a

dance of their agony. Young Man — who is to the end ignorant of the

identity of the ghosts — leave the place. By refusing to forgive the

ghosts, Young Man remains faithful to the smooth narrative of

Ireland’s struggle for independence. However, his decision comes at

the price of much bitterness and violence, which was to continue in

the years ahead, as the Anglo Irish War and then the Irish Civil War

ravaged Ireland. Ghosts will disappear as the dawn breaks, but will

- 109 -
come back again at the nightfall to tell their tale of sin to other

travelers. It is thus fitting that the song sung by the Three

Musicians to end the song is troubling:

THREE MUSICIANS [singing ].

At the grey round of the hill

Music of a lost kingdom

Runs, runs and is suddenly still.

The winds out of Clare-Galway

Carry it: suddenly it is still.

I have heard in the night air

A wandering airy music;

And moidered in that snare

A man is lost of a sudden,

In that sweet wandering snare.

What finger first began

Music of a lost kingdom?

They dream that laughed in the sun.

Dry bones that dream are bitter,

They dream and darken our sun.

Those crazy fingers play

A wandering airy music;

Our luck is withered away,

- 110 -
 And wheat in the wheat-ear withered,

And the wind blows it away. (CW 2 315-16)

Like The D reaming of the B ones, The Words upon the

Window-pane stages the supernatural, even though it does not use

the Noh form. The play is apparently realistic. Instead of taking place

in vague mythical time, the play takes place in the 1930s Dublin, at a

house frequented by Jonathan Swift in the early part of the

eighteenth century. Handful of people, almost all of whom are

members of the small spiritual society, have gathered there for a

seance. By situating the play in the context of the seance, Yeats

shows his knowledge and belief in the spirits in a form that people

could accept.

However, the play is more than just a realistic play for, by

making Swift’s ghost to return to the 1930s Dublin, Yeats also

criticized the Irish middle-class during that period. The middle class

Yeats wanted to criticize was not really a specific social class but

rather a narrow-mindedness, that same quality that he had criticized

earlier in poems such as “September 1913” and “Paudeen.” Yeats

contrasts this with the nobleness of Swift’s passion, who tried to

restore the high ideals of Brutus and Cato in Ireland. It was this

noble passion that had made Swift so captivating for Yeats, as

Donald Torchiana observes in the following passage:

The grip of Swift’s intensity never left Yeats. Later, merely

reading Swift could excite him enough to disturb his blood

pressure and leave him sleepless. In 1930, he wrote Wyndham

- 111 -
 Lewis of Swift: “. . . passion ennoble by intensity, by endurance,

by wisdom. We had it in one man once. He lies in St. Patrick’s

now under the greatest epitaph in history.” Swift’s intensity was

also tragic, for his wisdom was prophetic, his hurt human.’ (W.

B . Yeats and Georgian I reland 124-25)

Having said about the importance of Swift’s ghost, we must look into

each character in the play as we discuss the play.

As the play starts, we see Dr. Trench, president of the small and

struggling spiritualist society, welcome the visitors to a seance that

is about to take place. We realize as the story unfolds that Dr.

Trench is a person who is knowledgeable about the spiritual

phenomena. He devoted his lifetime to the study of spiritualism when

his father claimed that he saw a ghost of David Home. Then, Miss

Mackenna, secretary of the society, introduces a new visitor, John

Corbet. Miss Mackenna tells Dr. Trench that this visitor is currently

a doctoral student at Cambridge. Topic of his research is on Swift

and Stella. He is skeptical about spiritualism, and remains

unconvinced even after reading a book about it. Nevertheless, he

comes to the seance because of his intellectual curiosity.

The past two seances that had taken place at the same place had

been failure because one of the ghosts had dominated over all the

other spirits, denying opportunities for the spirits to have their say.

However, Mrs. Henderson, a medium who is going to preside over

the seance, insists on having a rest. Then Dr. Trench tells Corbet

that where people are about to take part in the seance once belonged

to famous people, most notably — in the early part of the eighteenth

- 112 -
century — to friends of Jonathan Swift, or rather, to Stella, one of the

women whom the author has befriended. Dr. Trench also talks about

the lines from poem attributed to Stella that had been pasted onto

the window pane. Corbet goes to examine the words.

Corbet then returns and tells Dr. Trench what they are about. We

learn from Corbet that the words are from the poem that Stella

th
wrote for Swift’s 54 birthday. When Dr. Trench characterizes

Swift’s life as being tragic one, in which he lost all the great

politicians who had been his friends, Corbet replies that Swift’s

tragedy went deeper than that. Swift’s tragedy, Corbet tells Dr.

Trench, had been founded in his admiration for the Roman Senate,

and for Roman politicians such as Brutus and Cato: “I do not think

you can explain him in that way — his tragedy had deeper foundations.

His ideal order was the Roman Senate, his ideal men Brutus and

Cato.” (CW 2 468) Swift had once thought that it was possible to

revive that ideal order, but realized that the chance for its revival

had passed, and “foresaw the ruin to come” in the wake of

democracy, thoughts of Rousseau, and the French Revolution (CW 2

468).

Corbet thus characterizes Swift as a person whose life had been

tragic because the values that he admired (stoicism of Brutus and

Cato), was at odds with those of the society he lived in. That is

why, Corbet says, Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, why he wore his

brain out, and why he felt “saeva indignatio ,” the words which are

engraved on his epitaph in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. Yeats’s

translation of the epitaph is given in a poem, “Swift’s Epitaph”:

- 113 -
 Swift has sailed to his rest;

Savage indignation there

Cannot lacerate his breast.

Imitate him if you dare,

World-besotted traveller; he

Served human liberty. (CW 1 250)

This epitaph, as Torchiana points out, is the writing by Swift that

moved Yeats most, particularly Swift’s ‘“passion” for undefined

liberty,18) something higher than him that Swift served (W. B. Yeats

and Georgian I reland 140). It is that same unselfish passion that

Yeats admires in a poem, “September 1913,” in which Yeats laments

the death of Romantic Ireland as follows:

What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

18) Torchiana writes about the distinctly aristocratic nature of that concept of

liberty, and democratic and Catholic turn that Irish society took around the time

Yeats was writing his play:

—
Such a concept of liberty is barely recognizable to us. The drift is toward

the few, toward imperious intellect, authority, mystical nationalism some have

even said toward fascism. Yet it cannot be repeated too often that the Ireland

of Yeats’s old age and the England of Swift’s pamphlet had just survived

revolution and civil war, acute religious contention, assassinations, and threats

—
of foreign invasion, not to mention the spread of new leveling and democratic

forces sectaries and republicans before the reign of Queen Anne, a left-wing

IRA and a militant Christian Front before the end of the thirties in Ireland.

Moreover, the Ireland that finally rid herself of British despotism possessed a

peasantry, as Swift had predicted, ready to inflict the even more despotic rule

of a zealously Gaelic and Catholic majority. (W. B . Yeats and Georgian I reland

142)

- 114 -
 And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone

For men were born to save;

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave. (CW 1 107)

Like O’Leary, Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

Swift was selfless in his devotion to the ideal, kind of devotion

which is incomprehensible to the vast majority of people who “add

the halfpence to the pence / And prayer to shivering prayer.” This

selfish concern might be best seen in Mrs. Mallet, who came to the

seance to ask her dead husband about where to open a teashop. Her

visit to the medium, therefore, is motivated by the concern about how

she could make money. She cannot comprehend the anguish of

Swift’s ghost, who keeps returning to Stella’s house because of his

guilt for two women.

Then, Mrs. Henderson comes down to the room where guests have

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gathered. Seance starts after all present have sung a hymn. Lulu,

Mrs. Henderson’s control, greets the guests. She is terrified, however,

when the male ghost that has spoiled past two seances appear again,

driving away all other ghosts. Mrs. Henderson becomes the other as

powerful and passionate ghost takes complete possession of her:

MRS. HENDERSON [upright and rigid, only her lips moving,

and still in a man’s voice ]. You sit crouching there. Did you

not hear what I said? How dared you question her? I found you

an ignorant little girl without intellect, without moral ambition.

How many times did I not stay away from great men’s houses,

how many times forsake the Lord Treasurer, how many times

neglect the business of the State that we might read Plutarch

together! (CW 2 473)

...............................................................................................................................

Mrs. Henderson. [speaking as before ]. I taught you to think in

every situation of life not as Hester Vanhomrigh would think in

that situation, but as Cato or Brutus would, and now you

behave like some common slut with her ear against the keyhole.

(CW 2 474)

When the name of the woman comes out of the lips of Mrs.

Henderson, John Corbet recognizes the male ghost as Swift, and the

woman as one of the women whom he knew. Ghost of Swift

continues to speak, scolding a woman he called Vanessa — who was

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christened Hester Vanhomrigh — for daring to ask another woman who

was called Stella — Esther Johnson, whether or not she was married

to Swift. He is indignant because for all his efforts to rebuild Rome

in her mind, she is only concerned about getting married and having

children. Vanessa replies that she has done so because of her love

for Swift. As Vanessa makes her reply, Mrs. Henderson’s voice

changes to a female voice:

[I n Vanessa’s voice .] If you and she are not married, why

should we not marry like other men and women? I loved you

from the first moment when you came to my mother’s house

and began to teach me I thought it would be enough to look at

you, to speak to you, to hear you speak. I followed you to

Ireland five years ago and I can bear it no longer. It is not

enough to look, to speak, to hear. Jonathan, Jonathan, I am a

woman, the women Brutus and Cato loved were not different.

(CW 2 474)

Vanessa, who loved Swift from the moment when the man had come

to her house as a tutor, asks Swift to marry her. However, Swift

refuses her proposal, saying that he has a quality that a child must

not inherit. The woman, undaunted the refusal, tells him that no one

can decide whether the child will inherit the bad qualities or not. She

also tells Swift about the cost of choosing intellect rather than the

ordinary happiness: he will die as a lonely, miserable man. Ghost of

Vanessa vanishes in despair, when she sees that there is no hope of

winning his love.

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 Then, Vanessa’s ghost is replaced by that of Stella, whose name

Swift has been murmuring during the hymn. The ghost addresses

her in a tender voice. Swift asks her for forgiveness for leaving her

as an unmarried, childless woman with no friend other than “A cross

and ageing man” (CW 2 476) like himself. Swift feels guilty that his

decision to choose intellect rather than ordinary happiness has left her

companionless. Then Swift quotes from the lines of a poem that he

says “Stella” had written to him, the lines that come after the words

upon the window pane:

‘You taught how I might youth prolong

By knowing what is right and wrong;

How from my heart to bring supplies

Of lustre to my fading eyes;

How soon a beauteous mind repairs

The loss of chang’d or falling hairs;

How wit and virtue from within

Can spread a smoothness o’er the skin.’ (CW 2 476)

Stella’s poem, which speaks about the power of “wit and virtue” to

repair the luster and beauty of face at old age is the best expression

of an ideal which Swift has served all his life. After he had

addressed Stella and quoted from the poem she had written to him,

ghost of Swift asks her to close his eyes.

As the ghost closes his eyes, Mrs. Henderson awakes from her

trance, and asks the participants whether the evil spirit has spoiled

the seance again. After one of the guests tell Mrs. Henderson that it

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was indeed the case, Dr. Trench asks the guests to leave her alone.

Then, all the people who attended the seance gives her money. Even

though she tells them that she does not want to be paid after such a

disastrous seance, she throws a furtive glance at the money to see

how much people are paying. All the people leave, with the exception

of John Corbet. Expressing his satisfaction at Mrs. Henderson’s

performance, Corbet asks her question regarding his research. He tells

her that the topic of his essay at Cambridge is on why Swift chose

to keep his celibacy. He asks her whether the reason for Swift’s

celibacy had to do with his concern about the democracy and the

collapse of “arrogant intellect” free from superstition (CW 2 478) that

it will bring. However, Mrs. Henderson is incredulous when Corbet

asks the question, for she does not know anything about Swift. To

her, Swift was just a “dirty old man” (CW 2 478) with boils and

swollen eye. Eventually, Corbet leaves too, at the request of Dr.

Trench. After his departure, Mrs. Henderson is finally left alone. She

is exhausted after the seance and tries to drink tea to revive her

spirit. However, ghost of Swift refuses to leave the seance room

even though all is finished. The play ends as Swift’s ghost possesses

her, exclaims “Perish the day on which I was born!” (CW 2 479), a

phrase from Job that was reserved in Swift’s lifetime for Swift’s

birthday.

Calvary is one of the plays in which Yeats dramatize his thoughts

on Christ and Christianity. As such, the play reflects Yeats’s ideas on

Christ.19) To Yeats, Christ is primary because Christ’s pity was

19) In his notes to the play, Yeats writes on Christ as follows:

We say of Him because His sacrifice was voluntary that He was love itself,

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directed towards not with intellectual — subjective — despair but those

who were suffering due to sickness and sin, sufferings that are seen

as objective because they are the common lot of humankind.20) As

such, Christ’s pity is powerless against the intellectual despair that

Lazarus and Judas are suffering from.

Before the start of the play, Musicians sing a song:

FIRST MUSICIAN.

Motionless under the moon-beam,

Up to his feathers in the stream;

Although fish leap, the white heron

Shivers in a dumbfounded dream.

SECOND MUSICIAN.

God has not died for the white heron.

THIRD MUSICIAN.

Although half famished he’ll not dare

Dip or do anything but stare

Upon the glittering image of a heron,

and yet that part of Him which made Christendom was not love but pity, and

not pity of intellectual despair, though the man Him, being antithetical like His

age, knew it in the Garden, but primary pity, that for the common lot, man’s

death, seeing that He raised Lazarus, sickness, seeing that He healed many,

sin, seeing that He died. (CW 14 200)

20) This point is supported by many miracles performed by Christ, all of which are

aimed to relieve people of pain and hunger, but not subjective despair. In the

episode from Luke 13:10-17, for instance, Christ heals a crippled woman on the

Sabbath, to the anger of religious leaders.

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 That now is lost and now is there.

SECOND MUSICIAN.

God has not died for the white heron.

FIRST MUSICIAN.

But that the full is shortly gone

And after that is crescent moon,

It’s certain that the moon-crazed heron

Would be but fishes’ diet soon.

SECOND MUSICIAN. God has not died for the white heron.

(CW 2 330)

After the song, Christ enters, carrying a cross on his shoulders and

climbs up the hill surrounded by the mocking crowd, dreaming of the

Passion after death. As Poulain notes in her article, “The King’s

Threshold, Calvary, The D eath of Cuchulain: Yeats’s Passion Plays,”

the fact that Christ is but dreaming this scene is “real enough for

the physical effects of the torture to affect the character’s

performance of his death” (54). In other words, even though Christ is

just dreaming of his Passion, the pain he feels is real, and its weight

makes him run out of breath and makes him weary.

On his way, he meets Lazarus, a dead man whom he has restored

to life. Christ thinks that Lazarus, being the man who has been

raised up from the grave, will not join the mockery. However, Yeats

turns the tale of Lazarus to its head by making Lazarus ingrateful to

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Christ:

LAZARUS. But death is what I ask.

Alive I never could escape your love,

And when I sickened towards my death I thought,

‘I’ll to the desert, or chuckle in a corner,

Mere ghost, a solitary thing.’ I died

And saw no more until I saw you stand

In the opening of the tomb; ‘Come out!’ you called21);

You dragged me to the light as boys drag out

A rabbit when they have dug its hole away;

And now with all the shouting at your heels

You travel towards the death I am denied.

And that is why I have hurried to this road

And claimed your death. (CW 2 331)

Lazarus, a subjective man, wanted to die so that he could escape

from love of Christ, which gave him no space to be by himself.

Christ’s love, like the ray of sun, shines on all people, and leaves no

one alone in the shade. When his death was drawing near, he was

21) It is interesting to compare the biblical tale of Lazarus with Yeats’s version. In

the original tale, the moment of Lazarus’s return is told as follows:

So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I

thank you that you have heard me. I know that you always hear me, but I

said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe

that you sent me.”

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”

The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen,

and a cloth around his face. (John 11:38-44)

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happy he no longer had to face it, only to find his peace broken

when he was dragged out by Christ. Christ — moved by primary pity

— thought that he had saved Lazarus by making him return from

death, which is the fate that befalls all human beings. However,

Lazarus disagrees with Christ’s account because his suffering is not

the objective suffering of sickness and death and sin but intellectual

despair.

Judas, whom Christ meets after He parts with Lazarus, is also a

subjective or an antithetical man, albeit in a different way from that

of Lazarus. When Christ asks Judas why he has doubted Him even

though — as one of His disciples — he knew that He was God. Judas

answers Christ that he had not doubted it. When Christ wonders

why Judas had betrayed Him for all that, Judas answers that it was

because Christ seemed to be so powerful. What drove Judas mad

was the reality of Christ’s overwhelming power on human beings. To

Judas, presence of Christ, with his God-given powers, threatened to

overwhelm his subjectivity:

JUDAS. I have betrayed you

22)
Because you seemed all-powerful.

22) Judas’s perception of Christ’s overwhelming influence on him might be inferred

from the words that Christ spoke on the last supper, in which He tells His

disciples that He is “the way and the truth and the life, thus telling all present

the power that is given to Him by His Father:

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how

can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to

the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my

Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.”

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

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 CHRIST. My Father

Even now, if I were but to whisper it,

Would break the world in His miraculous fury

To set me free.

JUDAS. And there is not one man

In the wide world that is not in your power?

CHRIST. My Father put all men into my hands.

JUDAS. That was the very thought that drove me wild.

I could not bear to think you had but to whistle

And I must do; but after that I thought,

‘Whatever man betrays Him will be free’;

And life grew bearable again. And now

Is there a secret left I do not know,

Knowing that if a man betrays a God

He is the stronger of the two? (CW 2 333)

Judas betrayed Christ because he thought this act will make him

more powerful than God who threatens his subjectivity by absorbing

him into one doctrine. Christ tells him to be gone when Judas mocks

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among

you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How

can you say, ‘Show me the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father,

and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my

own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.

(John 14:5-10)

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Him by saying that He cannot even save one man. Christ’s sacrifice,

like His raising of Lazarus from death, had been done out of pity for

the common despair of the humankind. He cannot save any man from

his intellectual despair.

Then, three Roman soldiers come, together with Judas who holding

the cross while Christ’s arms are stretched out. Christ is astonished

by soldiers’ total unconcern. Roman soldiers cast their lots using dice,

in a yet another retelling of the biblical episode. They place their bets

as to who will have Christ’s clothes.23) Problem of who has created

the world and who is the Messiah are of no concern to them. Only

god they will serve is god of gamblers, who is a god of luck

completely unconcerned with both suffering and despair:

THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER.

We are gamblers, and when you

are dead

We’ll settle who is to have that cloak of yours

By throwing dice.

SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER.

Our dice were carved

23) In the bible, the story of Roman soldiers casting their lots to have Christ’s

clothes is told as follows:

As they were going out, they met a man from Cyrene, named Simon, and

they forced him to carry the cross.

They came to a place called Golgotha (which means “the place of the

skull”). There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after

tasting it, he refused to drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided up

his clothes by casting lots. (Matt. 32-35)

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Out of an old sheep’s thigh at Ephesus.

FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER.

Although but one of us can win the cloak

That will not make us quarrel; what does it matter?

One day one loses and the next day wins.

SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER.

Whatever happens is the best, we say,

So that it’s unexpected.

THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER.

Had you sent

A crier through the world you had not found

More comfortable companions for a death-bed

Than three old gamblers that have asked for nothing.

FIRST ROMAN SOLDIER.

They say you’re good and that you made

the world,

But it’s no matter.

SECOND ROMAN SOLDIER.

Come now; let us dance

The dance of the dice-throwers, for it may be

He cannot live much longer and has not seen it.

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 THIRD ROMAN SOLDIER.

If he were but the God of dice he’d know it,

But he is not that God. (CW 2 334-35)

In gambling, a game of pure chance which any one can win and at

any time, the long-decreed prophecy of the coming of Christ and His

redemption of the sin by crucifixion have no place. Final image of

soldiers whirling about the cross serves as “a dramatic metaphor for

the giddy world Christ came to save” but seems almost to

overwhelm him completely. The play ends with the song of the

musicians about the lonely seabirds, which symbolize an antithetical

man who is absorbed in the self:

FIRST MUSICIAN.

Lonely the sea-bird lies at her nest,

Blown like a dawn-blenched parcel of spray

Upon the wind, or follows her prey

Under a great wave’s hollowing crest.

SECOND MUSICIAN.

God has not appeared to the birds.

THIRD MUSICIAN.

The ger-eagle has chosen his part

In blue deep of the upper air

Where one-eyed day can meet his stare;

He is content with his savage heart.

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 SECOND MUSICIAN.

God has not appeared to the birds.

FIRST MUSICIAN.

But where have last year’s cygnets gone?

The lake is empty; why do they fling

White wing out beside white wing?

What can a swan need but a swan?

SECOND MUSICIAN.

God has not appeared to the birds. (CW 2 335-36)

The Resurrection, play that tells the tale of Christ’s resurrection,

serves as a sequel to the previous play, Calvary. Theme of the play,

as Harper notes in her article, “A Vision and Yeats’s Late Masks,”

reflects Yeats’s thinking on the Great Year, or Magnus Annus, which

had to do with “how to measure the larger cycles in which the eras

and their gyres are set” (158-59). This concept of the Great Year, as

Matthew Gibson explains in his article, ‘“Timeless or Spaceless?”:

Yeats’s Search for Models of Interpretation in Post-Enlightenment

Philosophy, Contemporary Anthropology and Art History, and the

Effects of These Theories on “The Completed Symbol, “The Soul in

Judgment” and “The Great Year of the Ancients,”’ the Great Year

was originally a pre-Socratic idea ‘reportedly computed by Heraclitus,

Empedocles and others as a complete movement of the known planet

starting from alignment under Cancer, and measured against the fixed

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stars, or what Plato called the “Circuit of the Same”’ (SM I 276).

(117)

The play starts with the song of the Musicians who sing about

Dionysus, as well as about the larger cycle of history in which the

eras and the gyres are positioned, symbolized by rise and fall of

Troy:

I saw a staring virgin stand

Where holy Dionysus died,

And tear the heart of his side,

And lay the heart upon her hand

And bear that beating heart away;

And then did all the Muses sing

Of Magnus Annus at the spring,

As though God’s death were but a play.

II

Another Troy must rise and set,

Another lineage feed the crow,

Another Argo’s painted prow

Drive to a flashier bauble yet.

The Roman Empire stood appalled:

It dropped the reins of peace and war

When that fierce virgin and her Star

Out of the fabulous darkness called. (CW 2 481-82)

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When the song ends, the Hebrew stands alone in the midst of the

faint sounds of drums and rattle. The Greek come towards him and

the Hebrew asks the Greek whether he knows what the sound is.

The Greek replies that he has. He tells the Hebrew that the sound is

made by the worshippers of god Dionysus, who are “parading the

streets with rattles and drums” (CW 2 482), something that has

never been seen before. The Hebrew asks the Greek as to why the

Syrian is not there. The Greek answers that he had sent the Syrian

on a message, and that he will be back shortly after. Then their

conversation turns to the Calvary and the burial of Christ. The two

young men (Hebrew and Greek) argue over the issue of whether

Christ could be seen as the Messiah. To both of them, it is

impossible that Christ is the Messiah whose coming had been

preached over millennia. The Greek claims that Christ is but a

phantom, and when people thought that they were nailing Him on the

Cross, they were but nailing the hands of a shadow. He says that he

will have proof for his claim before long. The Hebrew used to

believe Christ as the Messiah but is now convinced that Christ is

just a man. According to the Hebrew, fooled himself into believing

that he was the Messiah, perhaps because he was tired “after a long

journey” (CW 2 484). To the Greek, all this sounds incredulous:

“How could a man think himself the Messiah?” (CW 2 484). The

Hebrew replies the ancient prophesies that foretold the coming of the

Messiah that is “born of a woman” (CW 2 484), thus alluding to the

long-prophesied coming of the Messiah in the scripture. To the

Greek, “to say that a god can be born of a woman,” and “fed upon

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her breast” and washed like any child, amounts to “the most terrible

blasphemy” (CW 2 485).

However, to the Hebrew, it seems natural that the Messiah to be

born of a woman because without that human nature, He cannot take

redeem the sins of human being. Without it, He cannot take pity on

the suffering that stems from them. The idea that one Messianic

figure can take away the sins of the humanity is unimaginable to the

Greek, who thinks that the sins belong to each individual. Therefore,

it is up to that individual to redeem oneself from them, and no one

else are entitled to take away those sins. The Greek rejects the

Hebrew’s take on the Passion because it is irrational, being founded

on the “morbid obsession with death and disgust for the human

body.” (Selected P lays 352)

Sounds from the outside continue throughout their conversation,

made by worshippers of Dionysius as they celebrate the violent death

and miraculous rebirth of their god. This parallel is not just a

coincidence if we think about the Greek god as the prefigurement of

Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection. For, like Christ who was

crucified and then resurrected, Dionysius was torn and put together

again. The parallel continues in Osiris (an Egyptian god of the

underworld) whom Chiefs of the Golden Dawn thought to have

prefigured Christ. In an Egyptian mythology, Osiris was a god who

had been murdered and cut into pieces by his brother, Set, and put

back again by the goddess by Isis, who was his sister and wife.

This thought is clearly reflected in the initiation ritual for the 5=6

Grade of the Adeptus Minor, in which death and resurrection of god

is symbolized first by Christ24) and then Osiris.25)

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 Then, the Greek hears tap of a drum, signaling the return of the

Syrian. The Syrian returns and reports the words of women that

they found Christ’s tomb empty (i.e. that He has risen). The two

young men, however, remain skeptical. The Hebrew thinks it is just

a rumor spread by the Jews to hide “the shame” of their defeat. (CW

2 489). The Greek (to whom Christ is but a phantom), resurrection of

the Christ is an impossibility. Among the three young men, only the

Syrian seems to perceive a larger pattern behind Christ’s possible

resurrection: he is the only one who feels that the event is a part of

the larger cycle of history, which is reflected in the concept of the

Great Year that had been told by the ancients. Return of the

irrational that the Syrian reminds Yeats’s definition of civilization as

“a struggle to keep self-control,” which comes to its end as it loses

its “control over thought,” and finally die with “the irrational cry,

revelation — the scream of Juno’s peacock” (CW 14 195). If Christ’s

resurrection is seen as a return of the irrational, Dionysian ritual

could also be seen as its enactment, for the ritual is characterized by

24) In the ritual of the 5=6 Degree of the Adeptus Minor, Yeats’s hands, waist, and

feet were tied with rope, and cord was tied around his waist, in a manner that

resembled Christ. After that, he was tied to the Cross while the long oath was

taken.

25) That Chiefs of the Order thought of Osiris as prefigurement of Christ is evident

in the following passage, recited by the Chief Adept, who mixes the New

Testament and the B ook of the D ead , quoted here in Israel Regardie’s book, The

Golden D awn:

I am the First and I am the Last. I am He that liveth and was dead, and

behold! I am alive forevermore, and have the keys of Death and of Hell. . . . I

am Amoun, the Concealed One, the Opener of the Day. I am Osiris Onnophris,

the Justified One. I am the Lord of Life triumphant over Death. There is no

part of me which is not of the Gods. [A pause.] I am the Preparer of the

Pathway, the Rescuer unto the Light. Out of the Darkness, let that Light arise.

(231, 232)

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frenzy and total abandonment. Christianity as a religion, like the

Dionysian ritual, puts emphasis on the unconditional belief:

THE SYRIAN. But what if there is something it cannot

explain, something more important than anything else?

THE GREEK. You talk as if you wanted the barbarian back.

THE SYRIAN. What if there is always something that lies

outside knowledge, outside order? What if at the moment when

knowledge and order seem complete that something appears?

[H e begins to laugh.

THE HEBREW. Stop laughing.

THE SYRIAN. What if the irrational return? What if the circle

begin again? (CW 2 490)

Then, three men suddenly notice the strange silence. Sounds of

drums and rattle had stopped, and they feel the gaze of the “unseeing

eyes” (CW 2 491) of the dancers. They hear footsteps where there

should be none, and feel that something is moving behind the blank

wall. The Hebrew backs in terror at what he sees moving on the

stage:

THE GREEK. Look, look!

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 THE HEBREW. Yes, it has begun to move.

[D uring what follows he backs in terror towards the

left-hand corner of the stage.]

[The F igure of Christ wearing a recognisable but stylistic

mask enters through the curtain. The Syrian draws back the

curtain that shuts off the inner room where the apostles are.

The three young men are towards the left of the stage, the

F igure of Christ is at the back towards the right. (CW 2 491)

Christ, whose resurrection the three had been arguing about, appears

before their eyes. This moment, when we consider the earlier

skepticism of the two young men, must be a terrifying one for both.

The Hebrew, who had denied the possibility that Christ was a divine

Messiah, kneels before Him. The Greek, who saw Christ as a

phantom, is terrified because the phantom’s heart is beating, screams:

“The heart of a phantom is beating! The heart of a phantom is

beating! [H e screams. The figure of Christ crosses the stage and

passes into the inner room.]” (CW 2 491). As the play ends, the

Greek realizes in a moment of his terror that the end of human

civilization — symbolized by wonders of Athens, Alexandria and Rome

— is coming, which is to be replaced by another. He realizes that this

change is but a part of the endless cycle, thus proving once more

that what Heraclitus had said was true: “God and man die each

other’s life, live each other’s death.” (CW 2 492)

Third play, The Cat and the Moon, while not dealing specifically

with any spiritual tradition like the previous two, nevertheless deals

with two issues which are central to religion: miracle and belief.26) It

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does this by contrasting the choices made by two beggars who go to

the holy well27) in the hope of finding the cure. One of them chooses

to be cured of physical disability while another chooses to be blessed.

Ultimately, however, Yeats remains skeptical about both, as is

evidenced by his treatment of these issues throughout the play.

Indeed, such skepticism is clear from early on. This is evidenced by

suspicion of the blind beggar that the lame beggar is cheating on

him in spite of his total dependency on the lame beggar for directions

to the holy well. It is evident, then, that his later desire to be cured

of his physical blindness is largely motivated by such suspicion, not

because of the genuine belief in the power of the saint to cure him.

Likewise, the lame beggar’s wish for beatitude is motivated by the

selfish desire to have his name put among the names of saints, not

through genuine belief in the power of the saint. This is evidenced

by his later disbelief when the saint asks him to dance.

Throughout the play, Musicians sing a song about a cat and the

change of the moon. In this song, the cat symbolizes the man and

the moon the opposite that he “seeks perpetually,”28) like the double

26) As we can see in many episodes in the Bible, belief plays a central part in any

of the miracles performed by Christ. In one of such episodes (in Luke 8:40-48),

Christ heals a sick woman as He was on his way to save a dying girl. The

woman who has been bleeding for twelve years touches Christ in the belief that

she could be healed by doing so. When the woman comes up to Him and tells

Him about her suffering, He tells her that it was her faith that cured her.

27) As Yeats writes in his notes, this holy well is the St. Colman’s Well in County

Galway, which is located just fifteen minutes from the Coole Park and not far

from Yeats’s tower, Thoor Ballylee. Its water supposedly had healing properties.

28) In his introduction to the play, Yeats writes about the symbolism behind the

song as follows:

But as the populace might well alter out of all recognition, deprive of all

apparent meaning, some philosophical thought or verse, I wrote a little poem

- 135 -
and the anti-self sought by I lle in “Ego Dominus Tuus.” In the first

part of the song, a cat, who is “the nearest kin” of the moon because

of his changing eyes, senses the change of the moon and is troubled

(CW 2 445; CW 1 169):

FIRST MUSICIAN [singing ].

The cat went here and there

And the moon spun round like a top,

And the nearest kin of the moon,

The creeping cat, looked up.

Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,

For wander and wail as he would,

The pure cold light in the sky

Troubled his animal blood. (CW 2 445)

When the play starts, a lame beggar and a blind beggar appear on

stage in a state of mutual dependency. The blind beggar has the

lame man on his back because he can walk, while the lame beggar

guides the blind beggar because he can see. The two had come in

search of the holy well, which is supposed to cure people of physical

disabilities and sicknesses.

As the two beggars go round the stage to the tapping of drum

after having an argument over whether they had arrived at the well

where a cat is disturbed by the moon, and in the changing pupils of its eyes

seems to repeat the movement of the moon’s changes, and allowed myself as I

wrote to think of the cat as the normal man and of the moon as the opposite

that he seeks perpetually, or as having any meaning I have conferred upon the

moon elsewhere. (E x 402-403)

- 136 -
or not, First Musician sings again. It sings of how the black cat

Minnaloushe, whose eyes reflect the changes of the moon, moves in

a deliberate manner, “lifting his delicate feet” (CW 2 446; CW 1 169).

Cat here is described as a “close kindred” of the moon because the

moon is his double as well as the anti-self:

FIRST MUSICIAN [singing ].

Minnaloushe runs in the grass

Lifting his delicate feet.

Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?

When two close kindred meet

What better than call a dance?

Maybe the moon may learn,

Tired of that courtly fashion,

A new dance turn. (CW 2 446)

The two continue to argue when they hear the voice of the saint

(who is doubled by the First Musician). The saint first questions the

Blind Beggar, giving him the choice between being cured of his

blindness or becoming blessed. Blind Beggar, who thinks that those

who have eyesight are cheating on him, replies that he wants to

have his eyesight restored:

FIRST MUSICIAN [speaking ]. Will you be cured or will you be

blessed?

LAME BEGGAR. Lord save us, that is the saint’s voice and

- 137 -
 we not on our knees.

[They kneel.

BLIND BEGGAR. Is he standing before us, Lame Man?

LAME BEGGAR. I cannot see him at all. It is in the ash-tree

he is, or up in the air.

FIRST MUSICIAN. Will you be cured or will you be blessed?

LAME BEGGAR. There he is again.

BLIND BEGGAR. I’ll be cured of my blindness.

FIRST MUSICIAN. I am a saint and lonely. Will you become

blessed and stay blind and we will be together always?

BLIND BEGGAR. No, no, your Reverence, if I have to choose,

I’ll have the sight of my two eyes, for those that have their

sight are always stealing my things and telling me lie, and

some maybe that are near me. So don’t take it bad of me, Holy

Man, that I ask the sight of my two eyes. (CW 2 449)

Then, the saint asks the same question to the lame beggar. When he

is asked to choose between the cure of his lameness and the

blessedness, lame beggar asks what is the meaning of blindness. The

saint replies that it is to become a kin of the great saints and

- 138 -
martyrs. When the lame beggar asks whether there is book of the

saints. Saint replies that there is such a book. Lame Beggar has his

name inscribed in it if he chooses to be blessed:

FIRST MUSICIAN. Lame Man, will you be cured or will you be

blessed?

LAME BEGGAR. What would it be like to be blessed?

FIRST MUSICIAN. You would be of the kin of the blessed

saints and of the martyrs.

LAME BEGGAR. Is it true now that they have a book and that

they write the names of the blessed in that book?

FIRST MUSICIAN. Many a time I have seen the book, and

your name would be in it.

LAME BEGGAR. It would be a grand thing to have two legs

under me, but I have it in my mind that it would be a grander

thing to have my name in that book.

FIRST MUSICIAN. It would be a grander thing.

LAME BEGGAR. I will stay lame, Holy Man, and I will be

blessed. (CW 2 450)

- 139 -
Lame Beggar judges that while it is great joy to be able to walk, it

is greater joy to have his name in a book of saints. Thinking about

how glorious it will be to be among the saints and martyrs, Lame

Beggar replies that he wishes to be blessed. The saint then grants

each of their wishes. Blind Beggar, who asked to be cured of his

blindness, has his sight restored. For the first time in his life, the

Blind Beggar sees all the sights that he has only heard about: the

sky, ash tree, the well and the flat stone. However, after he has been

cured of his blindness, sees that Lame Beggar has been lying to him,

and becomes angry. With this anger, Blind Beggar becomes

spiritually blind (even though his physical eyesight has been

restored), and wonders why Lame Beggar is talking to someone who

does not exist. Lame Beggar, who asked to be blessed because he

wanted to be among the saints, also has his wish granted. In

contrast, Lame Beggar, who is blessed, can see the saint. When the

Lame Beggar says that he can see the saint, the Blind Beggar thinks

that the lame beggar is telling him lies.

After Blind Beggar goes out after hitting the Lame Beggar, Lame

Beggar tells the saint that he will get going. The saint asks the

Lame Beggar to bend down so that he (the saint) could get on his

back. Lame Beggar fears that it will be heavy to have the saint on

his back, saint replies that it will not. Indeed, the saint is so light

that the lame beggar barely feels the weight on his back. Lame

Beggar and the saint thus go their way, as the Lame Beggar blesses

the path with his dance:

FIRST MUSICIAN [singing ].

- 140 -
 Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

From moonlit place to place.

The sacred moon overhead

Has taken a new phase.

Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils

And that from round to crescent,

From crescent to round they range?

Minnaloushe creeps through the grass

Alone, important and wise,

And lifts to the changing moon

His changing eyes. (CW 2 454-55)

The plays that I have discussed here address the issues of cultural

unity, the supernatural and religion. One group (At the H awk’s Well ,

The Only J ealousy and F ighting the Waves) represent some of his

efforts to achieve cultural unity through the use of a theme found in

Irish legend through emotional intensity. Another group (The

D reaming of the B ones and The Words upon the Window-pane )

stages the supernatural in order to show the enduring presence of the

past in the present or to comment on the state of contemporary

Ireland. Final group (which includes Calvary, The Resurrection and

The Cat and the M oon) deal with religion. While two of the plays

(Calvary and The R esurrection) retell the tales of Crucifixion and

Resurrection using the system of A Vision, The Cat and the M oon

deal with the more general issues of miracle and belief.

- 141 -
VI. Conclusion

Both Yeats’s poetry and drama are poetic and dramatic

representations of Yeats’s ideas on spirituality which are

demonstrated in his prose. This spirituality was not the conventional

spirituality but something more passionate and concrete, which he

hoped to find through his literary endeavor. Inspiration for such

literary works comes from the other, which could be called as the

double or the Mask. This other might exist within or outside the self.

In poetry, the double could be seen through dialogue poems (in which

two opposites participate in a dialogue), dreams and visions or

symbols. “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” for instance, each of the

participants in the dialogue represents the irreconcilable conflicts

between two different conceptions of reality: reality as the one and

reality as the many. Whereas My Soul represents the primary

impulse towards objectivity or the impulse to submit oneself

completely to God, My Self represents the contrary impulse towards

subjectivity or the impulse to realize the self as “unique and free”

(E x 308). In drama, the double is often symbolized by the mask.

Presence of the masks on actors estrange them from the audience.

For example, in At the H awk’s Well , both the Old Man and Young

Man wear symbolic masks, which make their wearers to be

transformed from individuals to types.

We might ask then about what exactly is that alternative spiritual

goal that Yeats was trying to achieve through these forms of

representation. Even though the answer is far from being clear, we

- 142 -
might carefully suggest that it could be the Unity of Being, the

concept which appear in several of Yeats’s works but which he never

clearly defined. However, what Yeats’s wife, Georgie Yeats, had

written in her notebook, could be helpful. She writes in her notebook

on June 30, 1920 that: “All the being vibrates to the note, it is like

striking a chord. It is like sounding on the piano certain harmonic

notes which are responded to by others in their sequence” (YVP 3

27). From that definition, Unity of Being (like musical harmony),

could be considered as the unity which is created when there is

perfect correspondence between “physical body intellect & spiritual

desire” (YVP 2 41). Thus Unity of Being in Yeats is that unity

which does not exclude the physical body but includes it. Harmony of

Yeats’s Unity of Being, therefore, is not an abstract one but

something more concrete, more physical.

This emphasis on the physical body in turn makes us to see the

image of dance as the visual representation of that concept. This

body makes human beings different from God, who only appears as

the Word. It is only Jesus Christ (who combines in Him the divine

and the human) who is visible to us human beings. Christianity,

which is a religion based on the teachings of Christ developed in

such a way to deny the pleasure of the body. Body had been

regarded as sinful because it was the source of sexual desire.

Frequent appearance of dance in Yeats’s poems and plays, then, could

be regarded as Yeats’s opposition to the denial of body that had long

been part of the Christian tradition.

One possible way to think about it is to see it as a body, for

Yeats thought of the Unity of Being as that which Dante compared

- 143 -
to “a perfectly proportioned human body” (E & I 518). However, we

should bear in mind that Yeatsian unity is conceived not as distant

(and therefore intellectual) like that in Christianity but imminent,

which adapts itself to the norm of an individual and the time. In

doing so, unity takes upon itself “pain and ugliness, ‘eye of newt, and

toe of a frog.’” (E & I 518)

Another way to think about the concept is to see it as a dance,

which combines both stillness and movement in itself. In dance,

opposites are embodied in a person of a dancer, like the one we see

in “Double Vision of Michael Robartes” or actors in his Noh-inspired

plays.

- 144 -
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 초록

영성에 이르는 길: W. B. 예이츠의 시와

드라마에 나타난 더블, 마스크와 비전
조수진

동국대학교 대학원

영어영문학과

본 논문의 목적은 예이츠의 시와 드라마에 예이츠의 영성 발전이 어

떻게 나타나는지를 살펴보는데 있다. 본 논문에서는 특히 예이츠가 어떻

게 자신의 작품을 통해서 존재의 통합을 이루려고 하는지에 대해 알아본

다.

I장에서는 그 동안 학자들이 예이츠와 영성이라는 주제에 대해서 어

떻게 논의해 왔는지를 간략하게 살펴본다. 첫 번째로, 어떻게 버지니아

무어가 그녀의 저서 The U nicorn: William B utler Yeats’ Search for

R eality에서 예이츠의 영성 추구 문제에 대해 탐구하고 있는지 알아본다.

무어는 예이츠의 영성 발전 과정을 아일랜드 민담, 드루이드 교, 헤르메

스 전통, 장미십자회 전통이라는 주요 주제로 나누어 논의하고 있다.

마가렛 밀즈 하퍼는 그녀의 논문 “Yeats’s Religion” 에서 학생들에게

예이츠의 영성에 대해 가르치는 것의 어려움을 이야기 한다. 이러한 어

려움은 예이츠가 학교가 전통적으로 사용해 왔던 과학적 학습 모델에 들

- 151 -
어맞지 않는데서 비롯된 것이다. 또한, 교실에서 예이츠라는 주제로 수업

을 할 때 예이츠가 속해 있었던 수많은 오컬트적 전통에 대한 설명을 하

면서 어떻게 원활하게 수업을 진행할 수 있는지에 대한 어려움도 있다.

하퍼는 이러한 문제의식을 가지고, 다음의 세 가지 주제에 대해 논의하

고 있다. 우선, 그녀는 선생님과 학생이 예이츠의 작품을 공부할 때 어떠

한 태도를 취할 수 있는지에 대해 이야기한다. 다음으로, 그녀는 예이츠

와 연관된 오컬트 적 전통을 빠짐없이 가르치면서도 수업이 방향을 잃지

않도록 해 주는 대략적인 역사 및 문맥적 지도를 그 리려 한다. 마지 막 으

로, 하퍼는 예이츠의 시와 산 문에서 그의 오컬트 적 생 각 소리

이 를 통해

나타나고 있는지 논의한다. 세 번째로, 헬렌 밴 들러는 그녀의 저서 Our

Secret D iscipline: Yeats and Lyric F orm에서 예이츠의 비 잔티 움에 대

한 시와 델 포 탁
이 신 에 대한 시에 대해 논의하면서, 이 시를 각각 후 사

세 계 에 대한 상상 과 실제 사 후 계
세 를 그 린 시로 보고 있다. 마지 막 으로,

닐만 은 그의 논문 “Yeats, Dream, Vision, and the Dead”에서 예이츠의

꿈 과 비전에 대한 관 심
이 어떻게 나타나는지를 시기 별 로 살펴보고 있다.

그러한 목적을 가지고 그는 우선 Theosophy에서 꿈 을 어떻게 분류 하고

있는지를 알아본다. 다음으로 만 은 예이츠가 어떻게 모드 곤 함께 상

과

징 을 통해 꿈
에 나타 난 비전을 보려고 했는지를 알아본다. 그후 , 그는

이러한 관 심이 어떻게 다 른 화권문 의 영적 전통에 대한 탐구로 이어지

고, 결 국에는 A Vision의 집필 출판 및 으로 이어지는지에 대해 이야기

한다.

II장에서는 영의 문제에 대한 예이츠의 생 각 이 어떻게 이루어 져 왔는

지를 네 가지 시기로 나누어 살펴본다. 우선 II장의 첫 번째 파 트에서는

예이츠의 유년 절 여 룬
시 에 대하 다 다. 특히 이 장에서는 우선 예이츠가

아버지에게서 받 육 친
은 교여 이 그에게 미 영향에 대하 살펴본다. 그 후 ,

슬 라이고에 있는외 린 절 냈 경험
가에서 어 시 을 보 던 이 어떻게 초자연적

존재에 대한 믿 여
음으로 리 발전하는지에 대하 알아본다. 그 고 이 영적

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존재에 대한 믿 음이 Theosophy에 대한 탐구로 이어지게 되 는지에 대하

여 알아본다. II장 두 번째 파트에서는 Theosophy에 내

대한 용으로 넘 어

가 예이츠에게 직접 적인 영향을 미 쳤 던 세 명의 인 물 점에 초 을 맞 춘 다.

우선, A. P. Sinnett의 저서인 E soteric B uddhism이 예이츠에게 어떠한

영향을 주었는지 살펴본다. 그 다음, Franz Hartmann과 H. P.

Blavatsky가 끼쳤 던 영향에 대하 여 알아본다. II장 세 번째 파 트에서는

예이츠가 Golden Dawn에 가 입 한 이 후의 이야기를 다 룬 다. 특히 이 파

트에서는 마 법과 의식에 초점 을 맞추면서, 이러한 의식이 예이츠의 생 각
과 언 어에 어떠한 영향을 끼쳤 는지에 대해 알아본다.

다음으로, III장에서는 예이츠의 영성에 대한 이 론 을 비 평 가의 이 론과

예이츠 자신의 이 론 으로 나누어 살펴본다. 우선 III장 첫 번째 파 트에서

는 해 당 주제에 대한 학자의 연구는 주로 영성과 double의 문제가 드라

마에 어떻게 나타나 있는지에 체 대해 다루고 있다. 보다 구 적으로, 이들

의 연구는크 크
게 예이츠와노 두마스 룹 , 예이츠와 드라마라는 가지 그

으로 눌 나 수 룹 있다. 크 개념 리
첫 번째 그 의 학자는 마스 의 , 그 고 마스

크 와 예이츠의 계 드라마 룬 사이의 관 에 대해 다 다. 예를 들어, 마가렛 밀

즈 하퍼의 논문은 개 판 집필
예이츠가 A 년 Vision의 정 을 하던 1925 에서

년
1937 사이에 크 예이츠의각 변화 갔
마스 에 대한 생 이 어떻게 해 는지에

대해 논의하면서, 변화 당 집필 이러한 가 시 된 예이츠의 드라마에 어떻게

드러나 여있는지 보 주고 노 能
있다. 술다음으로는 예이츠와 ( ) 라는 예

형 식에 여 대하 이루어진 룹 연구를 살펴본다. 이 그 에 대한 논의에서는

우선 임 롱엔바흐
제 스 의 노연구를 통해 예이츠가 어떻게 드라마에 대해

관심 을 되 가지게 롱엔바흐었는지 알아본다. 노 는 그의 저서에서 일본

연극 귀족 계층 즐겨온 극 형
이 이 점 밝 노 식이라는 을 히면서, 이러한 의

성격 이 노예이츠가 심 유중에 대해 말관 을 가진 이 하나라고 하고 있다.

다음으로 키네
마사루 세 노 극 는 그의 소개 논문에서 전통 연 의 구조를 한

다음, 그 구조를극 켜
예이츠의 에막 적용시 논의하고 있다. 마지 으로 아

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일 린 카토 는 그녀의 글 에서 문학 작품과 역사적 사 건 의 재 현 이라는 문제

를 제기하면서, 과연 예이츠의 노 극 연 에서 아일랜드의 역사적 사 건 을

재 현하는 방식이 사 건을 있었던 그대로 재현 하고 있는지에 대해 논의하

고 있다.

비 평 가들의 론
이 을 살펴본 다음에는 예이츠의 산 문에 예이츠 자신의

영성에 대한 생 각 이 어떻게 나타나 있는지를 알아본다. 우선 “Magic”

(1901) 에서 예이츠가 어떻게 자신의 비전 체험 , Joseph Glanvil의

Scholar-Gipsy의 이야기, 그 리고 라 플랜드 사 람과 아일랜드 서부의 농 민

과의 비교를 통해 영적인 존재에 대한 근거 를 제시하고 있는지 알아본

다. 두 번째로, “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places”

(1914) 에서는 스 베덴 리 말
보 가 하는 영의 환 단계 매
생 , 영 들의 이야기와

아일랜드의 민담에 흔 히 산 나타나는 자와 죽 만남 등

은 자의 을 통해 본

영적인 문제에 대해 이야기 한다. 세 번째로, P er Amica Silentia Lunae

(1917)에서 존재의 통합을 이루는데 중심 되 이 는 가면에 대한 이 론 과 세

계 영에 대한 논의에 대해 알아본다. 다음으로, 예이츠의 자서전 The

Trembling of the Veil 의 네 번째 장인 “The Tragic Generation” (1922)

에 대한 논의에서는 예이츠가 어떻게 주 변 물 인 의 비 극 삶 적 을 통해 존

재의 통합에 대한 생 각 을 발전시 켰 는지를 알아본다. 첫 번째로, 논문에서

는 와일드가 어떻게 자신과 반 되 대 는 비 극 삶

적 을 추구 함 써 으로 자신을

하나의 예 술 작품으로 만 들었는지 살펴본다. 리 그 고 이와 찬 마 가지로 싱

이 어떻게 의도적으로 아일랜드 서부 지역의 방 언 을 사용하고, 자신과

반 되 대 는 성 격의 인 물 만
을 들어 냄 써 훌륭
으로 한 작품을 쓸 수 있었는지

에 대해 논의한다. 마지 막 으로 A Vision (1937) 의 세 번째 장 “Soul in

Judgment”에 대한 논의에서는 후 계 환사 세 와 영의 생 과정에 대해 다 룬

다. 특히 이 장에서는 예이츠의극 등 에 자주 장하는 D reaming B ack의

단계 와 P urification의 단계 집중를 적으로 논의한다. 영의 환생과정 6 단

계중두 번째에 해 당 하는 D reaming B ack은 생전에 있었던 일들을 그

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일들이 킨감 불 순러일으 내 단계 섯
정의 세기 으로 다시 살아 는 이다. 다

번째 단계 망 억 두
P urification의 더 에서 자의 기 은 모 사라진다. 영은 이

상 름 억 못
자신의 이 였 을 잊 린기 하지 한다. 자신이 누구 는지를 어버 영은

마침내 유 워 자 같 류
로 지고, 자신과 은 영과 교 하게 된다.

IV장에서는 난 현 예이츠의 시에 나타 영성의 재 방식에 대해 논의한

다. 이 크 화형
장에서는 꿈시를 리 게 대 태의 시, 비전과 에 대한 시, 그

고 원추에 룹
대한 시라는 세 가지 그 으로 나누어 살펴본다. 첫 번째 그

룹 에서는 “Ego Dominus 리 Tuus,” “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” 그 고

“Man and the Echo”창 필 에 대해 논의하면서, 이 시들에 어떻게 조의

수 소 립
요 인 대 두
이 룹
나타나 있는지에 대해 살펴본다. 번째 그 에서는

“Double Visions of Michael Robartes”와 “Towards Break of Day”에

대해 논의하면서, 두 시에 드러 난 비전과 꿈 의 문제에 대해 알아본다. 마

지 막으로, 세 번째 그 룹에서는 “Vacillation,” “The Gyres,” “Lapis

Lazuli”에 대해 논의하면서, 세 편 의 시에 나타 난개 인과 역사적 차 원에

서의 원추에 대해 살펴본다.

V장에서는 예이츠의 드라마에 나타 난 영성의 재 현 방식에 대하 여 탐

구한다. 예이츠의 드라마 역시 시와 마 찬 가지로 세 가지 그 룹으로 나누

어 살펴본다. 첫 번째 그 룹 은 At the H awk’s Well , The Only J ealousy

of E mer 와 F ighting with the Waves와 같 은 예이츠와 쿠훌린 에 대한

극 들이다. 이 극 에서는 아일랜드 전설 속의 영 웅 쿠훌린 변 물

인 과 주 인

들이 등 장하는 극 을 다 룬 다. 두 번째 그 룹 은 The D reaming of the

B ones와 The Words upon the Window-P ane 과 같 이 예이츠와 초자연

에 대해 다 룬극 들을 살펴본다. 보다 구체 적으로, 논문에서는 예이츠가

인간과 초자연 적 존재에 대한 만남 을 통해 어 떤 표 달목 를 성하고자 했

는지에 대해 알아본다. 우선 The D reaming of the B ones에서 예이츠가

어떻게 아일랜드의 역사에 대해 고민하는지 살펴본 다음, The Words

upon the Window-P ane 에서 예이츠가 어떻게 그가 살고 있던 사회에

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대해 비 판 하고 있는지 살펴본다. 예이츠가 드라마에서 어떻게 가면을 통

한 존재의 통합을 이루고자 하는지에 대하 여 점 초 을 맞 춘다. 세 번째 그

룹은 Calvary, The Cat and the M oon, 리

그 고 The R esurrection과 같
은 기 독 교 및 종 교에 대한 극 들에 대해 살펴본다. Calvary와 The

R esurrection에서는 예이츠의 기독 교와 예수에 대한 각 생 에 대해, 그 리

고 The Cat and the M oon에서는 절름 발이 거
지와 눈먼거 지의 선 택 에

드러 난 기적과 믿 음의 문제에 대해 논의한다.

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