{"id":196,"date":"2019-05-07T05:32:41","date_gmt":"2019-05-07T05:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp04.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=196"},"modified":"2019-05-07T12:49:05","modified_gmt":"2019-05-07T12:49:05","slug":"w-b-yeats","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp04\/chapter\/w-b-yeats\/","title":{"rendered":"W. B. Yeats"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\nW. B. Yeats<\/strong>\r\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Life and Influences<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

A remarkable career that spans forty years commencing with the last two decades of the nineteenth century , and extending well into twentieth century till the outbreak of the Second World War, Yeats\u2019s poetic career acts as a bridge between romantic and modern poetry. Foremost among Irish English poets, Yeats was born on June 13, 1865 in Dublin as the eldest son of John Butler Yeats, a lawyer-turned \u2013painter and Susan Pollexfen, a member of a well-to- do family in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. He spent his early years between London and Sligo, due to the impractical nature of his father regarding money, forcing Yeats to grow up in a general atmosphere of poverty. Like many other Irish writers, despite having affluent relatives, Yeats was forced to lead an impoverished existence.<\/p>\r\n

Education and Early Influences<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

After completing school, Yeats chose to study Art in The Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where he met George Russell, which shaped his interest in mysticism and the supernatural. Similar meetings with William Morris and John O\u2019Leary awakened an interest in cultural nationalism. Yeats\u2019s interest in painting waned yet the two abiding interests that took shape during this time stayed with him throughout his life, shaping his poetry and outlook towards life, namely his interest in magic and the psychic, and his involvement in the Irish Nationalist Movement<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The Influence of FrenchSymbolism<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Through Arthur Symons, Yeats discovered French Symbolism and in 1896, he met French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine and the Irish dramatist, J. M .Synge in Paris. Yeats\u2019s use of complex symbols in his poems is a direct influence of the French Symbolist poets. Norman Jeffares, a noted Yeats Scholar has commented on this aspect. Symbolist Movement which originated in nineteenth century French poetry with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme and Valery, exploited the mysterious suggestiveness of private symbols. These poets focused on achieving a musical quality in their verse and believed that through blurring the senses and mixing images, they could represent a higher reality. Apart from Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound also were deeply influenced by the French Movement.<\/p>\r\n

The Celtic Twilight<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Yeats soon became a leading member of the Irish literary Revival of the 1880s, a direct outcome of the resurgence of the Irish Nationalism in the campaign for Home Rule.Yeats was drawn towards Irish nationalism and translations of Irish writing into English by John O\u2019Leary which gave Yeats a new sense of direction and subject matter in poetry. The places, stories and supernatural beliefs he came across in Sligo, as well as Ireland\u2019s ancient legends and largely forgotten intellectual heritage found expression in Yeats\u2019s poetry. The Wanderings of Oisin <\/em>(1889) was the first outcome of this interest. In 1891, following the death of the leader of the Irish National Party, Parnell, whose involvement in a divorce case had split the party, there was a lull in Irish politics and Yeats felt that the time was apt for launching a literary movement. He formed Irish Literary societies in Dublin and London. The Celtic Twilight <\/em>(1893), the title he gave to his collections of stories and poems epitomized the romance and mysticism of Celtic culture. The Wind among the\u00a0<\/em>Reeds(<\/em>1899)marks the crowning glory of his \u2018Celtic\u2019 poetry, where the bleakly beautiful landscape in and around Sligo blends in a mysterious, vague and beautiful manner.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

1.1.4. Mysticism and the Occult<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

Yeats developed a deep interest in the occult, which began with\u00a0 his study of Theosophy as\u00a0 a young man and this developed when he joined the Theosophists, a school of thought that was advocated by Madame Blavatsky who believed that knowledge of God could be attained through spiritual ecstasy and direct intuition . But he was asked to leave when he\u00a0demanded evidence and later became interested in different kinds of unorthodox thought: Buddhism, magic, spiritualism, astrology , the Cabbala. The reference to \u201cSpiritus Mundi\u201d in \u201cThe Second Coming\u201d and Byzantium, which is a poetic image of integrated art in \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d whereby death is transformed into a state of immortality, and \u201cThe Magi\u201d- all point towards a rejection of Christianity in favour of a more esoteric view of art, history, politics and love .<\/p>\r\n

Biographical influence onpoetry<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Yeats has dealt with highly personal and subjective experiences and emotions in his poetry. It is indeed difficult to arrive at a true understanding of his poems without becoming familiar with the real life characters who throng his poems either directly or in the form of archetypal symbols and mythological characters.<\/p>\r\n

\u00a0Yeats and Maud Gonne<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

The year 1889 was very significant in Yeats\u2019s life as his earliest verse, The Wanderings of Oisin<\/em>, a mixture of Romanticism, nationalist idealism, Irish mythology and mysticism was published. It was during the very same year that he met Maud Gonne (1866-1953),\u00a0tall and beautiful, a well-to-do revolutionary with whom he fell in love. Being penniless Yeats could only offer her poetic devotion and wrote the play <\/span>The Countless Kathleen<\/em>for her.In 1891, he proposed to her but was refused in words that have become famous since, for the same words were repeated by Maud Gonne on many similar occasions to Yeats- that the world would thank her for not marrying him, that they should continue to be friends and he should go on writing beautiful poems for her. Yeats\u2019s obsession with the fiery and beautiful Republican Maud Gonne, haunted his works for long which mirror the bitterness he felt at her continued refusal to marry him. Poems like \u201cWhen you are old\u201d and \u2018The Fish\u201dwhich he wrote to or for her, were rather abstract due to reasons of poetic style and personal discretion. Maud Gonne\u2019s marriage to John MacBride in 1903, which ended in a separation two years later, is hinted at many of Yeats\u2019s poems like \u201cEaster 1916\u201d and \u201cA Prayer for My Daughter\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Lady Gregory and the Abbey Theatre<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

A major change in Yeats\u2019s life took place in 1894 when he met Lady Gregory in London. Yeats first visited her in Ireland in 1896 and from 1897, started to spend his summers at Coole Park, her house in County Galway. It provided Yeats with an ordered peaceful existence and an opportunity to meet and interact with other writers like George Russell, whose penname was AE, George Bernard Shaw and George Moore. With the help of Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge and Sean O\u2019 Casey, Yeats established Abbey theatre in Dublin in 1904. Yeats was its manager from its inception in 1904 until 1910. It was a hard task as several objections were raised to the plays staged there -- Yeats\u2019s The Countless Kathleen <\/em>on religious grounds and Synge\u2019s The Playboy of the Western World <\/em>on puritanical, nationalist grounds.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nMarriage andFamily<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Yeats\u2019s marriage to Georgie Hyde Lees on October 20, 1917 when she was 26 and he 52 gave him the much needed stability and tranquility so far lacking. Two children Anne and Michael were born in 1919 and 1921 respectively. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 and was also appointed the Senator of the newly created Irish Free State. His best anthologies \u2013A Vision <\/em>(1925), incorporating his ideas on history and human personality, Michael Robartes and the Dancer <\/em>(1921), The Tower <\/em>(1928) and The Winding Stair <\/em>(1933)-all came out around this time. Yeats\u2019s meeting with Rabindranath Tagore on 7 July, 1912 in London was historic as it resulted in Yeats\u2019s introduction to Tagore\u2019s own English Translation of Gitanjali<\/em>, which fetched him Nobel Prize for literature. Yeats continued writing poems till a few days before his death in France on 28 January 1939, which W. H. Auden mourns in the poignant elegy \u201cIn Memory of W.B.Yeats\u201d.<\/p>\r\n

2.\u00a0\u00a0 Yeats\u2019s Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Paul Poplawski in English Literature in Context <\/em>has simplified the hugely complicated and varied poetic career of Yeats into three broad phases--roughly1886-99, 1900-18, 1919-39-- from a lush- late-romanticism deeply imbued with Celticism, aestheticism, symbolism and esoteric doctrine(e.g. The Wind Among the Reeds<\/em>,1899), through a transitional period of proto-modernistic austerity and impersonality of style(e.g. Responsibilities,1914) to a final phase of fully developed modernism where previous elements of his art fed into a highly complex, self-defining system of mythological thought built on an often obscure visionary symbolism (e.g. The Tower <\/em>1928)<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Major Themes<\/strong><\/p>\r\n

2.1.1 Irish Mythology, Narrative, Character and Places<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

Deeply influences by Symbolism, especially the iconographic approach of Mallarme, Yeats had steeped himself in mysticism and Celtic mythology. Peter Childs observes how Yeats\u2019s early Romantic work mirrors an attempt to escape from the urbanism and materialism into the Celtic twilight of pre-industrial rural Ireland\u2019s folktales and traditions. The opening lines of Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Lake Isle of Innisfree\u201d, a poem written when the poet lived in Bedford park, a London suburb, at the age of twenty three, shows his homesickness for Sligo<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree<\/p>\r\n

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made<\/p>\r\n

Nine bean- rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,<\/p>\r\n

And live alone in the bee-loud glade(1-4)<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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The idyllic and harmonious simplicity of life at Innisfree is contrasted with the complications of everyday world. He had also been influenced by his father\u2019s reading aloud from the American Transcendental philosopher Thoreau\u2019s Walden <\/em>where he describes how he spent two years of blissful solitude in the lap of nature in a cabin built by Walden Pond near Concord in Massachusetts. John Peck and Martin Coyle have commented that the apparently \u201clazy, reverie-like quality of the poem\u201d leaves behind \u201cthe abrasiveness of life\u201d and it \u201cis really a poem of escape, a poem expressing a desire to avoid engagement\u201d(242).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

A brilliant employment of alliteration, assonance and consonance, apart from internal rhyme add to the romantic aura of the poem, which belongs to the first phase of the poet\u2019s\u00a0poetic career and presents Yeats as one of the last romantics. The poem mirrors his intense dislike of life in London where he spent the major part of his life yet is never alluded to directly in any of his poems as well as an intense escapist desire to lead a life in Sligo countryside in the self-sufficient manner demonstrated by Thoreau in <\/span>Walden<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\u201cThe Wild Swans at Coole\u201d, \u201cCoole park, 1929\u201d and \u201cCoole Park and Baylee,1931\u201d are other poems belonging to this category.<\/p>\r\n

Love<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

The poet\u2019s poems on love depict a vast range of emotions ranging from praise and devotion in the early ones like \u201cThe Pity of love\u201d and \u201cThe Sorrow of Love\u201d to attempts to come to terms with the passing of love\u2019s euphoria and hopefulness in \u201cwords\u201d, \u201cReconciliation\u201d and \u201cNo Second Troy\u201d. \u201cAdam\u2019s Curse\u201d is a major poem of 1902 that reveals his mood and inability to maintain \u201cthe old high ways of love\u201d. The frustration and bitter disillusionment that Yeats had to suffer in his unrequited love forMaud Gonne colours most of his love poems. In \u201cNo Second Troy\u201d, Yeats expresses both his disagreement with her revolutionary activities and her inciting ignorant men to violence as well as his admiration for her beauty, nobility of mind and her seeming to belong to another world. A parallel is drawn between Maud gonne and Helen of Troy (one which Yeats repeats in many other poems), whose beauty and sexual attraction were instrumental in the destruction of Troy. The striking original conclusion heralds a new kind of love poem<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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Why, what could she have done, being what she is?<\/p>\r\n

Was there another Troy for her to burn? (11-12)<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nThe Poet\u2019s Family andAristocracy<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Certain poems like \u201cIntroductory Rhymes\u201d, \u201cA prayer for my Daughter\u201d and \u201cUnder Saturn\u201d centre on the poet\u2019s family. In \u201cA Prayer for My Daughter\u201d the poet prays for the safety of innocents like his daughter Anne and his foreboding regarding their future in the midst of the violence and anarchy let loose by the Russian Revolution, The First World War and the Irish revolt. He prays that his daughter to be blessed with beauty but not similar to Maud Gonne\u2019s which was self-destructive. Maud Gonne is equated with mythological figures like Helen, who had much trouble from a \u201cfool\u201d (Paris), Aphrodite, who \u201cbeing fatherless could have her way\/ Yet chose a bandy-legged smith of a man\u201d (Vulcan) .Maud Gonne whose \u201copinionated mind\u201d filled with \u201cbellows full of angry wind\u201d was widowed by \u201ca drunken vainglorious lout\u201d(Easter 1916). Yeats prays that his daughter may escape the intellectual hatred of Maud gonne that makes one a prisoner of bitterness and arrogance, the aftermath of her fiery involvement with Irish politics.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The only way to counter these evils is through ceremony and innocence, evoked in \u201cA Prayer for my Daughter\u201d through the images of the Horn of Plenty(Cornucopia in Greek mythology is the horn of the goat that suckled the all-powerful Greek god Zeus) and the hidden laurel tree, which convey the essential qualities of harmonious growth and unalloyed happiness. Yeats had firm faith that custom would enable his daughter to recover her innocence and remain happy in a troubled world. ceremony would provide her the means by which the soul could retain its integrity against the vulgarities. David Daiches has pointed out that Yeats\u2019s admiration of the great House tradition arises from his faith that it stood for a way of life which converted chaos into order by custom and ceremony.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Poetry recurs as a subject of great vigour in many of Yeats\u2019s poems. \u201cAll Things can tempt me\u201d, \u201cThe Coming of Wisdom with Time\u201d, \u201cA Coat\u201d and \u201cThe Fisherman\u201d deal with the difficulties encountered by him regarding inspiration and the vast difference between ambition and reality. The division between poetry and scholars, poet and the people form the subject matter of \u201cThe Scholar\u201d and \u201cThe People\u201d. The most poignant of his poems dealing with the art of poetry is perhaps \u201cThe Circus Animal\u2019s Desertion\u201d, one of his last poems published in 1939.it portrays the poet\u2019s inability to write poems and has invited comparisons with Coleridge\u2019s \u201cDejection: An Ode\u201d. Yeats looks back upon some of the themes of his earlier poems and plays and compares them to circus animals that have deserted him, leaving him with his human passions.<\/p>\r\n

Politics<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Political themes abound in Yeats\u2019s poetry and poems such as \u201cUpon a House Shaken by the Land of Agitation\u201d , \u201cSeptember 1913\u201d and \u201cto a Shade\u201d exhibit his anger whereas the theme of violence is present in others like \u201cMeditations in Time of Civil War\u201d, \u201cNineteen Hundred and Nineteen\u201d and \u201cBlood and the Man\u201d. Y<\/em>eats\u2019s bitterness towards politics finds expression in \u201cThe Curse of Cromwell\u2019 and \u2018Parnell\u2019s Funeral\u201d.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

\u201cEaster 1916\u201d was written in memory of the Irish revolutionaries who took part in the Irish Uprising of 1916, which saw them occupying the Dublin center, and proclaiming the Irish Republic. After a few days of stiff resistance they surrendered and fifteen of the rebels were executed. The refrain of the poem, \u201cA terrible beauty is born\u201d, highlights the antithesis between the \u201ccasual comedy\u201d of the Ireland of the past which wore \u201cmotley\u201d and the New\u00a0Ireland which witnessed the birth of a \u201cterrible beauty\u201d. \u201cAll changed, changed utterly\u201d laments the poet, and a terrible beauty is born.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n

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The image of the \u201cstone\u201d appearing in the third stanza of the poem transforms the idea of change and adds an ambivalent note to the poem. An ironic reversal of the metaphor of change is introduced in the middle of the poem by declaring that it was not change that transformed these ordinary men and women, but rather their lack of change or steadfastness which turned them into \u201ca stone\/ To transform the living stream\u201d. Their obsession with one purpose alone\u2014 their revolutionary goal of an independent Ireland \u2013 makes them the only unchanging objects in a world of flux. Thus the stone comes to signify not merely the immortality of their reputation but their own inflexibility as human beings. The image of the stone represents the poet\u2019s own ambivalent attitude towards the revolutionaries and the revolution itself.<\/p>\r\n

Old Age<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

The theme of old age recurs in many of Yeats\u2019s poems like \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d , \u201cAmong School Children\u201d and \u201cThe Circus Animal\u2019s Desertion\u201d. Norman Jeffers has classified them into different categories: those which lay upon the themes of detachment of old age in beggars and hermits(\u201cThree hermits\u201d , \u201cBeggar to Beggar Cried\u201d), those which are more personal and some which rage about the infirmity of old age(\u201cThe Wild Old Wicked man\u201d, \u201cAre You Content?\u201d or \u201cWhy Should not Old Men be Mad?\u201d) and others like \u201cThe Man and the Echo\u201d and \u201cWhat Then?\u201d which present the dilemma of not knowing what happens after life.<\/p>\r\n

Symbolism in Yeats\u2019sPoetry<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Yeats\u2019s interest in French Symbolist poetry, his study of painting and William Blake\u2019s poetry, his interest in mysticism, the supernatural and classical literature were all instrumental in the highly developed use of symbols in his poetry.<\/p>\r\n

Inherent and Arbitrary Symbols<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

In his essay, \u201cMagic\u201d, Yeats makes a clear distinction between \u201cinherent symbols and arbitrary symbols\u201d\u2014symbols arising out of a received tradition or seemingly invented arbitrarily by the poet. In his essay, \u201cPrometheus Unbound\u201d, Yeats classifies Shelley\u2019s symbols as \u201carbitrary\u201d and explains of Shelley: \u201chis system of thought was constructed by his logical faculty\u2026 not a symbolic revelation received\u201d (421). The arbitrary symbol is an emotional symbol as it depends on personal associations whereas the inherent symbol is an intellectual symbol evoking ideas mingled with emotion. Yeats has made use of both kinds of symbols in his poems.<\/p>\r\n

2.2.2 The Influence of Symbolists<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Comparing Yeats and Baudelaire, Edward Engelberg has pointed out that for Baudelaire, \u201cthe symbol is the end product, not the starting point\u2026 Baudelaire is interested primarily in his symbol, not that which goes into its making: the world is used to evoke the symbol. Yeats .. came to work in the opposite direction: he would use the symbol to evoke the world, and his interest, ultimately was less in the symbol than in the things it evoked\u201d (95).<\/p>\r\n

Symbolism in The Second Coming<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

\u201dThe Second Coming\u201d(1919) which makes use of Yeats\u2019s symbols profusely is examined to arrive at a true understanding of the complex technique and multiple associations that lie behind\u00a0each of his symbols. The poem presents a terrible prophecy regarding the birth of a new God by ironically fusing Christ\u2019s prophecy about his second coming in the Gospel of St. Matthew with St. Johns\u2019 description of the beast of the Apocalypse in <\/span>Revelations<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

The Gyre Symbol<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n

\r\n\r\nThe opening lines of the poemset the stage for the unleashing of terror, disintegration and chaos.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nTurning and turning in the widening gyre\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nThe best lack all conviction, while the worst\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\nAre full of passionate intensity. (1-8)\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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The gyre is one of the most fascinating of Yeats\u2019s personal symbol .He first came across it in the 1890s in a poem by Francis Thompson which left such a deep mark that it was quoted thirty years later in A Vision<\/em>. The cyclical theory of history envisaged by Yeats views human civilization as moving forward in antithetical or dialectical epochs of about 2000 years each. The Christian Civilization marked the termination of the Great Babylonian one that began in 2000 B.C. Each cycle of 2000 years contains within itself two smaller cycles of 1000 years each. Since\u00a0all existence, historical or individual is a conflict between opposing principles, the principle of objectivity tending towards self-realization and the principle of subjectivity moving in the opposite direction towards self-abnegation, the two smaller cycles within the historical cycle of 2000 years move in opposite directions. The geometrical symbol of gyre or cone was used to represent this conception of time. He conceives of a double gyre, the apex of one touching the base of the other. Each gyre is like a spool with thread wound around it.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

The birth of Christ marked the historical cycle of two thousand years of modern civilization. Christ becomes the falconer who inaugurated the first sub-cycle of a thousand years, the winding process of history which ended only to be followed by the second sub-cycle, the unwinding process that witnessed the falcon (man) flying away from the falconer. Yeats envisaged it to come to a close in A.D. 2000 when he expected a catastrophe to happen, the birth of the monstrous beast, which is prophesied in the poem. The anarchy and blood-dimmed tide let loose by the antithetical destructive forces refer to the state of affairs existing around the world at that time- the World war, Russian Revolution and the political turmoil in Ireland. The only means to counter this violence is by retaining the ceremony of innocence, which is referred to in \u201cA Prayer for my Daughter\u201d too, because \u201cinnocence alone opposes all sexual and social violence symbolized by the blood-dimmed tide\u201d (Unterecker 166).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The gyre symbol is drawn from occult books and Vivienne Koch points out that Yeats adopts this whirling metaphor to embrace the cyclic movement of history which includes not only the spirits of the dead, but dead cultures and civilizations as well.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n\r\nThe Spiritus Mundi<\/em><\/strong>\r\n
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The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi<\/em><\/p>\r\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\r\n

Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert<\/p>\r\n

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,<\/p>\r\n

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,<\/p>\r\n

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it<\/p>\r\n

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds (11-17)<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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The rough beast foreboding evil, reminiscent of the Beast of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation is said to rise from the Spiritus Mundi<\/em>. Norman Jeffers has defined it as a general storehouse of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality or spirit. Also called Anima Mundi, it is the spirit or soul of the universe. Spiritualists call it the subliminal mind and Jung the racial unconscious. Richard Ellmann has observed that in Yeats\u2019s view, it is \u201ca corporate imagination\u201d \u201cwhich creates and stores archetypes, and the man who is able to let his imagination fuse with the corporate imagination has all the images ever wrought by men available to him as the power to create new ones.<\/p>\r\n

The Rough Beast<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

The foreboding evil is suggested by the beast which is half human and half beast. The creature is obviously not the Egyptian Sphinx of wisdom which killed travelers for their failure to solve its riddle, what is being born is endangered from something neither Greek nor Christian, but more primeval overlooked by both as A. G. Stock explains. Denis Donoghue says that Yeats\u2019s beast is related to Christ as phantom to man. Yeats believed that time was ripe for a reversal of the present civilization and another one antithetical to\u00a0the present one was about to arise which was symbolized by the beast. The creature is a supernatural monster and hence beyond the moral concerns regarding good and evil which explains the \u201cgaze blank and pitiless as the sun\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

The wheeling movement of the falcon rising higher and higher at the beginning is directly linked with the desert birds reeling around the monstrous beast and both images recall the central image that links all others-- that of the double interpenetrating gyres. Yeats humanizes the reaction of the birds through the adjective \u201cindignant\u201d.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

The concluding lines raise a question and recalls the fact that the Yeatsian cycle of the 2000 years of Christian civilization is drawing to a close and that the new era is not a result of the old, but its doom. The reference to Bethlehem is a bitterly ironical echo of St. Matthew who speaks of the Son coming as the Sun from the East.<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
you can view video on W. B. Yeats<\/strong><\/td>\r\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>\r\nReference<\/strong>\r\n
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