Yeats and Murakami are writers who believe in spirits. They both treat them as if they are real. Yeats's Purgotory is a story of Father and Son, Father killing his own son to disrupt the cycle of Life that is tainted, whereas Kafka on the Shore is a story of Mother and Son, Mother causing all the tragedies in Kafka's father, sister, and himself. Kafka's mother is a person of Memory that stays constant, which is the origin of all the tragedies, and refuses to flow with time; and Son intervenes in her Fate, changing her and himself. The leitmotif of the novel is the Oedipus complex. In the meantime, Purgatory is a practice of Yeats's religious system of Life and humanity. In the play, the two kinds of people are illustrated by Father and Son; Father can see the invisible, ghosts, but Son cannot. The play is based on the conception of souls being born again and again in endless cycles. To disrupt it Father kills his own Son, as he had killed his own Father. It is beyond the moral of the world, killing his own son, following his own belief. Both works could be read as a metaphor of life. One relies on psychology, and the other relies on mythology. Murakami may have read Yeats, and Yeats might be interested in Murakami if he lived and read him. Murakami is in a position to deal with this kind of subtle subject in a subtle way, because he is a writer of the East well versed in the West. In the same way, Yeats was in a unique position, who was familiar with things eastern. Hence, their works manifest strong inclinations toward mysterious milieu, most prominently what is supernatural.

This paper aims at exploring the postcolonial aspects of William Butler Yeats’s poetry, especially the ‘Crazy Jane Poems’ written approximately from 1929 to 193l. The term ‘postcolonial’ means ‘anti-colonial.’ In Ireland, during the colonial state and the partially postcolonial state, Yeats’s involvement with Irish politics had never been static, straightforward, or comfortable. Whereas most critics see these poems from the feminist perspective, I regard them as the attempts to decolonialize Ireland from the British colonialists as well as the bitter critical insight on the rigid ethics of Irish Catholicism. 'Crazy Jane' resembles the Cailleach Bhearra, the goddess who serves not only as historian of the land and teacher of the farmers but also as bearer of sovereignty. Therefore her challenge to the colonial legacy is identified with the newly formed Irish state. What are the most abject of British stereotypes of Ireland － recklessness, vagrancy, violence and so on - ironically transform themselves through 'Crazy Jane' into the antithetical values of passion, earthiness, and exuberance. Overthrowing the preconditions of British and Church authorities, she criticizes both the Irish Catholic Church and the British authority which has appropriated Ireland. In addition, by using the ballad form, Yeats consolidates the nationalist intent of these poems. Therefore, 'Crazy Jane' may be identified with Yeats' alter ego, the personality that represents Yeats' various ideological positions. Subverting the British colonialists on the same stereotypes that British colonialists used to exploit the Irish people, she denounces both the stiff ethics of Irish Catholicism and the prevailing Irish patriarchy. Therefore, we can conclude that 'Crazy Jane' resembles a cubist icon that superimposes the double aspects of the Irish postcolonial state.

Faced with an unknown and uncertain reality in the early 20th century, W. B. Yeats is poignantly aware of the impossibility of objective truth as well as of ineffectiveness of all traditional modes of acquiring knowledge. He well recognizes that there is no center or a focal point of reference in a reality, which is sought over and over again. “The Second Coming” well expresses the absence of a fixed center or origin of experience in Yeats’s historical system. It shows that there is a non-locus at the center of all history, of all thinking, speech, writing, and action. “The Three Beggars” also gives a vivid illustration of how empty meaning swirls around a missing center and the lack of foundation, which is well represented by the three beggars’ collapse. Another poem “Among School Children” suggests that despite one’s efforts, one cannot arrive at “Presences,” which, like the answers to Yeats’s final rhetorical questions, are endlessly deferred. Despite such the limits and deferral of meaning, Yeats never gives up to assign meaning to the fragmentary reality by declaring and creating a symbol. In “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” the Self asserts the emblematic status of Sato’s sword and its covering. In “Blood and the Moon” Yeats again assigns meaning overtly by declaring the tower his symbol, though the poet in its last stanza, recognizing that ultimate wisdom is deferred beyond life, self-reflexively uses a metaphor of the blood stain to encode the limits of human understanding. In “1916 Easter” Yeats demonstrates what he can do as his part of a poet with the fragmentary reality. He calls each victim of the Easter Rebellion by name and writes it in verse, which denotes a bricolargic strategy of using the only language at hand to impose meaning on the painfully unresolved ambiguities of the Rebellion, even if he not only well recognizes that he can attribute no ‘truth-value’ to this transmutation, but also no longer expects to arrive at the final meaning of the political event in his poem.

Yeats has expended so much energy on theatre for the simple reason that his imagination was essentially dramatic. Just as in his lyrical poetry he was to find a way of embodying his conviction that conflict is at the root of life, so in his drama he was to develop techniques that enabled him to shape his vision into actable form. Despite great differences in subject matter and technique, Yeats's plays consistently dramatize the conflict between the opposing values: passion, intuition, heroism and self-assertion, on the one hand, reason, prudence, convention, community and self-submission, on the other hand. This paper studies the conflicts in Yeats's three early plays: the conflict between the poet Aleel's world of dreams and beauty and Cathleen's decision to sacrifice herself for the community in The Countess Cathleen, the conflict between the life-denying forces of moral orthodoxy and social conformism and gaiety and aesthetic vitality in The Land of Heart's Desire, and the conflict between the poet Forgael's transcendental journey and his companions' absorption in wine, women, and loot in The Shadowy Waters. Thus, conflict is a powerful instrument to dramatize Yeats's dramatic vision and these early plays, in spite of many failings, show the embryo of the recurrent theme of conflict in his more successful later plays.

Despite the controversy over Yeat’s political position, it is manifest that he was a nationalist who passionately loved his homeland, Ireland. But the nationalism he has pursued was different from those of other nationalists of his time. This thesis explores Yeats’ special nature of nationalism of that is reflected in his various works. Yeats’ nationalist philosophy is formed on the basis of his view of cyclic history which is well embodied in A Vision. Unlike the historical view of the Western world, as a whole Yeats does not presuppose any specific teleological beginning or end. For Yeats, death and revival are always repeated anew in regular spans of time: the universe repeats genesis and extinction and every life repeats metempsychosis. He attacks the project of modernity as a teleological fiction, : that is, as a myth occupying the spirit of the time, and as a mere “gigantic story.” There is no possibility for a tradition to definitely overcome another waning it completely, and thus history is far from being teleological. Yeats has tried to serve his homeland through poetry and drama, making use of their popularity for heightening people’s perception of the reality of the time and his artistic achievement. But the upcoming middle class, arising as a new political power in Ireland, couldn't understand his intention. But, having witnessed in the Easter Rising in 1916 that the spirit of the nation still survives, he came to conceive a new hope for his homeland. About the heroic deeds done by the patriots killed in that event, he regretted for the bloody violences happened there and enthrallment for their deeds of “terrible beauty” at the same time. Yeats sees that Ireland needs to find its own characteristic culture and identity in order to achieve independence from the hands of England. Guarding against pursuing exclusively what is Irish, he also wants to acknowledge the diversity of culture lying inside the boundaries of Ireland. Stressing that various different cultures are conflicting with one another outwardly, are reciprocal rather than exclusive actually, he seeks the way of hybrid nationalism.

This paper aims at presenting the postcolonial aspects of William Butler Yeats’s poetry. The term ‘postcolonial’ means not only ‘the anti-colonial’ but ‘the hybridity’. Leaning on the recent studies such as those of Edward Said, Jahan Ramazani and Homi Bhabha on Yeats and Irish literature, this study investigates the multiple aspects of Yeats as a postcolonial poet. First of all in this paper, Yeats’s complex reaction to the two consecutive wars in Irish history is examined thoroughly. The two wars accelerate the process of decolonization in Ireland, and after 1920s the country enters an at least partially postcolonial state by succeeding in reaching home rule. Yeats writes two important poems about the wars, “Meditations in Time of Civil War” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Because of his familial background as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, the poet is unable to wholly support either side of the conflicts. Whether in the war of the colonized against the colonizer (the Anglo-Irish war), or in the battle between the colonized themselves (Republicans vs. Free State supporters), his position is far from complete support for either party. Just as the speaker of “Meditations in Time of Civil War” feels sympathy for the fighting troops or ponders whether or not to join them, it is not certain as to which side he would lend his allegiance. This lack of certainty and the divided loyalties is another sign of his conflict in the postcolonial position. His dual loyalties are well represented in terms of the features of postcoloniality, namely, hybridity and ambivalence. During the colonial state and the partially postcolonial state, Yeats’s involvement with Irish politics had never been static or straightforward or comfortable. His writings more often represent conflicted responses to the issues of Irish nationalism and British colonialism. Therefore, his body of work, his political beliefs and his involvement in the anti-colonial struggle require the serious consideration for such concepts as resistance, tension, ambivalence, and hybridity. Therefore, my main contention is that the tensions and contradictions inherent in Yeats’s later poetry can best be explored in the context of his postcoloniality. Yeats’s contradictory and uncertain attitudes and stances cannot simply be defined by leaning to ready-made political labels.

This paper examines Yeats's idea of hero and heroism in his Cuchulain plays. Cuchulain is the mythological champion of the ancient province of Ulster. He is the protagonist in a cycle of plays written by Yeats over a span of thirty-five years. Cuchulain became for Yeats a personal symbol for the heroic as well as the national ideal. He was not only his mask or alter ego but also the chief representative of that heroic age to which Yeats wished Ireland to aspire. Yeats significantly altered the Celtic legend to serve his dramatic purposes. He was concerned more with the nature of heroism than with the character and the life of the Ulster champion. So he was not interested in the hero's superhuman feats of arms or bravery which his source had emphasized. Instead he wished his countrymen to learn the hero's spiritual virtues: the unyielding spirit of challenge in At the Hawk's Well; selfless courage and sacrifice for his country in The Green Helmet; the comparison and contrast between the actual anti-heroic world and the heroic ideal in On Baile's Strand; true love and self-sacrifice of his wife in The Only Jealousy of Emer; forgiveness, mercy, unselfishness, and transcendence of the fear of death in The Death of Cuchulain. Cuchulain's heroism consists in a combination of daring, gaiety, strength and beauty, and he is a free man, a challenger who, whether he wins or loses a specific battle, is ultimately victorious over himself and over others. The hero is freed from every form of hesitation, both moral and physical. The essence of Yeats's heroism is sacrifice and the creative joy separated from fear.

As a symbolist, Yeats used many symbols in his collected poetry. Therefore, if you do not know what the symbols in Yeats's poetry are, you cannot understand the hidden meanings in Yeats’s mystic and prophetic poetry. One of the significant symbols of Yeats’s early Rose poetry is the Immortal Rose as the Divine Feminine, Daughter Sophia in Christian Gnosticism. Yeats not only emphasized the feminine principle as a symbol of the Immortal Rose but emphasized the role of the masculine principle with various symbols. Especially, in Stories of the Red Hanrahan, Red Hanrahan symbolized as the role of the masculine principle, searching for the Immortal Rose, Echtge through his lifetime. Therefore, Red Hanrahan is identified with Yeats's self-portrait as well as a symbol of the Arthurian Knight, searching for the Holy Grail as the Divine Feminine. After the symbol of the Immortal Rose in his early poetry, Yeats continued to display the symbol of the feminine principle with various animal symbols such as a hare, cat, colt, and lion.Yeats alluded that the Immortal Rose was suffering on the rood of time during the last 2000 years period of the androcentric age. The meeting of the hare and the hunters represents the balance of the masculine and the feminine principles as the New Age comes. The hare is identified with a dying lady in “Upon a Dying Lady” as a hidden savior, suffering in the world. However, the death does not represent a real death but symbolized as the recovery of Sophia's glory and power. As Red Harahan’s anti-self, the fool dreamed the meeting with the hare and the hunters and hounds. The meeting is a paradoxical symbol for Yeats to hide his mystic poetry from the world until the right time comes. Yeats believed that at last his beloved, the Immortal Rose would awaken from a deep sleep and open his prophetic poetry in the last generation of the masculine Trinity age. A cat also represents the wisdom and dignity of the Daughter Sophia in the world. It is contrast with the symbol of the hare, symbolized as a sacrifice and sufferings of Daughter Sophia. Therefore, the symbols of the cat and the hare are related to two aspects of the feminine principle: proud and sad Rose. Yeats asked all sages in the last generation as a symbol of hunters and hounds to search for the hare, the Immortal Rose in the world. Yeats also prophesied that the last reincarnation of the Immortal Rose, would come from the East as the cat crawls into the Buddha represented Asian religion. Therefore, Yeats emphasized all sages to turn to the East, representing “Meru” and “Buddha” to find the last reincarnation of the Immortal Rose. The cat image also developed the symbol of the lion. The Daughter Sophia symbolized as a cat would awaken and recover her glory and power as showed the Sphinx in “The Second Coming.” As the 2000 years period of the androcentric gyre is gone, the Immortal Rose will have her characters such as Jane and the fierce young woman, who severely criticizes the bishop and she was angry at the persecutors during the androcentric age. Yeats showed the symbols of the Divine Feminine such as Sphinx, Buddha and a girl but they are One. It is related to the three aspects of the Immortal Rose such as red, proud, and sad Rose. She is in the world as showed "a plummet-measured face." Mathematics is a symbol of material not supernatural. Yeats prophesied the hunters, the chosen men to search for the Immortal Rose, the hare when the right time comes. The Sphinx’s “Empty eye ball” may be related to the “cold eye” symbolized as disdain and breaking the imperfect world as the great Judge in the Last Great Judgment Day. The colt symbolizes as the sufferings of the Immortal Rose like a hare. However, Yeats prophesied that the colt also would be released by the suppress from the masculine Trinity age. At the end of the androcentric age, the masculine principle would be united with the feminine principle as the symbol of the dead hare meets hunters and hounds in “Hound Voice.” The meeting of the hare and the hounds represents the Immortal Rose meet with the sages to prepare for the New Age. Therefore, the various animals and hunting in Yeats's poetry are paradoxical symbols to show the achievement of “Unity of Being” and the New Age.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the current state of W. B. Yeats’s poems in Korean translation. My examination includes nearly all of the Korean translations of the quoted verse lines of Yeats’s poems appearing in The Yeats Journal of Korea between 2006 and 2008, and parts of translations of Yeats’s works published as separate volumes by the Yeats Society of Korea since 2003. Although so far three generations of scholars have actively engaged in Yeats studies and translation of his works since 1945 when academic research on the poet began in Korea, the translation endeavours by the second and third generation scholars have not yielded satisfactory results and that the senior group of scholars cannot shirk its responsibility.The problem areas in the translations include choice of words and phrases, tense adjustment, versification and punctuation as well as scene description and poetic imagining. Following a detailed discussion of inappropriate and awkward translations, I offer my own translation for comparison if need be.

The paper searches parallels between English and Korean poetry as represented by Kim Chunsoo and Kim Jonggil, two of modern and contemporary poets in relation to W. B. Yeats. It clarifies the validity of such a comparative study by showing the interrelationship in the visual art, for it is there physically to see, as exemplified by the giving and receiving of Picasso and Matisse through their works. Even though it is not that easy in poetry, it is nevertheless possible to relate such relationship in it. Yeats has been a great influence on English and American poets; and a large number of researches and studies have been done. But Yeats has not been compared with Korean poets, in part because Korean and English are totally different languages. But as this study has shown, this kind of study could give benefits to both scholars and writers as well. This paper selects two of Kim Chunsoo’s early poems to compare with Yeats’s parallels. The fact is, Yeats’s poems seem to have had influence on the early Kim. Kim's poetry is different, though. What we could benefit from this study is that Korean poets need not worry about influences from great foreign poets. Understanding foreign language poetry helps Korean poets enrich their own poetry by learning what their true self is, what language Korean is; Kim must have learned that from reading Yeats. The paper takes and analyzes Kim Jonggil in relation with Yeats. Kim Jonggil is different from Kim Chunsoo; Kim Jonggil teaches Yeats and other poets in English. But what interests me is he is far different from other Korean poets. He seems to have transcended foreign influences, not to mention that he has outgrown Yeats and other English poets. Two of Kim’s poems are elaborated in relation with Yeats’s. I deal with Kim’s supreme poem with one of Yeats’s best. Kim’s quality compares well with Yeats’s, but his poetry itself is different from Yeats’s.

Yeats’s studies of ancient myths, legends and occult tradition form a part of his artistic enterprise to quest for the occult wisdom and reaffirm the power of occult imagination. His work is so deeply immersed in the supernatural that it intends to regenerate the modern world by reopening ancient spiritual wellsprings and reviving primal religious sensibilities. His interest in occultism did most to create occult images and symbols as signs of imaginative salvation. Yeats’s mystical lore helped him ascertain the spiritual reality within human consciousness and use magical symbols as a means of calling up visions. Art for Yeats is about the “wisdom of the daemonic image” which holds for a moment of illumination the warring opposites of flesh and soul. Yeats created occult images of spiritual intensity to convey the quality of the Unity of Being out of the increasingly scientific and secular culture of the modern age. His occult images create the rich texture of his poetry that examines the spiritual situation of modern humanity.

This paper investigates the images of landscapes in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, the two greatest poets of the last century. Facing landscapes of the present world and the ancient as well, using his imagination, Yeats maximizes the poetic quality in his poetry. Some of his favorite landscapes, for example, include Innisfree, an islet in Sligo, Thor Ballylee in Coole Park, Byzantium, which delineate clear-cut images of his poetic themes. Either Yeats lived in Sligo with his mother's parents in his childhood, stayed in Lady Gregory’s house in the Coole Park, and owned and lived in the tower, Thor Ballylee in summer; or he admired the old Byzantium that he idealizes in his supreme poems. They serve as optimum metaphors for his poetry, making his poetry simple but rich in its imagery. On the other hand, Eliot focuses on delineating the life of modern man in his poetry by using cities, including London, Boston, Paris, and St. Louis. The people of the cities are being described as faithless and purposeless with their mind void. His depiction of the city further represents the whole modern civilization. The big city is the backdrop of such infertile imagery of modern man.

Building on the readings of Yeats’s esoteric poems, essays, and A Vision, I poses to rethink the ethical dimensions of his occultism, more specifically his reflection on an encounter with the transcendental beings. The need for rearticulation of the role of the ethical, that is the relation to the other gains urgency because the transcendental beings are by nature obscure, indistinct, and indefinite. They resist too much clarification and determination that may reduce their complicated and irreducible beings to distinct concepts. The difficulty, therefore, lies in the question of how Yeats could present the beings in a manner as precise, proper, and rigorous as possible and at the same time he could respect and honor the mode in which the beings conceals themselves in the mystery, by letting them be the mystery that they are. A Vision was the culmination of Yeats’s lifelong wish to relate the divinity of the supernational beings to the human soul. In order not to present God as a personal deity, Yeats says only about the nearest equivalent his system offers to God, the gnomically-named Thirteenth Cone. The Cone is actually a sphere because sufficient to itself, but as seen by man it is a cone. It is more a symbol of the human relationship to the ultimate being than a symbol of that ultimate itself. Otherwise unknowable, the supernatural beings could be evoked by symbols. The symbol's job for Yeats therefore is not, first and foremost, cognition, in the sense of understanding, calculation, and definition, but instead bringing what is other for language and thought into the openness of its alterity and maintaining this alterity against the power of cognitive assimilation. Yeats lets the symbols work up the mind to evoke the world of the supernatural beings, which will remain unknown to those who relay on the evidence of their senses. “The Cold Heaven” gives a good illustration of the human relation to the supernational beings, for it combines Yeats's own personal history with his supernatural vision. Staring at a winter sky, he desperately looks back at where his life has gone, gathering together in a passionate fusion the lacerating memory of his failure with Gonne and his themes of death, ghosts and dreams. Supernatural Songs shows how Ribh's ecstasy in an encounter with the supernatural being not only arises from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen but also escapes from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement. "The Spirit Medium" well exemplifies the phenomenon of permeable structure inhabiting different regions of reality simultaneously so that the world of the supernatural being and that of the individual, inside and outside, one side and the other, subject and the other, appear as correlated and overlapped as equal parts of the inhuman symbolic spirit medium.

This paper is an attempt to discuss Yeats’s ultimate reality. Yeats’s Unity of Being can be said to be similar to the system of Upanishad’s AUM because AUM is the combination of Brahman and Atman. Upanishad’s ascetic realized that Atman, reaching to a state of Turiya, can be Brahman. Subject and object, Atman and Brahman, dancer and dance, and the Four Principles and the Four Faculties also become one in Turiya. As we would identify Atman with our self, Brahman is our self-consciousness. Moreover, if we would identify Atman with our body, Brahman become a cosmos that reveals itself. Yeats understood the Self, the ultimate reality, through Upanishad. His macrocosm was made up of Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body and his microcosm was made of Will, Mask, Creative mind, and Body of Fate. In A Vision, the Four Principles, which consists of Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body affected individually and complementarily the Four Faculties which consists of Will, Mask, Creative mind, and Body of Fate. Spirit and Celestial Body are mind and its object, while Husk and Passionate Body are sense and the object of sense. Will and Mask are will and its object, while Creative Mind and Body of Fate are thought and its object. The whole system is based upon the belief that the Self falls in human consciousness. Robartes, from self-contained energy of contemplation, encompassed cyclic system in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”. He strayed away from the physical world, found his way into the supernatural world, and returned to the physical world again. Robartes's first vision is the state of total objectivity in which no human life exists. It is identical with U of Upanishad and Mask of the Four Faculties. And his second vision is, then, the state of total subjectivity, Sushupti, which unifies subject and thought, object and idea. It is the same as M of Upanishad and Creative Mind of the Four Faculties. However, he momentarily reaches eternity, Turiya, through the multiple contemplation. It is AUM of Upanishad and Body of Fate of the Four Faculties. In Turiya, Brahman and Atman, Buddha and Sphinx, dancer and Helen are integrated into one and accomplish the ultimate reality as a phaseless sphere. In conclusion, Yeats showed Unity of Being in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”. His Unity of Being is a kind of Turiya of Upanishad. He attains the Ultimate Reality completely, in which subject and object, macrocosm and microcosm, Brahman and Atman, the Four Principles and the Four Faculties are unified in the space without the time. He achieves the ultimate reality as an eternal instant. This ultimate reality is Yeats’s Unity of Being.

W. B. Yeats in his whole life suffers from his introvert or passive self that hesitates to take action. In his agony, he creates his anti-self that boldly expresses his instinctive rage, and the anti-self is concretely established as a “fiery mask” in his poems. However, not oppressing the introvert and passive self completely, the fiery mask frequently conflicts and clashes with the passive self. Therefore, this paper explores how the fiery mask conflicts with the passive self in his “September 1913” and “Easter 1916,” and how in “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” the fiery mask overcomes such a discord represented in the two previous poems. In the first poem, the poet is indignant at political Irish nationalists who are unable to appreciate the true valuable arts. Attacking the political nationalists through the fiery mask, however the poet reveals his hidden self that hangs back from taking action. In the second poem, such hidden self under the fiery mask becomes undisguised, and the conflict between the fiery mask and the passive self is exacerbated and maximized. Such conflict is dissolved through a female mask, crazy Jane in the third poem. Usually, mad woman’s angry voice makes a strong impact on society even though she does not take a proper act from asocial responsibility of her rage such as revenge. Therefore, the fiery mask of crazy Jane makes the poet escape from his duty to take action resulting in the solution of the conflict between the fiery mask and the passive self. Ironically, Yeats’s ideal anti-self is completed in the mad female mask, crazy Jane, not in the courageous male mask.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the theme of The Only Jealousy of Emer, one of W. B. Yeats's 'Cuchulain plays'. The central action of the play is the struggle of three women—Emeer, Eithne Inguba and Fand—for possession of Cuchulain. Unlike Eithne Inguba's confused, cowardly action, Emer's behavior is brave as well as insightful. And as the chorus suggests, Fand's allurements are transitory. Fand's metallic allurement contrasts with Emer's passionate suffering. Fand wants to catch him to fulfill herself, not to aid in his salvation. Emer is more courageous than Eithne Inguba, more self-sacrificing than Fand, and more forgiving than Aoife. Emer's love for her husband transfigures her, whereas Aoife's vindictive hatred for Cuchulain costs them their only child. Emer is certainly a Yeatsian heroine who performs as nobly as Deirdre or Cuchulain. Yeats's most immediate source for his Cuchulain plays was Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne, but he significantly altered the source to serve his purposes. Emer's thwarted desire to attack Fand with her knife is one of the few links between Yeats's source and his much changed finished work of art. From this primitive tale of vengeance and jealousy, Yeats created a sophisticated drama of mental suffering and self-sacrifice. A second major change in the source involves Cuchulain's recollection of Fand's attempt to ensnare his soul. Both his fear upon awakening and his later praise of Emer for saving him suggest that he is glad of his deliverance, not despondent over the loss of Fand. Yeats's greatest modification came in his treatment of Emer's temperament. Instead of the jealous wife of seeking vengeance for herself, she is jealous only for her husband's well-being. By renouncing the love of the man she needs to end her loneliness, Emer proves herself superior to the source heroine. In the final version, Yeats dramatized, through Emer's hope for the return of Cuchulain's love for her, through her initial inability to give up her hope of winning back his love, and through her final renunciation of his love, the depth of her love and the extent of her sacrifice.

In the period of nationalism, W. B. Yeats's works address the loss of nation and resolute fights for independence and remembrance of the fighters killed in the struggles. Freudian ideas of mourning and melancholy and moral masochism and Jacques Rancière's ideas of colonial 'policy' or 'police order' and postcolonial 'politics' can provide effective tools to understand characteristics of the post-colonial works by Yeats. By putting side by side Freud and Rancière, we can produce a combination of mourning-colonial police-order vs. melancholy-post-colonial politics. The colonial police-order induces the colonized Ego to forget the loss of nation and move on to other objects, for example, money, through mourning. Melancholic post-colonial fighters derail the workings of mourning espoused by the colonial policy or police order. Melancholy and moral masochism of the colonized Ego are the driving forces of post-colonial struggles. Melancholy of the colonized Ego and sadism of the Super-Egoic demand of independence and moral masochism of the colonized Ego can explicate the bloody and 'erotic' relationships between the colonized Ego and the womanized ideal of nation, which have been interpreted as 'fatal mistress,' 'eroticized politics' and 'vampirism' by many Yeats critics. But melancholy and moral masochism drove the colonized Ego to fall into a fatal love relation with the female symbol of nation demanding unconditional sacrifice of the colonized Ego, which renders 'eroticized politics' and 'vampirism' noticeable.

This paper is to discuss the supernatural ecstasy in the “Supernatural Songs”. When focusing his poetry on the physical, Yeats turned his attention more and more toward the East. While seizing upon an increasingly physical and sexual emphasis, Yeats's secular spiritualism moved in an Eastern, monistic direction. As far as he was concerned, sexual spirituality was much more compatible with indian spirituality. To embody these instincts and passions, he posited a mythical character by the name of Ribh as the cental character of the “Supernatural Songs”. He tried to display a transcendental ecstasy. He associated early Christian Ireland with India. He described the fictional character of Ribh as an early Christian hermit, who is ninety years old. In the East, Yeats found a propensity toward unity of being that would underscore the essential unity of flesh and spirit so necessary to his thought. The “Supernatural Songs” thus brought together an Eastern amalgamation of Christianity and Asian religiosity, merging the supernatural-spiritual with the natural-physical. Yeats espoused tantric sex, a form of Kundalini, with its emphasis on self and the sexual act as the way to spiritual energy and fulfillment. The word Kundalini means coil, which Yeats reflects in the serpent imagery. In conclusion, Yeats found an imaginative way whereby he was able to fuse the spiritual with the physical in the “Supernatural Songs”. This secular spirituality allowed Yeats the sexual freedom he sought for. The intense moment of climax is that conflagration in which all antinomies are resolved, time stands still, and natural bonds with supernatural. His emphasis on unity of being is compatible with an Eastern worldview, which merges all into a monistic unity. Indeed, poetry itself is in Yeats's mind an imaginative alchemy, the transmutation of life into art, a fusing of the spiritual with the material.

'Eco-feminism' as a combination of two words, 'ecology' and 'feminism', rests on the basic principle that patriarchical philosophies are harmful to women, children, and other living things. Eco-feminists feel that the patriarchical philosophy emphasizes the need to dominate and control unruly females and the unruly wilderness. What is stressed in eco-feminism is to change the still prevailing idea that the male-dominated civilization must be justified: eco-feminists think that human beings came to recognize that such civilization can't be the source of happiness. Meanwhile we can find that in Yeats's and Heaney's poems land and landscape are personified as an oppressed woman, from which I drew a hypothesis that these two poets may offer the prominent examples of literature based upon eco-feminism. By contrast, we can also find that these two poets also reveal patriarchism based upon Catholicism. Therefore, if anything, we can suppose that many works of these poets are reflecting both eco-feminism and patriarchism. The Irish poems and poets cannot but reflect these two ideas: eco-feminism and patriarchism. Meanwhile, in Irish poetry, woman is mainly reflected as three types of human-sovereign, procreator and lover. In Yeats's and Heaney's poems, woman and nature are to be appraised as important materials. Women in Yeats's poems are faithful to the traditional image as the lover or rarely the sovereign. And also, we can find that the persona wants to use her as his poetic inspiration by admiring her beauty and seeking sexual energy and wisdom from her. By contrast, women in Heaney's poems are mainly described as procreators who are to survive the oppressed land. The two poets are to be appraised to reflect eco-feminism in that they both show their love for woman and nature. Strictly speaking, however, Heaney's poems are more declined to eco-feminism while Yeats's poems are more declined to patriarchism: in Heaney's poems land and landscape sometimes appear as the oppressed woman; in Yeats's poems the persona blames woman for her violence, emphasizing that woman should have courtesy, wisdom and sexual attraction, not the intellectual hatred, whereas in Heaney's poems the persona never blames woman but feels pity for her oppressed situation.