Baile and Aillinn, based on a pagan myth of ancient Ireland, is a long narrative poem which expresses Yeats’s private love story along with his deep interest in his fatherland and its national literature. Naturally, Yeats enlarged the simple plot of the story which tells about the two lovers’ death and their going to live in Aengus’s land among the dead. He also partly created his own private myth in order to transmit his many-folded intent. By clothing each mythical character with a role and symbol appropriate for his purpose, he succeeded in making his poem overcome the limitation of private utterance and making it a poem with both individuality and universality. The death of Baile and Aillinn has a duplicate symbolic meaning. Firstly, their death is an inevitable ritual process to get an eternal beatitude through the union after death and a sort of sublimation of a tragic love, in which we can glimpse at the poet’s plaintive love for Gonne. Secondly, their death is a kind of ritual murder symbolizing a Messianism of the Irish desiring for liberation from inveterate poverty and oppression over time. In conclusion, Baile and Aillinn is an excellent piece showing Yeats’s seasoned poetic technique of creating a poem with new meaning through mythologizing with great subtlety not only his own autobiographical elements but also the national feelings of the Irish people.

• 이세순(중앙대) | Se-Soon Lee