This paper is an attempt to discuss Yeats' meditative poem and its formative process. Before taking up the main subject, I will survey the background of the meditative poem. The most notable of meditative practices were the Ignation meditations that synthesized several medieval branches of meditation and gave them new echo in the early modern world. These meditation then formed the structural backbone of poems that also demanded a similar type of ordered contemplation by Donne, Herbert, Hopkins and Wordsworth. Also Yeats clearly fits into this English meditative tradition due to the Irish and mystical elements but works with meditative techniques in a quite novel manner. The techniques of meditation become significant for their impact on how a poem works to trace the mind's progress. Yeats's poems, especially his mature poems, develop many of the imageable patterns and employ similar technique. There is a close correspondence between meditative discipline and the creative imagination. If we cannot imagination ourselves as different from what we are and assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves. It is the creation of this self that a meditative poem records. A self is ideally one with itself, with other human beings, with created nature, and with the supernatural. Thus the self of meditative poetry speaks a language based on that of common men, but includes whatever in its own experience is unique and individual. In conclusion, Yeats' meditation allows him to reach that Unity of Being where the oppositions of change and changelessness, time and eternity, are reconciled. Toward the union of "the powers of the soul," Yeats's "Unity of Being" by disciplined effort makes his way, while creation of the poetry plays its part in the struggle. Unity of Being is both the resolution to the tension between opposites and the point at which all things connect.

• 고준석(조선대) | Ko, Joon Seog