Recalling images from the past is one of Yeats's favorite poetic activities, especially in his old age. Many of his later poems are created on the basis of this technique, providing considerable information on his contemporary characters, events and other factors. In a sense, this kind of versification appears to mythify prominent historic figures in turbulent modern Irish history. In the poem "Municipal Gallery Revisited", Yeats sees his poetic personae as 'permanent or impermanent images', but ironically, they will be remembered permanently because of this work. They will also illuminate individual and national history dealt with in the poetic stanzas. Yeats's creative strategy is to enumerate a series of intense scenes that are worth remembering. To grasp a specific image in a particular moment is intended to reveal an absolute feature of a given character or a historical as well as cultural event. Through their own images, these people depicted in the poem are turned into symbolic characters. Greatness is impressed with a single scene and genuine perpetuity is uncovered with an instant reflection. In other words, a briefly described image is not just a section randomly isolated from a particular person's life. Rather, the image implicitly sums up and typically project an individual's complex personality in the poem, and in turn, on the reader's mind. The poet-narrator walks through the gallery, appreciating the portraits and other paintings on display and opens up his own creative world. Political characters in the beginning, then Hugh Lane and other Gregory people as a cultural stepping stone and finally the portraits of John Synge and Lady Gregory appear in sequence through the poetic work. Such a climactic approach stresses what the poet has in his own mind. Artistic ideals and literary colleagues who shared them with the poet are remembered and in the end, he himself go beyond the grave and sees his own self as an image already dead in an elegiac imagination. What he wants to record in a literary epitaph is gradually expressed along the long gallery of the museum. Eventually, the scenes composing this verse create a visionary gallery to light up the poet's real self.

• 김재봉(동아대) | Kim, Jae-bong