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pp.31-52
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.
