Colors in the poems are non-verbal communication. Colors in the poetry have symbolism and color meanings that go beyond ink. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to investigate how Yeats chooses colors for his poems and how those colors are related to his poetic imagination. Yeats uses many colors in his poems in order to strengthen his poetic themes.
The color that he uses frequently in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is red. The color red is often related to the word blood in several of his poems. In Yeats’s poems, the color red and blood are connected to Ireland and the Irish people’s devotion to their country. In his poems Yeats tries to praise the beauty of Ireland and those people who dedicated their lives to Ireland. For example, in “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time,” “The Rose Tree,” “To Ireland in the Coming Times” and so on, Yeats uses the red and blood imagery associated with Ireland in order to exalt his own country and his own people just as Christians praise the red blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross for their salvation.
Finally, grasping the meaning of various colors used in his poetry will help us understand his poems more broadly.

• 유병구(대구대) | Yoo, Byeong-Koo