Colors in the poems are non-verbal communication. Colors in the poetry have symbolism and color meanings that go beyond ink. Therefore, the purpose of this paper 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 quite frequently in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats is white. The color white is often related to the fairyland, his ideal land, or the beauty of woman in his several poems. In Yeats's poems, he also equates the love of country with the love of woman. He connects the physical world to the spiritual world by using the color white in his poems. For example, in "The White Birds" Yeats hopes to flee from the material world of sorrow with his beloved in the form of white birds. Yeats describes Maud Gonne's beauty as a white woman because she is the loveliest woman that he has ever met. In his Autobiographies, he says that her complexion was luminous like that of apple-blossom when he met her for the first time. The color of apple-blossom is white. The color white is used in many places in his poems to express the beauty of woman or the love of Ireland. In short, understanding the meaning of white used in his poetry will help us grasp his poems properly.

• 유병구(대구대) | Yoo, Byeong-Koo