The Old Age of Queen Maeve(1903) is a very short pure dramatic poem, which deals with Queen Maeve’s heroic episode related to the god of love Aengus’s love affair in the ancient pagan period of Ireland. In this work Yeats expresses his strong will to disinter almost forgotten ancient narratives and propagate them among the contemporary Irish people who are getting quite unfamiliar with them, and at the same time he expresses his admiration of his beloved Maud Gonne more overtly and proudly than in any other work by juxtaposing/overlapping her image with that of Queen Maeve. This poem, along with such long dramatic poems as The Wandering of Oisin(1889) and The Shadowy Waters(1906-12), belongs to the same group of narratives in that all of these are related to his unrequited sweetheart Gonne. However, The Old Age of Queen Maeve is somewhat different from those two in the manner the poet takes toward his beloved, and in this poem he deplores that she too will grow old and die though she is as great, beautiful and passionate a woman as Queen Maeve was. In those two longer poems the star-crossed lovers follow heartbreaking pattern of love―meeting only after their death. But in The Old Age of Queen Maeve the lovers are supposed to meet each other in this world eventually, however long time it will take, as Aengus was to meet his lover Caer by the help of Queen Maeve and her grandchildren. In this article the present writer intends to descry Yeats’s purpose of using the ancient Irish myths and his power of creating an individual mythology based on them, and interpret the symbolical meanings caused by the overlapped images of Maeve and Gonne.

To Yeats, as Mario Praz remarks in The Romantic Agony, sex was “the mainspring of works of imagination”(vx). This paper is an attempt to read Yeats’s “A Woman Young and Old” in terms of poetic representations of feminine sexuality and gender. All written in years 1929 through 1931, the sequence of eleven poems deal with the problems of female body and desire in a repressive patriarchal society. The first and introductory part of the paper briefly surveys the social and cultural background of the poems. The centrality of the subject of feminine sexuality and gender in these poems shows that Yeats saw the social and cultural repression of women and their sexual desire as one of the serious and urgent problems facing Ireland at that time. In Ireland of the 1920s, where the new national frame was being created under the hegemony of the Catholic Church and the middle class, the general attitude toward the women’s position and role and their sexual expression was very conservative and repressive. The main part of the paper closely reads the poems of the sequence, from “Father and Child” in which a daughter boldly asserts sexual freedom in defiance of her father’s opposition and criticism, to “From the ‘Antigone’” which shows another daughter defying the authority of king for the sake of filial love and the freedom of conscience. In reading the poems, this paper tries to show how Yeats’s awareness and affirmation of the female body and desire is expressed in his criticism of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. In opposition to that sexually repressive and ascetic culture, he shows women’s body and sexual desire in such a bold and affirmative way that the poetic expression itself turns out to be an effective critique of that culture.

이 논문은 Yeats의 두편의 초기시를 분석한다. Yeats는 학자들 사이에 잘 알려져 있듯이, 자신의 시에 끊임없이 수정을 가하였다. 대부분의 학자들은 마지막에 Yeats 자신이 수정하고 배열하여 간행한 The Collected Poems를 “final”한 것으로 간주하며, 당연히 여기에 실린 시가 초기의 것 보다 우수 한 것으로 간주하는 경우가 많다. Richard Ellmann의 분석도 예외가 아니었다. “The Ballad of Moll Magee"는, 그에 의하면, 열등한 시이나, 본 논문에서 분석한 바로는 그의 주장이 옳지 못함을 보여준다. 특히, “The Ballad of Father Gilligan”에서 Yeats가 들춰내려고 한 종교의 가식을 풀어낸다. 이 시는 Yeats에게서는 좀처럼 보기 힘든, humor가 흥미롭게 담겨있다. Gilligan 신부는 신앙심이 무척 두터우면서도, 극히 인간적인 것으로 묘사된다. 임종을 지키는 신부의 일이 지나치게 많아지자 심신이 피곤해져, 자신도 모르게 불평하고, 다시 깜짝 놀라 하나님께 사죄한다. 이러한 Gilligan의 인간적 면모는 다시 한번 마지막 두 연의 기도에서 나타난다. 자의적으로 하나님의 뜻을 풀어 간 것에도 우리의 미소를 자아내게 한다. Gilligan이 자신도 모르게 빠져든 잠깐의 잠에서 놀라 눈을 뜨고 말을 달려, “새처럼 즐겁게”(as merry as a bird) 죽은 그 여인의 남편의 소식을 접하는 장면들의 묘사에서는 종교에 대한 Yeats의 풍자적 체취가 느껴지기까지 한다. 즉 앞 연들에서 보인 무의식적인 Gilligan의 인간적인 면모에 종교로 다듬어진 Gilligan의 의식을 대비시킴으로써 이러한 종교적 가식을 들춰 내려한 것이 Yeats의 의도였는지 모른다. 왜냐하면, 마지막 두 연에서 이 두 의식이 두 행씩으로 대비되어 있는 것을 미루어도 알 수 있는 사실이다. 결론적으로, 이 논문에서 다루어진 Yeats의 초기 시들은 일부 평론가들의 주장처럼 열등한 시가 아니다. 도리어 수정하지 않은 시들에서 보다 더 미묘한 시적 묘미가 더 살아 있는 것 같다.

This paper is to get away from contemporary literary criticism and discourse concerning Yeats and Eliot. This is not to ignore the features of contemporary culture which are changing rapidly, including modernism to postmodernism. Yet, I want to focus on the poem itself. With the poems of both poets dealing with the same topic coincidently, I concentrate on the different aspects of modern poetry and importance of style from the two poets. Also, I believe that such aspects and difference in style will dedicate to understanding contemporary culture from their different points of view of the world and religion. This view helps us to understand today’s cultural facets from which we can experience a variety of lifestyles. Especially, religious points of view by the two poets help us see the relations of religion with today’s culture, the religion which might not be considered serious today in a general sense. The poem, “The Magi,” is thus delivered in this paper to see such religious significance as suggested from various literary symbols they are using in their poetry. Eliot tries to find the way in which ultimate happiness of human beings comes from the life in religious dimension; whileas Yeats wants to possess a complete life on a different level, that is the world of poetry. Such visions are well suggested in the poem, “The Magi.” Eliot discovers a Christian life from which people can experience a new vision in today’s difficult times. Yet, Yeats explores a new life in arts. The former is dreaming of a Christian kingdom while the latter is dreaming of a visionary kingdom. These differences command the style and form of the two poets. In this respect, Yeats gets over Eliot’s prejudice on him. So, the two poets should not be evaluated on the basis of time. They should be taken into account from a variety of perspectives, not from any fixed ones, with the different values they are suggesting beyond time and place.

In the early twentieth century, Ireland was still under the colonial rule and the struggle for independence was at its height. Besides the political struggle, there were cultural movements and the Irish Dramatic Movement was one of those movements. W. B. Yeats was perhaps the most important leader in the Movement and his ideal was to create a national drama of Ireland and to have the Irish people recover their identity. Yeats wanted to create his own original dramatic form which was different from realistic dramas. In Yeats’s plays, imagery, symbols, style and plot are well organized and unified as an organic whole. Therefore, the characters usually have symbolic meanings. In Cathleen Ni Houlihan(1902), Cathleen is a symbol of Ireland. The setting of the play is a cottage of Killala in 1798. A young person named Michael is marrying Delia Cahel, a beautiful young girl. And a poor old woman enters the cottage and says that her land has been taken from her and many people have died for love of her. This is Cathleen ni Houlihan, a personification of Ireland. At the end of the play the poor old woman is transformed into a beautiful young girl. The woman can be a symbol of the sovereignty of Ireland and Michael can be a symbol of a king of Ireland. The transformation is the result of the symbolical marriage of land and king. Deirdre, the heroine of Deirdre(1907), is an important figure in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. In Yeats’s Deirdre, Deirdre comes back to Ireland from a long exile with her lover, Naoise with promises of King Conchubar’s forgiveness. However, the treachery of Conchubar is revealed and Naoise is killed. At last Deirdre commits suicide. In this play, Deirdre is an archetypal figure who symbolizes the exile and misfortune of Irish people under the colonial rule. Therefore, Deirdre can be considered as an apt symbol of Ireland. In the last scene, Deirdre does not lose her dignity and chooses her death. In the early twentieth century, Irish people felt a great sympathy for the tragic experience and misfortune of Cathleen Ni Houlihan and Deirdre in Yeats’s plays and they would consider them the symbols of Ireland. With the dramatization of those heroines, Yeats helped to encourage Irish people to recover national consciousness.

In my article titled “Nationalism of William B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney in their early poetry: mythic nationalism and realistic national consciousness” which was published in The Journal of English Language & Literature Vol. 45 No. 3, I analyzed three among four factors of nationalism (implicated) in the two poets’ early poetry, that is, ethnicity, language, territory. This article deals with one remaining factor of nationalism, religion, in their middle poetry. Religion is so powerful an influence in Ireland that Irish nationalism can be considered Irish Catholic Nationalism. The political, religious, and economic conflicts between Anglo-Irish Protestants and Catholic Irish made Ireland divided into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, after Ireland was liberated from British imperialism in 1922. The native Irish who had lost even their mother tongue, Gaelic during the colonial period of almost 800 years ruled by the British Empire sought their national identity in Catholicism and made the religious oppression of Britain their centripetal force. To Yeats, religion was not a dogmatic faith of institutionalized religion but a field in which his imagination of the supernatural is allowed full play to go beyond the ephemeral real world to the eternal spiritual world. He set the Irish religious identity on Irish countrymen’s native faith in faerie, ghost, eternity of soul, and the world of magic expressed in Irish legends, folklore, myths, and oral traditions. He satisfied his hunger for the ultimate truth of universe with the Irish ancient faith in the mystical world of the everlasting soul and the visionary as well as various kinds of mysticism in the East and the West. The mystical religious identity of the native Irish emphasized by him anticipated the continuous collisions among him, the Catholic pulpit and Irish nationalists. His romantic belief in a heroic spiritual Ireland materialized his Irish Literary Movement and his idealized Anglo-Irish Ascendancy culture was far from the political nationalism of the middle class of Ireland, the political class of the people democracy. Seamus Heaney has also suffered from the conflict between his cultural․ political ideals which are fundamentally Ireland-centered and the political reality of the violent IRA (Irish Republican Army) which kills even civilians at random for the cause of nationalism. To Heaney the religious faith was a recognition of the deep value of the religious ritual and the Catholic ritual has been internalized in his feminine poetic sensibility of patience, humility, duty, discipline, guiltiness, grace, wonder, and the ritual supplication. The Irish religious identity he put an emphasis on was not the visionary mystic one of Yeats but the real one which has been internalized in the minds of the native Catholic Irish as “self-afflicting compulsions” and spiritual paralysis, especially in terms of political martyrdom complex in IRA and historical defeatism of Catholic priests in Northern Ireland. Both Heaney and Yeats opposed violence of nationalism and sought their ideal one. Religion has had a devastating influence on the two tribal struggle in Ireland so that the two poets refused the established Christianity and tried to enhance Irish republican nationalism to the genuine nationalism allowing the peaceful co-existence of the two races living in Ireland. Heaney demythodized Yeats’s myth of the political martyrdom and denied the religious halo of Irish nationalism as well as the mythodized force in the history of the Northern Europe. His quest of democratic co-existence of plural culture in Ulster seems realistic and idealistic solution of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Yeats presented the fallen majesty of Sophia who is a veiled goddess as in Valentinian of Christian Gnosticism, Cabalism and Rosicrucianism. In this respect, Yeats himself rejected the masculine Trinity and insisted on an androgynous Trinity throughout his works. Yeats’s view of Sophia is that of Attis for goddess Cybele. Yeats sought to reveal that Daughter-Sophia was a fallen Deity such as Helen of Troy or Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty of the fairy tale. Therefore one of Yeats’s major poetic themes is the longing for Sophia. From his early poems, Helen is symbolized as Sophia’s secular image and as one of the Yeats’s personal poetic heroines. Yeats wanted Helen, the cause of Troy’s fall, compared to Sophia who was the cause of the Christian’s fall for early Christian Gnostics. Also, several of Yeats’s poetic heroins can be approached in terms of Sophia’s secular and mournful beauty who is suffering with mankind in this world. Especially, Yeats as a master myth-maker himself recreated Helen as his personal unique mythic character in Sophia’s image. For Yeats, Maud Gonne’s poetic role was the embodiment of Ireland as Rose, Helen, Cathleen, Deirdre, Niamh and Jane. These figures are all symbolized as a divine Feminine Principle existing within the God, Masculine Principle before the all creation. And Yeats lays himself and the world at her feet as the love poet or her sole priest just as did Attis for Cybele. Yeats’s personal and poetic heros as symbols of Yeats’s portraits: Attis, Homer, Jester, Oisin, Red Hanrahan, Fergus, Cuchulain, and Aleel. Through Sophia’s imagery, Yeats suggested gnostic speculations about the female elements of divinity, rigorously suppressed by the orthodox Christian fathers of the early church, and this rejection remains to this day. In other words, Yeats tried to carry out a poetic recovery of one single body work of art from the veiled goddess, Sophia. Because Yeats wanted to become Sophia’s sole priest, Valentinian. His hope appears in his poetic theme of a ‘Unity of Being’ by uniting with Sophia after his own death and Sophia’s death too. In this sense, Yeats often illustrated in his poems sorrowful love and an eagerness for the death of the beloved. This idea and sentiment is seen in Aleel’s attempted unity with Cathleen: Aleel suggests Countess Cathleen who is suffering with her people go to Heaven to escape her pains. Although people mocked Yeats’s attitude regarding Sophia, he envisioned a heroic dream in which Sophia will be revealed with her Heavenly power in a future as her era comes. And at last, she will recover her genuine glory in Heaven. Sophia’s era will come 2000 years after Christ’s birth according to Yeats’s unique historical view. For example, “Leda and the Swan” and “A Nativity” symbolize the coming of the masculine Trinity era with in the Orthodox Church. So Yeats stated when the Christ or Helen or Christ’s sister (Daughter-Sophia) was born, the Mother of God, Mary or Leda was frightened and terror-struck. Therefore Helen symbolized secular beauty suffering with mankind during the 2000 years of the masculine Trinity age. On the other hand, in “The Second Coming,” Yeats suggested that Sophia’s veil be removed when she recovers her glory. The terrible Sphinx stands for this coming of Sophia, which will establish an androgynous Trinity just as seen in the Egyptian Trinity: Osiris, Isis and Horus. Sophia as Yeats’s beloved is also symbolized by the Sphinx, ‘half lion, half child’ in “Against Unworthy Praise.” Thus we see Yeats endeavoring to draw the readers’ attention to the stress laid by feminine principle, Helen-Sophia who is with mankind as Countess Cathleen -with sacrificial love and her suffering under the masculine Trinity- until the new age comes, which was stated as ‘until coming sphinx’ or ‘until God burn time.’ So Yeats was an authentic prophet in our time.

This study proposes to venture into the common elements and differences in both W.B. Yeats’s and Derek Walcott’s poems. It has been said that the young Walcott was sympathetic to the Irish writers, such as Synge, Pearce, Yeats, and Joyce, because he intended to make himself master of the themes and rhythms of the exile or castaway that the Irish writers echoed in their works. Of the Irish writers, Yeats was especially a poet who a little more previously wrote of the same issue as the young Walcott tried to and the young poet’s attention was deeply caught in the Yeatean poetics, more specifically, in the Yeatean mask which echoes a solitary self as an artist. Walcott’s Crusoe as a poetic self echoes the Yeatean mask. More specifically, it is a parallel for a poet with his daily ritual of the poet creating a new poem in the desperately isolated island. It is believed to be created by Walcott’s comparing himself and his own country to Yeats and Ireland in terms of an exile, a castaway or a lost self, which reflects a solitary and artistic figure in his poems, such as in “Crusoe’s Island” and “As John To Patmos”. Despite this fact, Walcott is also a poet who has built up the self-figure on a different base from Yeats’s heroic or aristocratic self. His poems are based on the Caribbean multi-racial background characteristic of slavery, poverty, lost hope, and lost identity that have resulted from the colonial policy of the British government that stepped into the Spanish and the French shoes. His Caribbean figure is a poverty-stricken, obedient, but patient, willful castaway, with his thick lips tightly closed. Although Walcott is a poet who has developed his own poetic self on the Yeatean base, which resulted in his fruitful poems, it is believed that he made greater efforts to weave the Caribbean spirit into poems than others. Then, the Caribbean tropical landscapes, such as sea, wood, and sun, etc. are a poetic space which sublimated his themes into the Caribbean soul.

이 글은 시적 창조와 재현(representation)의 문제와 관련하여 예이츠 詩에 나타난 죽음과 不在의 문제를 다룬다. 우선 부재와 죽음이 어떻게 시적 상상력의 조건이 될 수 있는 가를 살피고 다음으로 죽음이 경험적이 것이 될 수 없으며 재현 불가능하다는 것을 논하다. 재현 불가능한 죽음은 언제나 이름이나 은유로만 남아있게 되며 그 의미 또한 결정할 수 없게된다. 죽음의 이런 특성에 착안하여 이 글은 예이츠의 “A Dream of Death,” “Man and the Echo,” “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” “Sorrow of Love”를 다룬다. “A Dream of Death”에서는 시의 화자가 꿈속에서 연인의 죽음을 상상하고 언어적인 것으로 치환하여 그녀의 아름다움을 고정하고 한계 짖고 결정하여 오직 자신만의 것으로 만들려 의도하는데, 이런 의도가 어떻게 언어 자체가 갖고 있는 비결정성의 특정 때문에 좌절되는 가를 논한다. “Man and Echo”에서는 죽음이라는 것이 재현불가능하며 항상 미래의 가능성으로만 남아있는 점을 분석한다. “Song of the Wandering Aengus”는 사라진 연인을 은유적 치환으로 재현함으로써 생기는 있음과 없음 사이의 갈등을 보여준다. “Sorrow of Love”는 처음에 출판한 시가 나중에 다시 쓴 최종판에서 어떻게 흔적으로 남아 의미의 고정을 방해하는 가를 분석한다.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore W. B. Yeats’ poetic representation from the perspective of an approach which has arrested critical attention in recent development of contemporary critical theories. In most of its previous readings, Yeats has been generally considered as a romantist, occultist, and even modernist. However, this paper regards Yeats as a decolonialist living in a colonial society, and attempts to locate Yeats’s position in the context of decolonialists view including Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. Decolonialism as a literary theory is becoming an influential textual strategy rather than remaining as one of the academic master discourses. So far, the established textual reading theories have been closely related to logocentrism, and they failed to be acknowledged as an objective way of reading. For this reason, the decolonialism has an important implication in the sense that it subverts the colonial ideology within the context of colonized society, and at the same time, reconstructs counter-discourse to find out self-identity and decolonized space. Yeats lived in Ireland from birth to death. During his lifetime, Ireland was under the colonial rule by England. At that time, under the influence of the Irish armed struggle in 1916, Yeats had eye-witnessed historical moments of the death of his mother land, Ireland as well as of the Irish people, as the history of Ireland manifests. In doing so, the Irish people broke the cycle of imperial situation. The consciousness of them became consciousness of the nation. The nationalists claimed the independence of their Ireland. By way of this historical experience of authentic decolonialization, Yeats’s aesthetics became, more and more, politicized against the crisis which the repressive force of imperialism caused. In this traumatic disasters of Ireland, Yeats’s poetic quest makes him struggle against the colonial power in a poetic way. In this regard, this thesis analyses Yeats’s text from the perspective of decolnialism. To begin with, focusing on the decolonization expressed by Yeats’s text, I tries to examine the process of his poetical writings and his attitude against colonialism. To this do, my major interest is in his myth and language employed in his poetry. And I attempt to search for the true Irishness in which Yeats makes every effort to materialize the reality of Ireland in his poetry. To sum up, the decolonial discourse and its textual strategy have important implications that lay bare the dominant ideology hidden in the seemingly impersonal intention of imperiali’sm.