『캘트족의 황혼』의 일차적인 기획 목적은 현대의 산업적이고 물질적인 영국의 정신에 대항하여 아일랜드의 정신을 세우는 것이며 아일랜드 소작 농민의 민 담과 전통에 부합하여 올곧은 아일랜드의 정체성을 부활하는 것이다. 이 작품은 또한 아일랜드를 나누고 있는 이질적인 가톨릭 계층과 프로테스탄트 계층을 문화적으로 통 합하려 한다. 그러나 예이츠가 통합을 시도할수록 종교, 계층, 종족, 언어와 같은 문제 들은 이야기 속에 지속적으로 반복하여 재등장한다. 민족이라는 보다 매력적인 외관의 이면에는 해결할 수 없는 여러 문제들−예이츠의 민담수집에 소극적인 소작 농민들의 태도, 예이츠의 이야기에 나오는 것을 꺼리는 소작 농민의 태도, 게일어를 모르는 예 이츠의 한계, 소작 농민과 거리를 두려는 시인의 태도 등−이 곳곳에 도사리고 있다. 『캘트족의 황혼』은 민족과 문화의 통합을 이루려는 예이츠의 노력과 이를 방해하는 아일랜드의 종교, 계층, 언어가 서로 갈등하는 공간을 눈부시게 드러낸다.

예이츠 『비전』의 ｢영혼의 심판｣은 그의 체계적인 심령론을 반영하고 있다. 아일랜드의 요정이야기와 민담 그리고 정령 신앙에 흥미를 느낀 예이츠는 죽음과 재생 사이 중간계에 머무는 영혼의 존재에 관심을 갖게 된다. 그런 믿음이 비단 아일 랜드에만 국한된 것이 아니라 전 세계적으로 보편적이라는 것을 알게 된다. 예이츠는 스베덴보리나 블레이크에서부터 일본의 노 극, 『티벳의 사자의 서』, 그리고 우파니샤 드에 이르기까지 사후 영혼의 단계에 대한 지식을 지속적으로 탐구한다. 그리고 ｢영혼 의 심판｣에서 사후 영혼을 아주 상세히 6단계로 나누고, 지난날의 행위와 습관의 복 합체인 영혼은 자신의 카르마의 영향으로 사후 육신이 없어졌음에도 과거의 죄의식을 벗어나기 어렵다는 점과 환생의 개념 등을 상세히 설명한다. 그리고 그의 ｢유골들의 꿈｣은 일본의 노 극『銀木』의 구조와 표현을 닮아 있는데, 두 극 모두 “몽환 회상” 상태에 있는 유령 연인을 등장시킨다.

This essay is a comparison between Celtic myth and Korean myth with emphasis on hero Cuchulain and Jumong. Cuchulain is a Celtic Irish mythological hero who appears in the stories of the Ulster Cycle. In this study the main text of Cuchulain is Lady Gregory's Cuchulain of Muirthemne. Jumong, whose birth name was Dongmyeongseongwang(東明聖王), was the founding monarch of Goguryeo. The best known version of the founding myths of Goguryeo is the Dongmyeongwangpyeon of the Dongguk I Sanggukgip(Collected Works of Minister Yi of Korea) by Yi, Gyu Bo. According to Jeseph Campbell's idea of monomyth the standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation−initiation−return. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder, fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won, and the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man. Cuchulain and Jumong's hero-journey show the nuclear unit of the monomyth. Their stories exhibit with extraordinary clarity all the essential elements of the classic accomplishment of the impossible task. Cuchulain is the son of the sun god Lugh and Deichtire(a daughter of Maga, the child of the love god of Angus). Jumong is the son of Hae Mosu(解慕漱: the son of heaven) and Yuhwa(柳花:daughter of the river god Habaek(河伯). Cuchulain and Jumong are the child divine yet born of human mather. They are sons of sun and abandoned by their divine father. The characteristic adventure of Cuchulain is winning of the bride, Emma. The adventure of Jumong is going to succeed to his father-the father is the invisible founder of Buyeo. Cuchulain's adventure had given him the capacity to annihilate all opposition. At the age of seventeen Cuchulain single-handedly defends Ulster from the army of Connacht in the Tain Bo Cuailnge. Jumong's adventure had given him the capacity to rule his subjects. At the age of twenty-two, in 37 BC, Jumong established Goguryeo, and became its first "Supreme King." Goguryeo considered itself a successor to Buyeo. Cuchulain, the Irish Achilles, is the symbol of all those who fought for independence of Ireland. Jumong, the korean Achilles, is the symbol of the pride of Korean. The aim of this essay is that my comparative analysis contribute to the sense of universal understanding of the human condition.

This paper examines animal motifs related to Cuchulain in Ulster Cycle, especially Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Celtic culture. In the preface of the text Yeats said that she will have given Ireland its Mabinogion, its Morte d’Arthur, its Nibelungenlied. The Ulster sagas are documents surviving from a Celtic culture unaffected by the Latin civilization of the rest of Europe. Set a century before the time of Christ, the Ulster stories posit an older world than any known in other European vernaculars. The narrative materials were transcribed as early as 8th century continued to be part of living literature until 18th. Esteem for the Ulster Cycle passed into English during the 19th century, when nationalists searched ancient literature for heroes to replace those imposed on Irish children by English-run schools. During the generation of Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge the Red Branch Cycle fostered widespread adaptation in English. Lady Gregory expected to let Irish students know that the Cuchulain stories were put into permanent literary form at about the same date as Beowulf, some 100 to 250 years before the Scandinavian mythology, at least 200 years before the oldest Charlemagne romance, and probably 300 years before the earliest draft of Nibelungenlied. In Cuchulain of Muirthemne there are twenty stories in English. Lady Grogery have exchanged for the grotesque accounts of Cuchulain’s distortion into the appearance of a god. In the Cuchulain’s stories still remains the ancient heart of Ireland and Celtic culture. In the Celtic supernatural world animals can talk, move about like humans, jest, warn and shapeshift. The Celts not only relied on animals for their survival but they respect them, learned them, and honoured them. The legendary Irish warrior and solar hero, Cuchulain, son of the god Lugh, exhibited the ‘hero light,’ a flaming aura, around his head when he entered the state of battle frenzy. As a lineage of Angus the hero fell in love with a swan goddess Fand. And was unsuccessfully wooed by the Morrigan in her raven aspect. Cuchulain, whose name means “Culan’s Hound,” was a Gaelic hero likened in his exploits to both the Greek Hercules and Achilles. He is said to have been able to perform a ‘salmon’s leap.’ In the War for the Bull of Cuailgne the hero single- handedly defends Ulster against the depredations of Connacht, as led by Medb and Ailill. The young Cuchulain, a superhuman, semi-divine hero has two chariot- horses, the Black of Saingliu and the Grey of Macha. The clairvoyante Grey cries tears of blood at the foreknowledge of his death. when the Ulster hero Cuchulain is finally killed, he has such a fearsome reputation that it is not until one of the raven-goddesses alights on his shoulder that his enemies believe he is dead and dare to approach and behead him. To the Celts, animals were special and central to all aspects of their world

This study examines Celtic fairy tales relating to the sociocultural background of Ireland in Victorian Age. W. B. Yeats's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 1888 and Irish Fairy Tales, 1892, The Celtic Twilight, 1893, and Joseph Jacobs's Celtic Fairy Tales, 1892 and More Celtic Fairy Tales, 1894 are correlated with the Irish celtic history, religion and culture. They are best known as collectors of fairy tales at that time. Jacobs thought that the fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans, "they went forth to battle, but they always fell, yet the captive Celt has enslaved his captor in the realm of imagination." And he insisted that nowhere else was there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels, and especially concerned that the Irish tales and ballads had this peculiarity. The aim of Jacobs's volumes is to present to English children the vision and color, the magic and charm, of the Celtic folk-imagination. While Yeats's volumes show his interest in spiritual beings and his nationalism. Yeats who believes that faith to perpetuate in the three early Cycles of Irish folktales taught by the Druid sees in Tir-na-n'Og, the land of the Sidhe, Plato's and Plotinus' "yonder" when our souls descend whither they return. The Celtic beliefs in rebirth and in the otherworld are connected with beliefs surrounding the burial mounds of the Megalithic people. Among the Celts these tombs were connected with religious usages, chiefly with a cult of gods and fairy-like beings. Beginning with the Ulster Cycle, the sidhe and the Tuatha de Danann merge and become one, and renamed "fairy." A tale entitled "Connla and the Fairy Maiden" chosen by Jacobs is the earliest fairy tale of modern Europe and contains an early account of one of the most characteristic Celtic conceptions, that of the earthly paradise, the isle of Youth, Tir-na-n'Og. And in Fairy Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry there are also new characters like changlings, merrow, leprechauns, banshee, pookas. Samain, the first of November is the beginning of Celtic Year and the biggest festival of Ireland. On the November Eve the sidhe dance with the ghosts and witches make their spells. When the soul has left the body, it is drawn away, sometimes, by fairies. The souls of the dead sometimes take the shapes of animals. And there are 'ghosts' in fairy tales. Yeats chose Lady Wilde's "The Black Lamb" in his volume. And there are 'witches' and 'fairy doctors' in Irish fairy tales. "The Horned Women" of Lady Wilde chosen by the two collectors is the famous tale of witches. Witches and fairy doctors receive their power from opposite dynasties; the witch from evil spirits and her own malignant will; the fairy doctor from the fairies. Samain was adopted by the Christian missionaries to serve their own purposes and renamed "All Souls Day." When the Christian missionaries came to Ireland in the fifth century AD they were able to infiltrate the oral traditions of the Celtic people and infuse Christian beliefs through process of recording the Celtic tales in written form. And the Christian missionaries create the biographies of Christian saints known as "The Legend of the Saint." So there are 'Saints' and 'Priests' in Irish fairy tales. When the pagan gods of Ireland, Tuatha de Danann, robbed of worship and offerings, grew smaller and smaller in the popular imagination, until they turned into the fairies, the pagan heroes grew bigger and bigger, until they turned into the giants. So there are 'giants' in Irish fairy tales like "A Legend of Knockmany." In three major Irish tales cycles (the Mythological cycle, the Ulster Cycle, and the Fenian Cycle) there are so many kings and queens and princesses. Beliefs in the fairy faith, the remnants of an earlier faith than Christianity, have influenced the more modern motifs and characters of Irish Celtic fairy tales.

In the paper, "The Anti-self in Yeats's Per Amica Silentia Lunae" published on Dec. 2004, I studied the theory of Yeats's anti-self in the occultic meditation. In "Ego Dominus Tuss," Ille finally found his anti-self. In "Anima Hominis," Yeats said that the saint like Christ and Buddha, and the poets like Dante and Keats attained the anti-self. The anti-self is the opposite of daily self and the egoless self. After leaving the Golden Dawn in 1917 Yeats explored a wide range of meditative traditions such as Zen Buddhism, Upanishads, Tibetan Mysticism and Chinese Taoism. Throughout his poetic career, Yeats defined poetry, and indeed all art, as a form of meditation, as an experience which can reveal the unified "Self," defined by the Upanishads, and unlock its creative energy stored in the "deep of the mind." In "Discoveries," Yeats said that the more he tried to make his art deliberately beautiful, the more he follow the opposite of himself. In this paper I argue that Yeats's anti-self is similar to the "Self" of Upanishads and the Buddhahood of Zen Buddhism. In "The Double Vision of Michael Robartes" the girl dancing between a Sphinx and a Buddha in the fifteenth night is the anti-self of Yeats. In a moment the girl, the Sphinx, the Buddha and the poet himself had overthrown time in contemplation. They remain motionless in the contemplation of their real nature, Buddhahood. Full moon is the light of Samadhi and Turiya which is the forth state corresponding to the whole sacred word "AUM," pure personality, the "Self" of Upanishads. Only when Yeats becomes the anti-self he can be a totally subjective mind, overcome the illusion of duality, and find a "revelation of realty." It is a deliverance that leads simply to seeing things the way they really are, in their most naked reality. The process of spiritual realization is cognitive, for knowledge unites the knower and the known together, reverting to the language of "A Dialogue of Soul and Self," intellect no longer knows/ Is from Ought, or Knower from the Known. "The Self is Brahman": the individual soul is seen to be the universal spirit. When each man realize that his original nature is the eternal spirit, no matter how ordinary he is, he will enter Buddhahood. Like Bodhisattvas who, on the verge of their own enlightenment, vow to hold themselves from that final bliss until all sentient beings are released from the phenomenal world Yeats would like to be an Avalokitesvara in this rag-and-bone shop.

This study is on Irish Fairies in Fairy and Folk Tales in Ireland with a foreword by Kathleen Raine edited by Yeats for Korean readers. Nowadays many Korean editions about celtic culture were published after 2000. Fairy and Folk Tales in Ireland is the first American edition by Colin Smythe Limited in 1973. This volume contains Fairy and Folk Tales of Irish Peasantry, first published in 1888, and Irish Fairy Tales, first published in 1892. In this volume Yeats divided Irish Fairies into two great classes: the sociable and solitary and described the characteristics of each fairies, and then collected 8 fairy poems and 16 stories. Every poem and story in this volume is very interesting to me. Yeats is the best selector. The sociable fairies who go about in troops, and quarrel, and make love, much as men and women do, are divided into land fairies and water faires or Merrows(mermaid, merman). The solitary fairies who are nearly all gloomy and terrible in some way. However there are some among them who have light hearts and brave attire. There are the Lepracaun, the Cluricaun, the Far Darrig, the Pooka, the Dullahan, the Banshee. In Irish folk-lore Yeats had come across these fairies many others undiscovered.He had thanks to Patrick Kennedy, Miss Maclintock, Lady Wilde, Mr. Douglas Hyde. Mr. Allingham, Fergusson, and Miss O'Leary. He quoted from their works. His role is a vital linker in a chain of truly apostolic transmission of traditional lore. Evans-Wentz dedicated his first remarkable anthropological work, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries(1911) to Yeats and G. Russell(A.E). According to Kathleen Raine, Yeats's own interest in the "Matter of Faerie" was two fold. In part, certainly, it was a literary admiration for the highly formalized art of story-telling, and perhaps for the Irish use of the English language, those idiomatic turns of phase which arise from translation, by Gaelic-speakers, from one language to the other. Yeats who believed in Fairy-Faith to perpetuated in popular form mysterious taught by the Druids see, like A. E and Evans-Wentz, in Tir-na-N'Og, the land of the Sidhe, Ploto's and Plotinus' "yonder" when our souls descend and where they return. They also thought the Fairy-Faith belong to a doctrine of souls. In the Irish fairy poems and stories there are great beliefs in fairies. But Irish people remember the word, 'Be careful, and do not seek too much about fairies.'

Per Amica Silentia Lunae (Yeats translated it into Through the Friendly Silences of Moon) was written between January and May of 1917, and consists of a Prologue and an Epilogue for Iseult Gonne, "Ego Dominus Tuss," Anima Hominis and Anima Mundi. In Anima Mundi Yeats said, "I have always sought to bring my mind close to the mind of Indian and Japanese poets, old women in Connacht, mediums in Soho, lay brothers whom I imagine dreaming in some mediaeval monastery the dreams of their village, learned authors who refer all to antiquity: to immerse it in the general mind where that mind is scarce separable from what we have began to call 'the subconscious'... ." In the background of his theory of anti-self there are Indian and Japanese Religious thought, Celtic folklore, Spiritualism, the Order of Golden Dawn, and the great poet Dante. "Ego Dominus Tuss" is a dialogue between two men, Hic and Ille, who discuss poetry and creative process. Ille, like Yeats, is a daimonic poet walking in the moonlight. For Yeats, lunar and subjective were always the antitheses to solar and objective. Poesis called for complete subjectivity, for entry into the friendly silence of the moon. The moon is always associated with feminine divinity. With the help of a mask, Ille is calling to the opposite of his daily self, his anti-self. In the end of the poem, Ille found his anti-self. In Anima Hominis Yeats said that the saint like Christ and Buddha, and the poets like Dante and Keats attained the anti-self. The anti-self is a egoless self, the higher self. Saint, hero, and poet are all inspired. Yeats said, "Saint or hero works in his own flesh and blood and not in paper or parchment, have more deliberate understanding of that other flesh and blood." Only when Yeats became the anti-self could he become a totally subjective mind, overcome the illusion of duality, and find a "revelation of realty." Yeats could receive daimonic inspiration only during visionary experiences. Finally Yeats found the anti-self he felt ecstasy. According to his theory, the production of art was an expression of the artist's longing for "Unity of Being." In Per Amica silentia Lunae Yeats said "the poet, because he may not stand within the sacred house but lives amid the whirlwinds that beset its threshold, may find his pardon."

Yeats’s study of fairy had occupied him steadily for fifteen years from 1887 to 1902. He continued to study in connection with spiritualism until 1915. Yeats’s own collection of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry had been published in 1888, Irish Fairy Tales in 1892 and The Celtic Twilight in 1893 before he met Lady Gregory. Any theory about nature of the fairy-faith shared with her came from Yeats, and he claims originality. In writing The Celtic Twilight(1902) his study of fairy was deepened by his collecting trips with Lady Gregory. The result of Yeats’s collaboration with lady Gregory was not to appear until 1920 when she published her two volume edition of Visions and Beliefs in West of Ireland, “Collected and arranged by Lady Gregory: with two essays and notes by W. B. Yeats.” Yeats’s essays(both dated 1914) were “Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places” and “Witches and Wizards in Irish Folk-lore.” Like all the Irish antiquarians, Yeats also commonly referred to the fairies as “the people of Raths,” “the Danaan nations,” “The Tribes of the Goddess Danu,” In Fairy and Folk Tales he explains the Galic terms. The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue[sidheog], a diminutive of “shee” in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee[daoine shee](fairy people) In Irish tradition anyone may be taken by the sidhe, but there is, in fact a hierarchy of those who are most desirable. Yeats follows this tradition in one of his first poems about the sidhe, “The Stolen Child.” As Yeats understood the Irish tradition, the sidhe can do nothing the help of mortals and it is for this reason that they must always seek out humans. When the sidhe takes someone that person is said to be “away.” As a spiritualist would interpret this, it means that the soul has left the body and is travelling with the fairies. Often when appears ill or asleep or “lies in a dead faint upon the ground” it is because that the person is “away.” The Sidhe, according to Yeats’s countrymen, never takes anyone or anything without leaving some changeling in its place. In The Only Jealousy of Emer―Yeats’s most successful and moving dramatization and use of a changeling― Emer guesses that Cuchulain is “away.” When people are taken to live with the sidhe, they take on supernatural powers and work and live just as the Shape Changers that they are amongst. The chief distinction to be made between the shide and the dead is that the dead returns to the earth as ghosts of their former selves, whereas the sidhes are the everlasting ones. The idea that the fairy faith is in reality a doctrine of souls was lent supported by the fact that the country people say that almost all who are dead are taken by the sidhes. As the place where souls temporarily reside, the middle land of the sidhe is the Bardo of the Tibetans, the summerland of the Spiritualists, and ethereal world of theosophy and magic. Yeats saw his studies of spiritualism as a continuation of his studies of fairy, both of them as leading to the beginning of his philosophy. His study of fairy led him to the formulation of two theories that makes his system possible―that of Anima Mundi and that of the “airy body” or “vehicle” of the soul. A Vision is the result of his study about the fairy.

Yeats published the first edition of A Vision in 1925 and the revised edition in 1937. He had poured the most intense concentration of his intellect into it for 20 years. It may be regarded as the greatest of Yeats’s works, containing some of the most penetrating and beautiful prose that he wrote. It is essential to any understanding of many of his most notable poems and plays. But many critics agreed it was difficult to read and understand; it is extraordinarily distilled, yet complex in an extremely precise way. In this thesis I compared “Unity of Being” in Yeats’s A Vision with “Dao” in Lao Zi’s Dao De Jing. I interpreted the similarity between the theories of Yeats and Lao Zi. In A Vision Yeats explained 28 incarnations according to the 28 phases of the moon, the Great Wheel and the deliverance of the bond of rebirth. His major symbols are the gyres, the double triangle or the primary or objective and the antithetical or subjective. The Four Faculties(Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate) and the Four Principles(Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body) are related to the two contrasting tinctures. The antithetical gyre is lunar, aesthetic, expressive, multiple, hierarchial, aristocratic, artistic, particular, creative. The primary gyre is solar, moral, dogmatic unifying, humane, democratic, scientific, abstract. There is a state of perpetual conflit between the gyres and the moment of harmony of the gyres. The gyres are living each other’s death, dying each other's life. In Dao De Jing Lao Zi explained the dual character of the “Dao” operate as Being-Without-Form and Being-Within-Form, or Heaven and Earth, interrelated so closely the two sides of a coin. Yeats wanted to teach us what is the ultimate reality is and we can attain the “Unity of Being” at the moment of harmony of antinomies. The ultimate reality because neither one or many, concord nor discord, is symbolized as a phaseless sphere, but as all things fall into series of antinomies in human experience it becomes, the moment it is thought of, what he describe as the Thirteenth cone. Lao Zi insisted, “the world is oneness, or unity, emerging from the moment of the Dao.” Yeats also told us, “Eternity, though motionless itself, appears to be in motion.”

In reading Yeats’s works rooted in the ancient Irish tradition it will be helpful to understand celtic myth. Among extraordinary women from the ancient celtic tradition I studied three Irish women in W. B. Yeats's works: Queen Maeve in The Old Age in Queen Maeve, Deirdre in Deirdre, and Emer in The Only Jealousy of Emer. Moyra Caldecott’s Women in Celtic Myth provides much knowledge about Irish women characters. For the Irish stories the writer consulted Jeffrey Gantz’s Early Irish Myths and Sagas, Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men, and T. W. Roleston’s Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race. Maeve is the most written about among the Irish heroines: she is beautiful, forceful, strong, proud, devious, clever, lusty, and bloodthirsty. Daughter of Eochaid, the High King, she married a relatively minor king, Ailell, son of Ross Ruadh, king of Leinster. Their castle was on the plain of Magh Ai in the province of Connacht. Although Ailell was no weakling, he was, without a doubt, secondary to Maeve in many ways. She had property of her own: cattle, treasure and land that couldn’t match what he had. In fact the whole bloodbath of war to steal the Brown Bull of Cuailnge was brought about because there was one possession Ailell had that outshone her own: Ailell had a better bull. Maeve is the Queen most quoted as showing the privileged position of celtic women in the Iron Age. They were equal in every respect to men, and in some cases they were superior. They owned property; they could, as kings did, “divide gifts” and “give counsel”; they could ride chariots, fight battles, and dispose of lives. And with all this power and freedom went the recognition that women’s sexual needs were as legitimate as men’s. In The Old Age of Queen Maeve Yeats rehandling a given myth depends upon a combined knowledge of the myth that he learned and Yeats’s personal vision, sometimes even his personal affairs. Yeats’s love Maud Gonne is compared to Queen Maeve. A god of love, youth and poetry, Aengus who is crossed in love reminds us of the poet himself. In celtic myth there is a story of the love between Deirdre and Naoise: love with a lot of risks and sacrifices. This love is contrasted with the possessive and destructive lust of Conchubar. Then there is a theme of honor and dishonor. And finally there is beauty. Much is made of the extraordinary beauty of Deirdre, and it is a male reaction to her beauty that brings about “the sorrows.” In Deirdre Yeats selected certain elements which seem to be characteristic of the tale and dramatic in themselves, and introduced three wandering musicians, who are not in the myth. Deirdre was the Irish Helen, and Naisi her Paris, and Concobar her Menelaus. Yeats’s thematic structure provides the clearest link between the Irish myth and heroic romance. He wrote it in praise of the heroic woman, of “wild will”, and of passionate love and the powerful and joyous shattering of common codes and lives. Emer is the admirable wife of a great hero Cuchulain. She is beautiful, healthy, strong, intelligent, and vigorous. Her love for Cuchulain is the best of human love. In The Only Jealousy of Emer Yeats elevates Emer to the same tragic stature as Deirdre, the heroine of his Deirdre. Told by Bricriu that she must renounce her love for Cuchulain as the price for his return to life, Emer decides at the last moment to accept this bitter choice and return Cuchulain, ironically, to the arms of his mistress. These celtic women’s beauty may be representative not only of physical beauty but also the high aspirations of the soul. They are not virgins but mothers or wives. The heroic women show us that love makes humans mature. In these Plays Yeats turned to romantic dreaming, the tradition of nobility in the ancient celtic myths.

In this thesis I discussed feministic attitudes in the works of three writers: William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Butler Yeats’ A Woman Young and Old, and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching(道德經). Blake and Yeats were English visionary poets and Lao Tzu was an Old Master who lived in the 2nd century B.C. in Han Dynasty China. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion Blake is not only concerned with the rights of women but also with the slavery systems and freedom. The heroine is called ‘soft soul of America.’ Blake knew the first radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and may be responding to her enthusiasm for the emancipation of women. Moreover, the oppression of Oothoon is bound up with the campaign of the early 1790s against both the slave trade and the nearer cruelties in the exploitation of child labour. The heroine Oothoon is raped by Bromion and abandoned by her lover, Theotormon. Theotormon’s jealousy binds them, back to back in a cave. Bromion’s violence and Theotomon’s jealousy and oppression cause her woe. She is trying to justify the innocence of love, the joy in the making of love and delight in life, the beautiful in every life. Her long outburst against hypocrisy in marriage and restraint in love in the third section of the poem is for women repressed by men in traditional and Christian society. She wants to be a human, not a servant of man. In A Woman Young and Old the woman speaks first in youth, then in age. This series of poems are companion poems to those of A Man Young and Old. These poetic sequences have an identical structure of eleven poems, ending with a section from Yeats’ translation of the Oedipus cycle. The first poem, “Father and Child” opens with an image of a young woman leaving the conventional world and the judgment of other people for an attractive life and her own opinions. In the sixth poem in the central position, “Chosen” the woman takes for her theme the theme of the poem. The young woman compares the peace and feeling of completeness after lovemaking to the perfect moment when the “Zodiac is changed into a sphere,” the Thirteenth Cycle or Thirteenth Cone in A Vision. It is that cycle which may deliver us from the twelve cycles of time and space. In the last poem, “From the ‘Antigone’” the old woman, now a tragic heroine, narrates her descent “into the loveless dust.” The heroine in A Woman Young and Old tries to find her own voice and life. In the first chapter of Tao Te Ching the nameless Tao is the origin of heaven and earth which grows the myriad things. Thus these two are the same. Upon appearing, they are named differently. Their sameness is the mystery, mystery within mystery. Heaven is the symbol of man; earth is the symbol of woman. Man and woman have the same root, and their union makes the myriad things. In the sixth chapter of the book Lao Tzu praises feminity, called ‘the valley spirit,’ the root of heaven and earth. The valley is used metaphorically as a symbol of ‘emptiness’ or ‘vacancy;’ ‘the spirit of the valley’ is something invisible, yet almost personal, belonging to the Tao. ‘The female mystery’ is the name of chapter 1, or the Tao which is ‘the Mother of all things.’ All living beings have a father and a mother. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching could be translated as The Law (or Canon) of Virtue and its Way. He thought that all straining, all striving is not only vain but counterproductive. One should endeavor to do nothing (wu-wei). It means not to do anything literally, but to discern and follow the natural forces-to flow with events and not to pit oneself against the natural order of things. In this way Taoist philosophy reached out to council rulers and advised them how to govern their domains. Blake and Yeats insist women’s human rights and the union of man and woman can give us the perfect moment in this life. Lao Tzu teaches us feministic Tao and the harmony of man and woman. The three share great wisdom about the order of the nature and can elucidate the way of Feminism.

Modernism is not a rejection of the mass culture but rather an effort to produce a mass culture, perhaps for the first time, to produce a culture distinctive to the twentieth century, which Le Bon called “the era of the crowds.’ The conservatives who followed him, developed a different ideas of the relation between the aristocracy that built culture and the masses. Yeats viewed the theatre as a potential means of mobilizing and nationalizing the masses, something he recognized any successful nationalism in the age of mass politics must do. His wish to nationalize the masses led him to cast the playwright and stage as magicians with the power to transform the audience as Cathleen transforms Michael in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Le Bon’s vision is very similar to Pound’s and Yeats’s: they all defined the goal of social change and of their art as the producing of a deep wave from the unconscious. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is about a crowd. A wet, black bough is a restored cultural center that will hold together the chaotic small waves now agitating society. Modernism was an effort to write based the unconscious mass.

In “Among School Children” Yeats meditated on lover’s passion, nun’s piety, and mother’s affection in the tradition of Plato’s dualistic philosophy. Plato’s philosophy is an idealistic system resting on a sharply defined dualism between mind and matter, God and the world, body and soul. Soul is always superior to body. Soul is the ideal world; body is the present world. Therefore, those who worship images like lover, nun and mother can not fulfill their dreams in the present world. There is a conflict in the dualistic world. But in the last stanza of the poem, the poet showed us the unified world of soul and body as in Hawom thought. The main features of the Hawom thought belong to Tushun and Chihyum, and Bobchang in China. Great Monk Euisang studied under Chihyum and later held the title of National Teacher in Shilla Era of Korea. His thought was given a pictorial form: a meander design made up of a poem consisting of 210 Chinese characters entitled the Hwaom Iisung Bubgyedo: the cosmology of dharma in the One-yana of Avatamsaka philosophy. In this paper I interpret the last stanza of the poem in the light of Euisang’s Hawom vision. The Hawom vision of the world can contribute to solving the problem of dualistic conflict. The Hawom vision of the world is based on the Mahayana ontology of Emptiness(sunyata) or nonsubstantiality. In Euisang’s Bobsungge, soul and body are not different from each other because both have nonsubstantiality. Yeats also said “Labour is blossoming or dancing where/ The body is not bruised to pleasure soul” in the first and second lines of the last stanza. He continued his song, “O Chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,/ Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?” Euisang sang “One is in all, all is in one: one is all, all is one.” A Chestnut-tree consists of the leaf, the blossom, and the bole. The relationship between a part and the whole is in “organic” unity: a part is in the whole, the whole is in a part: a part is the whole, the whole is a part. Yeats argued “How can we know the dancer from the dance,” Euisang suggested ie is not differ from sa. For example, in a golden statue of lion, gold is ie, the statue is sa. ie is represented by sa. The dance is represented by the dancer. Nothing is self-sufficient and all things are interdependent. The Hawom philosophy views the world as a harmonious whole without any dualistic conflict of its fundamental nature. Euisang and Yeats showed us a beautiful vision of the universal reconciliation and harmony of all beings in the world. Euisang called it Buddha’s world whereas Yeats called it “Unity of Being.”

The aim of this study is to analyze Yeats’s first essay on Shelley, “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry” and Shelley’s impact on Yeats. The essay was divided into two sections, “His Ruling Ideas” and “His Ruling Symbols.” In “His Ruling Ideas,” Yeats pays his attention to Shelley’s Intellectual Beauty which is the perception of beauty in thought and things. He began to write three early works on the search for love - The Seeker, The Island of Statues, and Mosada. In the nineties, particularly in The Rose poems, his study of Shelley impelled him toward an Intellectual vision of life in which he rejected the flawed world for an ideal vision of Intellectual Beauty. Later Yeats was to regret finding only Intellectual Beauty . He then reversed Shelley’s quest, and searched not to find the ideal, but to rediscover the actual. But when Yeats wrote the essay, he could not realize Shelley’s full gifts as a poet. In “His Ruling Symbols,” Yeats writes about the symbols of Shelley’s cave, river, tower, the Morning and Evening star, and Sun and Moon. The symbols of Shelley occur together and represent the ideal world which Yeats also wanted to achieve in the present world. In “The Gyres,” “Under Ben Bulben,” “The Phases of the Moon,” “The Tower,” “Blood and the Moon,” and “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” have verbal echoes of, or allusions to the Shelleyan passages that Yeats quotes. The relation between Shelley and Yeats deepens our appreciation of Yeats’ work. “Shelley,” he wrote, “shaped my life.”