In December, 2007 the present writer wrote a paper on the errors in interpretation in which I raised an objection to the two Korean professors' translation of ‘hole’ which appear in the first stanza of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” into Korean 구멍. Instead, the present writer insisted that ‘hole’ means ‘a deep place in a body of water’, one of the definitions of the word as described in Webster's Third New International Dictionary in that the meaning harmonizes well with the whole poem. But in May, 2009, Mr. Kim, Sangmoo, Professor Emeritus of Young Nam University read his paper to the effect that the present writer was wrong. His paper subjected the present writer to a thorough examination into the matter. In the course of close examination, the present writer came upon a book entitled A Yeats Dictionary. The present writer consulted the book for some hint leading to the solution of the present issue. At last the present writer found what he wanted in its entry, Coole Park. It read, "The lake further fascinated Yeats because its only drain was a narrow subterranean passage which caused the lake to double and treble its size in winter." All quess-works are needed no more. The present writer had to own that he made a mistake by his hasty conclusion. The ‘hole’ was the only drain in Coole lake, so that its translation into ‘구멍’ in Korean does not mar the meaning of the poem. In addition, this research proved fruitful in some other way. In the process of solving the above-mentioned point in question, the present writer faced a problematical and arbitrary way of Prof. Kim's presenting his argument in his paper. This gave the present writer a motivation to suggest, although in a crude way, a desirable mode of presenting arguments in paper.

It cannot be too much emphasized that in reading and appreciating poems, a correct understanding and interpretation of them is necessary; in criticizing and teaching them, a correct understanding based on the correct interpretation is a must. In the course of translating "Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931" into Korean, it was found that both American and Korean scholars have made some errors in interpreting the poem.　Two American scholars, Thomas R. Whitaker and Daniel A. Harris, made the same misinterpretation of the 4th line in the second stanza of the poem. They saw “all the rant” as made by the poetic speaker. Cross-checking the sentence structure and contextual meaning of the part makes it reasonable to say that the rant was a line uttered by Nature, the tragic hero of the tragedy which is the winter season. In the same way two Korean scholars made the same mistranslation of the word “hole” in the first stanza. They translated the word as an empty space within the bottom of the bed of Lake Coole. When one applies the sense to the line where the word belongs, the meaning of the part does not fit in well with the meaning of the whole poem. After all, it is also reasonable to say that the word “hole” means “a deep place in a body of water” in that the meaning harmonizes well with that of the whole stanza. In view of the errors committed in common by both Anglo-American and Korean scholars, no one can be expected to be perfect in interpreting literary works. Perfect interpretation is an ideal which every literary critic aims at but does not attain. This ideal can never be realized by a single person; but by the collaborative work of many researchers engaged in elucidation of the same literary work in their own way. This is, specifically, true of the Korean scholars who usually rely upon what their Anglo-American counterparts say about the literary works of the Anglo-American writers and poets. When this kind of collaborative work has been accumulated, and is easily accessible to our junior scholars, they will benefit greatly by avoiding the confusion suffered often by their senior scholars.

In 1938 Yeats had his New Poems (starting with “The Gyres”and ending with “Are You Content?”) published by Cuala Press. These poems were, however, mixed up with the real last poems written between January 1938 and January 1939 under the heading of Last Poems and Plays published in 1940 to be incorporated in the Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats. This editorial work turned out to be ill-advised and unfortunate: Yeats's intention to make a new beginning with New Poems was, in fact, obscured. It is quite natural that one should consider “The Gyres,” the first poem of New Poems suggestive of what the new start was and what change in his attitude of mind toward life stimulated Yeats to do that. Yeats systematized what he had learned from his long involvement in various mystical activities in his own way in A Vision. He probably wished his statements in the book about man, and history would be proved on the empirical level so that he might make confident poetic statements of them. At this juncture he certainly experienced a kind of epiphany: he probably attained to visionary insight that man, history and things are nothing but phenomena in flux. From this insight he gained two things: one was, as he said, nonchalance, that is, a detached attitude to life and things, the other was confidence in himself when making poetic statements out of anything. These two made his new beginning possible. They are summed up in the expressions, “The Gyres! the Gyres!”, “what matter?”, “tragic joy,” and “Rejoice.”

Yeats received a letter from Sturge Moore complaining about the way he dealt with the goldsmith's bird in his “Sailing to Byzantium”. After Yeats had done a complete version of “Byzantium”, he wrote to Sturge Moore saying, "The poem originates from a criticism of yours." He added that the idea needed exposition. The focus of this paper is to discuss what that idea was which needed exposition. Frank Kermode maintained that Yeats wrote the latter poem to make more absolute the distinction between the goldsmith's bird as the Image and the natural bird. On the other hand, A. E. Dyson argued that Moore's criticism "can be safely ignored." Balancing these two contrary views, we have to rely on what Yeats himself implies as to this topic. What Yeats has to say about Byzantium as a symbolic city can be found in his poem itself and in his book A Vision. In the poem, we find the following expressions, "A Starlet or moonlit dome disdains / All that man is, / All mere complexities / The fury and the mire of human veins." As is evident to all Yeats students, a starlet night is a moonless night, phase 1 (complete objectivity) and a moonlit night is a full moon (complete subjectivity) in his system. These two phases represent superhuman purity. At these two phases human life cannot exist; for all human life entails a mixture of the subjective and the objective, hence "mere complexities." But their importance lies in the fact that they point to two different directions for human beings to pursue perfection. He wrote in his A Vision, "in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one." In addition, we have a great dome, symbolic of inclusiveness and the process of purgation in stanzas 4 and 5. We can infer that Yeats tried to represent Byzantium as an ideal city where "religious, aesthetic and practical life" are lived out in harmony with the vision of perfection available to man. But as night becomes day in Byzantium itself, "unpurged images" will surge upon the streets of Byzantium, and so goes on and on the process of purgation.