Yeats and Blake consistently used rhetorical counter-questions whenever they expressed spiritual ambivalence of human existence throughout their poetry. Although Yeats was influenced by Blake, he explored different subject matters to express diverse ambivalence. While Yeats focused on ambivalent fusion of spiritual and physical conflicts, Blake focused on ambivalent integration of theological, social, and moral conflicts. Yeats used rhetorical counter-questions to express the ambivalent unseen reality in "The Second Coming," "Among School Children," "Leda and Swan," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War." "Beast" in "The Second Coming," "dancer" in "Among School Children," Helen in "Leda and Swan," and "dream" in "Towards Break of Day" connote fusion images of opposing objects to evoke many aspects of one thing by using rhetorical counter-question. Also, Blake used rhetorical counter-questions to express the ambivalent spiritual, social, and ethical reality in "Tyger" and "A Little Boy Lost." Especially, Blake qualified spiritual ambivalence through various images of fire in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" in that fire includes associated meanings of heaven and hell. Most of Blake's spiritual poems often begins with a rhetorical counter-question and ends with a rhetorical counter-question to strengthen the significance of ambivalent archetypal cycle. Although both poets differ from each other on human spiritual value, they used rhetorical counter-questions to free from religious, political, moral, social, and traditional repression in their poetry. In this sense, men are making meanings through their mystic imagination which is free from religion and tradition rather than scientific reason. Therefore, Yeats and Blake used rhetorical counter-questions to qualify open aspects of human imagination and to complete archetypal counter cycle.

Eliot seems to have been much impressed by Yeats's poetics and poetic techniques, in particular the union of emotion and reason. Not only is Yeats a supreme Romantic - he is a poet of mysticism. To Eliot, Yeats is not just a great poet, but a great craftsman; Yeats's reputation as such a poet has remained strong, from the beginning up until now, as Eliot has foreseen. In Yeats's works, there are both aesthetic and mysterious elements, and just as we could call him a romantic-mystic poet. Eliot thinks highly of Yeats's pure poetry, with poetics based on the principle of art for art's sake. He praises Yeats as a great poet-craftsman, as we have seen in his works above. Yeats has been under the influence of French symbolists's poetic techniques, such as those of Baudelaire, Mallareme,. Neval, Verlaine. In Yeats's works, there is their influence.

This paper is an attempt to understand George Yeats: who she was, how she lived, and what kind of relationship she had with the poet W. B. Yeats. Based on the recent biographical and critical studies of Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Brenda Maddox, Ann Saddlemyer, and Margaret Mills Harper, the present writer tries to show that George Yeats was not only the devoted wife of W. B. Yeats and mother of their two children, but also the poet's literary and spiritual collaborator. The first introductory part of the paper deals with George Yeats's life until she married W. B. Yeats. Her birth and education, the first meeting with W. B. Yeats, and the establishing of a close relationship which, strengthened by common interest in occultism, led to their marriage in October 1917, are briefly surveyed. The paper then discusses the problem which arose from Yeats's unresolved sexual love for Iseult Gonne, and shows how George Yeats solved it by trying the automatic script at their honeymoon hotel. The automatic script, which saved George and W. B. Yeats at the critical moment, and dominated the early years of their married life, is mainly discussed in the next part of the paper. The paper first describes how it started, and then discusses the main issues related to it: why George did it, and whether it was "her hoax, a joint self-deception, or daimonic intervention" (Saddlemye xix), and how it affected W. B. Yeats's life and work. In order to see how W. B. Yeats expressed his feeling and thought about the automatic script in his poems, the writer of the paper reads "Solomon to Sheba," "Solomon and the Witch," and "The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid." The last part of the paper deals with George Yeats's life after the automatic script and the "sleeps" ended in summer 1922. Unlike the exciting and sexually intimate life of early five years, the later long years of her married life were very tiring and "problem-ridden." The paper discusses the major problems she had to face as wife of the great poet and mother of two children, and describes how she "lived through it with self-possession, with generosity, with something like nobility" (Elllmann xxviii).

This paper examines Yeats's idea of hero and heroism in his Cuchulain plays. Cuchulain is the mythological champion of the ancient province of Ulster. He is the protagonist in a cycle of plays written by Yeats over a span of thirty-five years. Cuchulain became for Yeats a personal symbol for the heroic as well as the national ideal. He was not only his mask or alter ego but also the chief representative of that heroic age to which Yeats wished Ireland to aspire. Yeats significantly altered the Celtic legend to serve his dramatic purposes. He was concerned more with the nature of heroism than with the character and the life of the Ulster champion. So he was not interested in the hero's superhuman feats of arms or bravery which his source had emphasized. Instead he wished his countrymen to learn the hero's spiritual virtues: the unyielding spirit of challenge in At the Hawk's Well; selfless courage and sacrifice for his country in The Green Helmet; the comparison and contrast between the actual anti-heroic world and the heroic ideal in On Baile's Strand; true love and self-sacrifice of his wife in The Only Jealousy of Emer; forgiveness, mercy, unselfishness, and transcendence of the fear of death in The Death of Cuchulain. Cuchulain's heroism consists in a combination of daring, gaiety, strength and beauty, and he is a free man, a challenger who, whether he wins or loses a specific battle, is ultimately victorious over himself and over others. The hero is freed from every form of hesitation, both moral and physical. The essence of Yeats's heroism is sacrifice and the creative joy separated from fear.

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.

The paper compares Yeats and Renoir. In his Autobiography, Yeats mentions Manet and Monet in passing, but by the time he received his Nobel Prize for literature, he has formed a clear idea of French impressionism and knows painters, such as Monet. Though Yeats has never touched on Renoir, he is very much like him, sharing the same poetics of art: the heavenly vision of the world, and puts it into practice in his works, such as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” which is the main focus of my study in this paper. Then I try to establish a link with Renoir. Like Yeats, he regards art as an expression of heavenly vision, turning his landscapes into Heaven on earth; his nudes into a unionizing of nature and man. It is the poetics of Unity of Being in Yeats's term. Renoir in his later life suffers from severe physical pain, being wheelchair-bound because of his rheumatism. Despite his personal hardship, Renoir never wavers and aims to transform the worldly into the heavenly. His painting is, thus, a manifestation of his beautiful vision of the landscapes of the other world he will live in.

As a symbolist, Yeats used many symbols in his collected poetry. Therefore, if you do not know what the symbols in Yeats's poetry are, you cannot understand the hidden meanings in Yeats’s mystic and prophetic poetry. One of the significant symbols of Yeats’s early Rose poetry is the Immortal Rose as the Divine Feminine, Daughter Sophia in Christian Gnosticism. Yeats not only emphasized the feminine principle as a symbol of the Immortal Rose but emphasized the role of the masculine principle with various symbols. Especially, in Stories of the Red Hanrahan, Red Hanrahan symbolized as the role of the masculine principle, searching for the Immortal Rose, Echtge through his lifetime. Therefore, Red Hanrahan is identified with Yeats's self-portrait as well as a symbol of the Arthurian Knight, searching for the Holy Grail as the Divine Feminine. After the symbol of the Immortal Rose in his early poetry, Yeats continued to display the symbol of the feminine principle with various animal symbols such as a hare, cat, colt, and lion.Yeats alluded that the Immortal Rose was suffering on the rood of time during the last 2000 years period of the androcentric age. The meeting of the hare and the hunters represents the balance of the masculine and the feminine principles as the New Age comes. The hare is identified with a dying lady in “Upon a Dying Lady” as a hidden savior, suffering in the world. However, the death does not represent a real death but symbolized as the recovery of Sophia's glory and power. As Red Harahan’s anti-self, the fool dreamed the meeting with the hare and the hunters and hounds. The meeting is a paradoxical symbol for Yeats to hide his mystic poetry from the world until the right time comes. Yeats believed that at last his beloved, the Immortal Rose would awaken from a deep sleep and open his prophetic poetry in the last generation of the masculine Trinity age. A cat also represents the wisdom and dignity of the Daughter Sophia in the world. It is contrast with the symbol of the hare, symbolized as a sacrifice and sufferings of Daughter Sophia. Therefore, the symbols of the cat and the hare are related to two aspects of the feminine principle: proud and sad Rose. Yeats asked all sages in the last generation as a symbol of hunters and hounds to search for the hare, the Immortal Rose in the world. Yeats also prophesied that the last reincarnation of the Immortal Rose, would come from the East as the cat crawls into the Buddha represented Asian religion. Therefore, Yeats emphasized all sages to turn to the East, representing “Meru” and “Buddha” to find the last reincarnation of the Immortal Rose. The cat image also developed the symbol of the lion. The Daughter Sophia symbolized as a cat would awaken and recover her glory and power as showed the Sphinx in “The Second Coming.” As the 2000 years period of the androcentric gyre is gone, the Immortal Rose will have her characters such as Jane and the fierce young woman, who severely criticizes the bishop and she was angry at the persecutors during the androcentric age. Yeats showed the symbols of the Divine Feminine such as Sphinx, Buddha and a girl but they are One. It is related to the three aspects of the Immortal Rose such as red, proud, and sad Rose. She is in the world as showed "a plummet-measured face." Mathematics is a symbol of material not supernatural. Yeats prophesied the hunters, the chosen men to search for the Immortal Rose, the hare when the right time comes. The Sphinx’s “Empty eye ball” may be related to the “cold eye” symbolized as disdain and breaking the imperfect world as the great Judge in the Last Great Judgment Day. The colt symbolizes as the sufferings of the Immortal Rose like a hare. However, Yeats prophesied that the colt also would be released by the suppress from the masculine Trinity age. At the end of the androcentric age, the masculine principle would be united with the feminine principle as the symbol of the dead hare meets hunters and hounds in “Hound Voice.” The meeting of the hare and the hounds represents the Immortal Rose meet with the sages to prepare for the New Age. Therefore, the various animals and hunting in Yeats's poetry are paradoxical symbols to show the achievement of “Unity of Being” and the New Age.

Analysis of how texts’ rhetorical strategies endanger or sustain the narcissistic structure of the self is an important approach in recent deconstruction criticism. This criticism carries out a challenge to the analogy between the mind and nature that is to establish a coherent image of the mind and the self. By taking Wordsworth’s the Prelude and a few poems in the earliest Yeats, this essay focuses more centrally on threats to the self and the possibility of self-representation posed by the process of representation itself. In Book IV of The Prelude, the dynamic of passion and memory operates through the image of self-knowledge as a ‘reflection.’ The motion from past to present is a totalization of the self by means of metonymical substitution: the mere eye that looks into the water receives a whole image. But as the word hang, deeps, and gleam suggest, the motion is not necessary to lead to a totality of the self. Passion and prop of affection is always already involved in the self-reflection, preventing it from closing upon itself. The complex dynamic of passion and memory thus is inimical to self-representation. The Blessed Babe passage in Book II is also governed by the figure of passage, present here in the word passion as a sort of originary movement. The self-recognition of the poet is structured as crossing between past and present relations. Here substitution occurs as a transformation of the negation of the mother into a positive gain of nature. But the phrase ‘unknown cause’ and the reference to a ‘trouble’ imply the disruption of the passage from the maternal props to natural properties. The dominant mood of Yeats's earliest poetry is one of narcissistic self-contemplation. The poet in the mood does not contemplate a thing in nature but the working of his own mind. The outside world is used as a pretext and a mirror for self-representation. In “The Song of the Happy Shepherd,” the shell is not sheer nature, impressing itself upon a passively receptive consciousness, but the subjective dream of a human imagination. In spite of the apparent replacement of all the substance of the object by its reflection, however, the image of the shell remains altogether conditioned by the existence of this object. The reflection can be left to exist as a mere phantom of the self without substantial existence of nature. The failure is made explicit in “The Sad Shepherd” where the same shell shatters his song into confusion. Yeats is well aware of this paradox. In order to escape from this narcissistic predicament, for example, he uses the image of a parrot in “The Indian to His Love” who rages “at his own image in the enamelled sea.”

Symbolism is central in Yeats’s work. His symbols can be thought of as many sided crystals, which “grow from solutions of traditions, from the dissolved thoughts of many minds”(Henn 146). They are the context of meaning, allowing for multiple interpretations and variations within themselves. Yeats believes the perceived difference between the language of poetry and that of ordinary speech to be arbitrary, arguing, “we should write out our thoughts in as nearly as possible the language we thought them in.” After 1900 Yeats’s style changed radically as he worked toward simplicity, reducing the use of adjectives, and aiming for a harmony of metaphor, symbol, and diction more natural, vigorous, and sincere. The most complex facet of Yeats’s poetry is perhaps its linguistic subtlety and nondiscursiveness. He does not tell the reader what to think, but aims to evoke emotion or feelings through particularly resonant imagery. This article aims to argue that symbols in Yeats are not fixed at an unique point, but ubiquitous at any point, and therefore are infinite. The first part of the article examines, in the process of proving infinity in symbol, picturesque images in later poems, which are analyzed from the point of view of Benjamin’s language theory. The second part addresses the argument that Yeats intends to reveal, through picturesque images, not material objects but emotion and feelings, or the mental life via images. The last part argues that symbols in Yeats’s poetry are infinite, as reflects the infinitude of language as his medium.

Purgatory includes as its main themes Yeats’s feeling of crisis and anxiety as an Anglo-Irish who was alienated from the Irish society, his skeptical view of the modern Ireland which was seeking after materialism and his predilection for eugenic thought. In Purgatory, Yeats reveals those representative themes of his later writing using the conventions of Gothic: for instance, the supernatural modes such as the transgression of the ancestors, whose tragic result affects the present, the ruined house, wild landscape, and the ghosts, the theme of ‘life in death’ and ‘the death in life’, the opposition of nature and culture and the Freudian psychological characteristics such as ‘the return of the repressed’ and ‘the uncanny.’ This paper aims to analyse how Yeats borrows and modifies those traditional Gothic conventions to convey his themes in a more effective and impressive way and to finally argue that Yeats came to be skeptical about the heroic theme and its representation. Yeats places the old man as a narrator who speaks for his thoughts, but at the same time he puts him as an unreliable narrator and shows us his limitation. Here arises irony, through which Yeats reconsiders his heroic theme that he has insisted throughout his lifetime. Through the old man’s failure to save his mother from her repeated pain of purgatory and his consequent helplessness, Yeats reveals the anti-heroic theme.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the current state of W. B. Yeats’s poems in Korean translation. My examination includes nearly all of the Korean translations of the quoted verse lines of Yeats’s poems appearing in The Yeats Journal of Korea between 2006 and 2008, and parts of translations of Yeats’s works published as separate volumes by the Yeats Society of Korea since 2003. Although so far three generations of scholars have actively engaged in Yeats studies and translation of his works since 1945 when academic research on the poet began in Korea, the translation endeavours by the second and third generation scholars have not yielded satisfactory results and that the senior group of scholars cannot shirk its responsibility.The problem areas in the translations include choice of words and phrases, tense adjustment, versification and punctuation as well as scene description and poetic imagining. Following a detailed discussion of inappropriate and awkward translations, I offer my own translation for comparison if need be.

The paper searches parallels between English and Korean poetry as represented by Kim Chunsoo and Kim Jonggil, two of modern and contemporary poets in relation to W. B. Yeats. It clarifies the validity of such a comparative study by showing the interrelationship in the visual art, for it is there physically to see, as exemplified by the giving and receiving of Picasso and Matisse through their works. Even though it is not that easy in poetry, it is nevertheless possible to relate such relationship in it. Yeats has been a great influence on English and American poets; and a large number of researches and studies have been done. But Yeats has not been compared with Korean poets, in part because Korean and English are totally different languages. But as this study has shown, this kind of study could give benefits to both scholars and writers as well. This paper selects two of Kim Chunsoo’s early poems to compare with Yeats’s parallels. The fact is, Yeats’s poems seem to have had influence on the early Kim. Kim's poetry is different, though. What we could benefit from this study is that Korean poets need not worry about influences from great foreign poets. Understanding foreign language poetry helps Korean poets enrich their own poetry by learning what their true self is, what language Korean is; Kim must have learned that from reading Yeats. The paper takes and analyzes Kim Jonggil in relation with Yeats. Kim Jonggil is different from Kim Chunsoo; Kim Jonggil teaches Yeats and other poets in English. But what interests me is he is far different from other Korean poets. He seems to have transcended foreign influences, not to mention that he has outgrown Yeats and other English poets. Two of Kim’s poems are elaborated in relation with Yeats’s. I deal with Kim’s supreme poem with one of Yeats’s best. Kim’s quality compares well with Yeats’s, but his poetry itself is different from Yeats’s.

Yeats’s studies of ancient myths, legends and occult tradition form a part of his artistic enterprise to quest for the occult wisdom and reaffirm the power of occult imagination. His work is so deeply immersed in the supernatural that it intends to regenerate the modern world by reopening ancient spiritual wellsprings and reviving primal religious sensibilities. His interest in occultism did most to create occult images and symbols as signs of imaginative salvation. Yeats’s mystical lore helped him ascertain the spiritual reality within human consciousness and use magical symbols as a means of calling up visions. Art for Yeats is about the “wisdom of the daemonic image” which holds for a moment of illumination the warring opposites of flesh and soul. Yeats created occult images of spiritual intensity to convey the quality of the Unity of Being out of the increasingly scientific and secular culture of the modern age. His occult images create the rich texture of his poetry that examines the spiritual situation of modern humanity.

This paper focuses on the problems of poor imagination presented in the later poems of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats. Being older and being barren of ideas, both poets feel the bitter anguish about their poetry writing. In his later poem, “Of Mere Being,” Stevens continues his endeavor to picture the ‘abstract’ or true reality but fails to accomplish “a supreme fiction” that is his own ultimate form of poetry. Yeats also seriously doubts of his own capabilities and laments the lack of theme as well as of subject matter in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Although the imagination is sterile, however, the desire itself does not wither away totally. The elderly Stevens simply was not blessed with creative imagination in his later years. Hence, only the “mere” reality repetitively and gallantly appears in “Of Mere Being” and other later works. Yeats also does not give up but undertakes to write significant poems with integrity.

This paper investigates the images of landscapes in the poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, the two greatest poets of the last century. Facing landscapes of the present world and the ancient as well, using his imagination, Yeats maximizes the poetic quality in his poetry. Some of his favorite landscapes, for example, include Innisfree, an islet in Sligo, Thor Ballylee in Coole Park, Byzantium, which delineate clear-cut images of his poetic themes. Either Yeats lived in Sligo with his mother's parents in his childhood, stayed in Lady Gregory’s house in the Coole Park, and owned and lived in the tower, Thor Ballylee in summer; or he admired the old Byzantium that he idealizes in his supreme poems. They serve as optimum metaphors for his poetry, making his poetry simple but rich in its imagery. On the other hand, Eliot focuses on delineating the life of modern man in his poetry by using cities, including London, Boston, Paris, and St. Louis. The people of the cities are being described as faithless and purposeless with their mind void. His depiction of the city further represents the whole modern civilization. The big city is the backdrop of such infertile imagery of modern man.

This paper aims to study Yeats and Nietzsche through Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” in some of Yeats’s poems. In 1902, Yeats first read Nietzsche’s works; through Nietzsche Yeats’s voice turned into a manly voice. An internal conflict appears as a Mask theory in Yeats's poetry. Self and Anti-self (Mask) are two components in the Mask theory. While Will is an internal and subjective self, Mask is a social and objective self. The internal conflicts between Will and Mask determine the human mind. Yeats’s “Mask” and “Ego Dominus Tuus” exemplify Will to Power as an internal conflict. Nietzsche’s Will to Power is a concept of quantity based upon the law of energy preservation refusing causality, the movement ascending and descending and the eternal recurrence of the same. Similarly, Yeat in his A Vision has rewritten a European history based upon the theory of opposite forces in a gyre. He classifies personalities into 28 types based one phases of the moon. Assigned to Phase 12, the phase of heroic man who overcomes himself, Nietzsche is a forerunner; who is fragmentary, violent, and subjective. Perspectivism, a kind of Will to Power, is a plural and relative point of view that is classified into 4 categories; Will to Power as knowledge ("Leda and the Swan"), art ("Ego Dominus Tuus"), love ("Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers"), and truth ("Demon and Beast"). In conclusion, Yeats’s later poems achieve a creative and powerful voice when he thinks and speaks with Nietzsche; in particular, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, a philosophy of Being and Becoming, is echoed in some of Yeats’s later poems.

Building on the readings of Yeats’s esoteric poems, essays, and A Vision, I poses to rethink the ethical dimensions of his occultism, more specifically his reflection on an encounter with the transcendental beings. The need for rearticulation of the role of the ethical, that is the relation to the other gains urgency because the transcendental beings are by nature obscure, indistinct, and indefinite. They resist too much clarification and determination that may reduce their complicated and irreducible beings to distinct concepts. The difficulty, therefore, lies in the question of how Yeats could present the beings in a manner as precise, proper, and rigorous as possible and at the same time he could respect and honor the mode in which the beings conceals themselves in the mystery, by letting them be the mystery that they are. A Vision was the culmination of Yeats’s lifelong wish to relate the divinity of the supernational beings to the human soul. In order not to present God as a personal deity, Yeats says only about the nearest equivalent his system offers to God, the gnomically-named Thirteenth Cone. The Cone is actually a sphere because sufficient to itself, but as seen by man it is a cone. It is more a symbol of the human relationship to the ultimate being than a symbol of that ultimate itself. Otherwise unknowable, the supernatural beings could be evoked by symbols. The symbol's job for Yeats therefore is not, first and foremost, cognition, in the sense of understanding, calculation, and definition, but instead bringing what is other for language and thought into the openness of its alterity and maintaining this alterity against the power of cognitive assimilation. Yeats lets the symbols work up the mind to evoke the world of the supernatural beings, which will remain unknown to those who relay on the evidence of their senses. “The Cold Heaven” gives a good illustration of the human relation to the supernational beings, for it combines Yeats's own personal history with his supernatural vision. Staring at a winter sky, he desperately looks back at where his life has gone, gathering together in a passionate fusion the lacerating memory of his failure with Gonne and his themes of death, ghosts and dreams. Supernatural Songs shows how Ribh's ecstasy in an encounter with the supernatural being not only arises from the contemplation of things vaster than the individual and imperfectly seen but also escapes from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement. "The Spirit Medium" well exemplifies the phenomenon of permeable structure inhabiting different regions of reality simultaneously so that the world of the supernatural being and that of the individual, inside and outside, one side and the other, subject and the other, appear as correlated and overlapped as equal parts of the inhuman symbolic spirit medium.

This article examines Yeats’s laughter which operates as an overtone, undercurrent, or a keynote throughout all his work. We discover that his comic aspects betray various meanings or nuances. First, the comic elements in Yeats are explosive in that they function as a means of disorienting and transgressing social regulations, and social categories like class, gender, race within a social system. Moreover, laughing escapes from and discards the established system at a burst as the disproportionate laughter of King Goll in “The Madness of King Goll.” Furthermore, Tom’s laugh in “Tom O’Roughley” concentrates itself on the aimless joy as Derrida says that laughing laughs at itself like a sovereign operation. Secondly, the laughing in Yeats is conveyed in the degradation of the dignified or exalted objects. Freud says that the increased expenditure of the solemn restraint discharges vacantly when it does not satisfy its higher purpose. Sometimes the lightest thing can acquire superiority over the weightiest by pulling down or aerification which makes the solemnity unable to retain its dignity. In “Crazy Jane Reproved,” Jane challenges the omnipotent God with such lighthearted refrain as fol de rol. The technique of pulling down applies to the depreciation of national monument or eternal art. Yeats knows well that Maud Gonne will be slighted by the coming generations and that the great Irish patriots, O’Donell, Emmet, and Parnell can also be mocked severely. Likewise the eternal art as the marble of Callimachus cannot avoid damages from weightless wind. Yet, for Yeats laughing is not always easy to express; he cannot release any laughter encountering with the same situation as effortless laughing was possible once. In “The Apparitions,” Yeats confesses that he required all his energies to disperse the fright of an apparition which he could easily have laughed at last time. On the other hand, there is an occasion in which the childish and vulgar comic changes to utter solemnity like a revolution. Yeats examines the transformation of the middle class carefully from indulging in silly talks to generating terrible beauty in “Easter 1916.” The trivial levity turns into the sublime inconceivably without intention. Lastly Yeats proposes a peculiar and paradoxical laughter which is difficult to vocalize as in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.” This sort of laugh cannot surpass the burden of secular life, but great sweetness like Nietzsche’s tragic joy can break out even if the afflictions of human life make it distorted.

Natural Image in Yeats`s early poetry shows the relationship and tension between nature and consciousness. In Romantic poetry, natural image comes to be the most prominent dimension of the style. Natural image mediates between natural object and human consciousness and becomes an critical indicator of the problematic crisis related with the status of poetic language. Assuming the pantheistic nostalgia toward nature and the ontological primacy of the natural object, poetic consciousness compares poetic language to the natural object and desires to give poetic language the stability and substantiality of the natural object. However, poetic language which originates from nothingness differs from the natural object which is an epiphany, a natural emanation of a transcendental principle. Due to the ontological difference between them, poetic language fails to get the status of the natural object. The attempt to overcome the failure of the mimetic natural image leads to the self-conscious natural image. This conscious natural image belongs to the tradition of symbolism. Within the image nature and consciousness are mutually transformed and united. Now nature becomes the starting point and the mirror which reflects acts of consciousness. The self-reflective image is a reflection of consciousness which is reflected on the nature-as-mirror. It needs the natural object as its starting point and has no material substance; therefore, it fails to possess itself as its object and faces the narcissistic predicament in which consciousness is alienated from nature. Due to the intrinsic discrepancy of the natural image, the hope to unite nature and consciousness is frustrated. Consciousness still belongs to nature and poetic language becomes to face the crisis of sterility and extinction. This study considers the dialectic between nature and consciousness through the natural image of Yeats`s early poetry.

This paper is an attempt to discuss Yeats’s ultimate reality. Yeats’s Unity of Being can be said to be similar to the system of Upanishad’s AUM because AUM is the combination of Brahman and Atman. Upanishad’s ascetic realized that Atman, reaching to a state of Turiya, can be Brahman. Subject and object, Atman and Brahman, dancer and dance, and the Four Principles and the Four Faculties also become one in Turiya. As we would identify Atman with our self, Brahman is our self-consciousness. Moreover, if we would identify Atman with our body, Brahman become a cosmos that reveals itself. Yeats understood the Self, the ultimate reality, through Upanishad. His macrocosm was made up of Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body and his microcosm was made of Will, Mask, Creative mind, and Body of Fate. In A Vision, the Four Principles, which consists of Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body affected individually and complementarily the Four Faculties which consists of Will, Mask, Creative mind, and Body of Fate. Spirit and Celestial Body are mind and its object, while Husk and Passionate Body are sense and the object of sense. Will and Mask are will and its object, while Creative Mind and Body of Fate are thought and its object. The whole system is based upon the belief that the Self falls in human consciousness. Robartes, from self-contained energy of contemplation, encompassed cyclic system in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”. He strayed away from the physical world, found his way into the supernatural world, and returned to the physical world again. Robartes's first vision is the state of total objectivity in which no human life exists. It is identical with U of Upanishad and Mask of the Four Faculties. And his second vision is, then, the state of total subjectivity, Sushupti, which unifies subject and thought, object and idea. It is the same as M of Upanishad and Creative Mind of the Four Faculties. However, he momentarily reaches eternity, Turiya, through the multiple contemplation. It is AUM of Upanishad and Body of Fate of the Four Faculties. In Turiya, Brahman and Atman, Buddha and Sphinx, dancer and Helen are integrated into one and accomplish the ultimate reality as a phaseless sphere. In conclusion, Yeats showed Unity of Being in “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes”. His Unity of Being is a kind of Turiya of Upanishad. He attains the Ultimate Reality completely, in which subject and object, macrocosm and microcosm, Brahman and Atman, the Four Principles and the Four Faculties are unified in the space without the time. He achieves the ultimate reality as an eternal instant. This ultimate reality is Yeats’s Unity of Being.