자아성찰과 객관적 시각추구는 자아와 공동체를 개선하기 위해 필요한 정신이다. 그런데 히니는 시를 쓰는 목적에서, 종교 및 인종 갈등을 겪는 북아일랜드 사태를 해결하려는 자세에서, 종교와 정치 구속으로부터 벗어나 순수예술을 창조하려 는 의지에서, 자신의 시와 국수적인 국가를 엄격하게 비판하려는 태도 및 영혼의 세계 와 죽음을 고찰하는 태도 등에서 다른 시인보다 훨씬 깊은 자아 성찰적 태도와 객관적 시각을 드러내고 있다고 생각된다. 혼돈과 부조화와 단절을 찬미하는 시인과 달리 히니는 자신과 공동체를 객관적으로 보고 개선하려는 시인이다.

Yeats remarked, two years before his death, that it is the poets’ first business to describe desirable persons, desirable places, and states of mind. One of theses excellent persons and places in Last Poems―ascetics and the “half-way house” the Chinamen of “Lapis Lazuli” climb towards. Here we notice how many topographical associations lay everywhere: “the mountain,” “Alt” and the central character climbing some high point. Having lifted himself to the vantage point of age, Yeats is able to form a final altitude. The last poems are mainly set in the location of the open field, that dominates the poetic landscape. ‘The whole system’ of A Vision ‘is founded upon the belief that ultimate realit y…falls in human consciousness into a series of antinomies.’ Since he had long arranged his thought and disciplined his imagination by ideas of antithesis, it is natural that his later work should play out an extended series of oppositions: knowledge and ignorance; day and night; time and eternity. In the process of consciousness they have a tendency to be separated from each other into various sets of the opposite; while their attendant logic characterizes a struggle towards harmony. ‘Logical and emotional conflicts alike lead towards a reality which is concrete, sensuous and bodily.’ “Meru” invokes an image of human being in conflict with the cyclicity of a cosmic rhythm. Yeats, identified with the oriental hermits in the ascetic attitude to life, sees “the naked bodies” to awake to the realities of life, he is reassured that the higher perception should be gained through their sensuous experiences in the darkness of night. According to St. John of Cross, ‘the nature of the soul requires complete renunciation of the world.’ The darkness brings wisdom, emptiness sight. Yeats would describe it as ‘the luminous dark.’ This implies in ‘via negativa’ that one is nothing, paradoxically, to become everything. The open region for everything is the place Heidegger called ‘clairiēre,’ which Yeats would like to paint in his poetry. Its openness let brightness play with darkness in it. The relation to light and darkness characterizes as ‘a double’ like the dawn image. This curious relation Adams claims to name ‘identity.’ Identity has the same form, as does a metaphorical trope, where sameness and difference coexist in language. He would write a poem ‘cold and passionate as the dawn.’ The important metaphor, which Yeats uses to describe the intersection of the two worlds, is that of dawn. In this paper I was concerned with both the realm where religion, art, personal consciousness converge and the place in which gathers and protects everything. Yeats was life long a man who practiced both absolute integrity of craft and perfection of personality, the perfection of its surrender. I take poetry to be an exploration of human consciousness, where it faces time and eternity in their play. Equally it is an exploration of words.

Though all of the poems including Yeats’s Last Poems were written during the last years of his life, the remarkable vigor of thought and of imagination, which increased with the poets’ years, is shown here once more. However, compared with the powerful impact of The Tower and The Winding Stair, the accent of their nonchalant freedom and more colloquial style was one principal source of the reviewers’ dissatisfaction. And T. R. Henn suggested that we should perceive the philosophical and satirical implications behind so many seemingly personal poems, even in the accent of lust and rage of the Last Poems. The primary concern of philosophy is the problem of the self, while the philosophical implication of Last Poems is the self itself. Yeats’s final aim in writing poetry is the perfection of the life and of the work in the process of creating the true self. In his last letter he said, “man can embody truth but he cannot know it, but he must embody it in the completion of his life.” In this sense, the life itself is the total work of art, the completed symbol. When he elucidated that he would write a poem “cold and passionate as dawn,” the pregnant word “dawn” is to be the completed symbol of the work of art. This passage concerns those transformations which are endemic to art. The prime idea must be that necessary infusion of joy in the most tragic contents - the incoherence of the actual life and the limitation of human life. It is the poetics of his itself which achieves “the dawn,” the twilight zone of the darkness of night and the light of day. Yeats found that his place could be the trysting-place of the extremity of sorrow and the extremity of joy, the perfection of personality, and the perfection of self-surrender, passion, and stillness. “Lapis Lazuli’s” “Black out: Heaven blazing into the head” means that the dark grow luminous while the void fruitful. Yeats wrote, “when I understand I am nothing and nobody” through the state of darkness, . . . there must be the dance at the trysting-place or at ‘the clearing’ Heidegger might coin, in the mingling of the contraries. The nobleness of art exists in playing together the contraries. Where all the contraries can play together, the dawn will break. As Yeats can embody the truth, his form of self-conquest should be achieved through the self-surrender and the transformation endemic to art.