아이러니는 많은 모더니즘 시인들이 즐겨 사용하였듯이 시의 현대성을 판단하는 데 매우 중요한 척도로 자리 잡았다. 사실 그 기원은 아주 오래전으로 거슬 러 올라가 엘리자베드 시대의 소네트 시인이나 극작가 형이상학파 시인들의, 극적효과 를 동반한 이성적 형식과 감성적 주제 사이의 긴장에서 자주 발견되며 이러한 극적기 법에 모더니즘의 시인들이 많은 빚을 지고 있다. 그러나 모더니즘 시인들이 원용한 아 이러니는 어조나 감성에 있어 적대적인 요소를 그대로 병치함으로써 소위 의미의 미 확정성이라는 독특한 성질을 가지며, 예이츠의 􋺷최후의 시􋺸가 잘 보여주듯이 바로 이 러한 애매모호함 또는 불확정성은 역설적으로 그 어떠한 원칙에도 얽매이지 않는 자 유를 시에 부여하였다.

“Politics,” the last of W. B. Yeats’s Collected Poems (Richard Finneran’s New Edition), ends with the poet's wish for fulfillment of sexual desire and love: “But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms.” Yeats wrote this poem in May 1938, eight months before his death. In another poem, “A Prayer for Old Age,” written in 1934, the poet prays that he “may seem . . . A foolish, passionate man.” In these and other poems of Yeats’s last years, “lust and rage” really seem to “dance attendance upon [his] old age” and “spur [him] into song” (“The Spur”). This paper is an attempt to understand the last years of Yeats’s life and poetry in terms of sexuality and love. The first part of this paper discusses the Steinach operation which Yeats underwent in 1934, when he was 68 years old. Although it is uncertain that the operation had brought the poet the expected “second puberty,” it seems to have had an psychologically positive effect upon his writing of poetry. During the last five years after the operation, Yeats wrote almost fifty poems, which is surprising number considering his old age and precarious health. In this part of the paper, the present writer reads some poems in which the poet's feeling and thought about sexuality and love in these final years of his life are most clearly expressed: “A Prayer for Old Age,” “The Spur,” “The Wild Old Wicked Man,” and the sequence of “Supernatural Songs.” After the operation Yeats met Margot Ruddock, Dorothy Wellesley, Ethel Mannin, and Edith Shackleton Heald, all of them being young, pretty, and intelligent women. They were poets (Ruddock and Wellesley), a novelist (Mannin), and a journalist (Heald). The second part of this paper deals with the poet’s meetings with these women, and reads the poems which are based upon, and reveal the nature of, their relations: “Margot,” “Sweet Dancer,” “A Crazed Girl,” “To Dorothy Wellesley,” and “The Three Bushes.”

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.