This article explores Yeats's “A Woman Young and Old.” All the poems in the series “A Woman Young and Old" were written between 1926 and 1929. During this time Yeats was lamenting the vulgarity of hegemonic Irish culture. This series poems described feminine sexuality in the social and cultural repression of women. The sequence of eleven poems deal with the problems of female body and desire in a repressive society. In these poems Yeats insisted on the beauty or importance of feminine sexuality and sexual desire. “A Woman Young and Old” takes up Yeats's metaphysical questions - eternal beauty, the relationship between body and soul, the interdependence of sexual love and spiritual hate. Feminine sexuality is the mark of the rebellion against conventional social and cultural frame. Yeats's female personae embody a sacred sexuality and Yeats's sexual frankness close to a sexual mysticism. Feminine sexuality and desiring female bodies are defiantly asserted, and asserted specifically as transgressions, because they are precisely what is forbidden. In this series poems the female body and desire is expressed in Yeats's criticism of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. Linking of feminine sexuality and the sacred indicates Yeats's critique of Catholic Irishness. The speakers of the female sequence are embattled with a social and symbolic order that seeks to confine them. Yeats described sexual freedom and defiance against the authority and opposition in patriarchal society. Yeats's increasingly explicit emphasis on feminine sexuality and sexual desire at that time. Whereas Irish Catholicism viewed the desires of the body as threats to the soul, for Yeats the two were interdependent. Yeats insisted that “the love of man and woman, and inseparable physical desire, are sacred”(UPII, 451). This article tries to show how Yeats's of awareness of feminine sexuality is linked with a sexual mysticism and the sacred. Yeats connected women's body and desire with a sexual mysticism and the sacred in such a bold and defiant way.

To Yeats, as Mario Praz remarks in The Romantic Agony, sex was “the mainspring of works of imagination”(vx). This paper is an attempt to read Yeats’s “A Woman Young and Old” in terms of poetic representations of feminine sexuality and gender. All written in years 1929 through 1931, the sequence of eleven poems deal with the problems of female body and desire in a repressive patriarchal society. The first and introductory part of the paper briefly surveys the social and cultural background of the poems. The centrality of the subject of feminine sexuality and gender in these poems shows that Yeats saw the social and cultural repression of women and their sexual desire as one of the serious and urgent problems facing Ireland at that time. In Ireland of the 1920s, where the new national frame was being created under the hegemony of the Catholic Church and the middle class, the general attitude toward the women’s position and role and their sexual expression was very conservative and repressive. The main part of the paper closely reads the poems of the sequence, from “Father and Child” in which a daughter boldly asserts sexual freedom in defiance of her father’s opposition and criticism, to “From the ‘Antigone’” which shows another daughter defying the authority of king for the sake of filial love and the freedom of conscience. In reading the poems, this paper tries to show how Yeats’s awareness and affirmation of the female body and desire is expressed in his criticism of the repressive sexual morality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. In opposition to that sexually repressive and ascetic culture, he shows women’s body and sexual desire in such a bold and affirmative way that the poetic expression itself turns out to be an effective critique of that culture.