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.

예이츠는 시를 쓰고 편집한다는 것은 알려진 사실이다. 시집 속의 어떤 시 모음은 대체적으로 그 책의 큰 그림 내의 서로의 소통을 보이며, 결국, 시들이 어 떤 시들과 가까이 놓였나를 검토함으로써 독자들의 그 시들에 대한 이해와 감상을 깊 게 한다. 마이클 로바티스와 춤꾼 의 마지막 4편의 시가 분명 그런 경우이며, 어려운 시기에 태어난 사랑하는 딸을 가지는 것에 대한 복잡한 심정으로 고심하는 새 아버지 로서의 예이츠를 보여준다.

“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.”

Behind major poems of Last Poems stand specific works of art: the statue, the portraits and pictures, the sculpted pieces. The sculpture, like the poetry, which attracted Yeats most, was what seemed to have created from the integrated Self. His special concern with ‘Upanishads’ is the fourth state of the mind, the union of Self and Not-Self. He knew much better what to look for in Michael Angelo was the spiritual energy expressed by the physical power of the muscular structure of his figures. He remarks that it is the poet’s business to describe desirable persons and the states of mind. The primary example of the ability of the mind to create and to impose form is art. “Under Ben Bulben” evokes Michael Angelo’s “Secret working mind and expresses the concrete aspiration” of Yeats’s creative mind and the aim of his greatest poetry in a world of men and human passion. Yeats discovers his own freedom, his own greatness of soul as he discovers the freedom and greatness of his friends in “Municipal Gallery Revisited.” Throughout the poetry we may notice that it is a community based upon a mutual greatness, a mutual glory that springs from communion of such friends” conduct. “Lapis Lazuli” explores the relationship between mind and history. Yeats has discovered a way of thinking about the world that locates all value in the act of mind. It is the act of mind involved in forming. Yeats’s contemplation of the piece of lapis lazuli is itself the sort of act of mind that is exemplified on the stone. All the stone records is the aspiration of the Chinamen; their struggle towards the autonomy of soul that will provide perspective. But the achievement of that autonomy is Yeats’s “I delight to imagine them seated there.” Michael Angelo became identified with Yeats himself as an inexhaustible creative energy, “an old man’s eagle mind.” And also, in acting as autonomous individuals, Yeats’s friends the status and the efficacy of works of art. They have become the pictures of their own virtue, so that ‘lineaments are their thought. Yeats’s ‘generosity of mind’ consists in his ability to proclaim commitment on the part of his friends to the values that are proper to a community of heroes. It is in Yeats’s belief in the power of mind, in the act of mind that he could reach the union of flesh and spirit in the completion of his passion.

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.

Yeats는 노년의 질고와 생사문제를 명상하는 Last Poems에서 자아의 이원적 존재를 표상한다. 육체적으로 죽어가는 노인으로서의 시인과 내적자아가 희구하는 시인상의 이원성이 기존 주제와 상충되는 새로운 주제를 암시해준다. 종래의 지성적, 철학적, 신비학적, 음유시인적, 마스크 중심적인 주제를 넘어서는 새로운 주제는 생사의 문턱에서 죽음관, 도취하여 즐거워하는 육체성, 무도성, 성적표현성을 매개로 한다. 이 두 주제는 인간의 운명에 대한 내적 각성, 민족성과 정신의 본질로의 침잠/축소/회귀, 지적 심사(心事) 등과 대비되는 죽음의 공포로부터 탈출하여 최고 비전, 최고영성, 최고열반(희열) 등으로 상승하는 주제가 된다. 제1주제가 지성주의, 철학, 고담준론, 신비주의 이론, 마스크 이론, 젊은 시절의 바빌로니아 주제라고 한다면, 제2주제는 경험중심, 촉각과 현실 인식주의, 현실쾌락의 참여성, 정열적 희열감, 생의 기쁨 속에 잠겨서 긍정적으로 술 마시고 춤추는 모습, 성적 회춘기 성향 등이 된다. 그런데 Last Poems에서는 제 2 주제가 보다 강하게 표출되는데, 마치 블레이크, 로렌스적인 성감과 생의 자유성을 피력해준다. 이 성향은 시적 감수성 면에서 바빌론적인 시성에서 인도 및 중국적인 현실성과 성적 감각을 제시한다. 또한 기독교적, 그리스적 정신성, 또는 극동 아시아적 특성보다는 근동이나 인도적 정신성을 암시 받는다.

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.