이 시의 중심 이야기 즉 여신 이퍼와 젊은 전사와의 사랑의 이야기는 보통 정치적, 예술적 의미로 받아드린다. 그러나 이야기 속에는 예이츠와 모드 곤과의 좌절된 사랑의 의미뿐만 아니라 예술가로서 이를 어떻게 극복할건지에 대한 의미도 숨어 있다. 이퍼와 젊은 전사의 사랑 이야기 속에는 시인과 모드 곤과의 관계가 숨어 있다. 이퍼가 자신을 버린 젊은 전사를 원망하는 마음은 자신을 버린 모드 곤을 향한 예이츠의 마음이라는 말이다. 이퍼의 아픔은 고반이 빚은 술로 치유된다. 여기에서 술은 예술을 상징한다. 즉 시인은 스스로 좌절에서 벗어나는 길은 앞으로 창작활동 뿐이라는 점을 천명하고 있다.

예이츠의 후기시를 이해함에 있어 여성이미지는 매우 중요한 요소이다. 시인은 대표적인 여성이미지로서 모드 곤과 크레이지 제인을 제시하여 아일랜드인의 개인적, 역사적, 민족적 정체성에 대한 상징으로 삼아왔다. 특히 상류계층의 양심적 지 식인의 대표인 초기시의 모드 곤과 달리 후기시에서 큰 비중을 차지한 창녀 크레이지 제인의 상징적 역할은, 궁극적으로 시인이 거칠고 조악하지만 적나라한 삶의 이중성을 가감 없이 수용하는 아일랜드 민중의 지혜에 대한 신뢰를 드러낸다. 그러나 예이츠는 여기에 그치지 않고 모드 곤과 크레이지 제인의 한계를 극복하고 동시에 그들의 상징 성을 통합하는 여성이미지를 꾸준히 제시하고자 노력하는 데 바로 댄서이미지가 그것 이다. 예이츠에게서 댄서란 앞서 두 여인의 이미지가 상징하는 양심적 지성과 민중적 삶의 지혜를 연결하는 동시에 각각이 지니는 한계를 극복하는 이미지로서 예이츠 후 기시의 궁극적인 여성이미지이면서 민족적 구원을 약속하는 상징이다.

이 논문은 필자가 편집하고 해설을 한 저서 『W. B. 예이츠의 시』(런던: J. M. 덴트 & 선, 1990)(xvi-li쪽)를 『한국예이츠저널』41호(2013년 여름)에 전재한 것이다. 저자 대니엘 올브라트와 그의 출판사 오리온 출판 그룹의 전재허락에 대해 감사드린다

『율리시즈』속에 예이츠가 직접 등장하지 않지만, 그의 존재가 작품과 문맥 속에서 느껴진다. 예이츠의 『여자백작 캐스린』과 『훌리한의 딸 캐스린』은 스티븐의 돌아가신 어머니와 관련해서 그의 정신에 큰 영향을 끼친다. 그리고 모드 곤의 죽은 아들에 대한 집착은 몰리에게서도 나타난다. 역사적으로, 불름이 연관된 것으로 알려진 친 보어 운동은 모드 곤이 결성한 것이었다. 그리고 불름의 우유부단함은 예이츠의 이 운동에 대한 객관적이고 냉정한 태도와도 비교된다. 비록 예이츠의 아버지 같은 태도가 부담스러웠지만, 『율리시즈』의 3명의 주인공을 만드는데 예이츠의 영향이 크다.

As Maud Gonne had been regarded as one of the most important factors in Yeats’s life and literature, this study aims to analyze her images reflected in the poet’s poems which were published in 1910s and 1920s. Maud Gonne is presented as a political icon of that time in Ireland in Yeats’s poems. Unlike his early poems, where Maud Gonne is idealized as a goddess, a heroic figure of unbounded nobility and courage, Yeats presents her as a tragic warrior who devotes herself to political activities for violence and destruction in this period. At the same time, Yeats shows his holding back of approving Gonne’s political role of female warrior. The number of poems related to Maud Gonne also is decreased when Yeats realizes that Maud Gonne devoted herself too much on the political matters.

I look at the images of Maud Gonne in Yeats's "Bronze Head." The bronze head is a sculpture made by Lawrence Campbell, which is in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin. When Yeats saw it, he must be shocked; she is old, and yet she looks "magnificent." In the bronze work, Yeats sees Maud Gonne as "human, superhuman," and "supernatural," as well. He puts down all that occurs to him, from the very first encounter, when "she walks like a goddess," not without wildness, though, to the image of Cathleen-like soul, to the image of her being supernatural with a sterner eye. All this enriching vision is made possible in this last poem of his; it is a conclusion to his poetry that is a history of a great heart craving for life for anther great heart; it is the best paean dedicated to a Goddess in his heart.

Aiming to understand the poetry of W. B. Yeats in terms of gender, sexuality, and politics, this paper reads some major poems of his early years. The first part of the paper reads the poems in which the masculine world of war, science, and political power is negated in favor of the feminine world of nature, poetry, and wisdom. The present writer of the paper considers that the femininity of these poems, expressed in the pastoral world of the shepherd, or the stories of Irish legendary King Goll, Fergus, and the fairyland, comes from Yeats's poetic attempt to surmount the British imperial and materialistic world by enhancing the Irish cultural traditions and values. The next part reads a group of poems which deal with Yeats's love of Maud Gonne. Using the image of the rose or the courtly genre, both of them being old traditional poetic conventions, the poet represents Maud Gonne either as a goddess of eternal beauty or a woman of heroic nobility. However, she is also represented as a woman of "lonely face" and "pilgrim soul," a woman who brings "the sorrow of love," or a woman repeatedly associated with the tragic world of Troy. This ambivalence or double vision in the poet's representation of her seems to result form Yeats's ambiguous attitude to Maud Gonne and her revolutionary and social work. The last part of the paper deals with two poems and a play which represent Ireland as a woman. The use of a woman figure as symbolic image of Ireland, especially Yeats's use of Cathleen ni Houlihan in his poetry and drama, is important, because it most distinctively reveals the relations between sexual politics and aesthetic value in the early poetry of Yeats. In this respect, the writer of this paper notes that the woman figure in these works is a highly romanticized and idealized one, rather than a real one with human body and sexual desire, and thinks that this is related to Yeats's version of Iriish nationalism with its strengths and limitations.

In this study, I trace out the influence of woman’s images on Yeats in biographical and feministic point of view. For Yeats, woman was the major poetic motif and source of inspiration; meeting, interacting, and parting with women gave him a motive for poems and deepened philosophy as well as his literary view. As Yeats said in his Essays and Introductions, he "writes of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness,” and "would die of loneliness but for women.” Indeed, woman for Yeats is the focal point of various themes such as praise of heroic and ideal beauty, despair caused by unrequited love, friendship, maternal love etc. Among many women who influenced Yeats, Maud Gonne was the most important figure. It seems that she was a real feminist who tried to seek a dignified life and ideal as a woman, cultivating her identity and soul rather than being a common woman who is financially and physically subject to man and to cultivate outward appearance to draw man's attention. Even though not accepting Yeats's love, she was not an extreme feminist who denied the entire role and realm of man and supported just woman's opinion and benefits. Instead she seemed to be a moderate feminist who tried to find the real freedom and hope for the Irish women and children who suffered from the dignity and violence of a patriarchal husband as well as chronic poverty. Yeats’s painful but productive relationship with Maud Gonne determined his favor for certain type of women with masculinity rather than with a passive, complaisant, and traditional beauty. As in his fascination of Niam suggested, Yeats liked to praise beautiful women who have masculinity, and he took a courtly love attitude to receive their love. Therefore, he tried to write poems which needed great labour like a woman’s childbirth and praise women of a masculine spirit. Yet Maud Gonne’s constant decline of his suit and radical political inclination, and his depressed Libido made him deeply feel the pain caused by such a mannish woman. Especially, the sudden confession of her past love with Millevoye and her marriage with MacBride gave him a great shock and changed his view of woman. Now he instead dreamed of living a comfortable life with a woman who has traditional feminine nature. At last, Yeats got married to Hyde-Lees with such feminine factors, only to find that her charm and sexual satisfaction didn’t last long. After the conflict with Maud Gonne in 1919, Yeats came to emphasize conservative view of woman, insisting that woman should live in a pure blessing and give up her opinionated mind. He asserted that woman with perfect beauty could be happy only when she made herself beautiful and played a faithful role as man’s supporter. In this period, Maud Gonne’s images was painted dark in his poems; ‘intellectual hatred’, ‘opinionated mind’, and ‘a woman who lost the Horn of Plenty’. But such dark images soon disappeared. Yeats again longed for his lost love, Maud Gonne. However he could not escape from the conflicts between body and soul, ideal and reality. Such a dilemma made him pay attention to Unity of Being, the harmonious union of body and soul, and create his persona, Crazy Jane. Yeats's views of woman suffer many changes through his earlier, middle and later poems. It can be said that his views of woman are expressed according to the increase or decrease in femininity or masculinity inherent within Yeats’s self, the influence of his suppressed libido, and his attitude toward Irish politics. However it can’t be denied that woman was the continuous motif and inspiration of his poems.

It is well known that Yeats loved Maud Gonne all through his life. Even after she married John MacBride and he married George Hyde Lees, he couldn’t stop loving her. He proposed to her many times not only before she married but also after she became a widow. But she didn’t accept his courtship, saying that platonic love could make their love everlasting. She even said that the poems were their children for she made them possible by “sowing the unrest & storm.” This kind of love and/or friendship made Yeats write lots of poems about her and his longing for her love. The poems about her began to be written in his early youth in The Rose. After that many poems were written on and off through his long poetic career to Last Poems. The poems about her are more than fifty or so. The poems portrayed her as an ideal beauty like Helen and/or as a goddess of love and beauty like Aphrodite. Sometimes he complained her not accepting his courtship. At times he blamed her for engaging in the political movement of Ireland’s independence too deep. From time to time he lamented her marrying a “drunken, vainglorious lout.” But he loved “the pilgrim soul” in her all through his life. Though Yeats complained and blamed and lamented Maud Gonne’s human aspect, he idealized her divine aspect in his poems. He idealized her as a Rose, Helen of Troy and/or Aphrodite. That was the best way to keep her beauty everlasting. Though she suffered many human difficulties, she was an ideal beauty to Yeats to the end.

In the history of literature, women have appeared more as subsidiary figures to inspire or help male authors than as creators of literature themselves. Dante’s Beatrice, Petrarch’s Laura, and Dorothy Wordsworth can be cited as classical examples. Maud Gonne, Yeats’s lifelong lover, does not go beyond the boundary. In his poetry, Yeats portrayed her as an embodiment of eternal beauty, femme fatale like Helen of Troy or Deidre of Ireland, heroic figure of unbounded nobility and courage. But Yeats did not always praise and idealize her. He showed his dissatisfaction with her violent political activities and in his poetry she appeared as a heedless, overly proud woman who had wrought her own misfortune. But however diversified and numerous her images may have been, she exists in his poetry as objectified images shaped by Yeats’s transformed imagination. But in 1997, Maud’s letters to Yeats during the entire period of their acquaintance were published. Through them, we can get access to her as ‘a speaking subject’ uttering her own thoughts and emotions. We can acquire firsthand information on their relationship and direct response to the various incidents. By analyzing her letters in detail, I tried to present hitherto unknown aspects of Maud Gonne and shed light on some misunderstandings about her. For example, some critics denounced her indifference to Yeats’ poetry. But in her letters, she continually advised him not to let other activity ― be it political or theatrical―deprive him of his time and energy to engage in his proper work-writing of poetry. And her sincere concerns for the poor, the suffering, and the underpriviledged and her sympathetic understanding of women’s situation in Ireland have been hitherto unappreciated. As this essay’s main concern is Maud Gonne as a speaking subject of the letters, its aim is not an authoritative biographical study on Maud Gonne, but to view her life from a new perspective.

Based on the assumption that Maud Gonne was one of the most important persons in Yeats’s life and art, this paper is an attempt to understand the “labyrinthine” nature of their complex relationship. However, the present writer is not trying to dig into their lives for the specific facts which might be used to support his argument; rather, he is trying to read some of Yeats’s poems in such a way to illuminate his relation to Gonne. That is, through the close reading of related poems, the present writer examines how Gonne is thematically and formally represented in Yeats’s poems, how the representations change through the years of his life, and how they are related to other aspects of his poetry. The first introductory part of this paper very briefly surveys the life of Gonne, how her relationship with Yeats began and continued, and how she influenced him in writing his poems. Although it is true that she brought into his life “an overpowering tumult,” it is also true that between fifty and sixty of Yeats’s poems were created in the wake of their relationship. The main part of the paper analyzes Yeats’s poems chosen from his early, middle and late period of life. Some poems, such as “The Sorrow of Love,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “Adam’s Curse,” “No Second Troy,” “The Cold Heaven,” “A Prayer for my Daughter,” “Among School Children” are more closely and thoroughly read than others. In reading the poems, this paper tries to show how the poet’s representations of Gonne in the poems reveal not only the actual situations of their relationship at the moment of their writing but also the aesthetic and political ideologies of the poet himself at that moment.