William Butler Yeats was born at Georgeville, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, in 1865, and died in the South of France, in January 28, 1939. Yeats was fifty in 1915-1916. He provides a poetic rendering of his visionary experience at his fiftieth year in the fourth section of "Vacillation" written in November 1931, when he became absorbed in the philosophical thinking while writing A Vision: "My fiftieth year had come and gone,/ I sat, a solitary man,/ In a crowded London shop,/ An open book and empty cup/ On the marble table-top./ While on the shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed;/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed, so great my happiness,/ That I was blessed and could bless."(CPN 251). In May 9, 1917, recalling his fiftieth year, Yeats describes this experience in a prose, entitled "Anima Mundi": "Perhaps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, the open book beside me, or closed, my excitement having overbrimmed the page. I look at the strangers near as if I had known them all my life, and it seems strange that I cannot speak to them: everything fills me with affection, I have no longer any fears of any needs; I do not even remember that this happy mood must come to an end. It seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown pure and far extended and so luminous that the images from Anima Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that sweetness, would, like a country drunkard who has thrown a wisp into his own thatch, burn up time." (Myth 364-5) Seamus Heaney was born in April 13, 1939 in Count Derry, Northern Ireland, and has been attacking Yeats since 1980s for the latter's aristocratic mysticism and spiritual matters. Heaney gave a lecture at Oxford University in 1990, entitled "Joy or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin." This lecture was given at the end of his own fiftieth year and simultaneously commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Yeats's death. In this lecture, Heaney comes to open up "a sudden comprehension" to Yeats's vacillating visionary experience of the spirit in "The Cold Heaven": "The spirit's vulnerability, the mind's awe at the infinite spaces and its bewilderment at the implacable inquisition which they representall of this is simultaneously present" (The Redress of Poetry 148). In "Fostering," a poem from Seeing Things (1991), Heaney professes his poetic admission of Yeatsian visionary position: "Me waiting until I was nearly fifty/ To credit marvels" (50). In short, Heaney reaches what Yeats did for the spiritual world. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate how Heaney reacts Yeats's poetry of vision. My focus is on the year fifty, when they erupt their creative energy in terms of "vacillation"which nevertheless shows the provocative and violent dynamism of the Yeatsian "interlocking gyres."

연초에 에밀리 헤일에게 쓴 엘리엇의 편지가 공개되며 그들 사이의 관계에 대해 많은 관심이 모아지고 있다. 헤일이 엘리엇의 뮤즈였는지, 그렇다면 그 정도는 어떤 것인지, 그리고 수십 년간 이어져 온 그들의 관계가 결혼으로 이어지지 못한 이유는 무엇인지 등에 대한 의문이 편지 공개를 통해 어느 정도는 풀릴 것으로 기대된다. 간접적으로 그리고 부분적으로 공개된 편지에 의하면 헤일은 예상했던 것보다 강력한 엘리 엇의 뮤즈였으며 작품에 끼친 영향 또한 상당했던 것으로 판단된다. 하지만 그들이 맺어지지 못한 것은 두 사람의 성향이나 추구하는 가치에 차이가 있었고, 엘리엇이 헤일의 역할을 문학적 영감의 원천으로만 한 정한 데에 있는 것으로 보인다. 반면 헤일은 엘리엇과의 관계에 대해 강한 자부심을 가지고 결혼을 기대한 것이 드러난다. 이 글에서는 그들의 맺어지지 못한 사랑이 엘리엇의 작품에서 어떻게 원재료로 쓰이고 있는지를 추적한다. 엘리엇이 개인적 측면에서 한계를 설정했던 헤일과 의 관계는 그의 문학적 상상력과 결합하여 매우 풍부한 소재로 작동하고 있음을 알 수 있다. 『황무지』의 히아신스 소녀, ｢눈물 흘리는 소녀｣ 의 주인공, 그리고 『재의 수요일』의 숙녀, ｢번트 노튼｣의 장미 정원의 소녀는 모두 헤일을 연상시키는 인물들이다. 하지만 동시에 엘리엇의 작품 속에서 헤일과 그녀와의 관계는 특유(特有)함과 구체성을 결여하여 다른 해석의 여지를 남기고 있다.