CHAPTER-1

INTRODUCTION:

William Butler Yeats ( 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939 ) was an Irish poet
and one of the foremost figures of twentieth century literature . A pillar of both the
Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre,
and in his later years served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He studied poetry
from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. His
earliest volume of verse was published in 1889 , and its slow-placed and lyrical
poems display Yeats‟s debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the
poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more
physical and realistic. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

`Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and

astrology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, became a
member of the paranormal research organization “ The Ghost Club “ ( in 1911 )
and was especially influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. As early as
1892, he wrote: “ If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have
written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever
have come to exist. The centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I
write.” His mystical interest – also inspired by a study of Hinduism, under the
Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, and the occult – formed much of the basis of his
late poetry. Some critics disparaged this aspect of Yeats‟s work; W.H. Auden
called it the “ deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo-
jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.”

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 His first significant poem was “ The Island of Statues “, a fantasy work that
took Edmund Spenser and Shelley for its poetic models. His first solo publication
was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem ( 1886), which comprised a print run
of 100 copies paid for by his father. This was followed by the collection The
Wanderings of Oisin and other poems ( 1889 ) Which arranged a series of verse
that dated as far back as the mid - 1880s. The long title poem contains, in the
words of his biographer R.F. Foster, “obscure Gaelic names, striking repetitions an
unremitting rhythm subtly varied as the poem proceeded through its sections “;

We rode in sorrow, with strong hounds three,

Bran, Sceolan, and Lomair,

On a morning misty and mild and fair.

The mist – drops hung on the fragrant trees,

And in the blossoms hung the bees.

We rode in sadness above Lough Lean,

For our best were dead on Gavra‟s green.

“The Wanderings of Oisin “ is based on the lyrics of the Fenian Cycle of Irish
mythology and displays the influence of both Sir Samuel Ferguson and the Pre-
Raphaelite poets. His other early poems, which are meditations on the themes of
love or mystical and esoteric subjects, include poems ( 1895 ), The Secret Rose (
1897 ), and The Wind Among the Reeds ( 1899 ).

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 William Butler Yeats, a much read and loved Irish poet even today, is
considered by many as one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. His
contributions to English poetical traditions are many, like Sailing to Byzantium,
The Second Comings, Easter 1916, Adam‟s Curse, Lapis Lazuli, etc. to name a
few.

Yeats was chiefly influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley, a major English

Romantic poet. “Magic “was one theme that Yeats probably took from Shelley .
Besides this Yeats once admitted, however, that William Blake, another Romantic
poet, had a more profound influence on his poetical style than Shelley. Yeats was
also an ardent of other Romantic poets like S. T Coleridge, William Wordsworth
and Lord Byron. He borrowed from them the Romantic symbolism, subjects,
diction and vision. The romantic influence can be seen in his later poems like
Sailing to Byzantium where we find his escapist tendencies that are interwoven
with themes of life, magic and death.

Yeats witnessed a stormy Irish history of subjugation that creatively touched

his poetic style. Yeats poetry shows his fascination with Irish past, traditions and
myths. In the later years, Yeats poetry became mature and acquired alluring
mysticism, in comparison to his poetry of early years, which is lyrical but less
intense. Yeats Romanticism is rebellious, revolutionary, reflective and sensational.
Yeats himself declared that he and his associates were last Romantics in his poem
– Coole Park And Ballylee, 1931.

We are the last romantics – chose for theme

Traditional sanctity and loveliness;

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 Though Yeats style was inclined to being Romantic, there is some amount
of contradiction in saying that he was truly Romantic. His constant interest
towards Irish Nationalism and Irish Nation affairs, resulted in bringing a touch of
Modernism in his poetry, which is why Yeats is also often referred to as a Modern
Poet.

The mythology which Yeats used extensively in his early poems was the
great body of Gaelic heroic legends*. This mythology had the same fascination for
the young Yeats that Greek mythology had for the people of the Renaissance. Very
early in his career he attempted to treat legendary material on a large scale. The
Wanderings of Oisin is a long romantic narrative poem full of echoes of Morris,
Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and Sir Samuel Fergusson. As he admitted later, this
poem “has the overcharged color inherited from the romantic movement.” Yet the
mythology seems fresh and has the beauty and wonder of altogether new things.
Moreover, the conflict between the old Celtic bard, Oisin and St. Patrick is no mere
piece of romantic antiquarianism but a symbol of a permanent and unresolved
conflict in the European mind between the ideal of the artist that of religion.

Yeats found in Irish mythology, unfamiliar even to Irish readers, a treasury

of symbols ready to his hand. The Danaan children, the Shadowy Horses and
Fergus with his brazen cars- those mysterious and magical beings who play so
large a part in Yeats‟s verse-have little more objective reality than the images of
Mallarme. But they have a more satisfactory character than such a French
symbolist mythology as Mallarme‟s, because they constitute a world of which one
can to some extent get the hang, where one can at least partly find one‟s way about.

Yeats began in the late nineties of the last century to quench his thirst for
reality by creating authority and significance and reference in the three fields

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where they were lacking. He put into his poetry the substance of Irish mythology
and Irish politics and gave them a symbolism, and he developed his experiences
with Theosophy and Rosicrucianism into a body of conventions adequate, for him,
to animate the concrete poetry of the soul that he wished to write. He did not do
these things separately ; the mythology, the politics, and the magic are convinced,
through the personalities that reflected them, with an increasing unity of
apprehension. Thus more than any poet of the time, Yeats restored to poetry the
actual emotions of race and religion and abstract thought. Some of the mythology
and much of the politics, being dramatised and turned into emotion, have become
part of the British heritage. But where the emphasis was magical, whether
successfully or not, the poems have been misunderstood, ignored, and the actual
emotion in them decried and under-estimated, merely because the magical mode of
thinking is foreign to our times and, when known at all, is largely associated with
the quackery and fraud.

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 CHAPTER-2

A NOTE ON SYMBOLISM:

Generally, „Symbolism‟ may be defined as the representation of a

reality on one level of reference by a corresponding reality on another.” According
to Kenneth Berke, “ A symbol is the verbal parallel to a pattern of experience”. In
literature the symbolic use of a word is distinguished from the emotive use of a
word and is tantamount to intending the dictionary definition of the word. Edmund
Wilson defines Symbolism, “as an attempt by carefully studied means a
complicated association of ideas represented (d) to awakening by a medley of
metaphors-to communicate unequal personal feelings.”Because of his complexity
the depth and power of the symbol, C.M. Bowra regards symbolic poetry as a kind
of mystic poetry, a poetry in which the poet tries to convey his sense of the
mystery of life.

Symbolism is necessary for a poet who wants to say more than what
meets the ear, wants to suggest something beyond the expressed meaning. A
symbol may better express the sense of mystery and expansiveness, the feelings of
richness and complexity than other means. Hence symbols make the language rich
and expressive. The symbol may serve (a) to interpret a theme. (b) to make it
acceptable (c) as an escape. (d) to awaken dormant or suppressed experience, and
(e) as adornment or exhibition.

The seeds of symbolism may be traced in the allegories of Langland,

Spenser and Bunyan, the poetry of the metaphysical William Blake and to some
extent in the poetry of the Romantic poets. But as a conscious movement,

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symbolism was born in France as a reaction against naturalism and precision, and
exactitude of the naturalist school represented by Zola.

The French symbolists led by Mallarme and Verlaine, condemned mere

“exteriority” a laid great emphasis on the treatment of sensations or the
representation of the vague, fleeting impressions that constantly pass before the
mind‟s eye. It meant a virtual withdrawal from life a concentration inner
experience and its expression through the use of symbols. The symbolism
attempted to exclude from art those element which in life had receded into the
realm of the general the commonplace. Thus, the symbolists tended to repudiate
outer actuality, which they identified with bourgeois civilization and returning into
themselves, to concentrate upon their own experience, which became more and
more private and personal. The representative symbolists Baudelaire, Verlaine and
Mallarme in their search for ideal beauty weakened their grip on actual life and this
made it easier for successors to run away from actuality of experience altogether.

Arthur Symons dedicated his seminal book, The Symbolist

Movement in literature ( 1889 ) to Yeats in the following significant words:

“May I dedicate to you this book of The Symbolist movement in

literature, both as an expression of a deep personal friendship

and because you, more than any one else, will sympathise with

what I say in it, being yourself the chief representative of the

movement in our country ? France is the country of movements,

and it is naturally in France that I have studied the development

of the principle which is spreading throughout other countries,

perhaps, not less effectually, if with less definite outlines.”

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 The above quotations are apt to create a confusion and lead the reader
to think that Yeats was doing the same thing in Ireland as Baudelaire and
Mallarme were doping or had done in France. The fact of the matter, on the other
hand, is that Yeats, with all his sympathy for the practice of the French symbolists,
had a conception of the end and object of the symbolic technique which is
fundamentally different from that of his French compeers and counterparts.

In the case of the French symbolists there was a tendency to pass from
the literal object to its symbolic significance and then contemplate the symbol
itself with such an intensity that the object itself dissolved and disappeared. But for
Yeats the concrete and the visual, which was the starting point, was seldom
forgotten. In 1927 he wrote to Sturge Moore concerning the design of the book-
plate for The Tower--

“ I need not make any suggestion, expect the tower should not be too unlike
the real object, or rather that it should suggest the real object. I like to think of that
building as a permanent symbol of my work plainly visibly to passer-by.”

Just as his aim was to keep mythology rooted in the earth, so he sought to
fuse the physical and the symbolical aspects affectively together.

We may now glance at a few definitions of symbolism which occur in the

prose works of Yeats:

“Symbolism said things which could not be said so perfectly in any other
way.”

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 “A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a
transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of the many possible
representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy.”

It was through his interest in magic and its evocative symbols that Yeats
developed his symbology, because the age in which he lived was apt to emphasize
the close affinity between the magician and the artist. Madame Blavatsky in her
The Secret Doctrine, which Yeats had read, wrote significantly:

“Such is the mysterious poem of Occult symbolism, that the facts which
have actually occupied countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to
marshal, set down and explain… Are all recorded in a few pages of geometrical
signs and glyphs.”

In the spirit of the above passage Yeats wrote:

“I cannot now think symbols less than greatest of all powers whether they Are
used consciously by the masters of magic or half unconsciously by their
successors, the poet, the musicians, the artist.”

YEATS, DEEPLY INFLUENCED BY SYMBOLIST IDEAS:

Yeats had already much in common with the symbolists. Both aimed at
something elusive and intangible. Both were subjective, alike in method and
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natural mode of thought. Both were essentially fantasists. But Yeats‟s acquaintance
with the symbolists did not make any radical difference to his poetry symbolist
ideas deeply affected and attracted him, as may be gathered from the
autobiographies and his other very outspoken accounts of the development of his
mind. “It seemed to meet the time”, he says, “the only movement which was
saying new things‟ yet Yeats is not primarily a symbolist poet, and he certainly did
not inspire any new movement along symbolists lines. As to his own poetry of that
period, the nineties, there is no essential difference in form or method between The
Wandering of Oisin(1888) and “The Wind Among the Reeds” (1899).

STEPHEN MALLARME‟S CONCEPTION OF PURE POETRY:

Yeats fully accepted Mallarme‟s conception of “Pure” poetry. In his

essay on “The symbolism of poetry” he called for “a return to the way of our
fathers a casting out of description of nature” for the sake of nature of the moral
low for the sake of moral law, a casting out of all anecdotes and of that brooding
over scientific opinion that so often extinguished the central flame in Tennyson”.
Instead of the private symbols of Mallarme, Yeats uses the images of Celtic
mythology in his symbolic poems. These are at once more precise and more rich in
associations. In his earlier works, Yeats had used the ancient Irish myths simply as
stories. In the poem “The Wind Among the Reeds”, he uses them to express his
own states of mind. Thus The Song of Wandering Aengus he takes the story of the
ancient Irish hero who dreamed of a wonderfully beautiful maiden and searched for
their through out Ireland. Yeats turns the story into a symbol of the search of the
poet for an unattainable beauty. The symbolism in this poem is perfectly
intelligible but it had the magic of song and is not dimmed by any moralizing.

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YEATS‟S SYMBOLISM, CONNECTED WITH HIS BELIEF IN
OCCULTISM:

In some poems, however, in this collection (“The Wind Among the Reeds”)
Yeats uses symbols which have no precise of intelligible meaning but which live
by their own power and intensity. The cap and the Bells is such a poem. It is based
on a dream. No intellectual meaning can be attached to the Jester who in this poem
sends his soul in the shape of “a straight blue garment” and his heart in the shape
of “a red and quivering garment” to the young queen. Nevertheless, it is an
Impressive and moving poem and the symbols have a great emotion intensity. In a
note on this poem, Yeats said that it had always meant a great deal to him though,
“as is the way with symbolic poems, it has not always meant quite the same thing”.
This remark shows that Yeats‟ symbolism, unlike that of Mallarme, is connected
with a belief in occult influence and magic.

THE QUALITY VALUED BY THE SYMBOLISTS:

Intensity, concentrated richness, musical suggestiveness, evocativeness-

these were the qualities especially valued by the symbolists and those whom they
influenced. From their point of view, any image, any figure of speech, any literary
or mythological or historical allusion, any turn of speech even, may be symbolic,
carrying us to words a mystical realization beyond immediate experience.

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HIS EARLY AND LATER POETRY:

But when we turn to the mature and later Yeats, we find both these
qualities (vision and courage) in combination. No longer are they kept in separate
compartments –the vision for the making of poetry: the courage for the business of
living. They are fused, they work in partnership together and it was this
combination of the two that transformed him from the dream-singer of the
nineteen-nineties into a major poet that he became afterwards. The change come
somewhere in the early years of the twentieth century. The difference between
“The Wind Among of the Reeds” (1899) and “The Green Helmet” (1910) is
radical. The earlier Yeats of Aedh wishes for the cloths of Heaven had been a
spinner of words, the master of style as mannered and ornate in its own way as
Swinburne of Rossetti‟s : simpler and not so rich or so heavy loaded, but so
carefully worked over that every simplicity seems calculated but afterwards all this
changed. He wrote in discoveries (midway through the period of the change); I
found that without knowing it I had come to care for nothing but impersonal
beauty I had set out on life with the thought of putting my very self into poetry and
had understood this as a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut
away the non-essential but as I imagined the visions and an outside myself, my
imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. The more I tried
to make my art deliberately beautiful the more did I follow the opposite of myself .

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 CHAPTER-3

SYMBOLISM OF W.B. YEATS:

William Butler Yeats has been called the chief representative of the
Symbolist Movement in English literature. However, Yeats belongs not to be the
French symbolist movement but rather to general European Movement of which
the French have been leaders. It would not be strictly true to regard him as heir to
the French. Yeats knowledge of the French language was so meager that he could
not have read those difficult French poems to which, in the opinion of some
critics, he was indebted. Yeats‟ knowledge of the theories of the French symbolist,
Mallarme, was acquired at second hand, perhaps through Arthur Symons (who
was in next door neighbor in the temple during the last nineties ). In an essay called
“ The Symbolism of the Poetry” (1990), Yeats wrote; “ when sound, and colour,
and form are in a musical relation to one another, they become as it were one
sound, one colour, one form, and evoke an emotion that is made out of their
distinct evocations and yet is one emotion”. This statement could be attributed to
Mallarme as interpreted by Arthur Symons in his book “ The Symbolist Movement
in Literature “ which had appeared in 1899.

THE OCCULT SYMBOLS OF HIS EARLY POEMS:

The symbols of Yeats‟ early are occult in character. From Madame

Blavatsky, he had learned that the great memory of nature preserved the legends of
all nations. That made him feel that he could get in touch with Anima Mundi
through symbols drawn from Irish legend the symbolic characters of Oision or
Aengus for example, or the hound with on red ear, the white deer with no horns, or
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the island in the sea. But equally characteristics are his arbitrary occult symbols of
rose, lily bird, water tree, moon and sun, which he found in the Kabalistic,
Theosophical and others profound works. Of these early symbols used by the Yeats
the Rose is t5he most complex. As a member of the order of the golden dawn.
Yeats had known the symbolic ritual which centered upon the rose and the cross.
Only those who understand this ritual are able to understand Yeats‟ poetic
symbolisms in his early poetry. ( Most of his rose poems are to be found in the
volume called “ The rose “ which appeared in 1893 ). In The Rose of Peace, Yeats
uses the symbol of rose to mean earthly love. But the rose of the poem The Rose of
the world is more complicated, meaning on one level transient earthly love and
beauty and no another level eternal love and beauty. The Rose of battle symbolizes
God‟s side in the battle of spirit against matter. Here the rose is a refuge from
earthly love. The rose in To The Rose Upon the Road of Time is the Rosicrucian
rose but it is also the power of the creative imagination and occult philosophy. The
acting version of the Shadowy Waters has a passage on the rose and the cross as a
symbol of the union of body and soul, life and death sleep and waking. Yeats
feared the isolation of spirit from matter as he had feared the isolation of matter
from spirit. With these fears the rose come to mean what he called “unity of being”
or the integration and harmony of self, world, and spirit. These meanings are
present in the rose, but they are not all that it is suggests because from each
context, Yeats said that the value of a symbol is the richness or in definiteness
which makes it far more mysterious and powerful than allegory with its single
meaning. A hundred men would advance a hundred different meanings for no
symbols tells all its meaning to any man. The symbol, said Yeats gives voice to
dumb things and bodies to bodiless things.

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YEATS‟S EXPLORATION OF HIS UNCONSCIOUS IN SEARCH OF
SYMBOLS:

Though his experiments in the occult Yeats tried to explore his

unconscious in search of symbols. ( Rimbaud had tried to explore his unconscious
by a systematic derangement of the senses through drugs, fatigue, and depravity ).
Yeats was by nature inclined to waking dreams and trances in which he saw
wonderful thing. He found that through the use of ritual and hypnotic symbols he
could experience deeper and more effective trances in which new images swam
before his eyes. Magic permitted him to secure for his poems the wealth of his
unconscious. Thus yeats discovered a poetic territory which had been neglected in
England except by occasional madmen since the time of William Blake. One of the
episodes in the second part of The Wandering of Oisin(1899) was a dream
recorded exactly as he dreamed it. Here the images of queen, garment, hair cap and
bells, door, window, and the colours of red and green would have interested Dr.
Freud who was an investigator of the unconscious Yeats says in a note that this
poem meant much to him but, as wish all symbolic poems, its meaning was never
twice the same.

THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF SYMBOLS IN YEATS:

In Yeats‟s own words “a symbol is (in deed) the possible expression of

some invisible essence a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame”, symbols are not
merely denotative, but also connotative and evocative. In addition to the literal
meaning they also conjure up a host of associations before the mind‟s eye. The
word „rose‟ not only denotes a flower but it also evokes images of beauty and love.
Thus, symbols make the language rich and expressive.

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 Symbols, Yeats came to believe, are given, not deliberately chosen or
invented. In terms of Jungian Psychology one might say that great symbols well-up
from the depth of “the collective unconscious”, the racial memory, which is
described by Yeats, after the manner of Henry More, as Anima Mundi, the Great
Mind or Memory . This Anima Mundi, like Spenser‟s „Garden of Adonis‟, was the
nursery of all the seminal images, which helped the magician and the artist to
evoke the unseen essences or remould the world nearer his heart‟s desire. Yeats
was positive on this point:

“And surely whatever risk, we may cry out that im agination

is always seeking to remake the world according to the impulses

and patterns in that great mind, and that great memory. Can there

be any thing so important as to cry out that what we call romance,

poetry, intellectual beauty, is the only signal that the Supreme

Enchanter or someone in His council, is speaking of what has been,

and shall be again in the consummation of tome ?”

Yeats‟s use of symbols is differs from that of the French symbolists in

several ways. For one thing, he soon grew out of the French influence and
returned once more to life and reality. His volume of verses, The seven Woods,
marks the beginning of this change, but he continued to use symbols up to the very
end. Yeats was a symbolist from the beginning and he remained a symbolist to the
very end. It was not the French influence that made him a symbolist.

Secondly, his symbolism is different from the French symbolism as it

is mixed up and modified by (1) his belief in magic and (2) by his nationalism.

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Often his symbols are both poetic and magical and cannot be understood without
reference to his theory of magic. Moreover, his symbolism is deeply rooted in Irish
mythology and legend and he gives it a precision, a definiteness, a clarity which is
lacking in French symbolism. Yeats describes his symbols in all their elaborate
details, as in the following :

I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes as hake,

Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white.

We do not find such concrete details, such description and the resulting
solidity in the symbols of Mellarme and other French symbolists.

That W.B. Yeats was a symbolist is not disputed Arthur Symons called
him “the chief representative of that movement in our country”. To W.Y. Tyndall,
Yeats was a symbolist from the beginning of his career to the end. Tyndall is of the
opinion that Yeats was an heir to the French through Symons i.e. Yeats absorbed
certain of the doctrines of French symbolism as preached by Mallarme through the
medium of Arthur Symons Yeats himself did not know French therefore, whatever
knowledge of the French symbolist technique he had, was derived from secondary
sources through Arthur Symon‟s translation of the works of Mallarme, Villiers and
other French symbolists. But Tyndall is also the opinion that the sources and
influences on Yeats are not those of the French origin, and Yeats was a symbolist
even before the French Symbolists. He loved Blake and praised Shelley. His
association with Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophy his membership of the
Golden dawn, his interest in kabbalah- all contributed to his love of symbols.
Yeats‟s absorption in the world of unseen realities and his eulogy of visions
deepened his faith in spiritual truths which could be grasped with the help of
symbols. It has been argued that Yeats used symbolism to hide the world rather

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than to reveal another one. Yeats‟s love for symbolism was also necessitated by his
predicament. He love and worshipped Moud Gonne who became a symbol of
beauty for him. But the anguish and frustration he had to face needed some cover;
hence, he used symbol to conceal his anguish.

To conclude Yeats was a symbolist from the beginning of his career up to

the very end, even before and after the brief period of French influence. As his
powers matured, his symbols became more intricate and gained in evocative power
and associative richness.

THE KIND OF SYMBOLS USED IN YEATS POETRY:

Symbols are of two kinds-the traditional and the personal. Traditional

symbols are stock symbols which have been in general use. For example, „rose‟ is
a traditional symbol of beauty and has been used by poets from the earliest times.
As most readers are familiar with such stock symbols, their use increases the
evocative pleasures of poetry without introducing elements of complexity or
obscurity. Personal symbols, on the other hand, are devised by the poet for his own
purposes, to express the vague fleeting impressions passing through his mind or to
convey his own sense of the mystery of life. They express the poet‟s experiences,
often mystical in nature. As the readers are not familiar with such symbols, they
create difficulties for them though at the same time they enhance the richness of
the language.

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ALL PERVASIVE KEY SYMBOLS:

Yeats, symbol are all pervasive. There are certain key-symbols round
which a number of poems are organized and each succeeding poem throws light on
the previous poems and illuminates their sense. In the volume of verses, The Rose,
the rose is the key symbol. In these poems, rose symbolizes intellectual beauty,
beauty of women, more especially that of Maud Gonne, austerity and also Ireland.
Such symbols are not suddenly adopted but have their roots in mythology and
legend. Similarly in the volume of verses, The Wild Swans at Coole, the swan is
the ever-recurring symbol. Another recurring symbol in Yeats‟s poetry is Helen
symbolizing destructive beauty and the linking-up of Helen with Dierdre and
Maud Gonne imparts to the poems like “No Second Tray” an unimaginable
Vastness, complexity and continuous expansiveness.

THE SYMBOL:”THE ROSE”

The „Rose‟ symbol occurs frequently in the poems of W.B. Yeats. Most of
his poems, which have „the rose‟ as the central symbol, can be found in the
volume called „The Rose‟ which appeared in 1933, In the Rose or Peace. The
symbol of the rose means earthly love but in the rose of the world this means, on
the one hard transient earthly love and beauty and on the other hand eternal love
and beauty, thus, complicating the meaning. The shift in meaning of the same
symbol in different poems of Yeats, at times baffles the readers. In the rose of
battle “The Rose” is a refuge from earthly love, symbolizing God‟s side in the
battle of spirit against matter. But this very symbol stands for the power of the
creative imagination and occult philosophy in the poem called to the rose upon the
rood of time.

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THE SYMBOL; „BYZANTIUM‟

„Byzantium‟, too, has been used by Yeats as a symbol of unity and

perfection. Yeats felt that Byzantium and its golden age is symbolical or a kind of
unity and perfection such as the world had never known before or since. He
believed that the religious, aesthetic and practical life were one in the early
Byzantium. He saw in the Byzantium culture the unity of being, a state in which art
and life interpenetrated each other. In his poem Sailing to Byzantium becomes the
symbol of perfect world. The poet rejects the world of birth and death and decides
for Byzantium. He thinks he will be able to defeat time by taking refuge in the
world of art because art itself is timeless. He ignores the sensual music made by
“that dying generation” in favor of the ethereal music produced by the byzantine
birds or hammered gold and gold enameling.

“Byzantium” suggests a far of an unfamiliar civilization which is symbolical of the

ideal, aesthetic existence he longs for.

SYMBOLISM IN THE SECOND COMING:

A study of the symbolism in the poem the second coming will show us
the nature of the symbols Yeats was wont to use. They are taken partly from
private doctrine, partly from Yeats‟s direct sense of the world about him and partly
from both these sources. For Yeats‟ one of the qualities that made life valuable
under the dying aristocratic social traditions was the ceremony of innocence” a
phrase that occurs in this poem. The expression “falcon and falconer” have both a
symbolic and a doctrinal reference.

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THE SWAN AS A SYMBOL:

Another symbol used frequently by Yeats is the swan. In Nineteen

Hundred and Nineteen, he speaks of the comparison of the solitary soul to a swan.
Some years earlier he had seen in the swans at coole park in inviolable, un ageing
eternity of nature contrasted with time- ridden human experience, Speaking of
those swans, he wrote: Their hearts have not grown old-----“. This timeless
immunity entering into his conception of the soul of man an over tone to the line.
“This swan has leaped into the desolate heaven” ( Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen)
in the stormy nightfall of civilization. But this swan that sails out of time is also
Zeus, for the Gods too are mirrors of the soul of man: Zeus the swan, whose
wayward impulse ravished Leda and brought to birth the world homer sang of
(Leda and the Swan). He ruled western thought for two thousand years, when
divinity was seen mirrored in Nature rather than shining beyond it. And echoes of
these thoughts are gathered into coole park and Ballylee in the lines about “Sudden
thunder of the mounting swan” and in the last lines of the poem they re echo
giving fuller meaning to his lament for the passing of romantic poetry:

“But all his changed

Where the swan drifts upon a darkening flood.”

It is not a different swan standing for a different swan standing for a

different idea- each time, nor yet a code word for a fixed idea, but the same swan
acting in different ways, much like a living bird: there is a cluster of thoughts
which effect each other, and now one now another is in front. From the swan to
Homer by way of these last lines is an easy transition, for where the swan led the
poet followed, from Homer to Helen: and Helen‟s beauty is in separable in his
thought from Maud Gonne‟s and thus symbol is interwoven with living experience.
The pattern of the tapestry is inexhaustible. It is partly this intricacy that gives
Yeats‟ later poetry its intense power.

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 CHAPTER-4

POEMS OF W.B. YEATS RELATING TO SYMBOLISM:

Yeats‟s poetry is replete with symbols. In his poetry the same

symbol is often used for different purposes and in different contexts. The symbols
are often derived from Yeats‟s study of the occult in which case the symbols
become difficult for the reader to understand.

Many of poems are selected in Yeats‟s poetry such as:

1) The Second Coming

2) Sailing to Byzantium

3) Leda and the Swans

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Written in 1921, The Second Coming is among the best known and the
most significant poems of Yeats as also among the poems most appropriate to the
present age. It is superbly controlled by powerful poetic comment not only on the
First World War and the decline of traditional standards but also on the 20 th
century man the new invention of horror.

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 “The Second Coming‟ is the poem that illustrating Yeats‟s use of
symbols. They are taken partly from private doctrine, partly from Yeats‟s direct
sense of the world about him and partly from both these sources. For Yeats one of
the qualities that made life valuable under dying aristocratic social tradition was
the “ceremony of innocence”, the phrase that occurs in the poem. The expression
“falcon and the falconer” has a symbolic significance. The falcon or hawk is a
small bird of prey which can be trained to fly and hunt as ordered. It is symbolic of
the active or intellectual mind. Falconers are keepers or trainers of hawks who hunt
with their help. The falconer is perhaps the soul itself or its uniting principle. The
image is used here to represent man‟s severance from Lord Jesus Christ. A terrible
beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man, its look cruel and merciless, is
represented as advancing relentlessly upon the world. Yeats represents it as the
symbol of the end of human civilization, now that Christianity after a reign of two
thousand years has reached its utmost-bound.

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

Sailing to Byzantium is one of the major poems of W.B. Yeats. It Is the

first poem in the volume Tower.

It is a meditation on timeless existence or eternity. At the beginning of

the poem the poet express his anger and disgust against his own country. He is
facing the problems associated with old age. And old man is deprived of the
pleasure of the youth. In his poem “Sailing to Byzantium”, Byzantium becomes
the symbol of the perfect world. Rejecting this world of birth and death, the poet
determines to sail to Byzantium where, he thinks, he can defeat time by taking
refuge in the world of art because art itself is timeless. He ignores the sensual
music made by “that dying generation” (mortal birds) in favor of the ethereal
music produced by the Byzantine birds of hammered gold and gold enameling.
Byzantium suggests a far-off unfamiliar civilization which is symbolical of the

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ideal, aesthetic existence he longs for. The poem called “Byzantium”, regards
Byzantium as a purgatory. On the face of it, “Byzantium” describes a night scene
in the ancient capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. But this poem is full of
suggestive symbolism. The clue to the symbolism is given in the very first line
which states that the unpurged images of the day recede. It is evident that the city
represents the imagination of the artist. It has to purify the images from experience
and transform them into art. The drunker soldiers and the harlots represent impure
images and lower desires. The dome suggests the perfection of art.

In the second stanza the poet describes an image seen by him. No

doubt, it springs from life. At the same time, it is linked to the world of perfection
beyond death. In this sense, it represents both life and death. In the mood of poetic
creation, one can contact that world of perfection. In the third stanza the poet
speaks of a lovely golden bird in the city. It is placed on the branches of a golden
tree. It can sing. Here the poet is referring to an actual bird of this kind mentioned
by the historians of Byzantine art. But he invests it with a symbolic significance. It
can sing like the cocks of Hades. It can also sing about that perfection of artistic
achievement.

The cocks of Hades represent life in this world. For the Romans used to
place images of Cocks on their tombs in order to suggests rebirth for the Cocks
herald sunrise and they can as w ell herald rebirth also. In the fourth stanza the poet
passes on to describe strange fires on the prevents of stately mansions. He is
referring to the mosaic patterns which adorn the marble floors. Marbles symbolize
durability as well as patterns. These are the fires of imagination which work on the
raw material of experience and product art. It is a remarkable fire. It cannot be
kindly by a physical flame. Nor can it be extinguished by stormy winds.

In spite of all its greatness, it cannot directly affect even to the

slightest degree the world of experience. As the poet puts it, it can‟t sing a sleeve.
In the fifth stanza the poet proceeds to describe the tide advancing on the city. It is

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restrained by the smithies of workers in gold. Evidently, the poet thinks of
experiences as the tide and the workshops as the means for its transformation into
art. Mention it also made of dolphins carrying spirits in the sea. Here the poet
refers to an old belief that the souls of the virtuous ride on dolphins to heaven. The
poem ends with a description of the sea which stands for the mixed experiences of
life. The poem seems to be struck by wonder not so much at the achievements of
art as at the unpromising material from which they arise. He seems to be more full
of love for this imperfect world than for the flawless beauty of art.

LEDA AND THE SWAN

A poem about Greek mythology, is include „The Tower‟ volume. In

W.B. Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan” Yeats uses the retelling of a classical myth
and its connotations to symbolize English dominance over the Irish people. A
Swan, Zeus transformed, raping a women provides an image of sneakiness,
dishonestly, and tyranny. Leda provides the image of innocence, and of a person
forced into submission. Yeats loves the use of symbolism, and he writes about this
love in his essay “ The Symbolism of Poetry.” Using at minimum the two works
aforementioned , this essay will show hoe he uses symbolism and how it works in
this particular poem. First, will be a stanza-by-stanza analysis of the usage of rape
as a symbol, and why Yeats chose this particular story to retell. Then, the overall
usage of symbolism in poetry will be discussed in relation to Yeats‟s essay „The
Symbolism of Poetry.‟ Leda and the Swan” by W. B. Yeats retells the ancient myth
of Leda being raped by Zeus, and by this he provides imagery and symbolism for
the tyranny over Ireland and a model of his philosophy on Symbolism.

During the sonnet‟s opening line Yeats shows a surprise: “A

sudden blow: the great wings beating still”. What this line does for the poem‟s
symbolic meaning is makes the reader jump with shock, and powerful. Next, the

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poem provides an introduction to the victim of this rape: Above the staggering girl,
her thighs caressed by the dark…

Overt meaning is the opposite of symbolism, and if no different

opinions can be made on a particular symbol, then there ceases to be a symbol.
Imagination stands out in the philosophy of Yeats, and without imagination there
cannot be art. Without art there cannot be symbolism to convey, only reality:
something everyone needs break from, in order to relax and think.

Symbol generates multiple meanings and there is no definite end to

it. Often it taunts human intelligent to discover more layers of meaning as
exemplified in the lines of Leda and the Swans:

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent break could let drop ?

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 CHAPTER-5

CONCLUSION:

“Had Yeats ceased to write at the age of forty, it is probable that we

should value him as a minor poet, writing in the dying Pre-Raphaelite tradition that
had drawn for a time renewed beauty and poignancy from the Celtic revival. There
is no precedent in literary history for a poet who produces his greatest work
between the ages 50 and 75. The work of this period takes its core of being from,
his long and dedicated apprenticeship of two poetry, so that finally “words obey
my call”, from range of forms of poetry, drama, prose, from the consolidation of
his own mythology. This last, from which arises the distilled symbolism of his
great period, is not always easy to understand, no did Yeats intend its full meaning
to be apparent except to those who had followed his thought and who were
conscious of the tradition in which he worked. His own cyclic view of history
suggested a recurrence and convergence of images. So that they become multiple
and enriched, and this progressive enrichment (which involves the consideration of
his work as a unity) may be traced throughout his life. Among such dominant
images are Leda and the Swan, Helen and the burning of Troy; the Tower in its
many forms Byzantium and its mosaics; sun and moon; the burning house cave,
thorn tree, and well; eagle heron, sea-gull, hawk; blind man, lame man, and beggar;
unicorn and phoenix horses, hound, and bear, yet, though traditional these images
are continually certified, validated, by their alignment with his own experience,
and it is this that gives their peculiar vital quality. In the verse they are often
shaped into a strong and proud rhetoric, that “high-breeding‟ of style, or into the
many poetic tones of which he was master”.

Yeats looked for order, a new way of ordering experience. T.S. Eliot
was also looking for order but, while Eliot was able to find it in orthodox

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Christianity, the possibility of belief in orthodox Christianity, had, for Yeats been
destroyed by “Victorian Science” which he had grown to hate “with a monkish
hate” system, order, ritual-Yeats sought these because he needed them as a poet to
help him achieve adequate poetic expression. In an auto biographical passage in his
prose-writings, we find him expressing a desire for an electic symbolic system
which would at once be a source of literary symbolism and which would be
derived from the symbolism of imaginative Irish literature. His search for a
symbolic system was bound up in a very complex manner with his desire to utilize
traditional Irish material- literary, historic, mythical. and popular. In some ways
Ireland had to be involved in the system . Irish symbols had to be employed to give
the proper emotional quality to his work.

Yeats built up his own framework of belief and thought out of scattered
fragment of mystical and occult lore. A reader who began with Yeats exposition of
his system, a vision might be pardoned for doubting if substantial poetry could
spring from such a strange and elaborate construction of platonic cycles of cultural
and individual life. Yet, though Yeats‟ finest writing casts its spell even if its
meaning is dimly apprehended, the material of a vision do furnish essential
understanding and enrichment of the poet‟s symbols- Babylon, Byzantium, The
Moon, The Second Coming etc.

Of course, Yeats employed myths in his later as well as early poetry as

symbolic bearers of his emotions. In his earlier poetry, his Rosicrucian and Faerie
Lore equally served his wistful aspiration after states of being more satisfactory
than those provided by experience. The Sidhe and the old heroes were calling to
the wearied idealist to come, come away “into the twilight”, to “the town land that
is the world‟s bane” urging him to “brood on hopes and fears no more.” He wished
that he and his beloved were “white birds on the foam of sea”. With Wandering

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Aengus he wanted to follow the magic girl through hollow lands and hilly lands,
and through the looking glass of time, and pluck her

“the silver apples of the moon

The golden apples of the sun”

Or else it was the secret rose of the world, symbol of ideal beauty, which
is one with truth, and the denial in the world of ideals of all that in reality is
“uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old” and which reigns in violate
”beyond the stir and tumult of defeated dreams.

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