Yeatss A Vision helps the reader understand his poetic world. He sees the world asa process recurring at regular intervals. The consciousness of man is always placed inan opposite pair: the sun and the moon, man and woman, love and hatred, life anddeath, becoming a gyre penetrating and circling each other.
A line and a plane are combined in a gyre. A line is the symbol of time andexpresses a movement. It symbolizes the emotional subjective mind, the self. On theother hand, a plane, in combination with the moving line, making a space of three ormore dimensions, is the symbol of all that is objective, nature, and intellect. The gyrecombining both the line and the plane is always expanding and contracting. Thearchetypal form in a penetrating gyre reflects all lives, civilization, and the cycle ofnature. All things move from right to left and then move in the opposite direction. Wecan apply this principle to the cone of civilization.
“The Gyres” shows human history as a recurrent gyre, which is Yeats’s view ofcivilization. The Old Rocky face expresses both the anti-self of the poet and theprophet of civilization, gazing upon the world in front of him. Even though beauty isborn with its value, it must be destroyed owing to its own contraction. When a bravehero falls down, the war must be defeated. Faced with the destruction of an oldcivilization, humans cannot but accept the tragedy with superhuman will. A propheticvoice, longing for wisdom during long penance, tells those who rejoice.
Another poem “Meru” shows the wisdom of life realized through the rise anddecline of civilization. Civilization is hooped together; however, it is characterized byvarious conflicting aspects. Though man believes he can eliminate the terror, civilizationis doomed to break down again, as it must rise and fall as a process. Hermits come toknow that the day brings round the night; even the brilliant civilization and artdisappear in the dark of history.
“Lapis Lazuli” is another excellent poem revealing Yeats’s insight into the Western and Eastern civilization. When this poem was written, the Italians had invadedAbyssinia, and the Germans had occupied the Rhineland. Yeats knew that war anddevastation were now inevitable. Civilization reaching the highest point is to be ruineddue to the conflicts among races and countries. And even the great works of art can’tendure the destructive war and abrasion of time. The future generations, however, willfeel joy building up new things again. Through the history of civilization night bringsthe dawn, and a new life comes into being after the devastation.