Yeats published the first edition of A Vision in 1925 and the revised edition in1937. He had poured the most intense concentration of his intellect into it for 20 years.It may be regarded as the greatest of Yeats’s works, containing some of the mostpenetrating and beautiful prose that he wrote. It is essential to any understanding ofmany of his most notable poems and plays. But many critics agreed it was difficult toread and understand; it is extraordinarily distilled, yet complex in an extremely preciseway.
In this thesis I compared “Unity of Being” in Yeats’s A Vision with “Dao” in LaoZi’s Dao De Jing. I interpreted the similarity between the theories of Yeats and Lao Zi.In A Vision Yeats explained 28 incarnations according to the 28 phases of the moon,the Great Wheel and the deliverance of the bond of rebirth. His major symbols are thegyres, the double triangle or the primary or objective and the antithetical or subjective.The Four Faculties(Will, Mask, Creative Mind, and Body of Fate) and the FourPrinciples(Husk, Passionate Body, Spirit, and Celestial Body) are related to the twocontrasting tinctures. The antithetical gyre is lunar, aesthetic, expressive, multiple,hierarchial, aristocratic, artistic, particular, creative. The primary gyre is solar, moral,dogmatic unifying, humane, democratic, scientific, abstract. There is a state of perpetualconflit between the gyres and the moment of harmony of the gyres. The gyres areliving each other’s death, dying each other's life. In Dao De Jing Lao Zi explainedthe dual character of the “Dao” operate as Being-Without-Form and Being-Within-Form,or Heaven and Earth, interrelated so closely the two sides of a coin.
Yeats wanted to teach us what is the ultimate reality is and we can attain the“Unity of Being” at the moment of harmony of antinomies. The ultimate reality becauseneither one or many, concord nor discord, is symbolized as a phaseless sphere, but as all things fall into series of antinomies in human experience it becomes, the moment itis thought of, what he describe as the Thirteenth cone. Lao Zi insisted, “the world isoneness, or unity, emerging from the moment of the Dao.” Yeats also told us,“Eternity, though motionless itself, appears to be in motion.”