Unlike his early symbolic mode that is based on the natural representation oforganic universe, Yeats’s later works are constructed in the allegorical mode which isbased on the antinomies and oppositions that can be defined by rhetoric, form, tone andthematic motifs. If the antinomies are Yeats's central means of perceiving andinterpreting the world, what kinds of experience are posited in the center of his life,and in what manner are those experiences represented? The aim of this essay is toapproach, through his poetic sequence “Meditations in Time of Civil War”, Yeats’sframe of mind which perceives the world as a series of fixed set of antinomies.
Yeats’s later lyric mode is connected, in a very complex manner, with thecontradictions and conflicts which arise from what Michel Foucault calls “the absolutepower of life and death” and “the life-administering power”. He believed that if thepolitical power and the family authority were to be maintained in modern Ireland, he aspoet should embody the ancient forms of power in the aesthetic domain. Such idealeads him to enact in his own works the oral tradition of ancient poetry. He thinksthat, leaning on the model of ancient magical arts, modern lyric poet could embody theabsolute power of death in his poetry. The literary mode which enacts such power andauthority can function as one of the main agents that break the comedic power ofmodern individualism.
Yeats’s idea of absolute power and authority is, however, in constant contradictionwith the life-administering power of modern society. Therefore, despite the poet’s strongdesire to enact the tragic authority of ancient bard, the poetic space of “Meditations inTime of Civil War” remains the complex site of contradictions and conflicts betweenthe residual forms of Anglo-Irish traditional culture and the dominant cultural forms ofmodern individualism. It is a disruptive space in which what Fredric Jameson calls the “reversibility” and “disjunction” of modern literary text are embodied in thematic, figuraland formal levels.