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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.11 pp.237-260
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.1999.11.237

The Poetic Self in the Process of Self-Meditation: Yeats’s Last Poems (II)

Youngja Choe

Abstract

Yeats remarked, two years before his death, that it is the poets’ first business todescribe desirable persons, desirable places, and states of mind. One of thesesexcellent persons and places in Last Poems―ascetics and the “half-way house” theChinamen of “Lapis Lazuli” climb towards. Here we notice how many topographicalassociations lay everywhere: “the mountain,” “Alt” and the central character climbingsome high point. Having lifted himself to the vantage point of age, Yeats is able toform a final altitude. The last poems are mainly set in the location of the open field,that dominates the poetic landscape.
‘The whole system’ of A Vision ‘is founded upon the belief that ultimate reality falls in human consciousness into a series of antinomies.’ Since he had longarranged his thought and disciplined his imagination by ideas of antithesis, it isnatural that his later work should play out an extended series of oppositions:knowledge and ignorance; day and night; time and eternity. In the process ofconsciousness they have a tendency to be separated from each other into various setsof the opposite; while their attendant logic characterizes a struggle towards harmony.‘Logical and emotional conflicts alike lead towards a reality which is concrete,sensuous and bodily.’
“Meru” invokes an image of human being in conflict with the cyclicity of acosmic rhythm. Yeats, identified with the oriental hermits in the ascetic attitude tolife, sees “the naked bodies” to awake to the realities of life, he is reassured that thehigher perception should be gained through their sensuous experiences in thedarkness of night. According to St. John of Cross, ‘the nature of the soul requires complete renunciation of the world.’ The darkness brings wisdom, emptiness sight.Yeats would describe it as ‘the luminous dark.’ This implies in ‘via negativa’ thatone is nothing, paradoxically, to become everything. The open region for everythingis the place Heidegger called ‘clairi?re,’ which Yeats would like to paint in hispoetry. Its openness let brightness play with darkness in it.
The relation to light and darkness characterizes as ‘a double’ like the dawnimage. This curious relation Adams claims to name ‘identity.’ Identity has the sameform, as does a metaphorical trope, where sameness and difference coexist inlanguage. He would write a poem ‘cold and passionate as the dawn.’ The importantmetaphor, which Yeats uses to describe the intersection of the two worlds, is that ofdawn.
In this paper I was concerned with both the realm where religion, art, personalconsciousness converge and the place in which gathers and protects everything. Yeatswas life long a man who practiced both absolute integrity of craft and perfection ofpersonality, the perfection of its surrender. I take poetry to be an exploration ofhuman consciousness, where it faces time and eternity in their play. Equally it is anexploration of words.
Keywords :

시적 자아의 자기성찰 과정: 예이츠의 『최후의 시편들』(2)

최영자
한국외국어대학교

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