Faced with an unknown and uncertain reality in the early 20th century, W. B.Yeats is poignantly aware of the impossibility of objective truth as well as ofineffectiveness of all traditional modes of acquiring knowledge. He well recognizesthat there is no center or a focal point of reference in a reality, which is soughtover and over again. “The Second Coming” well expresses the absence of a fixedcenter or origin of experience in Yeats’s historical system. It shows that there is anon-locus at the center of all history, of all thinking, speech, writing, and action.“The Three Beggars” also gives a vivid illustration of how empty meaning swirlsaround a missing center and the lack of foundation, which is well represented bythe three beggars’ collapse. Another poem “Among School Children” suggests thatdespite one’s efforts, one cannot arrive at “Presences,” which, like the answers toYeats’s final rhetorical questions, are endlessly deferred.
Despite such the limits and deferral of meaning, Yeats never gives up to assignmeaning to the fragmentary reality by declaring and creating a symbol. In “ADialogue of Self and Soul” the Self asserts the emblematic status of Sato’s swordand its covering. In “Blood and the Moon” Yeats again assigns meaning overtly bydeclaring the tower his symbol, though the poet in its last stanza, recognizing thatultimate wisdom is deferred beyond life, self-reflexively uses a metaphor of theblood stain to encode the limits of human understanding. In “1916 Easter” Yeatsdemonstrates what he can do as his part of a poet with the fragmentary reality. Hecalls each victim of the Easter Rebellion by name and writes it in verse, whichdenotes a bricolargic strategy of using the only language at hand to impose meaningon the painfully unresolved ambiguities of the Rebellion, even if he not only wellrecognizes that he can attribute no ‘truth-value’ to this transmutation, but also nolonger expects to arrive at the final meaning of the political event in his poem.