This article explores Yeats's “A Woman Young and Old.” All the poems in theseries “A Woman Young and Old" were written between 1926 and 1929. Duringthis time Yeats was lamenting the vulgarity of hegemonic Irish culture. This seriespoems described feminine sexuality in the social and cultural repression of women.The sequence of eleven poems deal with the problems of female body and desire ina repressive society. In these poems Yeats insisted on the beauty or importance offeminine sexuality and sexual desire.
“A Woman Young and Old” takes up Yeats's metaphysical questions - eternalbeauty, the relationship between body and soul, the interdependence of sexual loveand spiritual hate. Feminine sexuality is the mark of the rebellion againstconventional social and cultural frame. Yeats's female personae embody a sacredsexuality and Yeats's sexual frankness close to a sexual mysticism. Femininesexuality and desiring female bodies are defiantly asserted, and asserted specificallyas transgressions, because they are precisely what is forbidden. In this series poemsthe female body and desire is expressed in Yeats's criticism of the repressive sexualmorality and culture of the Irish society, especially the Catholic Church. Linking offeminine sexuality and the sacred indicates Yeats's critique of Catholic Irishness. Thespeakers of the female sequence are embattled with a social and symbolic order thatseeks to confine them.
Yeats described sexual freedom and defiance against the authority and oppositionin patriarchal society. Yeats's increasingly explicit emphasis on feminine sexualityand sexual desire at that time. Whereas Irish Catholicism viewed the desires of thebody as threats to the soul, for Yeats the two were interdependent. Yeats insistedthat “the love of man and woman, and inseparable physical desire, are sacred”(UPII, 451). This article tries to show how Yeats's of awareness of feminine sexuality islinked with a sexual mysticism and the sacred. Yeats connected women's body anddesire with a sexual mysticism and the sacred in such a bold and defiant way.