11.1 Yeats's symbolism and Irish mythology

W.B. Yeats stands as one of the most important poets of the modernist era, largely because of how he fused Irish mythology and personal symbolism into a poetic language all his own. His poems don't just reference Irish legends or mystical ideas as decoration; they use these elements to wrestle with questions about history, mortality, art, and national identity.

Yeats's poetry evolved significantly over his long career. His early work leans heavily on Celtic folklore and romantic imagery, while his later poems grow more compressed, symbolic, and politically charged. Understanding his symbolic system is essential for reading his major poems with any real depth.

Yeats's Symbolic Poetry

Symbolism in Yeats's Poetry

Yeats uses symbols not as simple stand-ins for single ideas, but as layered images that accumulate meaning across multiple poems. He draws these symbols from Irish folklore, the occult, personal experience, and his own invented mythological system (laid out in his prose work A Vision).

His symbols serve a specific purpose: they connect the physical, everyday world to spiritual and mystical dimensions. Some of the most important recurring symbols include:

• The rose — associated with Ireland, ideal beauty, and spiritual longing
• The tower — linked to Irish history, solitude, and the poet's own aging
• The gyre — a spiraling cone representing cyclical history
• The moon — tied to phases of human personality and civilization

These aren't arbitrary. Yeats built a coherent symbolic vocabulary over decades, so recognizing a symbol in one poem often deepens your reading of another.

The Gyre as a Central Symbol

The gyre is one of Yeats's most distinctive symbols. It refers to a spiraling, cone-shaped motion that represents the cyclical nature of history. In Yeats's system, history doesn't progress in a straight line; it moves through roughly 2,000-year cycles, each beginning with a moment of revelation and ending in collapse before a new cycle begins.

The gyre appears most powerfully in "The Second Coming" and "The Gyres." In "The Second Coming," the famous opening image of a falcon spiraling outward from its falconer ("Turning and turning in the widening gyre") captures a world spinning out of control, where the current historical cycle is reaching its violent end.

Apocalyptic Vision in "The Second Coming"

"The Second Coming" (1919) presents an apocalyptic vision rooted in Yeats's cyclical theory of history. Written in the aftermath of World War I and during the Irish War of Independence, the poem captures a world in crisis.

Key images to know:

• "The centre cannot hold" — the forces holding civilization together are failing
• "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" — "mere" here means pure or absolute, intensifying the chaos
• "The rough beast" slouching toward Bethlehem — this is not Christ's second coming but something darker, a sphinx-like creature heralding a new and possibly terrifying historical cycle

The poem's title is deliberately ironic. Yeats inverts the Christian idea of Christ's return as salvation. Instead, the "second coming" brings not redemption but a monstrous new era. The poem remains one of the most frequently quoted in the English language precisely because its imagery of civilizational collapse feels perpetually relevant.

The Eternal City of Byzantium

Byzantium (the historical Constantinople, now Istanbul) functions in Yeats's poetry as a symbol for the perfection of art and the escape from bodily decay. He associated the city, particularly during the reign of Justinian in the 6th century, with a culture where art and spirituality were fully unified.

In "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928), the aging speaker declares that Ireland is "no country for old men" and yearns to leave the world of biological life behind. He wants to be gathered "into the artifice of eternity," transformed into something like a golden bird that sings forever, beyond the reach of time and death.

In the companion poem "Byzantium" (1930), Yeats pushes further into this symbolic landscape, depicting the city as a place where the living and the dead, the physical and the spiritual, meet and transform. The golden bird reappears as an image of art's permanence set against human mortality.

The Byzantium poems are central to one of Yeats's great themes: the tension between the body (which ages and dies) and the soul or artwork (which can endure).

Mystical and Occult Influences

Yeats's Interest in Occultism

Yeats's engagement with the occult was not casual. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, a secret society devoted to ritual magic, Kabbalah, astrology, and alchemy. He remained involved for decades and took it seriously as a path to spiritual knowledge.

This matters for his poetry because occult imagery runs throughout his work. References to tarot, astrological phases, alchemical transformation, and magical ritual aren't just atmospheric; they're part of a coherent (if eccentric) philosophical system. Yeats believed that rational, scientific materialism couldn't account for the full range of human experience, and he turned to the occult to fill that gap.

Mysticism and Spirituality

Beyond the Golden Dawn, Yeats drew on a wide range of spiritual traditions. He was influenced by Hindu and Buddhist concepts, particularly reincarnation and the idea that existence moves through recurring cycles. These ideas reinforced his own theory of gyres and historical repetition.

Yeats also developed the concept of the "Great Memory" (sometimes called Anima Mundi), a kind of collective spiritual reservoir containing the accumulated wisdom and experience of all humanity. This concept resembles Jung's collective unconscious, though Yeats arrived at it through mystical rather than psychological reasoning.

In practical terms, this means Yeats's poems frequently treat symbols and myths as more than literary devices. For Yeats, tapping into ancient symbols meant accessing something real, a shared spiritual inheritance that connected individual experience to universal truths.

Irish Nationalism and the Celtic Revival

Yeats's Role in the Celtic Revival

The Celtic Revival (also called the Irish Literary Revival) was a late 19th- and early 20th-century movement to reclaim and celebrate Irish cultural traditions, particularly the mythology, folklore, and language that centuries of British colonial rule had suppressed.

Yeats was one of its leading figures. He collected Irish folk tales, retold legends of Cuchulain and the Tuatha Dé Danann, and wove mythological references into his poetry and plays. This wasn't just literary ambition; it was a political act, asserting that Irish culture had its own rich, ancient tradition independent of England.

In 1899, Yeats co-founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with Lady Gregory and others. The Abbey became the center of Irish dramatic arts and a platform for distinctly Irish storytelling. Yeats's cultural work helped shape a national identity at a time when Ireland was fighting for political independence.

Political Commentary in "Easter 1916"

"Easter 1916" responds to the Easter Rising of April 1916, when Irish republicans seized key buildings in Dublin and declared an independent Irish Republic. The British crushed the rebellion within a week and executed fifteen of its leaders, turning them into martyrs and galvanizing the independence movement.

Yeats knew several of the executed leaders personally, and the poem captures his deeply conflicted response. He had previously dismissed some of them as ordinary people living "where motley is worn" (the world of trivial, everyday concerns). Their willingness to die for a cause forced him to reassess.

The poem's famous refrain, "A terrible beauty is born," distills this paradox: the Rising was both horrifying in its violence and sublime in its transformative power. "Terrible" carries its full weight here, meaning awe-inspiring and dreadful at once. The phrase acknowledges that the rebels' sacrifice fundamentally changed Ireland, even as Yeats questions whether such sacrifice was worth the cost.

The Tower as a Symbol of Irish History

Yeats purchased Thoor Ballylee, a medieval Norman tower in County Galway, in 1917 and restored it as a home and writing retreat. The tower became both a literal setting and a powerful symbol in his later poetry.

In "The Tower" (1928), Yeats uses the building as a vantage point from which to survey Irish history and his own aging. The tower represents endurance, the survival of Irish culture through centuries of conquest and upheaval. It also represents the poet's solitary position, standing apart from the world to observe and make meaning from it.

The tower connects to broader themes of memory, legacy, and the relationship between an individual life and the larger sweep of history.

Yeats's Evolving Views on Irish Nationalism

Yeats's political views shifted considerably over his lifetime. In his youth, he was a passionate advocate for Irish independence, channeling that energy into the Celtic Revival and his literary work.

After Irish independence was achieved (the Irish Free State was established in 1922), a brutal civil war followed almost immediately. Yeats grew disillusioned with the violence and factionalism that accompanied self-governance. Poems like "Meditations in Time of Civil War" (1923) and "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" (1921) reflect this disillusionment. They mourn the destruction wrought not by British oppressors but by Irish people fighting each other.

This evolution is important for understanding Yeats's later work. He never abandoned his love for Ireland, but his poetry increasingly questions whether political idealism can survive contact with reality, and whether the violence required by revolution can ever be fully justified.