A Return to Yeats - The Two Worlds

Yeats says, "I have no speech but symbol." Yeats also says: "Man can embody truth, but he cannot know it. . . . You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence" (quoted in Ellmann, Yeats 285). Ellmann claims, "each Yeats poem is likely to begin in decadence, and to end in renaissance . . . in general, the poems present decadence in order to overcome it" ("Uses" 14). Finally, Ellmann says there are two worlds in Yeats' poems, the natural and the "daimonic" world. In the first, "the life that we generally experience . . . is incomplete, but at moments it appears to transcend itself and yield moments of completeness or near- completeness, moments as he says half-humorously in the poem "There,"- "all the barrel- hoops are knit, . . . all the serpent-tails are bit." In his early work Yeats conceives of the boundary line between the worlds of completeness and incompleteness as twilit, in his later work it is lit by lightning" ("Yeats Without" 26).

Many of the later poems try to find a way to reconcile these contradictions in this world, often through images like ceremony, custom, courtesy, dancer and dance. Ellmann also writes, "Every poem establishes alternatives to indicate only one choice is worth making, and that [is] the agonized, unremunerative one" ("Yeats Without" 29). Finally, he says that Yeats' "poems take one of two directions: either they are visionary, concerned with matters of prophecy, of the relations of the time-world and daimonic timelessness, or with their own secret hopes and ambitions. In the visionary poems such as "Leda and the Swan" or "The Second Coming," Yeats is concerned to intermesh the divine world with the animal, to show the world of time as centaurlike, beautiful and monstrous, aspiring and deformed. In the poems which deal with artists or with heroes or with other men, he wishes also to show how brute fact may be transmogrified, how we can sacrifice ourselves, in the only form of religious practice he sanctions, to our imagined selves which offer far higher standards than anything offered by social convention" ("Yeats Without" 32).

** Liberally taken from: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Yeats.html **

                                                         Works Cited
Ellmann, Richard. "The Uses of Decadence." a long the riverrun: Selected Essays.
        New York: R-H-Vintage, 1990. 3-17.
- - -.Yeats: The Man and the Masks. New York: Dutton, 1948.
- - -"Yeats Without Analogue." a long the riverrun: Selected Essays. New York:
        R-H- Vintage, 1990. 18-32.
Yeats, W. B. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1965. _______________________________________________________________________