한국예이츠저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.1995.5.

55
Vol. 5 (1995) 55-73

Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry:

Unity in Diversity

Han-Mook Lee (Myong Ji Univ.)

In assessing William Butler Yeats's poetry, one requires an

understanding of such basic sources as Irish cultural nationalism,
the poet's personal muse, and poetic myths. The poet uses myth
consistently throughout his poems. As Harold Bloom observes,
"Yeats was always writing mythologies" (210). While Yeats's
Dublin and Maud Gonne subjectify important themes and various
subjects in his poetry, his golden bird and Ledaean girl objectify
the central ideas and diverse subjects theoretically. Because of
the connotative power of the imagination, Yeats highly poeticizes
myths which make his poetry unite reality with imagination,
nature with human beings, life with art, locale with universe,
logic with mystery, humanity with divinity, and history with
literature. In this capacity the poet explores the philosophical and
even religious possibilities of poetry through the poetic
revitalization of myth in the contemporary world. In this sense
Yeats culminates his poetry by the use of mythic vision.
Therefore, the myth plays a crucial role in Yeats's poetry as it
does in the world of most complex poets.
Since myth is used variously in science and literature, a
coherent conception of myth should be defined clearly for this
study. In its popular view, myth denotes stories which have no
factual basis. However, when we define myths in terms of their
56 Han-Mook Lee
cultural or communal function, we can view myth as a sacred
story that expresses and codifies belief, as an archetypal story
that shows the collective unconsciousness of human beings, and
as a ritual story that poeticizes the mythopoeic mode of
consciousness. This sense of myth suggests no judgment on the
truth of the story. Indeed, in Grecian and Roman literature,
according to Walter Bauer, the myth, μυθος or μυστηριον, signifies
"the secret thoughts, plans, and dispensations of God which are
hidden from the human reason, as well as from all other
comprehension below divine level, and hence must be revealed to
those for whom they are intended" (530).
The language and patterns of myths from the Irish cultural
mind are present in Yeats's poetic accounts. The notion of
myths in most countries including Ireland is alluded to frequently
in poetic passages, particularly in prophetic texts from the most
ancient literature, Hebrew to Greek. In this sense, the ancients
and even the Irish view a poet as a seer who realizes
supernatural will, reveals new philosophical and religious truth,
foretells the coming age, and charges a possible preparation
through the tool of mythological poetry. Sometimes a poet as a
seer utilizes poetic sense and sound of myth to capture people's
imaginations. For example, one Hebrew prophet and poet, Isaiah,
infuses poetic sound and sense with mythical prophecy by using
clusterings of onomatopoeic effects:

(24:1-4)

(24:19-20)
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 57
boqe q . . . bolqah . . . hiboq tiboq ha'arets
hiboz tiboz . . .
'abela nabela ha'arets
'umlalah nabelah tebel.
ro'ah hitro'e 'ah ha'arets
por hitporerah 'arets
mot hitmotetah 'arets
no'a tanu'a 'arets.

An approximate English equivalent to all this may sound as

follows: "the earth shivers and staggers, stumbles and tumbles,
quivers and quavers and quakes, jars and jerks and jolts." In
myth, powerful means of organic integration are used at the
levels of collective unconsciousness, religion, art, and literature.
In Yeats's poetry, this myth is part of a grand design which
unites such antithetical conflicts as the real with the ideal, the
credible with the incredible, and life with art from Crossways
through Last P oems. Furthermore, Van Harvey sees that myth
is a legitimate expression of the human mind and, therefore,
opens the door to irrationalism (156). Hence this conception of
myth includes primitive intuition without falling into literalistic
error. Yeats conceptualizes this sense of myth throughout his
poetry.
Yeats uses myth to create total organic unity in that myth has
the self-autonomy of the imagination. As Roland Barthes
explains, myth includes the tri-dimensional pattern: the signifier,
the signified, and the sign which imply the associative total of a
concept and an image (114). Barthes illustrates the spatialization
of the mythic pattern as follows:
58 Han-Mook Lee
Language
M Y T H
1. Signifier 2. Signified
3. Sign
I SIGNIFIER II SIGNIFIED
III SIGN

(115)
As shown in the illustration, this tri-dimensional pattern of
myth multiplies itself with the same signifying function that
multiplies one just as much as the other. As the pattern
continues the self-consuming process, myth can be experienced.
Therefore, Gerald Graff concludes that experience is always
superior to ideas about experience (6). In this sense, Yeats says
that man can experience truth but he cannot know it (L 425).
Yeats conceptualizes myth by including mythopoeia, mythology,
and the post-mythological experience to explain a full truth. In
mythopoeic experience, the ritualistic and prelogical mind makes
no distinction between dance and song, person and thing, and real
and ideal to complete poetic truth. In "Among School Children,"
Yeats uses various myths to unify the literal with the figurative
like dancer with dance (CP 245). Hence, most of his poems
include dramatic elements. Then, mythology fuses crude
experience into a unity of reference in which some mythopoeia
becomes symbolic. On the one hand, such symbols enrich the
reference which makes them suitable materials for poetry. On
the other hand, in post mythological experience, the conflict of
antithetical meanings may stimulate the making of a mythic story
to explain how those meanings are related. Therefore, this
process completes the circle of myth, as Yeats explains the
implication of the Great Wheel in A Vision, "This Wheel is every
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 59
completed movement of thought or life, twenty-eight incarnations,
a single incarnation, a single judgment or act of Thought" (81).
The basic form of the mythic process is a cyclical movement
which signifies completeness and totality (Frye 158).
Meanwhile Yeats applies this concept of myth in a general
context of all his poems rather than in individual poems in that
the myth unites microcosmic parts of each poem with the
macrocosmic totality of all poetry. Therefore, both his theory and
his practice point to the need to read an individual poem by
Yeats in the context of the rest of his poetry and of his life.
Yeats's use of the myth in some of its more traditional roles
manifests his deep respect for the poetic tradition, and at the
same time his use of myth in some of its more progressive roles
indicates his insightful vision of poetic progress. They especially
reveal some idiosyncrasies of his aesthetics. Exploring these
contentions, however, a closer investigation of specific and general
contexts in his poetry should be made.
Both "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Among School Children"
exemplify unity in diversity by the use of myth. On the one
hand, "Sailing to Byzantium" deals with the antithesis of the
physical and sensual world versus the world of intellect and
imagination, the mortal versus the eternal, nature versus art. On
the other hand, "Among School Children" manifests the first term
in these oppositions. Of course, Byzantium implies the second.
In one poem, Yeats seems to be elevating art above nature, the
eternal above the mortal. In the other poem, however, he seems
to do the opposite. A logical mind may not rationalize the
consistency of his view. However, the mythological mind may
experience a basic human truth about both views because of the
cyclical movement of the great wheel in the human and natural
worlds. As Cleanth Brooks observes on these two conflicts,
Yeats takes "both and neither" views (187).
Closer examination of "Sailing to Byzantium" reveals the whole
60 Han-Mook Lee
context of myth. In his book Part IV: The Great Year of the
Ancients of A Vision, Yeats wants to experience a month of
ancient culture in Byzantium about the year A.D. 525 if he can.
Byzantium of the Roman Empire symbolizes the flourishing of its
art: gold and other metalcraft, mosaic-work, and painting. In this
sense Byzantium implies a sacred city of the imagination. The
poet, who is sixty-three years old, desires something beyond the
physical life because of the mortality of the senses. He finds it
in works of art, "monuments of unaging intellect," which are
eternal (CP 217). He wants to leave the modern Ireland of the
young, the unreflective, the physical, and the decaying, and go to
the city of imagination and immortal intellect. Then, as his body
is dying, he wants to be incarnated as a golden bird which
cannot decay, but which will exist for ever. In other words, he
wants to be a sensuous work of art rather than a sensual man.
Yeats uses the concept of varying intellectual imagination in art
to illustrate modes of mythological or archetypal pattern. The
mythological pattern he considers is, in brief, the circular
movement of the great wheel in his A Vision as shown in the
poem:
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
------------------------------
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (CP 217-18)
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 61
This gold-enameled bird sings of "what is past, or passing, or
to come" (CP 218). The song of the final line repeats line 6:
"Whatever is begotten, born, and dies" (CP 217). In other words,
art celebrates the human world: the world of change,
deterioration, and death. Therefore, the poem has a cyclical
movement in which the last line goes back to its beginning. The
poet wants to get away from life into art, but as a work of art
he will celebrate life. In this sense, art is both superior and
inferior to life. Even though art is eternal, it does not possess
life. In his M ythologies, Yeats explains that the myth governs
such antithetical entities as enemy and sweetheart alike because
of the integrative and imaginative power of the myth (336). If
we examine only this poem, then we may rationalize that the
poet presents us with a logical dilemma. However, as Yeats
asserts in A Vision, this kind of antithetical revelation is an
intellectual influx neither from beyond the natural human world
nor born of a divine supernatural world, but begotten from human
spirit and history (262). Hence, in his A Vision, the poet
continues emphasizing "cyclic Man" which symbolizes such
mythological figures as Christ (250). Therefore, the myth unites
organically various parts and dilemma with archetypes in cyclical
movement.
In "Among School Children," Yeats uses mythologies of Plato,
Aristotle, Pythagoras, and other Greeks to illustrate the future of
sensual beauty. Although the poet manifests antithetical ideas
from "Sailing to Byzantium," he is not exclusively so to the
extent that myth is implicated, as we have seen, in mythological
development and circular movement. Just as "Sailing to
Byzantium" presents a cyclic pattern, "Among School Children"
manifests the same archetypal movement which shows the world
of process. This process, as Jonathan Culler claims, affirms
fusion and continuity of two entities, the dancer and the dance,
and the chestnut tree and its manifestations (247). In his
62 Han-Mook Lee
analysis of "Among School Children," Brooks generalizes its
structural extensions:
Throughout the poem, birth and growth and decay have run as
motifs: more specifically, the egg, the fledgling, the full-grown
bird, the molting bird, the scarecrow; or the babe at birth,
the child, youth and maturity, Leda and golden-thighed Pythagoras,
the man with sixty winters on his head. (186)

This position becomes identical in "Sailing to Byzantium" in

that both poems use the same mythological pattern of the cyclic
man to emphasize human imagination because of the integrative
power of the myth.
Another example of the myth occurs in "The Wild Swans at
Coole" where the poet experiences nature as mysterious and
beautiful rather than explains it logically in human language.
This poem presents us with a meditation on nature and on the
passage of time which changes the speaker but leaves nature
essentially as it is. Physical facts bring out emotions,
commemorative remembrance, and desires, and human life is
contrasted with nature, the present and past. Nature experiences
cyclical changes and keeps coming back to its same state. The
speaker of the poem representing the human being, however,
experiences progressive changes: birth, maturity, decay, and death,
at the same time he undergoes memories of previous states.
Nature is eternal and always in the present, human life is
temporary but possesses his own past, his present, and his
prophesy of the future.
The sad tone of the poem is set in a group of connotative
images such as "autumn," dryness, "twilight," and stillness. At
the same time, the poem manifests contrasting words with these:
"beauty," crystal "sky," "brimming water," and "clamorous wings"
(CP 147). The poet keeps the sad tone, and also the contrasts
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 63
throughout the poem. This ambivalent attitude of the poet
reflects the incompleteness of human beings because of his
inability to understand the swans. So the speaker simply
declares that swans representing nature are "mysterious,
beautiful" (CP 147). Although the swans capture his imagination,
they cannot be totally described in human language, justifying the
same Yeatsian technique of the conclusion as seen in "Among
School Children," "The Second Coming," and "Leda and the
Swan." Of course, the questions in these poems are not really
questions, because the poem suggests the answer as shown in
this poem. The poet does not really know where the swans will
be. Rather, since the swans represent to the speaker the
continuity and eternity of the natural world, any awakening that
finds them gone will be an awakening out of nature, into death.
Mysterious examples from Yeats illustrate:
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
64 Han-Mook Lee
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful. (CP 147-48)
The old expression of the number "nine-and-fifty" implies myth
which indicates the mystery of the swans. Even though the
swans seem paired "lover by lover" which is an even number, the
number "nine-and-fifty" is odd. Also, the mystery of the
numbers nineteen and fifty-nine is that both numbers are prime,
end in nine, and sound precise. The speaker keeps track of the
number of years. However, as he says, even on that first count
he cannot finish counting before they flow up off the water. He
cannot know their precise number. As the swans suddenly fly
away into the air, perhaps even do not want to be counted, they
scattered yet wheeled; they fly in rings but the rings are broken.
This group of images implies a precise but uncountable number, a
patterned movement that remains incompleted. In other words,
the poet conceptualizes a contrast between the human desire to
find out number and geometric shape in human expression, and
nature's resistance to be comprehended in such rational tasks.
In this view, the essential nature of the swans in the rest of
the poem is human expressions: their wings beat like clamorous
bells, they are lovers, the water is friendly, they are untired, and
their hearts do not grow old. They are therefore genuinely
mysterious, because the poem has not expressed their mysteries
fully, but seen in them parallels and contrasts to the human
condition, manifesting the impossibility of knowing them for what
they are. Rather, we may experience nature in a mysterious and
beautiful form through our mythical mind because the natural
world is impenetrable to the speaker.
In "The Coming of Wisdom with Time," Yeats presents us
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 65
with the incomplete nature of human life:
Though leaves are many, the root is one;
Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth. (CP 105)

In the poem, the poet manifests a self-antithetical nature of

youth and age. A unified mythic setting is introduced in the first
line as shown in "Among School Children," "O chestnut-tree,
great-rooted blossomer, / Are you the leaf, the blossom or the
bole?" (CP 245). Metaphorically, the poet relates youth with
"leaves," "flowers," and "sun," which are positive, and with
"lying," which is negative. Also he relates age with "truth,"
"wisdom," and "oneness," which are positive, and "wither," which
is negative. Therefore, he intentionally equalizes youth and age
as having positive and negative traits. Yeats is neither rejoicing
over a gain nor deploring a loss; but he is deploring the fact that
we cannot have all at once-sensual and sensuous pleasure, power,
dynamic energy, and intellectual knowledge. Human life is never
complete. Rather, we gain some favorable things at the expense
of missing others. This self-conflicting nature of human life sets
up a myth of his great wheel in A Vision.
"Leda and the Swan" describes a mythic union of divinity and
humanity. This sonnet depicts a rape which is implied through
sexual words and imageries. The first quatrain describes the
wild attack and the prelude; the second quatrain, the act of
making love; the first part of the sestet, the sexual peak; the last
part, the emotional release following the peak. But this is not
common rape but a rape by Zeus in the form of a swan. So this
rape is described in words that reveal awesomeness. The divine
nature appears as a "feathered glory" and its attack is "a white
rush" as shown in the poem:
66 Han-Mook Lee

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? (CP 241)
Zeus's
rape is momentous, but he pays a great price for the
future. And so the peak is described in symbols that suggest the
direct experience of orgasm and its indirect results which cause
the destruction of Troy and the death of Agamemnon. After the
moment of emotion is over, and its consequences indicated, the
poet asks a question about the meaning of the act: "Did she put
on his knowledge with his power?" (CP 241).
The word swan and the name Zeus of mythology are not
mentioned in the poem. The title gives us a hint of the
mythological story. Leda is a beautiful humane princess whom
Zeus rapes in the form of a swan. Zeus's passionate and
momentous action causes the ultimate defeat of the Trojans and
the burning of Troy by the Greeks. On his return from Troy,
Agamemnon is killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover.
In her relation with Zeus, Leda takes on some capacity of the
god, because she gives birth to Helen who shapes the future.
Whether she takes on his knowledge can be answered in different
ways. Because of the mythic blending of the poem, it multiplies
its meanings in itself. For example, we may draw many
philosophical questions: whether human sexual emotion can
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 67
foresee its consequences; whether power and wisdom can coexist
in human life; whether man can combine the vitality and passion
of youth with the knowledge and wisdom of age as shown in
"The Coming of Wisdom with Time." Without myth, all these
questions cannot be answered. Because of the integrative power
of imagination, the myth unifies all these parts together.
Therefore, the myth plays the pivotal role to approaching the
poem. The same recurrent theme occurs in "After Long Silence."
In the poem, as Brooks and Warren point out, "man cannot ever
be complete--cannot, that is, possess beauty and wisdom
together" (165).
Yeats uses history to create contemporary mythological
literature in "The Second Coming." When this poem was
published in 1919, Ireland was engaged a violent civil war; Europe
had experienced World War I; and Russia was experiencing civil
war right after its 1917 Revolution. All these historical conflicts
signify for Yeats the coming end of the Christian era, the
historical cycle begun almost two thousand years from the birth
of Christ. In Yeats's mythological-historical theory, the change
from one historical period to another is always marked by a
turning point of war and confusion.
The poem can be divided into two parts. The first part
presents us with the poet's feeling of the current. The second
gives a revelational vision of the coming era:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
68 Han-Mook Lee
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (CP 210-11)

The speaker's description of current history is horrifying. The

first two lines manifest imageries of a confusing world. In the
ancient time, the falconer trained the falcon to return upon a
signal. But in this poem, the falcon has flown away beyond the
hearing of the falconer's signal. The word "Mere" here possesses
its obsolete meaning of absolute, entire, sheer. The word
"Ceremony" has for Yeats special value as related with stable and
civilized life as shown in "A Prayer for My Daughter." The final
lines of this part depict a familiar crisis situation where good
people are unsure about what should be done, while the bad
people are gaining with their "passionate intensity."
The second part seems to begin with a note of hope. The poet
foretells that some divine revelation is coming as shown in the
passage: "Surely the Second Coming is at hand." Many violent
actions must be providential of change, symptoms of the changing
from one historical era to another. The vivid vision of the poet
arises to consciousness of the stone sphinx in the Egyptian
desert, slowly coming to life and "moving its slow thighs" (CP
211).
The vivid and brief vision of the poet is implied in symbolic
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 69
meanings of twenty centuries long "stony sleep" connoting the
sphinx. Also, it is "vexed to nightmare" by "a rocking cradle"
which is a metonymy for the infant Christ. And the poet knows
what "rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches
toward Bethlehem to be born" (CP 211). He is horrified by the
vision. A "rough beast" symbolizes the new era. The last
question is rhetorical, as shown by the presence of parallelism but
in which "what" can logically be linked only with "that." But
when is logic ever the most direct way to poetic power? The
poet's ambivalent position in syntactic structure diffuses logical
mind, instead, enriches the multiple meanings of the poem through
mythological signs.
Because of the title and lines 9-10, we expect that the poem
would reflect the Second Coming of Christ, but the expectation is
diffused by the final two lines of the poem. Instead, the
prophesied Antichrist is coming. Myths tell us that the
Antichrist will be born in Christ's birth place, and the Antichrist
is alluded to frequently in the Bible as the "beast." However, the
poet uses the mythological stories to unite Antichrist with the
desert sphinx and gives him new dimensions of terror and evil by
his use of the words "rough" and "slouches." This poem makes
us feel of evil and horror which are evoked by the integration of
cyclic history and historical myth in a contemporary world. As
shown in the poem Yeats unites history with myth in that both
move in cycles, as Robert Langbaun claims:
Yeats came to understand that history moves not in a straight line,
but in cycles. The new age cannot be said to advance on the old
because each age values opposite things, and because the new age
brings back certain values rejected by the old. The values of the
new age terrorize the old. It is through terror, as the two stories
indicate, that history moves and that the revelation ushering in the
new age descends. (148)
70 Han-Mook Lee
In his E ssays and Introductions, Yeats views mythology as
"the unquestioned belief," and "the deeper my thought the more
credible" (516). The poet explores every possibility of the
supreme mythology which completes human life in that the myth
unites the natural with the supernatural, reality with imagination,
the credible with the incredible, and humanity with divinity. In
this sense, as David Lynch concludes, the mythology provides
Yeats with "creative energy" in making his poetry (196-7).
Especially Yeats utilizes symbolic mythologies to invoke
supernatural realities (Perkins 600). After all, the mythological
thought becomes identical with credible reality through the tool of
poetic imagination. Therefore, in his final years, Yeats devotes
his life to reconcile reality with imagination through the poetic
truth of the interactive myth (Ellmann 283). On the whole the
Yeatsian interactive myth integrates organic unity in diverse
themes and subjects, and suggests philosophical and religious
possibilities of his poetry in contemporary civilization.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. M ythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.
Bauer, Walter. Griechisch-Deutsches Worterbuch z u den
Schriften des Neuen Testaments: und der ubrigen
urchristlichen Literatur. Berlin: Gleeerup, 1958.
Bloom, Harold. Yeats. New York: Oxford UP, 1970.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought U rn: Studies in the
Structure of P oetry. New York: HBJ, 1947.
Brooks, Cleanth and Robert Penn Warren. U nderstanding
P oetry. New York: Holt, 1960.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism
after Structuralism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982.
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 71
Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The M an and the M asks. New
York: Norton, 1979.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: F our E ssays.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.
Graff, Gerald. Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in
M odern Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979.
Harvey, Van A. A Handbook of Theological Terms: Their
M eaning and B ackground E xposed in Over 300 Articles.
New York: Macmillan, 1964.
Langbaum, Robert. The M ysteries of Identity: A Theme in
M odern Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
Lynch, David. Yeats: The P oetics of the Self. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1979.
Perkins, David. A History of M odern P oetry: F rom the 1890s
to the High M odernist M ode. Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1979.
Yeats, W. B. A Vision. New York: Collier, 1966.
. The Collected P oems of W. B . Yeats. London:
Macmillan, 1961.
. E ssays and Introductions. New York: Collier, 1986.
. The Letters of W. B . Yeats. Ed. Allan Wade. London:
Rupert, 1954.
. M ythologies. New York: Macmillan, 1959.
. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft,
1990.
72 Han-Mook Lee
Yeats의 신화 사용: 다양성의 조화
우리말 요약 이한 묵

Yeats는 시에서 다양한 신화를 복합적으로 사용하였다. 주지주의

시인들의 논리적이고 합리적인 언어로 표현되어질 수 없는 신비한
경험의 세계를, Yeats는 아일랜드 지방과 고대 그리스 로마 신화라
는 도구를 사용해서 독자로 하여금 유기적 상상력을 유발시켜 인생
의 진실을 경험케 하였다. 물론 Yeats 시에서 신화는 대중이 알고
있는 비현실적인 설화나 전설이 아니고, 인간의 시간과 공간을 초월
한 선험적인 무의식의 진실을 표현한 원형적 이야기이다. 그래서 시
인은 비이성적이고 비논리적이지만 실존하는 신비한 이원적 상반세
계를 신화를 통해 유기적으로 결속시키고 있다. 특히 Yeats의 신화
는 실체와 상상, 사실과 진실, 자연과 인간, 인생과 예술, 소우주와
대우주, 논리와 신비, 인성과 신성, 그리고 역사와 문학을 다양하게
유기적으로 융화시켜 새로운 시적 진실을 창출해 낸다.
이런 관점에서 볼 때, Yeats의 시는 총체적으로 접근하여야 한다.
예를 들면, "Sailing to Byzantium"과 "Among School Children"은
서로 상반된 견해를 제시해 주고 있다. 상반된 관점의 두 시에서 지
성과 상상을 겸비한 영원한 예술세계와 생명과 관능을 갖춘 일시적
인 자연인간 세계의 대립을 통해, Yeats는 인성 혹은 예술 하나만으
로는 불완전하다고 강조하며, 완전하기 위해서는 인간의 논리와 이성
을 초월한 신화적 경험이 필요하다고 시사한다. 시인은 인생에서 탈
피해 예술이 되기를 원하지만, 예술작품으로서의 시인은 결국 인생을
예찬할 것이다. 그러므로 예술은 인생보다 우월하기도 하고 동시에
열등하다. 비록 예술은 영원하지만, 작품이기 때문에 생명이 없다. 인
간도 역시 생명이 있지만, 결국 썩고 만다. 또한 Yeats는 "The Wild
Swans at Coole"에서 신비한 자연의 세계를 인간의 숫자와 모양의
이성적 언어로 표현이 불가능하다면서, 인간의 불완전과 동시에 자연
의 아름답고 신비한 세계의 경험가능성을 예시해 주고 있다. 이러한
Yeats의 신화 사용은 "The Coming of Wisdom with Time," "Leda
and Swan," 그리고 "The Second Coming"등 에서도 적용되어지고
 Yeats's Use of Myth in His Poetry 73
있다.
Yeats가 말했듯이 신화는 인간이 깊이 생각하면 할수록 더욱더 믿
어져서 결국에는 의문의 여지가 없는 믿음이 된다. 바로 이런 신화의
속성이 Yeats에게는 창의력의 바탕이 되어, 초자연적인 실체인 시적
진실을 도출해 낸다. 그러므로 Yeats의 시를 거시적과 미시적으로
접근할 때, 상관적인 신화는 다양한 주제와 소재를 유기적으로 융합
해 주고, 또한 현대문명에서 그의 시의 철학적이고 종교적인 가능성
을 제시해 주고 있다.