Yeats’s Symbols: Cycles and Antinomes           by Lindsay A. Lauersdorf

          In his 1901 essay “Magic”, Yeats writes, “I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist” (p. 28).  Later, in his introduction to A Vision, he explains, “I put the Tower and the Winding Stair together into evidence to show that my poetry has gained in self possession and power.  I owe this change to an incredible experience” (Vision p.8).  The experience he goes on to relate is the preliminary stage of the composition of the work itself.  In A Vision, however,  Yeats exhibits his poetic power as well, along with his knowledge of mysticism and affinity for symbology to illustrate the behavior of the  forces of human consciousness and history.   He ties these two cycles together into the overarching symbol of the work: the Great Wheel.  This is a symbol that Yeats uses not only to explain the cycles of one individual’s life, but also through the same motions, to explain the cyclical movement of the centuries, and the conjunction of certain historical events.  When asked about the factual reality of his cosmological descriptions, he replies that they are “purely symbolical ... [and] have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice” (Vision p.25).  Though to a large extent obscure and complicated, these symbols are paramount to an understanding not only of the ideas contained in A Vision, also the thought process Yeats conveys in much of his poetry. 

          The Great Wheel consists of and contains two opposing gyres, the primary and the antithetical, objectivity and subjectivity, which turn in opposite directions, the two opposing forces that govern the workings of the mind, life, and the universe. The two opposing gyres contain four more gyres, which symbolize what Yeats refers to as the four faculties: the Will and  the Mask, or what is and what ought to be, and the Creative Mind and the Body of Fate, or the knower and the known. He then adds numbers to the symbol, corresponding to the phases of the moon, and is able to use them to designate every possible action of thought or life.  He places these in a circular shape.  “The whole system,” Yeats writes “is founded upon the belief that the ultimate reality, symbolized by the sphere, falls in human consciousness... into a series of antinomies” (Vision p. 187). 

          The Byzantium poems are a prime example of the antinomies at work in the individual mind of man.  In many of his poems, Yeats idealizes Byzantium, as a symbol of unity in spiritual and everyday life.  He writes “I think that in early Byzantium, maybe  never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and artificers... spoke to the few and the multitude alike. The painter and the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the illuminator or sacred books, were almost impersonal, almost perhaps without the consciousness of  individual design, absorbed in their subject-matter and that the vision of a whole people” (Vision p. 279).   “Sailing to Byzantium” expresses Yeats’ longing to become a part of Byzantine art, to return to life as a golden bird, who transcends the temporality of the natural world. However, he is quick to criticize the idea of this transcendent state in the later poem “Byzantium”.  The two poems compliment each other, and together show the importance of the unavoidable contradictions that come with being human. 

In the first stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium” Yeats writes,

                “That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees, - Those dying generations - at their song, 

The conflicts  in this poem are evident-- between the temporal and the eternal, between the mortality of man’s body, and the eternal existence of his soul through artistic creation.  The speaker in the poem is concerned with his own advancing age, and is noticing the temporary state of everything around him. The song in this passage may signify the temporal world, in which “Fish, flesh or fowl, commend all summer long/ whatever is begotten born and dies.” Everything speaks to him of its beginning which he knows will ultimately lead to its end.  There is another song in the second stanza, that sung by the soul of an old man, and for Yeats this song is found in contemplation of Byzantine art.               

 “An aged man is but a paltry thing, 

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless 

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

 For every tatter in its mortal dress; 

Nor is there singing school but studying 

 Monuments of its own magnificence;”

          This song arises out of the speaker’s desire to transcend his temporary form, to contact that within him that which will continue after his mortal body has passed on.  He no longer sees a use for the form he now inhabits, sees it rather as an obstacle to his advancement.  The stanza that follows is an incantation, a song of sorts, addressed to the sages in a Byzantine mosaic.  He bids them “purne in a gyre and be the singing masters of my soul”.  He continues:

          “Consume my heart away; sick with desire

           And fastened to a dying animal,

           It knows not what it is; and gather me 

           Into the Artifice of Eternity.” 

He calls to the spirits of these sages in their own forms, carved in gold, and longs for an unchanging form of his own through which his soul can realize its own importance without the limitations of human desire and time.  Yeats continues the bird/song  symbology with his own longing to be transformed into a bird, though not of the nature of those he spoke of in the mortal world, but one:

 “Of hammered gold and gold enameling  

 To keep a drowsy emperor awake,

 Or set upon a golden bow to sing 

 To lords and ladies of Byzantium,

 Of what is past or passing or to come.”

          Without the narrow limitations that time gives to vision, the speaker sees the opportunity to improve and isolate the song of his soul from the obstacles of his changing physical existence.  He imagines that he will be able to see the past, present and future as they are, as a single, continual state of existence.  In his poem “Byzantium” Yeats looks at his dream of immortality from another perspective.  In this poem, the speaker has taken on the form of the golden bird, separated himself from temporality and his human, physical needs.  Instead of the glorious idea of all inclusive vision he has previously conceived, he finds a dark, ghostly scenario,  its only subjects immaterial phantasmic figures devoid of human flesh.  He  writes:

             “A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, 

              All mere complexities,  The fury and the mire of human veins.”

These “complexities” refer perhaps to the speaker’s previous state, caught in the conflict between the needs of the human body and the aspirations of man’s spirit.  The state of existence he achieves in “Byzantium” however,  Yeats likens to death, in that it transcends the physical, though at the same time has destroyed the possibility of contact with the physical world, as well as all the abilities that arise out of the conflict between man’s spiritual ambitions and his temporal, physical vehicle.  The poem continues:

 “A mouth that has no moisture 

and no breath 

Breathless mouths may summon; 

 I hail the superhuman;

I call it death-in-life and

life-in-death.”

           In A Vision, Yeats describes the state one is confined to after death as the domination of Spirit over Husk, or mind over physical body, in which in fact there is a widened perception, though there is only knowledge and no action.  In this condition, “...there is only Spirit, pure mind containing within itself pure truth, that which depends only upon itself.... mind deprived of its obstacle can create no more and nothing is left but ‘the spirits at one’, unrelated facts and aimless mind, the burning out that awaits all voluntary effort”  (p. 188-9).   The bird that Yeats has seen himself become is still superior to the living birds in that it will never change, and lacks the survival needs of flesh and blood creatures.  He writes,however, 

“At midnight on the Emporor’s pavement flit 

 Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit  

Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,

Where blood-begotten spirits come 

And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance,

 An agony of trance,

An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.”

Yeats sees the stagnancy in this representation, with the perspective of a living creature cast  into the world of the dead.  He allows his speaker awareness of what he is within a world where everything comes out of itself, and there are no necessary acts of will.  Yeats points out in this poem the necessity of the conflict which he was earlier concerned with in “Sailing To Byzantium”, that between the mortality of the human body and the aspirations of the immortal spirit.  Without the conjunction of the two conditions, the value of knowledge is lost on a living mind.  Yeats writes in A Vision that the spirit cannot understand all spirits in unity “until they have been perceived as objects of sense” (p. 189).  In “Byzantium”, the speaker has forsaken his physical senses for wider perception, but is unable to see the value in his newly acquired state.  It is knowledge simply for its own sake, and he is unable to make use of it.  The symbol becomes more complicated when applied to the cycle of history. The Great Wheel and its numerical system, the phases of the moon and the movements of the gyres, become a vehicle for the interpretation of historical events, which conjunct and oppose one another.  Yeats draws most of his parallels between two eras-- the pre-Christian time period, and that after Christ’s birth. Yeats begins the fifth book of A Vision with the entire text of his poem “Leda and the Swan”.  It is an introduction of sorts to his discussion of human history, and the nature of man’s development.  For Yeats, the rape of Leda by Zues in the form of a  swan is his symbolic perception of the beginning of the first era he discusses, and perhaps the beginning of human civilization as we know it.  Adams writes “In his placement of this poem and in what it dramatizes, Yeats seems to make the event stand for the beginning of human history, the history of a particularly human consciousness, the generating principle of what is mysterious...  power born of the introduction of love and strife with perhaps a new knowledge and power, put together into life” (p. 140).  The birth of Helen brought to Greek civilization new ideals  with regard to human beauty-- the greater attention to the human body changed the perspective of Grecian artists, but along with it came the bloody battles of the Trojan war. Yeats begins, “A sudden blow.  The great wings beating still/ Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed/ By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,/ He holds her helpless breast upon his breast” (Vision p.267).   The encounter is both violent and sexual in nature, and the conjunction of these two motions are reflective of their results.  Adams recalls that in the myth, this set of antinomies is personified in the two eggs that Leda produces-- love, in the form of Helen, and strife in the characters of Castor and Pollux (p. 139).  Yeats writes “A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead.”  At the point of orgasm in the sexual encounter, the seeds of war, as well as those of love have been conceived.  Adams writes, “In the Pagan era... religion is antithetical (gods being nearly human, in human images) and philosophy and secular life primary...In the Christian era, there is a reversal, and religion becomes primary” (p.141).  This is exemplified in the different conjunctions between man and God.  In “Leda” it is direct and brutal-- the human woman being physically overtaken by an actual creature.  The final lines, posing a question-- “Did she put on his knowledge with his power/ Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?” imply a choice on Leda’s part, though the rest of the poem makes it clear that the power and perhaps the knowledge as well  was inflicted upon her more than accepted willfully by her.  In the beginning of the Christian era, we will see another conception, which can be compared to the conception that takes place here.  Instead of a violent direct one, Christ’s conception is a mystical one-- between a human woman and a distant, more overshadowing deity, taking place peacefully, and meekly accepted by its recipient due to her trust in the will of her God whose understanding she believes to be far greater than her own. 

In book five, Yeats takes a scene from the Christian era, a vision of Salome “dancing before Herod and receiving the prophet’s head in her indifferent hands.”   He continues, “Seeking images, I see her anoint her bare limbs with lion’s fat, for lack of the sun’s ray, that she may gain the favour of a king, and remember that the same impulse will create the Galilean revelation and deify Roman Emperors whose sculptured heads will be surrounded by the solar disk.  Upon the throne and upon the cross alike, myth becomes a biography” (Vision p. 273).  This “exultation of the flesh and of civilization perfectly achieved” (Vision p.273) is a characteristic of the age begun with Leda’s rape and is continued into the Christian era.  The two ages are essentially opposites in nature, though the operable forces within them overlap to a great extent.  In the poem, “Two Songs from a Play”, Yeats draws on the idea that time is cyclical and that the ages overlap and merge with each other using an allusion to Virgil’s Fourth Eculogue to draw a parallel between the ritual death of Dionysis and the birth of Christ.   In A  Vision, Yeats quotes the passage: “The latest age of the Cumaean song is at hand; the cycles in their vast array begin anew.  The virgin Astrea comes, the reign of Saturn comes, and from the heights of Heaven a new generation of mankind ascends” (Vision p. 243).  In this passage, Virgil prophesies the return of Astrea, who had ascended from the earth to become the constellation Virgo, to begin a new Golden Age.  The work is seen as a foretelling of the birth of Christ: Astrea corresponding to the Virgin Mary, and the star Spica, the most prominent star in Virgo to the star of Bethlehem.  In A Vision, Yeats also makes mention of the birth of Christ falling between the signs of Pisces and Aries, and the sun’s transition between these two signs was also traditionally associated with the ceremonial death and resurrection of Dionysis (Finneran p.654).  Yeats writes further, “Each age unwinds the thread another age had wound...  all things dying each other’s life, living each other’s death”(Vision p. 270-1).   This conjunction begins to be evident in the second half of the poem: “Odour of blood when Christ was slain/ Made all Platonic tolerance vain/ and vain all Doric discipline.”  Yeats describes the age of Plato and Stoicism as having been overturned by the birth of Christ, ending the age of antithetical religion.  Yeats mentions that it is said  that the comeliness of the people began to decline, and the arts became more and more systematic after the crucifixion as religion became more fixed and influential in the lives of human beings (Vision p.271).  He writes “the tradition is founded which declares even to our own day that Christ alone was exactly six feet tall; the perfect physical man.  Yet as the perfect physical man He must die, for only so can primary power reach antithetical mankind” (Vision p.273). In the final stanza of the poem, we see the effects of this the interplay betweent the two symbolic forces.  The cause of each result becomes also its end-- the emotional, subjective part of each example is overpowered by the actual physical action that it originates from.  

          “Everything that man esteems

           Endures a moment or a day, 

           Love’s pleasure drives his love away, 

          The painter’s brush consumes his dreams; 

          The herald’s cry, the soldier’s tread 

          Exhaust his glory and his might: 

          Whatever flames upon the night,

          Man’s own resinous heart has fed” (Poems p.213).

The pleasure of love deprives the lover of its source; the actual action of painting overrides the painter’s vision; the action of war dominates over the soldier’s ability and his intentions. 

          There is another era that Yeats begins to discuss, and that is the new age to come.  He can only speculate on what may happen based on his system, though even that he finds to be nearly impossible.  In “The Second Coming”, written before A Vision’s completion, he predicts some vast new revelation, though in vague terms, viewing it as something immense and threatening, perhaps because it is unknown.  Yeats begins,

          “Turning and turning in the widening gyre 

           The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

           Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

           The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

           The ceremony of innocence is drowned” 

          The beginning of Yeats’ imagined revelation deals with the breaking down of all logical order and stability.  Then, he describes the image of an immense fantastical, creature to embody the coming of this new ideal that mankind will embrace, and  the essence of unforeseeable change: “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 indignant desert birds.” His final lines are full of foreboding: “What rough beast, its hour come round at last now slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” This is another reference to Christ’s birth therefore connecting  new era to the beginnings of other ages.  It signifies a completion and a new beginning of the circuit. 

          At the end of his historical discussion in A Vision, however, Yeats contemplates the new revelation with as much interest, but less underlying dread, and a final realization that he cannot, in fact predict the direction mankind will take in its continued cyclical path. 

He questions, “Shall we follow the image of Heracles that walks through the darkness bow in hand, or mount to that other Heracles, man not image-- he that has for his bride Hebe ‘the daughter of Zues the mighty, and Hera shod in gold’”(Vision p.301)? He contemplates whether civilization will continue along a primary vein, men worshipping idols of far away deities, or return to its antithetical predecessor, in which man’s idols seen as are actual living beings captured in myth. Eventually, he resigns himself to not knowing for certain what the future of mankind will be.  He concludes “The particulars are the work of the thirteenth sphere, which is in every man and called by every man his freedom.  Doubtless, for it can do all things and know all things, it knows what it will do with its own freedom, but it has kept the secret” (Vision p. 302). 

Works Cited:

Adams, Hazard. The Book of Yeats’s Vision. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Yeats, W.B. A Vision. New York: Macmillan, 1956.

Yeats, W.B. The Poems. ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

Yeats, W.B. “Magic”. Essays and Introductions.  New York: Macmillan, 1961. pp. 28-52.