A Mystical Philosopher:
W. B. Yeats is a mystical philosopher. His mysticism is partly-innate and partly acquired. Platonism and Occult mysticism exercised their influences on the mind of the poet. The world of Yeats' poetry is the world of a mystic visionary in which the gods and fairies of Celtic mythology live again. He was convinced of the realities of the fairies and other supernatural beings. It is evident that Yeats wanted to start a mystical order to be able to devote himself to the spiritualistic aims. Yeats loved occultism and comprehended significance of spiritual world, magic, mysteries and meditation.
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| Philosophy and Mysticism in W.B. Yeats' Poems |
Influence of Indian Thought and Philosophy:
Yeats was influenced by the Vedantic philosophy. Quite early in his career he came into contact with Mohini Chatterjee and was profoundly influenced by Indian thought. His acquaintance with Purohit Swami after 1931 furthered his knowledge of and interest in the Upanishads, and he wanted to produce a European Geeta. His early works include three poems on Indian themes, and the landscapes of these poems are alive, with the life of one spirit enveloping the universe and this faith remains an integral part of his poetry up to the very end. This conviction is voiced forcefully and clearly in the Indian upon God:
"I passed a little further on, and heard a peacock say,
Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,
He is a monstrous peacock, and he waveth all the night
His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light."
His Disbelief in Christianity:
Quite early in life Yeats had lost faith in Christianity as well as in Victorian science. He had his own convictions, but he searched for a pattern or a system which may give form and coherence to his beliefs. This led him to magic, to astronomy, to theosophy, to Plato and Plotinus, and to other occult studies. At last he succeeded in formulating a system of his own which has been elaborated at length in A Vision. This system of Yeats is a curious mixture of Christianity, philosophy, mythology, magic, alchemy, the occult and expository symbolism.
His Spiritualistic Experiences and Visions:
Like a mystic, Yeats too was subject to visions and trances. He sought to convey them through symbols which are not always intelligible, for how can a person without mystic exercises and experience understand them. A number of poems deal with his spiritualistic experiences and visions. In All Soul's Night, the theme is séance, the calling up of departed spirits; in the Double Vision of Michael Robartes, he gives us two visions of great importance. In Sailing to Byzantium, he tries to find out mystic joy:
"So great a sweetness flows into the breast,
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest."
His Belief in Indian Philosophy of Reincarnation:
The main ideas found in Yeats' poetry are: reincarnation, the notion that soul passes through round after round of life (Hindu idea of rebirth), interest in imagination; belief in heaven attained through love or a heaven attained through drunkenness (like Buddhist salvation); belief in the transmutation of the world; imagery of God or the gods. In Under Ben Bulben, he speaks of reincarnation:
"Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all."
In The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland, one of the best of his early poems, he recognises the power to withdraw from life as a gift not wholly blessed. In The Winding Stair, he records the intent of his mysticism.
The Phases of Human Soul:
Yeats further explicates his principle of the classification of a personality with the help of a wheel in his A Vision. The twenty-eight spokes of the wheel denote twenty-eight phases of the Moon, representing the twenty-eight types of personality. The human soul passes through twenty-eight phases in one's life-time. These twenty-eight spokes also suggest twenty-eight incarnations, and the twenty-eight basic phases of each cycle of world history. Phase one is the birth of Christ, two is the Second Coming, He himself belonged to phase seventeen. Yeats also envisaged four divisions of soul–‘Will', 'Mask', 'Creative Mind', and The Body of Fate". The will is sheer vital energy, the drive towards, self-realization. It sets before itself an image, shaped from moments of exaltation in past lives, of all it can conceive as most admirable, all that is most opposite to its actual incarnate self, and strives towards that.
Sorrows of Mortal Life:
Yeats believes that the mortal life is full of fever and fret. It abounds in complexities and furies. In the midst of the hustle and bustle of today, peace of mind is a far off dream. He writes in Byzantium:
"All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins."
His Philosophy of Soul's Purification:
The poet finds peace and serenity in the purification of soul. Unless the human soul becomes super- conscious, it cannot attain peace. He describes in Byzantium three stages through which the human soul has to pass. These stages are: Hades, Paradise and Purgatory. These stand for the three stages of human mind—sub-conscious, unconscious and super-conscious. The human soul becomes perfect when it attains super-consciousness.
Philosophical Imageries:
The poet uses various imageries to communicate his meaning to his readers. In The Second Coming, the poet uses the image of turning and widening gyre. Yeats believes that the process of history is a cyclic one. It is like the movement of rapidly rotating gyres or cones. The poet believes that the present cycle of history is almost over. A new civilization is to be born out of ruins of the older one. Next he uses the image of falcon and falconer. The falconer has lost control over the falcon which does not hear the falconer's call. The falcon's loss of contact implies man's separation from every ideal of himself that has enabled him to control his life whether this comes from religion, or philosophy or poetry. It is also, in general terms, his break with every traditional tie. It may also mean that emotion (falcon) has separated itself from intellect (the guiding principal of the falconer) or it may mean that knowledge is not guided by the spiritual influence of man. The image of the figure of the strange and monstrous creature is very significant. It symbolises the death of the old civilization and the birth of the new one.
