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Yeats’ Symbolism
Yeats was a symbolist by temperament and conviction. He believed that literature was not merely a
criticism of life but a revelation of the hidden reality beneath the opaque film of familiarity. The
hidden reality can never be stated in rational terms. “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.”
Hence, Yeats said, “I have no language but symbols”. Like the English Romantic poets and the
French symbolists, he assumed that symbols invoke/embody reality and bind together the scattered
fragments of perception. But Yeats was not directly influenced by the French symbolists; rather, his
symbolism is a continuation of the English symbolic tradition established by poets like Blake,
Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. Like the symbolists, he wished to fuse poetry and religion or absorb
religion in poetry; like Rimbaud, he believed in magic and occult; like Villiers, he felt an aristocratic
disdain for the common business of living; like Verlaine, he wanted to wring the neck of rhetoric and
like Mallarme he saw the mystique of art as the unifying factor of a whole life. In spite of all these
similarities, Yeats as a symbolist remains distinctly English because he never breaks away from the
popular and traditional roots.

Yeats employs symbols to embody permeation of the natural by the supernatural, for, he believes that
a symbol is the only possible expression of some invisible essence. Symbols, he thinks, are not
deliberately invented, but are given. They well up from the depth of collective Anima Mundi. Poets,
seers, contemplative men, “a vessel of creative power of God”, receive symbols which are essentially
heraldic or to use Pater’s expression, hierartic. He draws his symbols from Irish folk-lore and myth
because myths and legends grow out of the unity of man, nature and God and evoke supernatural
reality. He also chooses his symbols from other traditions which are like his own such as spiritism,
occulting, theosophy, ceremonial magic, Platonism, the Cabalan and Indian philosophy because they
are all branches of the same tree. “Free art”, he says, “is expressive and symbolic, and every colour,
every form and every sound is the signature of some essence”. To a symbolist poet, colours, forms
and sounds are natural symbols of the divine, for things below are the copies of the “Great
Smarugdine”, Tablet said.

The chief goal of the symbols in his early poems is the incarnation of the supernatural. They
occasionally refer to Ireland, Maud Gonne and earthly love. In his early poems, he uses figures from
Celtic myth and legends like Sidhe, Cuchulain as symbols. These symbols are often arbitrary. He also
uses other figures like Aengus, Oisin, Baili and Aillin as symbols. These figures become aware of
themselves as “a whirling and wandering fire” and they symbolise insatiable quest.

In his early poems, he also uses roses, trees, the sun and the moon as symbols. These symbols are
occult in nature. Of these early symbols used by Yeats, the ‘rose’ is the most complex. The rose was a
flower sacred to Virgin Mary and emblematic of Heaven in Dante. The Irish poets associated it with
Ireland while in English poetry, its association had been long and complex. Since the days of The
Romance of the Rose, it was adopted as a symbol of lady love.

The rose, the traditional symbol of beauty, takes on different meanings in Yeats’ poetry. The red,
proud, sad rose invoked by Yeats in the opening poem, is not only external beauty, it is also a
compound of ‘beauty and peace’, of ‘beauty and wisdom’ and of Shelley’s ‘intellectual beauty’ and of
man’s suffering. Yeats also associates it with physical love, Ireland and religion. In The Rose of
Peace, the rose symbolises earthly love. But in The Rose of the World, it has a more complex
implication which includes, on one level, transient earthly beauty, and on the other level, eternal love
and beauty. This very symbol stands for power of creative imagination and occult philosophy in the
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poem To the Rose upon the Road of Time. The Rose of the Battle is more occult and the image rose
symbolises God’s side in the battle of spirit against matter. Here, rose is a refuge from earthly love.

Besides rose, another favourite symbol of Yeats in his early period is “tree” which presents a contrast
between the past and present Irelands. It is also associated with old age, sterility, modern times,
morality, twentieth century Ireland, truth and once in a while- reality. The Lamentation of the Old
Pensioner presents the old man as a broken tree, symbolising aridity and loss of rap. But the tree
symbol reaches the climax of its intensity in The Two Trees. The two trees are the Tree of Life and the
Tree of Knowledge, of Good and Evil as we find them in the Christian tradition. But Yeats was more
concerned with the Sephirotic tree of Kabbalah which was supposed to have two aspects, one benign
and the other malign, and symbolised both the mind of man and the universe outside. The tree in the
first stanza of the poem symbolises organic unity of the world of spirit. Contrasted to this tree of
spirit, is the tree of Good and Evil in the world outside.

In the middle phase of his career, Yeats casts off symbolism which he used as a cloak that adorns and
conceals, and evolves a ‘masculine style that has more salt in it’. But Yeats was a symbolist by
temperament and conviction and in his later poetry, he fuses his aggressive realism with his symbolic
representation of reality.

But in his later poetry, Yeats no longer deploys Celtic symbols and occasionally he uses traditional
symbols, but the chief single source of his symbols is his private esoteric system which he embodied
in his A Vision. Yeats deploys many unusual and intriguing symbols soaked in the private association
of his system like the bird made of gold crowing on a golden bough in the starlight, the ‘rough beast’
made of lion-body and the head of a man, the interpenetrating gyres and the moon with its 28 phases.
However, his symbols of swans, Byzantium, dance, tree and tower are symbols of much richer kind
and even though he charged them with esoteric and private meanings, the familiar and traditional ones
are also activated.

The most powerful symbols of Yeats derive their rich suggestiveness from their interaction with the
context in which they are used. The swan, for example, appears prominently in many poems of Yeats
like The Wild Swans at Coole, Among the School Children, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, Leda
and the Swan, The Tower, and Coole Park and Ballylee. In one or the other of these contexts, the
swan is associated with such things as youth, passion and conquest, the animal as opposed to the
human being, ignorance as opposed to knowing and the solitary defiant soul as opposed to
nothingness.

The symbol of dance is clearly related to Yeats’ system and is often employed in his poems. It could
mean patterned movement, joyous energy or at times a sort of immovable trance or a kind of unity
that is represented by the sphere. The concept of unity is invoked by the symbols of dance in the
closing stanza of the poem “Among School Children” and the fourth stanza of Byzantium.
“Byzantium” in Yeats’ poem symbolises beauty and perfection. He believed that in Byzantium,
spheres of life were united. In Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium becomes a symbol of perfection, free
of the cycle of birth, degeneration and death, for it is a place of art and an ideal existence. Of these
later symbols, the tower is the richest and the most ambiguous. The tower sometimes represents the
heavenly aspirations of the solitary intellect, but these tend to merge with the different abstract
aspirations of the soul. In The Dialogue of Self and Soul, the symbol of tower represents the
contemplation of heavenly realities.

In his mature poetry, Yeats does not merely invoke or celebrate symbols as he did in his early poetry
but talks to them in a personal or dramatic voice. In other words, there is an interaction between the
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speaker and the symbols in ways that recreate “the marvellous dramas” out of the poet’s life and unite
the physical, psychological and spiritual aspects of reality. The symbols of his later poetry bind
together the scattered fragments of his perception and reveal the rich and mysterious reality hidden
beneath the opaque film of familiarity.