A Research on the Quality of Symbolism in William Butler Yeats’s Poetry

Exploring William Butler Yeats's Symbolic System in Poetry

by Mohit Sharma*,

- Published in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education, E-ISSN: 2230-7540

Volume 10, Issue No. 20, Oct 2015, Pages 0 - 0 (0)

Published by: Ignited Minds Journals


ABSTRACT

This examination is an investigation of the development of the symbolic system defined by William Butler Yeats and his ensuing utilization of this system to his poetry, with extraordinary thoughtfulness regarding the rose and the stone. To fathom and in this way completely value Yeats' poetry requires some learning of the powers cooperating to shape the premise of his reasoning and symbolic system. The impact of the French Symbolist Movement on Yeats has frequently been commented upon by the researchers. He is generally clubbed with alternate symbolists like Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and others. Nonetheless, very few have dove upon the distinction between the symbolism of Yeats and that of other contemporary present day poets. For writers like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, symbols were a piece of their cutting edge venture which tried to search for more up to date approaches to convey what needs be. Be that as it may, for Yeats, there was no contrast between his perspective and the system of symbols he worked for the duration of his life. This paper investigates the one of a kind and private distraction of Yeats with the coherent system of symbols utilized as a part of his poetry. It additionally looks to follow the development of Yeats' symbolism, the different impacts which molded his manner of thinking and probably the most usually utilized symbols in his poetry.

KEYWORD

symbolism, William Butler Yeats, poetry, Rose, Stone, French Symbolist Movement, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, symbols

INTRODUCTION

William Butler Yeats is considered as one of the vital figures of the Symbolist Movement. Principally a French Movement, it engendered the teaching that there exists a relationship between the human personality and the outside world and that a writer should look for these analogies and utilize them in his poetry as specific symbols from the world outside. Because of the expanding alienation amongst people and the society they lived in, these writers endeavored to overcome any issues between the two utilizing their symbolism. They looked for symbols which could pass on various implications. Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), one of the best symbolists made numerous out of his works utilizing symbolism. As indicated by him: This life is, where every patient is controlled by the want to change beds; One might want to endure before the stove, and another trusts that he would recuperate his wellbeing close to the window (Symons) Another incredible symbolist was Stéphane Mallarmé who trusted that a poet's undertaking was to cleanse the dialect with the utilization of symbols and not express specifically what he needed to. Yeats, nonetheless, ought not be viewed as mirroring these poets in light of the fact that for him, symbols were the main way he could express anything. He himself commented: I have no speech however image, the agnostic speech I made Amid the dreams of youth (W. B. Yeats, Among School Children 133) One of the best poets of the twentieth century and a beneficiary of the Nobel Prize, William Butler Yeats spent his initial childhood in Dublin and Sligo before moving with his folks to London. His first volumes of poetry, impacted by the symbolism of William Blake and Irish old stories and myth, are more sentimental and dreamlike than his later work, which is by and large more profoundly respected. Made in 1900, Yeats' compelling essay "The Symbolism of Poetry" offers a broadened meaning of symbolism and a contemplation on the idea of poetry when all is said in done. Symbolism became out of it a restriction to Naturalism and Realism in arts of the mid-19thcentury. This was the period of Darwin-the modern insurgency was all the while picking up power and Positivist rationality of come to held influence in scholarly circles. that is, the thing that you see is the thing that you get and just in the event that you can hold it or touch it is genuine, while the supernatural and otherworldly as sit out of gear hypothesis. At last, even contemporary are movements, for example, the paintings of the Sautéing from its sentimental roots, Symbolism supported over reason, however was more educated in its origination. The poets themselves appear to have drawn upon an assortment of structures and structures for their works-everything from the formal melodious ballads of Verlaine to the dreamlike rhythms of Rimbaud and the verlibre found in Mallarme. A free relationship of thoughts and subjects and an affection for the darker side of human instinct was something they all common. Symbolist composing, regardless of whether it is poetry prose, is famously troublesome. The sonnets look to bring out a state of mind as opposed to tell or depict anything. They are purposely loaded with shrouded significance and symbolism. Equivocalness is supported over direct introduction reflection, mystery, the stuff of dreams. "Recommendation that is the dream", composed Mallarme. What's more, it was he who penned what is maybe a standout amongst the most troublesome and cloud lyrics to be found in world writing: "The Afternoon of a Faun". Instinct and unions were much of the time drawn upon-the blending of thoughts in the faculties: aroma or sound and shading, with observation itself. Rimbaud drew upon the shades of the letters of the letter set for one paramount lyric. The majority of this was intended to be amazingly illogica. Symbols in the physical and "genuine" world were consolidated into the passionate and dream universe of individual experience subtle and relatively powerful for any individual who takes after where symbolist poetry, otherwise known as "symbolism", leads. Symbolism, even in its earliest stages, had an incredible impact in Europe. It was viewed as a freeing impact in numerous nations Belgium, Germany, and Russia, for example and taken up promptly and conveyed into different arts, including painting music. In Britain, it was an alternate story. English poetry in the 1890s-some time before Symons distributed his evaluates drew on the symbolist movement for some of its impact. Minor poets all-Symons himself, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Jhonson, Jhon Gray, and Oscar Wild-they each deciphered the French poetry and endeavored to bring it over into their own particular dialect. Regardless of whether they succeeded is another contention. Maybe it was excessively mainland – the occupants of symbolism appear to be even to have truly entered the English mind. America as well, for quite a while, stayed disengaged from the symbolism movement. In the main many years of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot found his own particular voice in the amusing separation of two early symbolist poets, Tristan Corbiere (1845-1875) Jules Lafourge (1860-1887). Under their impact he stated "Prufrock" and "The Wasteland". The rhythms of these poets-especially Lafourge are found in quite a bit of Eliots different functions also. Ezra Pound knew about Stevens and Hart Crane .One peruses Crane's ballad "The Broken pinnacle" (1932) with the information that some place behind it lies an extraordinary French-symbolist lyric. In any case, shockingly enough, it is "The Road Not Taken" by the traditionalist Robert Frost that is some of the time indicated as the best achievement of this sort of lyric in the English Language. Its intentionally equivocal nature, its message of something missed, something lost-a thing not exactly discovered appears to catch the substance of symbolism in poetry. Some poetry commentators and most perusers who are somewhat confounded by W. B. Yeats' lyrics would call him the "ace of symbolism." He utilizes the systems of poetry-musicality, rhyme, and meter-alongside the utilization of both passionate and scholarly symbols to express feeling and higher importance in a typically short and brief length of words. His speculations on musicality and utilization of symbols are apparent in his work, particularly in such pieces as "The Second Coming," "The Valley of the Black Pig," and "No Second Troy," and Yeats' sentiments toward feeling and the symbols and words that summon them make both he and his work novel. In Yeats' essay "The Symbolism of Poetry," he clarifies his hypothesis of how musicality, rhyme, and meter ought to be legitimately connected in poetry. Of cadence, he says that it ought to be melodic, not stilted at all by a strict shape, and the same goes for meter. All through his poetry there is a basic musicality and meter; he utilizes it in a way that influences its essence to come auxiliary to the simplicity of perusing the sonnet normally. He does this with "The Second Coming" and "The Valley of the Black Pig." In places, through variety in mood, clearly he is more stressed over the substance of the lyric than a specific meter. Lines, for example, "Clearly some disclosure is within reach;/Surely the Second Coming is nearby. /The Second Coming! Barely are those words out..."and "The dews drop gradually and dreams accumulate: obscure lances/Suddenly plunge before my dream-stirred eyes,..." (Poems of W.B. Yeats 1). Absolutely Yeats knows his speculations on symbolism in poetry and how to apply them. He demonstrates these characteristics in his own particular work through mechanics and substance. The thoughts of his essay unmistakably characterize and impact his poetry and his point of view of it. Plainly he is an ace of symbolism even among his associates. Maybe one of the impacts of his insight into symbols is that the moon might be something beyond a moon, and a bloom in excess of a blossom.

THE SYMBOLISM OF POETRY

"Symbolism, as found in the writers of our day, would have no esteem on the off chance that it were not

Mohit Sharma*

unpretentious book which I can't laud as I would, on the grounds that it has been committed to me; and he goes ahead to indicate what number of significant writers have over the most recent couple of years looked for a reasoning of poetry in the regulation of symbolism, and how even in nations where it is relatively shameful to look for any theory of poetry, new writers are tailing them in their pursuit. We don't comprehend what the writers of antiquated circumstances talked of among themselves, and one bull is all that remaining parts of Shakespeare's discussion, who was on the edge of present day times; and the columnist is persuaded, it appears, that they discussed wine and ladies and governmental issues, yet never about their craft, or never fully truly about their specialty. He is sure that nobody who had a logic of his craft, or a hypothesis of how he ought to compose, has ever constructed a show-stopper, that individuals have no creative energy who don't compose without thinking ahead and untimely idea as he composes his own articles. He says this with excitement, since he has heard it at such huge numbers of agreeable supper tables, where somebody had specified through lack of regard, or absurd energy, a book whose trouble had affronted slothfulness, or a man who had not overlooked that excellence is an allegation. Those recipes and speculations, in which a concealed sergeant has bored the thoughts of columnists and through them the thoughts of everything except all the cutting edge world, have made in their turn an absent mindedness like that of troopers in fight, so writers and their perusers have overlooked, among numerous like occasions, that Wagner put in seven years masterminding and clarifying his thoughts previously he started his most trademark music; that musical show, and with it current music, arose from specific talks at the place of one Giovanni Bardi of Florence; and that the Pléiade established the frameworks of present day French writing with a flyer. Goethe has stated, "a poet needs all theory, yet he should keep it out of his work," however that isn't generally vital; and in all likelihood no incredible workmanship, outside England, where writers are more effective and thoughts less abundant than somewhere else, has emerged without an extraordinary feedback, for its messenger or its mediator and defender, and it might be thus that awesome craftsmanship, now that obscenity has outfitted itself and duplicated itself, is maybe dead in England. All writers, all craftsmen of any sort, in so far as they have had any philosophical or basic power, maybe just in so far as they have been consider specialists by any their most startling motivation calling into external life some segment of the perfect life, or of the covered reality, which could alone douse in the feelings what their logic or their feedback would quench in the mind. They have looked for no new thing, it might be, however just to comprehend and to duplicate the unadulterated motivation of early circumstances, but since the celestial life wars upon our external life, and should needs change its weapons and its movements as we change our own, motivation has come to them in delightful startling shapes. The logical movement carried with it a writing, which was continually having a tendency to lose itself in externalities of different types, in supposition, in declamation, in pleasant written work, in word-painting, or in what Mr. Symons has called an endeavor "to work in block and concrete inside the fronts of a book"; and new writers have started to stay upon the component of inspiration, of proposal, upon what we call the symbolism in incredible writers.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SYMBOLIC SYSTEM

At the point when William Butler Yeats was in his mid-twenties a solitary sentence shaped itself in his mind: "Sledge your contemplations into solidarity"; for quite a long time, he writes in "On the off chance that I Were Four-and-Twenty," "I tried everything I did by that sentence." He in this manner considered life and workmanship indivisible. Justifiably, at that point, his idea of reality as solidarity and his conviction that symbols can inspire that reality developed from his own encounters and his combination of various systems of thought. Solidarity of different sorts ruled his brain from his youthful inclusion in the movement for Irish patriotism to his later endeavors to accomplish "Solidarity of Being" through poetry-During his youth, he would have liked to help bring together Ireland by assembling her writing—the fables, legends and myths—therefore assembling her kin; when the endeavor fizzled, "Solidarity of Being" in an individual sense turned into his prompt intrigue. While occupied with orchestrating an Irish folklore, he wound up keen on the mysterious and was acquainted with particular mysterious teachings. Associatively, he was acquainting himself with the works and speculations of different craftsmen and rationalists, some of whose thoughts in the long run liquefied into his own. At last, a one of a kind, individual symbolic system rose. Understanding Yeats'a vision and his endeavors to witness reality through symbolism is most ideal when his long lasting Yeats composes that as a young fellow he had three interests: "in a type of writing, in a type of rationality, and a confidence in nationality.1 As Ronsley takes note of, the seeds of Yeats' enthusiasm for a bound together Ireland lay in his Sligo childhood. As a little kid he regularly went with his grandma as she went to Sligo ladies, and he discovered strolling with the workers more intriguing than the ladies' gab, for the hirelings' stories captivated him. "All the notable families had their odd or awful or sentimental legends," he recalls,^ and he, it appears to be, heard a large portion of them.

THE ROSE AND THE STONE AS SYMBOLS

The rose's round shape and large number of hues have intrigued man since he initially started to consider and question his inception and his environment. Miss Seward talks about the development of the prototype rose in her amazing work The Symbolic Rose. Above all else, she starts, the rose is related with adoration and lady. Be that as it may, its importance isn't limited to those two territories: it might likewise be utilized to symbolize, in addition to other things, transience, torment and passing. The bloom's unique relationship with lady prompted its resulting relationship with parenthood and Mother Nature and, Miss Seward calls attention to, from that point it was a short advance to its relationship with the homeland, particularly England and Ireland. The rose was additionally lined up with birth and resurrection. In one of man's most punctual endeavors to comprehend his general surroundings, Miss Seward composes, he utilized the rose (or any correspondingly molded bloom) to recommend the physical association of the male and female, "the physical fruitfulness of every common thing, and the otherworldly fulfillment of extreme amicability"; at the end of the day, the generative procedure and its subsequent agreement—or solidarity—when all is said in done. In old Egypt, Miss Seward proceeds with, the rose of Isis was utilized to symbolize comparative ideas and Isis herself turned into the exemplification of all inclusive nature; "her blossom spoke to the female generative standard on the planet on the loose." In the long run, the blossom procured different shades of importance and came to symbolize the feeling of affection. Amid the early development of Christianity, Isis as well as Aphrodite (or Venus) also was related with the rose. As Miss Seward brings up, the Greek goddess' relationship with the blossom is particularly Important, for Aphrodite was fundamentally the goddess of mortal, not profound, adore; that is, she was the crude earth-mother. In this way, the symbolic rose went up against new significance. Additionally, Miss Seward clarifies, the rose "obtained an Immortal partner blooming in the domain of ideals"^ in its most punctual stages, amusingly, in light of the fact that the blossom's one defect is that it shrivels and bites the dust rapidly. It was at about this time the rose started the rose were debilitated with lack of definition. The rose was excessively essential and prominent, making it impossible to be completely overlooked by the Catholic church, notwithstanding; rather, the congregation chose to receive the bloom as its own. The rose's importance must be adjusted to some degree, obviously, for it was viewed as an image of agnostic arousing quality; in this manner, a considerable lot of its unique implications were changed out and out or generously altered to supplement Catholic creed. Along these lines, Miss Seward keeps in touch with, it turned into the Catholic image of Christ's profound love and step by step procured implications including the perspective of affection as "an indication of God in the world."* Also, it in the long run turned into the overwhelming bloom of the Garden of Eden, it spoke to Christ's torturous killing, and it symbolized the Joy of interminability coming about because of His passing. Most essential, notwithstanding, it turned into the image of the Virgin Mary, and profound love supplanted the blossom's previous relationship with Aphrodite and natural love. The rose was not really connected with the Virgin until the twelfth century maybe in light of the fact that, Miss Seward proposes, the Virgin was not worshipped so profoundly until that time. Yeats, a symbolist in the cutting edge convention, trusted that craftsmen must utilize old symbols beoause of the various implications such symbols bring out and due to their association with the Great Memory. Since both the prototype rose and stone are fit for working on different levels and evoking a large number of implications, each may assume its particular position as a noteworthy image in his work. What's more, as Miss Seward calls attention to in a dialog of Yeats as a symbolist, "in his rose, symbolic bloom of his initial, excessively subjective keeping in touch with, it is conceivable to see the causes and introductory phases of Yeats' advance—and of art's—from debauchery to control.

DISCUSSION

Yeats' journey for symbols can be seen even in his initial poetry. He swung to Irish fables and legend keeping in mind the end goal to discover his symbols. Different impacts which enormously formed Yeats' system of symbols were the Theosophical Society, The Golden Dawn, Pre-Raphaelites, The Rosicrucian Society and the considerable poet William Blake. Theosophical Society demanded parallels between the nature and one's perspective which is likewise reflected in Yeats' works. The more critical part was played by The Golden Dawn, a mysterious society. This society had faith in the "two columns", one, symbolizing water which thusly remained for peace, night, hush and the other, fire, which means enthusiasm, vitality and day. Here, Yeats rehearsed the technique for going into a daze keeping in mind the

Mohit Sharma*

Symbolists and the different social orders he went along with, he figured his own system of symbols through which he researched his life and his general surroundings. His initial poetry was dreamy and idealist. In any case, the symbols he utilized as a part of them discovered their way in his later poetry however in a more modern shape. The symbols like "rose" "cross" and the "four components" can be viewed as the establishment of his symbolism. In spite of the fact that these symbols were not new toward the western personality, their connotation for Yeats and in this way to his perusers were altogether not quite the same as what the symbols had before meant. Rose turned into a critical image in his initial poetry and can be found in a few of his ballads like "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time", "The Secret Rose", "The Rose Tree" and "The Rose of the World". It for the most part holds the meanings of enthusiasm or arousing quality yet to Yeats, it symbolized finish amicability. It was an extreme image of magnificence and fleetingness which was regularly related to a lady, a blend of physical and otherworldly excellence. Comparable capacity was performed by another image, that of "tree". In any case, tree spoke to different characteristics as well. In "A Man Young and Old", it shows a picture of rot as "the old thistle tree" yet in "Among School Children", the "chestnut tree, the colossal established blossomer" develops as an image of solidarity, the wholeness of being, like that of rose (W. B. Yeats 183). While the rose symbolized agreement, the cross was viewed as an image of contention, contrary energies and battle. Cross, a religious image to the Christian personality was secularized by Yeats. Yeats, similar to Blake, trusted that it was concordance must be accomplished after clash. "A Song of the Rosy Cross" dives into this movement from struggle to concordance. The pertinence of the four components, to be specific, Air, Water, Earth and Fire too should be featured. Water fortified the poet's tensions and desires while fire remained for enthusiasm, higher ideals and bravery. In the ballad "No Second Troy", he looks at Maud Gonne's "nobleness" to flame. Fire additionally conveyed the undertones of the limbo fire which would purge one's spirit. One needed to go through it keeping in mind the end goal to recapture one's immaculateness which was lost in his degenerate world. In "Cruising to Byzantium", he discusses "sacred fire" which would cleanse one which was a basic advance towards picking up everlasting status. Yeats' hypothesis of the four components was like that of Blake who credited comparable capacities to the four components. Blake's rationality of the four symbolic personages or "Zoas", to be specific, Urizen, Luvat, Tharmas and Urthona had a gigantic effect upon Yeats who associated them to reason, feeling, Being." (Ellmann 27) While the symbols utilized as a part of the poetry by Yeats penetrated the majority of his compositions there appears a change from the symbols utilized as a part of his initial poetry to the ones utilized as a part of the later works. Yeats was intensely mindful of his psychological development throughout the years and his poetry excessively appears, making it impossible to develop with him. While he developed more established, his poetry turned out to be more develop and his symbols, more unique and significant. The rose changed into Unity of Being, symbolized by a "circle"; the cross transformed into a gyre and the four components into four resources. Balachandra Rajan trusts that Yeats' poetic development resembled "physical change from the blooming plant to the dry uncovered tree… If something is lost, something is likewise picked up. The first light perhaps wanton and uninformed yet the nightfall brings its haggard, neediness stricken insight" (Rajan) The image of the Gyre ended up repetitive and critical in Yeats' later poetry. An advancement of the Cross, it was an image of contention and restriction yet was more unique and comprehensive in nature. Yeats guaranteed that his gyre gave "an order of each conceivable movement of thought and life." (ed. Catherine E. Paul). As per him every period started with the association of the human and the perfect and went on for two thousand years. Its movement, be that as it may, was not direct but rather as a spinning cone or gyre. Toward the finish of on gyre, another gyre toward the path inverse to that of the first started. Every gyre was ascribed its own unmistakable characteristics. The essential gyre was overbearing, inactive, ladylike, objective and so on while the contradictory gyre remained for manliness, cruelty and subjectivity. The Christian ear was essential while that of Greco-Roman was optional. In his sonnet "The Second Coming", he envisions that the finish of the Christian ear was nearing as twenty centuries of Christianity were finished. What might take after would be another period which had just started demonstrating its characteristics.

CONCLUSION

In this manner, one can securely contend that symbols were the way Yeats took a gander at the world and communicated him. They developed as he advanced and were idealized by their successive use in his poetry. Yeats commented: I should leave my myths and symbols to account for themselves as the years pass by and one lyric lights up another (Henn 126) keeping in mind the end goal to comprehend his implications. Not at all like different poets, he doesn't dispose of his symbols after their utilization. He holds and creates them. His symbols are adaptable with the goal that they could have various implications and meanings in various works. To know Yeats' symbolism is to know Yeats himself as it is through his symbols that he finds himself.

REFERENCES

Balakian, Anna E. (1992). The Fiction of the Poet. From Mallarmé to the Post Symbolist Mode. Princeton 1992. S. pp. 103-132: Yeats and the Symbolist Connection. Block, Haskell (1990). Yeats, Symons and the Symbolist Movement in Literature. In: Yeats. An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 8, pp. 9-18. Bonnefoy (2016). Yves: Yeats's Poetics. Emily Grosholz (trans.). In: Hudson Review 69, S. 403-425. Ed. Catherine E. Paul (1925). Margaret Mills Harper. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision(1925). New York: Scribner, 2008. English, Print. Gould, Warwick (2012). Yeats and Symbolism. In: The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry. Hrsg. von Fran Brearton u.a. Oxford 2012, S. 20 41. Ingelbien, Raphael (2005). Symbolism at the periphery. Yeats, Maeterlinck, and cultural nationalism. In: Comparative Literature Studies 42, 3, S. pp. 183-204. Kandola, Sondeep (2013). Celtic Occultism and the Symbolist Mode in the Fin-de-Siècle Writings of Arthur Machen and W. B. Yeats. In: English Literature in Transition (1880-1920). 56, S. pp. 497-518. Rajan, Balachandra (1969). W.B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1969. English, Print. Yeats, W.B. (2006). "Poems of W. B. Yeats." "No Second Troy." Handout. Dr. J. Whitsitt. September 2006. Pg. 1. Yeats, W.B. (2006). "The Symbolism of Poetry." Handout. Dr. J. Whitsitt. Pgs. 153-164. Yeats, William Butler (2000). "Among School Children." Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems od W.B. Yeats. London: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 183. English.Print. 24-28. English.Print.

Corresponding Author Mohit Sharma*

Research Scholar of Singhania University, Jhunjhunu Rajasthan E-Mail –