W. B. Yeats: Metaphysician as Dramatist
Heather C. Martin
Language: English
Pages: 168
ISBN: 0889201927
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Mainly concerned with the influence of Yeats’s mystical studies on his drama, but includes discussion of the influence of the nô: Yeats’s dance plays ‘are strikingly similar . . . to the Japanese Noh’, Martin believes, but this is ‘almost completely coincidental’; Yeats ‘embraced the Japanese plays . . . because they provided him with an established tradition for his own dramatic experiments’, but they influenced the development of his drama ‘far less than is often supposed’.
wandering and hardship, and who becomes first a monk and then a spiritual leader, is the quintessential seeker, and it is not surprising that Where There is Nothing is the play which most closely resembles the rituals fo Yeats's Celtic Mysteries (CMK 196). 26 P. M. Matarasso, ed. and trans., The Quest of the Holy Grail (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 172. 27 Like Yeats's plays, the Grail legends are derived from Celtic myth, "where the rudderless ship, to which the hero entrusts himself,
Cuchulain accepts the shroud, and by the end of the poem has been transformed into a bird and joined the spirits in their collective song: "They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds" (VE 635).28 In Calvary, The Words Upon the Window-Pane, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Purgatory, on the other hand, the dead do not escape mortality so easily. These plays in the main dramatize variations on the second state between lives, called alternately the "dreaming back" and the "return":
boils. Some disease had made one of his eyes swell up, it stood out from his face like a hen's egg" (VP1 955). But because the ghost takes on the body it inhabited when it underwent the different crises, this senile old man alternates with a younger, more impressive figure. Writes Douglas Archibald, There is great tension between the three images of Swift. The public figure imagined and discussed by Corbet is at the height of his power; the man loved by Stella and Vanessa is past his prime but
childbirth. As a direct consequence of her "crime," her son has become a murderer thrice over, first of his mother, then of his father, and finally of his only son. It is therefore not only up to the mother to unpack "the loaded pern" (VE 342), it is up to the tormented son to "Measure the lot; forgive .. . [himself] the lot" ("A Dialogue of Self and Soul" [VE 479]). A variation on the Old Man's view of purgatory is dramatized in The Player Queen, though in this play the subject of purgatory is
practical reason. So he does say, and what more can you expect from a man who has been entirely bald during the whole course of his life. He merely repeats a piece of common electioneering nonsense which writer has copied from writer for generations. The men who invented it had as much to do with philosophy as an Orange brass band on the twelfth of July has to do with religion. (TSML 124)ยป He began to read widely in the Western philosophic tradition, studying "chronologically, Heraclitus,