The Daimon and Anti-Self Concepts in Per Amica Silentia Lunae by William Yeats
In July of 1914 Yeats began communicating during seances with a spirit which he called his "daimon," one Leo Africanus, a Renaissance geographer and traveller. At Leo's request, through the voice of the medium, Yeats began a written correspondence in which he would write questions and observations to Leo, and Leo would answer through Yeats's hand. This correspondence would prove influential in Yeats's evolving concept of the sources of artistic inspiration as emanating from the interaction between the physical and the spiritual worlds. This paper will explore the growth of the daimon concept out of Yeats's divided-self theory during his correspondence with Leo Africanus and then its explication in the 1917 Per Amica Silentia Lunae.
Background
From the beginning of his literary career Yeats, like many authors in this age of a dawning awareness of modern psychology and concept of the sub-conscious, had been fascinated with the concept of an divided self or anti-self or a self which is covered by a mask or "pose." In these early John Sherman stories, the the dreamy, unsophisticated John Sherman is tempted by the elegant, citified, and High Church Rev. William Howard. In the Rosa Alchemica stories of 1897, we are introduced to two characters who will remain staples of Yeats's oeuvre: the pious, conventional John Aherne who is "educated" and tempted by the mysterious Michael Robartes, with his secrets of the "Order of the Alchemical Rose." In On Baile's Strand (1904) the instinctive, active warrior Cuchulain struggles against the wiles of the crafty, domesticated ruler Conchubar.
By the 1900's, Yeats is using the metaphor of the mask to portray this dichotomy in man. "The mask," Richard Ellmann says, "had come to occupy in his system during the first decade of this century the position which the rose had held in it during the 'nineties" (190). In 1907 he begins The Player Queen, in which each character seeks an antithetical self, and he introduces it with the explicit song "The Mask." Whatever exactly "the mask" is--an alter-ego, a heroic ideal, a protective shield--it is a metaphor for an internal struggle, a psychological process. The next step would be to give this process more cosmic implications by making the struggle involve an outside force, a representative from the "spirit world" who could put one in contact with the "beyond." This would happen when Yeats discovered his Daimon.
Keats, John. “The Eve of St. Agnes”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic
In the late eighteenth century arose in literature a period of social, political and religious confusion, the Romantic Movement, a movement that emphasized the emotional and the personal in reaction to classical values of order and objectivity. English poets like William Blake or Percy Bysshe Shelley seen themselves with the capacity of not only write about usual life, but also of man’s ultimate fate in an uncertain world. Furthermore, they all declared their belief in the natural goodness of man and his future. Mary Shelley is a good example, since she questioned the redemption through the union of the human consciousness with the supernatural. Even though this movement was well known, none of the British writers in fact acknowledged belonging to it; “.”1 But the main theme of assignment is the narrative voice in this Romantic works. The narrator is the person chosen by the author to tell the story to the readers. Traditionally, the person who narrated the tale was the author. But this was changing; the concept of unreliable narrator was starting to get used to provide the story with an atmosphere of suspense.
The tales were rediscovered around 1880 inspiring the Irish literary revival in romantic fiction by writers such as Lady Augusta Gregory and the poetry and dramatic works of W.B. Yeats. These works wer...
Experience is the hidden inspiration in all of literature. Every letter, word, and sentence formed, every plot imagined, and every conflict conceived has a trace amount of its creator’s past ingrained within it. But most of all, authors reflect themselves in the characters they create. The protagonist of any story embodies certain traits and qualities of his or her creator; the virtues and vices, ambitions and failures, strengths and weaknesses of an author are integral parts of their characters lives. When authors’ experiences differ, so do their characters, as seen with Welty and King. Both authors had distinct upbringings, each with their own forms of hardship. The contrasting nature of these authors’ struggles is why their characters are the antithetical. As a result of these
William Yeats is deliberated to be among the best bards in the 20th era. He was an Anglo-Irish protestant, the group that had control over the every life aspect of Ireland for almost the whole of the seventeenth era. Associates of this group deliberated themselves to be the English menfolk but sired in Ireland. However, Yeats was a loyal affirmer of his Irish ethnicity, and in all his deeds, he had to respect it. Even after living in America for almost fourteen years, he still had a home back in Ireland, and most of his poems maintained an Irish culture, legends and heroes. Therefore, Yeats gained a significant praise for writing some of the most exemplary poetry in modern history
White, Keith D. John Keats And The Loss Of Romantic Innocence.(Costerus NS 107). Minneapolis: Rodopi BV Editions, 1996. Print.
Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats all represent the Romantic style of literature with their unorthodox themes of nature, art, and life; and how those three points can be tied together and used for creative purposes among humankind. Art and life are counterparts; one is lacking without the other. The Romantic period was about passion; finding inspiration and beauty in things people see every day. Wordsworth found childhood memories in a familiar landscape, Blake found himself captivated by the mysteries of how the majestic tiger was created, and Keats’ urn triggered him to put his inquiries of it into poetry. Each man expressed his individual view within their works; and like many of their Romantic contemporaries, their ideas ran against the flow of their time’s societal beliefs.
...lls. Ed. Tamara Thompson. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2014. Current Controversies. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 5 May 2014.
In “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” Yeats employs two themes, the theme of good versus evil, and the theme of sexuality. He conveys the theme of good versus evil through the Bishop’s statements in the first stanza, as well as J...
This opposition shows Keats highlighting the delicate correspondence between happiness, death and melancholy having humanistic traits. In order to experience true sorrow, one must feel true joy to see the beauty of melancholy. However, Keats’s poem is not all dark imagery, for interwoven into this poem is an emerging possibility of resurrection and the chance at a new life. The speaker in this poem starts by strongly advising against the actions and as the poem continues urges a person to take different actions.
Though written only two years after the first version of "The Shadowy Waters", W.B. Yeats' poem "Adam's Curse" can be seen as an example of a dramatic transformation of Yeats' poetic works: a movement away from the rich mythology of Ireland's Celtic past and towards a more accessible poesy focused on the external world. Despite this turn in focus towards the world around him, Yeats retains his interest in symbolism, and one aspect of his change in style is internalization of the symbolic scheme that underlies his poetry. Whereas more mythological works like "The Shadowy Waters" betray a spiritual syncretism not unlike that of the Golden Dawn, "Adam's Curse" and its more realistic fellows offer a view of the world in which symbolic systems are submerged, creating an undercurrent of meaning which lends depth to the outward circumstances, but which is itself not immediately accessible to the lay or academic reader. In a metaphorical sense, then, Yeats seems in these later poems to achieve a doubling of audience, an equivocation which addresses the initiate and the lay reader simultaneously.
Wisdom becomes bleary, much like peering through 'midnight oil'(ln60), and confusion has been loosed through knowledge.With wisdom creating bleary vision, Yeats concludes that we have no way of knowing the 'dancer from the dance'(ln64). We have no capacity for understanding how to fulfill this dance as it cannot even be determined by the conscious individual. The dance may only be completed by what Carl Jung has termed 'the collective unconscious'. If one's consciousness has reached a new parallel in the continual turning gyre, one's awareness may be considered one thread closer towards confusion and anarchy. Each step taken into further consciousness may be considered a step in the direction towards confusion as the gyre is turning away from innocence. Conflict will be the resultant.
Yeats and Eliot are two chief modernist poet of the English Language. Both were Nobel Laureates. Both were critics of Literature and Culture expressing similar disquietude with Western civilization. Both, prompted by the Russian revolution perhaps, or the violence and horror of the First World War, pictured a Europe that was ailing, that was literally falling apart, devoid of the ontological sense of rational purpose that fuelled post-Enlightenment Europe and America(1). All these similar experience makes their poetry more valuable to compare and to contrast since their thoughts were similar yet one called himself Classicist(Eliot) who wrote objectively and the other considered himself "the last Romantic" because of his subjective writing and his interest in mysticism and the spiritual. For better understanding of these two poets it is necessary to mention some facts and backgrounds on them which influenced them to incorporate similar (to some extent) historical motif in their poetry.
By the oceans being polluted not only are animals affected humans are too. What some people don't know is that they are killing of and disturbing offspring by polluting waters. "Ocean pollution results in smaller catches of fish all over the world, either by killing fish directly, preventing them from breeding, or causing birth abnormalities. Seabirds are unable to breed and whales are poisoned. Pollution also seems to be responsible for a new disease among seals. Without even swallowed, plastic can kill seabirds, turtles, and other creatures by trapping them. People drinking water from polluted seas can become sick. Deadly infectious diseases like cholera and typhoid can break out." There are many different types of sizes of plankton everywhere in our ocean waters.
Keats, John. “Letters: To George and Thomas Keats.” The Norton Anthology: English Literature. Ninth Edition. Stephen Greenblatt, eds. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012. 967-968. Print.