earticle

영어

Traditionally, artists use contrary images when they attempt to indicate a theme clearly, or emphasize conflicts between theme and anti-theme. Those opposing values are also used to express superiority or reconciliation of any kind. The purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of Yeats's poetry on the basis of the principle of contrast and how they compare to his values. In his early poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” nature is the opposite of civilization. The grey color of the pavement in London where the poet stands may represent death in modern life. His mind leaves the urban culture for the natural tranquility of Sligo. The heathery purple of the isle is traditionarily a royal color, which may symbolize salvation from the hardship of real life. The busy roadway for cars, or continual horizontal movement, stands for worldly life, whereas vertical movement, the peace dropping slowly, implies heavenly blessings. Another early poem, “The Two Trees” praises the art created by heart or imagination, while shunning the art produced by knowledge. A tree in the heart and one in a glass come to form many contrasts. The heart cannot reflect anything but can contain the whole universe, with the opposite true for the glass. The former is warm and creative; the latter cold and critical. One of his middle period poems, “Ego Dominus Tuus,” deals with the same theme as “The Two Trees,” using totally different images. Here he uses a tower, a lamp, and a book instead of a glass; and a stream, the moon, and characters on sand instead of the heart. The images of the tower group are related to limitedness, verticality, and inflexibility. On the other hand, the stream group imagery is connected to limitlessness, eternity, horizontal movement, and flexibility all of which can suggest imagination. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” one of his last period poems, the contrast between young and old and between birds in trees and a bird made of gold are used to show that the ideal, spiritual, or artistic world is more important than the real, physical, or natural world. In that sense, the poem is similar to the earlier poems previously stated. In “Among school Children” written in the approximately same time, contrastive image groups exist as well. The nun who worships St. Mary, Maud Gonne who dedicates herself to a political ideology, Yeats who has been yearning for Maud Gonne spiritually, and Pythagoras and Plato who pursue only formulas behind things are a group of homogeneous images. The other group consists of an image of a mother who stakes her life on her son and Socrates who respects the real world. The two opposing groups of images meet harmoniously in the images of the school children who learn the ideal and the real simultaneously in the beginning and in the images of the blossoming trees and dancing bodies at the end. The most impressive contrast in this poem is seen between old Yeats as a scarecrow which is lifeless and senseless and school children as scared crows which are lively and sensitive. In “Byzantium” the spiritual or artistic world and the physical or real world are matched harmoniously through a mediator that appears in the form of a dolphin.As a whole, Yeats is oriented to the ideal or spiritual world to renew himself in the early and middle period poems. He in the late period poems, however, revives in finding out a truth that harmony between ideal and reality is more important than sidedness. It might be said that the poet's finding the worth of harmony has been achieved through the sense of balance obtained in the last phase of his life.