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William Butler Yeats in his poetry consistently and repeatedly alludes to an ancient sacrificial ritual and the imitations of ritual techniques through words and rhythms. For him, the ritual enacts an inner vision of permanent beauty and harmony and enables us to participate in the transcendental experience of a rite. It is a kind of fundamental glue in the society for the maintenance of social structure; through the sacrifice of the victims are social bonds created and individuals joined. We may get a new meaning of the ritual sacrifice if read in Georges Bataille's perspective. While classical economic thought emphasized the need for an efficient utilization of resources to fight the ravages of the scarcity of economic resources, Bataille analyzes economic history in terms of the expenditure of excess energy and production. It is within this general economic context that Bataille begins an explication of the expenditure which first of all fundamentally is related to the sacrificial ritual. Symbolically, the victim, the one who offers the sacrifice, and its participants are all seen as removed from the demands of utility and consequently as possibly a sovereign subject. An immense symbolic tie was created between the victim of the sacrifice and those for whom the victim was a substitute. They enter the realm of the sacred, of the free subject who is not subordinated to the demands of useful production. Sacrifice is the means of dissolution, of ceasing to be separate individuals caused by the demands of utility. Like Bataille, Yeats often clearly sees and evokes the effects of sacrifice to ensure symbolize the transcendental vision of whole beyond ordinary experience or expression. He inclines to consider the sacrificial ritual as the ultimate act of transcendence over the anarchy of world, civil, and personal conflict. In "Two Songs From a Play," it is revealed that the ritual is fed by the "resinous heart" of man, who enacts his awareness of death and his yearning for rebirth in his identification with the risen god. In the second section of "Vacillation," Yeats also presents a ritual ceremony in which "Attis' image" is hung between the two parts, uniting death with eternal life, assuring immortality. He who performs this rite "May know not what he knows but knows not grief." In "Parnell's Funeral," where he associates the dead Parnell with an ancient god, Yeats evokes the rite to exalt the hero only to exposes the extremity of the need for godlike qualities and the impossibility of fulfilling this need in a barbaric time. It does not allow for the kind of expression of personal power and subjecthood found in the sacrifice.