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영어

This paper aims at investigating the ways in which Yeats develops the image of the “white bird” throughout his poetic career. While most critics claim that Yeats' early poetry tends to disregard reality and escape from it, some of his early poems already present a more mature artistic vision that attempts to unify reality and the ideal world. From the beginning of his poetic career, Yeats was deeply influenced by Blake's dialectical view of the world, which led him to explore the unity between two opposing entities. In “The White Birds,” Yeats portrays the birds as creatures that can mediate between the ocean and the sky. Instead of allowing the birds to fly away from the sordid world of reality, Yeats focuses on the birds' ties to “the foam of the sea.” Likewise, in “The Wild Swans at Coole,” the swans ceaselessly paddle in the cold, and their efforts are precisely what enables them to function as the symbol of continuity and perfection. One of Yeats' most successful late poems, “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931,” appears to designate the swan as the emblem of idealistic purity, but this designation in turn admits the swan's continual return to the “darkening flood,” pointing ultimately to “the unity of being” that seeks a dynamic way of unifying the ideal vision with the real world.