The Gyre
The gyre, a circular or conical shape, appears frequently
in Yeats’s poems and was developed as part of the philosophical
system outlined in his book A Vision. At first,
Yeats used the phases of the moon to articulate his belief that
history was structured in terms of ages, but he later settled upon
the gyre as a more useful model. He chose the image of interlocking
gyres—visually represented as two intersecting conical spirals—to
symbolize his philosophical belief that all things could be described
in terms of cycles and patterns. The soul (or the civilization,
the age, and so on) would move from the smallest point of the spiral
to the largest before moving along to the other gyre. Although this
is a difficult concept to grasp abstractly, the image makes sense when
applied to the waxing and waning of a particular historical age
or the evolution of a human life from youth to adulthood to old
age. The symbol of the interlocking gyres reveals Yeats’s belief
in fate and historical determinism as well as his spiritual attitudes
toward the development of the soul, since creatures and events must
evolve according to the conical shape. With the image of
the gyre, Yeats created a shorthand reference in his poetry that
stood for his entire philosophy of history and spirituality.
The Swan
Swans are a common symbol in poetry, often
used to depict idealized nature. Yeats employs this convention in “The
Wild Swans at Coole” (1919), in which the
regal birds represent an unchanging, flawless ideal. In “Leda and
the Swan,” Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus and Leda to comment
on fate and historical inevitability: Zeus disguises himself as
a swan to rape the unsuspecting Leda. In this poem, the bird is
fearsome and destructive, and it possesses a divine power that violates
Leda and initiates the dire consequences of war and devastation
depicted in the final lines. Even though Yeats clearly states that
the swan is the god Zeus, he also emphasizes the physicality of
the swan: the beating wings, the dark webbed feet, the long neck
and beak. Through this description of its physical characteristics,
the swan becomes a violent divine force. By rendering a well-known
poetic symbol as violent and terrifying rather than idealized and
beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic conventions, an act of literary
modernism, and adds to the power of the poem.
The Great Beast
Yeats employs the figure of a great beast—a horrific,
violent animal—to embody difficult abstract concepts. The great
beast as a symbol comes from Christian iconography, in which it
represents evil and darkness. In “The Second Coming,” the
great beast emerges from the Spiritus Mundi, or soul of the universe,
to function as the primary image of destruction in the poem. Yeats
describes the onset of apocalyptic events in which the “blood-dimmed
tide is loosed” and the “ceremony of innocence is drowned” as the
world enters a new age and falls apart as a result of the widening
of the historical gyres. The speaker predicts the arrival of the
Second Coming, and this prediction summons a “vast image” of a frightening
monster pulled from the collective consciousness of the world. Yeats
modifies the well-known image of the sphinx to embody the poem’s
vision of the climactic coming. By rendering the terrifying prospect
of disruption and change into an easily imagined horrifying monster,
Yeats makes an abstract fear become tangible and real. The
great beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, where it will evolve
into a second Christ (or anti-Christ) figure for the dark new age.
In this way, Yeats uses distinct, concrete imagery to symbolize
complex ideas about the state of the modern world.
