[In the following essay, Sikka discusses the influence of the Upanishads on W. B. Yeats's thought.]

Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were …

—‘The Statues’

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Yeats's lifelong preoccupation was to write poetry based on truths perceived in moments of revelation, “to discover and communicate a state of being.”¹ Of the two, the first, “to discover,” related to the domain of the mystic, the second, “to communicate” was the responsibility of the poet. Yeats soon discovered that the latter was indeed a difficult task. He noted in his Memoirs a saying of Mohini Chatterjee: “I thought truth was something that could be conveyed from one man's mind to another's. I now know that it is a state of mind.”² Mohini Chatterjee's philosophy was derived from the Vedas and the Upaniṣads. It held that the highest truth was beyond the intellect and really a state of mind. The Rg Veda explained that the seeker after truth becomes the ultimate reality himself; his individuality is lost and no objectivity remains outside him.³ So what and to whom should he communicate? The Brhad-āranyaka Upaniṣad also voiced the view that communication presupposes the duality of subject and object, but where everything becomes one's own self, and all duality vanishes, communication becomes impossible.⁴ Yeats quoted Coventry Patmore who held that religious truth could not be taught to another, only a way could be pointed out by which he might find it for himself.⁵ Yeats came to see the truth of this idea through his personal experience; he found that it was difficult to communicate all that he had experienced in the state of trance. He recorded his inability to describe some vision to Lady Gregory, and remembered that sometimes lecturers on mysticism had to stop in the middle of a sentence.⁶

Another aspect of the difficulty was that although one could articulate what one had experienced, one could not communicate entirely, as the giver and the recipient lacked the common ground of experience; while writing his essay on ‘Magic,’ he tore up many pages describing incidents that would seem meaningless and obscure to the reader. Many a time he had wished to speak of the strange images that had risen in the deeps of his mind, but had decided against it.⁷ He was convinced that where there was no common ground of belief, there could be only disbelief and ridicule, and concluded that any effort at communication should be aimed at protecting believers, rather than convincing the sceptics.⁸

However, as a seer-poet, Yeats realized that he was different from a magician who kept the secrets of his vision to himself. He must convey to the best of his ability, his experience and knowledge, as he held an idealistic view of art and poetry. “Imagination is always seeking to remake the world according to the impulses and patterns in the Great Mind,”⁹ he said, and the poet was an instrument of that mind. If his art was pure, and free from “heterogeneous knowledge and irrelevant analysis,” the artist became a medium for the creative power of God.

Yeats spoke in ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ of his passionate belief that the arts would cure “the slow dying of men's hearts,” without necessarily using religious and theological language, as the latter was ceasing to attract the modern man. The eternal, essentially incommunicable state of being, had to be evoked in men's minds; spiritual truths had to be restated in a language that was poetical and literary. The poets had long used myths and symbols for the purpose of communicating to the people esoteric truths, in an exoteric form.

According to Harper, Yeats was inspired most consistently by Blake's aesthetic doctrine that the seer must communicate visions through symbol.¹⁰ However, in his essay on ‘Magic,’ Yeats admitted reading “some Indian book,” as well as Blake, on the subject.¹¹ His belief in the power of symbols had an occult basis also in theosophical writings, which derived their authority largely from the Upaniṣads. The Brhad-āranyaka Upaniṣad held that the self was endowed with desire, was, in other words, the power that could create objective phenomena.¹² This idea had been amply explained in theosophical publications; an article on ‘Thoughts on the Metaphysics of Theosophy’ referred to the fact that it was possible to modify circumstances and control the elements by their intellectual powers, “which are other and more intensified forms of the will.”¹³ Yeats expressed his belief that “the gross is the shadow of the subtle” in ‘The Symbolism of Poetry.’ In this essay he elaborated on the view that seemingly feeble things had been proved to possess overwhelming power at times.

This was an important law that Yeats observed, and applied to occult as well as poetic practices. For instance, it was a firm faith in the principle that imagination could create circumstance that enabled him to oppose confidently the formation of secret groups inside the Order of the Golden Dawn. According to him, this formation of groups would evoke distrust among members and lead to disruption: “such an obsession even if it had not supported the real disorders I have described, would have created, so perfectly do the barriers of conscious life copy of the barriers of the superconscious, illusionary suspicion …” He was always to maintain that:

The central principle of all Magic of power is that everything we formulate in the imagination, if we formulate it strongly enough, realizes itself in the circumstances of life …¹⁴

Harper comments that here Yeats was not in agreement with the other members, as he insisted on upholding his “personal philosophy and aesthetic” regarding magic. “Magic, as he uses the term, is a means of breaking down the barriers between the phenomenal or conscious world and the spiritual or superconscious world.”¹⁵ However, Yeats's “personal philosophy” was based on the above mentioned law, also upheld by Madame Blavatsky, that “when a thought of good or evil import is begotten in our brain, it draws to it impulses of like nature as irresistibly as the magnet attracts iron filings.”¹⁶

Yeats realized that the writer or artist could creatively exploit this law, in order to impress his ideas upon an age. Madame Blavatsky had clarified, that it was due to the “thought impulse” making itself “felt in the ether,” that it was possible that “one man may impress himself upon his own epoch so forcibly that the influence may be carried … from one succeeding age to another until it affects a large portion of mankind.”¹⁷ One way of effecting this change was through understanding the “mystical value of human language.” A priest or an occult magician could bring about a certain effect in the objective universe with the help of symbols and incantations. Madame Blavatsky admired the practice of this law by ancient Indians:

Nowhere is the mystical value of human language and its effects on human action so perfectly understood as in India, nor any better explained than by the authors of the oldest Brahmanas. … The greatest power of this vach, or sacred speech, is developed according to the form which is given to the Mantra by the officiating Hotri … If pronounced slowly and in a certain rhythm, one effect is produced; if quickly and with another rhythm, there is a different result.¹⁸

Yeats asserted the truth of this principle in his magical practices; in ‘A Postscript to Essay called “Is the Order of R.R. and A.C. to remain a Magical Order?”’ he said: “It is a first principle of our illumination that symbols and formulae are powers, which act in their own right and with little consideration for our intentions, however excellent. Most of us have seen some ceremony produce an altogether unintended result because of the accidental use of some wrong formula or symbol.”¹⁹ Evidently, Yeats applied to his experiments in the Golden Dawn, theories he had learnt through theosophy.

Like the magician, the poet too could, with the help of symbols, rhythm, and metre, affect the minds of men. According to Yeats, an emotion, in order to become effective, had to be expressed in colour or in sound or in form; these, in different modulations and arrangements would evoke different emotions; thus poets and painters were constantly affecting mankind. He said again, “Have not poetry and music arisen, as it seems, out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the passers-by?”²⁰

In Indian thought he found not only a corroboration, but progressively a clearer exposition of the philosophical and psychological principles that underlay symbolism. He expressed in his essay on ‘Magic’ his three convictions: first, that the borders of our mind were ever shifting, so many minds would flow into one another to create a single mind; second, that the borders of our memories were also shifting, so that our memories became a part of the great memory of Nature herself; third, that this great mind and great memory could be evoked by symbols.²¹

In the background of these convictions was the Vedic view of creation. As discussed in the chapter on “Nature,” reality is seen as four successive stages of existence, of which manifestation is the fourth and final stage. The first stage is that of the formless absolute, indiscrete, indescribable.²² The next stage is that of the First Cause that has the potential to create, pregnant with the concept of “I.” In the third stage, this Creator becomes charged with desires, ideas or notions, which are the seeds of the tangible world; the fourth stage is the tangible world of multiformity. By a process of passing through these stages the formless assumes form; according to this philosophy, the created universe is His symbolic representation which suggests His existence.²³ ‘One’ is therefore at the root of the many, a natural corollary being that this very process must repeat itself in all aspects of the resulting creation. Thus man becomes the microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic reality. In man too, there are these four stages,²⁴ though the process of realization moves in a reverse direction. To the immediately perceptible, tangible world, corresponds the waking stage, in which the senses and the mind operate. To the state pervaded with ideas and notions, corresponds the dreaming stage in which the mind sees its own desires or images of objects seen in waking life. The third stage is known as deep sleep, or Suṣupti, in which the objects and their images go dormant, to come into operation again in the dreaming or waking states. The final stage, corresponding to the formless absolute, is Turīya in which the I-consciousness of the third stage is transcended, and there is only pure consciousness.

The seers of the Upaniṣads based their spiritual practices upon this philosophy of the macrocosm and the microcosm. If the universe was a symbol of the Creator and finally of the formless Absolute, by meditating upon an object chosen from it one could finally reach the reality at its base. So they devised the method of meditation upon symbol, a method in which waking, dream and dreamless sleep became stages in meditation, finally leading to merger with the Absolute.

That Yeats understood much of this philosophy is clear from his writings. His three convictions enumerated above indicate that he was unaware of the first stage, that of the formless Absolute, but understood quite well the relation between the one mind, its ideas, memories and images. This was familiar to him as anima mundi, and later as Celestial Body or Hiranyagarbha. The process through which he learnt of these stages is discussed in the chapter on “Imagination.” Just as in religious meditation one begins with a familiar object, and passes through various stages to understand and be at one with the Creator, similarly a work of art must be pondered over, its meaning understood, and its experience shared. So creation and meditation are two complementary activities: the poet expresses his unique experience through symbols whereby the reader understands him.

This basic philosophy with its attendant ramifications offers a complete explanation of Yeats's theory of symbolism. In his essay on ‘Magic,’ he speaks of the one mind and one memory shared by people at some deep, subconscious level. In the Rg Veda and the Upaniṣads, ultimate reality is seen as intelligence, mānas, or the supreme mind, which pervades the regions of nature as well as the heart of man.²⁵ Sometimes, in the dream state, an individual may see visions or images of the ideas in the mind of the Creator. It is also by virtue of the One having become many, that many may share these visions. Yeats verified some of this philosophy with the help of experiments conducted in the Golden Dawn, and concluded that the same vision may appear to several people; he also recorded a particular instance of one dream shared by three people.²⁶

According to the Upaniṣads, objects or events experienced in the waking state leave their impressions on the mind. We have seen in the chapter on “Death and Immortality” that although an experience passes away, its “husk” or image remains in the mind. The memory of a vital experience of joy or sorrow is preserved in the mind of an individual over several lifetimes, and very often reappears in some other shape in the dream state, to fructify at some future period. The Brhad-āranyaka Upaniṣad has it that in the dream state, the self remains awake and notices the impressions of the deeds.²⁷ This indicates that the human mind has an inherent power to reduce to an image or impression, an event of the past, and to foresee through an image, an event in the future; this impression or image is the symbolic form of that experience or event. The Praśna Upaniṣad explains that in dream or in vision a seer may come in contact with the images preserved in the memory or the racial record:

There in sleep, that god (mind), experiences greatness. He sees again whatever object has been seen, he hears again whatever has been heard, he experiences again and again whatever has been experienced in different places and directions … what is existent and what is non-existent, he sees all; being all he sees (all).²⁸

The verse indicates not only that in dreams there are reproductions of waking experiences, but also that sometimes there are new constructions. Yeats discovered that the mind can reproduce in a changed form, the experiences of waking life. He narrated that when he dreamt in words, he knew his father to be tall and bearded; if, however, he dreamt in images, he sometimes discovered him represented by a stool or the eye-piece of a telescope.²⁹ From this he concluded that we cast off the “concrete memory” but not the “abstract memory” when we sleep. Thus abstract memory may be said to be symbolic of the original experience. This led him to realize that the mind itself is nature's own workshop of symbols, a view that he would find corroborated by the Upaniṣads. The self is immortal and contains the memory of Nature, hence events may be seen in symbolic form either during the same lifetime, or in subsequent lifetimes.

Basing his theory on the view of the Upaniṣads, Yeats's friend A E traced the process by which the mind transmuted a historical event or legend, into symbol:

These dreams, antiquities, traditions, once actual, living, and historical, have passed from the world of sense into the world of memory and thought … from things which the eye can see and the ear can hear, they have become what the heart ponders over … and are … more suitable for literary use, than the day they were begotten. They have now the character of symbol, and as symbol are more potent than history.³⁰

Yeats also said in ‘Magic,’ that whatever had attracted the passions of man over generations became a symbol in the “Great Memory,” and could be used by one who had mastered the secret, to arouse powerful emotions. In other words, imitating nature, a poet too can compress an experience into a symbol, and evoke through it his own experience in the mind of the reader, as far as it is possible. Experience, when shaped into symbol, becomes an inherent part of it. Thus a symbol carries a particular meaning right from inception and concentration on symbol ultimately unfolds it. According to Yeats, magicians, using this principle, consciously created and used symbols, poets and other artists using them half unconsciously. For a poet they were the only effective means of communication: “I love symbolism, which is often the only fitting speech for some mystery of disembodied life …”³¹

Armed with this philosophy, Yeats successfully countered the criticism of his contemporary, John Eglinton, who advocated that writers discontinue the use of ancient legends as these “refuse to be taken up out of their old environment and be transported into the world of modern sympathies.”³² Yeats argued that John Eglinton preferred a poetry that was, “like all the lusts of the market place, ‘an expression of the age’ and of ‘the facts of life.’” Yeats asserted his own belief in poetry that renewed an interest in ancient, universal belief, “old faiths, myths, dreams.”³³ A E in “Literary Ideals in Ireland,” said defending Yeats, that the inherent power of myths and symbols was due, not only to the fact that they were a part of the great memory shared by a people, but also to their embodying universal truths:

I think that the tales which have been preserved for a hundred generations in the hearts of the people must have had such a power, because they had in them, a core of eternal truth.³⁴

Yeats, like the seers of Upaniṣads, realized that the mind was not a closed, separate entity. He contrasted the modern tendency to praise the individual life with the view of the ancients who were always praising the one mind.³⁵ It was because the power of a symbolic poem depended upon a common memory, a shared ground of belief, that Yeats always sought symbols that were familiar, concrete, and had some link in the memory of the race. It must be clarified here that whereas he was eclectic in his search for ancient thought, ranging over Eastern and Western philosophy alike, he insisted on drawing his symbols from his race and nationality. Thought must be as close to eternal truth as possible, and must be communicated:

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.³⁶

However, as different races gave a different expression, a different embodiment to eternal truths, the poet too must draw symbols from his own race; he strongly disapproved of the practice of picking up stories and symbols from everywhere. “Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill?”³⁷

It was a cardinal tenet of Yeats's theory of symbolism that symbols must be rooted in time and space, in history and geography alike. To illustrate how symbolism worked, he cited the example of the Indian yogi who must fix his eye and thought upon the point of his tongue which symbolized all the senses. “He must not meditate upon abstractions, nor, because unseen, upon eye and ear.”³⁸ He spent some time marking in red ink upon a large map every sacred mountain. Also, some communication was instantaneous if the reader focused his attention on the known. “The distant in time and space,” he wrote, “live only in the near and present.”³⁹ The reason why he was critical of Shelley, was that the latter often chose unfamiliar symbols. In ‘Art and Ideas,’ Yeats spoke of the richness that was lost to Shelley's Prometheus Unbound because he had not discovered his Caucasus in England or in Ireland. Yeats instructed Sturge Moore that the tower he was to draw should resemble the real object, and added: “I like to think of that building as a permanent symbol of my work plainly visible to the passer-by.”⁴⁰

The entire burden and aim of Yeats's art was to create unity, to re-create the one mind that Europe had been and had ceased to be. He observed that this idea, for long a mere opinion of his, had finally turned into a firm conviction:

Nations, races, and individual men are unified by an image, or bundle of related images, symbolical or evocative of the state of mind which is, of all states of mind not impossible, the most difficult to that man, race or nation.⁴¹

This “state of mind” that he sought to convey was the “Self” of the Upaniṣads, Blake's “Imagination” and Dante's well-proportioned body, or “Unity of Being.” Yeats was, however, clearly aware that the mystic state, being an indescribable experience, would result in obscurity in his poetry.

Keeping in mind the principle that symbols must be drawn from one's own race, he tried to evoke unity of being through several symbols drawn from western history and geography. The chief among these was Byzantium as pictured in the two poems, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantium.’ Yeats consciously used Byzantium, a physical entity, a city, a period rooted in space and time, as a symbol of Turīya, a timeless state. What happens to the mystic in Turīya took place in Byzantium too. The physical was transmuted into a symbol of the immanent spirit, “those walls with their little glimmering cubes of blue and green and gold,”⁴² and the drilled pupil of the eye underwent a somnambulistic change. Thus Yeats superbly put into practice his theories of art discussed at great length in ‘Magic,’ and in ‘The Symbolism of Poetry.’ In the two Byzantium poems he created a symbol to evoke images buried in the memory of the race; he attempted binding with a spell his own mind, when he would enchant the mind of others, in order to create “the seeming transitory mind made out of many minds.” He had, it is obvious, created a symbolic talisman of the sort medieval magicians made, attempting to capture, in complex colours and forms, “a part of the Divine Essence.” He demonstrated that just as a state of mind can expand into history (an idea discussed in the chapter on “Unity of Being,” and also acknowledged by Whitaker⁴³), history too can contract into a state of mind, thus becoming symbol.

The self, according to the Upaniṣads, is not to be attained through the effort of the intellect or through pursuit of objects in the external world. The Old Man in At the Hawk's Well voices this view:

And do you think so great a gift is found
By no more toil than spreading out a sail,
And climbing a steep hill?(44)

In this play Yeats pictured man's search for the hidden self in terms of specifically Irish figures and setting; the self is personified in the Woman of the Sidhe who is “bird, woman or witch,” and Cuchulain is the hero who seeks her as his immortal self.⁴⁵ In ‘The Statues’ Yeats again presents the Irish hero Cuchulain as a symbol of the highest reality that cannot be defined through the empiric means of “calculation, number, measurement.” Yeats always sought to identify his beliefs with his country: in plays like The Words Upon the Window Pane, Purgatory, and The Herne's Egg, he presented in terms of Irish setting and characters, truths about fate and destiny, eschatology and immortality, that he learnt substantially from the Upaniṣads.

Another tenet of Yeats's symbolism was that experience must be linked to geographical reality. Ancient memories could be better revived if evoked by Slieve-na-mon or Croagh Patrick. After reading about Bhagwān Shri Hamsa's experience on Mount Kailaśa, Yeats wrote: “We have learnt from Dante to imagine our Eden, or Earthly Paradise, upon a mountain, penitential rings upon the slope.”⁴⁶ He noted in his introduction to An Indian Monk that Purohit Swāmi's experience was similar to the experience of European mystics. In ‘Under Ben Bulben’ he gave it geographical reality through the symbol of Ben Bulben, the Irish mountain, and described it thus:

And when its vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.

Racial symbols, according to Yeats, were important as a means of attaining the experience of the ultimate. He asked Purohit Swāmi if a European, undertaking a similar journey, would have shared the experience of Bhagwān Shri Hamsa. Upon getting a negative answer, he concluded that Shri Hamsa's experience of revelation “depended in part upon innumerable associations from childhood on, in part upon race memory.” Yeats knew that Mount Kailaśa was a symbol of some “act of creation” in the racial memory of the Aryans.⁴⁷

However, Yeats became aware through the revelations of his instructors in A Vision, and through his study of the Upaniṣads, that symbols drawn from nature, sun, moon, and sea for example, were universal, shared by West and East alike. The bright fortnight, leading to Turīya in the Upaniṣads, is paralleled by the full moon in European symbolism. Europeans would see the waxing moon as representing man's personality as it developed and moved to perfection at the full moon. These symbols have been discussed in the chapter on “Unity of Being”; Yeats noted that the European symbol of the full moon corresponded to the symbol of the sun in the Upaniṣads; the underlying concept, he saw, was the same.

Another symbol that Yeats regarded as universal, was that of lake or sea as a symbol of the mind of man. The Upaniṣads speak of the world of generation as a sea;⁴⁸ Yeats speaks of this sea in ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’ He also noted that lake Mānas Sarowar meant “The great intellectual lake.” When he describes the sea near Rapallo, “houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea,” he seems to give it the same symbolic significance. The symbol of the road or path in the Upaniṣads is also used by him. The Brhad-āranyaka Upaniṣad, for example, speaks of “the narrow ancient path which stretches far away, has been touched (found) by me, has been realized by me.”⁴⁹ Yeats echoes the same idea and symbol when he speaks of the mountain road from Rapallo to Zoagli as illustrating something he had discovered in his own mind.⁵⁰ He uses the symbol again in ‘Lapis Lazuli,’ in the picture of the “lofty slope” and the “little half way house / Those chinamen climb towards …” In each case the road symbolizes the effort of man to disentangle himself from the mundane and the temporal, and progress towards his inner spirituality.

However, all symbols, whether local, historical, or universal, are only of secondary, not primary importance. The levels of meaning and experience must be progressively reached by the reader. The efficacious symbol is one in which the reader has some idea of the meaning associated with it, and intended by the writer (otherwise, as Yeats had noted in ‘Magic,’ two confusing pictures would rise in the mind). Historical events, for instance, could function as symbol only if the right areas were meditated upon. As Yeats noted, belief in the Incarnation invoked modern science and modern efficiency; “the historical truth of the Incarnation is indifferent, though the belief in that truth was essential to the power of invocation.”⁵¹ In the practice of symbolism, meditation must be accompanied by concentration on the meaning of the symbol. This explains the relation of Yeats's prose work, his essays and introductions, his vast correspondence, even of the two versions of A Vision, to his poetry. The prose works expound, as far as it is possible to do so, the meaning of his work, while the poems and plays encompass it and seek to evoke the experience that is beyond the meaning. Commenting on Yeats's style in A Vision, Whitaker has said that “Yeats's historical sympathies are not simple … his prose is constantly shaped by the power of ironic qualifications.”⁵² Keeping in mind both the poetic and prose descriptions of say, Byzantium, it is obvious that in the poems history has been transformed into symbol through a process of selection and emphasis. However, looking only at the prose, one is led to ask the question, why the “ironic qualifications?” Yeats was not writing history with its scrupulous emphasis on fact. In his prose he was differentiating between those aspects of Byzantine history which represented unity, from those which represented abstraction, in order to enable the reader to understand the poems. He was indicating that the reader must select the areas representing unity, and associate them in his mind with the symbol offered in the Byzantium poems.

In the final stage, symbol and meaning alike give way to experience, which is of ultimate importance: “another turn of the gyre and myth is wisdom, pride, discipline.”⁵³ In terms of the Principles, symbolism is the Celestial Body, the cloak that must be discarded that spirit be revealed, as he explains in ‘The Soul in Judgment,’ section VII. The symbol itself vanishes in giving birth to experience. This aspect is illustrated in the case of Bhagwān Shri Hamsa who said that when the mental image of the God vanished, he had the transcendental experience of Turīya.⁵⁴ It was in order to learn about the state ensuing symbolic worship, that Yeats urged Purohit Swāmi to write about his experience, as he noted in his introduction to An Indian Monk.

A symbol thus led one to “the near and yet hidden”; it was important in so far as it facilitated “a return to the sources of our power.”⁵⁵ This idea became the theme of his poem, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’:

That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn
From some court-lady's dress and round
The wooden scabbard bound and wound,
Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

The heroic tales and mythologies, “old embroidery” on silken cloth, that formed the tradition of a race may have become so old and faded that few understood their meaning, yet were important as they had protected or enshrined the eternal spirit, the “consecrated blade” that is “unspotted by the centuries.” Tradition was precious if it performed its function of symbol leading a people to a realization of the spirit: “nor is mythology mere ostentation … if it draws me onward to the unknown.”⁵⁶ Tradition must be used to “follow to its source / Every event in action or in thought …” This results in the bliss evoked by the childlike and joyous rhythm of the closing lines of the poem: “We must laugh and we must sing, / We are blest by everything, / Everything we look upon is blest.”

However, the experience of bliss reached, spirit flows back into the body. The experience of Turīya best explains the relationship between body and soul, symbol and experience. As Yeats says, those who have attained this experience are said to be physically immortal, although invisible. They leave, like Christ, an empty tomb and pass into the Source.⁵⁷ In other words the symbol, the physical aspect, is not altogether discarded, it is transformed into the likeness of spirit. A reader's progress from symbol to final experience has four stages corresponding to the states of waking, dream, dreamless sleep, and pure or absolute consciousness. The first stage is that of the concrete symbol, the second that of identity between concept and image, or theme and symbol. In the third state there is only this identity; here the meaning may be understood as far as possible. As Yeats explains in his introduction to The Māndūkya Upaniṣad, the third state of meditation is in form, that is, meaning is still linked to symbol and through it to the racial comprehension of the final experience. In the fourth state pure meaning, bereft even of racial interpretation, gains supremacy. Yeats noted the difference between the third and fourth stages in the case of the spiritual experience of Bhagwān Shri Hamsa:

The Mantra, the sacred fire that he must presently light, the caress given to all parts of his body, are from the memory of the race, the immemorial ritual; but ‘the initiation into the realization of the Self’ is wordless, unique, an act of unbroken consciousness alone.⁵⁸

The experience is “wordless” because (as discussed earlier in this chapter) it is an experience in which subject and object become fused. As the Brhad-āranyaka Upaniṣad asks, who should communicate and to whom?

It is to be remembered, however, that even through symbols communication or evocation is partial; symbolic poems cannot be deciphered like allegory; the latter, Yeats said quoting Blake, is formed by the “daughters of memory.”⁵⁹ It is supremely important that the reader be close to the experiential level of the writer. This is why communication of poetic experience must remain partial, only those aspects of it capable of being evoked in the reader's mind, which the latter has himself experienced. The same idea can be understood in terms of Yeats's Principles. Spirit is pure mind that contains pure truth; this Spirit is the Daimon's knowledge. It is Mānas or the great mind containing all knowledge, and Creative Mind containing all the universals, is a faculty of the Spirit. The proportion of the whole that man possesses consciously is symbolized by a particular phase of the moon. Similarly the Mask represents the mind's growth in self-knowledge (in one lifetime or several), symbolized by the waxing moon, till, at last, this knowledge complete, man becomes capable of sharing the experience of the poet. Only those who have reached this state understand and share the experience compressed in a symbolic poem, more especially if it is an experience of a mystical state. The essential idea is that only when an experience is common to reader and poet, is communication absolute, complete. Such a reader is a rarity. Yeats writes:

A hundred generations might write out what seemed the meaning of the one, and they would write different meanings, for no symbol tells all its meaning to any generation …⁶⁰

In ‘Ireland and the Arts,’ Yeats dealt at great length with the relative importance of communication and artistic merit in a great work. He felt strongly that an artist's true business was not to aim at popularity, but to please himself; he quoted Walt Whitman:

The oration is to the orator, the acting is to the actor and actress, not to the audience:

And no man understands any greatness or goodness, but his own or the indication of his own.⁶¹

In the same essay he also quoted Edwin Ellis, who said that it was not the business of the poet to make himself understood, but the business of the reader to understand him. And he wrote to Sturge Moore in 1926 that he did not care to “prove” his special experiences to “the majority of teachers in universities … What matters to me is that it is my experience.”⁶²

Yeats summed up in ‘The Statues’ the reaction of those in whose minds he had not evoked this experience. In the line, “why did the people stare?” he indicated that it was a “stare” of incomprehension on the part of those who looked for “character,” for certain definable qualities in art which they could grasp at once. On the other hand, “boys and girls, pale from the imagined love / Of solitary beds, knew what they were”; these boys and girls represented persons who shared the poet's experience. They found in art a concrete embodiment of what they “imagined” but could not express, so their response was one of spontaneous rapport—they “pressed at midnight in some public place / Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.”

According to the Upaniṣads, all knowledge is contained in the mind and may be retrieved through meditation.⁶³ Yeats shared this view and applied it to poetry, believing that a great symbolic work of art demanded deep and prolonged meditation. He explained in ‘Symbolism in Painting’ that it was the artistic counterpart of the talisman made by mediaeval magicians; it required to be pondered over. Yeats's view was that the purpose of both art and religion was to attain the “Divine Essence”; the method remained the same regardless of whether a religious or an artistic symbol was used, for ultimate reality was one.⁶⁴ Through the method of meditation it was possible to cross the conscious mind and reach the unconscious mind. This could bring about not only knowledge, a change in the brain, but a transformation of one's whole life, because what the Spirit knew became a part of itself; he had explained this in ‘The Completed Symbol’ in A Vision. In his early years, Yeats had spoken to the members of the Golden Dawn of this change wrought by meditation:

The more vigorously they evoke the White Light in their recurrent meditation, the more active will their personal life become, the more decisively will it diverge from the general life, the more perfectly will it realize its isolated destiny.⁶⁵

Yeats discovered the underlying principle in the story of the courtesan who had prayed, “not foreseeing its consequence, not only for physical, but for spiritual health, and the ‘unconscious mind’ had heard her prayer.”⁶⁶

It is possible to conclude that for Yeats symbolism was not “mere ostentation,” but a fuller statement of the function of poetry. This function was identical to the function of religion: to awaken the divine life in the unconscious mind, or in the words of his poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ “to keep a drowsy Emperor awake,” and thereby transform one's entire life. If this effort of the poet could be shared by his readers, an entire nation, or even civilization, could be exalted into a state of spiritual wholeness or unity of being.

Notes

1. Memoirs, p.42.

2. Ibid., p.145.

3. See Rg. Veda, X. 82.7.

4. See Brhad-āranyaka Upaniṣad, IV.5.15.

5. See Memoirs, p.170.

6. Ibid., p.128.

7. See Essays, pp.37-38.

8. Ibid., p.38.

9. Ibid., p.52.

10. See Golden Dawn, p.104.

11. (a) See Essays, p.46.

    (b) Yeats wrote to Ernest Boyd in 1915: “My interest in mystic symbolism did not come from Arthur Symons or any other contemporary writer … Of the French symbolists I have never had any detailed or accurate knowledge.” Letters, p.592.

12. See Brhad-āranyaka Upaniṣad, IV. 4.5.

13. (a) Sandaram Iyer, “Thoughts on the Metaphysics of Theosophy,” Theosophical Miscellanies No. 1. (1883).

    (b) Madame Blavatsky too, in Isis Unveiled, had said that every objective manifestation required will and force, and these three were convertible forces. Isis, I, 198.

14. “Is the Order of R.R. and A.C. to remain a Magical Order?” Golden Dawn, p.265.

15. Ibid., p.55.

16. Isis, I, 181.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., II, 409.

19. Golden Dawn, p.269.

20. Essays, p.43.

21. Ibid., p.28.

22. See Rg. Veda X, 129, 2-3.

23. (a) See Swāmi Ms., ‘Philosophy of the Upanishads’: “That Being is the seed, all else is His expression.”

    (b) See Usha Grover, Symbolism in the Āranyakas and their Impact on the Upaniṣads (New Delhi: Guruvar Publications, 1987), p.8.

24. See Mānḍūkya Upaniṣad, 2-7.

25. See Concept of Ātman, p.270. “This One intelligence appears variously as perception, thought, impulse, memory”; Aitareya Upaniṣad cited in Concept of Ātman, p.110.

26. See Essays, p.33; Memoirs, p.183.

27. See Brhad-āranyaka Upaniṣad, IV. 3.11.

28. Praśna Upaniṣad, IV. 5.

29. (a) See A Vision (B), p.229.

    (b) “Our dreams select for their purpose images that may go extra-ordinarily close to those of memory, but never coincide with them.” Letters, p.708.

30. AE in Literary Ideals in Ireland (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), p.50. Hence cited as Literary Ideals. This work is a compilation of articles that appeared in the Saturday issues of the Daily Express, Dublin. According to the editor, “they constitute a controversy which was not intended when the first article was written, but which spontaneously grew from week to week.” Those who participated in the controversy were W. B. Yeats, AE, John Eglinton, and W. Larminie.

31. Essays, p.382.

32. John Eglinton, “Mr. Yeats and Popular Poetry,” Literary Ideals, p.41.

33. Ibid., W. B. Yeats, “John Eglinton & Spiritual Art,” p.36.

34. Ibid., AE, “Literary Ideals in Ireland,” p.50.

35. (a) See Essays, p.44.

    (b) See ‘A Postscript to Essay called “Is the order of R.R. and A.C. to remain a Magical Order?”’ Golden Dawn, p.270: “individuality is not as important as our age has imagined.”

36. Autobiographies, p.490.

37. Ibid., p.194.

38. Ibid., p.441.

39. Ibid.

40. Yeats and Sturge Moore, p.114.

41. Autobiographies, p.194.

42. Vision (B), p.281.

43. See Swan and Shadow, p.22. See chapter IV, “Unity of Being”, note 44 (b).

44. Collected Plays, p. 212.

45. Ibid., p. 216.

46. Holy Mountain, p.20.

47. See Essays, p.485.

48. See Kaṭha Upaniṣad, I. 3.2; Praśna Upaniṣad, VI. 8.

49. Brhad-ārnyaka Upaniṣad, IV. 4.8.

50. See Vision (B), p.7.

51. Autobiographies, p.482.

52. Swan and Shadow, p.88.

53. Explorations, p.345.

54. See Holy Mountain, pp.178-181/Essays, pp.477-479.

55. Explorations, p.345.

56. Ibid.

57. See Essays, p.465.

58. Ibid., p.480.

59. Ibid., p.382; see also pp.146-147.

60. Ibid., p.148.

61. Ibid., p.207.

62. Yeats and Sturge Moore, p.99.

63. See Munḍaka Upaniṣad, II. 2.3.

64. See Essays, p.207.

65. See Golden Dawn, Appendix K, p.264.

66. Essays, p.450.