Mystic Void in Yeats
The Mystic Void
To create a mystic world in poetry is itself an art par excellence. To welcome and enrich the world of perfect extinction of personality in the form of void as a superior creative excellence is definitely more than mere excellence in the art of poetry. It is the ascent of excellence, indeed, the ascent of poetry and the poet. Unlike any other mystic poet, W. B. Yeats enters into the world of mystic void when he is at his best in sonnets. As a matter of fact, the mystic aroma in his poetic creations finds its most serene and poignant efflorescence when he creates the mesmeric mystic void in his mature sonnets. As a background to Yeats's earnestness in solemnly dealing with the world of void as a distinctive, superior and more appealing form of writing mystic poems, he was somewhat compelled by his personal life terribly disturbed by the agonies of illness and gradual but unavoidable loss of physical and mental strength and vigour. Yeats, at the age of sixty, smiles in agonies and anxieties so much so that he seeks perfection of his life and work'. A Dialogue of Self and Soul is perhaps his first endeavour to enter into the world of mystic void with personified visions of Self and Soul well directed and well moulded in the dough of mystic void where he seeks deliverance from the crime of death and birth':
Why should the imagination of a man
Long past the prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect its wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth. The presence of a certain pattern of morbidity was already there in Yeats's mind right from the early poetic contributions. In fact, the search for an endless world of void as a characteristic element of mystic nothingness began in 1889 when he was interested in his attempt for a certain revolt of the soul against the intellect and found some
To create a mystic world in poetry is itself an art par excellence. To welcome and enrich the world of perfect extinction of personality in the form of void as a superior creative excellence is definitely more than mere excellence in the art of poetry. It is the ascent of excellence, indeed, the ascent of poetry and the poet. Unlike any other mystic poet, W. B. Yeats enters into the world of mystic void when he is at his best in sonnets. As a matter of fact, the mystic aroma in his poetic creations finds its most serene and poignant efflorescence when he creates the mesmeric mystic void in his mature sonnets. As a background to Yeats's earnestness in solemnly dealing with the world of void as a distinctive, superior and more appealing form of writing mystic poems, he was somewhat compelled by his personal life terribly disturbed by the agonies of illness and gradual but unavoidable loss of physical and mental strength and vigour. Yeats, at the age of sixty, smiles in agonies and anxieties so much so that he seeks perfection of his life and work'. A Dialogue of Self and Soul is perhaps his first endeavour to enter into the world of mystic void with personified visions of Self and Soul well directed and well moulded in the dough of mystic void where he seeks deliverance from the crime of death and birth':
Why should the imagination of a man
Long past the prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect its wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth. The presence of a certain pattern of morbidity was already there in Yeats's mind right from the early poetic contributions. In fact, the search for an endless world of void as a characteristic element of mystic nothingness began in 1889 when he was interested in his attempt for a certain revolt of the soul against the intellect and found some