The Thematic Study of Time in Yeats’s Mystical System

摘要

Yeats endeavors to set up the symbolic framework of time in the process of establishing his abstruse and systematic mysticism. A Vision not only provides a pattern according to which temporal events or human types occur or recur, but also reflects the close relation between Yeats’s mystical symbolism and the theme of time. The symbolic framework of time—the Gyres and the Great Wheel of mystical system together with their transformed shapes complement and elucidate each other in Yeats’s poetry so as to promote his thought of time to a higher level. Three distinctive features of Yeats’s poetry—a form of literature, a form of philosophy and a belief in nationality are hammered into the unity of the time theme in his mystical system.