A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka

In Book 2, Yeats explores The Interplay of Duality and Unity, challenging the boundaries between the empirical and the spiritual, the ephemeral and the eternal. That theme is intertwined with the theme of Cyclical Patterns in Dialogue With Modernism and Ancient Traditions, as he articulates the cyclical oscillations between opposites that individuals and civilizations experience through the metaphor of the gyre.

Yeats’s era was marked by a revival in Irish mythology and folklore, and he drew extensively on the Celtic tradition to create the metaphors and symbols that he uses in A Vision. The gyre, in particular, is reminiscent of the spirals that frequently appear in Celtic art and symbolism. In Celtic imagery, the spiral represents the sun and the concepts of life, death, and rebirth. Furthermore, Celtic legends often revolve around The Interplay of Duality and Unity: light and dark, land and sea, this world and the Otherworld. Yeats’s emphasis on pairs, such as Energy and Destiny or Mind and Fate, echoes this Celtic worldview in which complementary forces are in a perpetual dance of balance and imbalance. Another intriguing link is Yeats’s reference to supernatural entities and voices, which bring to mind banshees, Irish spirits known for eerie shrieks that foretell the death of a family member. The narrative in Chapter 1, in which a woman possesses a supernatural voice that transcends time and reality, evokes the banshee myth. This not only underscores Yeats’s engagement with the spiritual dimension of human experience but also emphasizes his grounding in Irish folklore.

Lastly, the idea of cycles, particularly the Great Year, echoes the Celtic festivals that mark the cyclical progression of seasons. Events like Samhain, the Celtic New Year, which celebrates the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, resonate with Yeats’s contemplation of cyclical patterns in history, life, and nature. Yeats’s deep engagement with Irish mythology and folklore is not merely an ornamental layer in his work; it provides the foundation for the text’s explorations of personal introspection, national identity, and cosmic inquiry. On a metatextual level, the way Yeats draws on ancient Celtic traditions to build a cosmology for the modern age also represents yet another way in which the text puts the modern and the ancient in dialogue.

The philosophy articulated in A Vision serves as a nexus between the personal, political, and cosmic, and there are hints in this section of the book about the ways Yeats connected his writing to the cosmos he envisions. The poem “Desert Geometry or the Gift of Harun Al-Raschid,” for instance, features a woman with a supernatural voice who utters cosmic truths. Yeats incorporated material from the automatic writing of his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, who believed she was transcribing messages from the spirits. Just as the woman’s voice in the poem possesses otherworldly wisdom that transcends time and reality, Georgie’s automatic writings conveyed to Yeats messages and insights from the spirit realm. Through this lens, the poem’s line, “A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner; / Under it wisdom stands” points to Georgie’s transformative role in Yeats’s life and work (102). Beneath her allure lay wisdom that reshaped Yeats’s philosophical and spiritual outlook.

Finally, “The Geometrical Foundation of the Wheel” suggests that the cyclical nature of existence and the interplay of opposites applies to all levels of existence. The oscillating patterns of the gyre describe the tumultuous experience of love—the ebb and flow of desire and destiny, the ever-spinning dance of rejection and union—which Yeats famously experienced in his unrequited love for Irish actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne and in his eventual marriage to Georgie. But the gyre also describes the cyclical rises, falls, and revolutions of political history, which were forefront in the minds of the Irish in the wake of the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.