William Butler Yeats was born in a Dublin suburb on June

13, 1865. His father J.B Yeats was a painter of some distinction.
Soon after his birth, Yeasts Parents moved to London and he
went to school in Hammersmith. For a short time he studied
painting, and retained throughout his life a passionate love and
understanding of that art. Because of that attitude his father
introduced him with two prominent literary figures ---- Edward
Dowden & John Todhunter. It was through Dowdens
encouragement that some of his earliest poerty was published.
The First Success came with The Wandrings of Oisin in 1889.

Yeats has been regarded as a great symbolic poet.

Innumerable are the symbols that Yeats employs, in many cases
the same symbol being used for different meanings and different
purposes and contexts. Many of his symbols are very obscure
and almost unintelligible to the uninitiated reader. In his early
years, he had been a devoted student of theosophy and magic,
and a member a society of Christian Kabalists. His study of
occulticism embraced the love of fairies, banshees, the Sidhe,
astrology, automatic writing, second sight, and prophetic dreams.
From Madama Blavatsky he had learned that the great memory
of Nature preserves the legends of all nations. That made him
feel that he could get in touch with Anima Mundi through
symbols drawn from Irish legends ---- The symbolic Characters

of Oisin or Aengus, for example, or the hound with one read ear,
or the white deer no horns. He also made use up other arbitrary
occult symbols of rose , cross , lily, bird, water tree,
moon, sun and tower which he found in the Kabalistic,
theosophical and other works.
The rose is a protean symbol in Yeats poem. Most of his
rose-poems are to be found in the volume called The Rose
which appeared in 1893. In The Rose of Peace, the symbol of the
rose has been used to mean earthly love. But in The Rose of
World, the symbol of rose means on one level transient earthly
love and beauty and on another level eternal love and beauty.
The poem Sailing to Byzantium reflects his interest in
Byzantine art and culture Byzantium here becomes a symbol of a
perfect world. Rejecting this world of birth, generation and
death, the poet determines to sail to Byzantium where, he thinks,
he can defeat time because he will go to the world of art and art
is timeless. He discards the sensual music made by the birds in
favour of the ethereal music made by the Byzantine birds of
hammered gold and enamellings. He turns from the country of
the fleshy life to Byzantium which is the symbol of the ideal,
aesthetic, existence he longs for the Byzantium suggests a far-off
unfamiliar civilization whose art is non-representational and
whose religion has taken and exotic form because merging of
western and eastern Churches and religious tradition.

The Second Coming is another famous poem illustrating

Yeats use of symbols. Its words and phrases flow partly from
private doctrine, partly from Yeats directs sense of the world
about him, and partly from both these sources. For instance the
Ceremony of innocence represents for Yeats one of the qualities
that made life valuable under the dying aristocratic social
tradition. The expression Falcon and the Falconer, have both a
symbolic and doctrinal reference. A falcon is a hawk, and a
hawk is symbolic of a active or intellectual mind; the falconer is
perhaps the soul itself Christian in the beginning, but develop an
image. Whose source is not the scripture but spiritus Mundi and
which concerns something like an Egyptian Sphinx, and passing
of Christ in his favour. The idea is that forces of Christian faith
are almost spent and that a new brutal force is about to take over.
In 1928 came the volume The Tower. In the poems of
this volume, symbolism and realism, metaphysical speculation
and Contemporary social comment, jostle each other. In the
poem called The Tower Yeats attacks Plato Plotinus. The
tower sometimes represents the celestial aspirations of the
solitary intellect, but these tend to merge with the different
heaven-bound aspiration of the souls. The intellect articulates,
dealing in abstract things: cancels speech and thought itself.
In Leda and the Swan Yeats has put every appearance of
unity and although such images as the dome are readily

intelligible, other image and their connection and references are

very abscure. It is a symbolist in the sense that the manifest level
is there to suggest unstated themes: the union of matter and spirit
of god and man of Dove and Virgin, and all the cycles of history
which begin with these unnatural conjuctions.
To conclude that Yeats had an excellent understanding of
how to use how not to abuse his symbols, that his religiousness
was wholly intelligent. But he has many passages commenting
his practice. Yeats poems are rarely transcendental as they seem.
Whatever their occult bearing, they are personal and worldly.
Whatever Yeats romantic contempt of world, it was as through
as the Mallarme, who saw the world merely as a store of
symbols for something else. Even in his Rosicrucian days. Yeats
wanted to reconcile world and sprit, and to integrate himself
with world and sprit. His symbols, like his mask, give him a way
to do this. By their triple reference to self, world and spirit, they
achieve on the aesthetic plane and unity of being which is
impossible in life.