A vision
Day 6 of nature in W B Yeats
Yeats’ most complex work fascinates me. A Vision. That’s the short title. The full title is:
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka.
A Vision was “written by” Yeats and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees. Described as “automatic writing” Yeats collated what Georgie Hyde-Lees spoke, while in a trance. This is when the storyteller is a spirit, narrating through a person. A context for this work is that Yeats and his wife Georgie were members of the esoteric society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The automatic writing began in 1918 a few days after they married until 1920. In the introduction, Yeats describes the trances and details supernatural events they experienced. Many of these involved nature — scents, including roses, violets, hyacinths and other flowers. There were also animal visions: “Sometimes my wife saw apparitions: before the birth of our son a great blackbird” (p.17). There were also darker encounters with unpleasant odours and associated unwellness that involved Yeats’ children. In the introduction, Yeats describes fifty volumes of notes. The spirits also communicated with Yeats as he collated the information, published in 1926.
This dense, complex and difficult work is part philosophy, part cosmological, seemingly mathematical, even astrological. I don’t know how to describe it. Yeats explains how the “communicators” explained the structures of the cosmos. Primarily, this was through symbols.
The symbols in A Vision are found throughout his poetry. For example, gyres, and light and dark phases of the moon. Gyres are seen as a pattern in nature in a way that I easily (and probably oversimplistically) now connect to my studies of pattern design in permaculture (such as spirals in permaculture). Regardless of your stance on the occult, arcane and strange content in A Vision, this is a fascinating insight into experiences that influenced Yeats’ complex poetry.
Trying to read A Vision without an explainer is difficult. There is a website that may help to navigate the complex symbols in this dense text (link below). I first read A Vision when I was around 19 and all of it went over my head. I then read The Golden Bough by Sir James George Taylor which detailed a lot of plant lore and ritual. This led me to Robert Graves’ The White Goddess on poetic myth. I was just interested in understanding Yeats as a myth-making poet and writer. What all of these texts had in common, was that they were mind-bending. With my schooling background, I didn’t have the academic grounding to understand many of the references. They were difficult to read from cover to cover, however, I have always persisted in reading things I don’t understand. These days it’s quantum physics. However, this wider reading, the lone struggle with it (dawn-of-the-Internet days) did enrich my reading of Yeats’ poetry. It helped me find a context for A Vision. I still find myself curious enough to dip into the pages.
You can read the full text of A Vision, supported by the website The System of W B Yeats A Vision to explain some of its complex symbols.