Choosing a book cover

I've written before about choosing an image for a book cover. It's both fun and slightly nerve-racking as it may affect people's reactions towards a book. It's probably less of an issue when that book is largely going to be downloaded as a PDF. And yet, it's still a key part of the book's identity. 

I was always a little unimpressed by cover of the original 2005 edition of Mythologies. The blue—somewhere between phthalo and Prussian blue, I think—is superb and reminiscent of the Cornell Manuscripts series. But the sketch of Yeats listening to Homer (even though it's by his brother, Jack) had little impact or clarity. So, partly out of lack of enthusiasm and partly to distinguish this edition, I decided to find another image.

The first thought was to use the portrait of Yeats by Pamela Colman Smith, which Ann Saddlemyer gifted to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. I only knew about it because I was working there when it arrived (?2014)—I had a memory of it as decent oil painting, and the period and associations were good. When the Berg kindly sent me images for confirmation—there's also a pen and ink drawing by Colman Smith in the NYPL collection, so there was some confusion—I realised that it wasn't nearly as good as I'd remembered. The colours are rather murky for a cover and—if you didn't know the important associations—it's not very attractive. And as the painting had never been photographed before, there was a (modest, but hefty for us) fee for getting a photograph of the painting to reproduce. (I'm not including it here, as I'm unsure about reproduction rights.)

So, I rethought. Probably because I already had Pamela Colman Smith in mind now, I started looking at images of hers and went to The Green Sheaf, a treasure trove of text and image. On practically the very first page of the very first number (okay, there were only ever thirteen), there was an image by PCS illustrating Lady Gregory's translation of a poem by Antoine Ó Raifteirí (Anthony Raftery), a poet born at the end of the eighteenth century in Mayo. This made a strong impression, as I'd been reimmersing myself in the articles and stories of Yeats's early years in Mythologies, and was aware of the importance of Raftery (Yeats used the anglicised form) and Lady Gregory. I continue looking further after that, but kept returning to this image.

The Green Sheaf 1

 

No one image can sum up a collection as diverse as Mythologies, but as I thought about it, this one tied in a number of themes from different parts of the collection. It referred to the blind poet Raftery, the centre of one of the articles in The Celtic Twilight—'Dust hath closed Helen's Eye'—and related to Augusta Gregory, who helped Yeats with folklore studies, translated Irish for him (including Raftery), and helped to revise the English of his Stories of Red Hanrahan. 

And the poem that she translated is an idealised vision of Ireland, a terrestrial paradise as conceived by a countryman at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A good number of the stories allude to places that are earthly paradises—Tir ná nÓg, Hy Brasil, the 'high hollow townland' of Hanrahan’s poem 'O Death’s old bony finger' (repeated in two stories), and even Joachim of Fiore's 'Vision of Paradise', alluded to in 'The Tables of the Law'. And almost all the articles and stories draw on a distinctly Irish landscape, whether heightened or not.

Having selected the image, though, turning it into a cover is another thing entirely. Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal at OBP came up with various ideas and colour schemes, one of which included repeating and reversing the image above and below the title (you'd noticed that, of course), with a golden tan tone (drawing out the gold of the trees).

 

Though the image is repeated, we made sure that the figure of Raftery appeared only once, dreaming of his ideal world. 

*  *  * 

It was only after the cover was already decided that I came across an interesting comment in a book by Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin on the tarot deck that Pamela Colman Smith created for A. E. Waite and Rider & Company: 

There is no doubt that the landscape of the deck is that imagined by Pamela and not designed or directed by Waite. The landscape has the nature of a singular dream—one where scenes are almost connected, but there is no consistent geography. . . .
        The secret is surprising: the landscape of the deck was actualised by Pamela some six years prior to the tarot project, in a painting for the first issue of her Green Sheaf periodical in 1903. An image entitled The Hill of Heart’s Desire appears in this slim volume . . . . It is both the landscape and the poem that set the inner nature of what would six years later become the tarot; even a cursory glance will show many similarities to the landscape of the deck. We see the loving couple in the foreground, later to appear on the 2 of Cups and 10 of Cups, and their cottage is to the left, from the same viewpoint we see in the deck.
      Beyond that is the Tower, and to the upper right we see the ships setting sail as they will do in the 2 and 3 of Wands. We can even view them from the same perspective if we go up the castle building on the hill just below.
      Further down on the right we see a church, the setting of the 3 of Pentacles, perhaps, and the two monks consulting on the path below. Elsewhere in the landscape we see shades of a wandering Fool and a Knight on horseback. Whatever the specific characters, the landscape, with its flowing rivers and idealised towns (from which the Charioteer will ride) is certainly that which is reproduced within the later deck.           

Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot: The True Story of the World’s Most Popular Tarot (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2015), 129.

2 of Cups, 10 of Cups, 2 of Wands, 3 of Wands

The cards, the tarot are, of course, part of Yeats's imaginary world—playing cards turn into a hare and hounds in 'Red Hanrahan' and hint at the treasures he is shown under the hill. In the rituals that Yeats was developing for his Celtic Mysteries, the four elements and the four tarot suits corresponded with the four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann. And Yeats, Waite, and Colman Smith were all involved to some extent in tracing the connection of these symbols with the Grail Hallows and the legends of the Knights of the Round Table.

A rider in 'The Hill of Heart's Desire'? More mobile than the Knight of Pentacles but not as gung-ho as the Knight of Swords—somewhere between the Knights of Cups and Wands?

The Tower, 3 of Pentacles, The Fool

A wandering fool?
 

 

 

 

Yeats's Mythologies

Just out: a new edition of W. B. Yeats's Mythologies, edited and fully annotated by Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey, revised by Neil Mann. This is available for free download as a PDF, or as a paperback or hardback book (£29.95 and £43.95, respectively). 

W. B. Yeats's Mythologies

Open Book Publishers have just launched a new edition of W. B. Yeats's Mythologies, a volume that brings together Yeats's early folklore articles and short fiction. Projected during Yeats's lifetime as part of Macmillan's Edition de Luxe, this collection originally appeared in 1959.* Warwick Gould and Deirdre Toomey prepared the volume of Mythologies for the Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (Scribner), but differences with the series's general editor, Richard Finneran, led them to withdraw it from that series and publish it independently with Macmillan in 2005. 

It had a rather limited circulation, as it never had proper distribution outside Britain and Ireland, and received relatively little publicity. Gould and Toomey retrieved the rights from Palgrave Macmillan in 2022 and were planning a new edition of the work, talking with Clemson University Press and Open Book Publishers about a open access PDF version of the book. When they died in December last year—Warwick just three weeks after Deirdre—they were moving forward with Open Book Publishers, but had no concrete schedule. 

I was honoured to take on the task of seeing the new edition into print—and as I went through tidying and revising, it often felt like a dialogue with Gould and Toomey through the words on the page. It's taken rather longer than I originally expected, but for someone who tends to focus on the later years of Yeats's career, it has been a wonderful immersion in Yeats's earlier years: his study of folklore in The Celtic Twilight, Irish legend and history in The Secret Rose and Stories of Red Hanrahan, and the jewelled prose of the occult stories, 'Rosa Alchemica', 'The Tables of the Law', and 'The Adoration of the Magi'. 

Those who have come across this edition before will know the richness of the annotation provided by Gould and Toomey, and those who haven't will find an abundance of background and explication for these works, tracing how Yeats's reading and experience fed into his writing. And now readers won't have to keep their thumb in the back half of the book, as the note numbers in the text are linked to the notes at the back of the book (and vice versa).

Please do comment here or write to me (yeatsvision@gmail.com) with any reactions, or with problems you encounter—though I have spent hours combing the text for typos and mistakes, I know that there will be some of those, too! Again, please let me know.

* In the Edition de Luxe Mythologies was paired with The Irish Dramatic Movement, which collected articles from Samhain, The Arrow, and a few isolated pieces. The 1959 edition dropped The Irish Dramatic Movement (which appeared in Explorations in 1962), but included Per Amica Silentia Lunae, which is omitted here—it appeared in Later Essays, volume V of the Collected Works. 

 

 

"A Vision" at the National Library of Ireland, September 2026

Though it's usually referred to as A Vision (1925), the first edition of A Vision actually appeared in January 1926. So this year marks the centenary of the publication of A Vision and, to mark this, the National Library of Ireland is starting to digitize the associated manuscripts and papers—including the automatic scripts—and organizing events. 

I'll be taking part in three of these, at talk on A Vision: System, Symbols, and Spirit,  a workshop on The Twenty-Eight Phases of the Moon: Exploring Yeats's A Vision, and a look at the role of manuscripts in approaching a work such as A Vision and Yeats's esotericism more generally.

There is also a tour of the Yeats exhibition at the Library, The Journey to A Vision, which traces Yeats's esoteric interests through the items on display. And that exhibition is itself now marking its twentieth anniversary. 

 (Version updated, 14 September 2026) 

Invincible Summer

I first came to Albert Camus's "Return to Tipasa" because it is the source of the quotation "In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer." (I hadn't realised that this is also circulated in a longer form with added explanations that were never written by Camus, though that did not surprise me as I've written elsewhere about the quotations that have come to be attributed to Yeats.)

What struck me was the way that there were so many echoes in the writing of the great absurdist and existentialist, Camus, of the great supernaturalist, Yeats. Yet, however close Yeats finds the supernatural world to the material, he constantly reaffirms the importance of physical reality, and even if there may be many other lives than the one we are living now, there is no indication that he thinks that humans should strive to be aware of anything beyond this life, which should be seized and savoured.

Two pieces by Yeats seem particularly close, "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" and the final section of the "Dedication to Vestigia" of A Vision (1925), with further echoes of "Stream and Sun at Glendalough" and "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" or "The Stare's Nest by My Window". Among the resemblances are the memories of the ignominies of growing up ("A Dialogue"), the Mediterranean and Classical landscape ("Vestigia"), the sense of a supreme moment ("Stream and Sun"), and the consciousness of human hatred ("Remorse").

 

View of Capri from a Sorrento vineyard

I don't wish to exaggerate the similarities, but I am more and more aware that sometimes the end products of Yeats's mysticism can come very close to the end products of avowedly atheist writers. Although Yeats views human beings as inhabiting a world with many other unseen spirits in other dimensions, his metaphysical system does not give much much attention to the meaning or purpose of life. The process of learning and rebirth dominates for him, not the end, and one could even see the repeated rounds of incarnations on the Great Wheel as a form of the Myth of Sisyphus, were it not for the fact that Yeats affirms a gradual change and evolution to something more perfect at the end of that process.

 

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.

What matter if the ditches are impure?

What matter if I live it all once more?

Endure that toil of growing up;

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

Of boyhood changing into man;

The unfinished man and his pain

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?—

How in the name of Heaven can he escape

That defiling and disfigured shape

The mirror of malicious eyes

Casts upon his eyes until at last

He thinks that shape must be his shape?

And what's the good of an escape

If honour find him in the wintry blast?

 

from "A Dialogue of Self and Soul"

 

Capri, with the Roman Villa Jovis on the high ground.

Doubtless I must someday complete what I have begun, but for the moment my imagination dwells upon a copy of Powys Mather’s Arabian Nights that awaits my return home. I would forget the wisdom of the East and remember its grossness and its romance. Yet when I wander upon the cliffs where Augustus and Tiberius wan­dered, I know that the new intensity that seems to have come into all visible and tangible things is not a reaction from that wisdom but its very self. Yesterday when I saw the dry and leafless vineyards at the very edge of the motionless sea, or lifting their brown stems from almost inaccessible patches of earth high up on the cliff-side, or met at the turn of the path the orange and lemon trees in full fruit, or the crimson cactus flower, or felt the warm sunlight falling between blue and blue, I murmured, as I have countless times, ‘I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and return­ing life after life like an insect in the roots of the grass.’ But mur­mured it without terror, in exultation almost.

A Vision (1925), Dedication ("To Vestigia"), xiii 

 

Roman ruins at Tipasa, Algeria

There is not a single one of these sixty-nine kilometers of highway that is not filled for me with memories and sensations. A violent childhood, adolescent daydreams to the hum of the bus’s engines, mornings, the freshness of young girls, beaches, young muscles always tensed, the slight anguish that the evening brings to a sixteen-year-old heart, the desire to live, glory, and always the same sky, for months on end, with its inexhaustible strength and light, as companion to the years, a sky insatiable, one by one devouring victims lying crucified upon the beach at the funereal hour of noon. Always the same sea as well, almost impalpable in the morning air, glimpsed again on the horizon as soon as the road, leaving the Sahel and its hills with their bronze-colored vineyards, dipped down toward the coast. But I did not stop to look at it. I wanted to see the Chenoua again—that heavy, solid mountain, carved all in one piece and running along the west side of Tipasa Bay before descending into the sea. You see it from far away, long before you get there, as a light blue haze still mingling with the sea. But gradually it condenses as you come nearer, until it takes on the color of the waters surrounding it, like an immense and motionless wave brutally caught in the very act of breaking over a suddenly calm sea. Nearer still, almost at the gates of Tipasa, you see its frowning mass, brown and green, the old, unshakable, moss-covered god, port and haven for its sons, of whom I am one. I was gazing at it as I finally crossed the barbed wire and stood among the ruins. And, in the glorious December light, as happens only once or twice in lives that may later be described as heaped with every blessing, I found exactly what I had come in search of, something which in spite of time and in spite of the world was offered to me and truly to me alone, in this deserted nature. From the olive-strewn forum, one could see the village down below. Not a sound came from it; wisps of smoke rose in the limpid air. The sea also lay silent, as if breathless beneath the unending shower of cold, glittering light. From the Chenoua, a distant cock crow alone sang the fragile glory of the day. Across the ruins, as far as one could see, there were nothing but pitted stones and absinthe plants, trees and perfect columns in the transparence of the crystal air. It was as if the morning stood still, as if the sun had stopped for an immeasurable moment. In this light and silence, years of night and fury melted slowly away. I listened to an almost forgotten sound within myself, as if my heart had long been stopped and was now gently beginning to beat again. And, now awake, I recognized one by one the imperceptible sounds that made up the silence: the basso continuo of the birds, the short, light sighing of the sea at the foot of the rocks, the vibration of the trees, the blind song of the columns, the whispering of the absinthe plants, the furtive lizards. I heard all this, and also felt the waves of happiness rising up within me. I felt that I had at last come back to harbor, for a moment at least, and that from now on this moment would never end. But soon afterward the sun rose visibly a degree higher in the sky. A blackbird chirped its brief prelude and immediately, from all around, bird voices exploded with a strength, a jubilation, a joyful discord, an infinite delight. The day moved on. It was to carry me through till evening. At noon, on the half-sandy slopes, strewn with heliotropes like a foam that the furious waves of the last few days had left behind in their retreat, I gazed at the sea, gently rising and falling as if exhausted, and quenched two thirsts that cannot be long neglected if all one’s being is not to dry up, the thirst to love and the thirst to admire. For there is only misfortune in not being loved; there is misery in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misery. This is because blood and hatred lay bare the heart itself; the long demand for justice exhausts even the love that gave it birth. In the clamor we live in, love is impossible and justice not enough. That is why Europe hates the daylight and can do nothing but confront one injustice with another. In order to prevent justice from shriveling up, from becoming nothing but a magnificent orange with a dry, bitter pulp, I discovered one must keep a freshness and a source of joy intact within, loving the daylight that injustice leaves unscathed, and returning to the fray with this light as a trophy. Here, once more, I found an ancient beauty, a young sky, and measured my good fortune as I realized at last that in the worst years of our madness the memory of this sky had never left me. It was this that in the end had saved me from despair. I had always known that the ruins of Tipasa were younger than our drydocks or our debris. In Tipasa, the world is born again each day in a light always new. Oh light! The cry of all the characters in classical tragedy who come face to face with their destinies. I knew now that their final refuge was also ours. In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

"Return to Tipasa" (1953) ("Retour à Tipasa", L'Été (Gallimard, 1954)

 

Mount Chenoua and the Bay of Tipasa
(J.P. Dalbéra/commons.wikimedia.org)

Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.

from "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" 

 

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

from "The Stare's Nest at My Window"
("Meditations in Time of Civil War")

Original Journals Online II

If you are among those interested in the more esoteric aspects of Yeats, you probably already know about the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, IAPSOP, but if you don't, they have a wealth of material covering the period "between the Congress of Vienna and the start of the Second World War", so the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Archive Index features over a thousand periodical titles, most of which run to multiple issues, and includes the major journals read by W. B. and George Yeats and their "fellow students" of esoterica (AVA xii, CW13 lv). These include the spiritualist journal Light, the Theosophical journals Lucifer and the Irish Theosophist, as well as others such as the Occult Review, Borderland, the Quest, and the Astrologer's Magazine. (There are still gaps in some of the journal runs.)

Yeats himself did not publish many articles in these more specialist journals. However, in his earlier years he did contribute to Lucifer and the Irish Theosophist, for example. 

Lucifer, 15 January 1889 (cf. Collected Works vol. IX, Early Articles and Reviews, 75ff).

 

The Irish Theosophist, October 1892 (cf. Collected Works vol. IX, Early Articles and Reviews, 182ff).

Most of Yeats's articles have, however, been collected and reprinted (perhaps surprisingly, not all*), and it is often the articles by others that were available and that he was—or could have been—reading that are of interest. These are usually unobtainable, except in the largest libraries and in many cases relatively localized, so the opportunity to find the magazines that are referred to in letters or notes and to peruse the articles being discussed is invaluable. 

Seeing the intellectual influences that the Yeatses were exposed to is often illuminating and is one of the reasons why their library and marginalia are so fascinating. Yet we know that the Yeatses read these journals, and browsing almost any issue from this period can provide possible insights into the less conventional ideas they read about and provides context for their own thinking.

Borderland, July 1893

The Occult Review, November 1929

The IAPSOP site enables Search via a restricted Google search, which can be very fruitful, though recent additions may not yet be included and the vagaries of Optical Character Recognition can mean that it will not pick up all instances of the search term—a degree of lateral thinking can be useful!

The site also includes the Standard Spiritualist and Occult Corpus (SSOC) which aims "to provide, at low cost, a more or less complete document database of important primary book-length materials to all academic and non-academic researchers, aficionados, and readers interested in Spiritualism, the occult and allied parasciences" between 1790 and 1940, though with texts on either side of that declared span. It brings together material from a wide range of sources from John Dee and Le comte de Gabalis to Mathers, Lombroso, and The Scripts of Cleophas. 

 * One of these uncollected pieces is "A Dream of the World's End".

Original Journals Online I

One of the great resources for researchers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the ever-increasing availability of journals and periodicals. For a long time, these were only really available in university and large research libraries, and in the cases of many of the more obscure and evanescent journals, only a few libraries held these. This situation was eased a little by reprints, but not again some of the more obscure articles were not included.

The invaluable companion for using these resources is a good bibliography, such as Allen Wade's bibliography for Yeats's own writings, or K. P. S. Jochum's bibliography for Yeats's and for others' writings about Yeats, such as reviews and interviews. The Variorum Edition of the Poems also gives the first publication place, which was often a journal.

 

I will start with a general portal, The Modernist Journals Project—modjourn.org— which provides "high-quality digital scans and metadata of periodicals published from 1890 to 1922". There are too many titles to list, but it's definitely a useful starting point for those who are looking for poems, articles, or essays that are part of Yeats's mainstream writing in their original state and context (I'll look at the resources for his more fringe interests later).

As a simple example here, I give Yeats's poem "He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World" (Variorum Poems 153). The apparatus tells us that it was first published in The Dome in June 1897, before appearing in book form in The Wind Among the Reeds (catalogued as 11 at the front of the book). (As it also indicates, the titles were different in each case: "The Desire of Man and of Woman" in The Dome and "Mongan laments the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved"in The Wind Among the Reeds).

Going to the Modernist Journals Project and going through the alphabetical listing:

 

 

All the issues of The Dome are listed—in this case only five ever appeared!

Selecting Number 3, and opening it, the contents locate the Yeats poem:  

The whole issue can be downloaded in PDF from this page (see "Download Issue Data" on the left)—about 30 MB in this case.

Though it started in 2011, the project is very much ongoing and the site is still under continuing construction—there are places with "Lorem ipsum" dummy text and blank images. It offers useful tools that are well worth exploring, but it also rewards browsing and brings up plenty of unexpected insights into the period.

Yeats and the Stars 6

Yeats and the Stars 1; Yeats and the Stars 2; Yeats and the Stars 3; Yeats and the Stars 4; Yeats and the Stars 5

And Yeats concentrates not on stars but on the figures themselves and the human archetypes that they project. The poem “Those Images" speaks of liberating the mind from the cavern of self-absorption and psychologising, not through the external lure of politics but through the masterful images of the archetypes: child and harlot, lion and virgin, and eagle.

What if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There’s better exercise
In the sunlight and wind.

I never bade you go
To Moscow or to Rome.
Renounce that drudgery,
Call the Muses home.

Seek those images
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child.

Find in the middle air
An eagle on the wing,
Recognise the five
That make the Muses sing.

He gives a slightly different version of the poem in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley in 1937, and he gives a variation on the idea in “An Introduction for My Plays":

I recall an Indian tale: certain men said to the greatest of the sages, “Who are your Masters?” And he replied, “The wind and the harlot, the virgin and the child, the lion and the eagle”.  

(Essays & Introductions 530; Collected Works, vol. 2, 25)

Though a source is indicated, it is not clear, and I have not found any note or commentary that identifies it. This may be because Yeats’s creative mix of memory and forgetting appears to be recasting an account from the Bhagavata Purana, where there are many more masters, whose names may not always match (translations vary quite a lot). 

Krishna tells how an enlightened monk is asked by King Yadu who his masters have been.* He names twenty-four, but not the ones that the king expects:

I have taken shelter of twenty-four gurus, who are the following: the earth, wind, sky, water, fire, moon, sun, pigeon and python; the sea, moth, bumblebee, elephant and honey-thief; the deer, the fish, the harlot Pingala, the fish eagle and the child; the maiden, arrow-maker, serpent, spider and wasp. . . .

(Bhagavata Purana: Canto Eleven: Chapter 7: Slokas 33–35)

The following comments then explain how each of these phenomena or creatures conveyed an important teaching concerning non-attachment and the path to liberation. 

Five of the six masters mentioned in the “Introduction" are found in the Indian source—wind, harlot, child, virgin, and fish eagle (kurara)—with only the lion missing. The selective recollection of this handful from the twenty-four and the addition of the lion may be influenced by the constellations, which would offer four of them: the virgin suggesting the lion, and the eagle, the child, which is often depicted with it. (And there are Blakean echoes as well.)

Ignace-Gaston Pardies, Globi coelestis in tabulas planas redacti descriptio (1674).
Aquila, the eagle, with the child, Antinous or Ganymede.

Yeats does not appear to be concerned with the lessons that each of the masters teaches, focusing instead on the images themselves “that constitute the wild" and “make the Muses sing". When looking at the skies and the stars, Yeats sees them within the symbol—the mind escapes the cavern of its own introspection through the forms it finds in the world beyond and the skies above.

Yeats follows Plotinus, who holds that “The soul bears [the kosmos] up, and it lies within, no fragment of it unsharing" (MacKenna) or “the universe lies in soul which sustains it, and nothing is without having some share in soul. . .” (O'Meara)(Ennead IV:3.9). Plotinus goes on to compare the physical cosmos to a net bathed in the waters of Anima Mundi or All-Soul.† And as with the macrocosmic, so with the microcosmic: the body does not have a soul within, the soul encompasses a body. Or as Ezra Pound would put it:

That the body is inside the soul—

                        the lifting and folding brightness
                              the darkness shattered,

                                    the fragment.
That Yeats noted the symbol over that portico

                                                                                  (Paris).

(Canto CXIII/808-9)‡

Yeats sees the symbol in the cathedral or in the universe, and all within the symbol. Soul is not inside matter, animating it; matter is inside soul, which informs and sustains it. The stars may seem far away, “inviolate and fixed", yet, like the whole universe itself, they manifest Soul or soul. We may discern that, at least in part, in the constellations of the heavens.

 

 ——————————————————

 

* Krishna, instructing Uddhava, tells him how knowledge of His nature as Supreme Lord can be learnt, saying “In this regard, sages cite a historical narration concerning the conversation between the greatly powerful King Yadu and an avadhūta" (liberated soul). The avadhuta tradition is connected with Dattatreya, and this teaching is often connected with Dattatreya himself (see, for example, “Self-education: The 24 Gurus of Dattatreya", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dattatreya ).

 

† “The kosmos is like a net which takes all its life, as far as ever it stretches, from being wet in the water, and has no act of its own ; the sea rolls away and the net with it, precisely to the full of its scope, for no mesh of it can strain beyond its set place : the soul is of so far-reaching a nature — a thing unbounded — as to embrace the entire body of the All in the one extension ; so far as the universe extends, there soul is ; and if the universe had no existence, the extent of soul would be the same ; it is eternally what it is" (Ennead IV.3.9, MacKenna). MacKenna's translation of Plotinus started to appear in 1917 (the last volume came out in 1930).  Yeats had earlier found similar thought in Henry More, the seventeenth-century Platonist, drawing on his writing in Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917) to explain Anima Mundi, and how the “general soul" is “a substance incorporeal but without sense and animadversion pervading the whole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein, according to the sundry predispositions and occasions, in the parts it works upon, raising such phenomena in the world, by directing the parts of the matter and their motion as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical powers". (CW5 22)

 

‡This reading owes a great debt to the treatment of the relation between Yeats and Pound in Colin McDowell and Timothy Materer, “Gyre and Vortex: W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound". Twentieth Century Literature 31:4 (Winter, 1985).