Reality as Told By Yeats

“Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing,
Wound in minds wandering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound”

We have seen Yeats battle with the notions of reality throughout the whole of his work so far. In the chapter Ellman declares that Yeats found a new confidence in his writing being in moon phase 17. In this phase literature, philosophy, and nationality were able to come together as one thing (13). While this epiphany and its fruits are rightly termed “esoteric,” I see how the three forms— literature, philosophy, and nationality— come together. I opened with the closing lines of “All Soul’s Night” to show that these forms are able to come together in Yeats’s thought or perhaps his imagination. But thought has become so important, to the point he would “need no other thing,” in understanding reality. In “All Soul’s Night” Yeats conjures spirits like he did in the “Memory of Robert Gregory.” But this time he does not remember young men as if they were champions of the ancient Olympic games, but as thinkers who both learned and taught. The first person, Horton (still unsure of the allusion), is called a master of platonic love. But we also see how the loss of his love made him beg for death. Both of these aside I see the most relation to Yeats himself in how Horton’s “mind’s eye…on one sole image fell” (33-34). This shows how despite Yeats’s new confidence and stylistic change he can still get hung up on an image, and think there be some Truth in it. Another part in the book where we see this is in “The Tower” where he calls upon literary characters, both his and others’, wanting to ask them more questions. The next ghost in “All Souls’ Night” is Florence Emery. From wikipedia (sorry Robin) I learned that she was a friend and collaborator of Yeats, and also a fellow member of the Golden Dawn Occult. We see her soul “whirled about/ wherever the orbit of the moon can reach” (54-55), as if Yeats is analyzing the phases of her soul. The last ghost is MacGregor Mathers, founder of the Golden Dawn Occult (wikipedia again), obviously a person who would be absorbed in the spiritual world.
So how does the mention of these people show Yeats’s changing perspective of reality? Much of it deals with the importance of Objectivity and Subjectivity that Ellman points out. I feel that Yeats has accepted reality but in doing so has not denied the presence of myth, legend, or dreams. Rather he objectively notices how images or fantasy have changed these peoples’ thoughts. But these identities Yeats remembers have become spiritual images in his own mind, by which he can subjectively pick out truths or “a certain marvelous thing” (16). The fact that a memory of someone is somewhat eternal is found in the line “friendship never ends” (65). Even though he admits to disagreeing with Mathers, Yeats remembers a time when the two were still friends.
While this stage of Yeats’s writing is somewhat uninviting due to its obscurity and inward complexity, I find it welcoming. Seeing that he places this new emphasis on his psyche and reality allows the reader to do what Yeats has been doing with the scope of image and art for his whole life.