想像力の汀 : Yeatsと海

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  • The Edge of Imagination: Yeats and the Sea
  • ソウゾウリョク ノ ミギワ Yeats ト ウミ

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This paper examines W.B. Yeats's poetic configuration through the trope of the edge. In his works, the edge, which is delineated by water, often forms the threshold of imagination. The threshold never lets the poet indulge in imagination and draws his consciousness back to the point where he plunged himself into imagination. It is the vestige of how the imagination works that is impressed in the imagining process itself. This examination focuses on four poems in Yeats's later period: "The Collar-Bone of a Hare," "The Wild Swans at Coole," "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium."\n"The Collar-Bone of a Hare" is a short and minor poem, but it holds a complex structure that affords a glimpse of Yeatsian poetics. The collar-bone works as a catalytic agent that both unites and divides an imaginary world and reality. The poet abandons a constrained reality\nfull of institutional restrictions and sets out on a romantic voyage to a mythical kingdom where everyone enjoys self-sufficient perfection. He, however, is not free from foreshadowing reality. The water edge challenges the poet by offering the collar-bone of a hare, through which he reflects back on bitter reality. Haunting reality never allows carefree escapism, and the water edge backwardly forms a liminal boundary to the imaginative world.\n"The Wild Swans at Coole" offers a similar perfection of the imaginative world. Based on a specific location, however, the imaginative beauty scarcely reveals its fabrication, but the revising process of the poem by the author elucidates how it is fabricated. The more perfectly the beauty is being organized, the more estranged the subject of the creation, the poet, becomes from the beauty. Finally, in the gap between the perfect beauty and the poet, the water edge emerges. It exemplifies that self-conscious creation is reflected in the edge.\nIn both "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium," the water edges are ambiguous. Like the poet's voyage in "The Collar-Bone of a Hare," no interruption is observed in the old man's trip to the ancient sanctuary.\nHowever, the seeming continuity of the real and imaginative faces off against a murky but existent threshold of the holy city when the final approach to the sanctuary is highlighted in "Byzantium." Rushing nature is refused entry, and a terminal doom breaks in the flow of the flood of candidates. No clear boundary emerges there, but the rejection is more than extant when the imaginary sanctuary finalizes its perfection.

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