Exploring William Butler Yeats' The Shadowy Water and Adam's Curse

"What is madness but a translation out of essence but into the abysses of the exterior interior?" - Antonin Artaud

In his 1901 essay entitled "Magic", the Irish poet William Butler Yeats formulated a conception of aesthetic work directly rooted in the ancient labors of the magician and the priest. His fundamental beliefs, beliefs which would shape the entirety of his life and literary career, can be summarized in the following points:

(1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and

that many minds can flow into one another, as it were,

and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting,

and that our memories are a part of one great memory,

the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked

by symbols.

(Ideas of Good and Evil, 21)

This psycho-spiritual conception of the relations between the individual, the other, and reality itself have a profound effect on all of Yeat's aesthetic works, but can be particularly felt in his verse drama "The Shadowy Waters" and the poem "Adam's Curse". These works reflect a theory of the interrelation of the categories of self, other and world that highlights the possibility of communicating truths, if indirectly, through the linguistic manipulation of symbols. This magical manipulation is capable of creating experiential worlds, shaping perceptions and beliefs, uniting the selves made separate by "our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education...

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...at "more than their rhyming tell" ("To Ireland", 20). Yeats investment in the mystical Order of the Golden Dawn deepens his symbolic resources, extending his fascination with Celtic mythology into a syncretic spirituality which stresses the Jewish mystical doctrine known as the Kaballah. Through a combination of highly accessible rhyming and metrical poetry with such esoteric systems Yeats is able to construct a dual-level poetics in which readily traceable meanings are amplified by an acquaintance with the symbolic systems Yeats spent a great deal of his life mastering. His investment in these symbolic systems, and their ability to invoke unseen spiritual forces instantiates the poet's resistance to certain developments of modernity - such as the stress on reason, urbanity and individuality - and makes his poetic work a central aspect of his magico-religious Work.