The Significance of Rose Symbolism in the Poetry of Yeats

In giving the title, The Rose, to his second book originally called The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), Yeats explained in the Preface to his Poems, 1895, that in them he has found, he believes, the only pathway whereon he can hope to see with his own eyes the Eternal Rose of Beauty and of Peace. This beauty and its nature will be a subject of our concern throughout this essay. Yeats treats beauty as a kind of muse who both informs the shapes of the external world and stimulates the poet to sing the glory of that immanence: ‘Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate, / I find under the boughs of love and hate, / In all poor foolish things that live a day / Eternal beauty wandering on her way.’ The Rose poems bear the general conviction that beauty is an eternal quality that can be perceived in the ephemeral forms of the natural world, and that it can be discovered in what has passed or what is passing. Furthermore, that this beauty appears under various guises in various poems of the volume, i.e., the Rosicrucian rose, Maud Gonne, and Ireland.

کلیدواژه ها:

muse ، eternal beauty ، ephemeral forms ، the natural world ، the Rosicrucian rose ، Maud Gonne ، Ireland