Contrast between object and subject. Aspects of the Beloved One between her inward self and opposite, fearful image. Irresistible beauty and threat. The speaker is beggar, fool, and prophet all at once.
The old realization of an objective moral law is changed into a subconscious turbulent instinct.
The 28 Incarnations
The soul begins out of primal darkness in a state of natural innocence like a bird or beast and grows into the intense intellectual subjectivity of "The Obsessed Man." Personality is now extinguished through its very triumph in imposing itself on external reality and, as it were, remaking and thus identifying itself with it. After this, objective reality slowly regains its primacy until the soul loses its distinguishing personality and becomes "deformed" (The Hunchback); then the soul renounces the insistence on its lost personality and becomes "The Saint," joyously and purposefully reducing himself to nothing to permit the total life to flow in upon him and express itself through his thoughts and actions--like "The Fool" a straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a nameless drifting and turning and sometimes called "The Child of God."
The Dark of the Moon -- when the human is obliterated and the self seems moved by coldly mechanical dead forces.
The Full of the Moon -- when the triumph of the human is bodied forth in the images of:
1) The Sphinx (physical over intellectual); 2) The Buddha (universal love dominant over tranquil physicality; 3) the universal image of the girl dancing beyond death (the aesthetic, transcending yet uniting the others) -- the vision of the dancing girl has brought him the nearest man can come to a triumph over mortality.
In moments of excitement, images pass from one mind to another with extraordinary ease.
"The Second Coming"
The Christian Era draws to its close. We do not know what the new shape of things will be but it must be terror-filled for us by virtue of the simple fact that it will intend so revolutionary a change.
The closing stanza resolves the problem back to the realm of man's own self -consuming imagination.
Greek rationality - standards of beauty and desire to combine passion with clear measured vision in contrast to the formlessness of this filthy modern time.
Groping in the dark, sensing the form of the energy & personality to be created out of inspired calculation.
The "Intolerable Music" that goes on endlessly . . .
mystical idealism, mythical romance,
sensual passion
The most valuable of all talents
is that of never using two words
when one will do.
From Yeats: . . . life is an endless competition between the imaginative hero and the raw material of his experience; the experience being necessary to bring out his heroic qualities to the full. The hero is one who sacrifices nothing to the ideal he has imagined to himself; death can do nothing but confirm his integrity.
The Four Ages
He with Body waged a Fight;
Body won and walks upright.
Then He struggled with the Heart;
Innocence and Peace depart.
Then He struggled with the Mind;
His proud Heart he left behind.
Now his Wars with God begin.
At the stroke of Midnight, God shall win.
I see behind the duality blind
And for this sight I rise in kind
To King's own Jester -- Fool Sublime,
Immortal Idiot, Godly Mime.
Each man is in his Spectre's power,
Until the arrival of that hour,
When his Humanity awake
And cast his own spectre into the Lake.
Yeats "The Second Coming" -- "The Christian Era draws to its close. We do not know what the new shape of things will be but it must be terror-filled for us by virtue of the simple fact that it will entail so revolutionary a change. . . . There is no alternative but to rejoice."
"The notion of a fixed but hidden pattern of things, awaiting Man's discovery but resisting his designs upon it, toppled. . . . It took the lonely voice of Soren Kirkegaard to proclaim that determinism was dead and to assert that the human being has no predetermined essence but is defined rather by freedom, the ability to create, and that character follows creation."