예이츠의 『갈대밭의 바람』에 실린 시의 순서에 대한 소고

Abstract

The order of poems plays a very important role in Yeats's book of poems without understanding which his poetry cannot be fully appreciated. Hence, understanding Yeats's poems requires looking into not only a relationship between the poems placed side by side in his Book of poems but also the principle of arranging the entire poems. The purpose of this paper is to find out a principle with which Yeats placed his 37 poems for The Wind Among the Reeds. The principle, if there is any, brings us closer to why Yeats moved "The Fiddler of Dooney" from the 11th place in the 1899 edition to the 37th in the 1909 edition. My argument is that Yeats's arrangement of poems selected in The Wind Among the Reeds reflects his poetics which he formed in between 1890's and 1910's. Reading Yeats's essays, “Nationality and Literature" (1893), “The Theater" (1899), "The Symbolism of Poetry" (1900), and “What is Popular Poetry?” (1901), we see that the poet talks about different subjects matters but reveals his idea of how the literature develops. Yeats believes that literature goes through three developmental stages: the epic period; dramatic period and the period of lyric poetry. The epic phase is marked by great racial or national movements and events; the dramatic phase mainly deals with characters who lived in them; and the lyric phase focuses on pure emotion or mood, the seed of which again grows into a tree of epic literature by stimulating human sensibilities. This cyclical pattern of literature, which Yeats compares with the growth of a tree, is a model after which the poems of The Wind Among the Reeds are arranged. That is, the opening poem, "The Hosting of the Sidhe" reflects the epic concern by dealing with great Irish people and soil; the second poem, “The Everlasting Voices," in which great racial or national movements disappear, talks about old human hearts; and the third poem, “The Moods,” shows the lyric phase concentrating on the birth of mood and its immortality. The following 34 poems are arranged in such a way as to mirror the epic-dramatic-lyric pattern; dramatic poems outnumber the epic and lyric poems. This pattern shows Yeats's message: literature goes through this three developmental stage and the parts do not exist in isolation from the whole. Yeats also announces that he is the poet of Irish people, drama, and lyrics.