Encounter between the Irish and Japanese Spiritual Traditions in At the Hawk’s Well, The Only Jealousy of Emer, Yōrō, and Awoi no Ue

Abstract

This paper discusses how Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well and The Only Jealousy of Emer connect his unique idea of spirituality with the cultural nationalism. Both plays use an Irish hero Cuchulain as a theme to evoke strong emotions, which in turn evoke national consciousness. In the former, Cuchulain appears as a young man who comes in search of a well whose water will give him immortality. However, he fails to drink the water from the well when he is driven away by the Guardian of the Well, who is possessed by the spirit of the hawk. The latter shows Cuchualin at a later stage of life, for its story takes place as Cuchulain lies unconscious after he has killed his own son and fought the waves of the sea. Then, I compare these plays with Yōrō and Awoi no Ue, which are widely considered to be their Japanese equivalents in order to show how Yeats uses, follows, and yet changes some of the conventions of the Noh at the same time.