Absence and Presence: Yeats’s Poetry about the Beloved’s Aging

Abstract

Yeats’s poetry about the beloved’s aging manifests a great diversity of response. The beloved’s aging begins as a romantic fantasy, a presence created by the poet for poetic expression, turns into a sentimental reality he tries to evade and to deny, an absence he is not ready to fill with language, and finally becomes an occasion of examination, contemplation, and creation. Aging of the beloved is no longer the life and death for poetic inspiration, but a hard fact the poet accepts, examines, ruminates and finally transforms. It is not only transformed into better knowledge of his beloved, better understanding of their relationship, of himself, but also transformed into food for philosophical contemplation, social critique and finally, poetic imagination. The absence that is caused by the aging of the beloved is turned into a strong presence. With these poetic responses to the aging love, the poet, once a dreamer dependent on love, grows to be a master of himself and of his art.