The Dance: Yeats and Hagoromo, a Noh Play

Abstract

This paper studies the dance motif in Yeats’s work, “The Wanderings of Oisin” and other poems, and based on this makes an attempt to compare Yeats’s work and Hagomoro, a Janpanese Noh. This essay is important as it will provide an analysis of Yeats’s work as work, not as work dependent solely on the existence of the Noh, as is wrongly claimed by some critics. This is the first reading of the first play, in a series of the two planned readings of two Noh plays, Hagoromo and Nishikigi, both translated by Pound and Fenollosa. I would like to touch on Yeats’s works that include dance imagery, before and after Yeats’s contact with the Noh plays. Thus, with this essay and the next we could conclude how much Yeats has been under the influence of the Noh, and know whether his work is valuable as work, regardless of the influence on his work, or whether his could be regarded as less valuable as work as it may have been derived from the Japanese Noh.