5. Gnosis and Self-Redemption

The theme of knowledge, or gnosis, is explored briefly in ‘Leda and the Swan’ and ‘The Mother of God’ (the first two poems, culminating in the third, ‘The Second Coming,’ in Yeats’s historical scheme of 2,000-year-cycles). That theme is then examined at length in two poems: the gnomic yet sweeping ‘Fragments,’ and in what is arguably Yeats’s central poem, ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul,’ in which his principal shaping influences, Blake and Nietzsche, are fused by Yeats, resulting in an ecstatic embrace, despite the attendant suffering, of eternal recurrence: an act of self-redemptive secular beatitude in which everything we look upon is blest.