BL. W. B. Yeats

102. Wilson, F. A. C. Yeats’s Iconography. London: Gollancz, 1960.

A ‘sequel’ to Wilson’s W. B. Yeats and Tradition (98) that extends the study of Yeats’s symbolism and its sources backward to Four Plays for Dancers (17) and The Cat and the Moon (24a). Like Wilson’s former work, refers throughout to symbolism and device Yeats took over from the nô (see index). Includes lengthy, cogent, and widely influential arguments that At the Hawk’s Well (12) follows ‘strict Noh rules with considerable fidelity’, The Only Jealousy of Emer (14b) draws its symbolism from Hagoromo (BK13d), The Cat and the Moon (24a) explores ‘potentialities . . . latent’ in kyôgen, CalVary (17a) culminates in a nô-derived ‘God-dance’, and The Dreaming of the Bones (14a) is ‘in a very real sense . . . not an original play at all, but the recreation of a Japanese original’, Nishikigi (BK8). An appendix summarises fragments of an unpublished Yeats ‘dance play’ of 1923, called The Bridegroom here, drafts of which according to Wilson include a ‘brilliant’ and ‘dramatic’ dance scene that is ‘perhaps the most exciting . . . in all Yeats’s plays’ and that ‘will not seem strange to anyone versed in the Noh’. Taylor (180) suggests that the play was begun in 1918 and notes that it follows ‘rather closely’ the ‘general plot’ of the nô SumidagawA, translation of which had appeared in Stopes (see D23).