Vacillations in a Quest for the Ultimate Symbol: Yeats’s “Meditations in Time of Civil War”

Vacillations in a Quest for the Ultimate Symbol: Yeats’s “Meditations in Time of Civil War”

This paper reads Yeats’s “Meditations in Time of Civil War” to identify the speaker’s frustration and ambivalent feelings that have been discussed in the light of different thematic variants in other readings. This paper first argues that the speaker’s emotional instability throughout the series of poems arises from a crisis of the philosopher-poet’s sense of identity in time of turbulent chaos. This paper further discusses how the vacillating mind of the speaker exhibits a typical trajectory of any effort to pursue a stable symbol that can accommodate the irreconcilable oppositions. Thus, this paper concludes that what keeps the speaker’s vacillations persisting is none other than his recognition that oppositions themselves are not stable all the time because of the indeterminate nature of the binary relationship.