Bodies and Names

In the collection of The Wild Swans at Coole, Yeats again, expresses the tension between the intellect and mysticism. This is especially apparent in The Phases of The Moon.
There is a scholar that sits in the tower and two old men see the dim light from the tower, laughing at the man who reads and finds “mere images”. They tell of the fact that he will never find what he searches for, which is the truth that the old man knows. The only truth is the phases of the moon. The moon is given endless depth in this and all of Yeats poems so far, summoning the mystery of the unknown that exists before it is divided and given image, or names. This is the same idea that Yeats was talking about when he said, “I long for your merry and tender and pitiful words, / For the roads are unending, an there is no place to my mind.” This abstract concept from Seven Woods is stated more explicitly in The Phases of the Moon through the voice of Robartes:

“All thought becomes an image and the soul
Becomes a body: that body and that soul
Too perfect at the full to lie in a cradle,
Too lonely for the traffic of the world:
Body and soul cast out and cast away
Beyond the visible world.”

It seems that he is saying, once this mystic quality is given a body, it becomes immortal and dies. It cannot be delineated with out dying. He says, “all dreams of the soul end in a body.”
Light is used to represent the death untouched knowledge, or the moon. Light is vapid, shallow; it contains nothing but narrowness and ‘heaven is bare.’
This sentiment is expressed in Lines Written in Dejection. This poem creates the sense that there is nothing more haunting then the loss of the moon. He creates a lot of movement and colors in the first five lines, and then takes them all away, creating a haunting silence. This void that later is expressed again, by the ‘embittered sun’ shows us Yeats’ love of the mystic. That which casts light takes away depth.

There is also a lot of talk of the body in this collection, especially in contrast with the mind. No matter how sound and active the mind is, no matter how much valor, strength, and will a person has to live, the body decays: this is inescapable. This as very fitting with the death of the moon, the tao, the nous.
The bodies that Yeats speaks of do not have to contain skin and bones, blood. The body can be a word. As I said in my previous posting, words delineate the abstract, killing the abstract. This is why the old man knows truth and the scholar does not, in The Phases of the Moon. The Old Man never pounded away his ideas, wrote them out, really took them out of abstraction and gave them a body. The body is what dies.