Overview

The aspect of A Vision that makes probably the most striking impact on Yeats's poetry is the view of history that arises from the system. The expanding and contracting gyres of the cones are mapped onto periods of thousands of years, highlighting points of emphasis and comparison, and provoking visions of the future. Poems such as “The Second Coming,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Leda and the Swan,” “The Gyres,” and “The Statues” are clearly based in this schema, and many others make more sense when readers appreciate how Yeats saw the ebb and flow of the tides in human history.

History is the operation of the Faculties, and the book that dealt with history, “Dove or Swan,” was one of the sections that Yeats felt some satisfaction with, telling Olivia Shakespear in 1924: “I am consentrating the history of the world into twenty pages or so,” adding that it “will seem better so abbreviated” (CLX 4637). As in the descriptions of the twenty-eight incarnations, Yeats's writing is impressionistic and often dense, conveying much in relatively few pages. And, like those descriptions, the text of “Dove or Swan” remains largely unchanged in the second version. Between the two versions, however, Yeats did a significant amount of research into earlier concepts of historical cycles, including a great cycle based on the precession of the equinoxes and some theorizing on the dispersion of symbols in Asia and Africa, so that he expanded the sections that had dealt with such matters into a book of their own, “The Great Year of the Ancients.”

The system posits a number of cycles that operate in history, the most important being of some 2,100 years, which corresponds to a month of the Great Year, the passage of the equinoctial points through a sign of the zodiac. There are in fact two cycles of 2,100 years, one that corresponds to a religious dispensation and the other to a secular civilization, and the start of each period is at the central point of the other. Both cycles alternate between primary and antithetical. The birth of Christ marks the start of the primary monotheistic dispensation and took place at the central point of the antithetical classical civilization. At the central point of the Christian dispensation, in the eleventh century, comes the start of the primary Western civilization.