The best things, he always used to say, are put together of a night and vanish with the morning. What people call the floating world
― Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
I am fey again
– Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
W.B. Yeats poems are well known, so it feels mundane spending time with them. He’s often on the A Level English curriculum. Certainly used to be. There is another dimension to his art, redeeming him from commonality.
Yeats was interested in The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn associated with Tarot, Kabbalah, and magical symbolism. I’ve read such books. He developed his own system which features in The Second Coming. The gyre is a spiral representing cyclical patterns of time advancing forward and receding backwards.
There are religious associations with his poem but you can extrapolate from superstitious belief into deeper ideas. Everything begins, grows, advances, and decays cyclically. When things become bad, new energies arrive, consistent with I Ching philosophy when extreme yin changes to yang.
My interest for this Conceptual Art is with these lines from The Second Coming and the River Mersey where I walk:
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
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The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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The symbolism is incidentally appropriate for politics. Things are perhaps falling apart, there seems very little centre, and those fighting as such are the worst. The best are the poets, musicians, philosophers, readers, artists, walkers, finding meaning and purpose in a creative pursuit and resonating with nature.
In Greek mythology, Zeus assumes the form of a swan and seduces Leda: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl” Yeats says in Leda and the Swan. Although it’s more than a seduction; we’re not naïve in 2025.
Leda gives birth to beautiful Helen. Paris abducts with Helen causing the Trojan War. According to Euripides, Apollo rescues Helen. The god of Sun and Music intervenes in human drama “turning and turning in the widening gyre.”
Yeats dreamed of a cabin at Innisfree, and imagined a dolphin near Byzantium. Then if you’re like me, making Conceptual Art, the gyre becomes the spiralling lines of the Bach Cello Suite Number One on a foggy October day.