‘A lamp burns on’: W.B. Yeats’s Christ

Abstract

This paper considers the sources that inform the Irishpoet W.B. Yeats’s conception of Unity of Being. Yeats expresses his belief inUnity of Being in religious terms and syncretically aligns his‘Christ’, his Unity of Being, with different forms of belief and philosophy. In this paper, I focus on a triad of influences Yeats frequently pose together: Dante, Blake, and the Upanishads. Through a reading of certain images from ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’ and ‘The Phases of the Moon’, this paper hopes to enrich existing literature on what Yeats considered to be his religion by the time the second edition of A Vision would be published.