yeats and alchemy

The Tengwar Project has just gained another layer. Yesterday as I yet again studied the chosen poems for imagery I could use, I discovered a whole new dimension to Yeats that I had never seen before. The last two lines of The Song of Wandering Aengus read "The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun." The connection between silver/moon and gold/sun in combination with apple trees simply reeks of alchemic imagery. Desperately trying to remember what I had read in A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery previously this year, all the poems for this project got spread on the table and I went to work. It turned out that there was alchemic imagery to some extent not only in Wandering Aengus, but in every other piece I had chosen as well. Since my knowledge of historic alchemy is fuzzy at best (something that will hopefully be rectified in the near future) it seemed quite feasible that the subject may have draw renewed interest during the Victorian Era as part of the Gothic Revival. It is well known that Yeats had a strong interest in the esoteric beliefs - something that led to him joining The Rosicrucians, The Theosophical Society, and (most importantly) The Order of the Golden Dawn. Some digging on my part has shown The Order deemed alchemy to be one of three parts of Wisdom of the Whole Universe. Further searching turned up a scholarly article published in 1971's The Review of English Studies/No. 85 entitled W.B. Yeats: Artist or Alchemist? by Robert M. Schuler. In the article , Mr. Schuler states that, "Although Richard Ellmann pointed out over twenty years ago [Yeats: The Man and The Masks, 1948] that Yeats was fascinated by the alchemical quest of self-transmutation and that alchemy was one of the subjects studied by The Adepts of the Order of Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn, no serious attempt has been made to eludicate the extended range of meaning contained in the poetic use of the symbols and doctrines of mystical alchemy as Yeats understood them." A lot has happened since 1971, and I would have to dig deeper in order to see if much else has been written on the matter of Yeats and alchemy since. The exciting thing though (I'm seriously giddy as I write this - it's like a connect-the-dot image with inumerable dots!) is that prior to yesterday I had never read anything that linked Yeats and the study of alchemy together. Not only was my "discovery" spot on, but now it has facts to back it up. Moreover, this is a huge breakthough in relation to the imagery that I design for The Tengwar Project. Instead of searching for arbitrary meaning within the poems to base the drawings on, I can now search for alchemic meanings. More importantly, this provides a window to include alchemical symbolism and iconography. For the past couple of years I have toyed on and off with the idea of creating a book of alchemy-informed pen and ink drawings. This revelation makes the latter null and void as that solo work can no be joined with the tengwar book already in progress.

Photographs of some notes created yesterday, as well as some drawings made pre-alchemy connection will be uploaded on the morrow.