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Chapter Title: W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process: The Example of ‘Her Triumph’
Chapter Author(s): Phillip L. Marcus

Book Title: The Living Stream

Book Subtitle: Yeats Annual No. 18
Book Editor(s): Warwick Gould
Published by: Open Book Publishers

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vjtw2.18

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The Living Stream

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 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0028.10

W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process: The Example

of ‘Her Triumph’

Phillip L. Marcus

‘HER TRIUMPH’ is surely one of the loveliest of W. B. Yeats’s poems,

and one of the great love poems in the language. It may seem sur-
prising, therefore, that it cannot confidently be related to any actual
woman or specific romantic experience in his life.1 On the other
hand, 1926, the year of its composition ‘had been a poetic annus
mirabilis for WBY. . . . The harvest of that frantic year’s writing
would stand very near the summit of his artistic achievement’ (Life
2 338-39). In fact, although the poem literally celebrates the trans-
forming power of love, its covert subject is the creative process
itself–and possibly a transforming moment in the evolution of
Yeats’s own work. Maud Gonne, herself the personal inspiration of
so much of his work, had once written to him perceptively that
‘[w]hat makes the extraordinary charm of your poetry is the terrible
though unseen effort of its creation. This somehow makes the
atmosphere of a precious jewel about it. Like a gem it is the outcome
of a terrible and hidden effort’ (G-YL 283). In 1916, H. W.
Nevinson recorded a conversation in which Yeats ‘talked of Freud &
Jung and the subconscious self, applying them to art; said the great
thing is to reduce the conscious self to humility, as by imitation of
some ancient master, leaving the unconscious free to work’.2
Similarly, Yeats himself was to tell an interviewer in 1931 that ‘[t]he
thing that gets you over the horrible business of beginning is the

1 Professor Roy Foster, personal communication, 13 February, 2004.

2 Ronald Schuchard, ‘“An Attendant Lord”: H. W. Nevinson’s Friendship with
W. B. Yeats’, Yeats Annual No. 7 (1990), 283.

169

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170 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process

momentum of the subconscious. The subconscious is always there,

lying behind the mind, ready to leap out. The weight of its momen-
tum grows with experience. The whole aim of consciousness is to
make the subconscious its obedient servant. That is why as one
grows older one gets happier’ (Life 2 419). The light tone of most of
his statement is belied by the word ‘horrible’, which chimes with
Maud’s ‘terrible and hidden effort’. His language also shows him
drawing upon the concepts of depth psychology to explain his expe-
rience, and in fact it is such an approach that offers the most fruitful
perspective for interpreting the hidden effort beneath the surface of
‘Her Triumph’.
Some of the manuscript record for the composition of ‘Her
Triumph’ seems to have disappeared, but the early stages of what
remains might actually refer to a real person or persons, whether
someone he knew is imagined to be the speaker or the poet himself
is speaking by way of a female mask:

I am not evil now; until you came

I had thought the shamefulest things imaginabel
And they but seemed the sweeter for the shame:
Thought love the better were it casual;
I had an opium eating friend, a friend
Who had drunk to drown a melancholy fit
The coils of the great dragon had no end.3

But the specific detail involving the speaker’s ‘evil’ life was obscured
in revision, much of it subsumed into the generalized ‘I did the drag-
on’s will’; and ‘I had fancied love a casual | Improvisation or a settled
game’ metamorphoses what nowadays would be called casual sex
into something apparently more benign.4 Even what are apparently
the earliest extant drafts incorporate the protective distancing and
generalizing effect provided by the legendary stories of Saint George
and Perseus. Some lines at this stage go better with the Christian
saint than with the pagan hero: ‘In your companionship I turn to
3 W. B. Yeats, The Winding Stair: Manuscript Materials, ed. David R. Clark
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 122-23; hereafter abbreviated WS and cited
parenthetically in the text.
4 This change is noted by Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History in
Yeats’s Love Poetry (1993; rpt. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 213.

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 171

God’, ‘lost in dragon without an end’. In the latter instance, ‘lost’

seems to have the Dantean sense of ‘damned’. In another early draft,
the word ‘evil’ appears repeatedly. But according to the Classical leg-
end, Andromeda is a guiltless victim, a scapegoat, and as the drafts
progress the text moves away from whatever the dark ‘private’ aspects
of the poem’s donnee might have been towards the paradigm of hero,
menacing dragon, and rescued maiden.
As Adrienne A. Munich has shown, the Perseus and Andromeda
story was the subject of nearly innumerable Victorian poems and
paintings, many of which Yeats certainly knew. His main visual
source was Edward Burne-Jones’s painting ‘The Doom Fulfilled’; his
primary literary source may have been William Morris’s verse tale
‘The Doom of King Acrisius’ from The Earthly Paradise (1868-70).
Yeats had read ‘as a boy . . . the third volume of The Earthly Paradise’
(Au 141, CW3 131), and Morris was to become one of his favourite
authors as well as his ‘chief of men’). He may have seen the painting
when it was first exhibited at the New Gallery in May 1888. He was
living in London then and taking French classes at Morris’s. In 1902
‘The Doom of King Acrisius’ was published as a separate volume
with photographic reproductions by Frederick Hollyer of ‘The
Doom Fulfilled’ and the other paintings in the Perseus series: a par-
tial realization of the early plan to have Burne-Jones produce illus-
trations for the entire Earthly Paradise, and the first time the poem
and the relevant painting were united.5 In this volume the freed
Andromeda is described on the page following the reproduction of
the painting in terms that ‘Her Triumph’ seems to echo:

For her alone the sea-breeze seemed to blow,

For her in music did the white surf fall,
For her alone the wheeling birds did call

5 Adrienne Auslander Munich, Andromeda’s Chains: Gender and Interpretation

in Victorian Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989);
Christopher Wood, Burne-Jones (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1998), 105-
06; William Morris, The Doom of King Acrisius (New York: R. H. Russell, 1902);
Joseph R. Dunlap, The Book That Never Was (New York: Oriole Editions, 1971). Of
special importance on Yeats’s visual sources for the poem is the study by David R.
Clark in Yeats at Songs and Choruses (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1983), 90-136. Although my own approach and interpretation are very different, I
am indebted to Professor Clark’s work throughout my own study.

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172 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
Over the shallows, and the sky for her
Was set with white clouds, far away and clear:
E’en as her love, this strong and lovely one
Who held her hand, was but for her alone (55).

In Yeats’s poem, the speaker in her transformed state similarly feels

a new relationship to the natural world, staring ‘astonished’ at the
sea; and that world perceives her and her rescuer differently, as evi-
denced by the miraculous strange bird shrieking at them. Morris’s
‘wheeling’ birds would have carried implications for Yeats of a cycli-
cal dimension to the experience, inaugurating not only a personal
transformation but a new historical era as well; and in fact this per-
spective was to emerge in his own poem. Two cancelled references
in the manuscripts–‘I thought the poets dreamed’ and ‘I laughed at
poets talk’–had made artistic renderings of the story part of the
story (WS 126-27). Munich’s study convincingly demonstrates that
the majority of Victorian poets and painters who dealt with Perseus
and Andromeda used their encounter as a vehicle for the expression
of fears about women and their increasing demands for political
rights and greater personal freedom.6 Yeats, however, was attracted
to the myth for different reasons, reasons specifically connected with
the creative process and the sources of his own creative power.
Yeats’s work on the materials that became A Vision (dated 1925
but actually published in 1926) immersed him in speculations that
bore upon the creative process, and elements of those speculations
emerged in The Trembling of the Veil, written 1920-22 and published
in 1922 and then again in 1926 in Autobiographies. One passage in
particular might be considered the earliest version of ‘Her Triumph’,
a virtual scenario for the poem he was to write a few years later:

When a man writes any work of genius, or invents some creative action, is
it not because some knowledge or power has come into his mind from
beyond his mind? It is called up by an image, as I think…but our images
must be given to us, we cannot choose them deliberately (Au 272, CW3
216).

6 Two other relevant studies are Joseph A. Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny:
The Social Discourse of Nineteenth-Century British Classical-Subject Painting
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Bram Dijkstra, Idols of
Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (1986; rpt. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1988).

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 173
As the passage continues it becomes clear that ‘mind’ is used here in
the sense of ‘consciousness’: ‘I know now that revelation is from the
self, but from that age-long memoried self, that shapes the elaborate
shell of the mollus and the child in the womb, that teaches the birds
to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis that joins that buried
self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind’. Yeats sometimes
used the term ‘Self ’ to refer to Unity of Being, what Jung termed
individuation; but as he uses the term here, it corresponds to the
Jungian concept of the collective unconscious. So creation of a ‘work
of genius’ involves the joining of consciousness with the realm of the
archetypes (a term used by both Yeats and Jung to refer to the para-
digmatic forms found in the collective unconscious).7 Perhaps the
‘Gates’ and ‘Gate-keepers’ to which Yeats goes on to refer correspond
to the archetypes themselves, which often assume in human experi-
ence a personified form: shadow, animus, anima, and so forth. Jung
argued that the conscious mind must confront them as part of the
process of achieving wholeness, and Yeats describes something sim-
ilar in this passage: ‘through their dramatic power they bring our
souls to crisis’. . . . The ‘chosen man’ is brought ‘to the greatest obsta-
cle he may confront without despair’. Yeats had already explored this
aspect of the process in ‘Ego Dominus Tuus’. In The Trembling of the
Veil Dante and Villon serve as his examples of the greatest artists,
those who have successfully undergone such a trial. In A Vision he
would place Dante at Phase 17, the phase at which Unity of Being
is most possible (CVA 75). In that volume he also speculated that
either he identified strongly with Villon, ‘in whom the human soul
for the first time stands alone before a death ever present to the
imagination, without help from a Church that is fading away’; or
alternatively that he ‘read into Villon’s suffering our modern con-
science which gathers intensity as we approach the end of an era’. In
the latter case, what seemed to Yeats ‘pitiless self-judgment may have
been but heroic gaiety’ (CVA 200-01). These men achieved what few
other writers have: ‘The two halves of their nature are so completely
joined that they seem to labour for their objects, and yet to desire
whatever happens, being at the same instant predestinate and free,
creation’s very self. We gaze at such men in awe, because we gaze not
at a work of art, but at the re-creation of the man through that art,
the birth of a new species of man’. In contemplation of them ‘the
7 See Phillip L. Marcus, Yeats and Artistic Power, 2nd ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2001), xviii-xix and xxvii, n. 9.

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174 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
hairs of our heads stand up, because that birth, that re-creation, is
from terror’, from what Maud Gonne had called ‘the terrible though
unseen effort’ of poetic creation.
In contrast to Dante and Villon Yeats places ‘great lesser writers
like Landor and like Keats’, in whose work ‘we are shown that Image
and that Mask as something set apart; Andromeda and her
Perseus–though not the sea-dragon’. . . . The distinction between
the two pairs of writers, Yeats goes on to make clear, is that unlike
Dante and Villon, Landor and Keats ‘lacked their Vision of Evil’.
Had the latter possessed that vision, it would have been represented
by the ‘sea-dragon’. The focus upon the creative process as involving
the joining of consciousness with archetypal unconscious contents,
producing ‘a new species of man’ at whom we ‘gaze . . . in awe’, the
necessity of the Vision of Evil, and the specific reference to the story
of Perseus and Andromeda all anticipate ‘Her Triumph’ and suggest
that the poem might be read as a sort of allegory of Yeats’s prose
speculations (Au 273; CW3 217).
The early draft of the poem in which the word ‘evil’ resounds has
a new meaning in this light. In it the speaker was made to say ‘O I
am evil’; but also ‘I was most evil’ and finally ‘I am not evil now’.
Whatever associations the word might have had with a private biog-
raphical event and/or the Christian values of Saint George (and
Dante, perhaps), in terms of the Perseus and Andromeda story, the
draft seems to show Yeats working towards the realization that the
proper vehicle for ‘evil’ would be not Andromeda but the dragon.
The necessity of this identification from a Jungian point of view, and
the psychological implications of prose passage and poem alike, are
illuminated by Erich Neumann’s On the Origins and History of
Consciousness, a study that takes its starting point from and develops
fully the perspective of Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious, a transla-
tion published in 1916 of his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido
(1912). Jung’s study, written at a point when he was beginning to
find Freud’s ‘conceptual framework . . . unendurably narrow’,8 was a
transitional work, survivals of that Freudian conceptual framework
mixed with elements of what would become Jung’s own distinctive
position, a ‘mythopsychology’ showing how ‘the fantasy life of the
individual is connected with mythological material’ and enabling

8 C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull (1967; rpt.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), xxiii; hereafter abbreviated as ST and
cited parenthetically in the text.

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 175
him ‘to get closer to the archetypal structural elements of the psy-
che’.9 What might seem individual memories might really be ‘“phy-
logenetic” reminiscences’, a major step from Freud’s largely personal
unconscious towards the concept of the collective unconscious.10
Jung was later to write that one of his main purposes in writing the
book ‘was to free medical psychology from the subjective and per-
sonalistic bias that characterized its outlook at that time, and to
make it possible to understand the unconscious as an objective and
collective psyche’.11 There is reason to think that at some point Yeats
actually read at least part of this book, for in the Introduction (first
published in 1932) to Fighting the Waves he says ‘a German psycho-
analyst has traced the ‘mother complex’ back to our mother the sea’
(VPl 571), which seems to refer to the following passage from
Psychology of the Unconscious:
The sound resemblance of mar, mere with meer=sea and Latin mare=sea is
remarkable, although etymologically accidental. Might it refer back to “the
great primitive idea of the mother” who, in the first place, meant to us our
individual world and afterwards became the symbol of all worlds? Goethe
said of the mothers, “They are encircled by images of all creatures.” The
Christians, too, could not refrain from reuniting their mother of God with
water. “Ave Maris stella” is the beginning of a hymn to Mary. Then again
it is the horses of Neptune which symbolize the waves of the sea….12

9 Gerhard Wehr, Jung: A Biography, trans. David M. Weeks (German edition

1985; New York: Shambala Publications, 1987), 127-28.
10 See also The Freud-Jung Letters, ed. William McGuire, trans. Ralph
Manheim and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 450:
‘The so-called “early memories of childhood” are not individual memories at all but
phylogenetic ones’; and Wehr, 144: ‘From here it was no longer a great step from
Freud’s personal unconscious to the “collective unconscious”’.
11 ST xxiv. The conflict between Freud and Jung involved many other issues, of
course; see C. G. Jung, ‘Freud and Jung: Contrasts’ in Freud and Psychoanalysis, trans.
R. F. C. Hull (1961; rpt. with corrections 1970), 333-40; C. G. Jung, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, revised ed.
(New York: Putnam Books, 1973), 146-69; George B. Hogenson, Jung’s Struggle
with Freud, revised ed. (Wilmette, Illinois: Chiron Publications, 1994), 36-42 et
passim; Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-
Wesley, 1991), 36-52; Paul Roazen, Freud and His Followers (1975; rpt. New York:
Da Capo Press, 1992), 224-96; Deirdre Bair, Jung (Boston: Little Brown, 2003),
especially 201-40; and Wehr, 127-60.
12 C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (1916; rpt.
New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1949), 283.

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176 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
If Yeats did see this passage at the time of writing the Introduction,
if not before, he might have been attracted by the resonance of the
final sentence quoted above with the title of his own rewritten play;
in and case, he seems to have recognized the essential procedure
adopted by Jung in the book, the movement from the personal to the
archetypal.13 For the purposes of understanding ‘Her Triumph’,
however, establishing that Yeats had any direct knowledge of Jung’s
work at the time he wrote his poem is unnecessary: either Jung’s own
theory of the collective unconscious or the two men’s equally great
indebtedness to the tradition of ‘the perennial philosophy’ would be
sufficient to explain the similarities.
Because The Psychology of the Unconscious was written during the
period when Jung’s perspective was undergoing a major redefinition,
he came to feel that it was ‘in urgent need of revision’ (ST xxiii), and
late in his life published a revised version as Symbols of
Transformation (1952), but even then he felt too limited by the orig-
inal study to bring it totally into line with his mature thought. Thus
he welcomed The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954) as the
realization with ‘outstanding success’ of what he himself had
attempted to do, and as a further advance: ‘he has succeeded in con-
structing a unique history of the evolution of consciousness and at
the same time in representing the body of myths as the phenomenol-
ogy of this same evolution’.14 Neumann, in turn, saw his own study
as ‘an application of the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung, even
where we endeavor to amplify this psychology, and even though we
may speculatively overstep its boundaries’ (xv). Jung had in fact
anticipated Neumann’s core idea as early as 1909, when he had writ-
ten to Freud ‘I feel more and more that a thorough understanding of
the psyche (if possible at all) will only come through history or its
help. Just as an understanding of anatomy and ontogenesis is possi-
ble only on the basis of phylogenesis and comparative anatomy. For

13 See James M. Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy–
Yeats and Jung (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 6; Olney is certain
that Yeats was referring to Jung but also that ‘he only half understood what he was
talking about and that [his] information came from what someone told him rather
than from a reading of Jung’. My own view is that Yeats’s comments in the passage
in question do show a clear understanding of Jung’s approach.
14 Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, with a Foreword by
C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull (originally published in German in 1949; English
edition 1954; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), xiv; hereafter abbre-
viated as OHC and cited parenthetically in the text.

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 177
this reason antiquity now appears to me in a new and significant
light. What we now find in the individual psyche–in compressed,
stunted, or one-sidedly differentiated form–may be seen spread out
in all its fullness in times past. Happy the man who can read these
signs!’15 There is no question, of course, of Yeats having been famil-
iar with Neumann’s book, but it is useful for understanding the psy-
chological dimension of ‘Her Triumph’ precisely because it draws the
crucial aspects of Jung’s emerging thought into a ‘unified whole’
(OHC xiii), and because one of its ‘amplifications’ involves an inter-
pretation of the Perseus and Andromeda story, which Jung had not
discussed.
The core of Neumann’s argument is that ‘in the course of its
development, the individual ego consciousness has to pass through
the same archetypal stages which determined the evolution of con-
sciousness in the life of humanity. The individual has in his own life
to follow the road that humanity has trod before him, leaving traces
of its journey in the archetypal sequence of the mythological images’
examined in his study (OHC xvi). Mythology, in other words, is
composed of projections of the unconscious, so that by interpreting
the one we can come to understand the other (OHC 262-63 et pas-
sim). More specifically, Neumann claims, ‘[t]he evolution of con-
sciousness as a form of creative evolution is the peculiar achievement
of Western man. Creative evolution of ego consciousness means
that, through a continuous process stretching over thousands of
years, the conscious system has absorbed more and more uncon-
scious contents and progressively extended its frontiers’ (OHC xviii).
He discerns three ‘mythological stages in the evolution of conscious-
ness’: ‘the Creation Myth’, the Hero Myth’, and ‘the Transformation
Myth’ (OHC 5), and all of these, but especially the second and third,
are important for understanding Yeats’s poem. The emergence of
consciousness from the primal unconscious appears in mythology as
the hero’s fight with the symbols of that archetypal androgynous pri-
mal state, the slaying of the transpersonal (this in contradistinction
to Freud) Father and the Terrible Mother (again, not Woody Allen’s
‘castrating Zionist’ but the negative transpersonal archetype–‘the
obsolete psychic stage which threatens to swallow us up again’ (OHC
182). Projected into mythological images, ‘[t]he three basic elements
of the hero myth were the hero, the dragon, and the treasure’ (OHC

15 The Freud-Jung Letters, 269.

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178 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
191); the last frequently takes the form of a captive female, corre-
sponding in Jungian terms to the anima or unconscious female side
of the male psyche. Through the hero’s slaying of the dragon, this
‘feminine image extricates itself from the grip of the Terrible
Mother, a process known in analytical psychology as the crystalliza-
tion of the anima from the mother archetype’.16 The ‘task of the
hero is to free, through her, the living relation to the ‘you’, to the
world at large’ (OHC 202). Contact with the anima figure ‘is the
source of all fruitfulness’, the ‘world of art, of epic deeds, poesy, and
song . . . revolves round the liberated captive’ (OHC 203). In other
words, the myth presents allegorically not only the essential Jungian
process of individuation, of full self-realization and wholeness, but
also the creative process lying behind a work of art. As a specific
illustration of this argument, Neumann chooses the story of Perseus
‘as a paradigm of the hero myth’ (OHC 213): ‘the sequence so typical
of the hero myth is recapitulated in the story of Perseus. The killing
of the transpersonal mother and father (the Medusa and the sea
monster) precedes the rescue of the captive, Andromeda’ (OHC 216).
By the backward light of Neumann’s argument we can see that in
‘Her Triumph’ Yeats was embodying the story of his own self-real-
ization and of the process whereby the poem itself was created. ‘I did
the dragon’s will until you came’, for example, personifies the anima
recalling ‘her’ captive state before her rescue by the hero and her
‘crystallization’ from the mother archetype. The next several lines
elaborate ‘doing the dragon’s will’ at a superficial level, but much of
the language used has a deeper significance as well. ‘[W]ill’ and ‘fan-
cied’ are terms from a faculty psychology outmoded by the work of
Freud and Jung. The manuscript versions had featured in this con-
text the word ‘thought’: ‘I was all evil thought until you came’, ‘My
thoughts were full of evil’, ‘I thought the evil things unspeak in MS
NLI 13589 (29), 1v; and ‘I thought the shamefulest things imagin-

16 Jung offered an early version of this paradigm in a lecture given in 1916 and
available in English translation in 1917: ‘It is precisely the strongest and best among
men, the heroes, who give way to their regressive longing and purposely expose
themselves to the danger of being devoured by the monster of the maternal abyss.
But if a man is a hero, he is a hero because, in the final reckoning, he did not let the
monster devour him, but subdued it, not once but many times. Victory over the col-
lective psyche alone yields the true value–the capture of the hoard, the invincible
weapon, the magic talisman, or whatever it be that the myth deems most desirable’.
See Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull (1966; rpt.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 287.

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 179
abel’ and ‘Thought love the better were it casual’ (MS NLI 13,592
(5), 2v (WS 122-23, 120-21). The word ‘thought’ resonates with
many other Yeats poems, including ‘Nineteen Hundred and
Nineteen’, in which it appears repeatedly and ironically; and, later,
‘Meru’ (But man’s life is thought . . .’) and ‘The Gyres’ (‘Things
thought too long can be no longer thought’). In all these instances
it is associated with the end of an historical cycle. Even more rele-
vant is ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’, which opens with a
description of a painting of Saint George and the Dragon and
includes the punning line ‘The half-dead dragon was her thought’.
This poem also anticipates ‘Her Triumph’ more generally in its con-
sideration of male / female issues and in the use of a female speaker
(there balanced by a male one). None of the ‘thought’ references sur-
vived into the final text, but the underlying concept remains in the
historical dimension of the finished poem.
Other words in lines 2-6 that have a deeper significance include
‘heavenly’ and ‘fall’ (linked with ‘temptation’ in the earliest draft),
which have traditional religious associations but also correspond to
the psychological concept of primal unity, ‘the perfect beginning
because the opposites have not yet flown apart’ (OHC 8), represent-
ed in Neumann’s schema by ‘the circular snake, the primal dragon of
the beginning that bites its own tail, the self-begetting Uroboros’
(‘The coils of the great dragon had no end’ in Yeats’s drafts [WS 122-
23]) and the ‘fall into division’ at which point ‘the ego begins to
emerge from its identity with the uroboros, . . . being born and
descending into the lower world of reality, full of dangers and dis-
comforts (OHC 39) and the archetypal Feminine and Masculine have
been differentiated.17 Finally, ‘deeds’ and ‘gave the moment wings’
anticipate Perseus with the winged shoes of Hermes: ‘wing heeled
Persius’ [sic] in NLI 13,592 (5), 2v (WS 122-23).
The turning point of the poem at all levels comes in line seven,
‘And then you stood among the dragon-rings’, which in terms of
depth psychology would correspond to the moment when the con-
scious element of the psyche confronts and overcomes the threat of
powerful unconscious forces. The involvement of Perseus in the
dragon’s coils is unusual in iconographic versions of the story (found
among Yeats’s possible visual sources only in Burne-Jones’s ‘The
Doom Fulfilled’) and suggests the close bond and also the tension
17 Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, 2nd ed., trans. Ralph Manheim (1963;
rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 21. See also 12.

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180 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
between conscious and unconscious dimensions. In terms of the cre-
ative process, this is the moment of the ‘crisis that joins the buried
self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind’, as Yeats had put
it in The Trembling of the Veil. It includes the sea-dragon and there-
fore the ‘Vision of Evil’ that he felt distinguished the greatest artists.
‘[M]astered’ in line eight is also significant in psychological terms,
for as Neumann makes clear the hero figure’s triumph has a ‘patriar-
chal’ dimension in that the dominance of the matriarchal has been
ended. But the new state is not a substitution of one dominance for
another; it corresponds historically to a period before ‘the female is
subjugated’ (OHC 199), and the goal is a balance of male and female
elements.18
The final two lines of ‘Her Triumph’, ‘And now we stare aston-
ished at the sea, | And a miraculous strange bird shrieks at us’, appar-
ently came comparatively easily to Yeats, for along with ‘And broke
the chain and set my ankles free’ they were the first lines of the poem
to reach final form (WS 122-23). Unquestionably they correspond to
the final stage in Neumann’s schema, the Transformation.
Neumann relates this moment to the anthropological researches of
Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough:

Every culture hero has achieved a synthesis between consciousness and the
creative unconscious. He has found within himself the fruitful center, the
point of renewal and rebirth which, in the New Year fertility festival, is
identified with the creative divinity, and upon which the continued exis-
tence of the world depends (OHC 212).

The stress here on imaginative fertility and creativity continues

throughout Neumann’s analysis of the Perseus and Andromeda
story: ‘[i]t is, however, impossible to find the treasure unless the hero
has first found and redeemed his own soul’. This statement corre-
sponds precisely to the manuscript line ‘You have redeemed my soul’
(NLI 13,592 (5), 2v WS 122-23]). ‘The inner receptive side is, on the
subjective level, the rescued captive, . . . who is at once man’s inspi-

18 The goal, as Neumann makes clear in his companion study The Great Mother,
is a balance of male and female elements: ‘the peril of present-day mankind springs
in large part from the one-sidedly patriarchal development of the male intellectual
consciousness, which is no longer held in balance by the matriarchal world of the
psyche. In this sense the exposition of the archetypal-psychical world of the
Feminine that we have attempted in our work is also a contribution to a future ther-
apy of culture’ (xlii-xliii).

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 181
ration, his beloved and mother, the enchantress and prophetess. . . .
[T]he fruitfulness of the hero who gains the captive is a human and
cultural fruitfulness. From the union of the hero’s ego with the cre-
ative side of the soul, when he “knows” and realizes both the world
and the anima, there is begotten the true birth, the synthesis of both’
(OHC 213-14).
The subjective ‘we’ and objective ‘us’ of Yeats’s final lines are cru-
cial, as they point to the union and balanced relationship of the male
and female elements of the psyche, the ‘hierosgamos’ or sacred mar-
riage of occult tradition. As Neumann puts it, ‘[t]he symbolic mar-
riage of ego-hero and anima, as well as being the precondition of fer-
tility, offers a firm foundation on which the personality can stand
and fight the dragon, whether this be the dragon of the world or of
the unconscious.’ Remarkably, Yeats’s drafts contain the same
phrase: ‘The dragon of the world’ (NLI 13,592 (5), 2v [WS 122-23]).
Neumann continues, ‘[h]ero and princess, ego and anima, man and
woman pair off and form the personal center which, modeled on the
First Parents and yet opposed to them, constitutes the proper sphere
of action. In this marriage, which in the oldest mythologies was con-
summated at the New Year festival immediately after the defeat of
the dragon, the hero is the embodiment of the “heaven” and father
archetype, just as the fruitful side of the mother archetype is embod-
ied in the figure of the rescued virgin’ (OHC 213). In To the
Lighthouse, written largely in the same year as ‘Her Triumph’,19
Virginia Woolf was to depict this process symbolically in the char-
acters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe (the artist in whose
psyche the male and female elements must fuse); and in A Room of
One’s Own (1929) she would assert directly that ‘the androgynous
mind’ (figured as a married couple) was essential to the creative
process.
The lovers in Yeats’s poem ‘stare astonished at the sea’ not because
they have never seen it but because their new way of seeing trans-
forms it, they inhabit ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. And because
they, too, have been transformed, they represent ‘a new species of
man’. As Yeats had put it in The Trembling of the Veil, ‘we gaze at
such men in awe;… and it may even seem that the hairs of our heads
stand up, because that birth, that recreation, is from terror’ . . . . Thus
the ‘miraculous strange bird’ (which David Clark has suggested
19 Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2005),
166.

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182 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
might derive in part from a Blakean passage identifying it as an
‘illustration of the Moment of Inspiration, as seen by the Poet’)
‘shrieks’ at them.20 And as ‘creation’s very self ’, they constitute both
the triumphant conclusion of ‘Her Triumph’ and the symbols of its
genesis as well as a celebration of the creative highpoint that 1926
represented for its author.
The romantic aspect of this moment in the poem naturally leads
to speculations about some contemporary romantic involvement in
Yeats’s own life, speculations that up to now at least have proven
fruitless. Perhaps, however, in the final analysis the autobiographi-
cal core of ‘Her Triumph’ was the ‘sacred marriage’ of the poet and
his wife. After nine years of marriage and two children, the superfi-
cial romance of their relationship had no doubt faded; but at a deep-
er level those same years had only intensified the bond. George
Yeats, after all, had been since their marriage Yeats’s own direct link
to the unconscious, via the automatic script and other methods, had
served as the conduit through which that ‘knowledge or power ha[d]
come into his mind from beyond his mind’. The most extended fruit
of their collaboration, the first version of A Vision, had been pub-
lished shortly before ‘Her Triumph’. In that volume itself Yeats had
celebrated their collaboration and acknowledged Mrs. Yeats’s crucial
role elliptically by including the poem ‘The Gift of Harun Al-
Rashid’. The spirits themselves had said ‘we have come to give you
metaphors for poetry’ (AVB 8), and, as Helen Vendler long ago
demonstrated, A Vision itself can be read as an account of the creative
process.21 In this context, ‘Her Triumph’ highlights both the success
of the Instructors’ mission as manifested in Yeats’s creative abun-
dance in 1926 (something despaired of not long before in ‘The
Tower’) and the union of husband and wife, male and female, sub-
jective and objective, conscious and unconscious, ‘the hero’s ego and
the creative side of the soul’ through which it came about.
In Jungian theory it is only when a man has accomplished the
freeing of his anima that he can ‘achieve his first true capacity for
relatedness to women’.22 What impact if any the process had upon
Yeats’s own relationships can never certainly be known. It may be
20 Clark, Yeats at Songs and Choruses, 98.
21 Helen Hennessy Vendler, Yeats’s ‘Vision’ and the Later Plays (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1963).
22 Joseph Henderson, ‘Ancient Myths and Modern Man’, in Man and His
Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung (1964; rpt. New York: Dell, 1968), 117.

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 183
said with greater confidence that his poem celebrating that act
extends the treatment of the Perseus and Andromeda story in a way
more positive that was typical among Yeats’s Victorian predecessors.
The contemporary scholar Elizabeth Cullingford, imagining ‘“alter-
natives beyond appropriation”–instances, however rare, when [the
male writer] has let femaleness transform, redefine, his textual
erotics, allowed himself to be read through femininity and femaleness’,
has speculated that Yeats in ‘Her Triumph’ has provided such an
alternative, though she is still disturbed that he ‘strips his modern
woman of her clothing and her power in the love game and restores
her, naked and grateful, to her rock by the sea’.23 Perhaps, as
Cullingford suggests, ‘the nature of the myth’ itself makes such reser-
vations inevitable. A comparison of Yeats’s poem with a contempo-
rary painting by a female artist, the ‘Andromeda’ (1927-28) of Tamara
de Lempicka, supports such a supposition.24 In this modernist work
there is no ocean; and the rock to which traditionally the heroine has
been bound has been metamorphosed into an urban space with
Cubist skyscrapers. Moreover, there is no Perseus. Andromeda her-
self, placed to the very front of the picture plane and nearly filling the
large canvas, is an imposing figure. In Jungian terms she would
make a formidable personification of the anima. But the painting
remains ambiguous: does Andromeda’s enigmatic expression suggest
a search for the absent rescuer? Or is his absence the point? She
looks powerful enough to break the binding chains herself–no res-
cuer needed. Was the artist exploiting the erotic dimension of
Andromeda’s plight, exposing her to ‘the male gaze’, or celebrating
post-War female power and independence?
Neumann’s paradigm also has an historical dimension, and this,
too, is relevant to the interpretation of Yeats’s poem. ‘[T]hese things
are true also of nations’, Yeats had suggested at the end of the passage
in The Trembling of the Veil (CW 218). At this level, ‘the hostile drag-
on is the old order’ (OHC 182), and the hero is the avatar of a new era
and is ‘destined to bring that new order into being and destroy the
old’ (OHC 175). His task is to ‘awaken the sleeping images of the

23 Gender and History, 214. Elsewhere in her discussion of the poem Cullingford
notes that ‘[p]sychoanalytic critics… celebrate literary cross-dressing… and Jung
exhorts men to discover and liberate the anima’ (203), but she does not apply that
approach herself.
24 The painting is reproduced in Gilles Néret, Tamara de Lempicka 1898-1980
(Köln: Benedikt Taschen, 1993), 27.

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184 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
future which can and must come forth from the night, in order to give
the world a new and better face’ (OHC 174). Of course Yeats’s fasci-
nation with historical cycles and points of apocalyptic historical
transformation goes back to the very early years of his career, to such
seminal texts as The Wanderings of Oisin and ‘The Secret Rose’. But
the researches that he and Mrs. Yeats had been conducting since 1917
had culminated in the new synthesis of the ‘Dove or Swan’ section of
A Vision (1925/1926). Both international events since the beginning
of World War I and the Russian Revolution and Yeats’s experiences
as a Senator in post-Revolutionary Ireland offered him abundant new
evidence that the end of an historical cycle was approaching, and he
expected that times were destined to grow still darker before the dawn
of any new era. His visions of the future were often bleak, ‘Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen’ being a case in point. ‘Her Triumph’, how-
ever, symbolically anticipates the moment of the new era’s arrival in
more positive terms. Morris’s poem had connected the story of
Perseus and Andromeda with ‘wheeling birds’ and in Yeats’s drafts the
word ‘thought’ hinted at the moment of cycle end. In the final ver-
sion, the dragon’s ‘rings’ (not typically stressed in the iconographic
tradition before Yeats) identify it with the cyclical process as well as
the old order, and the transformed lovers’ vision in the final lines does
‘give the world a new and better face’.
Only implied in this poem but clearly discernible in other
Yeatsian contexts is the artist’s role in the process of historical trans-
formation. In another episode of the Perseus legend, the winged
horse Pegasus springs from the decapitated trunk of the Medusa. In
Neumann’s view, ‘the winged horse strikes the fountain of poesy
from the earth . . . . [T]his aspect of the Pegasus myth lies at the root
of all creativity’ (OHC 217-19). His statement that the hero’s task is
to ‘awaken the sleeping images of the future which can and must
come forth from the night’ identifies the hero with the individuated
artist, in touch with his unconscious, with his anima–one of whose
roles is ‘prophetess’ (OHC 214). More than merely celebrating the
advent of a new era, the visionary artist may also be responsible, at
least in part, for bringing it about or determining its essential nature.
Neumann does not elaborate on the subject, but his position can
be understood more fully by reference to Jung, whose views about lit-
erature were generally congruent with Yeats’s own as well. One of
Jung’s essays on Eastern religion, for example, contains passages very
similar to the crucial section of The Trembling of the Veil, with the

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 185
substitution of Goethe and Nietzsche for Dante and Villon: ‘[i]t is
only the tragedies of Goethe’s Faust and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
which mark the first glimmering of a break-through of total experi-
ence in our Western hemisphere’–they understood that the process
of ‘daemonic rebirth’ is beset with ‘unknown terrors’. Zarathustra,
Jung claimed, ‘is no longer philosophy at all: it is a dramatic process
of transformation which has completely swallowed up the intellect.
It is no longer concerned with thought’,–that word so pregnant
with implications for Yeats in the manuscripts of ‘Her Triumph’ and
elsewhere–but, in the highest sense, with the thinker of the
thought…. A new man, a completely transformed man, is to appear
on the scene, one who has broken the shell of the old and who not
only looks upon a new heaven and a new earth, but has created
them’.25 Particularly relevant are Jung’s two essays about the creative
process, ‘On the Relationship of Analytical Psychology to Poetry’
(1922) and ‘Psychology and Literature’ (1930), essays from the same
decade as the composition of ‘Her Triumph’. In them Jung suggests
that the creative process begins with ‘the unconscious activation of
an archetypal image’, one of those images that ‘give form to count-
less typical experiences of our ancestors, . . . the psychic residua of
innumerable experiences of the same type’.26 These are Neumann’s
‘sleeping images of the future which can and must come forth from
the night’. At the moment when the archetype has been activated,
‘we suddenly feel an extraordinary sense of release, as though trans-
ported, or caught up by an overwhelming power’ (the moment, as
Yeats put it in The Trembling of the Veil, when ‘some knowledge or
power has come into his mind from beyond his mind’); and the
impact of the archetype ‘stirs us because it summons up a voice that
is stronger than our own’. This power is in turn transmitted by the
artist, who ‘enthrals and overpowers’ his audience (SMAL 82).
At such moments, the artist undergoes a transformation. ‘On the
one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other
he is an impersonal creative process. . . . As a human being he may
have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man”

25 Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 547-55.
26 The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1966), 81-82; hereafter abbreviated SMAL and cited
parenthetically in the text. I have discussed this material in a different context in
Yeats and Artistic Power, xvi-xxiii.

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186 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
in a higher sense–he is “collective man”, a vehicle and moulder of
the unconscious psychic life of mankind’ (SMAL 101). (Again, the
parallel with Yeats’s ‘new species of man’ is a close one). In order to
‘give suitable expression’ to primordial experience, such a writer will
naturally ‘turn to mythological figures’ (SMAL 96). Among the
examples Jung offers, several are suggestive of Yeats: ‘Wagner needs
the whole corpus of Nordic myth . . . ; Nietzsche resorts to the hier-
atic style of the bard and legendary seer; Blake presses into his serv-
ice the phantasmagoric world of India, the Old Testament, and the
Apocalypse’ . . . (SMAL 97). The potent unconscious material with
the visionary artist works has a tendency to overpower his conscious
artistic intentions, but still such an artist does elaborate and shape
the archetypal image into the finished work (SMAL 82). By giving
the archetype shape, the artist ‘translates it into the language of the
present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the
deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it
is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the
forms in which the age is most lacking’ (SMAL 82). This claim
reflects Jung’s central tenet of the compensatory relationship of the
unconscious to the conscious mind: ‘the one-sidedness of the indi-
vidual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the uncon-
scious’; and similarly, ‘art represents a process of self-regulation in the
life of nations and epochs’ (SMAL 83). The artist ‘reaches back to the
primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compen-
sate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present, . . . seizes on
this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings
it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it
can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to
their powers’ (SMAL 83).
For Yeats, the turn of the century had provided a vivid illustration
of the compensatory process: ‘[t]he close of the last century was full
of a strange desire to get out of form to get to some kind of disem-
bodied beauty and now it seems to me the contrary impulse has
come. I feel about me and in me an impulse to create form, to carry
the realization of beauty as far as possible’ (CL3 369). The phrase
‘about me and in me’ acknowledges the historical and cultural as well
as the personal reversal. Perhaps the most famous of his poetic
embodiments of the concept of compensation would be ‘The Second
Coming’, in which the operative word is ‘surely’–that is, the almost
total one-sidedness of the present moment made it certain that a

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 187
compensatory counter-dispensation was about to begin; the desert
birds that ‘reel’ about the rough beast recall the ‘wheeling birds’ of
Morris’s poem. Even the poem’s grimness has its parallel in Jung,
who saw the process as occurring ‘whether this blind collective need
results in good or evil, in the salvation of an epoch or its destruction’
(SMAL 98). More germane to ‘Her Triumph’ is the little lyric ‘The
Realists’, published in 1912:

Hope that you may understand!

What can books of men that wive
In a dragon-guarded land,
Paintings of the dolphin-drawn
Sea-nymphs in their pearly wagons
Do, but awake a hope to live
That had gone
With the dragons? (VP 309)

Yeats’s brilliant use of syntax and word placement, enjambment and

caesura points up the most important word in the poem, ‘Do’. To a
realist, art devoted to heroic and romantic visions of experience
seems remote from contemporary life, irrelevant. From Yeats’s very
different perspective, however, books (such as Morris’s) of men that
wive in a dragon-guarded land were important precisely because they
were at odds with contemporary artistic and social values; and the
artists who produced them would thereby be providing those sleep-
ing images of the future that would dominate in the era to come. In
‘Her Triumph’ Yeats was to attempt precisely that.
An index of the importance of ‘Her Triumph’ in Yeats’s career,
and of its relation to the compensatory process and Yeats’s own aes-
thetic of artistic power, emerges when it is compared with a poem he
wrote decades before, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897). In
many ways that lyric offers a remarkable anticipation of the later
poem. It had a personal level involving Yeats’s renewed romantic
commitment to Maud Gonne following his affair with Olivia
Shakespear;27 and a political level involving his ongoing commit-
ment to the national idea as embodied in a female figure, the speir-
bean of the aisling tradition, his own future Cathleen ni Houlihan;

27 This transition is reflected in ‘Aedh Laments the Loss of Love’, which Allen
R. Grossman relates to another of Burne-Jones’s paintings in the Perseus Series,
‘The Baleful Head’; see his Poetic Knowledge in the Early Yeats: A Study of ‘The Wind
among the Reeds’ (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 157.

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188 W. B. Yeats and the Creative Process
but the poem also had a psychological dimension closely congruent
with the theories Jung would formulate after his break with Freud.
The use of the Irish myth in the poem as vehicle for personal con-
cerns reflects Yeats’s assertion that ‘emotions which seem vague or
extravagant when expressed under the influence of modern literature,
cease to be vague and extravagant when associated with ancient legend
and mythology’ (UP1 423). Jung would later posit that ‘myths are first
and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul’,
projections into the conscious realm of unconscious psychological
processes, so the narrative and imagery of Yeats’s poem could also serve
as vehicles for embodying an experience involving individuation.28 In
a note, Yeats identified Aengus as the ‘god of youth, beauty, and
poetry’, highlighting also the aesthetic dimension of the poem (VP
794). If for Freud, dreams were generally symbolic expressions of
repressed contents, Jung came to believe that ‘big dreams’ constitute
coded messages from the unconscious designed to give direction to the
dreamer’s future development. The poem has a dreamlike atmosphere
and its action takes place at night, ending, like a dream, with the
‘brightening air’ of dawn. The ‘fire’ in Aengus’s head represents an
impulse from the unconscious that precipitates his encounter with the
buried parts of his psyche and thus propels him towards self-
realization. (‘The subconscious is always there’, Yeats would later say,
‘ready to leap out’.) His mage’s wand becomes a fishing rod because as
Jung was later to argue ‘[f ]ishing is an intuitive attempt to catch
unconscious contents’. Blowing his fire aflame, Aengus is like the
alchemists in whose materials and processes Jung would detect an alle-
gory of the individuation process.29 The ‘glimmering girl’ corresponds
to the anima. She calls Aengus by his name because she holds the key
to his true identity. The imagery of the poem is organized around a
pattern of red and white, gold and silver images because, as Jung would
write in an analysis of a young woman’s dream, ‘[s]ilver and gold, in
alchemical language, signify feminine and masculine, the hermaphro-
dite aspect of the fish, indicating that it is a complexio oppositorum.30
Sun and moon would have the same symbolic meaning. The path to
individuation would not be a straight one, but rather would go ‘in spi-

28 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull
(1968; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 6.
29 The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 133; see also VSR 128-29.
30 Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull
(1968; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 151-53.

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 YEATS ANNUAL 18 189
rals’, and even the most determined and courageous of questers might
never reach the goal. Significantly, Jung would represent the sought-
after state as ‘the union of opposites in the archetypal form of the
hierosgamos or “chymical wedding”. . . [in which] the supreme oppo-
sites, male and female . . . are melted into a unity purified of all
opposition and therefore incorruptable’.31 (Neumann’s use of this
‘sacred marriage’ image no doubt derived from Jung.) Thus the pattern
of opposed images has both aesthetic and psychological aspects, which
merge in the creative process behind the poem itself.
In both ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ and ‘Her Triumph’ Yeats
used mythic stories as vehicles for, because projections of, psycholog-
ical processes involving the encounter with the anima, individuation
and the creative process. But the difference between the future
prospect of ‘I will find out where she has gone’ and the present reality
of ‘And now we stare astonished at the sea’ points to significant con-
trasts. In the earlier poem ‘I’ and ‘she’ remain separate, their union yet
to come: in ‘Her Triumph’ that union has been achieved. The later
poem both offers an heroic figure as one of the images that might
inspire and shape a future cycle and reflects the author’s confidence in
the power of his art. Of course the coming years, with their losses, dis-
appointments, and prospects of renewed world cataclysm, would
frequently shake that faith; but it persisted to the end of his life,
embodied even in the noble and defiant final works, ‘The Black
Tower’ and The Death of Cuchulain: ‘Who thought Cuchulain till it
seemed | He stood where they had stood?’32
31 Psychology and Alchemy, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1968), 28, 37.
32 In 1931, Yeats referred to The Secret of the Golden Flower, an occult Chinese
philosophical treatise, published that year in English with a commentary by Jung (L
788). He called the book ‘invaluable’. If he read Jung’s commentary he would have
much material relevant to ‘Her Triumph’, including a discussion of the visionary
moment that ‘brings about a solution of psychic complications and frees the inner
personality from emotional and intellectual entanglements, thus creating a unity of
being which is universally felt as “liberation”. Such a symbolic unity cannot be
obtained by the conscious will because consciousness is always partisan. Its oppo-
nent is the collective unconscious, which does not understand the language of the
conscious mind. Therefore it is necessary to have the magic of the symbol which
contains those primitive analogies that speak to the unconscious. The unconscious
can be reached and expressed only by symbols, and for this reason the process of
individuation can never do without the symbol. The symbol is the primitive expo-
nent of the unconscious, but at the same time an idea that corresponds to the high-
est intuitions of the conscious mind’; and ‘As we know, the poets have often sung
the anima’s praises’; Alchemical Studies, trans. R. F. C. Hull (1967; rpt. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983), 28, 40.

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