Symbolism is the use of one object to represent or suggest another in literature. Yeats has been called the ‘chief representative’ of the Symbolist Movement in English literature. He uses innumerable symbols for different purposes in different contexts. Many of his symbols are very obscure and almost incomprehensible to the uninitiated readers because most of his symbols are derived from his occult studies.
Byzantium is used by Yeats as a symbol of unity and perfection. Yeats was drawn to Byzantium and its golden age because he felt that they represented a kind of unity and perfection such as the world had never known before or since. He saw in the Byzantine culture and unity of being, a state in which art and life interpenetrated each other.
ln his poem Sailing to Byzantium, ‘Byzantium’ becomes the symbol of a perfect world. The poet rejects the world of birth and death and decides to sail to Byzantium. He thinks he will be able to defeat Time by taking refuge in the world of art because art itself is timeless. He ignores the sensual music made by ‘that dying generation’ (mortal birds) in favour of the ethereal music produced by the Byzantine birds of hammered gold and gold enamelling. ‘Byzantium’ suggests a far-off, unfamiliar civilisation which is symbolical of the ideal, aesthetic existence he longs for.
The Second Coming is another famous poem illustrating Yeats's use of symbols. It words phrases flow partly from private doctrine, partly from Yeats's direct sense of the world about him, and partly from both these sources. For example, the ‘ceremony of innocence’ represents for W. B. Yeats one of the multiplications that made life valuable under the dying aristocratic social tradition. The expression ‘falcon and the falconer’ have both a symbolic and a doctrinal reference. A falcon is a hawk, and a hawk is symbolic of the active or intellectual mind; the falconer is perhaps the soul itself or its uniting principle.
The second part of the poem develops an image whose source is not Scriptures but Spiritus Mundi and which concerns something like an Egyptian Sphinx. The vast figure is so monstrous, so nightmarish, that the birds fly before it in terror. The monster has a pitiless, blank look as if it were the symbol of the inexorable, pitiless destiny. It symbolises mindless and merciless violence, and its birth is the death of the present civilisation. The ‘vast image’ Yeats draws from Spiritus Mundi is also a nightmare symbol of the coming time. This future would be hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical. The symbol of this future is presented as ‘a shape with a lion's body and the head of a man’ having pitiless, blank gaze. Thus the poem makes use of several symbols in a short space.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree is a famous lyric by Yeats. Innisfree is a little inland on the lake Lough Gill near the poet's home in Sligo. The Lake Isle of Innisfree is the symbol of a peaceful place. The poet has become weary of city life and so he yearns to go to the lonely isle of Innisfree where he would find peace and solitude in a place of the din and noise of the world.
To conclude, W. B. Yeats's use of symbols is complex and rich. Symbols, indeed, give dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies in Yeats's Poetry.
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