Phase Five

Yeats’s description of the phase from A Vision

Out of phase, and seeking antithetical emotion, he is sterile, passing from one insincere attitude to another, moving through a round of moral images torn from their context and so without meaning. He is so proud of each separation from experience that he becomes a sort of angry or smiling Punch with a lath between his wooden arms striking here and there. His Body of Fate is enforced, for he has reversed the condition of his phase and finds himself at conflict with a world which offers him nothing but temptation and affront. True to phase, he is the direct opposite of all this. Abstraction has indeed begun, but it comes to him as a portion of experience cut off from everything but itself and therefore fitted to be the object of reflection. He no longer touches, eats, drinks, thinks and feels Nature, but sees her as something from which he is separating himself, something that he may dominate, though only for a moment and by some fragmentary violence of sensation or of thought. Nature may seem half gone, but the laws of Nature have appeared and he can change her rhythms and her seasons by his knowledge. He lives in the moment but with an intensity Phases 2, 3 and 4 have never known, the Will approaches its climax, he is no longer like a man but half-awakened. He is a corrupter, disturber, wanderer, a founder of sects and peoples, and works with extravagant energy, and his reward is but to live in its glare.

Seen by a poet of the opposite phase, by a man hiding fading emotion under broken emphasis, he is Byron's Don Juan or his Giaour.

(AV B 112-13)