Yeats Symbol Analysis

In Betrayal, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats represents the heights of literary accomplishment, serving as a reminder of what Jerry and Robert have neglected in their pursuit of material comfort and professional success. Yeats, who won the Nobel Prize in 1923, was a ceaselessly inventive artist who continued to innovate his craft up to the end of his long career. Furthermore, he was highly politically engaged, playing a key part in the formation of Irish national identity. Such a figure naturally became the subject of long, idealistic letters Robert wrote to Jerry in their college years. In both his artistic integrity and his political engagement, Yeats stands as a counterpoint to the increasing apathy that comes to dominate Jerry and Robert’s compromised lives and careers, as they lower their artistic standards and use literature as a means of maintaining a comfortable bourgeois existence. When Robert discovers that Emma has betrayed him, he goes to an island alone to read Yeats at dawn, and he feels a rare moment of true happiness. Yet that happiness must be an escapist nostalgia for the idealistic days of his youth. When Jerry learns of his own “betrayal” (when Emma tells Robert about their affair), he turns to Yeats for consolation as well. For Jerry and Robert, then, over the course of their lives, Yeats and his work initially represent an ideal for which to strive, only to later serve as a bittersweet reminder of both those heady ideals of youth and the characters’ subsequent betrayal of those ideals.