‘Cuchulain Comforted’

Abstract

Before ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, Yeats made five plays and one poem about Cuchulain. Their development and diversity demonstrate the modern poet’s ‘full-blooded and intensely personal use of myth’, and show correspondingly its ‘extraordinary imaginative resilience and flexibility’ (Kennelly 1994: 162). We see ‘a certain arbitrary discretion’ at work in the poem as Yeats devises the extraordinary theme of Cuchulain’s posthumous existence, just outside of his ‘national history or mythology’ (Shelley 1967: 204), to give it a Dantean form and setting:KeywordsLiteral SenseLiteral TruthEternal ReturnHoly GhostGood TailorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.