The Spectator's Pleasure: Yeats's Long-legged Fly

This paper proposes an analysis of Yeats's poem based on the idea that the self is a space wherein imagination's drives inscribe ideographic realities of desire. I will argue that the re-presentation of such inscriptions in the presence of signs and symbols masks the absence of objective reality. Given that the sign is a landmark of memory I will explore how remembering gives a pleasure that is anchored both in the reality effect of signs' presence and in the imaginary. Yeats's attempt to forge a space of myth and mystery in the wastelands of the Modern Age was made in the spirit that animated many writers of his time; one of the questions this essay is trying to answer is whether we may still find it enticing in our time of demystification and post-modern cynicism.