-Totemic, animism and the primitive- nature and man are as one.
The primitive artist was the original modernist, upholding his tool or his medium (i.e. animals and pants) as his spiritual guide. Yeats adopts this spirituality, and uses similar symbolism, such as the moon, the sun, the tree, or the bird, but also his own tools such as in his book “The Tower” where he writes about his table in “My Table”, describing his working area and his own ‘tools’. I make the connection between the primitive animism and Yeats’ rhetoric or symbolism neither to emphasize Yeats as modernist poet nor to illustrate primitive art as being modernist, the significance of the connection between Yeats and the primitive craftsman is the unification of man to nature. Like the primitive, Yeats doesn’t see the human race to be superior to nature. Man is a part of nature and his existence moves equally and as one with his surroundings. Yeats enunciates how man and nature are affected by the same cause and effect relationships. For example in the poem ‘Death’, Yeats understands that in the end, in death, flesh is flesh.
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone--
Man has created death.
This poem is called “Death”, but really it best describes human vanity. The line ‘Man has created death’ searches for the significance of ‘death’. Why does the individual struggle to comprehend the meaning of his own mortality while the death of an animal weighs nothing on his mind? Death, the word and the associations with the after life, hell, and the grim reaper, are human inventions, a product of our self-obsession and attempt to make our lives seems more meaningful than they really are.

Yeats’ work is bound to nature. In this working relationship, Yeats’ understands the mechanics of the world through nature, in a cause and effect relationship. As I stated before in an earlier entry, (Observational Science) according to Descartes, the world is like a clock and as one gear turns so does the next. As he describes in the poem “Happy Townland” the world’s great annoyance and distress is due to the anomaly of the rotation of night and day. In other words, the ‘world’s bane’ is the universal ‘machine’.
The little fox he murmered,
Oh what of the world’s bane?
The sun was laughing sweetly,
The moon plucked at my rein;
The fox, is a totemic symbol, akin to the coyote, who represents cleverness, and slyness. The clever fox asks, ‘what about the trouble of the world’ and in response the sun says ‘I do what is natural for me to do… I rise when the night is over.’ in this part of the poem, Yeats describes a world that works under the principals of determinism. And determinism is the basis of all scientific inquiry.
- Cause and effect- modernism (causality) “When he thinks, he dreams, but when he acts, he thinks.”
(The Concept of Causality in the Physical and Social Sciences
Alexander Goldenweiser
American Sociological Review > Vol. 3, No. 5 (Oct., 1938), pp. 624-636)

-Creationism vs. determinism, a deterministic individual would be more inclined to appreciate the craft of something, and want to see it and show it. Where a creationist would be much more fascinated with the product of something, such as realism and perfection.