ABSTRACT
Nicholas Allen has noted that "as a child W. B. Yeats read Ecclesiastes and the Apocalypse". His grandfather, William Pollexfen, "kept a flask of water from the River Jordan" for the purpose of baptising the infant Yeats into the Church of Ireland. Once he actively rejected Christian religion, early in life, and realised that foundational elements of non-biblical Christian traditions were not so different from his own pagan religion, there is a sense that much that Yeats wrote was written in counterpoint to the Bible. In one way, as Foster has argued Yeats' sense of marginalisation as part of the decline of the Protestant Ascendency could well have directly or subliminally led him to tread this path. In the black tower, Yeats awaited a resurgent beast, the boar as avenging lover of the "One" Woman, as Christ is prophesied to return to put down the last "beast", who comes in the line of Constantine, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Mussolini and Hitler.
