Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli” as Theatrum Mundi

In his essay, “Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ as Theatrum Mundi,” Daniel T. O’Hara collaborates with the poet Yeats in justifying the theatre as a means by which tragedy is “not . . . self-destructive” but “subsumed by the vision of [a] spiritual quest.” This is a theatre that “permits” us to “imagine anew the tragedy of death,” where, by the “equalization” or “compensations” of performance, “we return exactly the same.” Suffering and return, this arc of “gaiety transfiguring all that dread,” are prefigured in Yeats’s three smiling Chinese wisemen, looking down on “all the tragic scene.”