Reveries, Visions and Obsessions: Tracking Mental Disease in Yeats’s "Rosa Alchemica"

W.B. Yeats was a scholar of Western and Eastern religions and esoteric doctrines; as such, he was profoundly interested in the intersection between medicine and alchemy. Throughout his writings, he constantly interwove the imagery and symbolism from these domains. For Yeats, alchemy was both a scientific-artistic pursuit and a means towards understanding the human psyche. In Yeats’s vision on medicine and alchemy as metaphors for healing and transformation, mental illness serves as a central motif and as the initial situation of that inner conflict to be healed, the boundary between reason and mysticism. In his early works, madness represents a recurring theme, as shown particularly by the short story Rosa Alchemica. This essay analyses the role of mental disease in this short piece of prose writing, manifested as a vision so powerful as to leave its protagonist shaken and bewildered, and highlights its connections with the alchemical process of transformation and progression.