Ego Dominus Tuus

[alt0182]

Can anyone help me with an explanation of this poem by Yeats?

The title translates as "I am the Lord thy"? or maybe "I am your Lord"?
Hic and Ille are just Latin pronouns. This and that or me and he...whatever...it suggests a dialog between two people.
Ille is a dreamer? a believer in magic.
Hic considers this a delusion.
Ille is seeking a specific "image"...one that will teach him because it is perfectly opposite to him. I immediately think of this in Jungian terms. Ille seeks his Shadow?
Hic now distinguisheds between an "image" and "himself".
Ille notes that this is "modern" and that it involves the mind, not the hand. It is intellectual and not experiential? What does he mean by the "nonchalance of the hand"? In any case, Ille clearly favors experience over mere thinking.
Hic now alludes to Dante and says that Dante "so utterly found himself". I don't fully understand. Why is Dante given so much credit for "finding himself"? Why is he considered so exceptionally successful in that way?
Ille questions as to whther or not Dante did find himself. And then it gets really tough...Bedouins and cliffs and camel dung. ??? But I guess the main import is that Dante also sought his "opposite" in terms of an "image". And in the torture of this effort, he found "The most exalted lady loved by a man".
Hic counters that there are also happy artists? happy seekers? People who love life and create art as a result?
But Ille implies that these happy artists are just trivial entertainers. Real artists are in a state of despair because they have awakened from the "common dream".
Hic now states that Keats was happy and a great artist.
Ille doubts this.
Hic advises Ille to take a more conventional and scholarly approach.
Ille refuses and reaffirms his quest for his image...his opposite...his "anti-self".

Can anyone shed any particular light on all this? What is truly the difference between seeking for "Myself" versus seeking for the image of my anti-self? Why does Ille use magic?

[Charles Darnay]

Don't try to translate Latin syntax literally, it doesn't work.. The title means "I am your Lord" or "I am your Master" (they both exist), and it comes from Dante's Vita Nuova.

When Ille and Hic stand on their own in Latin, without a noun, they mean "this man" and "that man". The dialogue is between two unspecified people.

Your breakdown of the poem seems apt. It is certainly a complicated poem.

Magic for Yeats is synonymous with Art. Real Art is magic because it has the power to create.

Yeats is also very concerned with the double or anti-self. This is the self that exists in Art and is not part of the Artist. Keats' the "poet" may have been happy, but the Keats the man was not: one is the self, one is the anti-self.

If you are familiar with Dante's Comedia: Dante as a person writing the poems is the self; Dante the character in the poems is the anti-self. Finding the anti-self is the great challenge of the artist.

Hic represents the Modern critics who were rejected such experimentation.

[cacian]

please delete.

[cacian]

what is the meaning of the title?
the ego dominate the you/yourself?
which in this case the title is suggesting that a person is two. one is the ego and the other is the self in juxtaposition.
the ego being the bigger of the two.