In 1914 Yeats concluded the first book of his autobiography with the dismal reflection that 'all life weighed in the scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.' 1 He was still concerned about the difficulty of understanding life as a process without finality, as 'becoming' - always in transit. never arriving - in his late ghost play, Purgatory ( 1938), which extends the process beyond the grave. Life in this drama becomes life-and-death and bears it out, even to the edge of what would be doom if the play were operating within a teleological framework that made provision for it. Rather than Christian apocalypse, however, Purgatory adopts the ancient teleology, updated by Nietzsche, of eternal return. We know that Yeats's thought was deeply influenced by Nietzsche's: among other things, it emphasizes the ethical importance of the idea of eternal return, in place of apocalypse, in the formation of human beings and cultures strong enough to endure the crisis of values precipitated by the scientific revolution, and to go beyond nihilism to new creativity.2 These human beings and cultures will possess a Dionysian or 'tragic' view of life that, as opposed to the Christian one, places ultimate value in the struggle with fate as an end in itself, and on the knowledge that what matters is 'becoming' or travelling, not being or arriving. This Nietzschean ontology provides a structure of ideas that Yeats develops in A Vision; it lies behind his construction, in poems and plays, of heroes who 'come/Proud, open­-eyed and laughing to the tomb.'3