YEATS - WILLIAM BUTLER
LEAVING CERT HONOURS ENGLISH A. Towey
INTRODUCTION: Despite his longing to escape to a mythical “somewhere else”—the eternity of art, the nostalgic past, some rural idyll—Yeats was deeply engaged with the issues of his own time. Yet his themes and preoccupations have universal relevance. His poetry seems timeless and asks modern questions. September 1913, for example, despite its date, is not a time-bound poem but could be a meditation on the shallow materialism of the Celtic Tiger.
His poetry deals with the contrast between youth and age , between our mortal fate and the timelessness of art, between the ideal and the real, between the heroic past and the squalid present.
His images are haunting and beautifully achieved.
His metaphors are vivid, graphic, richly allusive: the swans as symbols of timelessness. The bees as symbols of hope, healing, fertility, renewal, The image of the terrifying beast of the Apocalypse. The “gyre” the spiral of time. The gazebo as a symbol of the elegant, fragile, vanished world built by the old Anglo-Irish gentry
There is a music and rhythm in his poetry which often echo its theme e.g. the alliteration of “Lake water Lapping” perfectly captures the soothing sound of the water.
There is a directness in Yeats’s language which gets to the heart of experience. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold….Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart…The innocent and beautiful have no enemy but time.
His poetry challenges us to face truths about ourselves and about the world…for example, his unflinching honesty in face of the inevitability of old age and the loss of physical beauty and sexual love Oh that I were young again and held her in my arms.. a heartfelt, unanswerable cry against the cruelty of time.
There is an emotional honesty, an immediacy in his poetry. His poems have their source in his own situation. He links the personal and the universal.
Remember Yeats’s long life and evolving preoccupations
INNISFREE for example belongs to his Victorian period. Dreaming of escape to a rural idyll was a common Victorian fantasy due to encroaching urbanisation. The terrible greyness of the city and the pain of being trapped in it can be heard in the repeated “o” which slows the poem down to a sad finale I feel it in the deep hearts core.. Innisfree is a delightful dreamscape, a mythical idyll, a “somewhere else” environmentally self-sustaining, full of soothing sound and vivid colour---purples, greys, bees humming, water lapping….
WILD SWANS AT COOLE The stillness of autumn, the dryness of the leaves, the lake like glass---a time of taking stock, the autumn of the poet’s life…the swans, the stones, set an unforgettable scene. The great birds break from the water with a thunderous sound echoed in the alliteration The Bell-Beat of their wings… The swans seem to defy time and stand as a perfect symbol of the timelessness of art as opposed to the weary earth-bound reality of the human experience. The great broken rings of the swans wheeling flight is the “spiral of time” , but also has the idea of free-wheeling, of breaking loose into the vast skyway.
In the last stanza a silence descends upon the poem. The swans drift in perfect stillness and beauty on the mirror of the lake like a painting, a work of art..When I awake some day…when I awake to eternity (when I die) will their beauty, their promise of love and artistic vision pass on to a new generation of lovers and artists? OR… How transient, how fragile are beauty and love..OR..Will I awake some day to find my poetic gift has fled?
SEPTEMBER 1913: The money-grabbing of the Phillistine merchant class is contrasted with the self-forgetting idealism of the dead patriots. The tone is vituperative, bitterly enraged, perhaps excessively so? Class hatred? What need you…The you is a repeated accusation through the poem. Note the expressive graphic image of fumbling in a greasy till..These shivering hypocrites, counting pennies, counting prayers, retentive, afraid, always saving..saving money, saving their own skins. These materialists drain life of its passion, they dry the marrow from rhe bone..They are ploddingly rational. Contrast their cowardly caution with the “delirium”, the self-forgetting passion of the patriots, who threw away their most precious possession, their lives, for a dream: What god help us could they save.. The patriots’ very names have an awe-inspiring, mythical, spellbinding quality: Those names that stilled your childish play. The patriots lived their short lives on a plane far removed from sordid material preoccupations They have gone about the world like wind
THE SECOND COMING: A poem full of terror and prophecy. The Second Coming will not be the coming of Christ but the return of the Beast of the Apocalypse, bringing anarchy (Yeats’s great fear), bloodshed, chaos and terror. This new time will be the end of innocence, of order, of harmony, of civilization. In 1919 when he wrote the poem Yeats would have seen that the inhuman horrors of the trenches, as well as the threat of revolution at home and abroad, were undermining the old certainties. Mankind has lost contact with Christ (the falconer). The “gyre” is the cone-shaped spiral, the symbol of the cycle of history, where civilization flips into its antithesis—anarchy and horror, the violent end to the Christian cycle. The images are powerful, terrifying, hallucinatory: the slouching beast moving its slow thighs, its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, the wheeling predatory desert birds, contrasted with the innocence of the Christian Nativity, the rocking cradle. The poem’s famous line Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold is an example of Yeats’s “plain speech”, the direct, timeless, telling phrase which captures a mood and communicates it powerfully.It is a poem which foretells the triumph of evil. Its apocalyptic tone is perhaps excessive: Yeats’s admiration for order and control, his fear of the tide of anarchy, would lead him into dark waters.
THE STARE’S NEST BY MY WINDOW (MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR) Like THE SECOND COMING this poem also deals with disintegration, things falling apart, moral and social collapse, and a search for renewal, hope and love, symbolized by the honey-bees. High in his tower as the Civil War rages outside, the poet fears that his fortress is no longer impregnable my wall is loosening/ the key is turned../a barricade of stone or wood. The loosening masonry is a symbol of the disintegration outside, the collapse of civilized values. He cannot ignore the reality of violence, now so close The dead young soldier in his blood. The fantasy of heroic violence, he now sees, has been damaging (although he contributed to this dangerous mythology himself) We have fed the heart on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal with the fare. It is time to take stock, to rebuild on a foundation of love, not violence. The image of the honey-bees is very beautiful. They evoke sweetness, fertility, renewal, hope. They also symbolize his own creativity which he must now put to the service of a better dream: O honey-bees,/Come build in the empty house of the stare.
IN MEMORY OF EVA GORE BOOTH AND CON MARKIEVICZ. Here Yeats again laments the destructive power of time, as he looks back wistfully on his Sligo youth and his friendship with the lovely, aristocratic Gore-Booth girls The table and the talk of youth. Their upperclass, Anglo-Irish way of life has been swept away Like blossom from the summer wreath. What matter now the noble causes, the battles won or lost? Time and age are the real enemies The innocent and the beautiful/ Have no enemy but time. He prefers to remember Eva as a “gazelle”, and is bitterly dismissive of her reforming zeal, and work with the poor which he snobbishly dismisses as Conspiring among the ignorant. His nostalgia has a reactionary tinge in that he laments a fixed and static way of life which the Gore-Booth girls, despite their backgrounds, struggled to change through political activism. They turned their backs on their pampered, upperclass way of life and fought for the rights of the common people. He wants them to remain fossilised in time, beautiful and young, never daring to step outside their own class or question its values. Politics made these beautiful, aristocratic girls seem crude and ugly, members of the “mob”, which Yeats, in his reactionary way, despised. The “gazebo” is a perfect symbol of the fragile and elegant civilization built by the Anglo-Irish gentry, which is now destroyed in the “conflagration”, the great fire of time,( perhaps also the War of Independence, which overthrew everything the “gazebo” stood for.) Yeats calls out to the dear shadows, the ghosts of their younger selves, who have lost the only struggle that matters, the fight against the awful, inescapable power of time.
INTRODUCTION: Despite his longing to escape to a mythical “somewhere else”—the eternity of art, the nostalgic past, some rural idyll—Yeats was deeply engaged with the issues of his own time. Yet his themes and preoccupations have universal relevance. His poetry seems timeless and asks modern questions. September 1913, for example, despite its date, is not a time-bound poem but could be a meditation on the shallow materialism of the Celtic Tiger.
His poetry deals with the contrast between youth and age , between our mortal fate and the timelessness of art, between the ideal and the real, between the heroic past and the squalid present.
His images are haunting and beautifully achieved.
His metaphors are vivid, graphic, richly allusive: the swans as symbols of timelessness. The bees as symbols of hope, healing, fertility, renewal, The image of the terrifying beast of the Apocalypse. The “gyre” the spiral of time. The gazebo as a symbol of the elegant, fragile, vanished world built by the old Anglo-Irish gentry
There is a music and rhythm in his poetry which often echo its theme e.g. the alliteration of “Lake water Lapping” perfectly captures the soothing sound of the water.
There is a directness in Yeats’s language which gets to the heart of experience. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold….Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart…The innocent and beautiful have no enemy but time.
His poetry challenges us to face truths about ourselves and about the world…for example, his unflinching honesty in face of the inevitability of old age and the loss of physical beauty and sexual love Oh that I were young again and held her in my arms.. a heartfelt, unanswerable cry against the cruelty of time.
There is an emotional honesty, an immediacy in his poetry. His poems have their source in his own situation. He links the personal and the universal.
Remember Yeats’s long life and evolving preoccupations
INNISFREE for example belongs to his Victorian period. Dreaming of escape to a rural idyll was a common Victorian fantasy due to encroaching urbanisation. The terrible greyness of the city and the pain of being trapped in it can be heard in the repeated “o” which slows the poem down to a sad finale I feel it in the deep hearts core.. Innisfree is a delightful dreamscape, a mythical idyll, a “somewhere else” environmentally self-sustaining, full of soothing sound and vivid colour---purples, greys, bees humming, water lapping….
WILD SWANS AT COOLE The stillness of autumn, the dryness of the leaves, the lake like glass---a time of taking stock, the autumn of the poet’s life…the swans, the stones, set an unforgettable scene. The great birds break from the water with a thunderous sound echoed in the alliteration The Bell-Beat of their wings… The swans seem to defy time and stand as a perfect symbol of the timelessness of art as opposed to the weary earth-bound reality of the human experience. The great broken rings of the swans wheeling flight is the “spiral of time” , but also has the idea of free-wheeling, of breaking loose into the vast skyway.
In the last stanza a silence descends upon the poem. The swans drift in perfect stillness and beauty on the mirror of the lake like a painting, a work of art..When I awake some day…when I awake to eternity (when I die) will their beauty, their promise of love and artistic vision pass on to a new generation of lovers and artists? OR… How transient, how fragile are beauty and love..OR..Will I awake some day to find my poetic gift has fled?
SEPTEMBER 1913: The money-grabbing of the Phillistine merchant class is contrasted with the self-forgetting idealism of the dead patriots. The tone is vituperative, bitterly enraged, perhaps excessively so? Class hatred? What need you…The you is a repeated accusation through the poem. Note the expressive graphic image of fumbling in a greasy till..These shivering hypocrites, counting pennies, counting prayers, retentive, afraid, always saving..saving money, saving their own skins. These materialists drain life of its passion, they dry the marrow from rhe bone..They are ploddingly rational. Contrast their cowardly caution with the “delirium”, the self-forgetting passion of the patriots, who threw away their most precious possession, their lives, for a dream: What god help us could they save.. The patriots’ very names have an awe-inspiring, mythical, spellbinding quality: Those names that stilled your childish play. The patriots lived their short lives on a plane far removed from sordid material preoccupations They have gone about the world like wind
THE SECOND COMING: A poem full of terror and prophecy. The Second Coming will not be the coming of Christ but the return of the Beast of the Apocalypse, bringing anarchy (Yeats’s great fear), bloodshed, chaos and terror. This new time will be the end of innocence, of order, of harmony, of civilization. In 1919 when he wrote the poem Yeats would have seen that the inhuman horrors of the trenches, as well as the threat of revolution at home and abroad, were undermining the old certainties. Mankind has lost contact with Christ (the falconer). The “gyre” is the cone-shaped spiral, the symbol of the cycle of history, where civilization flips into its antithesis—anarchy and horror, the violent end to the Christian cycle. The images are powerful, terrifying, hallucinatory: the slouching beast moving its slow thighs, its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, the wheeling predatory desert birds, contrasted with the innocence of the Christian Nativity, the rocking cradle. The poem’s famous line Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold is an example of Yeats’s “plain speech”, the direct, timeless, telling phrase which captures a mood and communicates it powerfully.It is a poem which foretells the triumph of evil. Its apocalyptic tone is perhaps excessive: Yeats’s admiration for order and control, his fear of the tide of anarchy, would lead him into dark waters.
THE STARE’S NEST BY MY WINDOW (MEDITATIONS IN TIME OF CIVIL WAR) Like THE SECOND COMING this poem also deals with disintegration, things falling apart, moral and social collapse, and a search for renewal, hope and love, symbolized by the honey-bees. High in his tower as the Civil War rages outside, the poet fears that his fortress is no longer impregnable my wall is loosening/ the key is turned../a barricade of stone or wood. The loosening masonry is a symbol of the disintegration outside, the collapse of civilized values. He cannot ignore the reality of violence, now so close The dead young soldier in his blood. The fantasy of heroic violence, he now sees, has been damaging (although he contributed to this dangerous mythology himself) We have fed the heart on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal with the fare. It is time to take stock, to rebuild on a foundation of love, not violence. The image of the honey-bees is very beautiful. They evoke sweetness, fertility, renewal, hope. They also symbolize his own creativity which he must now put to the service of a better dream: O honey-bees,/Come build in the empty house of the stare.
IN MEMORY OF EVA GORE BOOTH AND CON MARKIEVICZ. Here Yeats again laments the destructive power of time, as he looks back wistfully on his Sligo youth and his friendship with the lovely, aristocratic Gore-Booth girls The table and the talk of youth. Their upperclass, Anglo-Irish way of life has been swept away Like blossom from the summer wreath. What matter now the noble causes, the battles won or lost? Time and age are the real enemies The innocent and the beautiful/ Have no enemy but time. He prefers to remember Eva as a “gazelle”, and is bitterly dismissive of her reforming zeal, and work with the poor which he snobbishly dismisses as Conspiring among the ignorant. His nostalgia has a reactionary tinge in that he laments a fixed and static way of life which the Gore-Booth girls, despite their backgrounds, struggled to change through political activism. They turned their backs on their pampered, upperclass way of life and fought for the rights of the common people. He wants them to remain fossilised in time, beautiful and young, never daring to step outside their own class or question its values. Politics made these beautiful, aristocratic girls seem crude and ugly, members of the “mob”, which Yeats, in his reactionary way, despised. The “gazebo” is a perfect symbol of the fragile and elegant civilization built by the Anglo-Irish gentry, which is now destroyed in the “conflagration”, the great fire of time,( perhaps also the War of Independence, which overthrew everything the “gazebo” stood for.) Yeats calls out to the dear shadows, the ghosts of their younger selves, who have lost the only struggle that matters, the fight against the awful, inescapable power of time.