William Butler Yeats is considered to be one of the notable poets of Irish literature and had a major role in Irish politics. One can notice the slow shift from the English style of romanticism to serious political messages in his poems. A lot of his early works had a lot of motifs and imagery of nature. I want to examine two of these poems, Down by the Sally Gardens and The Lake Isle of Innisfree, the way these poems are designed are somewhat similar, but may have contrasting meanings and may have different contexts.
Down by the Sally Gardens and The Lake Isle of Innisfree both are nature poems, which means, they use natural aesthetic to describe human emotions. Both of them are early works of W.B. Yeats. These poems, unlike, Easter 1916
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Yeats is starting to talk more about the beauty of Ireland. He is not getting fully political, but he is definitely more patriotic and is proud to call Innisfree his land. A bit of the poem is like an incantation. “I shall arise and go now, and go to Innisfree” (1); “And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee” (2-3) “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,” (The Lake Isle of Innisfree, 11)
There is a lot of description to nature in Innisfree, like, “veils of the morning”, “midnight’s glimmer”, “noon a purple glow”, a place that W.B. Yeats is mentioning in this poem. He is missing the nature, the feeling of that place that he considers his homeland. With reference to line 11 and 12, it may be because he is in a highly urbanized place, he wants to go back to his Innisfree where everything was perfect and beautiful. Unlike “Down by the Sally Gardens” where he uses nature to describe human emotions of struggle, in The Lake Isle of Innisfree, he believes he will be at peace over there, “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,” (5) This poem has a tone of an incantation and he uses nature to romanticize the country he loves. It may also be that the poet is giving Ireland it’s own anthem. That can be shown in the last stanza of the poem, “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” (12) This line sort of is like he is being called from Ireland and the Irish
On May 11, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory that he had received a letter from his long-time muse Maud Gonne, who had written from France with the belief that the revolutionaries had “raised the Irish cause again to a position of tragic dignity” (White 372). He went on to relate his own attempts to interpret recent events: “I am trying to write a poem on the men executed—‘terrible beauty has been born again.’” (Wade 613). The phrase “terrible beauty,” with its initial “t” and final “ty,” seems to echo Gonne’s “tragic dignity,” though the negatively charged “terrible” strains against “beauty,” making Yeats’s phrase more ambivalent than Gonne’s. Yeats may not have used the word “tragic,” but a sense of tragedy pervades “Easter, 1916.” Recalling life before the
Consequently, “Who Goes with Fergus?” is a very complex poem. It presents a stimulus for the young people to give up on their political struggle and instead find the mysteries of nature: “Who will go with Fergus now,/ And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,/ And dance upon the level shore?”. Moreover, the poem also represents the poet’s own frustration over his own lapsed romance. He is decided to leave his love behind and try to amend his situation by following Fergus: “And no more turn aside and brood/ Upon love’s bitter mystery;”. But more than anything, as was stated above, this poem symbolizes an analogy in order to stimulate the young into fighting for a better Ireland – showing in this poem, once again, Yeats’ own sense of nationalism.
When Yeats moved back to London to pursue his interest in Arts, he met famous writers like Maud Gonne. The Poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times” is one of the poems Yeats wrote in 1892 and was published in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends. “Know, that I would accounted
Finally, I find that both poems show deep concern for the environment and man impact on the natural ways of nature. Robert Gray has done this with an exquisite choice of techniques and his language to strongly convey his
William Butler Yeats is one of the most esteemed poets in 20th century literature and is well known for his Irish poetry. While Yeats was born in Ireland, he spent most of his adolescent years in London with his family. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he later moved back to Ireland. He attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and joined the Theosophical Society soon after moving back. He was surrounded by Irish influences most of his life, but it was his commitment to those influences and his heritage that truly affected his poetry. William Butler Yeats’s poetry exemplifies how an author’s Irish identity can help create and influence his work.
This poem is also about Art, and the Irish people's response to it. It is structured around the contrast between the Yeats' dream to write for the Irish people, and the reality.
What does Yeats say he will do when he goes to Innisfree? What do you think is the significance of the things he will do and have there? Is he likely to really go to Innisfree and build a cabin and live there?
“The Stolen Child”, a poem by W.B. Yeats, can be analyzed on several levels. The poem is about a group of faeries that lure a child away from his home “to the waters and the wild”(chorus). On a more primary level the reader can see connections made between the faery world and freedom as well as a societal return to innocence. On a deeper and second level the reader can infer Yeats’ desire to see a unified Ireland of simpler times. The poem uses vivid imagery to establish both levels and leaves room for open interpretation especially with the contradictory last stanza.
The Romantic relationship of nature and soul communicated in one of two ways. The landscape was, on one hand viewed as an expansion of the human identity, equipped for sensitivity for man 's enthusiastic state. On other hand, nature was viewed as a vehicle for soul just as man; the breath of God fills both man and the earth (Hanson, 2015). Keats stood out in the early nineteenth century Romanticism, a development that embraced the sacredness of emotion and creative energy and privileged the magnificence of the natural world (John Keats, n.d.).
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, a dramatist, and a prose writer - one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century. (Yeats 1) His early poetry and drama acquired ideas from Irish fable and arcane study. (Eiermann 1) Yeats used the themes of nationalism, freedom from oppression, social division, and unity when writing about his country. Yeats, an Irish nationalist, used the three poems, “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” “September 1913” and “Easter 1916” which revealed an expression of his feelings about the War of Irish Independence through theme, mood and figurative language.
In the context of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats raises compelling dialogue with Keats’ piece, which suggests that Yeats, to some degree, draws inspiration from John Keats, in that his pose concerning the nightingale becomes a basis and “touchstone” for “The Wild Swans at Coole.” Aside from commonalities concerning avians, both poems share elements of Romanticism, melancholy, feelings of weariness, and other key ideas, images, and plots as “Ode to a Nightingale” and thus, “The Wild Swans at Coole” strengthens Keats’ initial ideas in a harmonic and resonant fashion using its own unique methods. As a response to Keatsian Romanticism, Yeats revises the ideas surrounding transcendence of
Landscapes often create a connection of belonging within individuals that can reveal the challenges and perplexities involved within human relationships with landscapes. This idea is revealed in the poem, ‘For New England’, where the persona experiences a crisis of belonging between the imagined landscape of her British heritage and the remembered landscape of her childhood in Australia. The personas internal crisis is shown through the use of fricatives in the phrase ‘fighting the foreign battle’, which displays the intensity of the personas decision and paired with battle like imagery helps reveal the internal conflict and the damage that is inflicted as a result of the landscapes. The evocative metaphor of
Poets use many ways when they want to communicate something using poems. Poems are used as a means of passing ideas, information and expression of feelings. This has made the poets to use the natural things and images that people can relate with so that they can make these poems understandable. The most common forms of writing that are used by the poets are the figurative language for example imagery and metaphors. In addition, the poets use the natural landscape in their attempt to explore the philosophical questions. Therefore, this essay will explore the forms that have been used by the poets in writing poems using the natural landscape. The essay will be based on poems such as ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by
you feel calm and relaxed while you read the poem, as it has nice and
W.B. Yeat’s poem, Easter 1916, details the speaker’s feelings of Nationalism and heartache as he remembers those that he lost in the Easter Rising. As the speaker reflects on the time before the rising, he remembers not only how his life has changed but also how his friends and companions had transformed both in their character and in their state of being. The speaker uses metaphors to visualize the unchanging goal of Irish freedom and the coming of nights that bring about death and heartache. In this analysis, I will be focusing on the first and last stanzas of the poem. By comparing these two stanzas I will reflect on the literary devices used, as well as the differences of the speaker’s visuals from the beginning and end. Overall, the speaker